Of This Earth (20 page)

And Germany had been so good to us, had welcomed us fleeing the Communists in winter with barely our summer clothes, fed us, given us papers so the CPR could bring us to Canada on credit because they knew Mennonites always paid their debts … what land is Canada, what will we do there penniless with all our children? A total of seven hundred and twenty dollars Reiseschuld, travel debt: seven people by train from Prenzlau to Hamburg, ship to English Grimsby, train to Liverpool, CPR ship SS
Metagama
to Canadian Saint John, train to Montreal and Calgary and finally the small station in a prairie town with “Didsbury” painted on its mansard roof; almost a month of travel, February 8 to March 4, 1930. And now, in 1942, our Abe and Dan were supposed to help Canada shoot Germans?

According to reliable statistics, during World War II about 12,000 men who identified themselves as Mennonite registered with the Canadian government. Of these, 4,500 served in the military forces and 7,500 did alternative service as registered conscientious objectors. In Speedwell three sons of Mennonite families joined the Canadian military: Abe Koop, who served in the medical corps, Henry Koehn, a son of our Speedwell Church deacon, and Orville Fehr, the oldest brother of Isola and of Troy, with whom I was now becoming friends. One summer Sunday Orville came
to church in a belted khaki uniform and I studied him as he talked to a circle of young people in his confident “I’ve-seen-pretty-much-everything-there-is-to-see” manner. All those badges on his jacket, and a big “G S” sewn on his sleeve at the wrist. I was confused, I dared not ask a question, but later I whispered to Troy, “That ‘G S,’ is Orville really a German Soldier?”

Troy laughed out loud at my usual ignorance. “You stupid, that’s who we’re fighting! It means ‘General Service.’”

The great miracle of Canada, as great as enough food and always some work and seeing a policeman only once in twelve years and giving him a drink of water, was that my brothers were forced to shoot no one; not in the name of Canada, not for Great Britain, not for anyone else. Even in the throes of war, in this country their personal conscience was respected. They could individually register as conscientious objectors and work at acceptable public-benefit jobs for fifty cents a day while making monthly donations to the Red Cross on terms that were negotiated between historic peace church leaders (Mennonite, Quaker, Brethren in Christ) and the government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King. There was some writing in the
Free Press
about this, but in Speedwell no one said a word, not even Joe Handley and in 1944 our next teacher, Miss Klassen, showed us a picture
of Mr. King and Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt sitting close together with the stone walls of Quebec City behind them. But we never saw Mr. King beside King George and Queen Elizabeth, and so the Quebec picture was never hung at the top of the blackboard. Mackenzie King had no war face.

Any number, any word, could be written white on the big blackboard, any picture drawn. The longest number in the world, or those less than zero, or all the words in the English language. I leafed through the school dictionary and looked at the blackboard: since Speedwell School began—in grade two I had no idea that was barely twelve years before, the school might well have existed forever—numberless words had been written and erased there. Thin as chalk marks were, perhaps if they had not been cleaned off with the felt eraser—what a beautiful word, fast and abrupt as a swip over the board and it was blank—if the words had been written over and over on top of each other, perhaps the latest chalk words Miss Hingston wrote would stick out thick enough to drip dust onto her desk! Writing on the blackboard was like talking, more and more words could follow each other, you could write and see and say them in endless
arrangements, write or speak and erase and forget them as long as you wished, they were there an instant and gone. But books were different.

Books always said exactly the same thing; if you had the book in your hands the words were there to see, they could not be erased, changed or forgotten. When you opened
Highroads to Reading
, Book Three to page 224—Book Three was none of your business but you looked across the aisle at Wilfred Heinrichs’ grade three reader anyway—you saw:

“What’s a ‘shoon’?”

“How should I know,” said Wilfred.

“It’s a very old word for shoes,” Miss Hingston had materialized at my shoulder, “so old it isn’t used any more, it’s dead.”

Words could die? Why did it die, it felt better than “shoes,” it didn’t end hissing; so, books could say words even after they were dead—

“Rudy! Read what I told you,” Miss Hingston said in the air over me.

