Tea with Jam and Dread (9 page)

‘That settles it for me,’ Peregrine said. ‘What is sauce for this gosling is sauce for this goose.’

‘More sauce for another gosling,’ Celia said. ‘Please, mummy, dearest,
please
. I promise not to sass you for an entire week.’

Aubrey gave me a look of quiet desperation that can only be understood by one who has cared for a teenage girl. As a good Christian, I believe in the power of
caramel
just as much as I do in karma. However, what we call the Golden Rule is, in effect, behaving as if we believe in karma. The difference is that we don’t
expect
to be rewarded for our good behaviour. I nodded to give her the go ahead; in fact, I didn’t stop there.

‘Why don’t we all go?’ I said.

‘Rally?’ said Celia.

‘Rally,’ I said. ‘Gosh, it is a lot more satisfying to one’s mouth to say “rally,” than it is to say “really” – rally it is.’

‘Mags,’ said the Babester, ‘are you feeling OK?’

‘I’m fine and dandy. It’s just that it’s a beautiful day out. Why waste it inside, in a stuffy, musty building, listening to a boring sermon that might possibly elevate us spiritually when instead we can observe octogenarians dance with apathy.’ I turned to the others. ‘Did any of you happen to pack inflatable haemorrhoid cushions? The courtyard is ringed by benches but they’re all concrete. Also, if you want to join in the dancing, I suggest that you wear sunscreen because the rays in this part of the world are especially brutal – not at all like up in the UK. Total nudity is an absolute requirement for that, isn’t it, Ida,
dear
?’

Aubrey flashed each of her family members a warning look. ‘We are going only as cultural observers. Magdalena, do you mind terribly if we bring our bed pillows to put on the benches?’

I’d been afraid of that question because the truth was that I did mind. I’m not a complete dunce: I know that my guests engage in the reproductive act and other icky things in my rooms. In the old days when I couldn’t afford to hire someone to gather the linens each morning, in my mind I would sing ‘la-la-la-la-la.’ That was then, and this is now, and I don’t want my pillows plopped anywhere that apathetic postulates might have plonked their pathetic pink patooties.

‘What a droll idea,’ I said. ‘One of Britain’s most noble families toting a motley collection of pillows – ranging from silk filled with eiderdown to burlap filled with straw – into a make-believe convent filled with naked, despairing women. Now that’s a sight for sore eyes, as we say in America, and also a sight guaranteed to make English eyes sore. I will be sure to record this and put it on YouTube. It will undoubtedly go viral.’

Poor Rupert; his was the burlap pillow with the straw stuffing, which undoubtedly still had a certain
eau d’rodent
about it
.
I almost felt sorry for the lad, but my most expensive room package: The Settler’s Experience, had been a special gift to him from his parents for not being arrested for drunk driving for the last three months. It wasn’t my fault that he’d had to lay his noble noggin on a pillow that I’d made using the torso of one of my scarecrows. At least I’d taken care to evict the family of mice that had taken up residence in it, and not being quite the heartless innkeeper some folks on Facebook have made me out to be, I first found new quarters for this rather large family of rodents.

‘Oh dear,’ Aubrey said, pulling a long face, ‘how positively middle class! Imagine that, Peregrine? The Earl and Countess of Grimsley-Snodgrass toting their motley assortment of pillows! Don’t you just love it? Magdalena, I can’t think of anything more delightful. And I suppose there will be a surcharge on the toting – yes? Oh,
do
say, “yes”! Make it a hefty fine.’

‘Yes, hefty,’ said Peregrine. ‘Nothing could please me more than hefty.’

‘Ach,’ Freni cried, throwing her stubby arms heavenward (of course not literally). ‘I do not understand these English and their riddles.’

Young Celia recoiled in umbrage. ‘What riddles?’

‘She finds you to be enigmatic,’ I said. ‘Chronologically she is two generations older than you but culturally it is more in the neighbourhood of five.’

I glanced at my watch. ‘Well,
tempus fugit
, folks. And though we will not be attending a proper house of worship as the Good Lord intends, but will instead be watching a den of deviant nudes, clad only in wrinkles and age spots, dancing indecorously about to scratchy pirated tunes from the nineties – not the best decade for music—’

‘No offense, Magdalena,’ Rupert said, ‘but how would a Mennonite farmwoman like you know what constitutes good music?’

‘Uh, be careful son,’ Gabe said. ‘My wife knows just about everything. Don’t ask me how; just trust me on that.’

‘Rally? Is that so?’

‘Rally, you rascally rabbit,’ I said, to show him just how worldly I had become over the years, having once even watched a cartoon or two with my son at a friend’s house. ‘Now get upstairs, all of you, except for Freni. Brush your teeth and put on some slumming clothes – but do not bring down your pillows. It’s either sore bums on concrete or its church.’

‘What about me?’ Agnes said. ‘Where should I wait while everyone is getting ready?’

‘Well, dear,’ I said, ‘you can either be a sweetheart and help Freni clear the table, or else you can wait in the parlour with Granny Yoder’s ghost.’

