Mennonites Don't Dance (5 page)

“Uh huh,” Jonah said. He paused, turning his next words over on his tongue. They didn't taste right. He didn't even mean them. After all, he intended to throw the box of curtains into the back of his truck and get rid of them the next time he went to the nuisance yard. He didn't care about them. “What are you going to do with these?” he said.

“Salvation Army, I guess.”

“Really?”

“Sure, why?”

“She's going to want to know what you did with them.”

“I don't like them,” Hazel said simply. She was threading a needle and had a length of blue thread between her teeth, but stopped to give him her attention. Katie, who Jonah could just see under the sewing table, had stitched together two squares of fabric, with holes left open for the head and arms of her favourite doll to fit through. She was about to come out, would have stood up and leaned against his leg in the way she always did, but instead shrunk back farther under the table. She had dropped her needle. Jonah could see it, a thin silver splinter sticking out of the rug.

“Katie,” he said, crouching down to look her in the face. “Do you see that?” He pointed to the needle, a trail of red thread looped through its eye.

“I dropped it. Mommy's teaching me.”

“Teaching you to drop needles where people can step on them?”

“No.” He could see she was confused. Unused to being scolded. Not with the way they always treated her, as though she was a treasure on loan to them from God. As Jonah looked at his daughter, he saw how little it would take to turn her confusion into crying. He tried to stop himself. After all, he was wearing boots, so the needle couldn't have harmed him.

“What if Daddy stepped on that, got it stuck in his foot, right into the bone, and had to pull it out with the pliers?” he said, and watched as Katie's eyes began to blur under a film of tears.

“Jonah!” Hazel hissed under her breath. “What are you doing?”

She squeezed his shoulder, hard, and he glanced up from where he crouched and saw Hazel looking at him as though he was the crazy man down the hill. Like he hadn't just said something perfectly reasonable. Still, he considered apologizing to Katie, lifting her from under the table and saying he was sorry, that she just needed to be more careful. After that, once Katie's quivering bottom lip was stilled, he'd take his mother's curtains away, but not before he'd lean over Hazel, sweep her hair aside and kiss behind her ear. He'd whisper an apology to her, too, and she'd forgive him. Of course she'd forgive him.

As Jonah stood up, he knocked Hazel's scissors off the table. The blades opened into straight-edged jaws, but he barely heard them hit the floor. He cringed at the lack of sound and instinctively put his hand up to his ear. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe, again, that there might be something very wrong with him. And neither Hazel nor Katie, so busy with their own small concerns, cared enough to notice.

“I expect to see my mother's drapes up by tonight,” he said. He kicked the box and left for the barn. Hazel got up to go after him, but she was wearing slippers and stopped at the end of the walk. Jonah ignored her when she called after him.

When Jonah came home later that evening, it was almost dark, and he saw from the outside of the house that his mother's old curtains were hung. Light from the kitchen spilled, jaundiced, between the seams, and the curtains themselves looked harsh and stiff, the fabric bristly with sun stains on the lining. He remembered that they always smelled harshly yellow in his parents' house, like strong pollen. Now, when Jonah opened the door to his own house and stepped inside, he stood stiff as a switch. After a while, he managed to sit down, but for the rest of the evening didn't say anything. He just stared at the drapes in silence, picking dead skin from his lips.

By the next morning, Hazel had removed the old curtains and Jonah didn't ask what she did with them. In their place were the new blue panels she'd finished sewing the day before.

“I'm sorry,” Jonah whispered into Hazel's hair. He had found her still in her pyjamas, her body soft with sleep, standing over a pot of oatmeal. She looked the way she used to when they were first married and he would wrap himself around her from behind while she stirred. “I'll make it up to the two of you. I promise.” To Katie, waiting quietly at the table, he said, “How'd you and Mommy like to go for a drive today?”

With Katie in the backseat, Jonah reached beside him and squeezed Hazel's hand. As much a reassurance for himself as her. She turned towards him and he saw a new uncertainty tugging at her eyes and mouth. She was entitled to it, he thought, after the way he'd behaved over those damn curtains.

Jonah looked at Katie in the rear view mirror. “Guessed where we're going yet?”

“Swift Current?” she said, unsure.

“Nope. Some place you've never been. Even Mom doesn't know.” Jonah grinned and turned his attention back to the road. Though he still couldn't hear out of the one ear, he felt a lightness returning to him. He had overcome his worry, and nothing could bring him down.

But Jonah hadn't considered that the tourist amenities at Cypress Hills wouldn't be open yet in the second week of May. The hut where visitors could rent paddleboats and canoes in the summer was boarded up. As were the hamburger and ice cream stands. It was cold, too, when they arrived, with sharp gusts of wind blowing off the lake.

“Damn it.” Jonah jolted the car into park and dropped his hands back onto the steering wheel as they rocked to a stop.

“What are we doing here?” Hazel said, reminding him that Katie was in the back seat.

“Well.” He looked around. “I guess we don't need cheeseburgers and a paddleboat to have a good time. We'll go for a walk around the lake and look at all the cabins.” He got out of the car and opened Katie's door. “Isn't this nice, sweetheart?” He took her hand and started to walk towards the lake.

“I'm cold. I want to go home,” Katie said. She was already shivering.

“Where's your coat?”

“I didn't bring it,” she said, looking up at him as though he'd know where to find a new one. Jonah pictured where her coat was at home, on a hook in the mudroom. It would have been so simple for her to take it. Why hadn't she? He and Hazel had taught her better than to be so forgetful. For a moment he felt as though having identified the problem would make it go away. Katie would have her coat. And for God's sake, maybe if a few businesses opened a little earlier, more people would come.

