Of This Earth (7 page)

Individual farm herds were small, at most fifteen animals in the general poverty of the Depression, and each herd was belled for identification. Every morning my mother and sister milked our two or three cows, and then we would open the rails of the corral and our entire little herd would file away to graze for the day. We all knew the distinctive sound of our several bells and throughout the day we listened, tracking the distance they wandered to find grass. At times those sounds would vanish, sometimes when wavering summer heat lay over the wooded hills, when mosquitoes and bulldogs swarmed them, the cattle would lie motionless among thick willows to escape those pests and chew their cud. Then not a sound could be heard, and by early afternoon Mam would pull on her canvas shoes, slit to fit her painful bunions, and walk the cattle trails west with a saskatoon stick, taking Mary or perhaps even Helen along to help her listen to find them. And sometimes, in that wild land, it became a question of who was lost, the cattle or the searchers?

In our family, our mother did what needed to be done, always. For us small children the thought of Mam not knowing what to do on the farm was incredible; that she would not do whatever was necessary we could not imagine. But she had lived the first thirty-five years of her life in a Mennonite row village on the immense steppes sloping up to the wide Romanovka hills; she often could not recognize the features of this Canadian boreal landscape: it was empty in a way, yes, but also wildly endless and crowded, you could see nothing for bush! Walking, listening, straining to see while struggling over deadfall and through muskeg and around water sloughs and up the repeated rolls of hills, she lost any sense of where our house clearing might be. The search for cows became desperate then: they had to be found so they could lead her home. Where her children waited.

But a bull was coming! Mam and Mary and Carlo were searching for cattle again and only we three youngest were in our yard, playing tag and laughing and often standing still, listening for the cowbells we knew were ours, listening them closer, come, come home. And suddenly we heard a bull bellow, and saw it, and we ran into the house terrified.

The bull came across Louis Ulmer’s field and through the willow fence beside our house as if it
wasn’t there, bellowing, his enormous head, his horns curled forward above his wiry, white face, red body solid and thick as a steamer smoking across our yard, snuffling at the barn and manure pile, tossing chunks high with his horns and lifting his head, lips twisting back above his gigantic teeth as he roared the smell into the sky; we could see the steel ring in his nose flip upwards as we peered through the useless glass of windows. If he saw us move he’d charge the house, the kitchen door would crumple with one heave of his head, we’d have to be up the stairs like lightning before—but Mam! Mary!—if they came home with the cows he’d trample and horn them into dust, we were all three crying and trying not to move to attract the bull’s attention, but we had to look out to know where he was, to see what that wille Tiea, wild beast was doing—Pah was there!

Walking straight from where our wagon trail bent out of the trees and across the yard to the barn, a long poplar in his hand. The bull turned, stared, hooked up a sod of rage with his left hoof and Pah hit him smash on the ring in his nose so hard we could hear the
thud!
in the house and the bull wheeled and Pah sliced him one across both flanks and the bull galumphed away, kicking up his heels as if he was doing exactly what he wanted but he was running—towards us staring from the window!—past the corner
of the kitchen, crashing through the fence back into Louis Ulmer’s field again, his tail up and bucking high, the thin green summer shit squirting from his smeared buttocks. We ran out the door, Pah was home and Mam and Mary were coming waving poplar branches to fend off mosquitoes, we could hear the cowbells just beyond the barn and Carlo barking, we were laughing and crying at the same time.

“You don’t have to be scared,” Pah said. “Just Loewen’s scrub Mejchel.”

Mejchel, prejchel, loht mie läwe Dee baste Koo woa etj die gäwe…

Michael, prichael, let me live The best cow to you I’ll give…

That Low German skipping song goes on for as many verses as you can invent, but we were running wildly down the slope of the yard towards the cattle corral, shouting, swinging the empty milk pails over our heads.

Our mother sang at her continual and endless work, though never skipping songs about bulls. Her soprano
was clear, high as a child’s and it roamed through the countless High German hymns she knew, hundreds truly by heart. They were often sad Heimatlieder, home-songs of longing for the heavenly rest all earthbound Christians must desire, as she said, but at times sudden, surprising exclamations of joy would rise from her farm drudgery as well. Like Allelujah! Schöner Morgen, Hallelujah! Lovely morning:

Ach, wie schmeck ich Gottes Güte Recht als einen Morgentau, Da mein sehnendes Gemüte Wandelt auf der Grünen Au; Da hat wohl die Morgenstund Edlen Schatz und Gold im Mund.

Ah, today I taste God’s goodness Sweeter than the morning dew, As my longing spirit wanders Happily green meadows through; This sweet morning’s gifts unfold In my mouth like purest gold.

Singing on the flat of our yard near the barn, among the unnameable grasses and weeds growing there and picking tiny yellow-cone flowers of what she called Kamille, camomile, to brew into a tea only she drank,
for her stomach she said, which was always part of her various and continual ailments. The golden camomile tufts on their tiny stalks smelled like her mouth, and tasted like it too, their flecks sparkling on your fingers in the sun to the sound of her song and the dreadful bush emptiness, as she said, this Canada where the law said every family had to live on its own land, by itself, and our nearest neighbour was a bachelor, Louis Ulmer, who was a very good person, he let us chop a wagon trail across his land and directly through his yard so we had the shortest distance to the road allowance, but he was no Mennonite, he never darkened our church door, not even for funerals.

