Mennonite Blues: A Mennonite Romance

By Michael Klassen

In the quiet corridors of a Mennonite community, secrets buried deep in the past have haunted the lives of Ellen and Evan since their paths first crossed in 1969. A love bloomed in the hallowed halls of the university, only to be shattered by the dark shadows of murder and greed committed by their own ancestors. For fifty years, a web of unexplained silence has woven its way around them until the threads of destiny draw them together again.

As Ellen and Evan reunite, the echoes of their shared history resurface, compelling them to confront the ghosts lingering in their backgrounds. Yet, the moral fabric of their Mennonite upbringing is torn between the duty to uphold tradition and the yearning for a love that defies the boundaries set by their forebears.

In a delicate dance between past and present, Ellen and Evan grapple with the weight of decisions that may lead them down a path of either redemption or repeating the sins of the past. Will the ghosts of their ancestors be appeased, or will the allure of forbidden love once again challenge the very foundations of their moral compass?

In Mennonite Blues,' Michael Lynn Klassen weaves a tapestry of suspense, love, and moral reckoning, inviting readers on a journey through the clandestine corridors of a community haunted by hidden acts. Can Ellen and Evan rewrite the script of their shared history, or will the echoes of the past reverberate into their uncertain future?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Klassen
• Release date: Feb 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224044085

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

MANHATTAN, KANSAS, 2021

I stand in the bedroom, gazing out at the horizon. My eyes trace the rolling Flint Hills to the winter sun, which hangs heavy on its midday journey. It casts a soft yellow glow on the landscape. I can feel the sun’s warmth on my skin as it shines through the glass.

The joy I feel is incomplete, however. Something pulls me back on this day. I take stock of my life: disease, injury, regret. Three forces that can shatter human contentment in the blink of an eye. I am not beleaguered by any of these three. Yet I am bedeviled with a niggling feeling that my world is about to tip.

As I look out, my thoughts drift to my phone, tucked away in my pocket. I take it out, look at the time, and realize it is only three o’clock. I calculate that we have about two more hours of sunshine. Two more hours to enjoy the beauty of this moment, to revel in the sun’s warmth and the uncharacteristically gentle Kansas breeze that carries the whisper of distant birds.

What would you like to do next? I ask my wife, Dee.

She finishes hanging up a blouse in the hotel closet and walks toward the window. I watch her as she stands in the winter light of a mid-afternoon, early January sun. Her long, silvery-blonde hair and broad, rounded hips still stir me after nearly fifty years of marriage, despite the splinters and fractures that characterize our relationship.

You know, Evan, the temperature is pretty nice this time of the year. Why don’t we take a walk on the campus? It’s just across the street.

I look at my phone. Forty-one degrees. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘nice.’

Party pooper, she says, grabbing her coat. C’mon, let’s do it.

Okay, okay… I sigh loudly. We’re going to need more than these windbreakers, though, I say, digging around in my bag for a couple of old Lakers hoodies.

Ready, she asks impatiently.

Looking for my wool socks.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, Evan.

Alright, alright… I say. Wait. We’ll need some gloves.

Use your pockets, she yells as she heads for the elevator.

I shake my head in dismay as I follow her out the door.

Dee and I have just completed a three-day trip from our home in Santa Barbara to Manhattan, Kansas. We’d attended Kansas State University there in the early seventies.

The hotel lobby is busy as happy hour unites students and businesspeople in hot pursuit of cheap booze. Rising above the din is a pre-game analysis of tomorrow’s K-State game, which thunders from a gargantuan screen like the voice of God.

The door is this way, I yell at Dee, hoping to escape the chaotic room as quickly as possible.

Careful there, Dee warns as we approach the lobby door. Ice salt in the tracks of the sliding doors has caused them to jam. A guest wrestles the door open, sending a cold wind straight through us and into the bar.

Huh, boy, Dee sighs as we approach a busy intersection that connects the town to the campus. We are arm-in-arm as we step around half-frozen puddles.

A car honks, startling us. It swerves at the last second around a stopped motorcycle, missing it by a fraction of an inch. Unperturbed, the cyclist keeps his eyes glued to his phone while absently flipping the honker off.

This is worse than L.A., I complain.

Quiet, Dee snaps.