“Why didn't you put it on?” Jonah said. He let go of her hand and clenched both of his into fists, the colour of his knuckles draining to white.

Hazel came between Katie and Jonah. “Maybe we should just turn around and go home. We had a nice drive together. I think it's enough.”

Jonah knew she was being reasonable. Yet something flared. Like an explosion seen in slow motion, he could feel it expand but was helpless to stop it.

“We're not going to let her mistake ruin this for everyone,” he said. He put up a finger to silence Hazel and walked back to the car, unlocked the trunk and began to rummage around until he found a pair of his old garage pants, blotched with machine oil. When he wrapped them around Katie's shoulders she slumped under the stiff weight.

“I'm not really that cold,” she said, but it came out chopped up.

“I-m n-ot re-all-y th-a-t c-old.”

Hazel took off her own jacket, bundled it around Katie and picked her up. “It's not her mistake. If you'd told me where we were going, I would have known what to bring. For that matter, you knew — why didn't you grab her coat?”

“She's old enough to think for herself once in a while. And if she can't, it's your job to make sure she has what she needs.”

Hazel put Katie down but continued to hold on to her as she spoke. “Something's wrong. Something's been wrong for a while now. I've been waiting for you to tell me, but you need to do it now. What is it?”

“It's nothing. Nothing's wrong. Does something have to be wrong to expect a little gratitude?” Jonah got into the car and drove away without looking back at Hazel and Katie, whom he'd left at the edge of the lake. When he returned for them an hour later, they were huddled together on a large rock, throwing stones into the water. Nobody said anything until they were home.

“How about I make us some
varenyky
for supper? I think there's still some in the freezer,” Hazel said to Katie as they climbed the few wooden steps into the porch and took off their shoes.

Katie nodded and looked back at Jonah, her cheeks brightening a little. Jonah smiled thinly, deliberately, before he went past them and into the bathroom where he closed the door. In the mirror he saw that the contented creases at the corners of his eyes had begun to fade, replaced by the beginnings of channels that appeared across his forehead and between his brows. He covered his ear with his hand and looked away.

Later that night, Jonah woke up and found Hazel on her knees, praying in front of the picture window in their bedroom. He knew without listening to his wife's whispers that she was busy thanking God for something. Worse though, he knew she was praying for him. He turned away, waiting to be pulled back down into sleep.

A few weeks after the drive to Cypress, Katie peeked in on Jonah as he sat in a chair in front of his bedroom window, staring at the last narrow band of sunset.

“Daddy?”

“When's the last time you had an ear infection?” he asked. She took a step towards him, but when he didn't turn to look at her, or hold out his hand for her to come, she stayed near the door.

“I don't know. A long time?” Katie said, though Jonah knew she'd had more than her share of them.

Jonah let his head fall forward, as though a string at the back of his neck had been cut. He waved towards the door for Katie to leave. She didn't though, and Jonah saw her crouch into the shadow of the bed. He'd already decided that the only thing that could be wrong with his ear was a tumour. He had convinced himself of it, feeding the idea until it grew and invaded every other thought. He had cancer. The tumour was growing and pressing against his eardrum. Soon, if it hadn't already, it would spread to his brain and bones and that would be it.

“Cancer,” he said to himself, loud enough for Katie to hear. “Do you know what surgery is? They'll put me on a table and cut into my head. Remove as much as they can, but it won't be enough.” Jonah nearly laughed when he thought how the disease that had taken his Uncle Elias had skipped over his father — probably his insides were too vinegary for the disease to survive in — and settled for him.

“It's probably nothing serious,” Hazel said the next morning when Jonah told her what he suspected. “You haven't even seen the doctor.”

Jonah sat on a paper-covered examination table in the doctor's office, holding his breath as the doctor peered into his ear. He closed his eyes and thought about how his uncle was prepared to accept God's will. But Jonah wasn't. He was furious with God, and had told Him so.

“Why don't you take that pickled old shit down the hill?” Jonah had shouted up to the sky before driving to town. Then he hung his head and wept. “I've become a better man than him. I'm a good husband. A good father. I don't deserve this.”

Jonah was quiet when he talked to the doctor, describing what had happened with as few words as possible.

“Aha, well, there we have it,” the doctor said after he'd shone a light into Jonah's ear. He selected a pair of slender metal tweezers from a drawer and slid them inside Jonah's ear canal. “This little bugger must've been looking for a safe place. Wait, wait. Hold still, then, or you'll have part of him left in there, and my tweezers lodged in your eardrum.” He probed gently and Jonah felt something inside shift and be withdrawn. He didn't have a chance to ask what it was before sound rushed back into his ear like a cool breath. He waited quietly for the doctor to flush warm water into his ear and drain it into a crescent-shaped bowl.

“All done,” the doctor said, peering into the basin, sloshing the liquid back and forth until he seemed satisfied. “All anatomy present and accounted for.”

Jonah looked inside the bowl the doctor held out. Among other parts, an anther and a slender black insect leg floated together with globs of wax. On the table, a large luna moth had been set aside with the tweezers, its stained-glass wings crumpled against its body.

Jonah stared at the moth for a long while, as though it would reveal something. Finally, he slid off the examination table, nodded towards the insect and said, “I want to keep it. Can you put it in a jar?”

At home, Jonah put the moth in a drawer of his night table. He sat on the edge of the bed, rested his face in his hands. Even though it turned out to be nothing, he still felt as though he'd narrowly missed sharing his uncle's fate. And nearly lost something else, as well.

Jonah didn't tell Hazel about the moth that night. He woke early the next morning, before Hazel or Katie, and thought he could hear the moth fluttering in his ear. The sound was like whispers. The words, if there were any, were empty.