“Although Jake Maendel
wasn’t everyone’s uncle,
he was mine.”
Jake Maendel, a gifted
and persuasive orator.
THE COLONY CHILDREN all called him Jake Vetter, and although Jake Maendel wasn’t everyone’s uncle, he was mine. At two o’clock on summer afternoons, when we saw him walking from his house to the church with a bag of licorice in one hand and the leather strap in the other, we grabbed our pillows and blankets and followed. From every corner of the community we tumbled after him like goslings pursuing their mother.
Stern and aloof, Jake Maendel was in charge of afternoon naps for school-aged children in the summertimes. Naps were designed to keep us out of trouble and to continue to provide structure to our school-free days. While other cultures discouraged sleeping in church, ours, in its way, embraced it.
I would find my cousin Sandra, and she and I would claim a spot on the cool, hardwood floor beneath the rows of pews and inhale the velvety scent of varnish that permeated the darkened church. The spicy smell and dignified atmosphere transported us to a sacred place. If we lay very still, we could almost hear the echo of our parents singing and the vibrations of Jake Vetter preaching the sermon in his captivating, monotone voice.
Huddled together, nose to nose under our blankets, we were as inseparable by day as if someone had tied us together. Sometimes our sleepy eyes surrendered freely, but generally I would whisper something foolish and Sandra would giggle. Jake Vetter, who patrolled the aisle in his soundless bedroom slippers, suppressed any noise or chatter with a whack from his fearless strap. His aim was singular and fierce, and when he wasn’t sure which bump was the guilty one, he just guessed. As long as the end result was silence, he didn’t care. More often than not, the strap landed on me. I found it terribly unfair that Sandra didn’t declare her guilt and take her punishment, but she was just too happy to have gotten away with it. Unable to defend myself, I would turn over and sniffle our lump to sleep, two pairs of bare feet sticking out of one end of the blanket and two Mützen (bonnets) peeking out of the other.
An hour later, flushed and rested, we would stir but didn’t rise until a snoring Jake Vetter, his hand still clutching the strap, awoke on the front bench. “Kommts her!” he would command, telling us to “come here” as his hands wrestled with the bag of licorice. We would stream to the front, and he would playfully hit us over the head with a long rope of red licorice before handing it to us.
In the summer of 1965, Sandra’s and my kindergarten days were over, and our routines shifted significantly. We both turned six in July and without ceremony graduated from childhood to the status of young girls. We were now required to eat with the other children in the Essenschul (children’s eating school) and to attend Gebet (evening church services) seven days a week. With the exception of our summer afternoon naps, church had been off-limits. At first, daily attendance seemed overwhelming, but the sure knowledge that we would get the strap at the Essenschul if we dared miss did wonders for our attendance record. On weekday evenings, church began at five o’clock, just prior to supper. Mother would starch and iron her Tiechel while peering out of the front window, and when people began spilling out of their homes and heading for church, she knew Jake Vetter had been spotted leaving his house, clutching his sermons and songbooks.
“Reinhold, Gebet!” she would shout to Father, scrubbing up in our small bathroom. Father seized his black hat with one hand and the front door with the other, and Mother fell in line behind him, hastily fastening her Tiechel under her chin.
“Ann-Marie, Leg dein Mütz on!” she reminded me as the door closed behind her, and I quickly fastened my bonnet. My brothers, Edwin and Alex, and I knew enough to follow our parents out the door to the white stucco building with the gray roof across from Sana Basel’s house.
Mother was slender and fashion conscious and a woman deeply devoted to her children. She had promised herself on those awful nights so long ago when she ached with loneliness for her own mother that when she had children of her own, they would never feel like a burden. From morning to night, when it came to her family, her energy was boundless. From a young age I was very attached to her. I clung to her skirt when we went to town and were subjected to the often cold and suspicious glances of English people in stores.
During those years, I had a recurring dream that Mother and I had accompanied the colony seamstress to a fabric store in Winnipeg. It was a large warehouse, and there were shelves and tables of fabric as far as the eye could see. A rack of buttons in every color imaginable down one aisle caught my eye. After a time I realized Mother was gone, and I was alone in a store filled with English women. Panicked, I ran around trying to find her, but the tables were so laden with fabric, I couldn’t see over them. I ducked down low, and in the distance I saw her unmistakable pleated skirt. The way she dressed was my shield, and when she spoke to me in our language, her voice was my sanctuary.
