The Death of Pie (2 page)

I am five foot ten inches tall and skinny as a fence post. Each of my feet is as large as the state of Florida and, if I was ever truly destitute, I could hire my chest out as a billiards table. Fortunately, due to my God-given business acumen, the odds of rock-hard balls larger than my bosoms rolling hither, thither, and yon across my barren ribcage are entirely miniscule. I am, you see, a millionaire many times over.

My parents were simple Mennonite dairy farmers whose ancestors were Amish immigrants from Switzerland. Both the Amish and the Mennonites are religious sects – similar to Protestantism, but with some key defining differences. Chief amongst these is the fact that their members adhere to strict pacifism. Neither a Mennonite nor an Amish person will lift a hand against another human being – even to save the life of one's own child. There are many degrees of strictness, with some groups of Amish being the strictest, and some groups of Mennonite being the most liberal. For now, suffice it to say that the Amish are generally the ones you might see driving around in horse-drawn buggies, the men wearing straw hats, and beards with no moustaches, and the women decked out in their black travel bonnets and fetching black aprons worn modestly over their ankle-length dresses.

My, but I do get lost in my head! What I meant to tell you right off was that my beloved parents died early. Being liberal Mennonites, they were permitted to drive, but Pennsylvania where we live is a mountainous state with an exceedingly long tunnel. One fine spring day, when I was a mere lass of twenty, and my flat chest was palpitating with the sort of dreams that only the young – or stupid – dare entertain, my parents were squished like a bug in that tunnel when a truck carrying milk rear-ended their car, thrusting them forward into a semi-trailer loaded to the gills with state-of-the-art running shoes. Or was it the other way around? It doesn't matter – shoes, milk and parent parts were everywhere. It was unspeakably awful, and my younger sister, Susannah, literally did not speak for the next three years.

Now, I do not mean to say this unkindly – only with true Christian love – but Susannah, who was eighteen at the time, did more than just hold her tongue. She began dealing with her pain by driving into Bedford, the nearest city, and hanging out at its bars where she managed to convince evil men that she was of legal drinking age, and they indulged her. She soon descended into the world of— Hmm, how can I put this gently? The life of a harlot wearing scarlet, or perhaps a tart with a broken heart, or maybe even a floozy ever so boozy? I'm sure you get the picture. I have no doubt that our parents rolled over in their graves with such rapidity that they supplied our village of Hernia with enough electricity to see us into the twenty-second century.

This left me with no choice; I had to support both of us. Believe me, back in those days I would have much rather indulged myself by a day spent sitting on a lightly padded straight-backed chair, reading the Holy Scriptures, with the occasional break to refresh my energy by eating a slice of bread with jam. But pampering myself like that was not about to pay Papa's mortgage on the farm. Although our elderly Amish cousins, Mose and Freni, agreed to stay on to help with the farm work, it soon became apparent that I was not cut out for the life of a dairy farmer.

Fortunately our dear parents had the foresight to leave everything to me in their will, with the provision that I care for my sister in perpetuity, or as long as it took her to get on her feet financially – on her own. At that time I was to make some sort of just redistribution of property. At any rate, in the meantime, the farm was mine –
all
mine, to do with how I pleased. What pleased me was to turn my traditional farmhouse, with its authentic barn (and perhaps just two dairy cows) into a charming bed and breakfast. And since it was nestled in the western portion of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, a state famous for its Pennsylvania ‘Dutch' culture, I named it The PennDutch Inn. For the record, the Pennsylvania Dutch have nothing to do with Holland and windmills. The people referenced are descended from Swiss and German immigrants, and the ‘Dutch' they speak is laced with English.

