Fortunately I can’t remember the fall, or that it was caused by Jacob hitting me on the back of the head with a pitchfork handle. The next thing I knew I was waking up in utter blackness. At least I thought I was waking up. I wasn’t sure, you see, because it occurred to me I might have died and gone to Hell.
I know that might be hard for some of you to understand, since we Mennonites, like many mainstream denominations, believe that one can pretty much be assured of salvation by repenting and believing in the saving power of Jesus’s blood, but I seemed to have done an inordinate amount of sinning in recent days. Let’s face it, I had told more lies than Pinocchio, I had lusted after a married man, I had been greedy numerous times, and if memory served me right, I might even have spoken sharply upon occasion.
Now, I read my Bible on a daily basis, and it doesn’t say a whole lot about Hell, but I know it is a place of extreme discomfort and hot as well—Hell. My environment at the moment, however, was not exceptionally hot, and while I ached all over, it felt more like having the flu than anything else. I briefly entertained the notion that, thanks to my kinship with Susannah, I’d been relegated to Presbyterian Hell. You know, Hell “Lite.” For Episcopalians, I’ve been told, Hell is having to use paper napkins at a sit-down dinner.
Of course, one can always pinch oneself to see if one’s awake, so I reached down to where my leg should have been and gave it a real hard tweak. Much to my surprise, I could feel my flesh with my fingers, but not the other way around. I might as well have been pinching a meat loaf, if you get my drift. Anyway, even though I couldn’t feel myself being pinched, I heard, quite distinctly, a low guttural moan.
Again, while I could hear the sound, I couldn’t feel myself making it. Perhaps, I thought, this was simply a characteristic of Hell. Perhaps I, the spirit, was torturing Magdalena, the body. To test this theory, I grabbed a big hunk of flesh and dug my nails in deep.
“Ouch!” I yelled in a loud deep voice, even though I hadn’t even opened my mouth.
I willed my heart not to beat through the bony walls of my chest. The Bible gives us some of the horrors of Hell, but it doesn’t necessarily list all of them. “Mama?” I wailed. “Mama, are you here too?” Please don’t get me wrong, I loved Mama dearly, but when I was a girl, even the thought of spending an eternity with my mother was a Hell of its own kind. To be absolutely honest, back then I often fantasized that Mama and I would end up in separate places—if you know what I mean. That isn’t to say that I was a totally selfish daughter, and consistently chose Heaven for myself in these fantasies To the contrary, many was the time I was willing to dance with the devil, just to get Mama off my back. Rest assured that since her death— squished between the milk tanker and semitrailer loaded with Adidas shoes—I have stayed clear of these fantasies. For the most part.
“Ach, Miss Yoder, it is only you!”
“Benjamin!” I gasped. “Benjamin Keim?”
“Yah, it is me. Why do you pinch?”
“Sorry about that, dear. It was an honest mistake. You see, I thought I was dead and—well, never mind that now.” Little Freni was scrabbling about in the depths of my bosom, which settled that question once and for all. Scripture makes it very clear that animals do not have souls. If my pussy was stirring, I wasn’t dead. It’s as simple as that.
“Miss Yoder, are you still there?”
“As far as I know. But look, dear, I think you should call me Magdalena. Miss Yoder sounds awfully formal under the circumstances.”
“Magdalena,” he said slowly, as if trying my name on for size, “are you hurt?”
I frisked myself which, under the circumstances, was not at all pleasurable. “Remarkably not. But the funny thing is, this morning I woke up with a horrible headache, and now it seems to be gone. How about you?”
“Ach, my head. Young Jacob hits very hard with a shovel.”
“Is that what he did?”
“With you it was a pitchfork. The handle, yah? With me the shovel.”
“Was there a scuffle? Did you put up a fight?”
“It is not our way,” he said quietly.
“But it isn’t Jacob’s way either,” I wailed. “So what did you do, just stand there and let him whack you?”
“Ach, I am a man of peace, Magdalena. Not a jackass. I was running to my buggy, for to get help, when Jacob hit me from behind. I did not wake up until now.”
“Then how did you know it was a shovel, and not the pitchfork?”
“He had to hit me twice.” He laughed, choking on the pain. “I have a hard head, yah?”
Little Freni had not taken well to my frisking and was determined to crawl out of the safety of my bra. “Stay, girl,” I pleaded. “Stay.”
“Magdalena, who do you talk to?”
“My kitten. She wants out.”
“Ach, is this another of your riddles?”
“I wish.” One of these days I was either going to have to get the tyke declawed, or figure out another mode of transportation. “Benjamin, do you have any idea where we might be?”
“Ach, no. Do you?”
“For a second I thought I did. I thought I was in Hell.”
Benjamin’s laugh surprised me. “Ach, so funny, Magdalena. Do you see English tourists?”
“No.”
“Then this is not Hell.”
“But I don’t see anything. Do you?”
“It is as dark as the time I fell into the grain silo and was buried by the corn.”
“Ah, yes.” Benjamin Keim’s one claim to fame was the aforementioned incident. It made the headlines as far away as Cleveland and Newark. It even made the National Intruder—not that I read that rag, mind you. What caught the public’s interest was not the fact that an Amish farmer fell into his grain silo, but that by the time the rescue team dug the suffocating man out, he had somehow managed to become separated from his clothes.