In church we were seated according to age, with males and females on opposite sides of the aisle. The youngest sat in the first row so the minister, not our parents, could keep an eye on us. I squeezed into my spot next to Sandra, and we exchanged a quick smile, proud and nervous to officially be among the grown-ups. Weekday evenings, church was relatively brief, but on Sunday mornings, the Lehr (morning service) stretched from half an hour to ninety minutes. Sandra and I would pass the time by discreetly drawing on each other’s arms with hairpins, all the while staring straight ahead, our eyes fixed on the Prediger, who, with a fleeting look our way, commanded our best behavior.
The 350 sermons used by the Hutterite Church were composed nearly 500 years earlier and had been passed from generation to generation. They were as ancient as the method of singing that began the service. The minister would chant a line of a song, and the congregation would respond in a forceful, shrill manner. Annie Stahl, who considered herself gifted in the singing department, sang the loudest, and her voice was so piercing she could make the dogs howl. But to hear her tell it, if God gives you a talent, by golly, you should make good use of it. Sandra and I emulated the skilled sounds of our mothers coming from the middle rows behind us, for this sacred screech was applied only at solemn occasions, such as church and funerals, and would take some time to master. The elderly, like Ankela and my Oma, had earned their place on the cushioned back rows with others of their vintage, where the pressure to perform was not as great.
Even though my Oma, Eugenie Georg, had joined our Hutterite colony, she held on to her German heritage. She made no attempt to drah, or twist, her hair; wear a polka-dotted Tiechel; or speak the Carinthian dialect like everyone else. Instead, she combed her long, white hair straight back under a solid black kerchief and adhered strictly to High German. Perhaps it was the persistent sadness in her pale, oval face and eyes that never smiled that made Jake Maendel and other members of the community turn a blind eye to those things. They knew Oma had endured the loss of children and her homeland, which was enough sorrow for several lifetimes. But she had also lost Opa two years after we moved to Fairholme. He had died a torturous death from lung cancer.
My memories of him are vague, but the awful ordeal was etched in Oma’s face. Once a heavy smoker, Opa was forced to kick the habit after joining the colony, but it was too late. As the disease destroyed his body and rendered him helpless, my mother’s presence seemed to be the only thing that could soothe him.
Oma couldn’t bear to watch her husband’s terrible demise. “Ach Gott!” she cried every time he soiled the bedsheets.
“Looking after you is not trouble at all,” my very pregnant mother, who exhausted herself looking after him, constantly assured him. Day and night, she faithfully changed his bedsheets and gently washed his feeble body.
Opa was a man of few words, but when he spoke, what he said was memorable. His cool head and diplomatic skills fascinated colony people, whose direct manner of speaking was primarily designed to promote humility. Others often tried to involve him in their skirmishes just to see what he would say. Once, two colony men passionately argued their opposing points of view in front of him, after which, he calmly concluded, “So viel Wahrheit gibt’s uberhaupt nicht. That much truth doesn’t exist.”
Such stickhandling endeared him to the entire community, and in the days before he died, Opa requested to say good-bye to every colony member. One by one, they came to bid farewell to the gentleman among them. On the afternoon he died, tears streaming down his pain-racked face, he clasped Mother’s hand in his and said to her, “Good-bye, Mary. Gott wird’s dir belohnen. God will repay you for what you’ve done for me.”
In the fall, Sandra and I began German and English school. German school was taught by a Hutterite teacher and was held one hour before and one hour after English classes. I was already fluent in High German, thanks to Oma, who held fast to her German heritage even though her family had immigrated to Russia under Catherine the Great’s persuasive incentives. Thus, it was from our new English teacher that I would get a real education.
Mrs. Phillipot was Catholic, or so we were told. She was from the nearby French community of St. Claude and had been hired by the colony to teach grades one to five. Hutterite schools abided by the Department of Education’s curriculum but were allowed to retain their distance from the outside world by having the school on colony property. At the beginning of the year, Mrs. Phillipot would rely on the older girls as interpreters, since our English language skills were poor. But there was nothing wrong with our eyesight.
