by Armin Wiebe
At church they had opened all the windows and doors so air could blow through, but it was hard to sit through Preacher Funk’s sermon. To me, he seemed to be saying, “Mumps, mumps, mumps,” and in my head I was answering him back, “Selbstbeflecktda Shuft!” I didn’t see Obrum in the church, but then I kept my eyes mostly looking at the back of the church bench in front of me. For sure, I didn’t want to give people more yet to fuschel about. Tien wasn’t there, either, at least I didn’t see her, and that Sunday morning church was the longest in my life.
At least when it was so hot Mamuh had decided that dinner should be cold, so it didn’t take long to be ready. Not a word was said during dinner and I ate quite a lot even if I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to do anything to make Mamuh or Papuh remark about me. We were almost finished when Pete jumped up.
“Look! The cows are out of the fence!”
Papuh didn’t have to say anything, he just stood up fast so the dishes rattled on the table, and the rest of us, even Mamuh, hurried ourselves outside.
When I remember it now I don’t know how I could make myself do such a thing—but I had a strong feeling that even if I tried, I couldn’t again be the Sour Sarah I had been before I got close with Obrum Kehler—and even if it looked like I had left open the gate so the cows got out, it didn’t seem such a hartsoft sin that I needed to get myself all smattered with mud on a day that could yet maybe be my wedding day. No bride should have to do such a thing. So instead of helping to hitz the cows back into the fence, I schlikjed myself away behind the caragana bushes out of the village to the path along Mary’s Creek.
There was no fog to get lost in but mud there was, and any worries I had had about staying clean on my wedding day were forgotten right after I slipped in the place where the path bends sharply around a crooked oak tree and I sat down with the seat of my dress right in a puddle with a cow pie in the middle. As I felt the water seepering through to my skin, I heard a mourning dove coo and without thinking I cooed back to it. Then I laughed and pulled myself up out of the mud and hurried even faster. I couldn’t get any dirtier, I figured. When I got to the crossing place by Mary’s Creek I did stop and take off my Sunday shoes all thick with mud and the long stockings I had put on even if it was a shendlich hot day, and I held up my skirt to splash through the water, but then I figured I might as well try to wash some of the mud out as I went through, so I let the hem drop. Then, when I was in the middle, I crouched down so I could maybe wash the seat of the dress too and then I pushed my way through the water to the other side.
As I hurried along the path through the tall grass to the sod house, I laughed, thinking that this wet-behind-the-ears-bridegroom was sure enough going to have a wet bride.
And then I was standing there, dripping, in front of the door and I didn’t know what I should do. Should I knock like a strange English person at the door or should I just walk in like a Flat German Darpsfrü? Holem de gruel, I wished someone was holding my hand! A thousand twieveling doubts kjrieseled through my head. What if all this was a Kehler joke? What if I was just smearing myself on because I was too young to stand steady on a moving lawnswing? Did I even know what was happening to me? I looked around behind myself and I thought I saw Grandmother Glootje Susch chase a red-haired man through the tall grass, push him to the ground, and sit on him. Then she waved me to go in.
I pushed open the sod-house door and stepped inside.
“Obah Meyall, what has happened to you?” Tien stood beside Obrum’s bed. A white wedding dress lay on the bedspread. “It’s a good thing I made fire and heated water even on such a shendlich hot day.”
I hardly heard what Tien was saying, I just stared at that white dress. “Is that a real dress?” I said, thinking it was maybe an open-eye dream like my grandmother Glootje Susch.
Now, when I remember it, I think I saw Tien’s face go just a little bit red before she said, “Nah, sure, Susch, but you can’t touch it till you wash the mud off from yourself.”
“But where came it from?” I couldn’t stop staring at the white lace.
Tien shrugged her shoulders. “Obrum brought it.”
“A man can think of such a thing?” I was getting dizzy a little bit.
“You have yourself a good man,” she said. “More thoughtful than most.”
