Sweeter Than All the World

FICTION
Peace Shall Destroy Many
(1962)
First and Vital Candle
(1966)
The Blue Mountains of China
(1970)
The Temptations of Big Bear
(1973)
Where Is the Voice Coming From?
(1974)
The Scorched-Wood People
(1977)
Albeit a / A Celebration
(1979)
The Mad Trapper
(1980)
The Angel of the Tar Sands
(1982)
My Lovely Enemy
(1983)
Chinook Christmas
(1992)
A Discovery of Strangers
(1994)
River of Stone: Fictions and Memories
(1995)
Sweeter Than All the World
(2001)

NON-FICTION
A Voice in the Land
(ed. by W. J. Keith) (1981)
War in the West: Voices of the 1885 Rebellion
(with Bob Beal) (1985)
Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic
(1989)
Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman
(with Yvonne Johnson) (1998)

DRAMA
Far as the Eye Can See
(with Theatre Passe Muraille) (1977)

You’re coming home again. What does that mean?

    —Joseph Brodsky,
Selected Poems

Turning to the open sea
she speaks in low German.
No one can hear us now she says
except God who already knows.

    —Sarah Klassen,
Journey to Yalta

Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye; forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.

    —Russian proverb

I
N SUMMER THE POPLAR LEAVES CLICKED
and flickered at him, in winter the stiff spruce rustled with voices. The boy, barefoot in the heat or trussed up like a lumpy package against the fierce silver cold, went alone into the bush, where everything spoke to him: warm rocks, the flit of quick, small animals, a dart of birds, tree trunks, the great fires burning across the sky at night, summer fallow, the creek and squeaky snow. Everything spoke as he breathed and became aware of it, its language clear as the water of his memory when he lay against the logs of the house at night listening to the spring mosquitoes find him under his blanket, though he had his eyes shut and only one ear uncovered.

Everything spoke, and it spoke Lowgerman. Like his mother. She would call him long into the summer evening when it seemed the sun burned all night down into the north, call high and falling slow as if she were already weeping: “Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo.…”

And when he appeared beside her, she would bend her
powerful hands about his head and kiss him so warm his eyes rang.

“Why don’t you answer, you?” she would say against his hair. “Why don’t you ever answer? The bush is so dark and I listen and listen, why don’t you ever say a word?”—while he nuzzled his face into the damp apron at the fold of her thigh. And soon her words would be over, and he would feel her skin and warm apron smelling of saskatoon jam and dishes and supper buns love him back.

His sister laughed at his solitary silence. “In Waskahikan School are twenty-seven kids,” Margaret said, “you’ll have to talk, and English at that. You can’t say anything Lowgerman there, and if you don’t answer English when she asks, the teacher will make you stand in the corner.”

“R-right in f-f-f-f-ront—of—people?” he burst out fearfully.

“Yeah, in front of every one of them, your face against the wall. So you better start talking, and English too.”

And she would try to teach him the English names for things. But he did not listen to that. Rather, when he was alone he practised standing in the corners of walls. Their logs shifted and cracked, talking all the time like happiness; logs were very good, especially where they came together so hard and warm in winter.

Outside was even better. He followed the thin tracks of a muskrat that had dented the snow with its tail between bulrushes sticking out of the slough ice, or waited for the coyote in the field along the hill to turn and see him, one paw lifted and about to touch a drift, its jaw opening to its red tongue smiling with him. Then suddenly cock its ears, and pounce! double-pawed
into a drift, burrowing deeper. In summer he heard a mother bear talk to her cubs among the willows of the horse pasture near the creek. He did not see them, but he found their tracks in the spring snow behind the spruce and his father said something would have to be done if they came any closer to the pigpen. The boy knew his father refused to own a gun, but their nearest Ukrainian neighbour gladly hunted everywhere, whatever he heard about, and so he folded his hands over the huge pawprints and whispered in Lowgerman.

“Don’t come here, not any more. It’s dangerous.”

The square school sat at the corner, below the hill where the road allowances crossed south over the creek and bent around the spruce muskeg towards their Mennonite church, and the store. Inside the church every Sunday there were hands waiting for him. At the top of the balcony stairs—which led up from the corner behind the men’s benches, under the sloped roof with the church Highgerman of people murmuring like rain below them and poplar leaves at the window—were the hands that found things inside him, and let them out. Thick hands with heavy, broad thumbs working against each other on his neck, pressing down, pressing together, bending his small bones until through his gaping mouth they cawed:

“C – c – c – –
cat!”

“Yes, yes, like that, try to say it again, ‘cat.’ ”

And he would try, desperately, those marvellous hands holding him tight as if everything on earth were in its proper place, and all the brilliant sounds he could never utter when anyone listened coming out of him as easily, deeply, as if he had pulled a door open.