On the first day she swept onto the colony in a white Buick and into the school wearing a fitted, crimson dress with a double strand of pearls around her neck, smelling of cigarettes and English clothing stores. Her lipstick and nail polish matched the color of her dress exactly. Her high cheekbones were dusted with a soft sweep of rouge, and her dark brown hair was done in the same precise manner as Queen Elizabeth, whose picture hung immediately above her desk. Her feet were squeezed into jet-black, pointy high heels, and a matching purse glistened like polished ebony as she placed it on her desk with a thump. She was the most groomed and glamorous creature we had ever seen in our lives, and we nearly went cross-eyed looking her over.
After the roll call, during which we had to spring to our feet and reply, “Present, Mrs. Phillipot,” she arranged for basins of water and large bars of soap to be brought to the back of the class, and we were lined up and ordered to wash our hands and then have them inspected—palms up, palms down.
Mrs. Phillipot felt obliged to impose her standards in cleanliness, not that some—like young Roland, who loved skunks and mice and frogs better than anything—couldn’t use a proper scrubbing. Roland hung out at the machine shop with his older brothers, and his hands were ingrained with grease and dirt, and that’s the way he liked it. Mrs. Phillipot tried valiantly to separate the boy from the grime, but then he would pass gas, and she would flee for her economy-sized can of lilac air freshener. “Phee-yew, phee-yew,” she lamented, streaming the poison up and down the aisles while the rest of us coughed and rubbed our watering eyes until we nearly lost consciousness. When it was particularly foul, she would shout, “Roland, go to the washroom and don’t come back!” With a gleeful smile, Roland happily spent much of the school year in the bathroom, looking out the window at the squirrels.
After the hand inspection, the girls had to line up and remove their Mützen for a hair assessment. Some of the girls had quickly stuffed their long hair into their bonnets, more concerned with getting to the Essenschul in time for the 7:30 breakfast than having a good hair day, and it came tumbling out in a disheveled mess. With Oma as my hairdresser, I never had to endure a scolding from Mrs. Phillipot about my lack of neatness.
When we were clean to Mrs. Phillipot’s satisfaction, the basins were put away, and we finally got down to the business of schooling, which began with singing “O Canada” and saying the Lord’s Prayer. During “O Canada,” Mrs. Phillipot stood at strict attention at the front of the class and led the singing, but as soon as we started saying the Lord’s Prayer, she would grab a yardstick and march around the room, pounding it on the floor as she went. “Our Father . . .” thump, thump, thump, “which art in heaven . . .” thump, thump, thump. If we dared to turn our heads and look at her, she’d bop us over the head with the yardstick, leaving us with the impression that Catholics did not approve of the Lord’s Prayer.
The school year took shape with reading, writing, and arithmetic assignments, none of which interested me as much as what our teacher was wearing. I learned my colors from her outfits, the days of the week from when she wore what, and my numbers from how often she changed high heels. Day after day she wowed us with her perfectly tailored clothing and exquisitely matching necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.
Every day when the bell announced the noon meal, classes were dismissed, and hungry students ran to the Essenschul. Mrs. Phillipot would briefly escape to her special room in the back of the classroom, close the door, and apply a fresh coat of lipstick. The room was off-limits to the rest of us and held a particular mystique, because along with school supplies, a couch, a small table, and two chairs, we knew it was where Mrs. Phillipot kept her extra pairs of high heels. When she opened the door, the draft would smell of new books and perfume.
Mrs. Phillipot ate at the community kitchen with the rest of the women, but she never walked there by herself. She was escorted. It didn’t seem right that someone so beautifully dressed should be alone, so a bevy of girls would wait for her outside the school and fight over who would attend her right side and who her left. No matter how cross or frustrated she had been with us in the morning, when she pushed open the door, we all jockeyed for position. The older girls usually won out, leaving the rest of us to follow, but even that was a thrill. Watching the sleek, tapered heels of Mrs. Phillipot’s shoes disappear into Fairholme’s sand, making small, square holes all the way to the Essenstuben, we wondered how such thin heels could support her entire body weight and whether her next meal would be the breaking point.
