Of This Earth (8 page)

Since they moved from Kelstern, now a three-building spot well south of the Trans-Canada Highway, the street with the sidewalk must have been in Swift Current, and Highway 4, which then began at Orkney near the Montana border and was more or less cleared and laid out north to Meadow Lake in what was then called “Good Grade 2 Highway,” the road they travelled. On it they would have found a ferry to cross the South Saskatchewan River and at Battleford a steel bridge to drive over the Battle and the North Saskatchewan rivers.

When I ask Dan why, of all possible places, they hauled themselves to stony Speedwell, he replies, “There was really no work in the south, and Mam and Pah wanted their own land to work. Things didn’t go so good working for Henry Knelsen anyway, and all that drought and grasshoppers and foreclosures
down south. Then Pah heard the government had lots of homestead land up north, even new Mennonite immigrants from Russia were getting land to file on up there. And good rain and snow too, you just had to build a house, clear ten acres a year and break it. He heard through some connection with Fiedlers, they met somewheres.”

Dan’s eighty-four-year-old memory does not know if Pah somehow met Gust Fiedler, Tina’s future husband, or August, the thick and venerable Fiedler patriarch, but in May 1933 their groaning truck trundled off Highway 4 and when it reached Jack Pine School turned north, ground along past the clearing on the Enns hill where the cellar for the future Mennonite Brethren Church was being dug by men with shovels, on past Speedwell School where Annie Born had taught the first forty children in eight grades in the fall of 1931, half a mile farther to the August Fiedler homestead cut into the outermost northern edge of the community. Pauline and August had nine children—the oldest, Gustav, was twenty-six—a few acres of bush farm cleared and a steam sawmill.

“I still have my steam engineer papers,” Gust tells me in September 1995. “I ran our mill for twelve years.”

“He was an old bachelor then,” my sister Tina says slyly. Her face has grown into the folds I remember
of our mother. “I worked a bit for the Fiedlers, in the house, but I didn’t want anything to do with him!”

We laugh, drinking herbal tea around the table in their Lethbridge, Alberta, condo; by 1995 Tina and Gust have been married for sixty-two years.

“When we got to Speedwell on that miserable truck,” Tina says, “they let us live on his brother Ted’s homestead, half a mile through the bush from old Fiedlers. Dan, Mary and Helen started school in Speedwell.”

“Ted wasn’t married yet,” Gust says, “but he took over the quarter west of us when the Lemkeys moved away. There was a log cabin with a barn on the side so they saved building one wall.”

“Like the old Mennonite house-barn style, in Russia?”

“Sort of. We had no place, and they took us in, for a whole year, till we got the CPR quarter.”

“But you didn’t really like Gust?”

“Well, men, you know …” We all laugh again at her tone, and then she continues seriously, “We were always so poor in Canada, when we’d been a few months at Henry Knelsen’s I turned sixteen so Pah and Mam sent me to Manitoba to work for my keep. To Mam’s aunt, a Mrs. Siemens, and I was warned to watch myself, there was the old guy and four sons and their youngest daughter Nancy warned me ‘You
better watch my dad,’ and sure enough he came after me, the old goat, but Mrs. Siemens was suspicious of
me
. She opened my letters from the folks and read them when they came to the post office and it got too much, I left. But wherever I worked the men were always grabbing me so I wrote to Mam and I went back to Kelstern.

“But Mam wanted to get away from Kelstern too. They worked there three years and her uncles had been in Canada thirty years and had big farms but the Depression got worse and they said they couldn’t help us. Jake Knelsen was a preacher and couldn’t help anyway but Henry had this great big farm though he wouldn’t sponsor us to come to Canada—it was Mam’s aunt in Alberta that did that—there was something not very good there and Mam wanted to get away from them.”

Sad family stories that fade but never vanish, hard edges that remain irrefutable as fossils.

But Gust is full of Speedwell and sawmills. “There was lots of good pine and spruce there then,” he says. “In winter we had different guys cutting for us, Abe and your Pah too, skidding in the logs, and then we traded the sawed lumber in Fairholme for groceries—two-day trip with horses.”

“That’s how the Fiedlers paid,” Tina says, “with lumber and groceries.”

“Then in fall I went harvesting near Mervin,” Gust is grinning across the table at Tina, “stooking, field pitcher for the thresher, and you come there to cook for the threshing crew. I came to see you.”

“And I slammed the door in your face! I was sleeping in the hayloft on that farm.”

Gust bursts out, “And in three months we got married!”

“How did that happen?”

“Oh, it was Mam,” Tina says. “She thought Gust was a really good man, she told me she’d pray about it.”

We are laughing aloud now. Our mother and her prayers. Every one of us knew that once Mam really started praying for you, you might as well give up.

It seemed the walking stranger had spoken to no one, nor entered any yard. Odd. Anyone who came into dead-end Speedwell always visited someone; there was no place to stay except with a family and no way out, west, north or east, except the south road you had come in on. But a stranger had been seen, and barked at by the farm dogs who charged out of every yard at whatever went by, not even the fiercest brute was ever chained. But the stranger with his red
paint pail had passed by without so much as a word shouted at the dogs.

