Of This Earth (33 page)

I do know that, no matter how large the sewer, what Jean Valjean will be wading in is no sweet raindrop seeping through a hollow tree. Five years later when I find my first good summer job helping build the water and sewer system under Coaldale, Alberta, population 800, the biggest pipes we will lay are barely large enough for a slim teenager to slither along on his toes and elbows; and I will spend half a day’s wages buying the Modern Library of the World’s Best Books edition of
Les Misérables
and
read its 1,222 pages from first to last. I will come home brown and sweating from shovelling, hoisting pipes, measuring levels in the prairie summer sun and the long section of “The Intestine of Leviathan” will fascinate me, not only because of the clay sewer pipes I wrestle with every day in the deep trenches below the streets of my hometown, the houses of my neighbours, but also because by working on that construction crew I am forced to wade, all day, every working minute, in what to me are the sewers of the English language. I will be forced to understand that a head-on
shit
or
bugger
or
fuck
are the least of our superb language’s intricate, endlessly branching combinations of filth to smear on every conceivable human experience; especially on town girls I know from school and church passing on the sidewalk in their summer shorts.

Nevertheless, while gobbling down Charles Wilbour’s turgid translation of
Les Misérables
, through prairie heat and aching, growing muscles and the quickly boring profanity of a Coaldale construction crew, the soaring thread of those five girls’ “ble–e–ssing” will sing some quiet and peace, some clarity in my head. Also remembered sadness.

Because in 1946–47 Speedwell was going away. Leaving. Not its land of course, not the long eskers of hills laid down by glaciers grinding and melting
forward and back over the earth, the meandering swamps and creeks, the immovable erratics sticking up wherever you chopped down and uprooted trees to pile them in windrows, all your children helping clean up branches and brush, throwing them as high as possible so the windrows would later burn like long hills of fire leaping against the snow and winter sky, against the drift of northern lights flaming down upon you. In our small district more cleared land than ever nudged into the boreal forest, there were better houses and even, amazingly, a hip-roof barn built of lumber—but the depression of the 1930s was past and World War II was fought and won and over, Gott sei Dank, thanks be to God, and Canada offered much more than this labour subsistence in ice and mosquitoes and rocks and seneca roots. The neighbours who had already left wrote us that everywhere south in Canada there was a livable climate, there was electricity, there was work, there was money to buy a tractor, a car. The post office informed us of everything—so many letters from friends now gone and the Eaton’s and Simpson’s catalogues thicker than ever and weekly newspapers, the
Winnipeg Free Press
and the
Family Herald
and
Weekly Star
from Montreal and the
Western Producer
from Saskatoon—as we ourselves had seen that world during all those months in Vancouver.

And one Sunday Gustav Biech, for whom Dan often worked in winter feeding cattle, and who had built up the best and largest farm in the district, east of Jack Pine, close to the highway, one summer Sunday Gustav and Lydia Biech drove a pale grey 1946 Plymouth into the church yard, a vehicle that shone in the sun; that cost over a thousand dollars, it was said. Obviously only people in Sunday clothes would dare get into it.

A car. It is clear that over a year before, in May 1945, Dan came home with a car. It can be seen in a picture taken in our hay corral of me and my nieces Carol and Anne and five multicoloured (mostly Hereford) calves after I returned home from the North Battleford hospital: in the distant background, beyond the sod- and straw-roofed barns, between the usual small mountain of firewood, our buggy and the corner of our house, stands a roofless car. The engine is hidden by a corral post, but the straight, rectangular windshield is clear, as are the two front seats and the board box built behind them, between the high back fenders and their narrow wheels with wooden spokes.

Is there a yeast in memory that grows, knits our past into the timeless shapes we desire? Or do I now know
events and times only from what I see in accidentally retained pictures, the exact Kodak instant focused on crimped paper, and I gradually remember … because in my hand I recognize I’m wearing my homecoming present after having survived my appendix: a bright yellow shirt, my favourite colour, with a gleaming black collar and button-line down my chest. And behind us children standing in our hay corral yard is Dan’s car: a worn, tattered roadster worthy of being a Depression Bennett Buggy.

But despite its absolute uniqueness in our Speedwell life, I don’t remember ever riding in it, nor whether Dan still had it when we returned from Vancouver. The nearest gas pump, cash only, would have been in Fairholme ten miles away—though John Harder must have had a barrel for his 1942 Chev truck hauling cream twice a week to Medstead—but
for a car to be useful in Speedwell, even one with a platform for hauling sacks or boxed animals, it would have to be manoeuvrable on dirt roads and able to keep moving between all the mudholes. And a car would be completely helpless in winter snow, to say nothing of the radiator bursting in freezing temperatures. You could crank it till you were dizzy and it would still be a frozen dead machine; covering its hood with a horse blanket wouldn’t help any more than trying to build a house out of three walls. In Speedwell you could always lead horses to your well, stuff them with hay you cut in your own sloughs for nothing except sweat.

And I find my mother’s Gothic script on the back of another snapshot, “abgenommen den 28 Maerz 1947,” taken the 28th of March, 1947, six weeks before we left Speedwell for good, which shows
Dan and me seated not in the car but in our creaky cutter in deep snow with his pride team of grey Fox and dappled Silver, their necks arched to race us out of there. Dan wears his dress overcoat, I shade my face against the sunlight with gauntlet gloves, I remember them now that I see them, my pride in those huge leather cuffs but I know all their warmth was in Mam’s knitted liners. Behind us the spiky spruce of the muskeg across the road allowance from our house.

