Of This Earth (14 page)

As Marilynne Robinson says it: “I don’t know how the mind learns. I mean, language comes before any self-consciousness really.”

What I do remember is discovering individual words. Once when we boys were building a fort of leafy poplar in the bush corner of the schoolyard, someone yelled, “Drag them branches over here!” and that word caught in my breath:

Drag! Apparently we were doing that, so I drawled the word into sound again, “Dra-a-ag,” felt it push out along the top of my tongue and stub against my lower teeth, harsh, almost ugly, but it felt oddly good as well, every sound that was a word for some reason felt good in my mouth, my whole face flexing to make it.

“We’re dra-a-gging them!” I yelled back, and we did, the rustle and weight of the branches dra-a-gging through brush behind me like an echo, and later when the bell clanged for classes, I ran in beside Katie coming from some girl direction and I told her, “We dragged branches, for a fort.” She looked at me, uncomprehending, and laughed.

“Oh, you,” she said, “you dictionary.”

I had discovered how a dictionary worked when our school visited neighbouring Jack Pine School. Troy Fehr, who though two years older would later become my best friend because of the friendship between our sisters Helen and Isola, noticed me turning pages in their school’s huge dictionary, the
heaviest book I had ever seen, and he said with a quick twist of derision, “Don’t you know how to find anything?”

I blurted out, “This one’s so big!”

And he took pity on naive me. After I understood the simple sequence of alphabet, a further realization hit me: “But what if I can’t spell it?”

“Then you ask somebody smart!”

So
drag
was easy to find, easier than its fourteen different meanings; the first was all I wanted: “to pull along with great difficulty.” I didn’t notice the etymological Old Norse
draga
at the end, but in repetition I heard the echo of Low German
droage
, which in English meant “carry,” which in High German became
tragen
—neither meaning “necessarily physically difficult” but they could be; and I began to notice how words in sound and meaning slid closely over each other, though slightly changed, like wind over an oatfield, through the tops of trees. Fun.

The three languages I lived played between themselves, especially in the long church services where possible games in a hymn—hymns mostly High German, but an occasional “special song” sung in
English by a small group of young people on the pulpit platform—could easily carry me the length of the Reverend Jacob Enns’s slow, meandering sermon, always full of being good and loving God who was always so loving to us, but he rarely told a story to imagine. With the other little boys I dangled my feet off the front bench directly below his benign eye, and of course there was Pah two benches behind me and Mam’s everlasting attention from the women’s half of the church across the aisle to my right, but certain hymns could play games with my mouth and then my mind; not even the sharp edge under my thighs made me squirm while our log church filled with magnificent four-part harmony, four verses of “Er Bedeckt Mich” (“He Will Hide Me;” literally, “He blankets me”):

In the chorus the deep men’s voices repeated the women’s rising “Er bedeckt mich” after three beats like the crests of waves foaming in to shore, and the High German
Wogen
was like Low German
Woage
, which was English
wagon
—but how could wagons
braus
—roar and smash like whitecaps on the rocks around Indian Point at Turtle Lake—or was there a different meaning in one of the three?
Berg-en
must mean many
Bergs
, which was
Boajch
in Low German,
hill
like big Peeta “Boajch,” Peter Berg, thumping bass behind me, whose daughter Julia was in my grade and sitting across from us on the girls’ church bench with her hair like mist flowing about her face; she laughed so easily, or cried, when she was asked something in school, no, Julia was no
Berg
in that way, no English
mountain
—but mountain couldn’t mean “hide,” well, maybe
berg
in English could be like
ice-berg
, could God hide you, “berg” you in ice, shelter you from the roaring ocean?—but berged and buried in ice you’d freeze, and then you would really stand firm and strong, frozen stiff, buried and stone dead all right—the song couldn’t mean that, it ended with “in His hand”!

