Of This Earth (27 page)

We sang that plaintive song following Helen’s coffin to the cemetery in long procession. Abe and Dan and four neighbours carried it; Emmanuel was not there, nor Gust, and I was too small.

At the grave Abe Fehr unscrewed the handles and then the black coffin with the white declaration still fastened to its lid—

sank into the hole, down so slowly on ropes in the silence you could hear them creak, the coffin bumped and settled into the box waiting at the bottom for it. Arms lowered someone down, the box lid was tipped shut, pale straw thrown over it and as Reverend Jacob Enns prayed the young men seized the shovels and the rumble of earth falling began, passing spades swiftly from one to the other, frozen clods pounding hollow, fill it quickly, quickly, the sheltering earth, beyond pain, safe in the arms, at home, at last. I stood tight against my mother, but that was no help.

Three days later, on Wednesday evening, Mary and Emmanuel with Gracie and their new baby Gerald drove into our yard in their Model T. They had had not the faintest hint that Helen died on Mary’s twenty-first birthday, that she had been buried on Easter Sunday; not one of all the messages and telegrams we sent had reached them at their isolated mission near Mayfair, Saskatchewan, and
they had simply come for a regular visit, praying to find Helen improved. Mary’s shock, her frantic, wailing despair was as harrowing as another funeral.

When I add up the distances now on a provincial map, Mayfair is no more than a hundred kilometres from Speedwell as the raven flies. Why could they not be reached? Tina and Gust, who had moved from Alberta over the mountains to Vancouver, received our telegram within hours of its being sent. But to penetrate the lakes and boreal forest of Saskatchewan during the last months of a world war—who can be blamed? What cannot be changed, must be endured.

Anne Klassen, our Speedwell teacher, was at the funeral; fifty-eight years later she tells me that she remembered Helen very well, such a “lovely, lively young girl.” And also, that after Helen’s death I “became troublesome” in school, so she took me alone into the teacherage. “I talked gently to you,” she says, and on the telephone her voice at eighty-eight is so gentle still I feel my whole body shiver. “And you burst into tears.”

I see in the diary Liz continued that on the day after the funeral, Easter Monday, April 2,

She notes I wasn’t well enough to go to school on Tuesday either. I was ten years and six months old, and my loving sister who had read and told me stories until I could read them back and forth with her—what was she doing in heaven? She’d be without pain, and the Bible said they sang praises there forever and ever, as we did in church and at home, hymns that ran through my mind in an endless echo:

Helen loved to sing, smiling even when she could not breathe well enough to join in with Isola on her guitar or Mary pumping our brown organ. And singing with angels and harps, that would be even better—but all the time? She liked stories, would God let them tell stories, not just sing, in the Bible Jesus told lots of stories, would he do that in heaven too?

The first week of April 1945 was so cold that on Friday Liz records “Didn’t go to school today [on ac]count of the weather … Got a letter from Tina.” Even with Mary and Emmanuel there, our small house was empty. I remember we sat in the
lamplight around the kitchen table, looking at the worn oilcloth.

April greyness dragged into brighter, thawing spring, and a sharp physical ache suddenly hit me. At gradually increasing intervals, a swift punch in the stomach that hung there like a rock growing longer and sharper until it slowly dematerialized. And an hour or a day later, without warning, it punched me again in the same place. Soon I could sense it all the time hovering like a shadow about to shift into solid agony.

This was much harder than the frequent gut pains I already knew about. For my nausea, vomiting was simple relief, and as for doing “Number Two,” as we laughed about it in school, I remember telling Liz, who was forever trying to improve me,

“I can hold it, I don’t have to go to the toilet for three or four days.”

“You’re stupid, that’s why it hurts.”

“It doesn’t hurt there, this is here,” I fingered my lower right side gingerly, “But that—if I don’t really want to, I don’t go.”

I had worked it out: if my bowels tried to move, I’d go if it was convenient, sure, like going for a slow stroll in the fresh air to the boys’ toilet, but if not I’d
just hunch up tight and soon the feeling would vanish and I wouldn’t have to; especially not during the long evenings in winter, all the way to the frozen toilet across the garden among the trees near the icehouse.

“You’re so dumb.” Liz was disgusted, I knew, even to be talking about that. “You’ll get sick worse if you don’t … go … every day.”

“Go-o—go-o—go-o,” I chanted. Since the vivid English word was ultra-boorish and forbidden in any case, as swearing, I rocked all the more on the pale euphemism, “go-o-o, in the ice and sno-o-ow!” and then, to give her a dig with my boorishness, I sang the German rhyme Pah would repeat when he saw a woman mincing along on high heels, someone, as he said, laughing, who really “meant herself something”—“Yeah, yeah, you Fraulein, von hinten, scheisst ka-ka-rinten!” Lady, from the rear, [you] shit cu-cu-currants.

