collie The who truly understood me... and other stories
MEN CAN GO AND COME BACK. IF A WOMAN LEAVES, SHE CAN NEVER COME BACK
Author Deirdre Purcell, who died this week, was renowned as one of this country’s best writers. She has written for YOU magazine extensively over the years. Here are three of her wonderfully composed pieces about unusual colonies, her beloved dogs and, poignantly, death December 4, 2010
I’M ON a public phone, bang in the centre of the small town of Choteau, Montana. ‘Hello. May I speak to Sara, please?’ ‘Who’s this?’ The accent is guttural.
‘We saw the notice about the tours of your Hutterite colony. There’s a notice here to ring Sara.’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Ireland.’ ‘What time you wanna come?’ ‘We could be there in the next hour...’ ‘That works.’ ‘Thank you’ — but he had already hung up.
The road to Miller Colony runs between fields of silky green grain, an emerald lake rippling in the breeze of our passing. Set back about 200 yards from it, the colony, baking in the heat, proves to be a cluster of enormous silos, sheds, outhouses and a long low terrace of accommodation buildings; each with a front door and a few feet of garden.
A woman approaches us. She’s wearing a full-length navy skirt and a long-sleeved navy bodice hooked tightly to the throat over a white collar. On her sausage-rolled hair is a spotted navy and white kerchief. ‘Who are you?’ Hands on hips, eyes narrowed through her glasses.
I don’t blame her for being suspicious. Our RV sports the massive legend: ‘Cruise America 1800 RV4RENT’ over a picture of three grinning blond children. Subtle it’s not. As I explain, a second woman, identically dressed with the addition of a frilled sunbonnet tied under her chin, joins us and they speak together in a language I can’t figure. Middle European?
It’s clear neither of them like us very much. Eventually, however, the first woman waves dismissively towards the housing row. ‘Second door from the end.’ ‘That’s Sara’s house?’ ‘Yes. Sara Kleinsosser.’ Our Sara is a renegade: her skirt shows a faint but insouciant pattern of lighter-coloured plaid.
We start with their kitchen. ‘This is our kitchen. We’re havin’ soup today.’ The soup, a grey/beige liquid, swirls in a bath-sized stainless steel vat.
‘An’ this is where we do the washing-up...’ she leads us to where two women — more sausage-roll hair, long skirts, bodices, kerchiefs — are elbow-deep in baths filled with dishwater. Through an open door, we can see a refectory with long tables set with yellow plastic plates and bowls where eight additional women eat and chat.
She leads us briskly through the refectory and throws open a door, revealing a magnificently plain, wood-clad room with a small altar. ‘This is our chapel. We come here, six in the mornin’.’
She then leads us outside to the chicken shed to show us the egg-delivery machine, a shining, Heath Robinson-esque monster that, in an unbroken stream, delivers eggs from the hens, washes them, grades and packs them.
‘One of our men, he built this. De men, they do all this kinda stuff. Build things, construct machinery, that kinda thing.’
Montana has more than 40 Hutterite colonies. Their inhabitants dress in the clothing, and speak the high German of their 16thcentury founders but are raised to be bilingual because of their trade as agricultural entrepreneurs. ‘When we get to more than a hundred in a colony, we have to look around to find another.’
Today, the Miller Colony numbers 138, including 38 children. So they’re looking around.
As we pass a cubbyhole/office on our way out of the milking parlour, through a window we can see that a small boy, somewhere between eight and ten years of age, in a boy-sized 16th-century Prussian uniform and peaked military hat, is deeply engrossed, logging the milk yield on a computer.,
‘I can’t bring you to the schoolhouse,’ Sara carries briskly on, ‘they’re at school. They get two days off, spring and fall. That’s the days we clean it out.’ Only two days in a full year? ‘We don’t take holidays.’
Hutterite women don’t drive either. They cook, clean and pray. Their children are raised communally, although they sleep in the houses of their parents.
As we cross the spotless yard towards the grain silos we pass three more pint-sized Prussian soldiers conversing quietly. ‘Can anyone join?’ ‘They can if they can live like we do.’ Her first smile. A ghost. ‘Do people ever leave?’ ‘Men can leave and come back. But if a woman leaves, she can never come back.’
We’re heading towards the chicken slaughtering and hog butchering outhouses when, mercifully, a bell peals. ‘It’s lunchtime.’ Sara says. ‘Goodbye.’
The triggers for a fiction writer are individual and unexpected. Nor do they abate with time. Some day, that Hutterite visit will turn itself into a story.