Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth

by Tamar Myers

  Billy Dee sobered immediately. “You’re right. I should be the last one to find this funny. I guess it’s just my nerves working themselves off. Coming up here ain’t no picnic for me. It’s just something I had to do.”

  “Was Jeanette hurt?” It wouldn’t be so bad if she got hurt just a little bit, would it? Nothing serious, mind you, but just enough to send her packing.

  “Hurt? Nah, she was gabbing so loud she didn’t even know she was shot at. Not till I pointed it out. Bullet came whistling right past her head and hit an old stump nearby. I dug it out.” He reached into his pocket and produced a shiny lump of metal. “Funny thing is, this ain’t no rifle bullet. This is from a revolver. A Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, if you ask me.”

  “You mean to say that someone tried to kill her? That it wasn’t a stray hunter’s bullet?”

  He nodded. “Course, I didn’t tell her that. I just said there was some blind fool of a hunter in the vicinity and the wisest thing was for us to get back to the car.”

  “And?”

  He sighed. “And she agreed, after she’d made a few comments that I’d just as soon not remember. That woman has all the sensitivity of a brood sow in heat. Oops. No offense, Miss Yoder.”

  “No offense taken. Drink your milk,” I ordered. “It’s the best thing there is for nerves. Say, you wouldn’t happen to cook, would you?”

  He smiled gratefully. “I make a mean venison stew. Why?”

  I crossed my fingers under the kitchen table. “Well, tonight’s Monday night, of course, and that’s our traditional night for potluck suppers. You see, everyone at the table has to make their own favorite dish to share. Of course, you wouldn’t be making venison stew because we don’t have any, but—”

  “But I do.”

  “What?”

  He smiled broadly, like the old Billy Dee Grizzle. The milk must have taken its effect. “That ain’t no problem at all. Got me an eight-pointer tied to the roof of my car right now.”

  “You what? I thought you gave up hunting.”

  “Well, now, I didn’t shoot it. I picked this one up alongside the road. With all that shooting going on, them deer crowd the road for safety, and every now and then one of them gets just a little too close. Like this one done.”

  I nearly gagged. “You mean you want to make a road kill stew right here in my kitchen?”

  Billy Dee looked almost hurt. “This here ain’t no run-of-the-mill road kill, Miss Yoder. There’s hardly a scratch on it, and besides, it was as warm and red as a fresh-baked cherry pie when I picked it up.”

  “Thank you. Cherry pie will never be the same again.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Did anybody else see you pick up the deer?”

  “Not a soul. I was the last car to leave, and by the time I pulled up here, they’d all gone in.”

  Call me daring or just plain foolish, but I’d already survived two whizzing bullets and was feeling surprisingly adventuresome. “Quickly, pull your car around the back side of the barn. I’ll go open the main door. You skin and gut it in there.”

  The look on Billy Dee’s face was priceless. “Don’t that take all!”

  “Of course, you’ll do a good job of cleaning up in there when you’re done, and you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone?”

  “I swear! I mean, yes, ma’am!”

  By the time I’d squared Billy Dee away in the barn, and watched him at work for a while, the Congressman and his aide had returned. One by one, I cornered the guests and gave them my spiel about it being potluck night, and, much to my great surprise, one by one they volunteered dishes. Even Jeanette was cheerful and cooperative, which only goes to show you that a near miss by a bullet can do wonders for one’s morale.

  The Congressman volunteered to make Senate Bean Soup, but since he didn’t have time to soak the beans, he settled on a doctored-up version of canned baked beans.

  Lydia said she knew a wonderful recipe for vegetable curry she was sure everyone would like.

  “But I don’t have curry powder,” I explained. “The Amish aren’t big on exotic Oriental dishes.”

  “Well, do you have cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, coriander, cumin, garlic, and chili?”

  “Everything but cumin.”

  “Then I can make my own curry. A cumin-less curry unfortunately, but still a curry.”

  Happily, I found the spices for her. You have to admire a woman who knows how to make her own curry powder, that’s for sure.

  Joel, bless his heart, was as flexible as a willow twig in April. Before I’d even told him about the produce haul, he was all set to make something.

