The Novel Read online

  West of the farm buildings marched seven glorious blue spruce, tall, magnificently colored and rounded out like plump Dutch housewives. Their unexpected presence told much about the Zollicoffers and my other Dutch neighbors, and since I had been involved in getting the trees to the farm I can explain exactly how that happened.

  To look at the Zollicoffers and the way they lived you would have said: ‘These two gross Dutchmen between them haven’t a shred of appreciation for beautiful things.’ Herman was a big man, close to six feet, who weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. He had reddish hair, a copious beard, a clean-shaven upper lip, close-set eyes and a tremendous belly, which alone would have held up his pants, but, cautious man that he was, he wore both a belt and a pair of canvas suspenders. He favored thick socks and heavy shoes in which he waddled like a duck.

  His wife, Frieda, was not quite as tall as he, but enormous in girth. She wore shoes much like her husband’s, heavy black stockings and a skirt that came to her ankles. I rarely saw her without an apron, which she tied tightly just above her ample stomach. In the early days she had worn the filigreed white lace headdress of the Mennonite women, but shortly after I came to know her she discarded this, preferring a sturdy bonnet. To watch the two Zollicoffers throughout a working day you would have concluded that all they were interested in was eating, and you would have been partly correct, for their appetites were prodigious.

  But there was another side to the Zollicoffers that was just as strong. One day in 1938, when I was fifteen and picking up our family mail at the post office in Rostock, Mrs. Zollicoffer was there purchasing stamps, and since she was the best cook by far in our valley and I had been lucky enough to sample her culinary treats, I was always courteous to her. As we were speaking, a man I did not know approached and asked: ‘Pardon me, but are you Mrs. Zollicoffer?’ When she drew back, suspicious, he explained: ‘I’m Hans Draksel. I have the nursery.’

  ‘Yes! Up against Dresden yet.’

  ‘The same. I have a corner of beautiful trees in what we nurserymen call “the Depression Block.” ’

  ‘What’s that mean already?’

  ‘The trees we should have sold during the last eight years. Nobody had any money. They’ve grown tall, like trees do. This is the last season they could be sold. Either I get rid of them or we cut them down.’

  ‘If they’re beautiful, why do that?’

  ‘To make way for the small trees that we can sell.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, chust so?’

  ‘Aren’t you Herman Zollicoffer’s missus?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘They tell me he’s one of the few with any money in these parts.’

  ‘We aindt in poorhouse.’

  ‘I have seven of these fine trees, best that grow in America. Worth at least fifty dollars each …’

  Frieda broke into a laugh: ‘Fifty dollars for a tree. Such craziness yet.’

  ‘And I offer them to you and Herman for three-fifty each.’

  When all of us in the post office gasped, Mr. Draksel said: ‘Yes. We missed those years when they should have been sold. Everybody missed them. Now you take them, Mrs. Zollicoffer, or we cut them down.’

  ‘Well, now …’

  ‘I know your place and Herman’s. They’d look grand there. Big and blue and beautiful.’

  He asked if he could follow her home and show her where the spruce could be planted to best effect. She said: ‘The master makes all the decisions,’ but he ignored her and invited me to toss my bicycle in the back of the truck and ride along to show him the way to the Zollicoffer farm. When Herman heard the man’s story he appreciated immediately what the situation was, and I could see that he felt sorry for the immense reduction the nursery had to take on the seven trees. But he expressed no interest in buying them: ‘What would I do with blue spruce? I’m not a millionaire.’

  The man said: ‘You could plant them along this little side road. A windbreak,’ but Zollicoffer was stubborn and would have sent the man packing had not his wife suddenly joined us: ‘Herman, take them already. At three-fifty we can afford.’

  ‘What would we do with them already?’ Herman bellowed and his wife shouted back: ‘We could use them for nice,’ and he told Draksel: ‘Dig ’em up. If Frieda wants ’em, she can have ’em.’

