Meat thy maker, p.8
Meat Thy Maker, page 8
‘What? I’m being quite serious, dear. What is wrong with my suggestion?’
The sound of four sighs in an enclosed space can be compared to that of a toilet flushing.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘Who is going to elucidate me?’
‘Miss Yoder,’ Kathleen Dooley said hesitantly, ‘what makes you think that any one of us can recite scripture verses? We weren’t raised like you.’
‘More’s the pity,’ I said sadly. ‘At any rate, if you think now that you won’t be able to handle this stop, just stay in the car and breathe through your mouth. But this is going to happen, whether you like it or not.’
NINE
As it turned out, the two women and the octogenarian all found the process of turning pig carcasses into sausages so fascinating, that I had to pull them away from the processing plant and bundle them into the car to get them to the packaging place. The odd thing was that when we got back to the car after visiting the packaging plant, Ducky Limehouse was nowhere to be found, even though there really wasn’t anywhere for him to disappear to. The surrounding cornfields had only just been planted, and the road that connected all three Amish farms was as straight as my long Yoder nose. The only living thing that I could see on it was an orange cat.
I confess that it did occur to me that the Rapture had happened during the time we learned how sausages were made. That is not to say that I dwelt on this matter, but I did think it for just a second or two. But I have been assured of my salvation because I gave my heart to Jesus when I was a child of seven. Therefore, deep down I know that I will be whisked up into the clouds when the Rapture happens. I’m pretty sure that the three Schmucker brothers have also been saved (although the Amish don’t bank on their salvation). As for my guests, I didn’t have the foggiest idea where they stood with God – but surely at least one of them was headed up, and not down, at the End of Times. I just wouldn’t have picked Ducky Limehouse as harp-plucking material, but then who am I to judge?
At any rate, I quickly ruled out the Rapture as fearful thinking, the product of slippage in my prayer life. So, I resolved to resume praying a full hour every day, and after that I tooted my horns – well, not my horns, but my car’s horns. My vehicle has been especially outfitted with two horns; one emits a deep, loud tone, and the other has a very high, soft pitch. There are times, you see, when loud tone is needed to alert another driver that they are about to crash into your car. However, there are other occasions, like when you are stopped at a green light, and the person in front of you is not moving, when it is OK to give that person a ‘heads-up’. That’s when a soft, high note is the perfect thing.
All that said, I gave Ducky Limehouse both ‘barrels’, alternating between tones. If only I’d installed three more horns, I could have played him the birthday song.
‘Look!’ Kathleen Dooley shouted in my ear. ‘There he is, rounding the corner of that shed.’
‘That shed is an outhouse,’ I said.
‘A what?’
‘A toilet with no plumbing,’ I said. ‘I used to have a six-seater at the PennDutch. Actually, it’s still there, but it’s non-functional these days. You should check it out this afternoon.’
‘Imagine that,’ Kathleen Dooley said. ‘An outdoor restroom with six separate cubicles.’
‘Au contraire, Miss Dooley,’ I said. ‘This is a long wooden plank with six round holes cut into it. Between each hole there is a wooden panel that reaches to the ceiling, but they are certainly not enclosed.’
‘Eew, gross,’ Christine Landis said. ‘That’s barbarian.’
‘It’s not barbarian,’ I snapped. ‘Going to the bathroom is a natural function, and males and females use the outhouse at separate times.’
‘But why so many holes?’ Kathleen Dooley asked.
‘Ah, a reasonable question,’ I said. ‘That’s because Amish families tend to be quite large, so that they could have extra hands to help them work the land. My great-grandparents, who were Amish, had sixteen children.’
‘How selfish of them to procreate at that rate,’ Christine Landis said.
Just then Ducky Limehouse popped open the back door and jumped in. ‘Sorry guys,’ he said. ‘Nature called.’
‘How many holes did that one have?’ Kathleen Dooley asked pleasantly.
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’ Ducky Limehouse said.
‘She means,’ Christine Landis hissed, ‘how many over-sexed Amish get to do their business side by side in that miserable-looking shed?’
