Mennonites Don't Dance Read Online Free Page A

If you don’t mind the train, you can come stay with me for holidays. The money’s yours, if you decide.”
    After that they were quiet again, but Jonah had pocketed the words.
    When he got home he hid the folded page under his mattress but carried the passage around with him in his thoughts.
    â€œYou’re wrong, you know,” Jonah said quietly to his father. He had been back home for nearly two months and his uncle’s land had produced a better crop than his father’s, giving them more money than they’d ever had. “You’re wrong about people.”
    â€œYou may think that now,” his father said. He stood up straight and squinted until his eyes were condescending slits. He tried to work something out of his teeth with his tongue and made wet, sucking noises. “But when you get a little older and you have some brains and brats of your own, you’ll see. Nothin’ here in this world’s worth living for. Just a few things worth dying over.”
    When Jonah saw Hazel for the first time, it was one of those moments. Like when, a year later, they visited the West Coast on their honeymoon and Jonah knew he should have been born near the ocean instead of an island of dirt surrounded by wheat and flax.
    Jonah had finished high school at Caronport and moved across campus for college classes at Briercrest where Hazel was a year ahead of him, but a year younger. Her parents lived in Regina and had forgotten everything they ever knew about farming.
    At first Jonah couldn’t get Hazel to notice him. In the cafeteria, although he chose his seat so she couldn’t help but see him, she usually immersed herself in a book while forking up bites of mashed potatoes, of which she always took twice as much as anyone else. He watched as other young men offered to fetch her dessert: vanilla ice cream with stewed plums. Those who were in seminary and encouraged to have a wife before entering the ministry, would sometimes sit across from her and thoughtfully open their Bibles on the table, reading as though in deep contemplation of the mysteries. Hazel wasn’t the most beautiful girl on campus, but what beauty she had was knit together with a quick wit and steady peace that attracted Jonah and the others to her like mice to a sack of grain.
    When Hazel would glance up from her book to see who’d sat down across from her, and when one of the young men would gather the courage to start a conversation in hopes it might lead towards sitting together at the next meal, she politely told them that she hadn’t come to Briercrest to get married. Which was funny, because it was well known that Briercrest was where good Mennonite girls went to find a husband.
    One day Jonah brought her an extra plate of mashed potatoes. He set it on the table and slowly pushed it towards her. Looking up from her book she laughed, a self-conscious snort that acknowledged her own ridiculousness. The two of them stayed and talked until the cafeteria matron stood at the door and jangled her key ring. Hazel told Jonah that she walked with the Lord, and Briercrest was where she had followed Him. “Yeesh — that must really make me sound like a barrel of fun!”
    â€œBarrel of potatoes, maybe.”
    All through the rest of the school year Jonah was late to his first class of the morning, too busy trying to accidentally bump into Hazel on the way to hers. Sometimes she’d wave, other times she didn’t see him. What began to seem plain to Jonah was that she wasn’t looking. But when he noticed her in the stands one afternoon when his curling team was on the ice sheet in the old airplane hangar, he became certain that God had caused her to attend Briercrest just to meet him. Not long after, they became engaged. Jonah was twenty years old, ready to claim his uncle’s house and land.
    The house that once belonged to Jonah’s uncle was visible from Jonah’s old bedroom