Of This Earth (10 page)

Our mother loved order; her house was always opp’jiriemt, cleaned up, and she was very unhappy at having to live and work in such an endless mess. But she accepted that we had to leave our new, well-built CPR house, its high upstairs for sleeping under a watertight roof, for these shacks because of the Franka fields. There were three, about sixty acres wrestled clear of the bush; the largest opened east of the house, upward on a slope tilted into the spring sun, and beyond a small draw to the north, where water ran through willows in the spring, lay another field almost as large. The third bordered the open farmyard on two sides and part of it was the garden, convenient and as large as you wanted to plant it close around the house.

The barn of slim logs hunched even lower than the house, its roof was flat and covered with sod that
grew bush weeds as high as our grain fields in summer, and leaked long after any rain ended. There was no well on the yard, but a slough good for watering cattle lay a hundred yards beyond the trees behind the barn, and a seepage well dug beside it filtered swamp water that was drinkable—if that was all you had. Pah insisted our Pripps, the roasted, ground barley brew all Mennonites drank instead of unaf-fordable coffee or tea, for him tasted even better made with water from that well. But it was a very long carry in pails to the house, and cattle heaving themselves through spongy moss to reach open water in sloughs sometimes get stuck; if they sink to their heavy bellies, they may struggle until they disappear in brown water seeping up around them before anyone knows they’re in trouble. Certainly no cow can save another from a Saskatchewan slough or muskeg; nor any unharnessed horse.

Pah loved that land. He sits on our eight-foot disk with reins taut, the four horses alert and ready: the matched sorrels Prince and Jerry, which were his pride, hitched on the outside with wide Bell and her white-faced yearling Floss between them. The sod-roofed barn squats in the distance, the poplar trees along the horizon are sprigged without leaves, but he is already disking the big field beside the house, cutting and turning last year’s stubble over into a new seedbed. The season is so early he still wears his knee-high winter felt boots inside low rubbers. Surrounded by grey soil and mulched clumps of straw, with only two fist-sized stones visible anywhere. The Franka place, as we always called it even after we had moved away from it too, on the southeast quarter of Section 9, Township 53, Range 17, west of the 3rd meridian.

We lived there from the fall I turned four until the summer before I turned eight. I of course didn’t know its legal geographical coordinates, nor saw the surveyor mound already unnoticeable under fallen leaves and young aspen, its black iron rod pounded square with those numbers incised into it, and the warning:

Not red “wrath” from henceforth and forevermore as the stranger had painted, but scary enough; in its cut iron as foreign as sudden words on stone.

Years later Dan found such a corner marker for me. And I certainly felt no implied threat; much more how utterly flimsy the thin pin seemed poked away in this massive, incomprehensible bush; as if, in a flit of surveyor passing quick as the
ping
of its pounding in, the pin’s very minuteness could assert possession on this folded earth and force it into deliberate mile grids like the roads built by Roman Empire engineers; as if a single human being with a tiny instrument could, no matter what the land’s unalterable physical meanderings, quarter it down smaller than square miles, notch its crested trees with road allowances across long glacial eskers and swamps and dense poplars and thicker spruce, over water and valley straight as the eye could see no matter where the eventual trail would be forced to turn, so that horses driven by people could actually haul loaded wagons down ravines, around bottomless muskegs, up steep hills. And imagine they could declare: This land belongs to me! An iron peg half an inch thick hammered into boreal forest: if you can ever find it to take away, you may have to endure seven years in a six-by-eight-foot cell.

Our father lived his last forty-five years in Canada and laughter was always his best evasion for ugly memory. “Nä, nä, nijch hia!” No no, not here. No police ever pounded on our door in the dead of night. In Speedwell I remember seeing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police once, when I was nine. The two scarlet men turned their crested cruiser slowly into our yard in bright sunlight—we had heard it coming for half a mile—and we all came forward to meet them. They got out and both put on their hats perfectly. A neighbour had applied for citizenship and, after a few questions confirming certain facts, which we children translated both ways, the policemen accepted the hospitality of a glass of cool water from the well, folded themselves back into their car, and drove away.

On our new farm I gradually became aware of the powerful differences between my parents. It was not just the miserable house and all the money and time we needed to make this Koht, this hovel, livable—as we did—at five or six you do not think about such things. We lived where we lived, and though this farmyard had no slope to gather speed rolling a discarded wheel down towards the corral where the
cows were being milked in a haze of mosquito-smudge smoke, this yard did have more wide, flat space with two tall poplars to centre it and a log laid crooked between their branches from which you could hang ropes for a long swing, or where a dead pig could be hoisted up with a pulley and sliced open. But the family felt different now that the three older children were gone most of the time and our parents had to work more closely together on our growing farm.

