Chapter Four

Put the blame directly on my broad, but bony shoulders. In retrospect, it was stupid of me to assign seats at dinner that night. But that’s what I’m used to. At the appointed dinner hour my guests congregate in the parlor, and then I graciously seat them around the table my great-grandfather, Jacob “The Strong” Yoder, made for his wife and their sixteen children. Unless they are special favorites of mine, I seat folks in order of their arrival. Don’t act so surprised. Of course I play favorites with the seating arrangement, but isn’t that one of the “perks”—as Susannah is fond of saying—of being an innkeeper?

My place is at the head of the table, and Susannah generally sits at the foot. Fortunately, our taste in guests seldom coincides, so there is very little sibling rivalry in that department. Since I wanted to encourage Susannah’s interest in the comely Mr. Anderson, I placed him at her right. I will admit to being mildly interested in the dapper Mr. Mitchell, negative aura and all, so I put him up by me. Those two assignments made, I decided to put the haughty Ms. Hold on Susannah’s left, and taking mercy on the somewhat delicate Gladys, I separated her from her overbearing father and seated her opposite Mr. Mitchell. Where the others sat is, frankly, immaterial.

No doubt you will find me strict and unyielding, but I firmly believe in a set dinner hour. The PennDutch Inn is not a restaurant with a fast-order cook on standby. Freni works hard to produce edible, if not attractive meals, and the least my guests can do is eat the food when it is at its peak. No special provisions are made for latecomers. When I ring my little brass gong at half past six, the savvy diner will be present and accounted for.

That first evening, neither Susannah nor the comely Mr. Anderson appeared. Perhaps, given Susannah’s history, I should have assumed that they were up to something wicked—the horizontal mambo, as Susannah so crudely puts it—but I am a God-fearing woman, and I preferred to think they were in Bedford having a burger someplace and chatting about the meaning of life.

Ms. Holt was the last to enter the parlor—she was five minutes late—and therefore the last to be escorted into the dining room. She was actually quite pleasant to me until she saw the spot I had reserved for her.

“Well,” she huffed, “this smacks of favoritism to me.”

“Excuse me?” I was still adjusting to the fact that she had dressed for dinner. I mean dressed. She had made her entrance to the parlor in a black, floor-length gown, with a full taffeta skirt and a long-sleeved velvet bodice. Her pearl necklace and earrings were real, I’m quite sure. Of course far more oysters had had to die than did foxes. The woman was a walking monument to animal mortality.

Mr. Mitchell had already been seated, and she nodded in his direction. “Why do I have to sit at the opposite end of the table? I have my own television show in Boston, you know.”

“I know,” I said calmly, “and I’ve heard good things about it.”

“Oh?” I could feel her backing down. And since I’d already sinned by skipping church, I decided to placate her further with a little white lie.

“My sister Susannah is a big fan of yours. She watches your show all the time.” It seemed a safe fib at the moment, because Susannah had yet to swirl on the scene. The odds were that my sister was still in bed anyway. Ever since marrying that Presbyterian, Susannah has made it a habit of rising with the moon, not the sun.

“Really?”

“Oh, yes,” I gushed, and needlessly, I might add, “she thinks you’re better than Julia Child.”

“Really!” The frozen face of Kimberly McManus Holt began to thaw.

I smiled. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“In fact, she’s the president of the Bedford County Kimberly McManus Holt fan club.”

“Well, in that case...” Ms. Kimberly McManus Holt was beaming like a jack-o’-lantern with two candles inside.

I gulped. As usual, I had gone too far. Through the ball of my left foot I could feel the vibrations as Mama began turning slowly over in her grave. But of course it was too late to retract my lie. A word laid is a word played, Freni often says—never mind that the woman is metaphorically challenged. At any rate, Ms. Holt seemed sufficiently mollified, so it was time for the festivities to begin. I took my seat and gently rang the little brass bell, shaped like a southern belle, that I keep to the left of my plate.

A few seconds later Freni practically waltzed into the room carrying a huge platter of pork chops stuffed with mushroom puree.

“Voila!” Freni said. It is the only French word she knows, and she pronounces the first syllable to rhyme with “boy.”

“Mrs. Hostetler invented this dish,” I said proudly. Since it wasn’t myself who was being recognized, I was permitted to brag.

Everyone oohed and ahed appropriately. The loudest ooher and aher, incidentally, was the handsome Mr. Mitchell. At any rate, we oohed at every course until Freni brought in and served the desert. It was, I’m ashamed to say, her famous bread pudding.

With Mr. Anderson absent, Freni might have gotten away with her stunt had not the downtrodden Gladys blabbed. “Isn’t this one of the dishes that someone is cooking in the contest?” she asked.

Forks and spoons froze in midair.

After more time than it took my bigamist pseudo-husband to you-know-what, I found my voice. “What a coincidence!” I sang out merrily.