We released Mrs. Phillipot on the adult side of the communal kitchen to eat with the women and proceeded to the Essenschul, where I was now taking three meals a day with the rest of the children between the ages of six and fifteen. A latched opening in the far wall gave us access to the main kitchen, through which the cook’s helpers passed bowls of Alla Kartoffel, “egg fries,” and Focken Klops, “pork burgers,” that the teenage girls would set on the tables. We were again seated according to age, with the boys on one side and girls on the other. Andrew Gross, the assistant minister, supervised and kept Ordnung, “order.” Under his watchful eye, we closed our eyes and lifted our folded hands to say our prayers before and after each meal. At breakfast and supper meals, we would kneel for extended versions of our table prayers, addressing God in the most reverent tones, “O Du Allmächtiger, Ewiger, Gnädiger und Barmherziger Gott . . . Oh, almighty, everlasting, gracious, and merciful God . . .”
During Mittog, the noon meal, we kept our Essenschul Ankela Rahel on the run. If we ran out of something, we simply shouted for more: Brot—bread! Milch—milk! Hands were engaged more often than the cutlery, and reaching was more popular than passing.
After Mittog, we waited outside the adult dining room until Mrs. Phillipot emerged, and we accompanied her back to school for afternoon classes, where we inevitably practiced our spelling. She was obsessed with dictation, and we had a test almost every day. Standing at the front of the class in her finery, she called out words for each grade. “Grade ones, ‘cat.’ Grade twos, ‘never.’ Grade threes, ‘corral.’” Mrs. Phillipot had a habit of running her fingers up and down her pearls, which made a soft, purring sound that was intoxicating and did nothing to improve my spelling. We were lined up at the front of the class according to test results, and I was always dead last with Roland, the wildlife specialist.
Roland was an accepted part of the décor in Fairholme, and Mrs. Phillipot was no threat to his self-esteem. And regardless of what she might think, he had his talents. Sandra and I were indebted to him for helping us adjust to the new responsibilities that came with our age—in particular, feather picking.
Winter was pillow- and quilt-making time on the colony, and twice a week, all through the summer and early fall, our mothers harnessed us with a Federsock (feather sack), and hoisted us over the fence into the path of a thousand honking geese to collect feathers. It took forever to fill our sacks, and the tiresome job cut into our playtime. At first we included leaves and twigs and goose droppings, but Oma warned me that even if my gentle mother let me get away with it, she would not. Sandra’s mother took Oma’s side.
We were always on the lookout for dead geese, easy targets for a sack full of feathers, but Fairholme had the heartiest flock in the country. None of them were going to croak on our account. Roland’s frequent offers to kill one for us were becoming harder to resist, and once, in a weak moment, Sandra and I gave in to temptation and said yes. We covered our eyes and turned away to purge ourselves of sin by association. Behind us came an awful thrashing and flapping and grunting and quacking as Roland attacked a large gander. It was hard to tell which utterances came from the boy and which from the goose. “Sie iss tut!” he shouted as he sped off, bloodied and triumphant that the goose was dead.
The soft down feathers on the belly were just what our mothers wanted, and we stuffed our Federsöck until they bulged. The fear of being caught and getting the strap in front of all the children in the Essenschul was too much for us to ever consider a second offense, although nothing excited us more than finding a goose that had died of natural or near-natural causes.
As children, we found contentment in the bosom of colony life and in the routines that directed every new season. The honey-colored paths that led us to school and play and occasionally into mischief remained a sea of softness, and Jake Vetter rewarded us for keeping them that way. He instructed us to gather all harmful debris, in particular broken glass, wherever we could find it, and when we had a little tin can’s worth, to bring it to his house in exchange for candy and bubblegum. We scoured the paths and lawns and ditches like human vacuum cleaners, for Jake Vetter always had some new American candy on hand from his frequent visits to Hutterite colonies in the United States.
Once, Sandra and I decided to make a determined effort to learn how to blow bubbles. But we didn’t have any gum, so we spent an entire afternoon combing Fairholme’s trails. All we had to show for it by the end of the day was two rusty nails, not enough to earn our reward. Dusty and disappointed, we lay down on a patch of grass under the shade of a tree and watched the clouds go by. When Roland spotted us with our tin cans, he caught on right away. “Would you like to know where Jake Vetter puts the pieces of glass we bring to him?” he asked, his eyes twinkling. “Jo!” Sandra and I said in unison.
