kicked at. The animals in the barn would become similarly spooked, and inside, the lanterns they used would just go out for no reason.
“And these aren’t like our lanterns,” Sharon assured me. “This is their only light after dark because they don’t have electricity. These lanterns are designed to never go out unless you put them out.” She went to tell me that things would go missing and whole rows of sewing would be unraveled, almost as they watched. Not to mention that the kids—all eight of them—were constantly getting sick.
“And they also say they’ve seen their grandmother,” she concluded.
“Grandma’s dead?” I assumed.
“Yes,” Sharon agreed. “And she was … well, she was the queen of the family, for lack of a better word. She was harsh and rigid and very traditional. She always said Emma married the wrong man.”
When I got to the house, Hannah was there, and she was everything I’d been told and more. I could tell by the way she was eyeing me that she didn’t like me. I almost got the sense that she didn’t believe I could see and talk to her—just as she probably would have been when she was alive. But, of course, I could see and talk to her, and I did.
“Are you upset about something?” I asked pleasantly.
“She married the wrong man,” Hannah spat back. “If she’d married who I’d wanted her to marry—who we said she’d marry—she’d be living on a farm twice this size!” Aaron, Emma’s husband, was Amish, but he did a lot of woodworking for the non-Amish, and that upset Hannah. I suppose you could say they still had arranged marriages, but nowhere near as strict as we might think. Suffice it to say, Hannah had plans for her daughter that did not include Aaron, but Emma had decided to marry who she wanted to, not who she was told to.
That wasn’t all that had Hannah upset, though. She also spent several minutes cutting down Emma’s garden, her cooking, her sewing, and just about everything else the poor woman did. She was especially annoyed that Emma was not growing kohlrabi.
“She wants to know why you’re not growing kohlrabi,” I summed up diplomatically.
“Why would I?” Emma retorted. “I always hated kohlrabi, so why would I grow it? And I don’t like Brussels sprouts or cabbage, so I won’t grow those either!”
“That’s because she won’t stuff it!” her mother replied in a clipped tone, and I suddenly got what this was about. This was about a recipe Hannah was particularly proud of that Emma refused to make.
“Did your mother stuff kohlrabi?” I asked Emma.
She made a gagging sound and nodded. “Yes. She stuffed it with crayfish! I hate crayfish, too!”
I looked at Hannah. “If she says she’ll make that recipe for the kids to try, will you cross over?”
She didn’t answer. “You’re not doing any good here, you know. You’re making the kids sick, scaring the animals—”
“I know that!”
“And I don’t think you’re going to break up their marriage—”
“I don’t want to break up their marriage,” she snapped. “I just want her to know she did it wrong.”
“I think she knows how you feel. So why don’t you give me the recipe and then cross over?”
She opened her mouth to snap at me again, then shut it and sighed and finally said, “All right. I’ll go. But she has to make my stuffed kohlrabi!” She huffed again, then added, “And she doesn’t have to use crayfish if she doesn’t want to—it’s just as good without.”
Stuffed Kohlrabi
6–8 kohlrabi
½ pound beef or pork
½ white roll, moistened in milk and mashed
1 small onion, minced and lightly browned
1 whole egg, lightly beaten
Salt and pepper
Sugar to taste
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour
Peel kohlrabi carefully and cut into halves lengthwise; scoop out centers with potato scoop. Put meat through meat grinder and combine with roll, onion, egg, and seasoning. Stuff kohlrabi with meat mixture, and arrange in shallow water. Add salt and a little sugar to water, and add the scooped-out kohlrabi pieces to cook with the rest. Cook tightly covered so that the kohlrabi will steam. When tender (about 30 minutes), brown butter, add flour, and stir, adding a little of the cooking liquid, until thoroughly blended.
SURPRISE POTATO DUMPLINGS
SOMETIMES PEOPLE JUST WANT TO BE REMEMBERED, in whatever small way possible. We can’t all have buildings or streets named after us, but we do all touch others in ways that will help us be remembered after we’re gone. Veronica had been forgotten, however, at least by the people she wanted to remember her.
Shelly had called me because her son, Donny, was always talking to a “lady with a ponytail on top of her head, but with no tail.” Donny was four-going-on-forty, as his mother said—very well spoken for a four-year-old. I’m not sure he was quite forty, but he did certainly seem to speak and comprehend above his age group.
When I got to the house, Donny was thrilled to see me.
“Grandma is mad!” he explained of his excitement. “She’s mad because Mommy and Daddy can’t talk to her and she wants to talk to a grown-up.”
“Grandma?” I repeated, glancing at Shelly.
“That’s just what he calls her,” she said. “But it can’t be his grandma—they’re both still alive.”
At that moment the ghost walked into the room, and I saw exactly what Donny meant about a ponytail with no tail on top of her head—only I called it a bun. She looked like your pretty typical old lady, and I couldn’t imagine her having a mean bone in her body, but she also looked sad—and relieved.
“Here,” Donny said, interrupting my train of thought. He thrust some pictures he’d drawn into my hands.
“What are these?”
“Grandma told me to draw these,” he said. I flipped through them and saw lots of crayon pictures of food, by the looks of it. “Look,” Donny said, pulling out one in particular. “That’s green beans, and that’s corn, and that’s meat, and that is the surprise!”
He pointed at a blob in one corner of the plate. “Are they potatoes?” I asked.
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “Well, maybe … but surprise potatoes.”
“He’s been going on about that surprise for months,” Shelly said. “We don’t have any idea what he’s talking about, but this Grandma he talks to is very adamant about it.”
“Why is it a surprise?” I asked Donny.
“Because there’s something inside it!”
At that moment I remembered that this lady was standing in the room with us, so I looked at her and asked, “What is this?”
“It’s a potato dumpling surprise!” she answered cheerfully. “Oh, it’s so good to talk to you! I’m a relative of theirs. Donny is named after my husband.”
I told Shelly this, but she shook her head dimly. “Donny’s not named after anyone. We just liked the name Donald.”
“My great-grandfather was a Donald,” Shelly’s husband called in from the other room—where he was pretending not to be interested. “But that’s not who he’s named after.”
“That was my husband,” this ghost said, so I asked her who she was and she said her name was Veronica.
“Nope,”