Unfortunately, bed and breakfast inns are a dime a dozen, so in order to succeed, my establishment had to have a particular twist. To put it frankly, the angle I chose was
abuse
. Hold your horses, please, because I know that sounds bad. But consider this: when one travels to a foreign country, one where men can be seen urinating in public, albeit against a wall, is that not a form of visual abuse? When one must bravely attempt to sleep upon a pallet of lumps, and a pillow of buckwheat or straw, instead of a proper pillow-top mattress and an eider down pillow like the Good Lord intended, is that not a form of abuse as well? Likewise, when a humble soul, such as myself, enters a shop and blurts out a cheery ‘good morning, my dear sir, and where do you keep the laxatives?' and the proprietor turns up his nose, having taken deep offense just because I speak what is now considered to be the International Language, and I don't know any words of
that
man's language, which was once the lingua franca of the world, I ask you, isn't
that
abuse? So there you have it! People are prepared to pay outrageous sums of money for abuse just as long as they can view it as a cultural experience.

‘
Voila!
' I shouted when this thought occurred to me. I devised a system called the ALPO plan, an anagram for a popular dog food in the United States – there being no connection, of course. My initials stand for Amish Lifestyle Plan Option. The Amish are mostly farmers, and as such very hard workers. By signing up for my system guests can pay up to three times the normal rate by performing chores. For an extra one hundred dollars they get to clean their own rooms; two hundred dollars more allows them the privilege of scrubbing toilets. Three hundred bucks gets one into the chicken house, along with the right to rake droppings onto the compost heap. Four hundred dollars buys guests the opportunity to muck out the cow barn, and then there is the once-a-year ten thousand dollar grand prize raffle (guests have to be present to win) which is draining and relining the cesspool.

To make a long, sweet story slightly shorter, I had a head for business, and was soon raking money in fist over tightly clenched fist. However, I say that tongue in cheek. I give God ten percent of everything I make, and twenty percent or so after that back to the community. With less than two thousand residents, the village of Hernia could not afford a police department, so I pay for a police officer's salary, as well as that of the mayor and the animal-control officer. Lest I get too much credit for my charity, I must hasten to point out that
I
am both mayor and dog-catcher.

Of course, I am much more than just a flat-chested, wealthy woman, long of limb and somewhat hard on the eyes. I am a conservative Mennonite woman who chooses to wear her long, mousy brown tresses in braids that wrap around her head and are held in place by so many hairpins that I set off metal detectors wherever I go. Atop my metal mountain I carefully perch a freshly washed white organza prayer cap, although I hold it in place with yet another metal pin. This is because the New Testament instructs everyone to pray at all times, and that women should pray with their heads covered. I wear dresses that cover my knees (as well as my privates, of course) with elbow-length sleeves. I do not believe in wearing fancy-schmancy jewelry.

Now, it has been said that I am a stubborn, opinionated woman – even bossy at times. Rubbish! We Mennonites are a soft-spoken, gentle people, renowned for our humility. I, for one, am quite proud of my humility. But anyway, what is so wrong about a woman having an opinion? After all, we women are intuitive folk. Is it not true that a hunch from a woman is equal to two facts from a man?

One final, and confidential, bit of information that I will share about myself is that I suffer from a chronic and heartbreaking disease known by the acronym of STAB. The initials stand for sarcastic, tart, alliterative blather. I used to think that Lucifer was the reason I couldn't control all the alliterative words that flowed so effortlessly from my tongue. Believe me, I have prayed diligently about this matter. I have even worked with a speech therapist. The matter remains out of my control. I was on the verge of a deep depression until I consented to
one
session with a therapist, a very pleasant woman named Dr Luci Feragamo – a woman not of my faith. In that one session Dr Feragamo was able to convince me that alliteration is pleasant to the ear. She went on to say that only copy-editors and others like them – people who probably dance and stay away from fatty foods – find alliteration annoying. ‘Just ignore them,' she said, and so I have.

Well, enough about me. Now I suppose I should properly introduce the corpse, that despicable purveyor of pulp fiction, Ramat Sreym. Her first name was pronounced Ram-it, to rhyme with a certain cuss word, and her last name was pronounced S-raym. She claimed to have been born in the nation-state of Sreymistan, but I can find no such place on the map, and Google is boggled as well. However, her accent was Midwest American – possibly one of the square states.

