Candling

Associate Editor Andy Sia: Tracing the seams between the outer and the inner world, Jodi Cressman’s quietly observant essay reveals the stratifications of gender and family in a Mennonite and farming household. Among other things, I’m drawn to the animals in this piece, which populate the speaker’s world and take on bigger significance.

Listen to Cressman read her piece:

Candling

What I see most clearly is my brother, perched on a wooden crate, last year’s school shoes at eye level with the geese in the pen, practicing his auctioneering cries. Hi diddy ho now give me two dollars. One dollar, one dollar, will ya give me two? The geese hunted for clover while the bids increased, to four, then ten, and if the geese noticed this nine-year-old boy chanting and pointing—his Orange Crush T-shirt, his unwashed neck, his voice lengthening the filler words, opera-style, between the have and the want—they did not let on.

Earlier that day, we’d gone with my grandfather and great-uncle to the auction house, and they let Derek raise the paddle to bid early on a lamb they knew would sell for more. On the way there and back, he sat between the men on the car’s front bench, and I, one year younger and a girl, sat in the back with my grandmother in what they called “Mennonite style.” It was also Mennonite style for children to listen quietly at the supper table while the grown-ups talked. My great-aunt brought steamed green beans and, of course, a goose to the table, and my grandfather invited my brother to give the blessing.

By then, we had learned several prayers by heart, we knew to say Amen, and we knew to freeze our faces while sitting in the pews, my grandfather preaching, our hands sliding under our hymnbooks to pinch each other’s thighs. We were spending the summer with our mother’s family in Indiana to learn about farm life while she was learning about being a grown-up back home in Colorado.

My great-uncle and grandfather bowed their heads. Derek cleared his throat, lowered his eyes, and confidently boomed his blessing: God’s neat. Let’s eat. He cracked a grin at me, and then we all sat in a new kind of quiet.

After dinner, my grandfather corralled my brother’s arm to take him on a walk to the barn while I helped my great-aunt wash dishes. Later, I would stand at the threshold of the barn. When I looked out, I could watch my brother’s auction, and when I looked in, I could see my uncle holding a goose egg over a candle flame, to discern its inner life.