Of This Earth (15 page)

Nothing to be found years later, to hold in your hand and see. Everything my parents and I told each other in the first twelve years of my life, gone. So unlike the wonder of Helen’s neat English still here on the paper of her tiny notebook with its delicate circles over every “i,” coverless now on my desk and string binding lost, outlining our sequence of family sickness in a revelation beyond memory. On the first fold of a page:

On the second and third folds:

And on and on until:

A cryptic litany of “got sick” that eventually includes me:

Beyond all odds in my older sisters’ relentless opp’rieme, cleaning up, after our mother died, Helen’s notebooks have survived, though not so much as a letter in High German—which my mother wrote very well, my father never—exists from before the 1950s. It may well be these notebook words exist because they were Helen’s; her life was so short and we had so little to remember her by; and she lived such
a continuous illness that the repeated litany became her solitary solace. In our horse-and-wagon world so far from medical care, she timed our life by sicknesses, like a family heart beating. Her own “heart troubles” written down on pulp paper, but in durable ink.

Helen’s little notebooks actually record “Rudy Wiebe got sick” twice, but they are exactly the same words and there is a contradiction in the dates. One note says it was “1940” and “Sat July 22,” the other “1939” and the day “Sat July 27.” But these dates are reversed: in 1939 Saturday fell on July 22, and in 1940 on July 27 and therefore both dates are wrong So, which year was I sick once? Was I almost five or almost six years old when I was dragged uselessly from “Doc” to “nurse” to be brought back “home in the night” and be “very sick for first weeks”?

If only my sweet sister, now sixty years gone, had left a single descriptive word about my sickness. I remember being seriously ill as a child only once, and it happened because of what Tony told me, the inexplicable story he tried to act out on the clay by the dry hole of our well.

Our best, most powerful farmhorse at the time was a broad sorrel mare named Bell, and the summer after
she foaled I discovered a game with her. Whenever she stood in the yard, waiting to be hitched up or ridden, I would duck down and run through between her front and back legs, under her belly.

For me, farm animal babies simply were there: calves, colts, chicks, kittens, squirmy piglets. As a child I never saw any being born—there are certain things Mennonite children are kept from seeing—but I saw them tiny, saw them growing larger, and also saw our big animals, in the monotony of their continual eating, drinking, shitting and pissing do some ludicrous things. Sometimes a cow would heave itself up onto another and stagger along on two legs, holding on tight and trying to keep up with the mounted, then drop aside, only to have others inflict that leaping again and again on the same suffering beast. When a bull was let loose in the herd, the ridiculous mounting heaved itself through the herd, violent attempts to ride one another despite their huge bellies and stubby, straining back legs. It was what cattle did to each other, like one calf head-bumping another between its back legs and trying to nurse where there were no teats.

So a child asks why, and a cryptic answer is easily caught; an adult evasion is always more intriguing than relaxed information. Farmyard chickens for Mennonites are housewife concerns: she feeds them
and in summer, when they graze for food, their clucks and squawks and chortling float over the yard like wild bird songs from the trees and the children must keep watch so that when the chickens are counted in the evening, none has wandered away, and also search for their eggs wherever they try to hide and lay them under the granaries or among the haystacks or even under the low willows at the edges of the bush. Eggs were not eaten: Mr. Schroeder would buy them, eight or nine cents a dozen against our running bill at the store—good money when a man might earn a dollar a day if he found work with a CPR track crew, or mom and kids forty to fifty cents a day for dried seneca roots if they found a good patch to dig in spring—so we watched every chicken closely. And of course one day I asked why the rooster sidled with lowered wings against a scratching hen, who would either edge away and leave him to his silly posturing or, inexplicably, squat at his feet and let him leap onto her, his immense claws trampling her wings and his beak clamped onto the back of her head, and he’d hunch his body tight around her, mashing her against the ground, until in a flurry of awkward balancing and flapping feathers he uncoiled and hopped off. And after this grotesque attack, the hen would lift herself out of the dust, give a shudder that shook her feathers back
into place, and continue her calm search for food. But the rooster would rear his head high, stare about as if he had certainly been missed while not strutting about the yard, and his neck would arch, his beak gape and he would crow; a tiny animal in a wide yard screaming into the sky.

I asked, “Why does he do that?” The oblivious hen was pecking the earth, singing as before.

Mam said, “He’s just saying hello to her.”

Hello? Clawing himself onto her, squashing her down and biting her head? The hen was near him all morning.