Well, my head was tjrieseling in a fluffy cloud as Tien told me to pull myself all out from my wet clothes and made me stand there while she washed all the mud off with a warm cloth. A few years later when she went away to school and learned herself to be a nurse, I remembered how she made me feel when she washed me to get married and thought how lucky sick people would be to have Tien for a nurse. By the time Tien had me dried off and ready to get dressed, I was in such a warm dream that when that silk half-underskirt slipped over my clean skin, I almost forgot that I was in a sod house that smelled of earth. I almost stopped twieveling about where that white dress had come from and how come it fitted me almost perfect, not too tight, not too loose, the bloomers and the long white stockings—even the white shoes were only a little tight because a farm girl’s feet get bigger in the summer from going barefoot.
Tien did most of the work—I just stood there—and then after she had set the veil on my head, she stepped back with three bobby pins still in her mouth and looked me over from top to bottom, and then she told me to turn around before she at last held up Obrum’s cracked shaving mirror so that I could see what I looked like.
In that cracked mirror I saw a woman I hardly recognized, but then I had been afraid to look in the mirror after Tien behind the barn had said if she ever felt like I looked, she wouldn’t say no neither. I could only see parts of my face beside the cracks, parts burned in from a summer in the garden sun, and then the naked skin where the throat came out of the white lace. I shivered then inside the silk underskirt.
“Tell me, Tien, what means it if a man has mumps and his balls swell up?” I thought I saw a cloud come over her face before she spoke.
“Some say if a grown man has mumps and it goes down to his balls, he won’t be able to father children. Why want you to know such a thing?”
“Oh,” I said, and I started to laugh and I shuddered myself so I could feel that silk underskirt feather over my skin. For sure, what Preacher Funk said about Obrum’s mumps was a lie. My belly was truer than that dirty-mouth Funk. I started to say something to Tien but before a word came out, a mourning dove cooed outside and without even thinking I cooed back to it and then Tien’s brother, Tony, called out, “Is there a bride in here?”
“A bride, what?” I said, shivering again. And then the words came out smoother than syrup, “For sure, there is a bride in here.” And I took a step and the bride dress moved with me like it was part of my body.
“Where is Obrum?” Tien wanted to know when we stepped outside. Tony stood alone in his Sunday suit, holding a bouquet of stickroses with the stems wrapped in a wet rag.
“Flat tire. He drove over a mulberry thorn so he sent me with the flowers to say you will have to walk to the church.”
“But Fuschtje Funk said we couldn’t marry ourselves in the church!” I said, as I glutzed at the stickroses. Whose garden had they come from? For sure no hollyhocks grew around this sod house.
“Not the darp’s church,” Tony said. “The Mary’s Creek church.”
“And we can walk there?”
“For sure, it’s not far if we go across the field. It’s on this side of the creek.”
“Dauts gout,” I said. “I don’t want to sit down in the water again today.”
“It’s a good thing those stickroses are fresh, but we better carry them in a pail with water,” Tien said. She hurry found a syrup pail, dipped some water, then took the flowers from her brother and stuck them in the pail. Off we marched through the tall grass to the Mary’s Creek church and I felt like I was walking inside a white cloud.
Now w
hen I think about it, it must have been hard walking across that prairie with wedding shoes, but I don’t remember feeling it then. We were young and walked all the time, but for sure I was sweaty by the time we got to the little white church beside Mary’s Creek. Tien carried the stickroses in the syrup pail and she set them down on the church steps so she could look at me to see if I still looked like a bride.
Then I heard a fooss blosdink car horn and a car clappering and there was Obrum with a blood-red stickrose stuck in his Sunday-suit pocket, driving Yelttausch Yeeatze’s open Model A into the church yard. The world wobbled and my knees had no bones and if Tony and Tien hadn’t been right there to catch me, I would have crumbled to the grass by the church steps.
