Of This Earth (31 page)

And once, only once, an Indian chief wearing feathers around his head and down his long back like a picture book stood behind the pulpit in front of those magnificent organ pipes. He raised his arms, wide, so the long fringes of his white leather jacket swayed gently, and told us he had been invited to visit King George and Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace. While he was there he had asked them if they believed in God. And the Queen had told him, “Yes. We do.”

The enormous church exploded into applause, cheering, whistling! I had never heard such a sound in a church before, but this was so amazing I may have joined in: in London, England, the great capital of the British Empire that had been victorious in the greatest war ever fought in history, London where Mr. Winston Churchill spoke and Big Ben kept on tolling throughout the world, throughout the war, there in Buckingham Palace the Queen and the King believed in God! How could a little Baulch of a Saskatchewan Mennonite bush brat like me not believe?

This Canadian Indian chief stood below me on the podium in the church of St. Giles, patron of cripples,
and he had talked to them, and I suddenly knew that if this man asked them a question like that, they could only answer truthfully. He didn’t walk around the platform waving his arms and shouting, he spoke calmly with a profound dignity that had no need to either yell or threaten like evangelists; he told you what had happened to him and then you knew. He had asked, the Queen herself had answered. “Yes.”

The man in St. Giles Church looked nothing like the Cree men slumped in their wagons slowly driving past our yard on the Speedwell roads in spring, women and children staring over the sideboards. One of our talky neighbours, who always knew everything, told us road allowance Indians were as quick at stealing as any Russian Bashkirs, when they’re heading for Turtle Lake or digging seneca roots or picking saskatoons just make sure your chickens are behind the barn and your dog tied up; they’ll take dogs too if they’re hungry enough. Sure, you need the dog to warn you they’re coming, just don’t let him run out to the road.

Do Indian people eat dog? Katie Martens and I didn’t know any Cree to ask when in grade four we prepared our “Historical Indian Project” on the
wide table in the Speedwell School basement—it was a real basement with poured cement walls, not simply a hole in the ground like the cellar with its barrel heater under our church—and I liked to hear her talk about anything, whether she made it up or not. Katie easily stitched a piece of flour sack over the three peeled sticks I leaned together for the teepee (I didn’t know enough about the Cree to bring four) and Katie said it was too bad the Indians didn’t live in teepees any more, they were so poor now, and I told her I couldn’t understand why their horses and wagons looked so miserable, worse than ours who were refugees, and especially their clothes. The school books said they’d been here since before anyone and lived wherever they wanted everywhere in Canada, why were they so poor? Katie didn’t know any more about why than I did, but she thought a teepee would be fun with a campfire burning in front of it so we added that, wood splinters over shredded bits of red crepe paper, and our camp did look very neat among the flour-and-papier-mâché hills and spruce tips standing on them with strands of blue wool creek winding by over the cardboard earth. The basement was empty except for us two working and Katie laughed her cheerful bubbles of a laugh; we could be chief and squaw, she said.

I remember that project, and her words, as exactly as anything in my childhood. We were below the tiny northwestern basement window, where afternoon sunlight fell brightest, away from the open plank stairs onto the earthen floor. We could hear Miss Klassen walk overhead among school children slurring their feet. We never had classes in the basement, not that I recall; it was a freezing cave in winter where the risers for the annual Christmas concert stage lay stacked along with broken desks and the kindergarten table we no longer needed upstairs because there were fewer children. The entrance above the stairs was a heavy lid you had to heave up and lean against the wall where the boys hung their coats. But once Katie and I were down there working together on an “Historical Indian Project.”

When the Indian chief in Vancouver had spoken, he lowered his arms. He looked around at the people in the lower pews, and then he lifted his face to us in the circled balcony. He turned fully towards me clenched onto the brass railing nearest him over the pulpit, and stopped. His face was folded and gentle, like my mother’s, but also hard, not threatening but
fixed; like a hillside boulder exposed during the building of a road, deeply immovable.

Silence filled the church like prayer. Then he turned and walked back to his chair. The black tips of his feathers almost touched the floor between his tan moccasins. Before he could seat himself the piano began plinkering a frill, the evangelist had uncrossed his legs and was riffling his Bible in anticipation and the male quartet already stood breathing, stretching their mouths open. For me it was over.

