Black Creek Township
 
 
 

    There stood Grandpa saying the funeral service over Grandma's coffin. On the long wooden bench sat Father, wearing his suit and pinching the top of his nose, and Mother, in a hat with a veil and looking very pretty, baby Ed on her lap. (Grandma always said "Grandma's birthday baby" when she saw Ed, because he had been born on her birthday.) Then Roger, newly old enough to sit by himself, then me in my best dress, and then Sonny, my older brother, the tormenter of my soul and my guide in all things.

    Most of the other mourners were Mennonites dressed in gray and black. Our family stood out like flowers in the snow--Mother with her bright made-up face and her purple dress, I with my red winter coat, my white fur muff, patent leather shoes, and anklets with little dogs embroidered around the tops.

    I knew Grandma was dead. I understood that. What I didn't understand was why Grandpa was preaching the sermon. His face was white as a handkerchief, his voice faded in and out and out, it wavered, it trembled. Why, I asked my brother, didn't he just have Ray Baer--the assistant pastor--do it. "It's his church, he's got to do it," Sonny informed me in a whisper. "He has to see if he can stand it."

    Grandma's invariable habit had been to wake at four in the morning, an hour before her husband and sons, to light the coal stove, lay out their work clothes to warm, and cook an early breakfast for them before they went out to the barn. By the time they came down to the kitchen, she was always fully clothed, with her hair wound into a knot under her cap, this, every morning of her married life. Even during the flu epidemic of 1918, according to my mother, when Grandma had the flu too but kept going and nursed the family through it.

    How Mother knew this tale, I don't know: in 1918
she was only a year old, my father only six. Mother told this story whenever she wanted to witness, one, how Grandma spoiled the men; two, how overworked and unappreciated she was; and three, why she died so young.

    "She strained her heart during  that flu epidemic," said Mother. "No doubt about it."

    I believed this for years, but now I wonder. Grandma lived a good twenty-eight years after the flu epidemic without a trace of heart trouble. And she was not young when she died--she was sixty-seven.

    The morning Grandma died,  Father woke with a start. It was five-thirty.  Grandpa and Ralph were late to pick him up for morning chores. He drove to Grandpa1s house. They had just found Grandma. She had got up as usual, but had fallen by the bed, still wearing her nightgown, her long braid hanging down her back. She was gone.

    Father came home and told all this to Mother.  "I never saw her in her nightgown before," he said. He was crying.

    Mother was not. For all her championing of Grandma as an overworked slave, she disliked her and avoided her house. We  went there for dinner a only a couple of times a year. I still remember her cooking: good Pennsylvania Dutch chicken-pot-pie, and homegrown green lima beans in the dead of winter.

    I kept eating my oatmeal. I tried to remember Grandma's face because I knew I wouldn't be seeing it again, but I couldn't. Like all Mennonite women, she wore a long gray mother hubbard dress with a shawl, black old-lady shoes, and an organdy humility cap to cover her hair. I remembered that she walked bent over with her upper body almost parallel to the floor, like the lady on the Old Dutch Cleanser can. (She had "female troubles" which required her to wear a pessary, I know now,and walking like that eased her.) I remembered she kept safety pins stuck in her shawl, and when she worked in the garden she pinned her long dress up behind so it wouldn't drag, and whenever I visited her she said "Here's my big girl," which I loved because I knew I was still little, and gave me a dime.

    I remembered her stooping around her kitchen, cooking on the coal stove, letting me sit on a high stool and stir something (to keep me out from underfoot, I think now), but I could not, and cannot, remember her face. Mennonites don't believe in having their pictures taken so there are no photos of her, but I imagine I look like her. Father tells me that when she stood up straight--she could stand erect, but it pained her--she was a handsome, statuesque woman.

   Grandpa finally had to sit down and Ray Baer took over the pulpit and finished the sermon. Then he asked people to stand up and sing. There was no piano or organ; the old black hymn books had words but no music. Scmeone blew a note on a pitch pipe and everyone half-sang, half-chanted all the verses to a long moaning song about dying and coming to life again. Then there was a long silence.

   "Why is everyone so quiet?" I asked my brother. "Now is when you're supposed to cry," he said. So I cried.

 I wasn't sad that Grandma had died--that seemed all right  She was old. I cried because Father and my uncles Ralph and Marvin were crying, and because Grandma would never give me dimes any more and say "Here's my big girl," and I felt very small, and I was worried about Grandpa who had not been able to finish his sermon. Usually he could wear everyone out with his "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth." This time he had said "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" --I liked the sound of that too--and that's when he had to sit down. I cried because I couldn't remember Grandma's face and was thinking that maybe I had never looked at her face? but mostly I cried because I was supposed to, because they had allowed this long silent time for crying.

    My brother put his arm around me--a thing he never did--my brother who once locked me in a trunk, who twisted my arm and made me eat mud, and cut all my hair off with his first-grade scissors. "It's all right," he said. "You can stop now." And I did.

    Father and Ralph and Marvin and Grandpa and two other men carried the shiny wooden coffin out of the church. It creaked against their shoulders and they made little sighs and grunts as they hefted its weight. We got up and followed them. First Mildred, Marvin's wife, and their two children. Mildred was in black--she was not Mennonite but she knew how to dress at a funeral. The children were in plain gray, but their bright red hair shone like two lanterns in the darkness of the church. Then Mother and us. I was aware of all those Mennonite eyes following us and knew they did not approve of our finery.

    We walked down the road to the cemetery, my pretty mother stumbling in the snow in her high heels. She had her hands full with the two babies. My brother wandered off and I was left on my own.

    Father stood at the edge of the small crowd of mourners, out of place in his light-colored suit. He didn't know what to do with himself. He looked down at the ground, then up at the sky, he pulled a big handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose, he looked away from the graveyard across the dry corn stubble, he looked everywhere except where some
men were struggling with ropes to lower the casket into a hole in the ground.
 
    I saw my cousin Ruthie in her gray coat and bright hair and went over to stand by her. She was younger than me and usually not very interesting. We found a big pile of yellowish dirt nearby and climbed to the top and were ready to slide down when Maude Baer, in her gray Mennonite garb, looking like Grandma--all the women looked like Grandma--came and dragged us away.

    I leaned against her long skirts--just like Grandma's skirts--and watched Father take a hand with the shovel and throw some dirt in the hole. Then he walked away fast, in the wrong direction. I would have followed him, but Maude held my hand.
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copyright 1998 Patricia Stoll