But
Schatten
—
Schaute
—
shadow
, and
Hand
—
Haund
—
hand
were so alike, you didn’t even need God’s actual hand. Everyone was singing, the tremendous lilt and harmony resounded from the plaster walls, off the timber ceiling, and tripled this amazing
image of refuge into incredible, hierophantic power: to be completely blanketed, protected, you needed no more than the shadow of God’s outstretched hand—no hurt or hit in that hand, only goodness and shelter you could feel folding over you—and then if you stepped out into His sunshine—why would you need to be protected there, in warm loving sunshine? My multiplied imagination, unhoned by biblical desert heat, staggered: God was forever high in His bright heaven and only the towering clouds or occasional hawks or the great black ravens rowing themselves
whiff! whiff! whiff! whiff!
through air shifted light shadows, passed over me soft as breathing … and now in church gentle Präedja Enns’s devotional voice was lowering itself into his usual murmur of closing prayer.

Präedja and Mrs. Enns had four sons. Abe Enns, my own brother Abe’s best friend, and Jake and Henry and little Johnny in short pants on the bench beside me. Henry, three grades older, wore a strange
shoe with a layered, three-inch sole on his shorter left leg, and limped a little on that side—I liked the Enns boys, all of them.

“Amen,” Präedja Enns said. His head was bowed, but sitting directly below the pulpit I knew his eyes were quite undevotionally wide open. Already ready for after-church Low German.

The joys of Speedwell Church services were powerful four-part hymn-singing and story-filled preaching, but the highest drama was Gebetstunde, the so-called prayer hour, which might easily extend to fifteen or twenty minutes because anyone in the church could pray aloud for as long as they were moved to do so. When Präedja Enns said, “Jetzt wollen wir Zeit nehmen zum Gebet,” now we want to take time for prayer, the entire congregation rose, turned around and knelt down on the floor, bent into the benches they had been sitting on.

Since the benches had only a narrow top back support, you faced directly into the backsides of the row behind you. A completely different view of your church community: shiny trousers worn thin almost to the point of seeing underwear, frayed cuffs, cracked and broken shoe bottoms, even holes in socks
became visible, which Mam would never have allowed her family to wear to church—she would rather have spent half a night darning. And the smells; feet wrapped in foot clothes inside felt boots all week do not change their yeasty, over-powering odors for Sunday.

But sight and smell could not compare to the sound of the prayers rolling through the church. The person praying stood, speaking out to God over the kneeling congregation, and the prayers of the women especially, able now to speak their need aloud in the church, moved everyone with their thankful praise, their pleading with God, often in profound weeping, for healing in sickness, for a loved one still disappeared in Russia, for children wandering and lost “in the ways of sin.” O God help, O Lord be merciful. Prayer after prayer, this became utterance beyond words, beyond persons. I remember the whispers, the cries passing over us as we knelt on that board floor often moved even us little boys, bent over the front bench, to tears.

In church Gust and Tina always sent little Tony forward to sit beside me on the front bench with the other small boys. Our early family pictures invariably
show us two together, beginning at the CPR homestead where Tony is dressed in baby white and laughing in the lap of a neighbour girl while I, in tan shorts buttoned onto my shirt, am twisted as if to walk away grumpy, annoyed at his receiving so much baby attention. A year or so later we’re both in tan summer shorts on the homestead Gust already owned before our family arrived in Speedwell: standing at the corner of the house he built of logs sawn square in his sawmill, the corners neatly dovetailed. Tony is looking aside as we stand close together, but we are holding hands as if to prevent either of us from running. We played endlessly together, our yards were huge to hide in and scare each other from behind machinery, among the haystacks of the corral or tangled willows in the bush. My sister Mary often watched us; she preferred trailing us about the yard to washing those eternal dishes in a grubby basin.

She had us motionless, tight on her arms among the spring aspen: just back from Sunday church, she knew for the moment where we were.

So of the three languages in our world, which did Tony and I speak? We had our own, fourth, child language, to exclude everyone else, one of gesture and body more than specific sounds. He and I simply learned the three adult languages simultaneously, from my parents, from his Fiedler grandparents who
spoke only High German in their family, from my sisters telling us both English school stories and then, when we two played together, we used whatever words in whatever language occurred to us and concocted our own as we wanted. An orality now as vanished as our childhood.

For me Low German remained fixed, and always the easiest; a phrase, a comment, a quip on my lips all my life and spoken even while I thought it. The clearest way to speak, no worry about grammar or vocabulary and always a direct act of making yourself understood face to face. A language that could not be written down, nor corrected by being made visible.