‘I’m helping Freni!’ Agnes declared without a second’s hesitation. Although she’s never actually seen my ancestor’s ‘Apparition American,’ she
has
heard Granny’s voice on numerous occasions, and oft times Granny has been rather critical of my best friend. Frankly, I chalk this animosity up to jealousy. Granny Yoder was a bitter old woman when I knew her, and in my humble, respectful opinion, death does not become her.

As for the rest of the breakfast bunch, stumbling, mumbling and grumbling, they all obediently pushed and pulled each other up my impossibly steep stairs. In fact, one too many folks attempted the arduous, dizzying ascent.

BANANA NUT BREAD

1 cup liquid shortening

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup white sugar

4 eggs

6 ripe bananas (mashed)

1 tbsp lemon juice

½ cup melted butter (or margarine)

Beat above ingredients together until well blended. Add following dry ingredients that have been mixed together:

2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup chopped pecans

Mix well; pour into three greased and floured loaf pans. Bake at 250 degrees for one and a half hours. Cool on rack for ten minutes before taking out of pan.

T
he master bedroom is downstairs, below Alison’s room. That
way I can keep track of her comings and goings, as a proper mother ought to do, without being literally in her face. At any rate, I’d scarcely enough time to retire to my boudoir to attend to last-minute personal details when what was surely the world’s loudest bellow was emitted from somewhere on the second story of my very respectable inn. Believe me when I say that the following description is just barely an exaggeration.

Only once before have I heard a bellow of such magnitude, and that was when Willard Bontrager brought his prize-winning bull, Clarence, over to breed my two dairy cows. Despite her readiness for male companionship, Daisy did not find Clarence attractive and repeatedly rebuffed his advances. Finally, when Clarence wouldn’t take a hint, Daisy let loose with a bellow that was heard for miles around.

Emma Hershberger, who owns a catering business over in Bedford, told me that this deluge of mega-decibels caused all ten of her chocolate soufflés to instantly deflate while still in the oven. Reverend Watt Seeno, pastor of the church with thirty-two names up by the interstate highway, declared to his congregation that Daisy’s bellow was, in fact, the premiere sounding of Gabriel’s horn, soon to be followed by another, and that the rapture was imminent. Perhaps the most momentous consequence of Daisy’s peeved outburst was that a planeload of immigrants from the United Kingdom flying into Pittsburgh encountered unexpected turbulence created by the soundwaves. As it happened, the jet had been chartered by a group of authors fleeing the excessively strict libel laws of the United Kingdom. These poor underpaid men and women were so terrified by the intensity of this experience that they each, to a person, ascribed it to an outraged Divinity bent on punishing anyone so arrogant as to think that they might escape the most ridiculous statutes on the face of the globe.

Now where was I? Oh, yes, the bellow that I heard coming from upstairs on that Sunday when my English guests were supposed to be readying themselves for church was not bovine in nature, but emanated from an adult male of the Homo sapiens species. As we are responsible for the welfare of our guests, and not merely overly inquisitive – er, nosy-hosts, we dropped what we were doing (in Gabe’s case, his trousers), and hoofed it up my impossibly steep stairs. Having grown up with this staircase gave me an advantage so that I quickly caught up with him, slipped past him on the landing and appeared as if by magic at the top. I’ll also have it be known that I wasn’t even breathing hard.

When I observed my guests gathered in a tight knot in front of the door of my tiny elevator, I suddenly began to have problems with my respiratory system. My strange symptoms suggested that the oxygen supply had somehow become depleted in the upper story of my now-world-famous inn.

‘W-what’s going on?’ I gasped.

‘Oh Magdalena, it’s dreadful,’ Aubrey said. ‘Peregrine discovered – well, you tell her, dear.’

Peregrine waved a flashlight in my face. The Brits, who are far more refined than we, their boorish American cousins, call this item a
torch
! And to think that we poor, pathetic troglodytes reserve the word ‘torch’ for flames emanating from the end of a pole.

‘I had my passport with me,’ Peregrine said, ‘just in case that nudist colony gets raided by the police – you know how hung up you Americans are on the subject of nudity.’

‘And with good reason, dear. If prancing around naked was all right, God Almighty wouldn’t have personally tailored tunics out of animal hides for Adam and Eve. Genesis, chapter three, verse twenty-one.’

‘I dare say that the pair of them were created naked to begin with,’ Rupert said.

‘Darest thou?’ I said, allowing my dander to rise. ‘Do
you
, a lapsed Anglican, actually believe that?’

‘No, I can’t say that I do—’

‘Then butt out, dear.’

‘Good on yer, mate,’ Aubrey said, sounding incongruously like an Australian. Then again, with this bunch of notable nobles, it seemed like, as the old saying goes: anything goes.

‘Well, I won’t butt out,’ Peregrine boomed in a voice almost as loud as his bellowing. ‘What happened next is that I accidently dropped my passport and somehow it slipped down there, between the bloody lift and the floor, so I pushed the “down button” just to move it a bit and guess what I discovered laying across the roof of your miniscule lift?’

