Of This Earth (22 page)

In Sam Heinrichs, with his long ridged nose and leather apron hunched over and running sweat in that smoke of iron heat, I gradually recognized Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire and the forge. And I read the story again in the blue book and understood why laughing, golden Aphrodite, the irresistible goddess of love and beauty, born of foam out of the wine-dark sea, could love someone as bent and blackened as Hephaestus: with his hammer he could shape anything imaginable from glowing steel.

In August 2004, Frances Hingston Cotcher, now eighty-eight years old and living in North Battleford,
tells me, “In spring 1943 Sam Heinrichs begged me to come back in the fall. He was already ill then.” And in the Speedwell Church Cemetery list I find his name in the men’s row of graves, the second last from the north:

Parallel to his grave, four feet east in the women’s row, my sister Helen is buried.

Perhaps the remaining two men on the school board could not find another teacher before his death; perhaps, as some former Speedwellers think they remember, a young woman named Friesen was hired from somewhere in the south who “did not work out.” It might be that the Christmas concert went wrong, something happened between a soldier on leave and the teacher, in the barn, while Santa Claus was handing out Christmas bags to us little kids—that may well be a shadow incarnation of the ending of my first novel—but the fact is I can remember neither teacher nor problem; nor if we had any school whatever from September to December in 1943. I do remember Sam Heinrichs lying in his coffin like his elder brother Aaron, the man who brought Speedwell School into existence and whose
legacy Sam and then his youngest brother Dave carried on. Sam, the last man in Speedwell who knew the mysteries of fire and steel. After his death we had to drive ten miles to Fairholme where stood a false-fronted building with the name “A Tanguay” painted on it and below that the words, blocked out in letters made of three rows of beer-bottle caps:

Mam would not enter a place that flaunted such evidence of drunken sin, but luckily, she never had to; Pah or Dan got our plowshares sharpened.

Somehow the school board found Anne Klassen, and she came to be our teacher in early January 1944. Fifty-five years later, at a Saskatoon reception after I have given a fiction reading, we meet again. Her gentle face widens in a smile as she greets me emphatically with: “You were a naughty boy!”

Everyone standing crowded about, listening, laughs with me. It seems it was I, not mice, who got her into trouble with the all-powerful inspector of schools. I always did classwork very fast and since, she explains, I had already read all the books in the library, I had time for mischief. Nothing serious of course, such a nicely behaved little boy (more
laughter), so when she returned for a second year of Speedwell, she simply kept giving me more assignments; by June 1945 I had finished all the work of both grades four and five and she promoted me into grade six. The inspector declared that no one skipped grades in his jurisdiction, he wouldn’t allow it, but when Miss Klassen proved to him that I hadn’t skipped anything, that I’d really done two years’ work in one, he grudgingly accepted. But he didn’t like it, and said so in his report.

All I can say to her in 1999 is, “He should have got you more books for the library.”

Though I remember that “skipping” very well; it moved me into a class where the only other pupil was Nettie Enns, the quiet eighth child of our church minister, who if she didn’t already know everything necessary, certainly knew how and where to find it. Three years in classes with her, only two of us, and I was never first again. With time I could only comfort myself with the thought that Nettie would always come out ahead just because she was so schratj’lich je’neiw, dreadfully neat.

Except for the five German Trapp and the three Russian Sahar children—by my time the Metis

Brieres had none of school age—all of us in the Speedwell School district were Russian Mennonite and attended the Mennonite Brethren Church. That included the Speedwell teachers Isaac Braun, Anne Klassen and later Sarah Siemens. Community dances were sometimes held in Jack Pine School, which had a larger, more mixed population—including the English school board chairman Joe Handley, whose youngest son one summer burned down the school on a dare or, as rumour had it, so there would be no school for him to be forced to attend—but it seems nothing so ungodly as dances with their inevitable drinking and fights and fornications ever took place in Speedwell School building. Rather, the Mennonite Brethren congregation, established in 1926, met there from 1930 until 1933, when the log church was completed; after that, the school Christmas program and an occasional bazaar or taxpayers’ meeting were the only community events that took place in the school, and the church was the centre for all other happenings.

Our families taught us we were Mennonites, and that meant we were hard-working, quiet and simple people who should do almost anything to live peacefully together and go to church several times a week to pray, study the Bible, listen to sermons and sing, sing, sing. Always full harmony, the small church
bulging with harmony you could hear across the hilly forests for miles if the windows were open. And visit. The only community recreation, every Sunday and sometimes two or three evenings a week, especially during the long winters, was family visiting.

To visit meant eating, laughing, drinking Pripps—no church Mennonite in Speedwell drank alcohol; true, a bottle of Alpenkräuter had a higher alcohol content than any wine, but it was advertised in the weekly
Rundschau
as an excellent medicine “to cleanse all body systems,” and two tablespoons every evening before bed was perfectly acceptable to my mother for her ever-unsettled stomach. Above all, visiting meant Resse’riete.

