Mean and Shellfish

by Tamar Myers

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘All those words meant that if you asked me for my forgiveness, then she might make a baby with you tonight.’

  ‘Gotcha. But just so you know, Yoder, even I no longer believe that the Easter bunny hides them Easter eggs. And babies don’t come from eggs – they come from hospitals. Except for Thelma Denkler’s baby. It came from a car, on account she wasn’t able to get to the hospital in time to collect one of them free giveaway babies. Come to think of it, I never did figure out how the doctor managed to sneak that baby into Thelma’s car, on account of she was still all the way out on Bontrager Road.’

  I smiled kindly. ‘I guess that’s why they call it the miracle of birth. So, dear, now that you’ve agreed to ask for my forgiveness, go let my sister in. If the bears eat her, or a mountain man takes her to be his second squeeze, you won’t be getting that highly sought-after moment of satisfaction, and Melvin Ichabod Stoltzfus Junior might never be born.’

  Melvin’s eyes momentarily aligned. ‘A son? Is that a prophecy, Magdalena?’

  ‘The odds are fifty percent “yay”,’ I said, ‘and fifty percent “nay”, and that adds up to one hundred percent all the lived-long day.’

  He smiled happily. ‘Yoder, I have half a mind to let you live.’

  ‘No truer words were ever spoken, dear. So now that we’ve agreed that you’re going to ask my forgiveness, and allow me to live, go let my sister in. If you wait much longer you might not be able to discern who the father of Susannah’s son will be: you, the mountain man, or the bear – at least not judging by the hair on the poor child’s legs. Besides, as we both know, Susannah has always been a mite on the wild side, and she might love a new romantic challenge.’

  ‘Grr,’ Melvin said.

  I refused to laugh at his tasteless joke. ‘Now go get her, Mely-kins, or you might be forever sorry.’

  Remarkably, he did just that. Of course, I was right behind him. My plan was that when he opened the door, I was going to push him outside, and then slam the door behind him. How was I to know that my baby sister, after all that her man had put her through, would be such a tattletale?

  ‘Look behind you!’ she shrieked.

  Silly old me. Of course, I turned around and looked as well, proving that Melvin and I are genetically related.

  Alas, Melvin was quicker to react. Once he got his oversized head turned, the rest of him followed on a forward trajectory. That is to say, without any additional effort, he ploughed into me like an icebreaker on Lake Erie during the winter of 1976. And although my feet are bigger than icebreakers, I was knocked off balance and fell over backwards.

  While it is true that I have a hard head, I was nonetheless knocked unconscious. When I came to, the first thought that came to mind was that I had died, but as with many things I have attempted in life, I had not managed to do it very well. I arrived at this conclusion because I could not see, speak, nor move my arms and legs. How was I supposed to see my promised mansion in the sky, if I could not see? Or walk the golden streets if I had no legs? Most importantly, how could I praise the Good Lord eternally, if I could not sing? I did, however, hear a loud buzzing sound. Could that be insects gnawing away at my flesh?

  But after a few seconds of trying an incomplete death on for size as my new normal, my head began to throb with pain, and the buzzing in my ears was replaced by human voices. I couldn’t make out distinct words – not at first, not until I heard my name being called. Repeatedly. That, of course, could only mean one thing: the Archangel Gabriel had come to escort me home to Heaven.

  ‘Mmmmmph,’ was all that I could answer him. Believe me, dead lips don’t talk.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  But as I lay there, praying that the Good Lord would not allow me to lie mouldering in an unmarked grave, something akin to a miracle happened. My hearing returned loud and clear.

  ‘Take the tape off her mouth,’ Susannah said. ‘What if she throws up and drowns? I’ve heard of that happening.’

  ‘Then I say good riddance,’ Melvin said.

  ‘But Mely-kins, you promised that you wouldn’t really hurt her.’

  ‘A man can change his mind, can’t he, Sugar Buns?’

  ‘But Apple Dumpling, if she dies, you’ll be hurting me terribly. You realize that, don’t you?’

  Oh, Susannah, I thought, I love you so much right now. Why did I never see all that goodness buried deep inside you, hidden beneath a thick veneer of bluff, and indifference to familial affection? I have been so judgmental, and I owe you such a huge apology. Can you ever forgive me?

