Puddin' on the Blitz Read online

  Bindi laughed. ‘Drubbing! Ha! Ya ain’t changed at all, Auntie Mags. How old was ya when ya was babysitting me back then? Like thirty, or something? Ya was using them big old-fashioned words back then, and ya still are.’

  I snorted and shook my horsey head. ‘The last time that I sat for you, I was twelve. You, on the other hand, have always had atrocious grammar. In fact, the worst grammar I’ve ever heard a Mennonite use. Possibly even anyone at all.’

  ‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘Well, here’s a newsflash: I ain’t no Mennonite no more. I’m C of E.’

  ‘Excuse me? You’re a couple of vitamins?’

  ‘There’s no excuse for ya,’ Bindi said, then grinned. ‘Them initials stand for Church of England. Ya see, I married me an Englishman, a bona fide Englishman. Me and Oliver ran into each other by accident – a car accident. It was, like, kinda my fault, but he was real gentleman about it on account of he was an English. Back then Oliver was a student at Penn State University.

  ‘Anyway, it turns out he ain’t no ordinary Englishman neither, but one of them upper-class Englishman, the kind that don’t open their mouths when they talk – just like Prince Charles. Anyway, we was married a year later in England. After he graduated, I took me some lessons on how to be a proper Anglican and all. Now I get to drink me some real wine at Holy Communion – like every week, if I wanna, and not just some stupid old grape juice twice a year. Well, except that to be a proper English lady ya ain’t supposed to go to church, because almost nobody there does, on account of they prefer to stay home, drink their tea, and eat their strumpets.’

  ‘I’ve heard that their strumpets are very tasty,’ I said, giving her the benefit of the doubt. She was, after all, the international traveller.

  ‘Yeah, but not as tasty as their tarts,’ she said.

  ‘And to think that you’ve eaten both,’ I said. ‘Bindi, what an exotic life you’ve lived compared to mine. I thought your surname Twaddlebottom sounded foreign.’

  ‘Oh, Auntie Mags, the English are never foreigners, no matter where they live. Even here, Oliver refers to my family as foreigners, and we been here for over 280 years, same as you.’

  ‘I know, dear. All of our ancestors came over on one of two ships, the Charming Polly in 1737, or the Charming Nancy in 1738.’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, our name ain’t pronounced like ya read it; ya supposed to pronounce it “Twddlbttm.” I don’t know about them Welshes, or them Scotches, but if ya is upper-class English, ya ain’t supposed to pronounce no vowels. Oliver said that’s because they ain’t supposed to move their lips when they talk. Anyhow, a lot of them upper-class English – them that lose their fortunes – come to America and become highly successful ventriloquists. So that’s what my Oliver is: a ventriloquist. Ya ever hear of the famous Randy Upwood? That’s his stage name.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, sounding quite devastated.

  ‘I’m sure he’s very talented,’ I said kindly, ‘what with all that practice mumbling. I read once in a gossip magazine that some aristocrats are actually quite frightened of accidentally stepping on rusty nails in their horse paddocks. If they were to contract lockjaw, their condition might never be diagnosed until it was too late to do anything to treat it.’

  Belinda nodded vigorously. ‘That’s why I insist that my Ollie – that’s what I call him – wears thick-soled cowboy boots at all times, and denim jeans.’ She paused. ‘Ollie’s performing right here in Bedford, at the Black Margarine, if you wanna see him perform when ya make bail.’

  ‘Is the Black Margarine a – uh – bar?’

  Belinda sighed. ‘Jeezers wheezers. And here we was having a normal conversation like, so I almost forgot you was still a Mennonite. Yeah, it’s a bar. But ya don’t hafta drink, ya know?’

  ‘I know. But still, no can do.’

  ‘Hey, here’s something I bet ya don’t know: even lower-class ventriloquists, and American ventriloquists – who are all lower class, on account of them just being American – ain’t none them able to throw their voices.’

  ‘Is that right,’ I said, just to be agreeable, even though I did know it.

  ‘Yeah. That’s what we in the industry want you to believe. But it’s all just a delusion.’

  ‘That is absolutely fascinating, dear. But back to the business at hand, now that we have reconnected after thirty-seven years, and submitted to the back-whacking ritual that our people refer to as hugs, I trust that you can see your way to relaxing the rules a wee bit for your dear old Auntie Mags.’

  Officer Twaddlebottom bit her lip as she considered my request. ‘OK,’ she whispered at last, ‘but you can’t never tell nobody, and ya still gotta put on these prison duds, or else it’s my job.’

  I took the hideous outfit from her. ‘But the bottom half of this outfit is pants,’ I hisspered, which is to say that I hissed softly. ‘You know that Conservative Mennonite women don’t wear trousers.’

  Bindi rolled her beady brown eyes; it was a skill that she’d honed as a sassy urchin. ‘I know, and that’s crazy, if you ask me. My mother’s ancient – she’s like, seventy, and she ain’t never worn no pants. But look, here’s the thing: they don’t make no skirt with stripes. And your prayer cap has gotta go too. Them’s the regulations.’

  ‘But that’s religious discrimination!’

  ‘No, it ain’t. Last year I booked me a whole busload of nuns – some of them was even holding babies – and every one of them had to put on these here prison scrubs and lose them whippets they wear on their heads.’

  ‘That’s wimples, not whippets.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. My point is that I can’t make no exceptions. Zilch. Nada.’

  ‘Waah!’

  ‘Shh. Auntie Mags, ya don’t want Sheriff Stodgewiggle to hear ya hollering, do ya?’

  You can bet your bippy that I didn’t want to see neither hide nor hair of that corrupt sheriff ever again. To that end I closed my mouth tighter than a clam at low tide, took a deep breath and disobeyed Deuteronomy 22:5. By the time I had finished exchanging my sensible Christian garments for the sinful jail duds, I felt more degraded than a cat must feel when dressed up in doll clothes. At least a cat doesn’t feel shame.

  ‘Bindi,’ I said, feeling my eyes puddle up, ‘when you bring the library cart around, please make sure that it’s stocked with a variety of reads. Maybe a good book will help take my mind off my dire situation.’

  Bindi was gracious enough to merely snicker. ‘Auntie Mags, this ain’t no state prison; you’re in the county jail, in a holding cell, just ’till your arraignment which some high muckety-muck has seen fit to arrange for tomorrow. You don’t get no library cart, see? But there’s this book somebody left out front that I’ve been passing around back here. It’s pretty beat up by now – if ya want it, ya can have it, but just for tonight. It’s a mystery novel called Death of a Real Estate Magnet.’

  ‘Did you mean to say “Magnate”?’ I asked.

  ‘Ain’t that what I said?’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ I said quickly. ‘I love reading mysteries, and this one already sounds puzzling to me.’

  ‘Yeah, but ya see, I didn’t actually read it, Auntie Mags. I did hear a review of it on one of them liberal radio stations one day on my drive into work. The reviewer said that despite the fact that some readers might complain about there being too much character development in the front half of the book, that part is actually packed with clues. And it’s their loss if they miss them.

  ‘Also, the reviewer said that some folks might say that the author used too much humour. Ya know, like she wrote a stand-up comedy routine with a dead body thrown in. Again, the reviewer lady said that if the reader didn’t appreciate the humour, that was their loss.’

  ‘Hmm. I don’t like that at all,’ I said. ‘Never blame the reader! I’m a mild-mannered woman with a heart full of love, but I hate how some writers get us to spend our hard-earned money on worthless pieces of paper. Why, I’d throw that book acro
ss the room, and if I was outside, I’d throw that waste of time all the way to Disneyworld in Florida. That reviewer really hikes my hackles.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, ain’t ya something, Auntie Mags! But throwing that book is exactly how it got so beat up.’

  Bindi’s description of the Death of a Real Estate Magnate was, if anything, understated. The book was missing its front cover and first thirty pages. On just about every page at least one word or phrase had been underlined or highlighted, and on many there were doodles and even obscene drawings! But the worst offense, in my humble opinion, is that the last fifteen or so pages had also been ripped out. And this from a mystery! Yes, there were clever clues, despite too much character development in the first half, and far too many silly puns and alliterations, but reading it was all for naught because I never found out who the killer was. I felt like banging my head on the bars of my cell, but the only thing less attractive than a horsey head is a horsey head with long, narrow indentations.

