Grandmother, Laughing

by Armin Wiebe

  I looked up out past the fence and I saw Grandmother Glootje Susch waving me to come. So I held apart the hackel wires and crawled through the fence and walked toward my grandmother with one eye watching the ground for more fuzzy buds. Sure enough, here and there I saw them, and when I got close to my grandmother she pointed to a cluster of buds where one bloomed—light purple petals around a yellow seed cup hard to see in the dead winter grass. Later, I learned these crocuses bloom only in the very early spring. I bent to pick some to take to the house, but something stopped my hand, so I left the flowers blooming on the ground, thinking that even if the cows ate them, the flowers would grow again.

  From the house, that land had always looked like all grass, but when I walked, looking down to find flowers, I saw many kinds of plants. Most plants were still winter brown, only some green poking through here and there like the crocuses. Those crocuses were like my baby, hiding among the grasses and other plants and patches of snow, but once I saw one, I soon saw whole patches of them. There were no bugs yet, only birds, easier to hear than to see, except for a few crows and a hawk that glided around with its wings all spread out. A few times rabbits jumped up and flitzed away in front of me, and already gophers were running around.

  Halfway to the end of the land I reached a large patch of pepper bushes with leaves just starting to sprout. I took a deep breath and it fell me by that I couldn’t smell the barn anymore, even though I still had my milking dress on. I looked back to the yard and could still see the house and the barn, but when I hucked myself down among the pepper bushes, I couldn’t see them. Even flat land isn’t flat, I figured, and I stayed hidden for a while until the baby pressing into me made me feel very needijch and I did what a woman had to do.

  I walked almost every day, even when it seemed I had too much work to do. Things bothered me when I was in the house, but when I was on the land, especially in the middle with the prairie all around me, I felt like all was good—the baby was good, there were no questions to twievel over, and sometimes when the grass and the ground were dry, I lay down on my back and looked up into the sky. The baby wouldn’t press so hard then and I wondered if maybe it would be good if the baby came when I was lying in the field like that.

  Sometimes when I was leaving the house to walk, I would look at the Model T and think I should visit Tien or my mamuh and Liestje. It was hard to go for days without saying a word except to the cows or to Blatz. And the short time from Saturday evening to Monday morning hardly even gave me time to neighbour with my own man, and the longer I waited to tell him about the baby, the harder it was to try to tell him because then I would have to bring it by to him yet why I hadn’t told him nothing sooner. So with washing Obrum’s carpenter clothes with the scrubbing board and heating all the water for that, and then going to church on Sundays and sometimes going for dinner by my parents yet, it was easy to forget that I had something weighty to tell my man—and for sure, he was always tired and fell asleep almost before it got dark.

  Obrum hadn’t forgotten his promise to build me a house, and each week he loaded off building wood from Tony Schallemboych’s Model A truck and stacked it close to where he would build. But never had he time to do more than load off the truck because in those days a man didn’t work on Sunday, and it was almost too late for seeding before Obrum got to working his few acres of broken land.

  All this time Beethoven Blatz puttered with that piano, completely still sometimes for hours on end, and then playing so quietly I could hardly hear it, sometimes Moonlight Sonata, but mostly this new music he made up in his head and wrote on the paper. Sometimes he played louder and louder until the dishes rattled. At first he was just trying how it would sound loud. But other times he played the same part over and over, a part where even my ears could hear that the notes weren’t right. Then he hammered on that piano like an angry teacher trying to make a bad boy behave. And he called out things in High German that I didn’t understand and he would stomp out of the house and walk on the prairie until the sun went under.

  One day when he was out walking I tried to play “Chopsticks” and I got so yralled up with making that noise I didn’t hear Beethoven come back into the house. My left hand was starting to learn what the right hand was doing when I got that feeling that somebody was watching me. I turned my head and there stood Blatz, laughing hard with a tear leaking into his beard. I laughed too, and Blatz sat himself beside me on the bench to help me play and we laughed together for a long time. Just before I shrugged myself off the bench to go back to work, he fuscheled in my ear, “Sie tragen ein Kind, ja? Much happiness Kehler feels, yes?”