  So the sale was completed, and the next day Zollicoffer and I rode to the nursery and watched as two men dug out the seven beautiful trees, their blue-white needles shimmering in the sunlight. Mr. Draksel rode back to the Zollicoffers’ to help plant the trees, and as the three of us were digging the holes Mrs. Zollicoffer surprised us by suddenly appearing and shouting in her loud voice: ‘They’re too near already,’ meaning that we were planting them too close together. We ignored her, but she proved to be right, because three years later, when I was eighteen, I went back and helped Mr. Zollicoffer relocate three of the crowded trees and space out the line, just as she had advised that first day.

  Now, when I see the spruce ruling the road like seven majestic queens dressed in blue robes, I think of the day when fat Frieda, a woman with no physical grace whatever, cried: ‘Herman, we can use them for nice.’ She knew what beauty was, and how small trees, overlooked in the Great Depression, could grow into towering spires to gladden the eye.

  And Herman knew, also, but the focus of his attention was in another place. At the rear of his farm rested a collection of five enormous rocks, huge boulders really, shoved there forty thousand years ago, when ice shields reached down from Canada to cover much of what is now Pennsylvania. The terminal moraine, as this gigantic rubble is called, was the southernmost tip of the great ice field that totally submerged areas now occupied by states like Vermont, New Hampshire and New York. They were handsome rocks, and he had loved them since he was a child on this farm, just as his forebears had since the early 1700s. But his interest took a surprising turn, for he mowed all the grassland surrounding the individual rocks and made the place a rude garden in which the granite boulders were the flowers.

  And he did more. Between the fields adjacent to his house and the big rocks lay a body of shallow water, a marshland fed by small springs, and along one edge he erected a small gazebo, which became known locally as Herman’s Bench, and here his neighbors came to hold picnics. He too used it often, for toward the end of day he liked to sit in his belvedere and watch the numerous water birds that came to frolic in his marsh, with the great rocks standing guard behind. Imitating his wife and her trees, he had converted his part of the field into a kind of mammoth garden, for he too appreciated certain things for nice.

  Herman helped me enormously in my work by insisting that I never use what he called with sneering contempt ‘them made-up funnies about us Dutch.’ When early in our work together I first asked what this meant he snorted: ‘Comics down Lancaster way, never spoke the Deitsch, sat around thinkin’ up jokes about us that looked good on the souvenirs they sell to tourists. Never was a Dutchman said any of them.’

  Over the years I compiled a list of what we both called the No-No’s. Heading it was the unquestionably amusing sign at the door where the electric bell was out of order: BUTTON DON’T BELL, BUMP. When Herman convinced me that no one had ever said that, I replied: ‘They should have.’ Equally fake was the great statement by a girl explaining that Elizabeth’s vacation had ended: ‘Her off is all,’ and he made me surrender one that I really wanted to use. It dealt with a farmer who had both a wife and a girlfriend: ‘He keeps Rachel at home for cook but keeps Becky at the crossroads for nice.’ Beneath his contempt was the saying that had become popular on Lancaster ceramics: ‘We grow too soon old and too late schmardt,’ and he expected me to give up without his urging one of the famous ones: ‘Throw the cow over the fence some hay.’

  I argued with him about a sentence that I had heard my uncle say: ‘Bose rotes is gute, but herns is more up’ (Both roads are good but hers is steeper). And it seemed to me that another was usable, but he rejected it as spurious: �
�Them is all but those aindt yet’ (Those are used up, but these aren’t).

  His strictures did not limit me in my attempts to convey the spicy flavor of my childhood tongue, for I had at my disposal a barrage of individual words that members of my own family had used in their unique way. Make was a universal word, used in scores of idioms: ‘Make shut the door’ and ‘It makes rain.’ Aindt for ain’t rings in my memory as a word constantly in use by my parents, and all too, as in ‘The bread is all, I chust better bake.’ Words beginning in English with j became chimmy, chust and chugular, but many words with g were handled the same, most notably Chermany.

