Meat Thy Maker

ONE

The truth is that not all men are created equal. To my initial surprise the Schmucker men and their monstrous sausages were a huge hit with the ladies of Hernia. ‘Bigger is better,’ is what I heard over and over again from my friends. Personally, I preferred to place bite-size bangers on my breakfast plate alongside my scrambled eggs.

But like I said, Jacob, Solomon and Peter Schmucker (three very handsome brothers), had somehow stumbled on a winning product. Schmucker Brothers Sausages went from an obscure brand to one that had customers begging their favourite stores to keep it in stock. This all happened in just a few months.

Sceptic that I am, and one who loathes following trends, I finally capitulated and bought a package of the much-coveted breakfast meat. I am ashamed to admit that I had to snatch it out from beneath the reach of a slower-moving woman with shorter arms. In my defence, that woman was talking on her phone at an ear-splitting decibel level about arranging a ‘Bazillion wax’ that day. She was so upset that I got the last package of sausages, she dropped her phone in the meat case. For all I know, she may not have been able to get her floor shined that afternoon.

My beloved husband scoffed when he saw me unpack the prized sausages.

‘Following the crowd now, are you, Mags?’

‘Absolutely not!’ I said. ‘I simply want to see just how wrong everyone is.’

Gabe laughed and kissed my cheek. ‘You’re still the same, humble woman whom I married twenty-five years ago.’

‘Not quite,’ I said, as I continued to unpack groceries. ‘I finally have a streak of grey running through the mousey brown hair.’

‘What’s a mouse without a grey streak?’ my husband said, and gave me another kiss.

‘And I’ve put on a little weight.’

‘Well, you always complained about being thin as a beanpole, and what did I tell you?’ Gabe said.

‘That you liked women with rail-thin figures,’ I said, as I put away the frozen goods.

‘Yes. But I also said that you were in danger of blowing over in a stiff wind, because your head made you top-heavy, despite your enormous feet. However, since the weight you gained is all in your ankles, you now have a good shot at remaining upright in even the most inclement weather.’

‘Thanks, dear, you say the sweetest things.’ I tossed him the package of sausages, which were now lying on the counter. ‘Here, since you’re just standing around dishing out compliments and kisses, fry these up for supper.’

Gabe gasped. ‘Breakfast for supper? The label says that they are breakfast sausages.’

‘Let’s break some rules. After all, I’m seventy-four – you’re seventy-five. How many more good years can we expect? Ten? Twelve? The children are grown and on their own, or away at university. Eat breakfast sausages for supper, I say. Eat ice cream for breakfast.’

‘Who stole my wife,’ Gabe demanded, as he stepped away in mock fright, ‘and replaced her with this wanton woman?’

‘Now, now, dear,’ I said, wagging a long, knobby finger at him. ‘Let’s not get carried away. The rules that we break will only be societal conventions; they certainly won’t be anything that leads us into sin. Or anyone else into sin,’ I hastened to add.

Gabe grinned. ‘Does this mean that you’re going to shed your dowdy conservative Mennonite garb, and start dressing in something more – uhm – alluring?’

‘Absolutely, dear,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to run out and buy a low-cut dress with a mini-skirt. Given my beanpole figure, it will slip down to my chunky ankles and puddle there, just inches off the ground. Then you can spray me with blue paint and enter me in a snobby art show someplace like New York, or Philadelphia.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Gabe said, as he reached for a skillet.

I grabbed another skillet for the eggs, and a pot for the tin of baked beans that invariably accompanied this meal for us. Some toast with butter and thick-cut marmalade, along with some milky tea – now that was supper.

Gabe got halfway done cutting the package open with the kitchen scissors when he let out a howl of derision.

‘What now?’ I said.

‘Mags, did you read what’s written on here before you bought this stuff?’

‘You mean the list of ingredients?’ I said sweetly, for I knew exactly to what he was referring.

‘No, those seem to be on the up and up. It’s this stupid claim under the logo that these are hand-crafted sausages for the sophisticated consumer. I mean, are they implying that they fill each sausage casing by hand and personally tie off the ends? And if so, how does that make them any better than if a machine did the work? I think not! I know that I sure don’t want some stranger’s hands messing with my sausage.’

‘It gets cooked,’ I said. ‘Read there at the bottom – in big red letters. Unlike other sausages, these sausages must be cooked until a dark golden brown.’

‘Dark golden brown?’ Gabe echoed. ‘Is there such a colour?’

‘Just start cooking, hon, because the eggs will take only a few minutes, and I don’t want them to get cold. How many slices of toast do you want?’