  I was frightened to go to the piano after that and Beethoven too seemed frightened, and often when I was coming back to the house from walking on the land, I would see Beethoven leave the house and walk away in a different direction. At first I figured he was trying to let me sneak into the piano room again so he could catch me and for sure that wasn’t going to work with me.

  But then, as he walked on the prairie every day, and for sure I watched him with his hands waving the air in front of him, it fell me by that Beethoven walked on the land to hear music. I couldn’t help myself—I started to listen for music too when I walked through the greening grass. For sure, when I listened I heard wind through the grass and bushes, and birdsongs, many kinds of birds, and I wanted to know what the birds were called, and I started to look for nests. When I found a nest on the ground with four speckled eggs in it, I started to wonder if Obrum didn’t want to plough this prairie because all these beautiful things would then be gone. The baby schtooksed inside me and I wondered myself again about what kind of a man I had married. And over my clappering heart I heard again the words Beethoven had fuscheled to me on the piano bench. Part of me was pleased that Blatz had noticed, and part of me felt grizzlijch that he had said anything at all. A question started to twievel through my head. Which man would this baby liken?

  21

  Susch

  Darpslied Elders Villa

  Well, I couldn’t put off telling Obrum any longer. It was Friday already, but Obrum wouldn’t be home till Saturday after faspa, and when I went outside to spill the blue milk for the pigs I saw the Model T, and by the time I had spilled the milk and turned back toward the house, something was happening with me, and I dropped the pail in the grass and without hurrying myself I walked straight to the Model T. I pushed the hand brake back and then I cranked until that motor let loose and the next thing I knew I was driving that Model T along the track that led to the road. The track was easy to follow because Obrum and Tony had been driving it so much, but the last time they had come home, it rained hard and Tony’s Model A truck got stuck in a low spot not that far from the yard. I could see already that the ruts were still full with water, so I turned the steer to drive around it on the side where some mulberry bushes grew because it looked drier there. I drove over a dead branch lying there and the next thing I knew, the Model T wouldn’t steer good and when I stopped I saw a piece of the branch with a thorn sticking out of the front tire. I had heard men and boys talking enough about wheels to know that a person shouldn’t drive with a flat tire, though I had heard stories about people who packed a tire full with grass instead of wind and kept on driving. By this time it had fallen me by that I didn’t know the road to Gretna anyways and for sure people would see me, and then a story as big as Russlaund would spread itself all the way to Yantsied.

  For sure Obrum would see the Model T with a flat tire even if he didn’t see some other things. But he didn’t need to see that until after faspa on Saturday. So I left the Model T there and instead of going back to the woman’s work that waited for me, I wandered through the grass down to Mary’s Creek where Obrum had led me through the water from the other side. It had been a dry spring and the water was lower than it was that wet year when we first crossed Mary’s Creek, not knowing that our crossing would be almost as weighty as Moses crossing the River Jorda
n with the Israelites. I had weighty things on my heart but it wasn’t until much much later, one day after Obrum had made one of his maybe funny, maybe not Kehler jokes, that I wondered myself if in a thousand years there would be people who called themselves Kehlerites. Have I febeizeled my brain?

  Anyways, I thought maybe I’d go to where I sometimes dipped water from the creek beside a fallen tree that was good for sitting on and watching the water flow by. But before I reached the creek I saw a big patch of pink like somebody had spread a giant fuzzy blanket on the ground, so instead of going down to the water I wandered toward it, slowly, looking sometimes at the ground, sometimes across at the pink. I felt a little bit like I was walking into a dream, and I liked that feeling, so I gathered it around me the way a person pulls a quilt or a sweater around her shoulders to keep a warm feeling from seepering away. If I could stay in this dream feeling, then everything would be good, and I believed that everything was good, that I had done everything right, that a good woman helps the world along so that the men can think they did it all themselves. That one twievel that still itched me where I couldn’t quite reach to scratch got smaller as I got closer to the blanket of pink flowers. By the time I crouched in the middle of the patch to look at these flowers, I had mostly forgotten that twievel was still there.