“Wait a minute,” Art said in his charming Charlestonian voice, “isn’t your cook one of the contestants?”

“Ach!” Freni squawked, and fled to the kitchen.

The contest itself was to last five days, with each of the contestants getting a full day, or three tries— whichever came first—to re-create the best example they could of the dish that had made them famous. The contestants had yet to be assigned their particular days, and Freni, bless her heart, was itching to get her turn over with.

I glanced at Mr. Mitchell, who merely smiled and shrugged.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, she is,” I said, “but I’m sure this isn’t exactly like the bread pudding she’s going to make for the contest.” That was technically true. Freni doesn’t measure with spoons or cups, and she uses the “pinch of this” and “handful of that” method of cooking. In the event she won, East Coast Delicacies was going to be hard-pressed to transpose her instructions into a written recipe.

“Yah, it is so,” I heard Freni mutter through the kitchen door. Since my end of the table is the farthest from the kitchen, and I had neglected to swab my ears that morning, I’m sure the rest of the group heard her as well.

Gladys glanced at her father, and then down at her dessert plate. “Then it isn’t fair.”

More muttering from the kitchen. This time it was unintelligible.

I swallowed a spoonful of the delicious pudding. “How isn’t it fair, dear?”

Art leaned forward and addressed me. “With all due respect, ma’am, it’s a form of brainwashing.”

“What?”

“The judges—” he made a point of nodding at each of them—“now have this taste in their mouths, and the contest hasn’t even officially begun. Subconsciously it might affect them when they taste it again under contest conditions.”

“Why that’s ridiculous,” I said, not unkindly. “From what I understand, Mr. Anderson had already tasted all your dishes in preliminary contests.”

“Yes, but not in a social situation such as this, and not twice in the same week.”

“That’s my point exactly,” Gladys said, without looking up.

“It isn’t cool to be unfair,” Carlie said. It was a remarkable achievement, since the child had her mouth full of both bread pudding and the wad of gum, which she had refused to discard at the beginning of the meal. Well, to be truthful, she had made a lame attempt at parking it on her plate, which of course I could not allow.

I glared at the impudent girl. “How does this relate to you, my dear?”

“Well, maybe it doesn’t but fair is fair.”

“She’s right,” Ms. Holt said, and I could hear her words icing over. If only Susannah had shown up to distract her.

“And not only that,” the audacious urchin said, egged on by Ms. Holt’s approval, “but your cook shouldn’t be serving the judges anything else she cooks until it’s her turn in the contest. And y’all know what else? She should only be allowed two tries on her day.”

I snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

“That makes sense to me.” Ms. Holt dabbed at the corners of her mouth with just the tip of her linen napkin.

“Me too,” Gladys mumbled.

“Count me in,” Art said, and gave his gal pal a big smile.

I looked to Alma for support, but she was conscientiously studying a framed quilt on the wall opposite her. It was time to appeal to the powers that were.

With the comely Mr. Anderson absent, I had no choice then but to take it straight to the top. Surely the CEO of the E.C.D. could talk some sense into his mutinous mob. I turned to my right.

“Mr. Mitchell?”

His blue eyes twinkled. “Maybe we should take a vote, Miss Yoder.”

There was a clatter from the kitchen, and more buzz than you get from a hive in a clover patch.

I tapped my water glass with my bread knife. “Order!” I called. “Order!”

Everyone turned my way, including Mr. Mitchell. “This is my inn,” I said. “I get to decide who cooks for me, and who doesn’t.”

At that the kitchen door flew open, and Freni, face flushed and arms flailing, flounced into the room. “You can’t fire me, Magdalena. I quit!”

My stomach churned. Freni has quit her job as cook more times than the Democrats have raised taxes, and twice as many times as the Republicans have been caught raiding the cookie jar. She means it when she says those two awful words, and invariably I have to do something as demeaning as stand on my head in a snowdrift just to get her to recant.

“See what you’ve done?” I wailed to the group. “Now who’s going to cook for us?”

Freni threw her shoulders back. “Yah, who is going to cook?”

Several pairs of eyes fixed on me.

“No way, Jose,” I said. “I couldn’t cook if my life depended on it.”

Freni nodded vigorously. “Magdalena can’t boil water, without burning it.”

Marge Benedict, who had heretofore remained silent, actually raised a bony hand before speaking. “Miss Yoder, perhaps we judges could take turns.” The twinkle left Mr. Mitchell’s eyes faster than you- know-who fell asleep after you-know-what. He stood up.

“Well, I see no reason why Mrs. Hostetler shouldn’t continue to perform her regular duties here at the inn, provided she doesn’t serve us any more of this delicious bread pudding.”

Freni smiled smugly, her mission accomplished. There were, of course, some muttered protests, but they went either unheard or ignored.