Thank heavens my Sweetie Pot Pie, whom I often refer to as the Babester, shut up and began frying, and I was able to coordinate all the dishes to be ready when needed. The sausages contained sage, ginger, cloves, red pepper, black pepper and brown sugar, and although they were a tad spicy, they were a perfect complement for the otherwise bland eggs. However, I think that young children, and some of our elderly citizens, would be put off by the two kinds of pepper – at least in the amounts that these bangers contained.

The Schmucker Brothers Sausages by the way, came in two varieties: ‘Breakfast’ and ‘Dinner’. They didn’t sell a ‘Lunch’ variety, probably because no one in their right mind would eat sausages for lunch. At lunch a thinking person should eat either a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or a tomato and cheese sandwich. No salads, ever! Salads are just an excuse to pile on all sorts of toppings and caloric dressing to make the rabbit food palatable. In the end the salad ends up having twice as many calories as a sensible, and quite portable, sandwich.

At the conclusion of the meal the Babester sighed contentedly, and suggested that we take a walk through our little swatch of earthly paradise. About a decade ago I gave away my two beloved milk cows (on the condition that they would not be slaughtered), and replanted most of their former pasture with hardwood trees. I did, however, leave a large swath that curves down to the pond, free of trees, and each spring I toss wildflower seeds hither, thither and yon, amongst the grass. Some seeds get eaten by the birds, but many make it to the ground, germinate, grow and propagate themselves. Through the middle of this flower-bedecked meadow, a narrow, well-trodden footpath leads down to the water’s edge.

As always, the Babester and I held hands on our walk. After a quarter of a century we still love each other very much. I won’t exaggerate and say that we’re ‘in’ love because, frankly, the shine has worn off these two old cooking pots, if you get my metaphor. We’ve been dented and scratched by what life has thrown at us, and by what we’ve thrown at each other. One time we almost got a divorce – even though that’s against my personal beliefs, and against the teachings of Jesus as well, unless one or the other of us had been unfaithful (which neither of us had been). My point is, why would either of us throw away a given quantity in hopes of finding a better replacement? I know all of Gabe’s faults and foibles, and I’m sure that if he thought long and hard, he might come up with an imperfection to pin on me.

We’d had an early supper, and the late spring sun was still high in the sky, illuminating all the early blooming flowers along our way. The air temperature was about seventy degrees Fahrenheit (which I hear is a heatwave in the UK). Meadowlarks were singing, bluebirds were carolling, indigo finches were warbling, the Babester was humming – except for the Second Coming of Jesus, it could not have been a more perfect evening.

I leaned my horsey head on the Babester’s shoulder. ‘I love you, Pookey Bear.’

‘I love you more, Sweetums.’

After reaching the pond we sat on a woven willow reed bench. There we snuggled in the cooling air and watched the swallows swooping for emerging mosquitoes. Neither Gabe nor I are particularly bothered by these nasty insects, nonetheless we’d slathered each other with a repellent before leaving the back porch.

Suddenly two hours had passed, and the sun was setting to the accompaniment of whippoorwills. Where had the time gone?

‘Gabe,’ I said, ‘have you ever seen a sunset as beautiful as this one?’

My husband, who was sitting beside me, squeezed my shoulders lovingly, but when he spoke, it sounded like he was sitting on either side of me.

‘No, hon,’ he said in this strange stereo voice. ‘Never.’

I got abruptly, if somewhat unsteadily, to my feet. ‘Darling, I need to go back to the house. I’m not feeling very well.’

‘Oh?’ Oh, oh, oh. My husband’s voice came at me as if broadcast through multiple speakers.

‘I’m feeling – uh – weird.’

‘Weird, like how?’

‘Like I’m in a movie or something.’

‘Yeah? Well, whatever you’re feeling, I’ve got you, babe.’ Gabe put a strong arm around me and told me to just put one foot in front of the other. He’d see that I got home and to bed safely, and if need be, he’d call Jacob Livingood, our village doctor who actually makes house calls.

‘That’s good,’ I said, ‘because I’m suddenly hungry. Hey, we forgot to have dessert.’

‘That we did, babe.’

‘We still have some of that chocolate fudge cake that your sister brought over. And an untouched quart of premium vanilla bean ice cream.’

‘A winning combination,’ Gabe said. ‘And I’ll heat up that jar of extra fudge sauce that Cheryl left.’

‘Yummy for my tummy,’ I said and giggled.

‘You’re a funny girl,’ the Babester said.

I giggled again. Me? Funny? I was about as humorous as a cod liver oil milkshake. Now that was sort of funny – no, that was just bizarre. Who was this giggling septuagenarian whom my sexy husband had referred to as a ‘girl’? She definitely wasn’t funny. Bossy, maybe. Opinionated, definitely.

No, the funny thing was that despite having eaten so much for supper, by the time we got back to the house I was so ravenous that I forgot all about my earlier sense of being out of sorts. All I wanted to do was consume chocolate cake with hot fudge sauce, topped with premium vanilla bean ice cream. Fortunately, there was an ample supply of all three.