Through tears I saw two men climb down from the Model A, but only one came toward me while the other one schlikjed himself in through the church doors. But once Obrum Kehler stood before me, nothing else mattered. After Tien slipped the stickroses into my hands, Obrum bent his elbow and I looked at the hole it made and even though nobody had told me what I had to do I slipped my arm through. In front of us Tony did the same for Tien and he led her up the steps and opened the church door. That’s when I heard the piano music and my heart clappered faster, but I felt the tugging from Obrum’s arm as he led me up the steps into the little church.
Ach, even now I can’t remember everything that went on at the wedding. If I hadn’t had my arm hooked in with Obrum’s I don’t know if I would have been able to walk down that aisle without tripping myself. My head was still a little dizzy from the fainting, and somewhere far inside me I thought that I should be frightened about something, that what would happen there in that church would someday be grülijch for me, but at the same time I had never felt so good, so happy, so content and at peace. The shoes that had seemed so tight when I put them on now seemed light, a part of my feet, and the piano playing made me want to keep walking, but then we were at the front where Tien and Tony stood on each side like an open gate to where a preacher in a long robe like a king was waiting for us with a black book in his hand. I didn’t even think it was strange that the preacher was standing on the same floor as us and not on the platform behind the pulpit the way Preacher Funk would have in the village church. And it didn’t really come to me until later that the preacher didn’t preach a two-hour sermon before he asked us the question that we had come to say yes to.
We hadn’t practised the wedding the way young people do nowadays. The preacher hadn’t told us how it would be and what he would ask and what we should answer. So many things were going on that I hardly noticed and then there we were standing this preacher in front and he talked to us in English and asked us if we will take each other for man and wife and somewhere a ring appeared, only Obrum dropped it before he could put it on my finger and it rolled along the hard wooden floor to where this dark-haired man was playing piano.
Tony chased after it and brought it back to Obrum, whose freckles had turned so white that I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop until Obrum took my hand and shoved the ring on my finger. Then I heard the preacher say, “Kiss the bride,” and I looked into those robin’s egg eyes as Obrum bent to me and kissed me on the lips. I was ready to kiss him for a long time the way we had in the sod house, but then the piano music started up loud and fast. Obrum stopped kissing me and took my arm in his and we marched back down the aisle and out to the car with Tony and Tien behind us. Obrum was going to lift me into the car when the preacher called after us that we still had to sign the wedding papers. So we had to go back into the church to a little table in front and the piano kept playing that fast music while we signed the wedding papers and then Tony and Tien signed after us.
Oh, that tjrieselstorm got wilder after that. Tony and Tien drove us in the open Model A back and forth through the Darp, honking that blosdink, with old shoes and tin cans dragging behind. I tried not to see sideways when we drove past my parents’ house, but out from the corner of my eye I saw Liestje’s head by the upstairs window. I turned my head more but I didn’t see anyone else, not even Fuschtje Funk’s shadow slipping through the trees. When it got dark the young people who were able to schlikj away from their old ones danced in Yelttausch Yeeatze’s machine shop until late into the night, so I was almost too tired to climb up into the open Model A and drive with Obrum to his sod house on his section of virgin prairie that hadn’t even been ploughed enough to make a garden. That night too my blood came with such a grülijch flood I thought I was going dead. I wasn’t going to have a baby, not then at least yet. For an eyeblink I thought about mumps, but my sommamolijch man was warm beside me and I had a lifetime to count all those freckles.
A few days after the wedding we woke up and saw the lawnswing set down in the tall grass a few feet from the house. My best cow, Elsie Schemmel, was tied to the swing and a milk pail and my milk stool stood upside down on the seat. The next Sunday Obrum and me went to Fuschtje Funk’s church, Obrum on the men’s side and me on the women’s side. Fuschtje Funk didn’t look happy that we were there, but if you preach peace you can’t really shove people out the church door just like that.
