Of This Earth (32 page)

The Fiedler–Racho–Wiebe gathering was our only community for five months in Vancouver—the Lobes had scattered across Saskatchewan and Alberta cutting lumber and trucking, not even Mrs. Fiedler knew exactly where most of them were—and I do not remember visiting anyone else. After we tired of spring softball in Rice’s field, we ate ice cream. No endless churning in a bucket filled with
crushed ice, no slurping a semi-liquid mess, you could buy a miracle of ice cream bricks at any store on Nanaimo frozen hard as stone and cut them with a knife and let chunks melt off a spoon freezing your tongue. Vanilla or strawberry or chocolate, or all three at once, striped Neapolitan, whose layered existence was impossible to imagine until you actually ate it. Chocolate was best. I couldn’t know that chocolate revels were still to come.

Not a face or a name remains from Lord Selkirk School, neither student nor teacher; or from the church we attended every Sunday, or of the storekeepers on Nanaimo or the doorways where Tony and I laid our weekly flyers—what were they for, groceries? One person I do remember: a young man with fierce black hair who came leaping down cottage steps on Brant Street and yelled at me over their fence to stop standing there staring in their living-room window! Doubtless I was staring, but the curtains were open and so I assumed it was invited. That happened on the day we arrived, before Tony came home from school and found me riding his wagon up and down the sidewalk. I had never before seen the inside of a fancy city house—as it seemed to me then.

I must have passed that house hundreds of times in five months and looked through its huge single-pane window every time, but I never stopped walking and I remember nothing at all of what was inside.

Lord Selkirk had an auxiliary building with a high half-timbered peak set at right angles to the school where groups of classes were sent to watch movies. I had never seen a movie before, though by 1945 I was allowed to listen to “Lux Presents Hollywood” every Monday evening on radio station CFQC Saskatoon. I’d never heard the clicking flicker of a projector, seen the beam of light in a shuttered room and shadows twitch and tumble over a screen. Sometimes I watched the pupils, over a hundred of them on stacking chairs, every face turned to that rectangle of light, every face as grey as the faces they watched. Shadow stories for eye and ear. Both smart and simpler, somehow, and never to me as fascinating as written words. When you told movie stories to someone who had not seen them, they seemed flat, even stupid. But the continually reordered alphabet of words: that went far beyond smart or flat, into mystery.

What did we watch in that high, black-beamed hall? Tony tells me on his seventieth birthday that he remembers clear as today seeing a magnificent
Prisoner of Zenda
with Ronald Colman as the
Prisoner and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Rupert of Hentzau, whereas I retain nothing but a possible Mickey Mouse or
Snow White
cartoon. But most certainly I saw plenty of “Our Gang” films (The Little Rascals); the big-bolted rafters of the hall rang with laughter at the Gang’s endless bad antics. I find now that 221 “Our Gang” films were made between 1922 and 1944. We may even have seen Our Gang number 197 (1941), in which Mickey’s mother is pregnant for the fourth time and Mickey becomes very worried because he’s read that every fourth child born in the world is Chinese. Whatever we saw, Liz and I told our parents nothing about it, they might have forbidden us such worldliness; which may be another reason I’ve forgotten them so completely.

And I remember a song very well, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”—was that in a movie?—and the marvellous lines,

What an evocative word, “disguise”: your reality concealed, perhaps cancelled, shape-shifted. A profound word for a writer, I could feel that already, though not yet know it; not then.

The war was over, and slowly the world was changing. Wood carefully carpentered was no longer needed to cover a house: Gust simply nailed wide slabs of red asphalt pressed to look like bricks over the tarpaper walls and brown asphalt shingles on the roof and instantly our poor house was disguised into class. Every afternoon the
Vancouver Sun
arrived at 4160 Brant thicker than ever—the surrender of Japan certainly didn’t end the news!—a mass of paper folded neatly into itself and tossed onto the wooden deck along the front of the house where one March Sunday we lined up after church to take our last Vancouver family pictures. Mrs. Fiedler agreed to join us.

