Of This Earth (36 page)

The school’s peak roof rises over us, the mud plaster between its logs almost completely washed away by weather. One railing on the steps is broken
away and the door stands open, inward. You can see through the west window to the shadow of the hill behind the school where in winter we slid down on home-made sleds and occasional board skis, or wrestled and had snow fights and rolled down when pushed hard enough, pretending to be logs, spruce and birch and deadfall poplar we had known intimately all our brief, thoughtless lives.

I am almost gone; not even my grin is left under the Speedwell flagpole. But on the outside edge of our grey huddle, away from the school, there Katie Martens stands complete, hair pompadoured high, mouth open, white blouse and black bell-bottom slacks. She will not disappear meekly. When her family leaves Speedwell in 1948 she will walk away exactly as she pleases and everyone will see her do it plain as day.

I am lying on the bed where Dan and I sleep, under the angle of our house rafters beside the steep steps that open to the kitchen below; Liz sleeps alone in the other half of the attic, beyond stovepipe and a white sheet. I am reading, lying on Dan’s two-thirds of the bed to be nearer the tiny gable window. Outside is brilliant May, the towering clouds barely interrupt the
sun, but I am lost in a book—is it another Elsie Dinsmore book, or a Zane Grey, or
Rock of Decision
again, which over a year ago Helen and I read to each other? A book read out loud is very different from one read silently, especially with Helen, and it may be I miss her to the point of tears and that is why I am rereading it alone, aloud would be too much—

“Sonny!” my mother shouts from outside through the screen door. The slough frogs are croaking, it’s warm enough for mosquitoes.

More likely I am avoiding her with the last book I haven’t read in the Speedwell School library, so thick with its heavy cover:
The Toilers of the Sea
, by Victor Hugo. After Jean Val Jean and the winter ocean of Vancouver, I have to read this Guernsey book standing on the narrow shelf—had anyone ever touched it?—set on an island hidden against the map outcropping of France. It is thunderously boring but I plow on, words in books exist to be read, and for six decades I have forgotten everything except the last scene, which I remembered as a man chained to a post on an immense beach and gradually the tide approaches, rises as he struggles, roars his terror until the sea swells above his gaping mouth and he disappears. However, when I scan the book now, I discover my memory is almost totally reversed: there is no external power of post or chain in the last chapter. Rather, the
protagonist Gilliatt seeks out a natural declivity among the ocean cliffs, seats himself there and waits until the woman he loves—can only the French love this way absolutely and forever?—sails past with the man
she
loves, and he remains seated, rock upon rock, watching the ship vanish as the tide slowly rises to his waist, his shoulders, his neck, until, when the vessel fades on the skyline, “the waters covered the head of the watcher, and there was nothing visible but the waves of the sea rippling against Gild-Holm-’Ur.”

Perhaps I am fortunate that my closest memories cannot be overturned so easily in a used book store.

My mother is calling, and at a certain point even I, her reading avoider, am ashamed to ignore her. Work must be done, the whole bright day cannot be wasted following words.

Mam, in the long dress and apron she wears all day, sits on our plank front step, cutting potatoes for planting.

“Etj lauss de Bibel,” I tell her. I was reading the Bible.

She concentrates on the cluster of eyes in a red potato, turning it in her broad, worker hands. “Don’t lie.”

“The Old Testament, one of the killing stories.”

“You’re not too big yet for a thrashing,” though she has never really vedrasht me.

I laugh. “It’s not lying if you know it’s not true.”

“What is it then?”

“A joke,” I tell her, and add in English, “a story!”

She absolutely refuses “joke;” she will not so much as permit herself to smile, though her lips twitch. “Du enn diene Jeschijchte. You and your stories. Sometimes I don’t know if that’s what they are.”

“Then it’s your fault,” I say, picking up the pail with cut potatoes. “Catch on.”

“Soo eenfach es daut nijch,” she says. It’s not that simple.

But to me then, an impatient, impulsive boy, it seemed she was the simple one; for her everything seemed to be ent’wäda ooda, either or, black or white.