  “You do have potatoes?” It was more of a statement than a question.

  “Of course!”

  “Apple sauce?”

  “Organic to the core.”

  “And sour cream, for those who want it?”

  “That would be Matilda’s. She’s the nervous one.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind. What are you making?”

  “Latkes. Jewish potato pancakes. After all, in just six more weeks it will be Chanukah.”

  “Bless you.”

  “That will be my main dish contribution. Then for dessert, I’d like to make my famous broiled bananas.”

  “Double bless you.”

  Linda wasn’t quite as cooperative as I’d expected, at least not until I’d mentioned that Sam had sold me some six different varieties of leafy green things with foreign-sounding names.

  “There’s a Belgian something, a Swiss something, a Roman something—or was that Romanian?”

  “Well, I might put together a nice fresh salad,” she conceded.

  I decided not to clarify the fresh part. “Great! And I have lots of dressing in the fridge.”

  Linda looked like I must have when Billy Dee mentioned his road kill. “You mean commercial, bottled dressings?”

  “Yeah. Brand names even.”

  “Hmm. I do have an hour of hatha yoga this afternoon, and Ms. Parker did want me to do some channeling before dinner. Perhaps I have just enough time to make up a bottle of natural dressing. Without preservatives in it. You wouldn’t happen to have organic dandelion vinegar and fresh tarragon, would you?”

  “I think there’s some dandelion vinegar in the cellar,” I said. “On a shelf, way in the back corner. There’s a flashlight by the cellar door you can use.”

  Sometimes when I’m nasty like that, I wonder if I’m adopted. Neither Mama nor Papa would have, for even a second, considered sending an arachnophobiac down into a cellar swarming with spiders. But so help me, some people deserve what they get.

  Jeanette had already volunteered to make a vegetarian stir-fried dish, providing, of course, I could come up with some fresh, crisp vegetables. With my fingers crossed, I assured her I had.

  That left only Delbert, Susannah, and me. I, however, didn’t plan to make anything, because I would have more than my hands full supervising everybody else in my kitchen. Besides which, I’d already cooked breakfast, packed lunches, washed dishes, been shot at, shopped, matched wits with a witless lawman, shoveled offal, and watched Billy Dee butcher a battered buck. There’s only so much a body can do in one day. Fortunately, Joel had volunteered to make two dishes, so mine wouldn’t even be missed.

  Delbert James, as it turned out, was just as generous. He graciously offered to cook two dishes as well, but I reluctantly turned him down. While I knew I would love his macaroni and ground-beef casserole, I wasn’t too sure I could handle the tripe and suet pudding he proposed, even though he offered to go into town himself to pick up the ingredients. Delbert James, I was forced to conclude, had humbler origins than one might normally expect of a Congressman’s aide.

  As for Susannah, her concept of nutrition is taken straight from the Freni Hostetler School of Cooking. If it tastes good, eat it. Unfortunately, her boiled cookies were the only thing nobody got to sample that night.

  Chapter Fifteen

>   Susannah Yoder Entwhistle’s Boiled Cookie Recipe

  2 cups sugar

  3 tablespoons cocoa powder

  1 cup milk

  ½ cup chunky peanut butter

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  1 stick margarine

  3 cups rolled quick oats

  Mix the sugar, cocoa, and milk together in a heavy pot. Boil for one minute.

  Stir in the peanut butter, vanilla, and margarine. Remove from heat and add the rolled oats, mixing well.

  Using a teaspoon, drop the still-warm mixture by the spoonful onto waxed paper.

  When cool, peel off the waxed paper and enjoy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It got a little crowded in the kitchen around six p.m. Since Billy Dee Grizzle had a stew to make, he’d got there first and had appropriated the left front burner of our six-burner, institutional stove. Billy had started browning his meat around five, and by six his stew was well underway, filling the kitchen with a heady, but not altogether disagreeable odor.

  Delbert James was the next cook on the scene. His macaroni-hamburger casserole required some stove-top cooking in its initial stages, but was eventually transferred to the oven to bake. The cheese-topped concoction was already merrily bubbling and browning away in the oven when Jeanette and Lydia showed up at the same time.

