“Cous,” Sam said accusingly, “it may be all be hunky-dory on her end, but not so on mine. You have to remember that I’m the one who had to bathe and dress her when she was too big to get out of bed. And I was the one who had to empty her reinforced, jumbo-size bedpan. How do you recapture romantic feelings after twenty years of that?”
“Marriage counseling?”
“Ha! Where would I find a marriage counselor who would have even an inkling of what I’ve been through?”
Much to my surprise, I actually saw his point. In the same vein, I’ve often wondered how a celibate person could offer marital advice-well, I still do. There is, I think, only so much that one can extrapolate from the experiences related to them by others.
I shrugged. “Have you tried the Internet?”
“Mama, what’s ‘twapolate’ mean?”
It was Sam’s turn to jump. “Hey, buddy, back so soon?”
Little Jacob nodded and proudly held forth a large jug of maple syrup. This wasn’t that sugar water over which a maple leaf has been waved; this was the genuine stuff, the real McCoy-literally, in fact, since the sap was harvested and boiled down by Gerald McCoy and his three teenage sons.
Since it takes forty gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup, the real deal costs a pretty penny, to be sure. In fact, I never serve it to my guests, although I do make it available if they’re on my special luxury plan (at only two hundred dollars more a day, they hardly know what hit them). At any rate, Little Jacob was holding forth a half-gallon jug, for which Sam was asking $39.99.
“I want this, Cousin Sam,” he said.
Sam tried to pat my son on the head. “You gotta pick something else there, buddy. How about a candy bar? You want a whole candy bar to yourself?”
“I don’t want no stupid candy bah,” my son said, proving that I didn’t give birth to a cabbage. “Candy bahs cost less than a dollah, but this costs a pwetty penny. Wight, Mama? Besides, Mama says that yoh candy is stale.”
“Hey, Mags,” Sam said, “what’s with this otherwise precocious kid not saying his ‘R’s? Isn’t he in kindergarten already?”
“Sam,” I growled, “he’s right in front of you.”
“Yeah,” Little Jacob gwowled, “I’m wight in fwont of you.”
“Well, then, kid, I think you’re too old for that.”
“Butt out,” I said kindly. “It really isn’t your business.”
“Mama, this is getting heavy,” Little Jacob said.
“Then set it down, dear.”
“But I want my money fust.”
“You heard him, Sam. Pay up.”
“If you make him say his ‘R’s.”
“I most certainly will not.”
“Well, then, he can hold it all day, because I didn’t say when I’d pay.”
“You’re being ridiculous, Sam. I wouldn’t make him say his ‘R’s, even if I could. I mean, what if he decided to move to Boston someday. Would you not want him to fit in?”
“Mama, I can’t hold it no mo-ah!”
The heavy glass jug slipped from my dear son’s tiny fingers and shattered on the hard wooden floor of Yoder ’s Corner Market. I’ll say this for good-quality maple syrup: it’s a pleasure to lick the stuff off bare skin. I even licked some off my clothes and, when Sam went to get a mop bucket, I had a quick go at the nearest shelves.
Of course I was the one stuck with mopping the floor and getting the sticky-sweet stuff out from between the floorboards. In the meantime my cutie pie watched television in the back room with Cousin Dorothy. I worked quickly, as I do not approve of TV, convinced as I am that Satan lives in each and every set, and especially in wall-mounted megasize screens. As if to prove my point, when Little Jacob emerged, he said he’d been watching Opwah, and how come boys didn’t have va-jay-jays too?
I also had to bathe Little Jacob, and redress him, and do likewise for myself, so it was late afternoon by the time we got into Bedford, our nearest real city. With a population of nearly four thousand people, this bustling metropolis offers just about everything a good Christian could want-and then some. I was able to purchase poster board without any trouble and make it to the First Farmer’s Bank five minutes before they locked the doors.
As I stood at the island counter tallying checks for deposit, Little Jacob played on the floor at my feet with his own “checkbook.” This is a mockup that I made out of old canceled and voided checks just for him. It’s never too early to teach a child how to run a successful business if you ask me-even if he can’t say his “R”s.
“Mama,” the little fellar in question said, whilst tugging on my skirt, “I see a wobba.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“Now I see two wobbas.”
“A wobba what, dear?” I asked absently. “A wobba band?”
“No, silly; they ah wobba men. But now I see thwee of them.”
“Shhh, honey, Mama’s trying to hurry.”
He continued to tug on my skirt. “One of them’s wobbing that nice lady behind the countah, Mama. You know, the nice lady who sometimes gives me candy. The kind that isn’t stale.”
“What?” I looked up from my work.
There were three people in the reception area, other than the two security guards. All three of the customers were Amish men, but all three were indeed armed, and one did have a gun pointed at the back of Amy Neubrander ’s head.
2
Of course the scenario I beheld was impossible since Amish men don’t carry guns, and they don’t rob banks, and even a person with just one drop of Amish blood could not point a gun at another human being. I know this is so, because my own ancestor, Jacob Hochstetler, made the difficult choice that he and his family would be massacred by the Delaware Indians rather than defend themselves. Needless to say, some of them survived, but you get my point; the Amish are the epitome of the phrase “a gentle people.”
So if what I saw was an impossibility, then I was either experiencing a psychotic break or the world had just gone to Hades in a handbasket, and neither prospect was good for my Little Jacob. When you’re a mother, it’s all about the children, isn’t it? The thing is this: Amy was somebody’s child as well. The poor girl was barely into her twenties-if that. She might have been still in her late teens.
And what about the two security guards? one might ask. What were they doing? Why, absolutely nothing! They were standing as stock-still as the cylindrical trash containers on either side of the doors.
Amy seemed remarkably calm. “It takes two minutes for the SWAT team to get here,” she said in a loud clear voice, “and I pressed the alarm a minute ago. If you leave now, you might still have a chance to get away.”
The Amish do not value education; in fact they eschew it as worldly and dangerous. They are, however, as a rule not unintelligent. In contrast, these three were as bright as the warts on a pickle-and I say that with all Christian charity. The men looked at one another, at Amy, around the lobby at the security cameras, at the security guards, at me, and then back at one another.
The one standing closest to me called out to the others, “Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
“Only one way to find out,” said the man who had the gun pointed directly at Amy’s forehead.
“Shoot the witch,” growled the third man, “and let’s get on with it.” Of course, being a criminal, he used far stronger language than that.
“No, don’t shoot huh!” Little Jacob was on his feet and halfway across the marble expanse before I could react.
They said that one’s life passes in front of one’s eyes in a life-threatening situation, but the only thing I had on my mind was the safety of my sweet little son. Like a hundred-thirty-five-pound projectile of flesh and bone, I flew at my offspring, knocking him to the floor. We slid the rest of the way across the room, where we crashed into the villain in front of the counter.