So there we were, two people who just wanted to be together, and even the wedding night blood didn’t make us sorry that we had hurried ourselves to marry. I didn’t even think to go home to visit until after Mamuh and Liestje walked over one day with a pail of Komstborsch, bread and butter, and a jar of jam. Obrum and I were comfortable. We washed in the creek close by even when the mosquitoes were bothersome and I would remember how I fell in the puddle on my way to get married. So while Obrum and me were hunkered down so just our heads were out of the water, I would tell him how I fell and how I tried to clean the seat of my dress in the creek, and Obrum would listen with a schmuista look on his face and he never got tired of hearing that story even after I had told it to him a dozen times at least.
Obrum was still working by Yelttausch Yeeatze’s place so I was often alone during the day, but I made myself busy with fixing the sod house as nice as I could, and milking the cow and creamering the milk. I picked saskatoon berries along the creek, enough to bake some pies, and, of course, I had clothes to wash in a tub with a scrub board. Sometimes if Obrum had told me which field he would be working on, I would walk to see him and carry him a lunch in a syrup pail. And on days when he got home early he would lead me out on the unbroken prairie and show me the different colours of the plants that a person might not even see if she didn’t look.
Even the winter didn’t scare us. But when the first snow came Papuh and Mamuh came with the wagon and said we must live with them for the winter. Pete didn’t like that so much because he had to give us his room and sleep on the sleep bench downstairs.
And for sure, the snow wasn’t all gone yet when we moved back to the sod house and we never lived with my parents again. Before the summer was over, Yelttausch Yeeatze wanted to get rid of two small granaries, so Obrum schlepped them together side by side on our yard and built on a lean-to shed for a kitchen and we had a three-room house for the next winter.
10
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
Obrum, I should have buried you in that piano and set the lawnswing over the grave and planted poison ivy! By now those itchy plants would have ranked up those red and white boards halfway to the Himmel sky.
That piano was old already when Obrum brought it home one afternoon with a dunkel schwoakj on his face, darker than the time Tien told him he had pneumonia. I didn’t see him right away because I was bending over in the garden, pulling carrots, and I didn’t think I needed to look over to what he was doing until I saw that he had backed up the wagon nearly to the kitchen door.
Well, my heart fluttered when I saw that. I mean, Obrum had that morning at breakfast talked about maybe selling the farm and moving to Peace River, but I hadn’t thought that he would want to load up the wagon before the evening cows had been milked. Even Obrum Kehler wasn’t that hau
stig a man. But living with Obrum was sometimes like trying to stand up on a moving lawnswing and so my heart fluttered when I saw the wagon backed up to the door.
When I carried my carrots to the kitchen step, Obrum was still sitting on the tractor seat looking straight ahead away from the wagon, away from the house. I had lived with him long enough, two years already, to know that when he looked like that he wasn’t looking at what was in front of him; he was looking someplace deep inside his head. I never quite learned how to hold the forked willow stick in such a way that I could see in there with him. I didn’t have a forked willow stick anyways, but I had fresh carrots, so I rubbed the earth off from two of them and walked over to the tractor and tickled Obrum’s knuckles with the greens and then slipped the carrot into his hand. His fingers gripped the carrot but he didn’t turn to look at me until he had bitten off the spitz and was crunching it in his mouth.
Then he looked at me. A tear sippled out of the eye corner beside his nose.
“What’s loose?” I grabbed the top of the wagon box and stepped on a wheel spoke. I noticed that the wheel was stopped on my begonia flowers, but I knew there was no use complaining about flowers to a man who would just say, “Nuh Bloom kaun ye noch emma wada waussuh.” A flower can yet always grow again. Still, a part of me was maybe thinking that Obrum had such a cloudy face because he was sorry he had backed into my begonias. Yoh, I was still pretty young then.
A grey tarp covered what looked like a big box. For an eyeblink I saw a coffin under that tarp, I don’t know why, but that’s what I saw even when I could see that the shape under the tarp didn’t look like a coffin at all. In those days coffins were made of boards and just deep enough for a person to fit in, not like nowadays when everybody has to have a queen-size bed to be buried in and then yet a stone rolled on top of it. An old woman should be forgiven for talking about such dunkel things, but I was thinking that maybe I want somebody to play piano by my funeral.