Tina and Gust had three preschool children by then and were working a homestead themselves, three bush miles away. Abe and Dan, like most Speedwell young men, “worked out” from early spring to late fall in the beet fields of southern Alberta, earning hard cash for the family; during the winter Abe went to Bible school while Dan went logging for the Lobes. But better weather, good crops on better land as Canada’s Depression economy shifted into World War II called for decisions about buying another cow to raise more calves—did we have enough cows to keep our own bull?—or more sows, to sell more pigs, or ways to breed better horses.

By 1941–42 there was more money, even in our bush world, but, Mam said, our Pah could not always be trusted with it.

Money had nothing to do with how they met. In 1897 Russia, in the cemetery of their Orenburg Mennonite Colony village, tiny Katerina Knelsen stood weeping as the coffin of her mother Susanna Knelsen née Loewen, aged twenty-five, was lowered into the muddy ground. And then Abram Wiebe, the Jakob Wiebe boy from the farmstead across the village street from the Knelsens, came beside her and comforted her. She was two years old, he nine.

Exactly a century later I am for the first time in that village, once named Number Eight Romanovka after the Czar. Behind the single long street lined by worn houses, sheds and unpruned orchards and immense trees scruffed with massive raven’s nests, the cemetery lies on steppes opening south to a horizon of the gloriously folded Number Eight Hills. Our family beginning here has few explications: did my father pick my mother up, crying hysterically, or did he stand close beside her, perhaps take her hand, warm it between his own in the autumn air? What Mennonite village boy of nine would call such
attention to himself, surrounded at a funeral by everyone he knew? Mam was surely too small to remember; Pah must have told her, much later, or the family or community teased her—but then where were all the aunts and cousins, what was my grandfather Daniel Knelsen doing while his smallest child cried? Somewhere here, where these late May lilacs grow dense as purple perfume among sprouts of grass, depressions that reveal only earth enduring collapse, bodies decayed, somewhere under my gaze is the literal century of my grandmother Susanna Knelsen’s grave, and I try to balance decades of family story with what happened on this ground a moment before the village young men seized shovels and began to heave the earth down, covering her coffin: of a tiny girl weeping at her mother’s grave and the approach of her future husband; of an anticipating warmth and tenderness I do not, in my childhood, remember between my parents.

My mother said to me, cool and distant, “Wie weare je mau tjliene Tjinja.” We were just little children.

As if she remembered perfectly well, but it no longer mattered. This coolness did not enter the stories about her father Daniel Knelsen, who remarried within two months of Susanna’s death and whose Mennonite patriarchal discipline verged on a
brutality she recalled for us all her life with regret and warning. A father from whom she remembered not a single kiss. But that grave—she insisted she had lovely memories of her delicate mother who died when she was barely two, and then little but folk-classic misery with her first stepmother Tina, who favoured her own children Maria and Heinrich (two others died as infants), and who worked my mother as maid and servant to them all. At six she was milking the family cows—traditionally Mennonite women’s work, but rarely at that age—caring for babies and working all day in house or garden or barn. She scarcely attended the village school, but she was quick and learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic very well. Her father’s unpredictable and endless punishment, for whatever reason he thought she had earned it, was always, she told us, a hard hand or cane or horse-harness strap or rope, often a beating that left her battered, even bleeding.

There is even a family rumour, faint but persistent, that Grandpa Knelsen was a drinker. This was then all too common in Mennonite villages, but anyone who could speak with certainty about my grandfather is no longer alive.

In late 1913, at the age of twenty-five, my father returned to Romanovka from four years of unpaid
Russian national forestry work, which as a baptized Mennonite Brethren Church member he had done in lieu of the compulsory military service then required of all young men in Russia. He immediately began to court my mother, then barely eighteen. Was part of his attraction Mam’s dawning hope of getting away from her father and stepmother? Perhaps the memory of her mother’s open grave was one they found together; perhaps he told her something she did not know but loved to hear; the weeping girl and his instinctive child comfort, a feeling for her he had never forgotten, or a touch, as he watched her for years growing up across the street. As I saw for myself in 1997, their village farmsteads were almost directly across from each other. Abram Jakob Wiebe was a seventh child, a fifth son, with no land inheritance possible, and unaggressive, dominated by his older brothers Jakob, Klaus, Peter and Franz. He had not seen Katerina Knelsen during four years at Great Anadol near the Black Sea two thousand kilometres away, nothing but men in camps and endless dumb-ox work planting the Czar’s forests. But he had not forgotten, and now she was grown up, eighteen, “old enough to get married” as Mennonite wisdom had it.