I already had, seven times. But I flipped back in
Highroads to Reading
, Book Two, to page 229: to the
last section, called “More Enjoyment (For Good Readers)” where I always saw “4. The Fisherman and his Wife.” On page 230 was the picture of the barefoot fisherman hauling a huge fish onto the beach, the black diagonal of the fishing line between his right hand and the fish’s gaping mouth cutting through the tiny thatched hut far away up the sand. And the fish exclaiming, hook in mouth:

True enough. But when he gets home his wife calls him a goose! and sends him back to make a wish. Reluctantly the fisherman obeys; he walks slowly along the sea and sings a song I have always remembered, word for word:

Her first desire is for a “pretty little cottage,” but one wish fulfilled can never be enough for the woman: the next is for a big stone castle; then she gives up on houses and asks to become queen of all the land; the fish grants even that, but as her fourth wish approaches the sea is black under rolling thunder. When the now fearful fisherman shouts his song into the roaring surf,

I knew it would end like that. Again. I flipped back to the fisherman’s poem:

Plague. Like Pah said my grandfather had told him when he wanted to marry Mam: “Ploag die nijch met ahr,” don’t plague yourself with her. I realize now that
this word is a translation shift; the lines of the song in the Grimm Brothers collection are, literally, “My wife, Ilsebill, does not want what I want,” a disagreement that grows from her wanting to be Queen, then Emperor and even the Pope, and finally shatters at her demanding to be God. But I was learning English, this was the penultimate story in Book Two, and I read that in four fast demands a wife could become so greedy as to be, for her husband, a “virulent, pandemic disease?” Something here, as Miss Hingston sometimes said, was really fishy.

I remember grade two so well because of Miss Hingston: she very much wanted us poor Speed-wellers with our weathered log-and-plaster school—Jack Pine four miles away now had beautiful board siding painted creamy yellow with brown trim around door and windows—to be proud of ourselves. So she took individual pictures of every class, and when we told her we had never won a softball game against Jack Pine, she drilled us every noon and after school for the annual sports day and that spring, 1943, with the Martens twins alternately pitching and catching, we won both games, first on our school diamond and then on theirs. In 1971, when CBC television was making a documentary about my childhood, she came from North Battleford and we leaned out one of the school window spaces together—the building had been unused for fifteen years, but the walls, roof and floor were still in place—and she gave me a copy of the mouse-eaten school register. But the library cupboard, which always stood below the high window on the opposite wall, was gone; and so were all the books.

I studied the mouth of the huge jackfish Dan hauled hand over hand out of Turtle Lake into our rowboat.
I was in the bow to bail the seeping water out with a tomato can; the summer sun blazed blue to the bristle of spruce on the far shore and in the heat of rowing Dan had taken off his shirt. I watched his enormous hand, already thickened by endless heavy work, clamp on the neck of that jack writhing, pounding itself against the boards of the boat, saw it tighten, and then his other hand lifted our farm hammer and hit the fish once, exactly, on the flat of its slick bone head. Crunch. The jack had hit the trolling hook so hard Dan had to slash the lower jaw open to get it out, use pliers to reach in past those spiked teeth. His quick cut ruined the fish’s mouth: how could a fish, even though it had teeth like a saw, speak to me with its lower jaw split?

But I watched it, Dan rowing back to the beach at Indian Point where Mam already had a fire burning in a ring of stones to fry it. The Fiedlers were gone, there was no picnic of fresh fish and potato salad to spread out for all of us families; only a few children, Liz and Helen and our neighbour Herta Klassen, who was no fun at all, played on the golden sandbars where the lake stretched so thin it seemed they ran on bright water. No Tony no little Eldo and Annie to tease and bury. I had to sit in the heat and bail water in this leaky creaky lumber; watch this shining fish die. Slick as a finned bullet; its torn
jaws kept moving slightly, there were fish words, fish stories to be told from the black depths of the lake, stories stranger than castles and popes if only I had the right kind of ears to hear. How many stories there must be here in Turtle Lake—no one, they said, had ever been able to measure how deep it was—and how many more beyond the spruce that disappeared everywhere west over the Thunderchild Hills into sky.