  “What the hell is that stench?” demanded Jeanette. “This room is fouled with the odor of simmering flesh.”

  “It smells delicious to me,” said Lydia firmly.

  “Just how the hell am I supposed to cook with that stuff stinking up the joint?”

  “No need to,” said Billy Dee warmly, “there’s plenty in this pot to go around. Just put up your dogs and relax for a spell. Let us men do the cooking.”

  “Like hell I will."

  Normally I didn’t tell my guests how to talk, but this was Mama’s kitchen, and poor Mama had already done enough turning over for the day. If someone didn’t make Jeanette put a lid on it, Mama would soon be spinning so fast she might start generating electricity.

  “I don’t allow swearing on these premises, Ms. Parker,” I said as graciously as I could.

  Jeanette’s face turned as red as her hair, but she shut up for a minute. I wish Lydia had.

  “What’s in your pot, Mr. Grizzle?” she asked politely. Billy lifted the lid and deeply inhaled the escaping steam. “Venison stew, ma’am.”

  “Deer meat?”

  “That, and a few onions, carrots, and spuds.”

  “Bambi?” Jeanette almost shrieked. “You’re cooking Bambi?”

  “I knew a Bambi once,” said Billy Dee pleasantly. “Things were definitely cooking with her.”

  “That’s disgusting, and so is your stew. I thought you’d given up hunting, Mr. Grizzle. After what you did to your daughter.”

  A muscle in Billy’s left cheek twitched slightly, but other than that, he managed to keep his cool. “I have given up hunting, Ms. Parker. This is just something I scraped up off the road.”

  Jeanette looked as if she were about ready to toss her cookies. Instead, she tossed her flaming red hair out of her eyes, stomped over to the fridge, and demanded to see what vegetables I’d come up with. Humbly I showed her.

  “You call that bok choy? That’s as limp as Delbert James’s wrist.”

  “Hey, I heard that,” Delbert called from his position by the stove. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem at all miffed. If anything, he sounded amused. I, for one, was not amused. It meant that Susannah had got her information right, and that Billy Dee probably did have a girlfriend. Not that it concerned me, of course.

  “And are those supposed to be Chinese pea pods? I’ve seen pureed vegetables crisper than these!” shouted Jeanette.

  “Children, children,” said Lydia gently. She turned to me. “Would you happen to have any clarified butter, Miss Yoder? I need it for the curry.”

  I confessed that all my butter was blurry. “Can you make your curry without butter? Then maybe everyone will eat it.”

  Lydia smiled patiently. “But the curry contains yogurt. If they won’t eat butter, they certainly won’t eat yogurt.”

  “Keeping animals penned up is a form of slavery, and forcibly taking milk from them is a form of abuse,” Jeanette butted in, “possibly even sexual abuse. And besides which, dairy products clog one’s arteries, not to mention, milk is a leading cause of flatulence.”

  “Do you have any olive oil then?” asked Lydia graciously. How I admired that woman!

  “Yes, I do,” I said happily. I normally don’t stock the stuff, but this bottle was left behind by a guest, an Italian count, who had a fetish for anything extra virgin. The two-liter bottle he left behind was hardly compensation for all the times he chased me around the inn. Had he not been an octogenarian, or at least a little cuter, he might have caught me.

  “Good. Olive oil will do just fine,” the saintly woman said.

  That settled, we all set back to work. In a few minutes we were joined by Joel and Garrett. Then by a disgruntled Linda.

  “There isn’t any dandelion vinegar in the cellar, Ms. Yoder. Just millions and millions of horrible spiders. You must call an exterminator!”

  I could see that she was shaken, and her face was the color of a peeled leek bulb, but I hadn’t heard any screams. “Are you sure you went all the way to the back, to those shelves behind the furnace?”

  “Ms. Yoder, even Indiana Jones couldn’t do that! The place is crawling with those things. I insist that you call an exterminator.”