  I had never seen these flowers before, three flowers from one stengel, hanging down like bells, drooping, I guess you would say, but the flowers didn’t look like bells, no, more like pointed roses, still closed, with five windmill feathers. Something about those three flowers growing out of one stengel seemed to connect everything together in a good way and so I lay down, and I soon felt like I was on a pink cloud and then it fell me by that this would be a good place to tell Obrum about the baby. I stretched myself out, arms and legs, and breathed in the perfume of the flowers and the grass and the earth underneath. High over me the sky was clear blue, not a sniff of a cloud anyplace, only a hawk gliding in a slow circle, its wings spread out like my arms.

  A small wind puffed, just enough to make the drooping flowers shiver and whisper, so I felt like I was floating, and the next thing I had Obrum by the hand and was leading him away from the Model T with the flat tire, leading him to the blanket made by the pink drooping flowers, and his freckled face got as pink as these fuzzy drooping flowers when I pulled him down to the ground and started kissing him and rubbing his stubble face all over my cheeks. My hands were leading him, reaching and finding him. He had to come with me and I wouldn’t let him go until I had taken enough to wash away any sins I still might have. I told him he had to stay home and seed his field and build that house already because I wasn’t going to bring a baby into that fekjlämtet schpikja house and that was that! And Obrum looked at me with such big robin’s egg eyes that he couldn’t even open his mouth to talk and then his stiff red hair stood up straight on top of his head as his face went from looking scared to looking happy to looking worried because his little Susch was going to drive more than just the Model T from now on. The small wind puffed again and Obrum blew away and all around me those three flowers on one stengel had gone to seed, no longer drooping but standing straight up like Obrum’s hair in the daydream. I felt like I was lying in a field of pink smoke. A shadow fell over me and then Beethoven Blatz crawled into the pink smoke beside me, rested his chin on his fists, and gazed at me with his dark eyes.

  “You at least are here,” I said, “or will you blow away with the wind too?” Blatz moved his mouth but before the words could come out I felt like a rope was schniering around my belly and lifting my seat off the grass and my hurting backstring made me kjriesch out. Beethoven got a grülijch look on his face and then he jumped up and ran away.

  Have you ever had something happen where you wondered how you got from one thing to another? Where it’s like a cloud suddenly in a clear blue sky, and the next thing you know the sky is black, with thunder and lightning, then rain and hail pounding down, and wind kjrieseling around, tearing things apart like a wild dog in a hen house? That’s how it was with me. One minute I was lying in pink smoke flowers in a field and the next I was in the house with Tien and her mother helping me get the baby born. My mother and my sister somehow were there too, but it was Tien’s mother who knew best how to bring children into the world—and it was said that Tien, when she later became a nurse, got into trouble with some doctors because she would be fuscheling to them what to do when a woman was giving birth in the hospital. Not all doctors in those days were smart enough to listen to a woman who knew what she was doing. At first I was shaming myself to be all spread out in front of these women like that but then Tien laid her head beside mine and fuscheled like feathers into my ear while her mother persuaded our son into the world.

  Obrum was so proud when he saw his son that his freckles twinkled like stars in the sky on a clear night. His face got even redder than the hair on his head when he held him in his arms that first time, and tears sippled down his cheeks. And then Beethoven Blatz stepped into the doorway from the kitchen and Obrum stood up with the baby in his arms to show his son to the piano tuner. As soon as the baby saw Beethoven’s face, he screamed like he had been stuck with a needle. A schwierijch look passed between Obrum and Beethoven, a look like a question. For an eyeblink those two men were afraid to look at me. And then Obrum turned and reached the baby back to me and we all laughed as the baby quieted down, and we joked that it must have been Beethoven Blatz’s black beard that had frightened the child so. And yes, Beethoven Blatz had allowed his beard to grow long enough for birds to nest in it and a person not used to seeing him could have easy been scared.

