BUTTER
OVER THE JAM
It used to be said that Preacher Funk had no sense of Witsijchkjeit, and I have seen him at the faspa table, his wife Lachrijch Lenakje and all thirteen little Funks frautsing faces at each other, and his eyes wouldn't show even an eyeblink of a schmuista. Lenakje and her children seemed to have been born with oats under the skin and under the tongue. Those who were there when Lenakje Suderman was born say Sposlijchta blitzed in the baby's eyes even before she was given her first breast. Those who were there say Lachrijch Lenakje laughered herself even by her own wedding--the last wedding in the Gutenthal church where the bride wore a black dress--and that her lacharie spread the church through like fire across a stubble field; even Eltesta Thiessen had to schmuista himself as he tried to finish the wedding sermon--and Funk, already then a preacher, stood there as eaboa as Lot's salt stone wife.
There are those who said that Preacher Funk had really wanted to marry himself with Lachrijch Lenakje's sister, Suschkje, who had been born with a dunkel schwoijck on her face. Suaruh Suschkje Suderman she was called when she went to school--and it was said that she had never even frindtled her face at her own mother when she was a child. It was fuschelled during the wedding faspa that Preacher Funk had even gone so far as to ask Suaruh Suschkje to be his eaboa wife, but before she could say yes or no she bumpsed together with Kjrayel Kehler and those two have been shuddering shoulders together ever after.
How exactly it happened that Preacher Funk and Lachrijch Lenakje hooked hitches together even Weltwissent Wiebe couldn't forsch out.
Now it wasn't that Preacher Funk was against Sposijchkeit. Sure, he sometimes preached on a Sunday morning that people shouldn't talk through the flower too much, that dummheit could yet be overdriven. But even when he preached this way it sounded a little bit like he wasn't altogether sure why he was saying these things.
I heard Gnurpel Giesbrecht say to Yunges Yeeatze one time that he figured Preacher Funk just didn't understand laughingÑthat he just didn't get the joke. Gnurpel said too that when Funk was a boy on the Gutenthal school yard he was the only one who didn't feel nothing when you tickled his feet. And even Priejel Pauls, the teacher, hadn't been able to strap hard enough to make Preacher Funk cry.
For a while I was almost jungelied with Frieda Funk and we would walk around together on a Sunday evening through the darp and along the middle roads laughing so much that even the next day the hairs on my arms would still be vibrating each other. But the few times I sat beside Frieda and her lostijch Jeschwista across the faspa table from Preacher Funk's eaboa eyes boring me through I got so febiestahed I smeared butter over the rhubarb jam.
One Sunday evening Frieda and I laughed so late in the night that Preacher Funk's house was altogether dark when I schlicked Frieda back to her door. I leaned close to try to touch lips with her cheek when all of a sudden inside the house a man laughed.
"Who's that?" I fuscheled.
"Just Papuh."
"He laughs?"
"Sure he laughs," Frieda said, then a little wondering crept into her voice, "...together with God, I think."
For two weeks after that I smeared butter over the jam.
Armin Wiebe
This is one of a number of columns I have written for Rhubarb magazine. Rhubarb is published by The Mennonite Literary Society and is edited by Lois Braun, Elizabeth Falk, and Paul Krahn.
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