I cannot doubt my mother’s handwriting. But where were Dan and I going in our Sunday clothes on a winter Friday morning?

We were the only Speedwell Wiebes ever—though it’s the second most common Russian Mennonite name on earth—one small family and still proud of our magnificent horses that could run us to church or post office or town through any mud or snow, harness bells ringing. In the picture you can see the bells on Silver’s breeching. But people were leaving; by March 1947 the Speedwell–Jack Pine districts were three-quarters empty of people. People had come and gone since before I ever noticed, especially young people going away to work—spring sugar beets, summer railroads, fall threshing, winter lumber camps—or to Bible school in Hepburn, but even if they married and moved to isolated village
mission churches, they always came back to visit and remained part of their local family. True, before the war whole families had moved away permanently, but other families arrived then to take over their log houses and sod-roofed barns, to break larger fields out of the poplars. But that changed during the war; now whole families—the Henry Friesens, the Paul Poetkers, the Wilhelm Voths, the Otto Dunzes, the George Koehns, the John Schroeders, the John Dycks, the David Loewens, the Jacob Rempels, the Peter Bergs, and then by 1942 the entire Fiedler–Lobe–Racho–Dunz–Leischner–Biech clan (except stubborn Gustav Biech) had left for the southern prairies or British Columbia; trucks heaped high, growling slowly away on our stony roads; and not a single family came to take up the empty places.

Their farmyards stood bare; log buildings leaned, sank, collapsed into their cellar holes. Sometimes the farmers nearby would not even bother to work the laboriously cleared land; poplars sprouted along the edges of fields and soon the only crop you could find there were patches of early summer strawberries, wild and tiny as hidden drops of blood. I was no good at picking them, though my sisters could pluck a syrup pail full in an hour: I had to brush over the weeds and leaves with my fingers to reveal their berry shape before I could see them.

Leaving, the air of all seasons was filled with leaving. A rumour in church or at the post office this week was a fact the next, and when we four Wiebes arrived back from our unexpectedly long Vancouver stay in April 1946, Mrs. Sam Heinrichs and her family too were gone. For four years Liz and I had hiked the mile and a half to their yard and then the last mile and a half to school with Wilfred and Louise; in fact, Wilfred and I had scouted out the shortest possible route to school and had even convinced the girls to use it, despite their fluttery shudders about “bush animals!” What animals? “Maybe a cow, a squirrel, a slinky weasel!” Their apprehensions of course made us merely braver and we followed the Heinrichses’ field trail northeast from their yard to cross a corner of Jacob Rempel’s big field, where we picked up a cow path tramped deep between the tall poplars, angling through Grandpa Daniel Lobe’s bush—the old man’s grave was in the church cemetery, a perfect white picket fence around it with the tips and corner posts curved into bright orange—until we found the bare height above Grandpa Lobe’s creek and followed that down to the slough and skirted its swampy edge, where there were always lots of spring frogs croaking, their gelatinous egg masses floating in brown water, and blackbirds building nests in the bulrushes, singing relentlessly as the stalks bent and wavered
under them; finally, we came out between the willows just across the road from the school. The trail saved us half the walking—well, maybe a third—through Dave Heinrichs’ yard and past Old Stewart’s decaying cabin, though you couldn’t ride a horse on it, too many rusted barbed-wire fences. Now the Sam Heinrichs family was gone and the house where we often sat around the kitchen table talking and looking out of its unique bow window was empty; no one took the windows for salvage because no one was building anything. The blacksmith shop door hung on one leather hinge, the forge with its smoke canopy gone, nothing but a whiff and crunch of coal near the blackened wall. On the path between house and barn, where Sam Heinrichs’ coffin had leaned open with the family mourning around it, only a deepening mat of chickweed was growing quick.

And Mam’s best remaining friend, Gilda’s mother, the Widow Anna Heinrichs who was the finest seamstress in Speedwell, now talked British Columbia as well. After all, Bill Poetker and Rosella, her oldest daughter, had left several years ago to run a big dairy farm in B.C., on Lulu Island, and they wrote it was getting bigger—what was it like there by Vancouver? Mam and Pah had of course visited the Poetkers and could explain what
big
was, black-and-white cows the size of bone-hipped horses dragging udders like
bulging barrels. But rumour in Speedwell had it that the Widow’s oldest son Arlyss—where did they find such a name?—liked Speedwell teacher Sarah Siemens very much; the big question was, how much did she like him? She had boarded at the Heinrichses’ for a year, she should soon know. And if they did get married, would they stay so she could teach another year? No one had ever taught in our school three years in a row, but Isaac Braun had stayed for four at Jack Pine after the school burned down—it was said that George, the youngest son of the Jack Pine School chairman, Joe Handley, had started the fire, though no one knew why young George with his handsome, often scowling, face had done it and Mr. Handley had the school rebuilt so fast in the middle of winter it hardly caused a problem, perhaps wasn’t even reported. What Joe Handley did to George was beyond Mennonite rumour, but George joined the Regina Rifles before he was eighteen and was severely wounded, they said, fighting in France—but Ike Braun had stayed in the district because he married Doris Heinrichs and now they had a beautiful little girl, Gwen—where did they get those names?—so anything was still possible. The Widow Heinrichs might stay and if Arlyss and Sarah got married they might stay and then the Brauns probably would stay too and Doris continue
to be a Sunday school teacher (she had been mine when I was a little kid) though there were now so few children in church left to teach. Even in Speedwell School there were only twenty-three pupils in eight grades to perform the Christmas program.