  22

  Susch

  Darpslied Elders Villa

  If I don’t tell this, nobody will ever know. Some things shouldn’t be forgotten even if there is hurting in the telling. In this world so much hurting is covered over and then it festers under the skin for years and won’t leave a person alone until it is time to die. Such schwierijchkeit it gives when a person gets stuck into the wrong track and then can’t see a way out. Preacher Funk was like that, I think, voted in to be a preacher when he was yet so young that he didn’t know what he wanted or what he should want, and then he couldn’t see a way out of that burden loaded on his young shoulders. But I don’t want to talk about Funk now. He too is gone, along with Liestje. I want to talk about our son, Isaac, though people called him Knackbaul because he played baseball so good.

  Where he got that from I can’t say, because Obrum never played baseball after he married himself with me. He never even talked about how he played ball when he built that lawnswing for the raffle. For sure, Beethoven Blatz didn’t play ball, not even when he taught school before he came to fix the piano. And before Isaac went to school, he wasn’t interested in ball playing more than playing other things.

  Those first years after Isaac was born we had a good life on that unploughed prairie. Obrum finished the house and Blatz played piano in the schpikja house and Isaac soon learned to listen along with the music. Hardly three he was when Beethoven showed him how to play on the piano. This is hard to believe. People later said that when Knackbaul was teaching, he never even sang with the schoolchildren. That was sad, really sad, because Isaac had a voice that made birds stop to listen. And he could play piano too, maybe better even than Blatz. Not right away, for sure, but by the time Isaac started school he was playing with both hands, and not just Kinderlieder either. I know it’s hard to believe, but Isaac when he was six could play the first part of that Moonlight Sonata all the way through. Blatz learned him to read notes from the paper even before he learned to read words. But really Isaac learned the music with his ears. If he heard a song, he right away tried to play it and it didn’t take him long to figure it out.

  It was funny one day when Obrum came home from carpentering while Blatz was walking on the prairie. Obrum thought he would have some fun with Isaac and learn him how to play “Chopsticks.” For sure, Beethoven hadn’t
learned the boy that song—it wasn’t the kind of song that Blatz was interested in—but Obrum needed to play it through only once with his two-fingered playing and Isaac played it through with both hands and ten fingers so fast that his father almost fell off the bench. Obrum tried to play it with him, but he couldn’t keep up with the boy. Isaac thought this was funny, and because this wasn’t a Beethoven song with Blatz sitting him beside making him play it right, the boy started to decorate the “Chopsticks” tune with other notes, high ones and low ones. Some made the song sound better, at least to my ears from where I was in the garden, and other notes sounded like they were arguing with the tune. Obrum had a good laugh over that, and he never tried to learn Isaac piano playing again.

  I thought Isaac would show Blatz what Obrum had learned him, but he didn’t do that. Still sometimes when Blatz was walking over the prairie, Isaac would sneak into the schpikja house and nutz that piano out like nobody’s business and when he came out after, he would have such a look about him that I thought he had come back from a far wandering to a happy place. But he would never play that way when Blatz was nearby.

  When I think about them now, it is curious to me how those three men—yes, all were men in the end—stepped on tiptoes around each other, even already when Isaac was a small boy. Obrum, who wasn’t afraid to open his mouth and even boast about himself, never said a word to the neighbours about how his boy could play piano. And Blatz seemed to notice Isaac only when he was by the piano. Never did Beethoven take the boy with him when he walked the prairie. Never did I see him do other things with the boy. Never did he lift the boy up and carry him. And Isaac too from young on kept those two men separate, even when all three were together in one place. Many times, when Obrum and Beethoven stood together neighbouring about something, Isaac would slip over to me like he was maybe frightened to be between those men. Confusing for him it must have been having two men around his home. Confusing for me too it was sometimes.