Down in a dark corner in the kitchen basement, Roland pointed us to a large basin crammed with pieces of glass. We quickly filled our tins and ran to reap our reward. We had everything you could wish for in Fairholme—beautiful friendships, a strong sense of belonging, enough excitement to keep us looking forward to each new day, and in our hour of need, there was always Roland.
Of course, I knew it was a sin to take so much pleasure in Mrs. Phillipot’s worldly wardrobe. I knew that from Sana Basel, who sometimes came by the house in the evenings to help with our bedtime routines and to tuck us in.
Bedtime fell at the same time for everyone on the colony, and because children were always barefoot, we had to wash our feet in a pail of water on the front porch. Our neighbors were doing the same thing, and calls for a race or queries about a missing child’s whereabouts were often exchanged across the lawns. My younger sister, Rosie, who was a five-year-old hurricane, and I lifted our long skirts and vigorously stomped our feet in the water until most of the dirt was gone, then wiped them on a towel before following our equally diligent brothers into the house. Sometimes, Mother had to expel the whole lot of us back outside for a second wash. Inside, we knelt to pray, sang our evening songs, and then Father read us a German Bible story while Mother burped her babies.
After Renie died, Sana Basel had begun to pay special attention to our family. She had many grandchildren and was welcome in any number of homes, so it was always a privilege to have her with us. Her version of the biblical story of David, a mere Tüpfel (dot) on the horizon who dared to take on Goliath, held us spellbound. We sat on the floor in front of her chair, and she’d lean forward and ask, “How could that little boy, with a pathetic slingshot dangling from his wrist and five small stones rattling in his pocket, take on an enormous giant in a suit of armor?” Her eyebrows shot above the rim of her glasses as she pronounced how Goliath fell to his death “G’rod so wie Pienets! Just like a peanut!”
As a baptized member of the Hutterite church, Sana Basel felt it was her duty to vermohn, “warn,” the younger generation of the pitfalls of life, and nobody could make hell as hot as Sana Basel could. After Goliath’s spectacular demise, she cautioned us about Jüngste Tog, Judgment Day, the unexpected moment when the heavens would open and God, along with a host of angels, would burst upon the earth to judge every person and determine who was going to heaven and who would go to hell. As if Jüngste Tog weren’t terrifying enough, Sana Basel told us the story of a young girl who was so disobedient to her mother that one day God had had enough. The floorboards gave way beneath her, and hell swallowed her whole. That sorry story popped into my mind every time I didn’t want to do what Mother said.
Nobody knew, Sana Basel told us with conviction, when Jüngste Tog would come, but we should always be prepared, because God could read our thoughts, and they would also be judged. That was very unfortunate, because I spent most of my days dreaming about Mrs. Phillipot’s wardrobe and perfume, and I knew that kind of thinking was Irdisch (carnal).
Even Mother’s brother Fritz, the colony turkey man, was jeopardizing my chances in the hereafter. Fritz Vetter loved nothing better than a little escape to the Portage dump in his smelly old truck to forage through other people’s garbage. While some, like his wife, Suzanna, did not appreciate his scavenging ways, I shared his enthusiasm. Every broken piece of furniture had potential to him; I was just as determined to find discarded bottles of perfume identical to the kind Mrs. Phillipot wore. Uncle tried to help me by suggesting which bottles he thought belonged to reiche Leut (rich people), but he was so covered in turkey dust and feathers I preferred to rely on my own judgment.
Fritz Vetter was a small, stooped figure with a long, scraggly beard, who spoke with his hands. It didn’t bother him at all that his right thumb faced the wrong direction. Poor Fritz Vetter. He’d just lost his daughter Lena to the evils of the outside world, and he was so lost in the pain of it all that here I was, dabbling in temptation right under his nose, and he couldn’t see it.
Just before school had started, my dad’s youngest brother, Jacob Dornn, had stolen my uncle’s beautiful, nineteen-year-old daughter Lena Maendel in the middle of the night. At least that was Fritz Vetter’s version of the facts. The commotion woke the whole colony, and lights flew on in all the homes as people strained to see the taillights of Jacob’s car and Fritz Vetter running over to our house. Shouting from our hallway, he angrily demanded that Father have Jacob bring his daughter back. Father, roused from a deep sleep, tried to get to the facts.