Like so many Low German expressions, the subtleties of “Resse’riete” are difficult to translate. The two words do not simply mean storytelling; they
carry an alliterative aura of communal comprehension, and earthiness; the very sounds spring a taste in your mouth. The noun “Ress” means both a “well-deserved whipping” and a “trick,” a “prank;” the verb “riete” means “to pull, tug, tear,” very much like an ache in the body (the noun “Rieting” means rheumatism), and so Resse’riete could be paraphrased in English as whipping out or tearing off some good stories that will make you ache, or sting, with laughter, sentiment, even tears. For Russian Mennonites who don’t drink or dance, storytelling is the heart’s core of visiting and my generation, the first born in Canada, was imprinted with story in our mothers’ wombs.

Stories of the magnificent Ukrainian and Russian steppes, the lovely Mennonite villages where everyone lived, not isolated and scattered, lost somewhere in bush like Canada, but together, sheltered in a deep, sometimes steep valley where a stream of clear water always flowed, where the great village farmsteads faced each other across the single street and the window gables of the high-raftered houses kept watch over each other through the leafy branches of mulberry trees. Trees you planted exactly where you wanted them—you never had to chop them down in their thousands to create a field, never had to laboriously hack down and uproot even a single tree—and every morning the men drove their horses and
machines out to their big fields sloping up from the village onto the horizon of the steppes and children walked to school at the village crossroads opposite the church and in the evening the Ukrainian or Bashkir herdsman brought the village cattle herd back from the communal pasture and every cow with her calf would turn in at their home gate, where the mother was waiting with her pail, ready to milk her.

I sat on the floor in the heater corner or under the kitchen table and listened to this, a world I did not know and would never see. I would lay my head on my arms folded across my drawn-up knees, and I would feel as if I were looking at one of those pictures of tiny thatch-roofed houses almost hidden against hills beside a stream that were background to the German Bible mottos that hung in every Speedwell living room, ours too: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” As real as my leg muscles’ ache when I plowed my felt boots through snowdrifts to the woodpile.

But then the stories changed. The First World War came, bringing Forstei duty for the men, and long hospital trains where Mennonite men and women served as medical orderlies or nurses for thousands of horribly torn soldiers who died of their wounds in the train cars and were carried off at sidings—who knew who was shovelled under, or where—and then,
worst of all, the Communists and their violent, unending Revolutions. Speedwellers had lived in Russian Mennonite colonies thousands of kilometres apart; they had escaped to Canada in many different ways between 1923 and 1930, but they all had stories to tell that were stunning in their own way: of starvation, cholera, murderous bandit raids, beatings, fire and theft, vicious Red and White Army battles of advance and retreat and again advance; of torture, sons forced at gunpoint to torture their fathers, the slaughter in villages of every male over fifteen with not a shot fired, sabres only, and every woman—

No one ever said the word “rape.” I knew the word jewaultijch, which meant God, All-powerful and Great and Capable of Anything, but never did I hear the word vejewaultje—to be overpowered, or forced, as in sexually violated. No Mennonite child in Canada needed to hear that such a word existed, oh God have mercy.

And in our small family, a story stretching thin between the two pictures from Russia that my mother sometimes held in her hands, crying as she prayed: of her two brothers, Heinrich and Johann, the Red Army soldier and the conscientious-objector medical orderly. My parents never spoke of them while visiting neighbours, and only decades later, from my cousins in Paraguay and those who resettled
in Germany from the Soviet Union after 1982, would I hear more about the tragic Stalin-Communist fates of my two Knelsen uncles.

The August Fiedlers, who had helped our family so much and whom we visited most often, seemed not to have such stories about their past, and neither did their close relatives the Lobes, the Dunzes, the Biechs and the Leischners. Their older children were born in the United States, the younger ones in Canada and they spoke only English among themselves and there was nothing about Orenburg or Molotschna or Neu-Samara or Chortiza for them to tell: their stories were from the isolated plains of North Dakota or, for the parents, Bessarabia on the Moldavian plateau—wherever that was, I was never certain—where they had lived in German villages as well, though even old August, who had married Pauline Lobe there, could barely remember them. Nor did he appear to want to; he had been forced to serve the Czar three years in the Russo-Japanese War and when he finally got home again to his Pauline and tiny Olga in 1906, they packed up and left for the United States as fast as they could. Eighteen years later they hauled themselves north into Saskatchewan,
where they chopped and burned and plowed a homestead out of bush and got their six sons on their feet—husbands would take care of Elsie and Ruth. That was enough for old August to think about, forget that slave past of Europe where every little big shot could tell you what to do, what good was it talking about that now? Now was Canada, here, and he’d had enough of Speedwell too, they were moving again, to find a warm place by the ocean to die.