  ‘How will it hurt you terribly, Carrot Cake?’ Melvin asked of my sister.

  ‘Because she’s already practically a saint. If she goes missing and is never found, then she’ll be a legend in her own crime’ – she paused to laugh – ‘get it? But even if they just find her body, then there will be a massive funeral, like Bedford County has never seen the likes of before. Not only are we related to just about everyone, Amish and Mennonite, but Mags has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the community since the inn became such a success. And as you know, she paid your salary out of her personal funds when you were chief of police.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Melvin growled, ‘but she only gave me an annual raise; I wanted a monthly raise. That’s when I started calling her Scrooge McYoder. I thought it would catch on, but those Hernia yokels were so clueless, they’d never heard of Scrooge McDuck.’

  ‘What idiots,’ Susannah said.

  What a traitor, I thought. I am not going to take this lying down! Except that I actually am lying down – on the floor, I imagine – and my feet and hands are most probably restrained by that much talked–about duct tape. Aha! But they haven’t done anything about my neck. I can still move my head from side to side to show that I’ve heard them talking. Then maybe they’ll stand me upright; I’ve always thought fast on my feet.

  So that’s what I did. I moved my head vigorously from side to side like a lone windshield wiper in a downpour. So what if it ground my coiled braids, my crown of Christian glory, into the floor? Hair is washable. But if my baby sister went along with Melvin’s plan and dispatched me to the Throne of Grace and then never repented, she would burn in a lake of fire for all eternity. This is stated quite clearly in the Book of Revelation 20:15. It was my duty to save my sister’s soul, was it not?

  ‘Oh, lookee here,’ Melvin said, ‘your big sister is trying to tell us something. Shall we let her put in a final word?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Susannah, ‘maybe she’ll just start preaching at us.’

  ‘Ah, come on, Custard Cup,’ Melvin cooed. ‘This could be fun.’

  I tried nodding this time.

  ‘You better not preach at me,’ Susannah said as she ripped the duct tape off my mouth. In that split second, I was unintentionally given a mini-facial that not only exfoliated that area around my mouth, but saved me a whole lot of tweezing time on my upper lip.

  ‘You two are very clever people,’ I said, when I stopped screaming and could speak again. ‘I absolutely understand your dilemma about “dead Magdalena” versus “unexplained missing Magdalena”. But there is a third option, you know.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Susannah said.

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Sugar Plum,’ Melvin said. ‘This one’s as slippery as a greased snake.’

  ‘Melvin knows this from experience,’ I said. ‘When we were in third grade he brought a greased snake to Show and Tell. The snake got away in the classroom and couldn’t be caught – for the rest of the semester. Fortunately for all of us it wasn’t a poisonous variety.’

  ‘Oh, Mely-kins,’ Susannah purred. ‘Even back then you handled snakes. You were such a brave little boy. You are my hero.’

  I snorted. ‘Brave? After the glue incident I waited a week and then I put a bullfrog from Miller’s pond in your Sugar Dumpling’s lunch box. You should have heard him scream; it put the chickens off laying for weeks in six surrounding counties. Melvin, didn’t you twist your an
kle when you eventually climbed down from your desk?’

  ‘Tch,’ Susannah said. ‘Magdalena, you’re mean. And what’s this about a glue incident?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘In art class your brave hero dribbled a bottle of glue along the length of both my braids, because they had the temerity to hang down over the top of his desk. The glue dried before I noticed it, and Mama had to chop both braids off when I got home because she couldn’t untangle my hair.’

  Susannah giggled. ‘Oh, Snickerdoodle,’ she said to Melvin, ‘you were such a creative genius. If only you’d flunked more grades than just one, so that you and I would have ended up in the same class!’

  ‘What a lovely thought,’ I said. ‘Your Sweetie Pie is twelve years older than you, dear. Can you just imagine a twenty-year-old man in your third-grade class?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if he looked like my Mely-kins,’ Susannah said.

  ‘Well, I should have been held back more times,’ Melvin said, ‘because the one C that I made in Home Economics was the highest grade I ever made, until I graduated from high school, but the school district’s official policy was that no kid should be left behind.’

  ‘And so I hired you as our chief of police,’ I said. ‘On that fateful day my brain was out to lunch – on Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific.’

  Melvin’s right eye regarded me sceptically. ‘I don’t think so, Magdalena. I remember that it was you who interviewed me for the job, and then gave it to me on the spot.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, dear,’ I concede. ‘That was me – but just my body. My brain, as I said, was on Pitcairn Island.’

  Melvin turned to his Sugar Buns. ‘Is your sister putting me on?’

  ‘Like a feedbag on a horse,’ Susannah said.

  ‘Moving right along,’ I said, ‘don’t the two of you brilliant criminal minds want to know what your third option is?’

  ‘Of course we do, Yoder,’ Melvin said. ‘We were just waiting for you to spit it out.’

  ‘Well, dearies, my plan is to write my sweetie a Dear John letter in which I tell him that I have fallen deeply in love with one of my former guests and eloped with him.’

  Melvin snorted. ‘That’s nuts, Yoder. I know for a fact that your so-called sweetie isn’t named John.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t mean Gabe,’ Susannah said, trying to be helpful.

  ‘Take off my blindfold at once!’ I thundered. ‘And that’s an order. If you two don’t even know what a Dear John letter is, then you’re never going to be able to pull off the Greatest Crime of the Century.’

  Melvin snatched away my blindfold, and nearly took my right ear with it. ‘Oh, yeah?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You’ll be the laughingstock of criminals everywhere. At best you’ll be given a two-star rating by the Criminal Code of Conduct Court, which means you won’t be awarded the Golden Guillotine pin.’

  ‘She’s making that up,’ Susannah said. ‘You can tell that she’s lying because her lips are moving.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ my nemesis said. ‘I’ve heard that word before. Guillotine. I think it’s German for “crime”.’

  ‘How right you are, dear,’ I said. I was able to say it without moving my lips, even though I was lying through clenched teeth.

  ‘OK then,’ Susannah said, as she stomped one of her long, but narrow feet. ‘What is a Dear John letter?’

  ‘In essence, it’s a letter in which a girl writes to her sweetheart and tells him that their relationship is over. The point is that she doesn’t do it in person,’ I said, ‘but through the mail.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news,’ Melvin said. I could hear him clap his womanish hands just to my left.

  ‘Why is that such good news, Melvin dear?’

  ‘Yoder, you’re such a nincompoop. Because we can email your Dear John letter, then kill you, so that means it’s as simple as eating our cake and pie too.’

  ‘With a dollop of mixed metaphor on top as well, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘You got that right, smarty-pants,’ Melvin said.

  ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘we should get started. Although, we do have a major hurdle to overcome first, and it’s one that you, Melvin, might be afraid to even contemplate.’

  ‘My man’s not afraid of anything,’ Susannah said. Oh, if only I could ever feel that strongly about the man that I loved.

  ‘What is it that you think I’m so scared of?’ Melvin all but bellowed. For a rather small, pigeon-chested man, he could produce a prodigious amount of volume when provoked.

  ‘You’re afraid to untie my hands and feet,’ I said. ‘That’s what. I can’t possibly write a letter with my hands tied together.’

  ‘You can dictate the letter to Susannah,’ Melvin said.

  ‘I told you that you were afraid.’

  ‘I ain’t afraid! But why take chances when there are risks involved.’

  ‘Because, silly – I mean, dear – the letter has to be in my handwriting. Gabe will recognize my handwriting; he most assuredly will not recognize my sister’s. Trust me, I know this. She used to write to me from prison, asking for this and that, and my Dearly Beloved would invariably dissolve into fits of laughter when he saw her letters.’

  ‘You showed him my letters?’ Susannah cried. ‘That’s illegal! I could have you arrested for that.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t, dear. By then they were my letters. And the point I’m trying to make is that Gabe said that your handwriting looks like chicken scratches. He asked which of our hens had written to me. And was she asking for more feed, or maybe a week off from laying eggs.’

  ‘That hurts my feelings,’ Susannah whined. ‘In your Dear John letter to Gabe, I want you to tell him to apologize to me for being so mean.’

  ‘Will do, sis. If, of course, I had the means to write the letter.’

  ‘Well, now you do,’ Susannah said. She dove into her purse which, come to think of it, was large enough to accommodate my scrawny body, and a moment later she reappeared with manicure scissors. Meanwhile, Melvin picked his nose and glared at me with one hate-filled eye, while the other one followed a moth around the room.

  ‘There, now that’s much better,’ I said. ‘Now undo my feet, please, or would you prefer that I untie them myself? Mind you, they smell something awful, so I quite understand it if you prefer that I do the job.’

  ‘Then do it!’ Susannah said, and thrust the scissors at me, without pausing to consider if I even needed my feet in order to write the proposed letter. Of course I did not. By the way, pretending that my feet stank was merely subterfuge on my part; it should not be categorized as a lie.

  Once free from all restraints I sat up and discovered that I had been lying on an unmade hospital bed in a small, windowless room. Once upon a time the walls may have been white – or shades of beige – and what were those fancy patches of grey and black? Were they mould? All this I could see courtesy of a fluorescent light fixture that hung at a rakish angle from the ceiling directly above me.

  Susannah was sitting at the foot of the bed, a bottle of beer tucked between her thighs. Melvin was perched on a high white metal stool closer to my head. He had changed out of the skirt and into trousers, and if you didn’t know him to be the insect that he was, you could easily mistake him for a man. Bright red lipstick, lavender eyeshadow, and sweeping false eyelashes were the only vestiges of Miriam to cling to his carapace.

  ‘No cramps yet?’ he demanded.

  ‘Frankly, dear,’ I said crossly, ‘that’s none of your business.’

  ‘Not even a stomach ache?’ Susannah said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘Did I wake up from a hundred-year sleep with the flu?’

  Susannah giggled nervously.

  ‘You’re fit as a flute, Yoder,’ Melvin said. ‘Now write that letter before the symptoms hit.’

  ‘Symptoms? What symptoms?’

  ‘Stress symptoms,’ Melvin said. ‘It’s been kno
wn to make people very sleepy. Too sleepy, in fact, to cooperate with their captors.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I said, although of course I already knew that. ‘I’d hardly classify you as too stressful Melvin. You’re more like a bad case of gas.’

  Susannah giggled again.

  ‘The letter, Yoder,’ Melvin said. ‘Write it! Now!’

  After taking stock of my surroundings, and coming up with an exit strategy, I feigned calm impatience. ‘Well? How am I to make bricks without any straw?’

  ‘Dang it,’ Melvin said (alas, he used another word). ‘She must have had a concussion, and now the blood is playing pool in her brain. Your sister’s gone plum loco.’

  ‘Actually, Mely-kins,’ Susannah said, ‘it’s a biblical reference. It’s from the story of Jonah and the Ark.’

  My bottom jaw fell into my lap and I had to cram it back into place before I could talk. ‘My Land o’ Goshen! It is indeed a biblical reference. Good for you, Susannah.’

  My sister beamed proudly. ‘Was I right about the story?’

  ‘Oh, let’s not quibble about details, shall we? That’s how religious schisms start. My point was that I must have paper, and a pen or pencil, in order to write this Dear John letter. So would one of you please provide me with the necessary materials? Please. Pretty please, with sugar on top.’

  ‘That’s how she used to make me eat my vegetables after Mama died,’ Susannah said.

  ‘Hmm,’ Melvin mused, ‘I’ve always liked sugar on my cauliflower.’

  Susannah made a face. ‘No, not by putting sugar on them; she said “please”. That was so manipulative. And I was only eleven!’

  To his credit, Melvin vacated his seat on the stool near the head of the bed and walked around me to wrap my baby sister in his spindly arms. ‘There, there, Fudge Bar,’ he said, ‘she’s always been a big meanie. That’s why we can’t be showing her any mercy. You see that now, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Susannah said. ‘But she did one thing that was sort of nice.’

  ‘Just one thing?’ I said. ‘Pray tell. What was that? Intervene with the bullies on the playground dozens of times, or defend you to your teachers and the principal when you carved graffiti into your desk with a hairpin, smoked in the bathroom, cussed at them like sailors, threw food in the lunchroom, and destroyed books in the library? Or was it when I pled with juvenile court judges not to put you into foster care, and then later on bailed you out of jail so many times that I have lost track?’