Monday was supposed to be a settling-in day for the contestants. Theoretically they were supposed to familiarize themselves with the kitchen and check the supplies of ingredients they had brought with them. It was expected that many ingredients had to be purchased fresh, and a sort of field trip into nearby Bedford had been planned for after lunch.

Hernia, you see, has a population of only fifteen hundred and thirty-two, and that includes the two New York retirees who moved here last summer. Yoder’s Corner Market on Main and Elm is our only local source of food. Sam Yoder—and yes, he is a cousin—relies heavily on the American canning industry, and fresh produce is as foreign to his coolers as Japanese squid. The last time I shopped at Sam’s, I saw a head of lettuce that had been there for three months. I know, because I gouged it with my thumbnail the day it came in, just to see how fast it would be bought. Sam once hung on to a cauliflower for six months before taking it home to his wife.

At any rate, I was to be the official tour guide on the field trip. At the appointed hour I was ready and willing to do my part, dressed for the trip into the big city (Bedford has 3,743 residents, after all) when the hounds of hell were released on my peaceful inn. Armageddon had come to Hernia. I have never heard such a ruckus in my life. The clatter of swords against shields and anguished cries was deafening.

That final battle between good and evil was being fought in my kitchen, and I rushed to catch a glimpse. I am a believer after all, and have no fear of death or what comes after. Although, confidentially, I am not very fond of pain and would prefer to die in my sleep.

Just as I reached the kitchen door, it flew open, narrowly missing my prominent proboscis.

“Hallelujah!” I cried, quite prepared to meet my Maker.

Unfortunately, it was not my Maker I was seeing face-to-face. To the contrary, I had to look down considerably to see that face, and when I did my heart sank. No matter what those liberal theologians say, the face of God does not resemble Freni Hostetler.

“It’s only you!” I wailed, when I could catch my breath.

Freni took a step forward and the door swung shut, hitting her ample derriere. The short, but somewhat unbalanced woman took an unintentional step forward.

“Des macht mich bees!”

“You’re mad? I was headed for my mansion in the sky, until you came barreling through that door.”

“Gur Himmel, Magdalena! Make sense for a change.”

“Me? What on earth is going on in there? I thought it was the end of the world.”

“Ach, it’s only a little disagreement. It will pass.”

My hair would have stood on end had I not been wearing it in a rather tight bun.

“A disagreement with who?”

“Ach, that English woman who wears dead animals.”

The Amish refer to outsiders as English, regardless of their ethnic or national origin. Even we Mennonites, who are closely allied with the Amish, are sometimes referred to in this way.

I stormed into the kitchen. Pots and pans were strewn everywhere. Drawers of ladles, spoons, and the kitchen implements had been dumped on the floor. It was the culinary equivalent of Susannah’s bedroom. Standing there in the middle of it all, looking cool as a cucumber on ice, was Ms. Kimberly McManus Holt.

“Goodness gracious me!” I railed. My faith forbids me to swear, or I might have said a few choice words I’ve heard my sister use—words that she learned from that Presbyterian ex-husband, of course.

Ms. Holt actually smiled. She was wearing a leopard print pantsuit with what looked like a real fur collar. She looked disgustingly elegant.

“Your cook has quite a temper,” she said.

I counted to ten, prayed, and bit my tongue. And then just to be on the safe side, I said the alphabet backward.

“Freni is a pacifist,” I lisped. “Both Amish and Mennonites have a four-hundred-year tradition of turning the other cheek. I’m sure she wouldn’t have lost her temper unless she was thoroughly provoked.”

“I only asked her for a little more shelf space. Quite honestly, I was very polite about it. Suddenly she just lost control and—” she turned slowly in a semicircle, gesturing at the shambles that had been my kitchen— “there you have it.”

“Well, I’m sure—”

I felt a sharp poke in the back of my ribs. “Ask her about the list,” Freni hissed.

“The list?”

“Oh, that!” The leopard lady reached into a spotted pocket and withdrew a small notebook. “I was just inquiring about the whereabouts of some basic kitchen equipment. You know, electric can opener, Cuisinart, metric scale, that kind of thing.”

Freni Sapped furiously. “When I told her we didn’t have those things, Magdalena, she said this was the most primitive kitchen she had ever seen. She said she’d seen more sophisticated kitchens on a safari.”

My dander rose, despite the strictures of my bun. “Primitive? You called my kitchen primitive? I’ll have you know, Ms. Holt, that—”

The door to the kitchen slammed open and Susannah swirled onto the scene. “Oh, Mags, I can’t believe it! It’s just awful!”

“Not now, dear,” I said through clenched teeth. “I’m in the middle of something important.”

“But, Mags—”

“Unless,” I hissed, “it’s a matter of life and death, your business can wait until later.”

“But it is a matter of life and death,” Susannah cried. “Mr. Anderson is dead!”