Of This Earth (34 page)

Friday December 20, 1946. A heavy winter night, the two Coleman mantle lamps were hung high on their hooks, hissing brightly; the stage curtains were closed and the ceiling radiated twisted crepe-paper streamers, pink and red and white, centred at the stage by a large crepe-paper bell. I must have done something on the program, perhaps many things because, except for Edward Funk and Jackie Trapp, at twelve and in grade seven, I was the oldest boy in school. But I remember nothing.

Or … it may be I do. The title of a school play hovers in my Speedwell memories: “Wanted: A Housekeeper.” If it was performed in 1946, I would have played one of the two ancient bachelors who advertise for a housekeeper, but the only words I recall are those of the first applicant for the job; she can cook nothing but “Cabbage soup and fried pork,” words repeated throughout the play to great laughter. Would Miss Siemens drill us in a bumpkin comedy for Christmas?

I remember so little of that last year. After the city noise of Vancouver, did I long to be gone? I don’t
remember that either, not like reading
Jean Val Jean
beside the school heater. But by some fortuitous family exchange after Mam’s death in 1979 I have seven box-camera photos of that time, and four are labelled in my mother’s handwriting. One says: “den 1 Januar 1947.” It appears that on New Year’s Day, a Wednesday, Reverend and Mrs. Jacob Enns and their family visited us and the photo shows the four parents in front of the winter-shredded plaster of our house where snow is banked up for heat as high as the living-room windows. Pah and Mr. Enns stand on the outside in vests, suits and ties, while Mam and Mrs. Enns, who is even broader than my mother, stand between them wearing scarves and collared winter coats. The sled I use to haul wood from the woodpile sits behind them, half loaded, and beyond that the snow slopes across the garden past the well to the grey poplar knoll at the horizon. There is driven snow on the roof and on the windowsills behind my father’s right elbow but, strangely, the windows themselves are unclouded by frost. In fact the glass is so clear that the looped window curtains can be seen inside; and also something deeper, it may be shadows on the glass thrown by the bright sunlight or a presence standing there, peering out.

Three of the people in the photo smile directly at the camera; perhaps because they are good friends;
perhaps because they have decided that this year, or next year at the latest, they will leave Speedwell for good; perhaps because they have already told each other as much. Only my father does not smile; he squints into the winter sun, searching distance as if he has already gone south, far away.

The tiny spaces of Liz’s five-year diary (which began as Helen’s) are, for the first few days of 1947, filled with details of a teenage girl’s life no memory could retain:

Liz leaves the next twenty-two daily spaces blank, until abruptly:

Liz made only two more 1947 diary entries in Speedwell:

What books did I bring home from the Aaron Heinrichses’? Five church meetings in twelve days
to begin the New Year, getting the mail twice a week, visiting the Abe Fehrs, playing Chinese checkers, listening to the radio—CJNB North Battleford must have had a community message program for Dan to speak on, to let us know he was coming home from wherever he was working; a marvellous service in that bush country without telephones or electricity—and for Liz washing floors, endless ironing, learning to knit. But also a book dream of growing up beautiful, nice dresses, and above all an actual “real kiss.” And Leslie Nord? A cousin of Isola and Troy Fehr, tall, hardworking, well over twenty—really too old for my sweet-sixteen sister, but there was no teenage boy left in Speedwell to dream about. How often did Liz cry, alone now in her bed under the rafters, for Helen with whom she might have talked about real kissing? Helen, who may never have kissed any boy, though she dreamed of John Koehn after the Koehns left Speedwell in March 1944.

Through all of March 1947 Liz’s diary is blank, though the Speedwell Cemetery records show two funerals within a week of each other, the first since Helen’s death two years before. One was for Maria Dorn, an ancient, wrinkled lady who lived with her daughter Katerina (wife of Dave Heinrichs), and who had a superb goitre under her chin—what a
tantalizing, gurgling word, “goitre,” not like the Low German “Kropp” as harsh and ugly as “chicken gizzard,” which it meant too—a goitre large and smooth as if she had swallowed a great turtle and it remained permanently moored in her neck.

The goitre memory may be misplaced. Katerina and Dave Heinrichs had no children, but Dave had been on the school board since his brother Aaron died, and if he was in the yard when we crossed on our way home from school he would wave, sometimes call us in for a sweet, flavoured drink in that time of wartime sugar rationing, or perhaps a cinnamon roll. Dave’s big, permanently bowed body and rock-bottom bass anchored every hymn, every choir that sang in Speedwell Church; and I remember the wake packed two or three chairs and benches deep around their kitchen table, with Katerina Heinrichs seated there, mourning her aged mother while the community women served Tweeback and coffee—it may actually have been Katerina who had that moving, unforgettable, neck.

The second March death was sadder: Abe Fehr, only forty-seven years old, gaunt and handsome husband of Katie and father of Orville and Isola and Joyce and Troy and Delano and Mildred and Carolyn, a man who played western or Hawaiian guitar with a sliding silver bar until your body shivered in rhythm,
who sang his singing family into country gospel harmony the radio Carter Family could barely match. But he always had weak lungs, they said, and he died of tuberculosis. So my only friend left in Speedwell, Troy, who once explained the ways of dictionaries and forced a devastating translation from stallions and mares to Emmanuel and Mary upon me, Troy, only fifteen, his face shattered, was partnered at the head of the coffin with his big brother Orville who had been a soldier in the Canadian Army, carrying the heavy body of their father through the snow around the leafless poplars to the graveyard with four other Fehrs and related Nords. I remember one summer day behind all the teams tied up at Harder’s General Store when Troy shot his pressured urine higher and farther than any boy in Speedwell, an arc of sunlight over three grain wagons: it was no contest, and for a few years he kept up, as it were, a standing challenge. Who could have guessed that such a tough boy, who already seemed to know everything on the edge of manhood, could also cry.

During Abe Fehr’s burial, Helen’s white gravestone was photographed. Mrs. Katerina Martens, Katie’s mother, stands with arms folded on the left, and the tall, stooped shape of Leslie Nord bends away from it towards the new grave they are filling.

Abe Fehr died on March 27. In that March 28 picture which Mam carefully labelled in ink, it may be that Dan and I were going to the Fehrs to help them prepare for the funeral. Within six weeks Dan and Isola Fehr, who had once given Helen her own new, unworn dress to be buried in, would be married: on Mother’s Day, May 11. Four days later Pah, Mam, Liz and I would leave Speedwell for good.

My mother labelled two other pictures in March 1947, but neither of them is of the funerals. They seem typical homestead work pictures, but as I study them over days they change, they begin to slip from focus to focus, as if these ordinary Brownie Box snaps were shape-shifting

One was taken in our yard; half the picture is blank snow and a quarter is poplar and spruce sticking up into blank sky; on the narrow band between the two lies a long pile of logs, as high as a man, which is being sawn into firewood. Six men labour around a stationary steam engine that plumes a white cloud against the far spruce: two men lift each log, pass it to two others who shove it against the saw-blade, while the fifth seizes the cut block and throws it behind him on the growing heap of firewood; the sixth man—from his shape and the cap pulled low over his ears it must be my father—seems to be coming towards the camera, walking away from the workers. My big brother Dan, legs wide apart and arms cocked in lifting, is unmistakable against the white burst of steam. Who the other men are or who owns the saw outfit I don’t know.