Tamar Myers - Butter Safe Than Sorry

“Piffle,” Peewee puffed dismissively.

“She isn’t kidding,” Gabe said. “But you’d have more fun at Miller’s feed store or watching the blacksmith shoe the Amish horses.”

“That really still goes on?” Barbie asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We permit only well-dressed horses in Hernia. In fact, the farrier ’s name is Jimmy, so the horses all wear Jimmy’s shoes.”

The women groaned in unison, whereas the men looked as if they’d been asked to name the three countries which compose North America.

“Hey,” Gabe said, “now that we have someone to watch the desk, why don’t I take you on a tour of the area?”

“And what about our son?” I asked archly.

“What about him?” Gabe said. “What were you planning to do with him?”

Caught between a rock and a hard place, I chose to lean on the rock. After all, diamonds, sapphires, rubies-they’re all rocks.

“Why, he’s coming with me, of course. I was checking to see if you’d thought of him.”

“I want to go with my papa,” Little Jacob said.

“But your mama is so much fun,” I cooed.

“Yes, but Papa lets me do things.”

I gave everyone at the table a stern look; in other words, my glare informed them, unequivocally, that they were to stop listening to what was essentially family business. “What things?” I said.

“He buys me ice cream.”

“What else?”

“And candy.”

“Uh-huh. What else does he do?”

“He lets me put my arm out the window.”

“What?”

“Just his hand,” Gabe said. “Every little boy needs to feel the breeze on his hand.”

“Tell that to Kurt Zimmerman-or One-Armed Kurt, as the kids used to call him at school.”

Gabe recoiled. “Is that how he lost his arm?”

“Lost it to the side of a farm truck on Yutzy Road.”

Our guests gasped.

“Well that settles it,” I said. “This morning our son rides with me.”

Mary Berkey has been a single mother for the past half dozen years, ever since the day her husband suddenly disappeared, leaving her with six children under seven. One minute Lantz was there, tending to their commercial chicken operation, and the next minute he was gone. It even occurred to Mary that the rapture had taken place, leaving her behind; although why her somewhat-innocent children hadn’t been caught up to Glory was a bit puzzling to her.

I mention the rapture business because it proves that I am not a nutcase for having jumped to a similar conclusion from time to time; after all, this is the way Mary and I were both brought up to think. I must confess, however, that I am as curious as a stimulus package full of cats as to what it was that Mary had done to make her think that she was undeserving of Heaven, even after she had accepted Jesus as her savior. Oh well, you know what they say about the quiet ones.

At any rate, several weeks after her husband’s disappearance, Mary Berkey noticed a foul odor emanating from the tall silo in which they stored the chicken feed. She had it emptied, and sure enough there was Lantz’s badly decomposed body-still dressed in his outside work clothes. An autopsy showed that the poor man had fallen into the silo from the trapdoor in the roof, and had literally “drowned” in the sifting grain.

There were those in the community who chose to believe that Lantz had committed suicide. However, as far as anyone knew, there had been no suicide note, so most of us chose to believe otherwise. After all, there were well-documented cases of men having fallen into silos while inspecting their grain levels, and subsequently suffocating. But sadly, there were even a few folks-and I am not one of them-who went so far as to speculate that perhaps Mary Berkey, in a moment of passion, may have pushed her husband through the trapdoor and into the silo. Their flimsy theory rests solely on the fact that the Lantz and Mary Berkey union, six children aside, was clearly not a match made in Heaven. While most Amish couples strive to at least present a peaceful face to the world, the Berkeys were either incapable of doing so, or else their marriage had deteriorated to the point that neither of them cared anymore.

Whether it was the stigma of a possible suicide, or the rumor that she may have murdered her husband, the sad fact is Mary Berkey would always live under a cloud of suspicion. Although no formal shunning was ordered by her bishop, Mary’s in-laws (Mary’s own parents were no longer alive) refused to have anything to do with her after the funeral. This harsh treatment unfortunately set the tone for others, and soon Mary and her children found themselves living on the periphery of the Amish community.

No longer able to run the chicken farm by herself, she began taking in sewing and soon developed a reputation for excellence at it. Although her fine work did nothing to enhance her social standing, or improve her relationship with her suspicious in-laws, it did keep body and soul together for her and her six children. Every Amish woman knows how to sew, and while most sew their own dresses and intricately pleated bonnets, no one in a six-county radius could do so as expertly as Mary Berkey. Eventually overworked Amish women were thinking up reasons not to make their outfits. So popular did Mary’s expertly sewn clothes become, that in one district the bishop saw reason to ban them, citing the sin of pride inherent in their ownership.

No sooner had I pulled into the long gravel drive than the front door to the white frame house opened and a passel of kids, ranging from ages seven to fourteen, piled out. Close on their heels came Mary, a tall, angular woman, with a pinched narrow face and cobalt blue eyes. When she saw that it was me, her thin lips parted, forming a sparse smile, and she waved.

“Don’t the children have school?” Tiny asked. It was a reasonable question.

“They’re homeschooled,” I said. I saw no reason to tell Tiny that the children were homeschooled because their mother was an outcast-an unofficial outcast, of course.

When we got out of the car, Little Jacob was immediately mobbed with friends. He’d played with the younger Berkey children a number of times, and they were all very fond of him. But as the ladies and I made our way up to the house over an uneven stretch of yard, badly in need of reseeding, Rudolph, the youngest Berkey, ran over and grabbed my arm. His sister Veronica, who had been chasing him, nearly knocked me over. The poor girl is built like a panzer, but alas, possesses only half the grace of a German tank-or of a war machine of any nation for that matter.

“Miss Yoder,” Rudy said-rather he shouted in the way some seven-year-olds do when they’re highly agitated, “why does the little Englishwoman have such big udders?”

“Don’t be rude, Rudy,” I snapped.

“But why?”

“They’re not called ‘udders,’ ” Veronica said between gasps. “They’re called ‘bossoms.’ ” She pronounced the word to rhyme with possums.

“Oh.”

“And that’s the way God made her,” Veronica said.

I must admit that Tiny had a pleasant laugh. “Actually, Dr. Sayeed was running a two-for-one special, and I thought to myself, why would anyone want just one? Of course I’d want two! But when you think about it, it really is like getting them for half price, right?”

I could almost hear the wheels turn in Veronica’s head as she began to process this alien information. But after a few seconds her brain spit it all back out. This was too much too soon-perhaps more than she’d ever want to know.

“Come on, Rudy, let’s go see if Little Jacob wants to play with your snake.”

Now that set off an alarm bell in my head. “That better be a real snake,” I hollered after them, “and it better not be poisonous.” One can never be too careful with one’s children if you ask me. If one must err, ’tis better to err on the side of over-protection, because one can always loosen up. Make your kids wear their helmets when they ride their bicycles, no matter how much they complain. So what if the other kids in the neighborhood don’t wear theirs? So what if they don’t like you for imposing this rule on them? Tough chocolate chip cookies, that’s what I say. Not wearing a helmet can result in a dead, or brain-damaged, child.