Either or: anything anyone did, in all of God’s creation, it was always black or white—with the black most likely to come first. I then thought of my mother’s life as contradiction: her abiding fear at the immanence of divine, eternal wrath, yet she herself lived a life devoted to goodness and love—perhaps not a contradiction as much as an inexplicable dissonance, a disharmony so powerful I recognized it like an echoing revelation a decade later in Münich’s Alte Pinakothek where the Renaissance paintings
of the life of Jesus presented him in magnificent wealth, an opulence so stunning it rivalled any possible Medici: the Son of Man who in biblical story walked the dry earth of Palestine with lepers and described himself as having nothing, no, not so much as a place where to lay his head. Either or. Black or white. Where, I wondered, were the brilliant colours of God’s rainbow that arched all together? Only promised, occasionally, in the sky?

I had been too young to notice earlier, but after Vancouver it seemed to me there was no avoiding it: the world was enormous beyond all comprehension, certainly beyond only black or white. But what my mother actually meant when she said, “It’s not that simple,” was still beyond me.

Along the bush on the far side of the garden Dan is plowing with four horses, seated on our two-share plow. His big arm works the depth lever, threading the plowshares along the line between shallow grey-wooded soil and the underlying clay. I walk the furrow bent low, nudge the cut potatoes into the soil, tight as I was taught years ago, so the next round of the plow will cover them to an exact depth and then we will mark the long rows with pegs and rake the surface smooth. A winter’s worth of good food, to be eaten in all the ways Mennonites prepare potatoes, but best they are sliced and fried
in Jreewe’schmolt, rendered pork fat with bits of red meat, we call it “cracklings,” nothing can taste better after a day outside in February than these potatoes browned deep and fat between your teeth. In garden ground my bare toes bump into stones, curl in pockets of sand scattered like bits of ante-diluvial beach in the tan clay, sand so moist you can shape it momentarily between your toes—actually in the sunlight the varied earth feels more intriguing than any book. That was one stupid thing about winter: the early dark is good for reading, but your feet and hands are always wrapped in something heavy—bare feet and hands know things too, especially in sunlight; they are the four opposite corners of your always inquiring body and they can know things far beyond your hard head.

In this garden our food begins; and in our farmyard where the chickens graze, in the sloughs where cattle forage along the edge of mossy water, in the boreal bush where saskatoons and cranberries and chokecherries grow, wild strawberries on deserted fields; and miles north of Speedwell School, beyond the fire cutline where forest fires begun by lightning burned years before I was born, over the sandy jack pine and poplar hills grow wild blueberries, square miles of them bunched in drops bluer than sky, which we pick in August to fill five-gallon cream
cans, and Mam boils them in the hot summer kitchen and I carry them down the ladder into the cellar below the house and set the preserves in rows of purple, red, blue and black sealers: winter jam for bread and berries for Plautz and for whipped cream desserts with just a ration sprinkle of sugar.

Standing barefoot in the turned soil behind our house, I know: Of this earth my cells are made.

I have felt remembrance beyond words when I returned to the boreal place where my sister is buried, where my mother conceived and bore and fed me.

But such remembrance also happened when, after six decades of life, I walked in places where I
had never before physically been: in Russia, the former Mennonite village once called Number Eight Romanovka, north of the city of Orenburg, driving up the great steppe hills that stretch into horizons, the village cemetery where my parents met beside my grandmother’s grave and where gravestones overgrown by grass and lilac bushes still say “Wiebe” in both German and Russian; and also two thousand kilometres west of Orenburg in Ukraine, in the former Mennonite village of Neuendorf, now Shirokoye, just west of the huge Dnieper River city of Zaporizhzhia where my father was born and where the bricks of the village school he first attended are falling from the walls in broken piles among wandering chickens; and in the town of Harlingen on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands where my blood forebears were forced to begin their wandering, where in 2003 the registration clerk at the Hotel Anna Casparii recognizes my Frisian name Wiebe and asks when our family left Holland and I tell him, “Almost four hundred years ago.”