  Already and oncet, the latter for once, were universal, as was the word of approval, wunnerful, as in ‘She was wunnerful kind.’ In my family a constant phrase was ‘It wonders me,’ and although we did not usually pronounce the normal w as v, we did the reverse by always saying wery for very, a word used frequently, and walue for value. Friendlich was a word we used a lot to indicate a person with a kindly nature, and of course we had our own way of pronouncing somesing and Besslehem.

  If Herman Zollicoffer banished some of the locutions I might have used, his wife, Frieda, more than compensated for the loss by the richness of her speech. I rarely visited them without acquiring from her normal speech some gem of syntax, for she had been reared in a family that spoke almost no English and had gone to school with other children who also used Deitsch at home. Her speech was larded with German words, many of which I never learned, but I had decided early on that I would not sprinkle such words in my novels and would restrict myself to English spoken with a Deitsch lilt. In pursuing this tack, Frieda Zollicoffer was an invaluable help. Whenever I took out my notebook to record some barbarous but heartwarming expression of hers, she would cry in her loud voice: ‘Look oncet, Herman, there he goes again already,’ and she would warn me: ‘Don’t make games with me, yet,’ and then burst into laughter.

  She used idioms like ‘Outen the cat’ and ‘It wonders me that she can eat so much,’ and ‘It ouches me!’ when she nicked herself peeling apples. But as with all the Deitsch speakers it was her lyrical pronunciation of ordinary words that made her the archetypical resident of my imaginary Grenzler. She pronounced w as v and vice versa as my own family did. This was a term she often used, calling it wiciewersie in a lilting way that made listeners either gape or chuckle. At other times she dropped letters in her exaggerated mouthing of a simple word. Thus over became not ower but a prolonged ooo-er in which her mouth performed gymnastics. Her telewizion carried its own translation, as did the compass directions norse and souse. She said britches for bridges, veddink for wedding and zoop for soup.

  The Zollicoffers’ kitchen had been my library and university, and as I sat in it this morning while they wolfed down Emma’s rice pudding in great gulps, I remembered how indebted I was to them.

  ‘Herman,’ I said as I handed him a copy of the manuscript, ‘I bring you the last of the lot. Give it a careful eye because I’m worried about this one.’

  ‘You done good so far.’

  ‘But this one’s different. It’s about our Dutch people wrestling with difficult ideas.’

  ‘You got a good story, don’t you? Nothing to fret.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. I have the original bundled up in the car. Mailing it this afternoon to New York. See what they say.’

  Mrs. Zollicoffer broke in: ‘The Mister enjoys readin’ your stuff.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked

  ‘Me?’ she laughed heartily as she licked her spoon. ‘I leave readin’ to the Mister.’

  When I left the Zollicoffers’, I faced two choices for reaching my next customary stop, Otto Fenstermacher’s farm, where I would trade Emma’s rice pudding for a sampling of his scrapple, the best in Dresden. I could double back to Rhenish Road and head west through the town of Dresden, or I could stay on our country road until I reached Fenstermacher’s.

  Because the rural road was so colorful I chose it, and shortly after passing under the Interstate I saw to my right the simple one-story church that Emma and I attended. Valley Mennonite it was called, and it could have had no more appropriate name, for it overlooked the handsome valley that nestled between two low ranges of hills that protected the town of Dresden to the north and south. From the front porch of the church one could see endless miles of the most beautiful land in Pennsylvania.

  The site had been selected by the first Zollicoffers and Yoders to settle in this region, and they had chosen well. A record kept by my family explains how it happened:

  In 1677, the year Yost Yoder was released from prison with scars from torture marking his face, the Word of God seemed to arrive in our Palatine valleys in the person of a tall Englishman of gentle manner who brought us news we could scarcely believe. His name was Wilhelm Penn and he said: ‘In the New World the English king has given me a principality larger than Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and your Palatinate combined. There we live in peace. Each family has its own free land to till as it disposes. We have no army, no forced enlistments, no crushing taxes, no Lords to whom we must bow down. A free air blows from our mountains and a man’s home is safe at night. And what should encourage you Mennonites most of all, in my lands each family is free to worship as it pleases, for we allow no Bishops to hand down orders which all must follow. We live under the rule of God, as each man in his heart interprets it.’

  Although young Penn seemed an honest fellow, we could not believe the promises he was uttering, so we sent Heinrich Zug across the sea to inspect this new paradise and in 1681 he returned with news that kept us awake at night: ‘The young Englishman has the land. It’s even bigger than he said. Freedom does rule there, and we’re invited to send him fifty families of good repute, who will each receive a large farm of the best land available.’ The Yoder families decided that night to come to Pennzylwanische as we then called it and we have never looked back.

  A later passage of extreme simplicity and devotion told how Valley Mennonite was established:

  Almost the first thing Yost Yoder and Uriah Zollicoffer did when they reached our valley in 1697 was to select a site for their church in the wilderness, and it was Yoder who stood atop the little rise on which Valley Mennonite would later stand and cried: ‘Let’s build here so we can see our entire valley when we give thanks to God for our salvation.’

  I spring from reverent people, which is why I have written of our Mennonites with reverence.

  Today, as I looked at the old church whose roots dated back to 1698, I saw a modern building of the choicest kind: one story, built in the shape of an extended L, fronted by a spacious porch supported by five white columns. Architecturally it is a gem and I often speculate on why our Mennonites, who are so conservative in most aspects of life, are so liberal and almost radical when it comes to building their churches. Ours is a beauty, and I salute it each time I pass by.

  The Wannsee, which stretches off to the north, is a handsome body of water graced at the far end by the buildings of Mecklenberg College. Then comes the village of Neumunster, the most fiercely Dutch of our settlements, after which the Cut Off drops quickly down to Fenstermacher’s farm. This was in many ways the most memorable part of my ride, because from the Cut Off I could see the rare charm of western Dresden: the rolling hills, the spacious valley, the little roads, the farms, one perfect vista after another, all bespeaking the richness and stability of the Dutch country. Striking a jarring note in all this loveliness was the dilapidated Fenstermacher farm.

  Otto’s place dominated one of the most valuable spots in Dresden, where the important Rhenish Road intersected with the Cut Off. On these rich fields thrifty farmers should have been able to build fortunes, but the feckless Fenstermachers, starting as far back as the 1850s, were beset by one misfortune after another, and to keep themselves afloat they were forced to sell their precious land bit by bit. The family had started in 1709 with two hundred acres awarded them by William Penn, and to this fine start the early owners had
added another three hundred acres, until ultimately they had what amounted to a small principality.

  But later Fenstermachers made poor marriages that produced sons of little merit, so that while the Zollicoffers and the Yoders prospered on lands of smaller size and limited fertility because of the thrift with which they tended them, the Fenstermachers drifted constantly downward. This morning, when I came upon their farm after having enjoyed the glorious views from the Cut Off, I felt sick. The big barn was in disrepair. The house needed painting and the smaller outbuildings had been surrendered to slow ruin. It would have been difficult to find, in all of Dresden, a worse case of misguided husbandry, and I was ashamed to think that it was one of my fellow Mennonites who had behaved so ineptly.

  And yet I liked Otto, enjoyed his witty companionship, and often told my neighbors: ‘Otto’s better at making scrapple than I am at making books.’ When I drove into the messy yard fronting the unkempt house I hesitated a moment to consider one of the reasons I had made this long detour: on the face of the old barn, which ought soon to be torn down in an orderly way before some storm did the job haphazardly, rested three handsome hex signs, somewhat faded by weather but elegant in design. For some years I’d kept watch on those signs, waiting till Fenstermacher was willing to sell, and now, with my book done and the barn about to collapse, I wanted to make sure they were saved.

  So when I entered the kitchen, so disorganized when compared with Emma’s or Frieda Zollicoffer’s, I told the Fenstermachers: ‘I come on three missions. Emma sends you her rice pudding. She wants to buy three pans of your scrapple. And I want to talk about those hex signs on your old barn.’