  Those were pretty strong words coming from a mere snippet of a kid, if you ask me. “Ms. McMahon, I am shocked at how you talk. And I thought you reverenced life! Killing spiders, indeed. What, pray tell, is worse? To kill a nasty old cow for food, or to slaughter an entire community of innocent insects?”

  “Spiders are not insects! And they aren’t innocent. They’re horrible!”

  “Have you ever been bitten by one?”

  “No.”

  “Mugged, raped, or otherwise accosted?”

  "Very funny,” said Jeanette. That woman butts into more things than a drunken billy goat. “Leave the poor kid alone. She’s absolutely right. This place is a dump. What a dump!”

  “Bette Davis you’re not,” said Delbert gaily.

  “But dumpy’s another thing.” I think I said that.

  “What?”

  “If you don’t have any basmati rice, then ordinary long grain will do,” said the ever vigilant and cooperative Lydia.

  “Now where are those canned beans I’m supposed to doctor up?” asked Garrett impatiently.

  Before I could reply, Susannah and Shnookums meandered in. At first I could only assume that Shnookums had accompanied her, but it would have been a safe bet. Susannah was wearing enough yardage to conceal a Great Dane. Just thinking that made me count my blessings. If Shnookums had been a Great Dane, those wouldn’t have been pellets I found on my pillow the week before.

  Billy obligingly transferred his stew to a cast-iron Dutch oven, which he then stuck in the oven, so as to open up more stove-top space. I made Susannah say thank you.

  Because Susannah is anything but competent, and claims to be more anemic than a perpetual blood donor, I myself got out the huge pot for her cookies. Susannah did, after all, want to make a double batch.

  Susannah’s recipe only requires a few minutes at the stove, but my sister was determined to make them count. Quite unexpectedly, she burst into a high- pitched wail. I’m sure the sound startled everyone in the room but me, who immediately recognized it as a tune from the centuries-old hymnal, the Ausbund. This isn’t even a Mennonite hymn, but an Amish one, and I can only guess that Susannah’s motive was to give her captive audience the authentic flavor of Pennsylvania Dutch life, which her cooking couldn’t deliver.

  That Susannah even remembered the hymn surprised me. Mama used to sing it to me as a child, but I am ten years older than Susannah, and I can’t remember Mama singing it after I reached my teens.
At any rate, the hymn, like many others in the Ausbund, sounds more like keening than singing to English ears.

  And while Susannah’s rendition was neither musically nor lyrically accurate, it definitely was loud.

  I scurried over to the stove to tell her to put a lid on it, before someone else did. But before I could even open my mouth, Susannah opened hers even wider. What seconds before had been keening was now genuine screaming. I’m sure that at first I was the only one who could tell the difference.

  I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around. “What is it?”

  Susannah wrenched free and faced the pot again, her screams louder than ever. Then she began to gesticulate wildly at the pot, almost as if she were trying to do the breaststroke. Perhaps there was something about the pot that was not quite right. I bent over and examined its contents closely. Then it was all I could do to keep from screaming myself.

  There, blinking up at me, totally covered with chocolate and peanut butter, was Shnookums. His little mouth was open too, and he would have been screaming as well, except that it was clogged with peanut butter.

  Without even thinking, I yanked the pot off the burner and dumped its contents into the sink. Then I turned on the cold-water faucet as far as it would go and aimed the sprayer hose at the half-cooked canine. Susannah, in the meantime, had fainted. Fortunately, Billy Dee managed to grab her before she had a chance to slump over the stove.

  “What the hell is going on now?” Jeanette demanded.

  “Go away!” I snapped. The cold water wasn’t doing much to dissolve the hot goo from the dog’s coat. I switched to warm.

  Jeanette pushed into my space. “What the hell is that? I demand to know. My God, it’s a rat!” she shrieked. She too began to faint, but when nobody made a move to catch her, she revived in time to brace herself against the sink.

  “This is not a rat!” I shouted, so that everyone could hear. “This is Shnookums, my sister’s dog.”

  Linda gasped, and although my back was turned, I’m sure she tried her hand at fainting too. “First spiders,” I heard her say, “and now rats. I’m calling the board of health myself.”