Of This Earth (2 page)

Our mother would have been there in a second. Kettles with long spouts are a dangerous story in our family; even as a baby I knew how in Russia my oldest brother, Abe, at six, ran in from play outside and inexplicably tipped the spout of the kettle boiling on the stove into his mouth for a drink and scalded his tongue and throat almost to the point of death. Steel kettles squatted on every kitchen stove, Russia or Canada, often steaming and dangerous, but they were as necessary as continuous fire in the grate.

This must have happened on our CPR homestead before I turned three, certainly in summer when we had washtub baths on Saturday evening, though we washed our feet, dirty from running barefoot all day, every night before bed. First I hunkered down in the tin tub used for washing clothes, then my three sisters bathed in the order of their ages, just adding more hot water each time to what had already grown cold around the person washing before. Until Mary, thirteen with curly blond hair, who would sometimes seize the tub by its handle, drag it to the kitchen doorstep and dump it out, she’d rather wash herself
in a cup
than sit down in everyone else’s Schwienarie, piggish filth!

My first memory: water arcing and the length of Liz’s small leg scalded; which is not as dreadful as
Abe’s throat, but why are the rafters there? Why would we bathe upstairs in the sleeping loft? Where is Mary? The extremely hot, very heavy kettle would have had to be hoisted up the ladder stairs you needed two hands to clutch and climb—hoisted somehow by Helen who was always sickly, never strong? This should have happened in our lean-to kitchen, as usual, beside the woodstove where Mary would simply swing the kettle around by its handle, off the firebox and tilt it over the washtub.

But in this, the first undeniable memory of my life, nothing is more fixed than that low, open jaw of roof rafters and three of us screaming. Childhood can only remain what you have not forgotten.

The pole rafters were in the log house our family built on our original Saskatchewan homestead. It stood on a quarter section of land my father acquired in 1934 from the Canadian Pacific Railway—the CPR owned every odd-numbered section in the area—by making a down payment of “Tien dohla fe daut wille Bosch,” he told me: ten dollars for that wild bush.

According to Gust Fiedler, my sister Tina’s husband for over sixty years, the first people to clear land for farming in the northernmost area of what would
become the Speedwell school district were his cousins the John Lobes. The Lobe–Fiedler–Dunz clan were not Mennonites but ethnic Germans originally from Bessarabia (now in Moldova) who had emigrated to Harvey, North Dakota, before World War I. However, they were extremely poor there and wanted better land, closer together for their extended families, so several clan sons, including Gust, moved again, north into Canada to look for the “free” homesteads Saskatchewan was advertising. By 1925 they found what they wanted north of Glaslyn on the highway to Meadow Lake, west and north on the Jack Pine School Road: a whole township of land available for homestead settlement. Within the next five years they filed on some twelve to fifteen quarters north of Jack Pine School. As Gust said, “We were close together and the land really cost nothing, just work.”

“But solid bush wilderness?”

“We weren’t scared of work, clearing land! There was some good bottom land and hay sloughs and lots of big spruce and pine, so we Fiedlers set up a sawmill, John Lobe brought in a steamer and breaking plow to bust sod and Otto Dunz a good threshing machine. And in ’26 and ’27 lots of Mennonites were coming too, immigrants, everybody wanted land. Poplars can be chopped down and rooted out.”

Jack Pine School had been organized in 1920 by the Joe Handley (English) and Elie Nault (Metis) families for the few homesteaders who already lived in Township 52, northeast of shallow Stony Lake, but north beyond them, in Township 53, the Lobe–Fiedler–Dunz clan began settlement and Russian Mennonite immigrants from the Soviet Union followed them. Area population grew fast during the Depression because immigrants prefer to settle land in language and racial groups—a practice Canada has always encouraged for stability and development—and also because the Saskatchewan government wanted farmers in its aspen parkland north, away from the dried-out prairie south. As
Maclean’s Magazine
reported on April 1, 1932, in an article called “The Trek to Meadow Lake”:

So Township 53, where the Speedwell School had been organized in 1930, grew quickly into a cul-de-sac community of log and mud-plastered houses, of sod-roofed barns and tiny fields surrounded by boreal forest west and north and east. A single trail led in, cleared more or less along the road allowance survey line over the esker hills and around the swamps north from the Jack Pine School corner. When my family arrived from the dusted-out Saskatchewan prairie in May 1933, every quarter-section homestead along the only road between Jack Pine and Speedwell schools (see map, p. vii) was, except for Joe Handley settled by the Lobe–Fiedlers or Mennonites. Dad found our “CPR quarter,” as we called our 160 acres, at the end of a bush track a mile and a half west of the main road.