On the other hand, horses belonged to the world of men. I was not allowed to see what happened after the studhorse man drove his buggy into our yard with his enormous animal tied behind it and whinnying, all arched neck and bulging muscles, but within two years I learned how to disappear behind the barns before I was sent into the house, to peer around a shed corner and be astounded at what I saw. And become aware of my own body inexplicably shivering at that violence; like a fever, but almost, faintly, pleasant. At six I could not imagine where Floss came from, how she could be a lighter, more beautiful sorrel than Bell, have a white left hind stocking and a wide white blaze down her face from ears to nostrils. Even Floss’s lips were white, and she would walk alongside, tilt,
thrust her head under Bell’s belly between her huge thighs and suck at her black udder. Bell’s udder was tiny, her teats stubby compared to our cows, but there seemed to be enough milk for Floss, she grew fast, her hide slick when I ran my hands over her flanks warm as white baked Bultje. She nuzzled my armpit with her soft lips, but I had nothing there she wanted. Floss and I were small together in a world filled with giants, and perhaps it was her smooth movement of going alongside her mother, of her sleek head gliding down and open mouth reaching while Bell stood motionless, waiting for her lips, probably that began my game of running under.

Farm animals are for work, not play. If a family adult had seen me do anything so uselessly stupid as running under a horse, I would have been yelled at, whacked once for emphasis and sent howling. Tony and I were alone in the yard when he tried to explain what men and women did, and I knew nothing to tell him—absolutely nothing astounding like that—and I leaped up, I had to show him something I knew he wouldn’t dare do after me, he was nearly five but I was way bigger, almost six and I’d never be scared like he was, of anything, I would always have nerve and know first. Bell was loose in the yard near the granary and this is what I can do, Tony, just watch me.

Bell stood with her long head stretched down, cropping the yard grass in a tight semicircle as horses do; I ducked and ran under her. But at that instant she moved—was she reaching for more grass or did I brush her full udder?—she moved a step forward, she knocked me down and her huge hind hoof landed on my stomach, the full weight of her next step.

Thank God it was not my back, but at the moment no one thought of that.

It was obvious I would die. There was no bleeding, no bones seemed broken, I was simply crushed and dying in dreadful pain. Any homestead family hours from any possible medical care would recognize that, especially Mennonites from a Russian steppe village:
children live, children die, who understands the inexplicable ways of God? I had been named Rudy for a six-year-old Speedwell boy who died on the operating table in North Battleford Hospital when he finally arrived there after a week of stomach agony and swelling: when the doctor made the first incision, his brother Paul Poetker told me years later, pus spurted across the room. He was bloated from the infection of a ruptured appendix. Who could anticipate or prevent that?

The will of uns leewa Gott, our loving God. Bell had crushed me and Trajchtmoaka Aaron Heinrichs, whose hands would have felt and known everything, was two years in the graveyard. And yet my family cried and prayed, I was always so thoughtless, so impulsive, oh God have mercy.

I curled into a ball, not even my mother should so much as touch me—Loht mie toch, leave me alone! But she washed my face with water, she kept me awake and screaming, and someone galloped to the store for John Schroeder, who came immediately with his truck—or was it his car—and there is a shadow moving like trees upside down in the thick window of a vehicle, I am coiled in the soft, useless warmth of my mother’s lap and we are bumping into the yard of the Reverend George Thiessen south of the railway tracks in Fairholme—what
good could he and his sobbing wife do?—and then driving somewhere east but we find no one who can help beyond weeping, there is a yard with a slavering dog where they send us away and another, and I have no idea why they can’t find Doc Coghlan in Glaslyn—is he away fishing?—but we do grind over all the bush trails and gravel that far, until it is finally summer dark and we are home again in the north room of our house, I am twisted in my parents’ bed and who knows how “very sick” I am for the “first weeks,” but I never do see the doctor about it, particular pain rarely leaves a memory beyond screaming, and it would seem after time I recover completely.

After all, I’m not yet quite six. Running around the yard and bush and animals and barns every sunny day at that age I will do stupid things and accidents have to happen. God in his mercy was there with his Schitzenjel, guardian angel: it was only the stomach and not my back or head.

Five years later a surgeon in North Battleford would find my appendix unnaturally grown onto my stomach. Bell’s hoof had apparently rearranged my stomach cavity, and my immediate experience of that was nausea. I began throwing up in the back seats of cars the rare times I was in them, just climbing in made acid nudge up in my throat but in our
almost carless world no child ever rode in front; the best I could ever do was sit beside the back door and, at the critical moment, stick my head out the window and try to project far enough not to splatter the car. Which for me wasn’t at all difficult. A crowded bus to North Battleford was worse, and years later the ultimate adult body humilation in propeller-driven planes. But my mother, who endured much lifelong body misery herself, had a sentence for all uncontrollable physical voidings, no matter where they caught and shamed you: