by Armin Wiebe
I sneaked a glance at Obrum as he followed Papuh into the kitchen. I thought his freckles had gotten lighter sitting the whole afternoon inside. Then he looked at me before I could look away and his face got so red the freckles hardly showed at all, and for sure my face was hot as a whistling tea kettle. I turned away to get something else for the table but those eyes had started tickling my blind intestine again and I knew this would be the hardest faspa eating in my life.
Lucky, Liestje decided that she would nerk me by slipping into the chair across the corner from Obrum where I had had to sit when Preacher Funk was visiting, so I sat between Liestje and Mamuh while Pete sat across the corner from Obrum on the other side and Papuh sat on the end where he always sat. Just before I closed my eyes so Papuh could pray I noticed the Bloomuhkomst pickles in a dish beside the plum jam right in front of Obrum Kehler.
After the “Segne Vater” grace the table was stiller even than when Preacher Funk was there. I could hear my heart, and when I bit through a Bloomuhkomst pickle, it crunched like a branch breaking from a tree. Obrum reached for a bun and I thought I saw a sliver of red paint under his little fingernail and for an eyeblink I had that finger in my hand and was scraping the paint out with a toothpick. Tien once had a boyfriend with pimples and she told me that she had to sit on her hands to keep herself from reaching out to squeeze the yellow ones. The day before she died she said to me, “Maybe if I hadn’t sat on my hands so long, I wouldn’t be going eeletsijch to my grave.” And then she laughed and tried to squeeze my hand but her hand was so weak I had to squeeze for her, and I thought of all the sick people those hands had comforted and for an eyeblink I thought of Mary Magdalene drying Jesus’s feet with her hair, and what with Tien laughing beside me on the hospital bed I saw a picture in my head of Tien reaching out and squeezing a yellow pimple beside Jesus’s nose and then another picture seepered in with Tien squeezing a pimple on Mary Magdalene’s back.
My double-sleigh brain keeps slipping out of the track like a dog going to a wedding. Let me swallow my spit and get my hackel-hook back into this story I’m crocheting. I can hear the nurses’ aides coming with the nursing home faspa.
Obrum broke the bun open with his hands. I felt the air stop moving as everybody in my family froze still, letting only their eyes see. He picked up his knife and cut a sliver of pale butter from the saucer beside the jam. He spread it slowly over the rough inside half of the bun. I had never seen anybody make such a little bit of butter spread over so much bun. I could almost hear Papuh thinking, here’s a man who can make a little bit go a long way! Obrum put down his knife and raised the bun to his mouth. Just as he almost bit into the bread, he saw the plum jam. He rested his bun elbow on the table and picked up his knife again. He dipped the spitz of his knife into the jam and carried a drop with a plum peel in it to the bun. He spread it over a small part of the bun. Papuh didn’t say anything. Obrum reached his knife back to the jam dish and dug out a bigger drop of jam with a bigger sliver of plum peel and spread it on another part of the bun. Papuh still didn’t say anything. I felt like we Sudermanns were all turning blue because we were scared to breathe. Obrum reached for a third dip of jam. Only after that was smeared on his bun did he put the knife down. A big sliver of peel stuck up from the edge of the bun closest to his mouth. Just as he was biting down Papuh said in that graveyard voice he had, “By us we don’t smear double.”
Obrum bit all the way down. The sliver of plum peel pushed up into the red fuzz that was trying to be a moustache. He held the bun up on his elbow and he chewed and swallowed. “I know,” he said, “but it tastes me so good!” And he took another bite and looked around the table at each of us as he chewed with the sliver of plum peel waving up and down where it was stuck in his red moustache. When his eyes looked into mine, I couldn’t have held my laughter in even if Papuh had gotten out the willow whip. I could hardly keep my seat on the chair. Mamuh started laughing next and then Pete and Liestje let go so loud the dog barked outside. I sneaked a look to see what Papuh would do. His face changed from one man into another. By the time Papuh stopped laughing, Obrum had smeared double on the second half of the bun and I had reached for another Bloomuhkomst pickle to crunch on.
After faspa Mamuh made Liestje stay inside to wash up and Obrum led me to the lawnswing. We sat down across from each other and before I knew it I had told him about “Lieber Gott” and Bloomuhkomst and we laughed together until I saw Papuh come out of the house in his barn clothes, lift the upside-down milk pails from the post, and walk to the barn. I shivered myself then, even as I was still laughing with Obrum. He stood up then and said he was already late for milking Yelttausch Yeeatze’s cows. I stood up too and before I knew what I was doing, I had picked that plum peel sliver from his moustache and popped it into my mouth. I thought his laugh changed its sound a little then, and I shivered again. Then he stepped off the lawnswing and I stumbled back down on the seat, and I rocked back and forth until Liestje called me into the house.
6
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
Obrum was living in a sod house when I first met him. I didn’t know this. For sure I thought he was boarding by Yelttausch Yeeatze’s place because usually the hired man stayed by the farmer he worked for. But not Obrum. He was eajenkoppijch that way—independent, as if he had to prove he could do things alone, or maybe because his family had left him alone, because he hadn’t gone with them to Mexico, he maybe didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. But with Obrum Kehler maybe there was something else going on … everything he did always seemed to have some reason that wasn’t necessarily connected with what was going on right then on a particular day.
So why would a young man, hardly twenty years old, build himself a sod house to live in? Maybe it’s the same reason that people who live in nice big houses with furnaces and air conditioners drive into the bush so they can sleep on the hard ground in a tent and cook outside with the mosquitoes. I mean, I did it too one time when I went along to Whiteshell. That was the first time since I moved off the farm that I was in such dark that the stars were bright enough to be the eyes of God. I think the others were asleep already when I crawled out of the tent, and I sat on the picnic table bench and looked up at the sky and I felt Obrum sitting beside me with his arm around me, pointing at the different pictures the stars made in the sky, and it was almost like we were sitting in front of the sod house the night Obrum pointed to the Little Dipper and said that from now on we would call it Susch’s Schaptje, Sarah’s Dipper.
I first saw the sod house the day that Obrum showed me how to coo to a mourning dove. He had me by the hand and led me through the bushes along the banks of Mary’s Creek. I had never walked so far in my life before, though I don’t remember getting tired. Obrum was so full with living, like a child playing, only even more. He seemed like he was really part of this world the way he noticed the butterflies and the garter snakes sliding between the different flowers growing in the tall grass. Later, I sometimes thought that Obrum Kehler could maybe have been part fox or something the way he seemed right at home on the wild prairie.
He led me along a cow path beside Mary’s Creek. The path maybe had been made by deer or some Indians long ago, he said. We didn’t see any Indians that Sunday afternoon, though in those days they sometimes came around to the villages to sell baskets or just to ask for things. Even when I was little, the Indians never looked like storybook Indians or TV Indians with feathers and fringes. Obrum didn’t hurry himself as he pulled me along but he wouldn’t let go my hand, even though it was getting sweaty between our skins. I wondered where he was leading me. I hadn’t thought much about what might be outside our Darp. There was really just our yard, the Darp, and then Russlaund from long ago, and now too when more Flat Germans had run from Russlaund again, and then some people were moving to Mexico like Obrum’s family. But for me, even Yantsied by Steinbach was as far away as any of these other places, because ev
en if we had frindshoft relatives there, I had never gone there, just like I had never gone to Winnipeg. I had never even been to the Red River where Mary’s Creek runs in.
I can’t remember everything Obrum showed me along that creek—for sure there was lots more wild stuff than there is now. The berries weren’t ripe yet, but the blossoms were gone already. We saw squirrels in the oak trees and he showed me an owl sleeping in a tree and a beaver dam that had backed up the water to make a pond. It was after the dam that Obrum told me to take off my shoes so we could walk through the water to the other side. I was happy for sure that it was a hot day and that we women had been able to get away without putting on Sunday stockings for church. In those days even young women didn’t go around with bare legs showing almost all the way like now. Still, I had to lift my dress up over the knees to walk through the cold water, and my toes sank down into the soft mud. By the time we got to the other side, our ankles were black half to the knee. But Obrum showed me a board we could stand on and wash the mud from off our feet before we put our shoes on, and then he led me up the path to the top of the bank and all of a sudden we were in a big field of grass. Some grass came up past our waists, and most of the grass had seeds already, and there were flowers too, yellow and blue.
Obrum led me through the grass on a path where the grass had been stepped down, but not through to the earth yet. It wasn’t a path that had been used for years and years by cows or deer and people. I guess it was Obrum’s path that only he had used.
Then I saw the sod house. I had heard of such things. Mamuh remembered something about living in a sod house when she was little when her family first came to Gutenthal, but nobody still had one, not even for a barn. I mean, that was almost fifty years ago when they first came, and for sure they only lived in the sod house long enough to get through the first winter and then the men cut wood so they could build houses. But here was a sod house so new that the grass on the roof was still green. Around the house was a patch of ground where the sod had been cut from, but I couldn’t see any rows to show that he had planted a garden.
“Who lives in such a place?” I said.
“A man’s home is his castle,” Obrum said. “This is my castle.” Gripping my hand in his, he pushed open the door, and he pulled me inside. Two windows shone blocks of light on the earth floor, the one from the sun side brighter than the other one. It felt cool inside and it smelled of earth. Once my eyes got used to the shadows I saw a table with two chairs, a two-person bed, and a cookstove with the pipe leading up through the roof. A closet stood beside the bed but the door was closed and I couldn’t see inside. One thing I thought right away was that this house was cleaned up pretty good for a bachelor, though for sure I had never visited by a bachelor before. The inside walls were covered with rough boards that looked almost new and the roof was made of poles that Obrum said he had earned himself when he worked for the Lutheran carpenter in Gretna. That was the first time I heard about this Lutheran carpenter.
“Räd dee lutearisha Bümeista dietsch?” I wanted to know. Did this Lutheran carpenter speak German?
“Hü’dietsch,” Obrum said. High German. “But he could understand Flat German too. But we talked mostly Hü’dietsch because in school Prinzipal Schapansky wouldn’t let us talk Flat German, so we only talked it in the beckhouse or on the street if we could get away. Funny thing, when I went to live with the Lutheran carpenter I talked more Hü’dietsch than if I had stayed in the boarding school. Schapansky didn’t like it when I moved out of the school and he almost wouldn’t let me still come to class, but I brought it by to him that the only way I could stay in school anyways was if I could work off my room and board by the carpenter and when I told him yet that I would be talking High German all the time too he let me go. Besides, my family had moved already to Mexico and he knew that the only thing stopping me from going too was that I wanted to go to school.”
As I listened to him talk I wondered how it could feel if a person’s family all moved away far to another land and left him alone by himself. He told me how his little brother Kjikjel’s dog had followed the wagon all the way to the train station and wouldn’t come home when the train started moving. Obrum said the dog jumped up onto the ladder on the end of a boxcar and somehow climbed all the way up to the roof. The people watching from the ground had laughered themselves over this stupid dog, but Obrum said it had been hard for him to see how that dog wouldn’t let his people go, but he, Obrum, could.
“But if I had gone to Mexico with the others I wouldn’t be sitting here with such a beautiful Engel Mäakje,” he said. Then he took me around with his arms so fast and kissed me on the mouth so that I almost fuhschlucked myself. I hadn’t ever thought about all the spit there might be in a kiss and they must have had schinkjefleesch for dinner at Yelttausch Yeeatze’s place and the red fuzz under his nose tickled my lip a little bit and I never figured a kiss could take such a long time and I didn’t know if I was supposed to like this or even let this to happen, and my heart was clappering and I closed my eyes and Grandmother Glootje Susch sat up in her coffin again and said loud enough for me to hear, “Dee kromme Nasuh pausse noch von o’jefäa toop.” Those crooked noses fit yet almost together.
