Backache Saga
The day Aunt Katie let my
tiny body fall back from
her arms with a jerk,
like a rag doll,
I cried all day like a knife
had done cut me through
for good.
Pain followed my years like
that dog Mickey followed
us everywhere.
Still my brothers made me
drive the horse attached to
the hay wagon over rutted
fields, cultivate corn and
arrange shocks in endless rows;
my back felt like plowed
earth, sleep was impossible.
The brace around my torso for
three hot summers, beginning
with my sixteenth year, was so
unbearable I took a yardstick
to scratch driving-me-crazy itch
inside the metal cast that
didn’t do a bit a good.
Finally, Dr. Cassidy said I’d be
paralyzed if I refused last-chance
surgery in Lewistown.
They cut me open like a carcass,
used silver bolts and burrs to
fasten femur from my leg onto
backbone while ’bout every doctor on
the East Coast, like a circle of
curious cows, stood around my bed
observing this experimental operation.
I never saw Dad cryin’ like he did
when we thought I was dyin’ after
my second awful feverish day.
He had to leave me with Mother
to await the clock’s eleventh hour
which the doctor said would
determine my fate and I believe
he must’ve been prayin’
mightily
as the dreaded time approached.
The moment came and
I felt a change comin’ over me
sure as I’m sittin’ here.
Under no medication
the pain and fever slunk
away like a whipped cur,
and life coursed through my
body like when God first
breathed into Adam.
That night I slept so good
I was sittin’ up eatin’ the
first
breakfast I’d wanted in days
when my dad walked in
off the milk truck he’d hitched
a ride on, looked at me like he was
seein’ the Resurrection, and
repeated
“I can’t believe it! I
can’t believe it!”My aunt Amelia Kanagy grew
up in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, moved
with her family to Virginia, left the
Amish, joined the Mennonites in Florida,
and finally followed an itinerant
evangelist to California. There she spent
most of her life before returning to
Virginia. I have turned little vignettes
from her life journey into poems for my
Master’s thesis in creative writing.
The poems are written in her voice, and
the stories are not made up (mostly).
—Esther Yoder
Stenson, Harrisonburg, Virginia, was born
in Virginia but, like her aunt, left the
Amish and lived in such far places as El
Salvador and China. She works as an ESOL
professional in the Reading/Writing
Resource Center, James Madison
University, Harrisonburg.
False
Teeth
Eighteen
years old,
teeth all rotten like
kernels gone bad
when Mom took me
to Lewistown to pull ‘em
all for twenty dollars —
no fillin’ teeth
those days.
Ran away from callers and
covered my ugly flat mouth
nine months of Sundays with
flowerdy hankies to keep
folks from seein’ how
my nose and mouth met
like a hag as gums
shrank to proper size for
forty-five-dollar chompers.
Fittin’ day I preened like a
peacock goin’ home,
till I stopped at McCrory’s to
buy straight pins for Mom,
my mouth suddenly felt fulla nails.
The dime store clerk seein’ my
big black bonnet, pointin’ finger,
and garbled Jr-rr-rr, must’ve
thought
I was some dumb Dutchman
that couldn’t speak proper English.
But it was better’n havin’
a mouth fulla lies
like some o’
those ol’ men
up in Washington
nowadays.
—Esther Yoder Stenson
Lessons
And
what do people do when
they have a date?” I asked one
who was older and wiser in
the ways of rum springa.
“You lie down like this,
put your arms around him
like so,” she instructed.
“Just like the pigs!” I
snorted,
amazed that human activities
find their parallel on our family farm.
So when a visiting “Pequaer”
asked me out, I was ready.
After the singin’ at John
Bylers’
we two, joined by my brother
and his date, bundled in their
big bed upstairs — four across
—
like cigars lyin’ in a box
waitin’ for a light.
Took but a few moments for the
animal beside me to commence,
shiftin’ himself to the position
that unleashed my foot to
let go a mighty kick,
pitchin’ him onto the floor
into the cold.
“Let’s go home!” I hissed
to my brother.
So without a word, he left his
gal of brief acquaintance and
marched with me up the long lane
through the seething night.
—Esther Yoder Stenson
|
