Of This Earth (17 page)

During the later thirties and the first years of World War II a number of families, including the store owners William Voth and John Schroeder, left Speedwell.

The world seemed to be emptying, trickling away south nearer the circle of the sun where the weather was obviously warmer. And then August and Pauline Fiedler with their four sons and one daughter still unmarried moved to Vancouver; they had helped Pah find Speedwell, given us a house to live in for the first year, they were our in-laws twice over and Mam and Pah’s best friends. How could we go to Turtle Lake for our annual summer picnic without them?

Mrs. Fiedler knew how to clean and fry jackfish perfectly on a fire between stones, and her sons knew where to catch them by the boatload. Even Mam’s wonderful potato salad and Schnetje, layered biscuits made with thick cream, without Mrs. Fiedler’s fish would be like trying to celebrate Christmas without a candy.

Then, in spring 1942, our family itself began to separate. Helen recorded it in her first notes that did not begin with “got sick.”

Like his father, Gust had given up on Speedwell farming for the lure of another place: Coaldale, Alberta. He acquired a 1927 Graham truck by trades and barter and, as Helen notes, they spent a last week with us carefully loading it.

We took pictures with our box camera, family or couples lined up alongside the truck being loaded, my sisters about to cry holding the new baby, Carol, wrapped to her tiny nose in blankets with Annie or Eldo or Tony peering up beside them. We loved
them, they were us and they were leaving. Everyone, even Gust, wept, but inevitably the packed truck slowly ground itself through the ruts and washouts up the hill south past the root cellar and disappeared between the grey April trees.

We stood in the yard, listening. That stupid truck. Past the empty Dunz yard, past the Biech place, like smoke drifting away they were gone … no! they were climbing the church hill … and then they were gone. Gone.

Life without Tony couldn’t be imagined. After a week of carrying Annie and baby Carol, suddenly Helen and Liz had no babies to play with; they cried abruptly and disappeared somewhere. My sisters had never been much fun in the sandpile anyway, but what was there for me to do alone? Chase Carlo, try to grab a cat, run through cowpies, splat!

Nonetheless bright spring came: blue sky and hot sun turned the grey world green with a wedding. Helen laconically records:

Pierceland was an isolated village in the boreal forest beyond Meadow Lake; Abe and Gilda would pastor a Mennonite Brethren mission church there for the next eight years.

I remember their wedding only as one black-and-white photo: Gilda in her amazing (to small me) long dress and tiara veil and Abe in dark-striped suit coming out onto the Speedwell Church steps crowded with everyone in the community. Later a studio portrait was made of them in Saskatoon, posed again in the same clothes, but that May Sunday must have been dazzling. The trees, the road and the small clearings of the hill and valley below the church where the creek ran through willows and poplars shimmered golden green as if the heavens and the earth had just been spoken into existence. In God’s seven twenty-four-hour days, as Abe preached Genesis all his life. “And, behold, it was very good.”

The crops were excellent that year I turned eight, and to save the expense and to keep the bundles dry until the threshing machine appeared, Dad and Dan hauled our early barley and oat bundles from the fields and stacked them in the yard. Bundle stacks were different from the long, breadloaf
haystacks behind the barn; they were temporarily piled round as beehives near the granary for easy pitching into the thresher, and I discovered a new game to play between them. Gust had given me a worn-out tire for playing which I hoisted and rolled endlessly around the yard, down the small hill from the root cellar, jumped it over logs and bumped into trees, fence posts, even slammed it against the barn door when no one was listening. Then I found an iron machinery wheel with spokes. If I stuck a stick through the axle hole, I could bend down and, holding the stick with one hand on either side, my arms were just long enough to keep it clear of my face as I rolled it around the yard. Not like rolling a heavy tire and watching it crash wherever—this was a wheel I could control and I bent low over it, roaring, wheeling figure eights between the round stacks like the Fiedler or Lobe brothers who always had everything interesting like guns and bucking horses and a motorcycle like a little colt to follow their big car, the first anyone had ever seen in Speedwell—head down, running as fast as I could, I was spinning circles on my single-axle motorcycle around the stacks and across the yard, bbrrrrrrmmmm!

I forgot about the four-wire fence strung across the yard to keep the cattle away from the bundle stacks. Bent close over the wheel, roaring around the
stacks and sprinting for the house, I drove headlong into the barbed-wire fence and ripped my face.