I will never speak ill of the dead unless, of course, it is necessary to do so in order to make a point or prove a case. I am afraid that I shall have to do both of those shortly, so here goes. Ramat was first and foremost a celebrity. My dear friend, and self-described literary critic, Doc Shafor, once quipped that Ramat Sreym might be able to write her name on the condition that she was allowed to plagiarize it. She was the sort of author who became famous overnight because her publisher bought space for her on the end caps of all the right bookstores. Again, this rather bitter sentiment came from Doc, who was a ‘wannabe' writer and jumped to conclusions faster than a sports commentator. Personally, the only books that I read other than the Bible are autobiographies. As those are written by the subjects themselves, it stands to reason that, like the Good Book, every word in them is true.

But back to poor, misguided Ramat. By the time that I first met her, she had bought into the worst that American celebrity culture had to offer – hook, line and sinker. As a consequence (by her own admission), that meant fat-sucking, fat infusion, silicone implants, liposuction, toe removal, rib removal, dermabrasion and acid peels. The end result was a woman that even she couldn't recognize.

She had managed to become ageless, with perfect features and skin, yet at the same time curiously unattractive. For all I knew, Ramat was closer to being a century old than she was to being the fertile twenty-something she appeared to be from a distance. Let it be known that I have great reverence for the elderly, despite the fact that I have been scolded by many a crone (with just cause, no doubt). The cantankerous and hard-to-please are our national treasures and we must treat them that way: we must turn them over to the government for their safekeeping.

Still, a body has a right to complain – and vociferously – when an outsider like Ramat Sreym falls face down into my prize-winning apple pie, causing not only the death of said pie, but the premature end of
Hernia's 110th Annual Festival of Pies
.

‘T
he clue was “it was a dark and stormy night,”' I said upon opening the door of the PennDutch Inn. ‘The answer was “cliché.”'

Our new Chief of Police scratched the back of his head with manicured fingers and attempted to wrinkle his unlined brow. He was our
only
police officer now that we'd been forced to downsize. Fresh out of the academy, and on the job for just two months, he was younger than my sturdy Christian underwear, but he was a very polite lad, which is all that really mattered to me. Honestly, it didn't bother me one whit that his given name was Toy Graham.
Toy!

‘Miss Yoder,' he said, clearly unable to make eye contact with someone as ancient as myself, ‘would it be all right if I come in?'

I don't mind telling you that my cheeks burned with embarrassment. A Southern woman would have already fed him dinner, maybe even burped him in the time it had taken me to answer the door. In my defence, Toy Graham had not called ahead, and I was determined to get the answer to number fifteen across before I set down my crossword puzzle.

‘By all means, come in,' I said, and with a grand sweeping motion showed him into my stuffy sitting room and bade him to sit on my notoriously uncomfortable furniture. ‘Have a seat. There is no point in being picky because they are equally torturous on one's backside. By the way, would you care for a snack?'

‘No, thank you, ma'am.'

‘Are you sure? There are pies galore in the kitchen. As usual, Freni forgot that the contest rules allow only one pie from each category, and she baked multiples of everything, determined as she was to finally win this year. Before the contest even began, she sent Mose back here with the extras so that I could freeze them for her. Freni is Amish, you know, and they aren't permitted the use of electricity.'

‘Ma'am, I realize that it was rude of me not to call first—'

‘Indeed, it was.'

‘Please accept my apology, ma'am.'

Just looking at Toy Graham is enough to fill my head with foolish thoughts. If I get too close to him, I have to concentrate on Mama's liver and prune soufflé to keep myself from self-combusting.

‘Of course, dear,' I said, my eyes on his shoes. ‘You have my partial attention.' Since folks never really listen to each other, it never mattered what I said.

‘I asked if we could talk about Miss – uh – Miss—'

‘OK, Chief, here's the deal. Ramat Sreym is an unusual name, a bit tricky for anyone to pronounce except for a native Sreymistani, so I suggest that henceforth we refer to her as either the “deceased,” or simply “Ramat.”'

He laughed with nervous relief. ‘Yes ma'am. Anyway, she can't object now.'