We knew all about fierce brutes. The most direct wagon trail to our new Franka farm led from the main road across the Johann Martenses’ yard, between their barn and cattle corral, and their dogs were especially violent. The Martens twins, Abe and Henry, told me, “De Hunj motte fe ons op’pausse.” Those dogs have to keep guard for us.

The Martens family of parents and ten children lived in a log house, as we all did, but it was strangely hip-roofed, like the barn picture in a reader with two windows in the gable. Whenever we drove through that yard their dogs rushed us and had to be whipped away from slashing our horses’ heels or noses. The dogs followed us anyway, barking and slavering as if berserk. I never understood what they were guarding in that yard that was so special; our black Carlo never behaved so stupidly.

None of us children, especially me at four and five, ever walked through the Martenses’ yard. Besides, there was a shorter trail to walk or ride a horse from our Franka place to the church and the Schroeder store; it meandered diagonally south through our bush and across the Otto Dunz and Gottlieb Biech homesteads where there were patches of dust and sand warm as water on your bare summer
feet. That trail came out on the main road just north of the church, which stood on the hill above a creek crossed by a culvert whose planks were often cracked or caved in, the road was driven so much. From below, the wide church gable, with its brick chimney straight up against the sky and log walls shingled as smooth as its peaked roof, made the church look even larger. Where over the pulpit every Sunday the mild voice of Präedja, preacher, Jacob Enns pronounced das Wort Gottes, the Word of God.

The graded road cutting up through the crest of the hill beside the church exposed a grey bulge of boulders in a cliff of sand almost as golden as the beaches of Turtle Lake. You could burrow into it as far as your arm could reach, and at your fingertips the sand grew cooler, darker, then changed softly warm in air. And moist, you could shape anything your hands imagined.

But one day, on a boulder exposed by the road in this sand hillside, there appeared words:

On the largest granite boulder directly below the church. Like a foundational curse.

It must have been the stranger. No one in the community had ever seen such a thing, red words
on a roadside rock, nor knew what to do about it. I remember seeing them, though I could not have read that, nor understood it spoken aloud; I’m not certain I understand it even today. My parents read the Bible daily, but only in High German and the only person in our family then who would have known where to find Numbers 32:23 would have been Abe, who had already taken a year of Bible school and so might have tussled with Luther’s translation, which is no clearer than the King James Version:

which in literal English means:

There were such red statements burning the length of the road from Jack Pine to Speedwell, on rocks large and small, on slab fences and corner post braces. Every passerby now knew that their personal sin was a relentless bloodhound smelling them out; or they were threatened with wrath:

Only miles of barbed wire and slim willow posts defied the stranger’s red words.

What a lovely sound: “wra-a-a-th.” Your wide mouth, your whole face feels its hiss, its rhythm, its expulsion, and if I had said it then I would have been singing it. As it was, the paint on a rock in the valley below the church, near the creekbed, turned into the first sounds I remember composing. This solitary rock looked like the knuckled fingertip of an enormous hand buried deep in the earth: it could point you in a direction but was too small to reveal a full anathema, and all the stranger could do was print on it a threatening code which would, hopefully, drive you to search out your curse yourself:

Abe must have explained that JAS meant the New Testament Book of James, chapter 4, verse 4. The “fours” fascinated me, not because I knew the sacred number of the Cree people—I didn’t yet realize they had lived for millennia on the warm ground I walked barefoot, and lived more or less invisibly around us still—no, it was something about the three
short sounds, “James four four,” the “four four” repetition. Those sounds … and then the literal significations of words reasserted themselves briefly: “James chapter four verse four” … but I couldn’t like that numb plod, so “chapter” fell away and “verse” rhythmized itself into nonsense and I was chanting:

Da, da, da-da-da,
da
. The meanings of language sounds are always accidental; it is their rhythms that first imprint the memory.

And red words on rock, sung, are ineradicable. This was no gentle Präedja Enns mildly reading a Bible verse: rather, as Jesus once had prophesied, suddenly the very stones were crying out. Here, in our stony country.

I was four years, three and a half months old at my parents’ silver wedding anniversary, January 19, 1939. The celebration would have taken place in our church on the hill. The Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church had about eighty adult members by then, which meant at least two hundred people in thirty families, but the entire community in two
school districts knew my parents, perhaps three hundred people, and no more than half of them could have crowded into the building, balcony and all. I remember nothing of what took place, but four black-and-white pictures of the day have survived and, inexplicably, two poems from the church service.

The poems were “Glückwünsche,” “Good Luck Wishes,” also called “Vergissmeinnicht,” “Forget Me Not,” copied out by hand, read aloud and then presented to the wedding couple. This was a Russian Mennonite custom for publicly honouring parents. The one offered by Dan is a High German “Silberhochzeit,” silver wedding, verse in eight rhyming six-line stanzas; the image throughout is that life is a voyage with Jesus at the helm of the boat—of which the couple seem to be the only passengers—and, despite the past “nine thousand days” of being “tossed about in the waves of foaming time,” the Saviour will eventually guide them safely into the harbour of ew’ger Lust, “everlasting delight.”