The one
Sun
front page I remember was a large picture of a woman in high heels at a bus stop, standing on one leg with the other bent up high and bare, pulling on a stocking. The caption read that she had bought the first pair of nylons for women ever sold in Vancouver—price $1.75, when a quart of milk cost 5 cents—and she could not wait to get home to put them on. Her usual lisle stockings lay puddled on the sidewalk beside her shoe and her skirt was flipped up so high, if you looked long enough it was possible you might see the two nubs of her garters against her long, naked thigh.

“That’s how it is in the big world,” Pah said. “Ohne Shomp.” Completely shameless.

I had tried to fit a three-quarter-size violin between my chin and shoulder and fingers for several months; it was a stubborn, squeaky thing. On Monday, April 1, 1946, we left Vancouver without it. Mam said Speedwell was where we belonged, uns Tüss, our home.

The CNR passenger train steamed east through the Rockies, over Alberta hills and through the long parkland forests into Saskatchewan smooth as a dream, and then the bumping Meadow Lake bus.
North of North Battleford, Highway 4 dragged itself up between the round drumlin hills surrounding Cochin until the great ice sheet of Jackfish Lake lay below, slowly softening under the sun. In April 1946 I was eleven and a half years old, and I had no idea we were travelling alongside large Indian lands (at that time reserves were not allowed to declare their presence with highway signs) nor had I the faintest premonition that 120 years before, the brilliant Plains Cree leader Big Bear had been born here to a Cree mother whose name is forgotten and a Plains Saulteaux chief named Black Powder, born right here, on the shore of this lake, only forty kilometres from my own birthplace as the raven flies. But there was no raven to fly an omen across the spring sky which I could then have comprehended: that Chief Big Bear, who died on January 17, 1888, would someday inhabit half a century of my personal, my writing, life.

E
arly December, 1946. In front of the wide windows of Speedwell School, on a temporary stage built by the school board secretary, Dave Heinrichs, the girls from grades five to eight are practising “Good King Wenceslas” for the Christmas concert. There are only five of them, and the school
has no piano or pump organ—nor could anyone have played it if there was one—but Miss Siemens’ voice anchors a note here and there, her waving arms guiding the girls along the melody so that momentarily they sound like one, full and clear as an evening owl among the trees gliding over the little bump of “gath’ring winter fu–ooo–el.” Miss Siemens wants a bit of harmony whenever possible, and on several lines Katie Martens and Nettie Enns, who have sung in our church longer than they can remember, slide into an alto that deepens, broadens their sound into another colour, while Annie Sahar and Vera Funk and Helen Trapp can only remain true on the melody, softer then, almost a hush in your ear.

I am scrunched sideways in a desk, leaning against the warm galvanized surround that guards the gas-barrel heater in the centre of the room. It may be I have just stacked it with split poplar because the heat of wood burning fondles me, heat unlike any other I know, having lived for five months with propane in mouldy Vancouver, thick wood heat you can smell in waves even before you feel it nubble your body like dense fur. As usual, I am thoughtlessly chewing my fingernails as I sit with a book opened into the low winter sun red between the sheets draped over wires around the stage.

The book is Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
. The wavering carol of cruel cold and snow and deep footprints—so Canadian bush—and the beatific heat, the level light are so brilliant, I hear Javert’s conscience finally split and burn crimson on the page,

Indelible childhood. I cannot know that fifty years from now I will literally walk in the Seine River sewers of Paris with this song, this warmth, this story light my shadow still, walking with me.

And at barely twelve I am not quite reading Hugo’s massive novel either; I am reading Solomon Cleaver’s drastic diminution of it into
Jean Val Jean
, a sanitized text approved for Canadian children by both the public and the Roman Catholic school boards; in it, the thirty pages of
Les Misérables
’s intricate cloacal history is eviscerated to one subordinate clause:

Hugo summed up his cloaca chapters with the Parisian proverb, “To descend into the sewer is to enter the grave,” and, “The sewer is a cynic. It tells all.” Such understandings become in Cleaver simply an image of “some hollow tree, stretching for miles”—hollow tree, horse apples! Even in 1946 that doesn’t fool me for one second. I have lived in a city; after my lifetime of plopping outhouses I have studied the spiral of water in a toilet bowl swirl my turds down into the bowels of sewers—but I never dreamed sewers could be huge enough for a man to walk in, much less carry a body.