Finally, satiated with food, my still handsome hunk of a husband led me tenderly back to our boudoir and … well, the rest of it is simply none of your business.

TWO

My name is Magdalena Portulacca Yoder Rosen, although because I was a Yoder for most of my life, that’s what most folks call me. Gabe is all right with that, because he knows what is on our marriage certificate, and he realizes that he doesn’t own me. His full name is Gabriel Joshua Rosen. Ours is a mixed marriage.

Gabe is a non-believing Jew (and yes, there can even be atheist Jews), and I am a Conservative Mennonite woman of Amish descent. The Amish don’t use electricity, they don’t own and drive cars or tractors, they don’t believe in education beyond the eighth grade, they have their own language, they dress a particular way, baptize only adults, and they don’t believe in violence.

If someone in their community violates these strictures, they will be reprimanded and be required to repent in front of the community. If they refuse to do so, or persist in their behaviour, then they will be shunned. Shunning is meant as a way to keep the community cohesive, but in my opinion, it is a cruel custom. When someone is shunned, it is as if that person is dead. No one – not even their parents – is allowed to acknowledge the sinner’s existence, until that person has repented. As a result, many shunned Amish move away and join other faiths, particularly the Conservative Mennonite Church, its closest relative.

It often happens that family members of the shunned person will begin to question key religious points of the Amish faith, or miss their relative so keenly, that they will break away from the Amish Church also. As a result, the Amish suffer a twenty percent attrition rate. However, their very high birth rate more than offsets this loss by a wide margin. All four of my grandparents were Amish, but they left that denomination when my grandfather, Melvin Yoder, bought a car when he was thirty-five. By then he and my grandmother had eight children. My grandmother decided to leave with my father when he was shunned, as did his parents, her parents, all of their siblings, along with their spouses and their parents – all told, two hundred and seventeen people eventually left the Amish fold and became Conservative Mennonites the day my grandfather refused to repent for buying a car.

At any rate, I do drive a car, live in a house with electricity, and we even have a television in the bedroom sitting area, where my husband spends many happy hours watching bright young men getting concussed (even though they wear helmets), and slapping each other’s buttocks. I don’t dress in a discernible costume as do the Amish, but I dress conservatively: skirts and blouses with elbow-length sleeves, or dresses with similar sleeves. The skirts fall to below my knees. The Holy Bible states that a women’s hair is her crowning glory, so mine has never been cut. I wear it braided and the braids are wrapped around my horsey head every morning and held in place with enough hairpins to hold together the Hoover Dam.

My parents died when I was barely out of nappies, around age twenty. My younger sister and I inherited a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, and a herd of dairy cows in the mountains of south-western Pennsylvania, four miles outside the quaint little village of Hernia. Dairy cows take a lot of work, so I put my horsey head to work and came up with the brilliant (if I say so myself) idea of selling the cows and turning the farmhouse into a full-board inn.

I named my inn the PennDutch, and styled it to cater to tourists wishing to have an authentic Pennsylvania Dutch experience. My cook was an Amish woman, and her recipes were her own. My décor was simple, because most Amish don’t decorate, except with wall calendars. The guest rooms, which were all upstairs, were not air-conditioned, and the only heat they received was radiant heat through the floor from a large wood-burning stove in the parlour. In other words, my establishment was to be a quasi-authentic Pennsylvania Dutch inn.

Then I had another crazy thought, one that turned out to be really lucrative. The impetus for this came from listening to friends recount their tales of trips to Europe. It is as follows: tourists will pay big bucks to endure great discomfort, just as long as they get to view it as a cultural experience. Think about it. Visit just about any cheap chain motel in America, and the rooms will be large, with private baths, an easy chair, a closet with hangers, an ironing board, a coffee maker, quite possibly a small fridge and sometimes a microwave. And of course there will be a flat-screen television that receives dozens upon dozens of channels.

Are you having hot flashes? Then crank down the air conditioning. Are you cold-natured, even in the summer? Turn on the heater. Well, it’s a good thing that you’re in America then, isn’t it?

By contrast, the rooms in some European hotels are so small, that you have to plop your suitcase on the bed so that you can open it in order to retrieve a fresh set of sturdy Christian underwear. By then you need to use the loo, so out comes a robe, because you will have to toddle down a dimly lit hallway to use a common toilet. In that horrid little closet, you try to line the seat, but instead of a roll, all you find are little squares of waxed paper, more suitable for hot cross buns than your own. And don’t even think about controlling the climate in your room; air conditioning is almost unheard of, and if you complain that it’s too cold in October, the manager will tell you that no one, but no one, gets heat until November.