“Rudy, you be still,” Mam was worried. “Dit es tjeen Sposs.” This is no joke.

And it wasn’t. Though I now “went” whenever my body demanded, the sharp pain came more often. Then on May 2 the radios of the world announced that Adolf Hitler was dead; on May 7 and 8 the last German forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. I must have heard some of
these announcements on the CBC news because I remember thinking, Now the World War is over, there will be no more news to broadcast; no more Big Ben tolling “This Is London Calling,” or Matthew Halton talking while Germans shoot at him, the only thing left would be Elton Britt yodelling once again, “Wave to me, my lady, as I roll on down the line.” If the war was over, all the news was over. But according to Liz’s diary:

And I know that as soon as I got to North Battleford, where Dr. Coghlan had sent me fast from Glaslyn, I was on the operating table and doctors were looking for my appendix. They finally found it, one of them told me some days later on his morning round, rearranged and grown against my stomach where it had no business being, and that was one reason my incision was so big; they had done a thorough abdominal search and found it among the confused organs just before it ruptured. Why had I waited so long, in pain?

Doc Coghlan was a country doctor and no hospital surgeon, but had known our family for ten years; by 1945 he was a legend far beyond his love of fishing,
and today a room in the Glaslyn CNR Station Museum is filled with his memorabilia, including the huge buffalo coat he wore as he climbed out of the cutter when Dan brought him from the highway where he left his car in winter, and the black satchel of doctor mysteries he always carried, including I suppose scalpels he might have used in a desperate emergency to open and explore me. Though he could not save Helen, among hundreds of others he certainly saved Dan’s life, and Mam’s and mine, and Isola Fehr’s as well, so she could marry Dan in 1947 and they could raise a family of five and love each other for over fifty years.

The hospital doctor in North Battleford tried cracking jokes about my wandering appendix; he and the nursing sister laughed, but I was thirsty. I was dying of thirst, water was all I wanted—I didn’t care where I vomited or if the sisters in their stiff grey and white shoved bedpans under me somewhere or took them away or offered me a long-necked pisspot or noodles on a plate or taped a new bandage over my stomach that looked worse than trying to sew a butchered pig back together. Mam could have sewed stitches far neater and not such thick string either. “I want a drink!”

“Just be thankful,” the sister said, “you didn’t need clamps and buttons to hold you together.”

And the doctor, who in a hospital controls the world and everything in it, told me, “It’s the ether. When you’re over the ether you can drink all you want. Just wait a little, it won’t be long.”

An hour was a day! The spring hours dragged on forever and finally I got tiny sips, not even a decent swallow, a sip through a paper straw! A bent grey man in a white hospital gown kept walking past in the corridor, back and forth, the sister told me he had cancer, poor man, and I asked her if he could drink water and she said of course he could. I told her I wanted to have cancer, then I could drink and walk around bent. She gave me another sip and I was burning up. Just wait she said, you’ll heal perfect, all healed up.

After mother returned home I had visitors, including Abe and a Bible school friend who grinned without stopping and told funny stories, but I clearly remember only the old man with cancer and my thirst. And also the room: not anything inside it, but the brick outside because Dan brought me a postcard of Notre Dame Hospital, North Battleford, and pointed out my room window to the left of the main entrance on the second floor. A beautiful three-storey brick hospital with what looked like an iron grating up its right side; I knew nothing about fire escapes, I asked why did they have what looked like shelves
there and Dan told me, that’s right, they were shelves for storage, that’s where those Catholic sisters put all the sick stuff the doctors cut off or out of people, the legs, the fingers, the gall bladders, the appendixes. So my hospital window remains unforgettable: it was half the brick building away from where they stored the body parts.

Tina arrived in North Battleford by train from Vancouver. She brought little Anne and Carol and baby Rose, born a month before Helen died, with her, and she got me at the hospital and all together we took the Greyhound bus north on Highway 4. On Wednesday, May 16, Liz admitted to her diary,

My stitches were out, I was healing fast, but it took a while for me to recover. During late May and June our entire scattered family came to Speedwell, except for Gust who had to work, and Tony and Eldo who were in school. We were all still grieving: Tina who could not come to the funeral, Mary and Emmanuel who had so tragically not known about it, and all of
us who had been there, especially our mother for whom Helen had prayed so much, often ill herself with Helen lying there for months, helpless to help.