Mennonites Don't Dance Read Online Free PDF Page B

bottom peppered in grit. The sound it made on the floor scraped into Jonah’s good ear, which he couldn’t help but turn towards the noise. “They’re not blue, but I don’t see any good reason these won’t keep out the sun just as well. She can save her material and make something useful for her and the girl to wear to church. Noticed you weren’t there last Sunday.”
    As he walked back up the hill to his own house, weighed down with his mother’s box, Jonah thought about Hazel and quickened his pace. Halfway home, he wondered why his mother had noticed his hearing and Hazel had not.
    â€œWhat did Mom want?” Hazel said when Jonah let the porch’s storm door spring shut behind him. He dropped the box with the curtains into a corner and heard a one-dimensional thud.
    â€œShe thought you could use these,” he said, looking from the bile-coloured drapes in the box, to the length of watery blue fabric draped across Hazel’s lap. She was getting ready to sew. “Something about paying you back for some Saskatoons?”
    â€œThat’s nice.” Hazel glanced at the box and scrunched her nose. She seemed amused, the same way as when one of the old people from nearby pressed a greasy paper bag full of fried New Year’s cookies into her hands, a thank-you for a visit. She’d thank them as though the simple-minded gratitude of farm-folk was endearing. But who was she to think that? And now, Jonah thought, she was making the same face over his mother’s gift. His mother, who wasn’t grateful for the berries, just worried that anyone might think she owed them.
    â€œUh huh,” Jonah said. He paused, turning his next words over on his tongue. They didn’t taste right. He didn’t even mean them. After all, he intended to throw the box of curtains into the back of his truck and get rid of them the next time he went to the nuisance yard. He didn’t care about them. “What are you going to do with these?” he said.
    â€œSalvation Army, I guess.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œSure, why?”
    â€œShe’s going to want to know what you did with them.”
    â€œI don’t like them,” Hazel said simply. She was threading a needle and had a length of blue thread between her teeth, but stopped to give him her attention. Katie, who Jonah could just see under the sewing table, had stitched together two squares of fabric, with holes left open for the head and arms of her favourite doll to fit through. She was about to come out, would have stood up and leaned against his leg in the way she always did, but instead shrunk back farther under the table. She had dropped her needle. Jonah could see it, a thin silver splinter sticking out of the rug.
    â€œKatie,” he said, crouching down to look her in the face. “Do you see that?” He pointed to the needle, a trail of red thread looped through its eye.
    â€œI dropped it. Mommy’s teaching me.”
    â€œTeaching you to drop needles where people can step on them?”
    â€œNo.” He could see she was confused. Unused to being scolded. Not with the way they always treated her, as though she was a treasure on loan to them from God. As Jonah looked at his daughter, he saw how little it would take to turn her confusion into crying. He tried to stop himself. After all, he was wearing boots, so the needle couldn’t have harmed him.
    â€œWhat if Daddy stepped on that, got it stuck in his foot, right into the bone, and had to pull it out with the pliers?” he said, and watched as Katie’s eyes began to blur under a film of tears.
    â€œJonah!” Hazel hissed under her breath. “What are you doing?”
    She squeezed his shoulder, hard, and he glanced up from where he crouched and saw Hazel looking at him as though he was the crazy man down the hill. Like he hadn’t just said something perfectly reasonable. Still, he considered apologizing