I am not a violent woman. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek. But if I were a violent woman, I might have reached into the back seat and slapped one of Christine’s perfect cheeks, turned her face, and then slapped her other one.
‘There’s only one seat in that outhouse, of course,’ Ducky Limehouse said. ‘Don’t be crude. The Amish are a very conservative people.’
‘That says how much you know, doofus,’ Christine Landis said.
‘Witch!’
‘Children,’ I shouted. ‘Play time is over; we’re going home.’
‘But we haven’t been to the office,’ Kathleen Dooley said calmly. ‘Don’t we get a chance to pitch our business propositions?’
‘Actually, you don’t,’ I said.
The ensuing cacophony caused me to clamp my hands over my ears. It was only by the grace of God that I had yet to commence driving, or we might have ended up in the ditch, and given my heavy foot (can I help that it is so large?), we might all have been killed.
‘Children!’ I hollered. ‘Order in my car. Whoever says the next word without my permission gets to walk home. Just so you know, cell phone reception out here is very iffy, and good luck on getting a cab, because Hernia doesn’t have any.’
There followed a minute of silence which I savoured. Then came the coughing, sniffing, lip-smacking, foot-shuffling and raised hands that eventually got shoved in my face. None of that bothered me; I enjoyed knowing they were squirming with frustration. When I put a stop to their foolishness it wasn’t because I gave in to them, but because I wanted to be the one who spoke first.
‘I know what you all are thinking,’ I said, ‘but you are wrong. You have already unknowingly made your pitches to the Schmucker brothers. You see, they are only interested in partnering with a company that is interested enough in the product to see how it is made – that they use the finest cuts from the hog, and the purest spices. The previous guests that I brought refused to even step out of my car, once they got a whiff of the farm. They didn’t expect you to want to see the slaughtering house, and anyway, the Amish normally slaughter their hogs in the autumn and winter. But all three of you passed the test by showing up at the processing plant.’
‘That’s excellent news,’ Terry Tazewell said.
‘No, it’s not!’ Christine Landis snarled. ‘We can’t all be winners. Aren’t they going to be interviewing us individually?’
I looked at her beautiful, but sullen, face in the rear-view mirror. ‘They already did. At the processing plant. Those Amish men may have just been Jacob’s cousins, because he’s at home with his wife who’s having a baby, but believe me, you were on trial. Those men paid close attention to the questions that you asked. They observed your comportment, and how you interacted with each other, with me, and how you treated them. They also made note of how everyone dressed.’
‘Why, that’s absurd!’ she raged. ‘It’s my right to show some cleavage. This is America; this isn’t Saudi Arabia.’
‘They didn’t say anything to me about you specifically,’ I said, ‘but you didn’t respect their religious sensitivities. And I did warn you.’
‘So?’ she said. ‘When do we hear their verdict?’
I shrugged. ‘Perhaps in a day or two.’
‘That long?’ Kathleen Dooley asked, sounding a mite put out. She at least had worn a shirt dress with elbow length sleeves that could be buttoned to the throat. Her hemline also reached below her knees.
‘Well, we had an appointment,’ Christine Landis said. ‘At least I did. What kind of man puts babies before business?’
‘A good husband,’ I said. ‘Clearly that’s something you’ve never had, bless your heart, as they say in the South where Mr Limehouse comes from.’
‘You seem to know a lot about my part of the country, Miss Yoder,’ Ducky Limehouse said. At least he was agreeable, but then again, he didn’t have a dog in the hunt.
‘That’s because a dear friend of my lives in Charleston. Her name is Abigail Timberlake, and she owns an antiques shop on King Street called the Den of Antiquity. Have you heard of it?’
‘Heard of it,’ Ducky Limehouse exclaimed excitedly. ‘Abby is a dear friend of mine as well.’
‘Shut the front door!’ I said.
‘Will you two stop your yakking, and get back to what’s important,’ Christine Landis said irritably.
