Just Plain Pickled to Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

realized, of course, that it was important for Susannah to seek professional help, but since she’d managed to avoid it for twenty years, what harm was one or two more weeks going to do?
    As soon as Aaron and I got back from our honeymoon I was going to see to it that Susannah got the help she needed. It might take both Aaron and me, along with a team of horses, to do it, and undoubtedly Susannah would hate me for the rest of her life, but it had to be done. After my wedding!

Chapter Four
    My Pooky Bear showed up just in time for breakfast, and it was immediately clear that all was forgiven. The humongous bouquet of freshly picked irises he thrust at me would have been proof enough.
    The kiss that followed scorched my lips to the gums. I will confide here that it was only our second kiss—we Mennonites tend to be chaste. I shudder to think what might have transpired had we been Presbyterians like Susannah.
    “I see that Auntie Leah has arrived,” he said jovially.
    “How can you tell?”
    “The New Jersey plates. My guess is that the next one to show up will be Auntie Lizzie. I know she lives in Pennsylvania—but it’s all back roads from Du Bois to here, and neither she nor Uncle Manasses will drive at night. Otherwise she would have been the first to arrive.”
    Aaron was absolutely right. I had just devoured my bacon—not quite enough play but still good—when the Du Bois duo danced in. I don’t mean that literally, since Aunt Lizzie Blough is a devout Mennonite, but still, she and Uncle Manasses are by far the most liberal members of our sect I have encountered. They almost look English!
    True, Auntie Veronica and Uncle Rudy are wealthy enough to put your average Episcopalian to shame, but from the neck up they look like Mennonites. Not that all Mennonites have big noses, mind you. What I mean is that Auntie Veronica does not wear makeup, and her jewelry is confined to that ten-carat monstrosity on her left ring finger. As for Uncle Rudy, although I had yet to see his teeth, undoubtedly they were the only place he wore gold. If you stuck the two of them in the right clothes and put them in a buggy, they could pass for Amish in the eyes of a tourist. Not so for the Du Bois duo.
    “Can you believe it? Platinum-blond hair?” I whispered to Susannah.
    “Cool,” my pseudo-pagan sister cooed.
    “And lipstick?”
    “But it’s pale,” Susannah sniffed, immediately relegating Aunt Lizzie to the ranks of minor apostates.
    “And pierced ears?” I almost shrieked.
    Actually, it was more amazing than appalling that the woman had ornaments dangling from her ears. They were, without a doubt, the smallest ears I’d ever seen on an adult human being. They were like tiny dried apricots, but of course not so orange. I checked her feet quickly; they were normal. Her hands, however, were not. She could have spanned an octave on a piano without even trying, two if she taxed herself at all.
    Uncle Manasses was as much of a Mennonite anomaly as his wife. He was wearing a suit and a tie, but his was a bolo tie, with a turquoise steer skull as the slide. Both his hair and his mustache owed their pigmentation to a drugstore bottle. These manifestations of the world’s influence were disconcerting, but it was the distinct outline of a cigarette pack in his pocket that was shocking.
    Sure, Susannah smokes, but she is ten years younger than I am and of a generation totally lost. Uncle Manasses is the age my father would have been had he not ended his life sandwiched between an Adidas truck and a milk tanker. Papa would sooner have danced naked with the Lennon Sisters than let one of the devil’s toothpicks touch his lips. It was clear to me that the Bloughs were borderline Presbyterians, and well on their way to becoming Episcopalians if someone didn’t turn them around.
    “Oh, that’s just so terrible about little Sarah,” Auntie Lizzie said to each of us, as she hugged us in turn.
    I could smell the world on Aaron’s