Screaming again. My sisters and mother came running, and this time there was blood enough to make it look frightful. But blood can be wiped away, Mam knew there was lots of it under my tanned summer hide. So, no desperate evening search for neat doctor stitches, just her tight bandages torn from sheets wrapped criss-cross over my face. Such wild running around! “Etj woa die aunbinje mett’n korten Strang,” I’ll tie you [to a post] with a short rope, she told my mummied head. She also knew I healed quickly, and when school finally began that year, there were no bandages left for our new teacher, Miss Hingston, to ask about.

But the body remembers, and some remembering is redrawn on your changing skin for as long as you live, visible to anyone close up and loving: the flat, disordered gnarl of an operation that begins under your ribs and vanishes in your crotch hair; the faint, white writing of barbed wire on your face, one line slanted across the bridge of your nose and a longer, deeper, couplet below your right eye, What’s that? A story that grows warmer the more intimately you desire to tell it.

For lack of a teacher, Speedwell School began late in 1942, on October 19. That was the Monday after the engagement of Mary Wiebe to Emmanuel Fiedler was announced in the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church. I know these exact dates because of Helen’s notebook. The engagement was announced on October 18 and the wedding held next Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m., October 25, in the middle of milking and chores, when fall darkness had already settled in and the two kerosene mantle lamps would need to be lit in church—why the sudden rush?

Not for the usual quick-wedding reason. In 1942, after Gust and Tina left and Abe and Gilda were married, our family moved our farm operation from the Franka land on Section 9 to Gust’s homestead on the southwest quarter of Section 5. Gust’s fields were as good and the house much better than the Franka place, and his well was known as the best in the entire Speedwell–Jack Pine area. I remember nothing of that move, but the October wedding picture of our reunited family is taken in front of the house Gust had built. He and Tina returned from Coaldale for this marriage of her sister and his brother.

The wedding photo shows baby Carol is old enough to sit erect on Tina’s arm and peek over Emmanuel’s shoulder. Our entire family is in the picture except for Dan, who is taking it. Wind and
rain have washed the plaster coating off the logs to above the window sills and nothing has been done to prepare the house properly for a wed ding—was that also because of the rush?—leave alone for winter, but Helen and Liz and little Anne pose in their bare arm dresses. No one, not the bride, the groom, or even us little kids, looks particularly happy. My sister Liz insists that Mary cried all day.

As Proverbs has it, “The way of a man with a maid” was “too wonderful” for Agur of Massa to understand. It may be that Solomon the son of David, king of Israel, added Agur’s lines to his collected wisdom for very personal reasons; it certainly makes sense to me that with each new wife he added to the hundreds he is recorded to have had, Solomon might very well have understood less and less the
delicate mystery that can be inspired, or embodied, between a woman and a man.

Understood, understand; I do not believe Emmanuel could, or tried to, make me understand anything that darkening afternoon as we ran behind the caboose inside which our family sat warm and patient for home. On either side of us leaned the walls of boreal forest, with stars brilliant as ice gradually appearing one by one in the narrow sky, but the winding trail led us true and with winter wilderness like cold steel in our nostrils, we might well ponder mystery and contradiction. I knew a mist of sadness drifted through our family talk: Mary was not happy at having married Emmanuel. The man she really wanted—the helpless, uncontrollable expression of “falling in love” does not exist in either Low or High German—was one of his John Lobe cousins. I was never sure which, there were several single sons, all tall and handsome and carrying themselves as if they knew everything worth knowing in the world and they would do it too, whenever they felt like it. But the Lobes had also left Speedwell—for Cold Lake, Alberta, where the Lobe sawmills were expanding as the war demanded more and more production—and something had happened, or hadn’t happened that should have, and Mary suddenly agreed, on the rebound as it might
have been whispered, to marry Emmanuel who had tried to woo her for a long time and whom she just teased, laughing. She liked certain ways of laughter, very much, and he was forever telling jokes—not really witty or ironic, more folksy sayings or long, slow build-up stories that were sometimes okay but at other times she would simply snort her disdain and walk away, her lovely lips curled. But nothing discouraged Emmanuel Fiedler; he was irrepressible, not tall but we all thought him very handsome, and not cutting with words like the Lobes could be in their erect confidence: rather, he was unfailingly gentle, a considerate man of whom my mother was particularly fond because, she said, he was soo trü’hoatijch, so genuine, literally so true-hearted, a Christian. Moody, asp-tongued Mary would never find a better man. Which was probably true, but such a truth could not necessarily make Mary happy. Ever.