Then I felt a shadow move over us where we were kissing on Obrum’s bed. I opened my eyes and I thought I saw something at the window. Obrum felt it too. The shadow at the window moved away. Obrum let me go and he hurried outside. I was too scared to move. He came back in and said it had probably just been the fox that lived on the other end of his land. I believed him then, but later, when I got home late for milking, I wondered. I thought I saw Preacher Funk in his long black coat on the darp’s Gauss walking away like he had maybe been visiting by our place. And I shivered myself over that shadow again.
7
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
Ach, I was right to shiver myself over that day in the sod house with Obrum the first time. That was no fox shadow by the window. But once you have stepped onto a moving lawnswing with a man like Obrum Kehler, the earth will never be stopped flat under your feet again whether you bend your knees or not. And I found out for sure how breaking the ninth commandment can be a hartsoft schwierijch thing if you are the neighbour getting smattered with the false witness.
The last time I sat with Obrum together on the lawnswing, he asked me if God was still a Bloomuhkomst. My heart clunked a little when he said that, because I couldn’t remember talking to him about my Bloomuhkomst God after that Sunday when he smeared double at Faspa and we sat alone on the lawnswing. I mean, even I had almost forgotten that I had told him such a thing, but that’s how it was with Obrum and me. There were things tying us together that we didn’t always see, and I was surprised and then not surprised when he asked about that Bloomuhkomst. I didn’t answer him back right away. I didn’t know what to tell him. With all the English every place I had almost forgotten about “Lieber Gott.”
Obrum didn’t push me for an answer, he just pushed against the swing floor to keep us moving back and forth in the warm sun. When I didn’t answer him about my Bloomuhkomst God, after a while he said, “When God gets put on young shoulders that are still having trouble being a Mensch it gives nothing good.” He took my hand in his.
“Lieber Gott,” I said. I saw myself walking along a garden row. “Yes,” I said. “God is still Bloomuhkomst … only not a jar pickle Bloomuhkomst anymore. God is a whole cauliflower head growing in the garden, pure white, all wrapped with green leaves.”
“I love you, Susch,” Obrum said, and I leaned my head on his shoulder as he squeezed my hand.
But again I have slipped out of the track. Obrum used to say it’s okay to schwaäkjs back and forth on a muddy road as long as you keep moving ahead and don’t slide off into the ditch. I was telling about the fox shadow by the window. That shadow was Preacher Funk himself, his long, black preacher vaumst heavy on his young shoulders. And Obr
um knew that he had been looking in on us when we were fitting noses together there on the bed.
They say the world is a ball that turns around at the same speed day after day, year after year, but I don’t believe that is altogether true. For sure, after that afternoon in the sod house, the world was turning lots faster than usual and it was wobbling too. Whatever Preacher Funk thought he had seen, he told my parents about it in such a way that by the time I came home late for milking, Mamuh and Papuh thought for sure that the angel Gabriel had come by to visit.
I knew Obrum and me hadn’t done anything to make an earth baby—that’s what we called an earthquake in Flat German: Ead Bäben, earthquake. I mean, even in those days a person growing up on a farm couldn’t help knowing something about how the world worked, even if the grownups were mostly talking through the flower about such things. But somehow Preacher Fuschtje Funk was able to put a picture in my parents’ heads that Obrum and me had gone too far and that the only way we would be able to cover our shame would be with a wedding. If Preacher Funk had told only my parents we maybe could have convinced them what the truth was, but Fuschtje Funk had pluidahed his story to the whole Darp and before the sun went down the next day, the whole West Reserve had heard that I would be giving birth to sommamolijch twins.
Why Mamuh and Papuh were so willing to believe Fuschtje Funk’s word over mine, I couldn’t understand. Maybe it was Papuh’s pride because he had let himself be heard about raffles and dances and hurry-up weddings, and while he had been willing to give in on winning the lawnswing and Obrum Kehler smearing double by the Faspa table, having his daughter shame him when he had first wanted her to marry the preacher yet was a harder humbling than a rich man’s camel shrivelling itself up to go through a needle’s eye. I thought Mamuh would believe me. She had seemed so understanding when we schuckeled together on the lawnswing, but her face had turned into a stone as she stood beside Papuh, two steps behind.