“Did she take a suitcase?” he asked, running his hand through his hair that had taken the shape of a stack of hay.
“Why?” Father’s brother-in-law shot back.
“If she packed her suitcase, then she went willingly,” Father said quietly. The door slammed, and Fritz Vetter went home only to find Lena’s suitcase missing from under her bed and her clothes gone from her closet. She was perfectly prepared to be “stolen.” Young people “running away” from the colony before they were baptized for a taste of outside life was fairly common, but so was having them apologize and return because they couldn’t make the adjustment. By morning, the story was percolating in the nearby colonies, and people were saying that’s what you get when you try to do good and bring in outsiders.
At least Father’s other brother, Pete, wasn’t coming to steal the women. He just came to sell them . . . beauty supplies. After leaving New Rosedale, he’d found work as a door-to-door salesman for the Rawleigh Company, selling household cleaners, spices, and hair products out of the back of his car. He would arrive on Sunday afternoons, his trunk loaded down with jars, cans, and bottles of products from chicken soup base to hair gel to toilet cleaner.
The sight of half a dozen women bent over the trunk of a runaway’s car was more than the elders of the community could tolerate, for they were quite certain nothing good could come out of that particular scenario. But Uncle Pete worked fast. He was a born salesman, and he successfully convinced the women, including Mother, that they absolutely couldn’t do their hair without Dippity-Do when for five hundred years they had. It was a pink hair gel with an irresistible fragrance and became a best seller among the colonies.
Pete’s trunk was as close to a hairdressing shop the women would ever come to, and the Dippity-Do for $1.50 made them feel that they could give those English women some competition. Even Ankela fell for it, but she never used hers. Every day she just visited her plastic jar of Dippity-Do and inhaled its flowery fragrance for a pick-me-up after her noon nap.
Dippity-Do Pete’s intrusion into our sheltered way of life didn’t seem to have much of an effect on anybody’s conscience, including my siblings, who all appeared undaunted by Jüngste Tog. We slept in the same room on two full-sized beds. Three-year-old Phillip slept between Rosie and me in one bed, and Edwin and Alex slept in the other. I could tell by how quickly they all fell into a sound sleep that Sana Basel’s warning went in one ear and out the other.
Oltvetter, whose loud snoring rattled the house, seemed to think his salvation was secure too. Maybe he supposed he’d been to hell already with his harrowing experiences at Julius Farm and during the war. On Wednesday evenings, after our prayers, my brothers and I would go to his room, kneel on a chair, and sort through a burlap sack of pinto beans for the Saturday noon meal of beans, bacon, and fresh buns. As we separated the good beans from the bad, he regaled us with stories about his life in Russia and how the revolution had ruined so many lives. Our mouths gaped open when he explained how he had hidden his wealthy employer’s jewelry and valuables in a manure pile and was nearly caught when the soldiers poked at it with pitchforks. His stories gave us nightmares, but we always came back for more.
Hell wasn’t hot enough to stop me from thinking about Mrs. Phillipot’s outfits. After much agonizing, it occurred to me that Sana Basel’s warning included an escape route. “Nobody knows when Jüngste Tog will come,” she had said, emphasizing that God could read our thoughts. Thus, I began a nightly ritual. “God, I know tonight is Jüngste Tog,” I would whisper during evening prayers, “and you are coming for sure.” It was a ridiculous routine that provided me tremendous comfort. I had God in a corner, and the Almighty would have to postpone Judgment Day indefinitely because Ann-Marie Dornn at Fairholme Hutterite colony knew all about it.
After our baths on Saturday nights, we would congregate in the living room in our pajamas and Father would conduct wrestling matches. “Ready, set, go,” he would call out, and Edwin and Alex would run from opposite ends of the room and spar and brawl until they were exhausted. My brothers took the matches very seriously, and Father couldn’t contain his amusement. Pint-sized Rosie should have been no contest for me, but when our turn came, her fast, slick moves brought both me and the house down. Father threw his head back and laughed until his sides hurt. He had a wonderful laugh. It was a rare, carefree moment for a man who craved order in work, in life, and in relationships.
Order brought my father peace. Sometimes at dusk, Edwin, Alex, Rosie, and I would follow him to the pasture to watch him feed the milk cows. Father would put on his leather working gloves, cut the binder twine, and pull apart bales of hay, spreading them evenly in a long row. The Holstein cows sauntered toward the fence as Father iced the hay with molasses to stimulate their appetites and increase milk production.