  Instead I did what every other reader of that ding-dong-dang (that’s as bad as I can swear) book before me had done. I threw that book across my cell. And then I stomped on it – again and again and again.

  TWO

  I suppose that I should start at the beginning. You already know that I am a mild-mannered, Conservative Mennonite woman. My grandparents were Amish, and because the Amish marry strictly within their own sect, I am related by blood to almost eighty percent of them. The end result is that I am, in fact, my own cousin. Whenever I eat a sandwich outdoors, even by myself, it can be said that I am on a family picnic.

  My hunky husband, on the other hand, is of the Jewish persuasion. He’s a retired heart surgeon from New York City who chose our beautiful corner of Southwestern Pennsylvania to call his forever home. Gabe and I have two children: a fourteen-year-old daughter, Alison, and a two-year-old son, Jacob, whom I gave birth to when I was forty-nine.

  We live in the idyllic Pennsylvania Dutch village of Hernia, population 2,169 ½ (Greta Lehman is pregnant again), where everyone knows everyone else’s business before they even know their own. Case in point, twelve people knew that Greta Lehman was expecting a baby before her husband did, thanks to my blabbermouth cousin, Sam, who sold her the pregnancy testing kit at our village grocery store. The villagers live in single-family homes, many of which are two-story, Victorian-style wooden houses that sit on large lots. The streets are lined with large, mature trees and most of them lead back to Main Street. We have no stoplights, only stop signs, and many, or most, of our vehicles are horse-drawn buggies. There are hitching posts in front of the grocery store, the police station, and the feed store.

  I live with my family four miles outside this throbbing hive of activity. Our home is situated on the remnants of a dairy farm, in the shadow of Buffalo Mountain. When I was in college, and my sister Susannah just ten years of age, our parents were squished to death between a truck carrying expensive athletic shoes and another one carrying unpasteurized milk. The farm had been in our family for well over a hundred years and had been paid for, and our parents’ life insurance policy provided us money to live on for a while, but when it finally ran out, I had to take a long hard look at my options.

  I had already sold off most of the dairy herd after our parents were killed. Now I could also sell off the land, and move into town, but then what would I do? Or, I could marry some farmer whom I didn’t love, and immediately begin breeding little farm hands. Or – and this idea I lifted from a magazine at my doctor’s office – I could turn our nineteenth-century farmhouse into a quaint bed- and full-board inn, in order to capitalize on the tourist trade. After all, it is a little-known fact that Lancaster, Pennsylvania does not have a monopoly on the Amish.

  Our farmhouse had five upstairs bedrooms that were available for guest use, but only two baths, neither of which were en suite. But that last fact was of no consequence. I’d read about or heard enough travel stories to know that even in many old European hotels, one had to toddle down the hall in robe and slippers at night to get to the loo. What’s more, in some of those places the rooms were scarcely larger than the beds, and the rooms lacked climate control, and what passed for reading lights were so dim that even a cat couldn’t see to lick its tail.

  Whereas my rooms were so spacious that one could dance in them (although that would surely be a sin), they were each equipped with their own thermostat, and one could actually see to read even the smallest print (in a proper King James Bible, to be sure). As for my lack of loos – well, whoopy-doo, as we say on this side of the Pond. You see, I’d concluded from those European reports that tourists will put up with just about any amount of discomfort as long as they can view it as a cultural experience. And when they travel to Asia, they lower the comfort bar even further. Why else might one stay in a dive in Delhi, a hovel in Hanoi, or a shed in Sri Lanka and still rave about one’s ‘awesome’ experience? In some Far Eastern places, a hole in the cement floor is your toilet, thank you very much.