‘Hmm, well it wasn’t America, because Christopher Columbus did that – although actually the Vikings got here long before he did, but they didn’t stay, and they didn’t enslave entire cultures. And the Good Lord only knows that you English helped the Spanish decimate the native populations of the New World, what with your smallpox and your many Indian wars. And if you want to get really technical, the Indians – many folks call them Native Americans these days – arrived on this continent well over ten thousand years ago, which is four thousand years earlier than the Bible says that the earth was created. Now there is a brainteaser for you, one which you could be asking my preacher, the good Reverend Diffledorf,
if
you decided to accompany me to God’s house today instead of shaking your booties with the naked heathens in that Gateway to Hell across the road.’

‘Does she
ever
shut up?’ Aubrey whispered. Boy, did I feel betrayed.

‘Rarely,’ said Gabe, just as disloyally. He had, by the way, pulled his trousers up by then. ‘But she might now, if just for a minute.’ His eyes were as big as cinnamon buns, and he was pointing past Peregrine in the direction of the elevator.

‘
What?
’ I said. Just to prove my critics wrong, I closed my mouth. And anyway, a closed mouth allows me more energy with which to open my eyes even wider. I didn’t, however, like what I saw.

‘Holy guacamole!’ I screeched. ‘What
is
that thing?’

‘What does it
look
like?’ Peregrine said. At that point he was standing off to the side of the elevator and his demeanour was calm – strangely calm, if you ask me.

‘Gabe,’ I cried, ‘you’re a physician! What do
you
think? What I’m looking at doesn’t make any sense – but man does it ever stink!’

‘It’s a mummy of some kind,’ Peregrine said.

‘Magdalena,’ Rupert said, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so, now that’s what I call some first-rate entertainment.’

‘Rupert!’ his mother said with surprising sharpness. Aubrey turned to me. ‘It
is
very realistic, Magdalena, and I’m so glad that you arranged to have Peregrine find it.’

‘I most certainly did
not
arrange to have him find this – this, whatever it is!’

‘It’s a preserved body,’ Peregrine said with the equanimity that only a Brit could muster under such horrific conditions. ‘When discovered in Egypt and Peru, we called them mummies. Given that this is a Mennonite establishment, shouldn’t this be called a “memmy”?’ Then he laughed, and to put it frankly, he sounded just like a jackass. ‘“
mem
” – instead of “mummy,”’ he finally said. ‘Don’t you see?’

‘Jolly good joke, that,’ Rupert said, and did his own imitation of a braying donkey.

‘It’s about as funny as a toothache, dears,’ I said.

‘I’d better call Toy,’ Gabe said.

‘Yes, Toy,’ I said. The reality of what it meant to find a corpse on the roof of my defunct elevator was beginning to hit home and I was beginning to shake.

‘Rally?’ Aubrey said, for now she had totally turned on me. ‘Shouldn’t you be calling the police instead of blathering on about toys?’

‘Toy
is
the name of our Chief of Police,’ Gabriel said as he slipped his arm around my shoulder. ‘He’s from Charlotte, North Carolina, which, despite its name, is one of our Southern states. And Toy is just like one of those pot-bellied, Southern sheriffs from an old black and white movie that is set in the nineteen sixties: he has a chip on his shoulder as large as the Rock of Gibraltar. He is particularly xenophobic. He can’t stand anyone who can’t speak English. Good old A
mur
ican English.’

‘Say what?’ Peregrine said. ‘
We
speak English. We speak the King’s English.

‘That would be the Queen’s English,’ Aubrey said.

‘Not to Toy’s ears,’ I said to Peregrine as Gabe dialled Toy. ‘You speak British. Aubrey speaks a few words of English – Rupert, you seem to have a facility for languages, don’t you, dear?’

The lad smiled. ‘Rally? You think so?’

‘Of course, dear,’ I said. Divide and conquer: that was the name of the game, even for a pacifist, and one who had to resort to manipulation in order to win her battles. ‘Rupert, repeat the following phrase after me, making sure to rhyme the similarly spelled words with “gain”:
the rain in Spain runs down the drain in vain.
’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Rupert said and shuddered dramatically. Perhaps he was genuinely horrified at the way we Americans torture our diphthongs, or he had never heard the actual lyrics from
My Fair Lady
. Then again, he might have been just a young smart aleck having fun at an old biddy’s expense.

‘Well, dear,’ I said, peevishly, ‘we simply must take care not to break the UK’s ridiculously strict libel laws, mustn’t we? At any rate, practice saying the phrase I gave you – about a thousand times a day – and you’ll soon be speaking English as well as Arnold.’

‘Arnold? Arnold who?’

‘I can’t say,’ I said. ‘It’s those pesky libel laws again.’

‘Toy’s on his way,’ Gabe said and gave me a supportive squeeze.

Alas, Toy did not make it there in time.