Father was well suited to the structure and routine of community life and embraced the words written in the Hutterite Chronicles of 1525:
To have all things in common means to love our neighbor, to have with him, to want with him, to suffer with him and to endure the ups and downs with him.
In Heaven (as it should be on earth) there is no ownership and hence there is found contentment, true peace, and blessedness.
But like the unease a man feels when a room is too hot or his suit is a size too small, my father was always strained, torn between the tenets of the Hutterite faith and his experience in Fairholme.
Months after Lena had eloped with Jacob, a new crisis erupted. The women leaving the community kitchen with warm rhubarb pies for Lunschen saw their husbands exiting the church after the yearly Stübel and quickened their pace home. Mother caught sight of Sana Basel blazing a trail to our house, her square heels hitting the ground with a steady thud. You could feel the tension in the air. Mother knew without being told that Father was in the thick of it. So did Sana Basel. Paul Vetter had told her there had been fireworks and retreated to his office in the back of the house to revive himself.
Women made it their business to find out what their men were up to behind closed doors, and if their own husbands were vague on the details, they’d get them from someone else. Oma, sitting on our front porch with her knitting, was shouting at Oltvetter for being so evasive. The two were like oil and water and didn’t get along at the best of times. “You’ve cackled and cackled and you still didn’t lay an egg!” she scoffed as she grabbed the yarn in her lap and followed Sana Basel into the house.
“Reinhold, wos’ iss enn fürgongen?” Sana Basel demanded, pumping my father for information as Mother entered the kitchenette with the pies.
Father did not mince words. Anger rose in his voice as he spoke and told her how Jake had given the men the yearly Rechnung (account) of Fairholme’s income while her other brother Hons, the colony manager, who handled all the money and paid all the bills, had nodded his approval from the front bench. “Recht oder unrecht, mir bleiben z’somm. Right or wrong, we stick together” is how the two brothers described their relationship.
“I listened as Jake gave us the figures from the cows, hogs, chickens, geese, turkeys, and bees, and then I stood up and said, ‘Now, Jake, you’re a good artist and you’ve drawn a very nice picture here, but it’s wrong. The income you have reported for the cows is much lower than it should be, and I can prove it to you! I have copies of all my receipts for sales and supplies, and so does Feed-Rite. Another thing,’ I said, ‘you have us making a good dollar with the apiary, and we didn’t even have bees this year!’” Father had made a mockery out of the figures.
“You’ve sure got nerve, to take on Jake in front of all da men like dat! He must feel humiliated,” Sana Basel proclaimed, diving into her piece of pie.
“We should be doing really well financially here in Fairholme,” Father continued, “but we’re not, because of the way Jake and Hons are managing the affairs! I just find that so offensive.”
“Dose Maendels, dey shure can cackle,” called Ankela from the hallway, noting the Maendels’ penchant for exaggerating. “For every two dollars dey make, dey spend tree,” she continued. “Dey’re real treshing machines with da money.”
“Koom einhin! Wegen stehst enn in Gangel?” Mother said, motioning her into the room, but Ankela refused, preferring to listen in from the hallway.
“Ich will nitt, Ich will kolla einhin losen,” Ankela insisted.
Oma put down her knitting and looked Father straight in the eye. “You better be careful or you’ll end up in der Strof,” she cautioned, warning that he might be disciplined.
“Oma,” Father replied, “I chose community life because I wanted to obey the will of God and live an honest and sincere life. I expect the same from our leaders.” He reached for his hat and left to milk the cows, slamming the door behind him.
“If Ronald didn’t speak up, who would?” clucked Sana Basel to Mother. “Da men all have big mouths at home, but when they go to da Stübel, dey turn into Tag Mandlen [dough boys].” Swallowing her last bit of coffee, she took her leave.
In June, one year after Renie’s death, Mother was back from the hospital with our annual gift. “Doh iss dein Brüdela. Er heist Carl Jacob,” she said, introducing him as she offered me the squirming bundle. My six-year-old arms nearly gave way to the weight of the nine pounder.
“We won’t give you away,” I whispered to him as I squeezed him tight.