  If folks wanted a cultural experience, I reasoned, I could give them that. I named my establishment The PennDutch Inn. Pennsylvania Dutch, incidentally, is the term that refers to the descendants of the Germans and German-speaking Swiss settlers, and their dialect, which is still spoken today by the Amish. If folks wanted to pay outrageous European prices while they enjoyed their cultural experience, I would give them that opportunity as well. Yes, ma’am, and Bob’s your uncle, my guests were going to be treated to the ultimate hotel experience. By paying mere hundreds of dollars more, these fortunate few would be able to make their own beds, clean their own rooms, clean the lavatory on a rotational basis, set the dining room table, wash up after meals, muck out the cow barn, milk my dairy cows, gather eggs, feed the chickens, sweep out the chicken coop, and replace the straw on the floor. That was just for starters, mind you – there were other chores that were more seasonal.

  Take my exorbitant room prices, add my scheme for selling chores, throw in a pinch of Continental attitude (French works the best), and voila, one has the perfect recipe to appeal to the tastes of America’s much-talked about one percent. Few people would be willing to shovel cow dung for two dollars an hour, but slap a fake Amish bonnet on a rich woman’s head, and charge her two hundred dollars to haul manure out of the barn in a little wheelbarrow, and she’ll be in ‘hog heaven’ – so to speak.

  My business was almost an instant success. Then the murder of a United States Congressman occurred at The PennDutch Inn, and the story made national news. I held my breath for five minutes, thinking that surely no one would want to stay where there had been a violent death. But au contraire. God bless America, and Americans’ obsession with violence – oops, perhaps a good Christian woman such as myself ought not to say that. What I meant was that virtually everyone and their pedigreed poodle was scratching at my front door begging to get on my waiting list. That meant that I could pick and choose my guests.

  Just a word of advice to any would-be hoteliers, be their businesses large or small: very famous people travel with large retinues – as well as quite obnoxious people whom they call ‘groupies’. Also, one might consider carefully the wisdom contained in this original saying that is sometimes attributed to Auntie Mags: ‘Even the Prince of Wales puts on his knickers one leg at a time.’ In case this message is still obscure, I shall be blunt. People are people, and bad behaviour is no respecter of either class or money.

  Unfortunately, I am often the first person to ignore my own words of wisdom. Also, as a simple woman, I am highly susceptible to flattery, which scripture warns us to guard against in Romans 16:18.

  Approximately three months before I was thrown into the slammer, the daughter of my erstwhile nemesis called on me. I would have been better off pretending not to be home, but my hunky husband deprived me of that chance by bounding to the door. A moment later he called out, ‘Hon, you have a visitor.’

  ‘Is it a fat elf with white chin whiskers?’ I asked playfully.

  ‘No, Mags
,’ he said, a mite crossly, ‘it’s not my mother.’

  That’s when the chirpy voice of Hortense Hemphopple lilted through the front entrance like that of a giant sparrow. Indeed, were the common house sparrow able to mate with a human (a sin for which they would both have to die according to Leviticus 20:16), their progeny would surely resemble, in all respects, our own dear Hortense. I am not suggesting that the woman sports a great deal of feathers. The overall avian vibe that she gives off might have something to do with her short, spikey hairstyle, which never fails to remind me of a badly plucked chicken, with half its quills remaining. And I suppose that if she ditched the yellow lipstick, her protruding upper lip might look less like a beak – if only when viewed from the front. But then who am I to judge?

  Bless her heart, Hortense Gelato Hemphopple is the daughter of Wanda Sissleswitzer Hemphopple, the woman who tried to kill me and my beloved daughter Alison two years ago. Wanda and I had been feuding since the third grade when she dipped my braids in her inkpot. So as not to paint an unfair picture of little Wanda, I must divulge here that the poor child was an orphan, who was being raised by a bachelor uncle who couldn’t be bothered to wash a little girl’s hair, much less braid it. My mother, on the other hand, was a neurotic, obsessive-compulsive neat freak who braided my hair so tightly every morning before school that my eyes were in veritable danger of popping out and rolling under the bus.

  All through elementary school I hated Wanda, but I lacked both the nerve and the creativity to strike back in kind. Finally, I got my revenge in high school when, unbeknownst to Wanda, I tucked a frankfurter down inside her beehive hairdo while she dozed off during maths. Wanda shampooed her hair only twice a year, so she discovered the meaty addition to the matted mop atop her noggin only when the odour brought her some unwanted attention, a lot of it from flies.