Who was he, with a strange name like Louis Ulmer? He never said and if we knew then, no one remembers now. His small cabin built of sawn lumber, not logs, my father said was already there when we bought the quarter west behind him, and we built our house right beside his biggest field that opened east down the knoll, every tree cleared away for a quarter of a mile so we could see the sun rise over his oats, and in fall the northern lights burn above his stooks.

In fact, the photo of our house on the knoll shows that our kitchen lean-to was less than ten feet from Louis Ulmer’s grain field. The border between us was a rail fence interwoven with vertical willows
where clothes on washday could be draped to dry, and the Süa’romp, sorrel leaves, for soup and the sour-sweet rhubarb stems for Plautz, open-face fruit pastry, both the first green plants that could be eaten in spring, grew along the fence down the slope where the late April sun could best brighten over their unfolding underground shoots.

It seems to me now that Louis Ulmer was a short stocky man who often lent us his machinery when ours broke on our stony land. Because of “Louis” we thought for a time he might be related to the Metis Briere family that lived a mile north of us and stayed in the Speedwell district almost as long as we did, or even the many Naults farther south, but “Ulmer” doesn’t fit with Metis names and Louis disappeared before I could remember him personally. Nevertheless, his name remains indelible; when I hear “Louis,” “Ulmer” follows like a distant, Low German echo of “Just wait, we’re almost home,” and between the swinging heads of our horses I see the bright notch in the sky made by the poplars where the road allowance cuts over the esker ridge towards his cabin, and it may be the sky is burning, shifting with northern lights and I know the wagon track that begins there on his yard will end half a mile farther west, deeper in the darkening forest but the sky will still be aflame with light. Tüss: home.

Tüss es Tüss, Enn hinj’rem Owe Es tweemol Tüss.

Home is home, And behind the stove Is doubly home.

I
t was said a stranger had been seen, walking on the road past the Mennonite Brethren Church. The Watkins or Raleigh medicine pedlars, the studhorse man leading his giant dapple-grey Percheron stallion, the knife-and-axe-and-scissor sharpener with his many grinding stones, even an occasional pedlar of used but clean clothes would appear in the district at some time every summer, but always with a good trotter pulling a buggy; and travelling evangelists or the Dispensations Bible teachers who drew timelines and beautiful chalk pictures of die Entrückung, the Rapture, on charts usually arrived
in someone’s Model T or even Model A Ford. From where would a solitary man come to Speedwell on foot? Why?

By 1938 our Wiebe family had lived and worked at every available labouring job in Canada during eight years of worldwide Depression. The five children born in Russia were learning to speak English so well that all their lives they spoke it without an accent. And even while trying to homestead on land never cleared before, we managed to feed ourselves for years with barely a bit of government relief; besides Dan’s fifteen dollars a month earned cutting railroad ties, we may have received, at most, two or three twenty-five-dollar vouchers to order winter clothes. And once I remember standing in a lineup of farmers with Pah during an early autumn snowfall when he was handed a wooden box of red Nova Scotia apples—the end-label with beautiful, shining apples was right!—out of a boxcar beside the Fairholme Pool elevator.

Our family was fortunate to have two grown sons; they worked at everything from cutting cord-wood for groceries to hoeing sugar beets, working
on threshing or railroad building crews, to logging and cattle feeding. But clearing the CPR quarter for a crop was too hard, there was other land already cleared available, and in 1938 we moved all our Oam’seelijchtjeiten, our paltry possessions, and few cattle four miles from our CPR homestead north into Township 53, to the John Franka land half a mile east off the road between Speedwell and Jack Pine.

That main road itself could not follow the surveyed road allowance very often because of the rolling terrain: it was mostly wagon ruts worn wide and winding around hay sloughs and along ridges or hills to avoid muskeg, but in short sections it was cut as straight as the surveyors marked it; it was even ditched and graded, especially where it led down to plank culverts crossing two creeks that ran in spring or prolonged summer rain. The road’s surface was whatever the land offered: black topsoil, clay, sandy hillsides, swamp, gravel ridges and mudholes. Your horses simply had to be strong enough to haul your wagon through or around these mudholes that widened and deepened with the seasons, especially during spring thaw. In winter tracks could be hard, but breaking through drifts blown by heavy blizzards with a cutter or family caboose or sleigh-rack loaded high with hay was even harder.

My mother remembered the exact day that our family for the first time, drove north along this road. May 9, 1933, she told me when I was writing Pah’s obituary; in a small rented truck. They wanted to be farmers, but after three years in Canada they did not own a single animal, not a cow, not so much as a dog. They were coming from Kelstern in southern Saskatchewan where since May 1930 the family had worked on the large grain farm owned by Mam’s uncle Henry Knelsen, who had emigrated to Canada early in the century. Like all of southern Saskatchewan, the Knelsen farm was being buried in the blowing dust of the thirties.

Dan tells me—he was then thirteen—that around Kelstern it was so dry that if anyone dipped a pail of water out of a slough, a hole was left in the slough. “So we left, the whole family with our little stuff hardly filled a ton truck, and we drove down a street and Dad was standing in the back eating a chicken leg and he waved it at people on the sidewalk, ‘See!’ He was so happy in Canada we still had something to eat.” I presume Mam and baby Liz, born at Kelstern, were in the truck cab and did not hear this declaration, the only story that remains of the more than three-hundred-mile travel up the desert length of Depression Saskatchewan, and which ever after was told in our family as a bit of
laughter or chagrin. Apparently “See!” was our father’s one English word after three years in Canada; very useful, he said.