‘Look, toots,’ I said. ‘I’ve had it up to the top of my impossibly big head with your nasty attitude. If you keep this up, I might have to give the Schmucker brothers my two cents’ worth of opinion.’
‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Christine Landis shrieked.
‘Don’t push your luck, sister. At this point, I’m trying as hard as I can to remain neutral – but it’s getting very difficult. I suggest you revert to your post-breakfast state of civility. I think that we would all agree that we liked you much better then.’
‘Harrumph,’ she said.
‘Well, you at least get points for saying the actual word. People only ever say it in fiction in America, and now in real life you’ve uttered this peculiar word. I’ll take that as half an apology.’
‘I don’t need to apologize to you for anything,’ Christine snapped.
‘Tut-tut,’ I said, ‘your fate now hangs in the balance.’
‘You think so?’ Christine Landis sneered. ‘Perhaps your braids are pulled too tightly back into that abysmal pile atop your boulder-sized head. You’ve stupidly shown me the way to the Schmucker brothers’ farms. As soon as you drop me off at your faux farmhouse, I’m going to jump into my decent automobile, and drive myself right back there.’
I prayed for patience, but as it’s my least answered prayer, I didn’t wait for it to be answered. Instead, I smiled.
‘That’s a wonderful idea, dear,’ I said. ‘OK folks, once more, buckle up, and off we go.’
Then, because I had a metaphorical bee in my pile of braids, and a perennially heavy foot, I pressed the pedal to the metal and made the trip back to the PennDutch in record time. I’ll say this, Christine Landis was not talking through her hat when she said she’d be heading right back to the Schmucker brothers. I’m not as agile as I was at her age, but I’m no slow poke. Still, I didn’t expect her to get to her car and start it before I’d even planted both feet on my driveway. Then I remembered that Chief Toy had asked me to do him a favour, so I hauled my gigantic feet back into my car.
‘My husband will take care of lunch for you,’ I called out to the others. ‘And I think that he has some sightseeing planned, if you’re up to it. Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, Falling Waters, is an easy drive, and it’s a “must see”.’ Then I drove the easy four miles back into the village of Hernia to execute the favour I’d promised Chief Toy.
One might assume that ours is a pretty monolithic population, but let me assure you that it is far from the truth. We are, however, a very religious town, in that we have a ridiculous number of churches per capita. Given the number of church steeples in Hernia, an unskilled parachutist would do well to steer well away from us. At any rate, while it is true that most of our citizens are Mennonites, their membership is almost equally split between just two churches. But we also have a Lutheran church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, and even a church with sixty-six words in its name, where the parishioners handle poisonous snakes as part of their worship experience. Although I refuse to call it a church, we have a wholly heathen, surely satanic, cancerous cult that bills itself as the Church of Melvin, and I’ll touch on that later, after I get all of my inoculations up to date. As we only have two Episcopalians, and three Jews, they have to travel further afield to get their religious needs met. But we do have one very liberal, la-dee-da church that does have a woman pastor and is open to having a non-celibate gay pastor, and that is the Presbyterian Church (USA). Except for me, that’s what our village’s wealthiest citizens call their spiritual home.
Bill and Linda Steele are lifelong members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and would appear to have a lot of dough. They live in a massive ‘new build’ on the east side of town, which can only be described as ridiculously gauche, and I’m not a judgmental woman, mind you. Their mansion resembles a Hollywood version of a Southern plantation house, replete with massive white columns. Both Linda and husband Bill drive Porsches, and trade them in every year for the most recent model.
Both of them are native Herniaites, which explains their presence in our humble village, even after they obtained their wealth. Also – mind you, I eschew gossip and gossipers – it’s been said that they continue to live here because anywhere else they might choose to live, they’d be in danger of ‘soiling their nest’. That is to say that they are both real estate developers, and there are numerous places throughout the county where one sees denuded patches of forest and bulldozed farmland, all in the name of ‘development’, and most of them have Bill and Linda Steele’s Development Cooperation signs on them.