“I did not take them off,” he said, as if reading my mind. The Amish, it seemed, were remarkably good at this.
“Whatever you say, dear.”
His ears, unused to sarcasm, didn’t hear it. “Are you afraid, Magdalena?”
“A little.”
“Just a little?”
“I’m sure I’ll be terrified at any minute, dear. It’s just that I’m still so relieved I’m not in Hell. The question remains, however. Where are we?” I felt around me with my free hand, taking care not to feel in Benjamin’s direction. I was sitting up, that much I could tell, and on a relatively smooth, hard surface. “Perhaps we’re in a cave,” I said in answer to my own question. “A deep cave. There are lots of limestone caves in the area, you know.”
“Yah, there are many caves.”
“Any on Jacob Troyer’s farm?”
“I do not know of any. But the Schrock farm is next door to Jacob’s, yah?”
“So?”
“So, Jonas Schrock has a deep cave on his farm.”
“He does? I never knew that.” I’ve always had the hankering, but not the guts, to go spelunking.
“Even Jonas did not know until this spring when his new heifer disappeared. Jonas looked all over the pasture, no heifer, and all the fences not need mending. Finally, Jonas found the cave. By then the heifer was dead.”
“That’s too bad. How did they get it out of the cave?” “They could not. The cave is too deep, and the heifer too heavy.”
I gingerly smelled my hand. It didn’t smell like dead heifer remains. It did smell familiar, however. I took another deep whiff.
“Coal.”
“Yah, it is cold,” Benjamin said sympathetically.
“I’m not talking about the cold,” I said, perhaps a bit irritably, “although that should have been the big tip-off that this wasn’t Hell. I’m talking about coal. C-O-A-L. We’re in a coal mine.”
“Yah?”
“Rub the floor and smell your hand. It’s slightly greasy and the smell—well, it’s like our old furnace room used to smell like before Papa installed gas.”
I heard Benjamin sniff. “Yah, it is coal. But there are many abandoned coal mines in this county, Magdalena. We could be anywhere.”
I sighed. “Isn’t that the truth.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. What about you? What do you think our plan of action should be?”
“Maybe we should pray.”
“It certainly couldn’t hurt, dear. Why don’t you pray first?”
We Mennonites and Amish are used to praying aloud, and in each other’s company. The Bible assures us that when even just two people share their prayers, God hears them. Fortunately the Good Lord knows High German as well as He knows English, because that’s the language Benjamin used.
While I know some Pennsylvania Dutch words and phrases, none of them are prayer words. High German is certainly beyond my ken. Not only did I not understand most of Benjamin Keim’s prayer, but it was interminable. Sometimes I think we Mennonites get carried away with our ecclesiastical verbiage, but the Amish really take the cake. Their church services last more than three hours and Benjamin, I remembered belatedly, sometimes preached in his. Therefore, I cannot be blamed if my mind wandered just a bit.
From infancy up, I’d been taught to pray with my hands folded and my eyes tightly closed. That is how one should pray. However, it was so dark where we were that I didn’t bother to close my eyes, and as for my hands—well, in my defense, I started out with them folded. Can I help it that Little Freni started fussing again? What else could I do but unfold my hands and put her in my lap?
Alas, the feline furball was not content to stay put. Much to my horror, she wiggled free of my restraining grasp and got completely away from me.
“Little Freni,” I whispered desperately, “Little Freni! Come back to me. Please!”
Either Benjamin didn’t hear me, or he thought I was praying for Big Freni. At any rate he droned on as if I hadn’t said a word.
“Little Freni!”
I felt the playful bat of a padded paw against my arm.
The sweet little dear was trying to engage me in a gentle game of boxing. I batted back with an unseen finger.
Benjamin prayed while Little Freni and I played. Every now and then, just to be polite, I threw in an amen. Who knows how long the man would have prayed, had not Little Freni suddenly stopped playing by the rules and sunk both teeth and claws into the palm of my hand. I shook her off, but she was on me again in a flash, her fangs sunk even deeper.
“Stop that!” I wailed in genuine pain.
“Ach!”
“Not you, Benjamin. My cat!”
“This cat,” he said skeptically, “I cannot see it. And I do not hear it. How do I know it is really there?”
“Just like God,” I said.
He gasped.
“I don’t mean to be sacrilegious, dear, but it’s true. Have you ever seen God?”
“No. But I feel God. In my heart.”
“You can feel Little Freni too.” I fumbled around until I had the troublesome little waif by the scuff of her neck. Then I dropped her in what I hoped was the general direction of Benjamin’s lap.
“Ach, you do have a kitten! One with many teeth and sharp claws. But where did it come from? I did not see one with you in the barn.”
“I have my secrets.”
“Yah.”
We sat in silence for a moment, which was a big mistake. What is irksome in broad daylight can be downright terrifying in utter blackness.
“Did God speak to you?” I asked just to hear the sound of my voice. “Did He tell you how to get us out of here?”
“No. Maybe now you pray.”
“Me?”
“Yah. Mennonite prayers are good too.”
I gave it my best shot. I began by begging the Good
Lord to forgive me all my sins, both known and unknown. Then, the slate wiped clean, I implored Him to show us the way out of the coal mine.
No sooner had I said amen than my prayer was answered.