That evening, beautifully, there was no Vancouver rain. Riding home on the trolley I recognized that the city had both names and numbers for its night streets. And so much light: night barely gained a shadow between blazing lights. I saw myself in the trolley window, and through myself the brightness of the street lights outside where they labelled the corners, first with tree names—Spruce, Willow, Ash—and then suddenly Yukon, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec; they skipped Saskatchewan probably because they couldn’t spell it, as no one in grade six at Lord Selkirk School could, except me, and then the trolley was singing its wires down the light corridor of Kingsway bright as day, the driver droning “King Edward” and “Victoria Drive,” and I waited and pulled the cord for Gladstone because that was closer to Brant than Nanaimo Road, only four short
blocks, but running ahead on the concrete I saw that the lights of the city were doubled against the hanging clouds overhead and night was a thin, bent line between two immense blankets of light reaching to the unchangeable North Shore Mountains with their pale silhouette of stars. Where was the moon? Tomorrow, Saturday, I would help Tony distribute the weekly flyers in his area along Nanaimo and then we would follow the creek ravine under the tram trestle to Trout Lake and build a log raft and paddle out onto the lake and in the evening we might take the trolley to the evangelistic campaign again, but the Indian chief would not be there, he had spoken tonight and that was sufficient. I ran faster through the shadows and light of the street wishing there were no bright windows beside me, wishing for the heavy darkness of a trail worn between poplars to run into but there was none and I was happy, very happy.

Tony and I did push ourselves out onto Trout Lake next day, too far out, and after some time we believed we would drown because several logs got away from our raft and our poles were too short to find bottom in the mud and we gradually sank so deep we could only hand-scoop ourselves by submarine inches towards the nearest swampy shore. Sometimes Tony, sometimes I crouched in cold water over our shoes trying to balance. I knew I hated
water, there was no trusting so much water and though this was not the ocean it was close enough and it would be even colder the deeper you sank and we would most certainly sink. But we didn’t drown, not quite, and in the general relief at our coming through the door we were no more than yelled at for the soaked clothing and mud we brought home, and next morning we went as usual to the Sunday service at the Mennonite Brethren Church off Fraser Street. Gust took all ten of us in his car.

This church gathered underground; only the basement was completed, with heavy roofing paper and tar where the floor would be when they had collected enough money to build more. From the top of the outside steps you could look south down the slope of city houses to the Fraser River flats, the grass and silos of dairy farms on Lulu Island (now Richmond and Vancouver Airport) and far beyond to the pale blue snow of Mount Baker across the border in the United States of America. No one simple name for that country would do, it had to have a title. I wondered what changed, what new world happened when you stepped over the line drawn so straight on maps; if you stood with one foot on either side would you suddenly split because the USA could do anything it wanted? But, close as it was, we never crossed to find out.

Everything in the basement church was High German, as was proper for Russian Mennonites in Canada then, especially those who, with the war ended at last, were beginning to move into the crowded city from the isolation of their stony immigrant homesteads on parkland and prairie. As usual I sat with the other boys on the backless front bench of the men’s side, directly below the pulpit. My legs were now long enough to comfortably triangle myself to the floor and I could sing all the hymns from memory—it seemed I knew hundreds of them—but Tony beside me didn’t sing, and neither did Gust. Tina had a beautiful soprano, like our mother, but she could never sing duets with Gust like Mam did with Pah when they were working together in our bush home, or outside in the garden, or in the cattle corral milking or anywhere on the farmyard: if they were within earshot of each other my father would lift his lyric tenor to her soprano:

When together they sang such a soaring hymn, carried by heart for centuries across continents and oceans, they sounded like lovers, though I do not remember seeing them kiss.

During my evenings in the Fiedler living room Zane Grey had, by means of brutality, tried to confirm what Emmanuel told me running in the snow behind our caboose: love between a man and a woman was stronger than death. In his books nothing, not even the most vicious, relentless violence, could break it. I never associated Zane Grey love with my parents—they were too old, too Mennonite fixed for that—but I tried to see if something was perhaps happening in Liz on the verge of fourteen, so vivid and alert, so laughing when we all played softball in the Rices’ grassy field in the warm March (March!) sunlight when the cherry trees, not the
spruce, were as if dusted with snow; the way she ran into Alvin Fiedler trying to get back on base before he could touch her with the ball in his hand. Though if that happened it seemed fine too, she’d grab his hand and wrestle him for the ball and finally whirl away from him and throw the ball to the pitcher, laughing. Alvin was as tall and handsome as he had to be, but often he looked merely dour, grumpy like his aged father often had, and happy, passionate Liz seemed to be laughing at the wrong guy. Julius maybe, but he was far too old, over twenty. Even when Alvin tuned her guitar—Liz took guitar lessons and I violin because our mother insisted that in a city with music teachers we each had to learn to play a good, portable instrument—Alvin never told funny stories like his brother Emmanuel did. When I teased Liz with, “You really like Alvin, huh?” she wrinkled her nose and contorted her usual sisterly aphorism, “That’s for me to know and you not to find out.”