But look at the bright side! You’re in Europe, seeing European things. So, I reasoned, why not come to the PennDutch, pay exorbitant prices, have a pseudo-authentic Amish experience, and be just as miserable without the jet lag of flying to Paris or London. Even if one was the romantic type, whose wish was to visit Rome in order to get her rear end pinched (not an Amish desire), I could arrange to have them sit on my neighbour Janet’s beehive. For a fifty-dollar fee of course. A mere two hundred dollars got one the privilege of mucking out the horse stalls and cow barn. For three hundred dollars one got the privilege of raking out the chicken house and putting down fresh straw. Collecting the eggs cost five bucks apiece. Weeding and hoeing in the vegetable patch was an activity guests would vie for, as it is backbreaking work. The base price was two hundred dollars a day for a single row. On hot days the price went up. And of course guests had to clean their own rooms and communal baths, for an extra fee – or they didn’t get to eat. And they would want to eat, that was guaranteed, because the four Amish food groups are lard, sugar, starch and more starch.

Why would any sane person put up with this … uh – one might call it nonsense? Because there are people in this world with money to burn, and once word got out about my quirky establishment’s existence, my little farm became the in inn place – pun intended. The filthy rich and the very famous from all over the world just had to say that they too had endured abuse at my hands, so to speak. To have stayed at the PennDutch Inn was like having gained access to an exclusive club from which the hoi polloi were excluded.

Then the unthinkable happened; someone was murdered in my inn. A normal person might guess that this would put a damper on business, but au contraire. Who knew that there are folks out there that request rooms where murders have happened? And there were plenty of murders. Death seemed to follow me like that fictional woman from Cabot’s Cove. I started receiving letters and emails telling me that I was possessed by the Devil, and that I was the Grim Reaper. However, my best friend Agnes, who is a nominal Christian at best, came up with a theory that I like much better. Perhaps our omniscient God, knowing that these victims would soon be murdered, had directed them to the PennDutch to die, because He also knew that I was capable of solving their murders.

Frankly, I got too good at solving murders. Some have implied I was suspiciously good solving them. I took umbrage with those sentiments, as it implies that I had a hand in causing these deaths. What’s important for you to know is that my reputation for solving murders was renowned throughout the State of Pennsylvania, and even grudgingly accepted as fact by Sheriff Stodgewiggle (he who should have retired many elections ago). That’s really all there is to say about me, except maybe that I’m as sweet as brown sugar pie, and I eschew gossip, unless its victims really deserve it, like the three guests who were about to arrive at the PennDutch Inn that particular spring day.

THREE

Christine Landis was the first guest to arrive. She flew into Pittsburgh from her base in Chicago, and then hired a Lexus for the hour-and-a-half trip from the airport to the PennDutch Inn. When she drove up my front driveway, I was busy talking to my tulips.

‘You’ve outdone yourselves this year, girls and boys,’ I said. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

‘Thank you, Mama,’ they said, in one voice. ‘But we couldn’t have done it without your expert care.’

‘That’s quite true, dears. I amended your soil, supplied fertilizer, and watered as needed, but the Good Lord supplied all of your sunshine – there’s no arguing that. Still, I just hate it when folks claim to have black thumbs. All they have to do is follow the instructions that come along with each specific plant purchase. It’s like cooking, or baking a cake. All one has to do is follow the recipe. Right?’

My tulips had the temerity to twitter. ‘Then why are you such a terrible cook, Mama?’

‘Hush, dears! Just for that I’m going to cut an armload of you to take inside.’

‘Murderess,’ my babies cried. ‘You’ll be committing tulipcide!’

That’s when I hear a car door slam, and I looked up and saw the most beautiful woman whom I have ever had the pleasure of gazing upon. Believe me, I don’t have a lesbian bone in my body, but if I did, this divine creation could just be the one to sway me in that direction. Dancing is, of course, a sin, but the thought of doing the satin sheet samba with this new arrival was not all repugnant. Au contraire … well, I shall stop there, lest I convict myself unnecessarily. However, please permit this short description. She was quite tall, perhaps five foot eight, with an hourglass figure. Her hair was very dark brown, bordering on black, but her flawless skin was milky white. Her face and long limbs exhibited perfect proportion. Her scoop-neck minidress matched her large green eyes. It’s been said that I can be critical, but honestly, I couldn’t find a thing wrong with her. She didn’t have a mole, wart, or even a freckle on her that I could see, and those lips – they were bow-shaped for heaven’s sake!

‘Get behind me, Satan,’ I muttered as I moved to greet her.

Miss Gorgeous grimaced, revealing teeth that either cost a fortune, or else were yet just another proof of how unfair the Dear Lord can be when he deals out our physical attributes. I’m not hopelessly uninformed; I have heard about genetics. But I’ve known many a handsome couple who’ve produced