A threatening snowstorm has this Kansas college town leaving work early to get prepared. The five o’clock rush has been unofficially rescheduled to three o’clock on this first Friday afternoon of 2021.

Do you think they will cancel the reunion tomorrow? Dee asks as we wait at the next corner.

A robotic voice answers: Wait! Wait! Then ominously stops. We look at each other silently, unsure what to do next. Then…

Fifteen, fourteen…

Hurry, I cry, startling Dee.

Ten, nine… Halfway across, I let go of Dee’s arm and hoof it across the wet street, yelling, Every man for himself.

My hero, Dee mumbles sourly as she darts around oil-slicked puddles in front of steaming car hoods.

Once across the street, we pass under a massive ten-foot-deep stone gate. Dry ivy rustles loudly as I gingerly follow Dee through the ice-caked wind tunnel. I notice that she has stopped at the end of the gate.

What’s going on? I ask as I enter the old Central Campus. It is bordered by thick stone walls mined from a nearby quarry in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Oh my… Dee says, taking my arm. I don’t know what I expected, but…

It’s beautiful… I finish.

The cacophony of engines, horns, and tires on wet pavement is replaced with a serene pastoral scene.

A snow-white canvas accentuates an approaching dark figure. It is a student on a bicycle a few hundred yards away. Brave woman to be pedaling across icy sidewalks. She deftly winds around building corners, trees, and snow-shrouded shrubs on a sidewalk sparkling from the melting run-off.

Nothing’s changed, I say, entranced.

Everything’s changed, Dee counters.

The student is the picture of youthful vitality and adolescent inelegance. Her long blonde braids fly out from under her stocking cap. Her shoes are soaked, and mud stains her lower pant legs. Hands off the bike handles and arms hanging loosely, she speaks loudly at a concealed cell phone, oblivious of random ice patches threatening to send her to the student clinic. Shit. I thought the test was next week, she says. Fuck!

She glides past, sending a scavenging squirrel up a tree trunk. Its tail waves, and its ears are peeled back in fury against the crass interloper. The tiny animal clucks a warning to others in its dray who have joined it in a last-minute shopping trip before an approaching storm sets in.

I chuckle and look at Dee. She is still under the spell of the snowy campus.

There’s nothing like an old Midwest university campus, she says.

I think about our young Santa Barbara campus with its cement- and glass-clad buildings.

Is it me, or are these buildings shimmering? Dee asks.

It is mandated that every building on the century-and-a-half-old, seven-hundred-acre Kansas State University (K-State) campus be made with native limestone. These stones carry a smooth patinated surface with lines of granite and quartz that still run straight as a draftsman’s rule after a million years.

The Golden Hour, I reply to Dee’s question.

It is that time of the day when shadow, light, and ambient temperature trip the light fantastic like ballerinas in their prime.

Let’s enjoy it while we can, she says. Sounds like things won’t be so golden in a few hours.

Forty-miles-per-hour wind with light snow is predicted to begin at one in the morning. But that’s later. For now and for the next hour, the world is golden. Even the frayed remnants of Dee’s and my aging marriage.

Maybe this is what we need to fire old passions, I quietly hope.

We come up behind a large classroom building. The word LABORATORY is etched in stone above the front door threshold. The cornerstone reads 1875. I try to imagine what a science lab in 1875 looked like.

Freud, I say out loud.

What? Dee asks in a clipped tone.

Sigmund Freud was in medical school when this lab was built. He would have been right at home the day it opened its doors.

Dee pulls out her phone and begins shooting pictures. I find a small dry spot on a hewn rectangular block of flint stone and get as comfortable as possible.

A late-afternoon shadow cinema enacted by a cast of lively wintry branches from surrounding hundred-year-old oaks is cast upon the old lab’s ivy-laced surfaces. The visual feast stirs a celebratory spirit within me that adds to the joy of Dee’s and my private college homecoming.

I love this, Evan, Dee says. Why have we not visited sooner?

I think Eisenhower Hall is just around that corner, I say, ignoring her question, trying to get my bearings. The cold of my rock seat is beginning to penetrate my thin California trousers and climb up my spine. Let’s keep walking, I urge.

We turn a corner and come upon an old turreted stone building where I was assigned an office as a graduate student. The flagstone steps to the entrance are worn and slightly concave after nearly a hundred-and-thirty years of student traffic. I pull on the heavy, old wooden door. It’s locked.

Didn’t you work in this building when you were in grad school? Dee asks.

The Dean of Students, I say, straining to look in a side window for signs of life. I guess they’re still on Christmas break.

What?

Sorry, I say louder. Yeah, I worked here with the Dean of Students.

Fifty years of marriage to Dee has taught me that conversational topics are best understood when not mixed. In other words, one subject at a time.

Occam’s razor, I mumble.

What?

Never mind, I reply.

Eisenhower Hall was named after Kansas native Milton Eisenhower, twenty-two years after his older brother, Dwight, presided over the deaths of eight thousand eight hundred and fourteen men in a single twenty-four-hour period. The two men grew up an hour’s drive from the university and an hour-and-a-half from my boyhood home.

What was his name, Evan? The Dean of Students? It was Don something, she says. Wait. No. It wasn’t Don. It was Earl. Earl Nelson, Dee says, recalling the Dean’s name.

During the eighteen years I lived with my parents, our extended family and I occasionally visited Abilene, Kansas, after attending Mennonite church together. We shared a picnic in a wooded park, strolled through the Eisenhower brothers’ humble boyhood home, and paid respects at the President’s and First Lady’s graves.

This hall is named after the President, right? Dee asks, pointing to Eisenhower Hall.

His brother, Milton, I reply.

Never heard of him, she replies.

Trust me. It’s named after Milton, not Dwight, I insist.

So what did Milton do that was so great that he got a building named after him? she asks.

The Second World War was still fresh in the minds of most Americans in the fifties and sixties. Its remnants were evident to the astute observer.

Look at this, my dad said on one of our visits to the Eisenhower Museum, fingering a piece of dry mud still stuck to the knobby tire of a 1943 Willys Jeep that was on display.

Glenn, is this American or German mud, he laughed.

My Uncle Glenn, a former Army medic during World War II, arranged our Abilene trips. Uncle Glenn assisted in the invasion of Europe led by his Kansas neighbor (a.k.a., Ike) in June of 1944. He seemed unfazed by the memories he held and occasionally articulated of young boys dying all around me. His cheerful countenance was evident in his dimpled face and shone from his dark brown eyes. He died at ninety-five. The boys he held to his chest in their final minutes… Did they weigh heavy on his mind when n his final day, or were his memories of them lost to time?

Evan, I asked you what he did?

Dee’s voice grates against my musing. What do you mean what did he do? He was the dean.

Not Earl Nelson! Her voice raises to a high pitch of frustration. The other Eisenhower! Milton! Mill-Tunn!

I could hear her teeth grinding in her effort to control her temper. Milton Eisenhower was the president, I try to soothe her, but she already knows the answer. Her eyes narrow as if daring me to disagree with her.

What are you saying? That there were two President Eisenhowers?

"Of the university, I shout testily. Milton used to be the president of Kansas State University. That’s why the building is named after him!"

Oh.

I take her hand, hoping to assure her I still love her despite our insanely convoluted conversation. She shakes it off, seeing another photo opportunity.

Oh, my goodness. Evan, I think there is still a flower blooming in this bush.

Dee is on one knee near a frozen bush, pointing her phone at its small, brittle limbs.

Careful, I warn. She is on the verge of dragging her ankle into a slushy puddle of floating mud and ice.

Aren’t you an impressive one… She baby-talks to the flower. In a Kansas wind, no less…

I fall back into musing. The Kansas General’s advance into Europe sealed the fate of one of the most diabolical antichrists of human history. Unfortunately, Ike did not destroy the monster’s vile beliefs or the allure of autocratic regimes.

It’s the only one left. Amazing, Dee comments while photographing the withering bud from several angles.

My Mennonite family endured Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and Hitler’s barbarities. Some of my relatives’ lives improved under Hitler’s reign. Whispered conversations between them weighed the pros and cons of his monstrous reign.

Evan, there’s a rabbit’s nest under here. This is so awesome. How can life survive in this cold?

I get high with a little help from my friends. Lennon and McCartney break the solemnity of our adventure. It’s Dee’s new ringtone.