Boreal forest continued endlessly west of us, but walk on “our” land in any direction and aspen, black poplar, birch, clumps of spruce towered over you, here and there a ragged jack pine or a tiny hay slough rimmed by willows with spring water for singing frogs and mosquitoes. A quarter square mile of basically flat land—good to clear for fields—except for a long esker knoll that ran across our neighbour Louis Ulmer’s west field and over our eastern boundary to end in a shallow slough. A well beside a slough was always good for watering cattle:
my father and brothers cleared that knoll of aspen to make our farmyard.

As the people of the Thunderchild Cree or Saulteaux Indian reserves might have told us, whose ancestors had hunted animals and gathered berries and roots and collected poplar sap on that land for hundreds of generations, we Russian Mennonite Wiebes were the first people since creation to build a house of wood on that place; to try and live there by farming. But the Cree and Saulteaux people were isolated by Treaty Six, restricted to live on their reserves twenty miles apart, in bush beyond Turtle Lake to the west and Midnight Lake to the east. I don’t know if anyone in my family ever met them, or even exchanged a word with one of them when they drove by on the road allowances in summer, their wagons filled with children. I know I never did. And though I waved, only the man driving waved back.

We lived on the edge of white settlement with only endless “empty” bush, as it seemed to us, west of our CPR land, but we never trapped wild animals or hunted them for food. My parents would not have a rifle in their house, not so much as a .22 for rabbits or the partridges that burrowed into the
grain stooks when the snow caught us in fall before Otto Dunz’s threshing machine reached our place, and we had to haul the oats through the snow for cowfeed and wait with threshing what was left of the barley till winter was over. One spring we heard that Alex Sahar, a Russian homesteader beyond the Aaron Heinrichses near Highway 4, had shot four thousand rabbits that winter, sold the pelts for eight to ten cents each and fed the carcasses to his pigs, but no, our Pah said, we’re Mennonite farmers, we raise our food, we grow gardens, grain, raise chickens for eggs and meat, pigs for meat and cows for milk and cream. Daut Wille enne Wildnis es nijch fe uns, animals in the wild aren’t for us.

Nevertheless, like the Cree and Saulteaux, we did eat jackfish caught in Turtle Lake when we went there for summer picnics with the Fiedlers; we traded eggs and chickens for frozen fish when occasional pedlars came around in winter. And we certainly picked wild berries, especially blueberries and saskatoons, ate them with cream or baked them into Plautz, open-faced fruit pastry, or canned them for winter—though we did not know how to dry them and pound them into dried meat to make pemmican the way the Cree had once preserved their food. And, like them, we also dug seneca roots.
We knew nothing about making medicines from them, but Voth’s or Schroeder’s store paid thirty cents a pound for dried seneca roots which, they said, a company bought from them to make into cough remedies. Robin Hood flour cost two dollars for a one-hundred-pound bag: if we found enough good seneca patches in early summer, Mam, Mary and Helen could maybe dig and sun-dry eight pounds in three days, or four. That was a burlap sack full of tiny sun-wrinkled roots, and Liz and I were too little to dig but I could find the plants as easily as anyone; their flowers were instantly recognizable, a ring of tiny white spears among all the green, like two hands cupped upwards together with flowers on every fingertip. And at their centre the unseen root: the thicker the flowers, the bigger the root.

Seneca plants grow best at the moist edges of aspen groves, and by the time I was big enough to dig them out, my brother Dan had made us diggers from the cut, sharpened leaf of a car spring bolted to the broken spoke of a wagon wheel. I have one still, though I have never found a seneca plant in the aspen forests I wander west of Edmonton. I know I would instantly recognize that ring of flowers, delicate white and low against the earth; it is an image painted on my memory like the face of my mother
bent down, smiling, her broad fingers sifting the earth for every gram of root that will buy her one more handful of flour to feed her family.

Our CPR house was built of peeled spruce plastered with mud. The only complete photo of it is a distant side view from the south: a bare yard with the bush a ragged wall peering over its vertical slab roof. A man with his hands behind his back and wearing a hat stands against the left window; on the right five children and a woman wearing an apron are lined in a row up to the lean-to door; between them, stretched out on bare ground, two men lie on their
elbows in the Russian Mennonite style of taking group pictures, a white-and-black dog at their feet. A two-horse cutter stands beside the willow fence in the right foreground, something we certainly used in winter, but I have no winter memory of that yard; everything is green summer.

The man with his hands behind his back is my father. The spot of white shirt farthest from him in front of the screen door is me, with my mother and her Sunday white apron beside me. Liz is almost invisible, her dress so dark against the butt-ends of the house logs. The taller girl in white beside her is Helen, who died too young. Her hands are folded up together at her lips as if in prayer.