Fortunately, this couple is two decades younger than me, so that I hold nothing personal against them, except that I just can’t stand them. Please allow me to clarify that statement. What I meant was that we never crossed paths in school, so they never rubbed me the wrong way, and when I say that I can’t stand them – well, they are raping the land for the almighty dollar, and it does get me pretty hot under the collar. But I do pray about this very wrong, very unchristian attitude of mine, so that puts me one step ahead of Chief Toy. That, in a nutshell, is why he asked me to drive out and talk to the Steeles, so that he didn’t have to. Apparently, they had requested yet another audience with Chief Toy, but it wasn’t going to happen. However, as Mayor of Hernia, Pennsylvania, and Chief Toy’s boss, I was to be his proxy.
However, when I drove up to the massive wrought iron gates and punched in the code which Toy had supplied, nothing happened. I tried again.
‘We asked to see Chief Toy Graham,’ said a deep male voice. Bill Steele, by the way, sings bass in his church’s choir.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know that you wanted Chief Graham, but—’
‘Magdalena, go away,’ Linda Steele said. ‘We don’t want to talk to you.’
I let out a long, protracted sigh. Toy was going to owe me big time for this.
‘The truth is, dear, Chief Toy doesn’t want to talk to you. He thinks that subject has been exhausted; that’s why he sent me.’
‘Exhausted?’ Bill boomed in his basso profundo voice.
If I hadn’t still been buckled in, I’d have jumped and hit my head on the ceiling of my car. I’ve been called hard-headed many times before, but the repeated knocks on my noggin over the years have started to leave my grey matter a mite scrambled.
‘Look, dear,’ I said, when I’d recovered enough to speak, ‘it’s either me or my shadow. You’ve already decided not to sue Brian Epps, your late son’s best friend. It seems to me—’
‘Oh, quit your blathering and get your bony butt in here,’ Linda said.
The gates swung open. I drove up the circular drive and parked directly in front of the bank of marble steps that led to the massive front doors. When I pushed a buzzer, a smaller door set inside one of the large doors was opened by Linda Steele. She was wearing so much diamond jewellery that I had to squint in order to protect my retinas until my vision could adjust.
‘Baines, our butler, quit without giving notice last month,’ she said. ‘Left like a thief in the night, without even saying “tootles”. Since he lived in another wing of the house, we didn’t hear him packing, much less leaving. When he didn’t show up with my morning cup of tea, I went looking and found a note on his bed. Which he’d made, of course – hospital corners and all. But the wardrobe was empty, as well as the dresser drawers. Do you know how hard it is to find a good British butler out here in the boondocks?’
‘Oh, it’s ever so hard,’ I said, with only a slight eye-roll. ‘What did the note say?’
‘Baines said that the food we provided him caused chronic constipation, and that if he was going to die, it would be on English soil.’
‘One can die from constipation?’
‘Yes, you twit, if it leads to bowel obstruction and worse. Again, quit your blathering and come all the way in.’
I stepped into a foyer that soared so high that one could easily imagine angels in the upper reaches plucking at their harps. Unfortunately, my attention kept returning to her jewels. She was wearing a diamond choker which, had the likes of it been around the neck of Marie Antoinette when the guillotine blade fell, would have prevented her execution. In addition to that, another diamond necklace covered her chest, and draped down into her deep cleavage, like the aftermath of an ice storm that had been bulldozed into a ravine. From her stretched earlobes dangled chandelier style earrings that crashed against her choker with the slightest movement of her head. On her slender wrists she wore diamond encrusted cuffs, and the diamond in her engagement ring was so huge, and heavy, that she had to support her left hand with a cane. (That part may not have been true.)
I may be a simple Conservative Mennonite woman who doesn’t own a single bracelet, necklace, or a pair of earrings, but I have learned from well-groomed guests in the know, that when it comes to wearing jewellery, less is more. And never wear diamonds during the day. Of course, some rules are just silly. I, for one, wear white two weeks before Memorial Day, and two weeks after Labor Day, just to show the world that I am my own person. Nevertheless, even a country bumpkin like me can recognize vulgarity, and the temptation to point it out was too strong for me to resist.
