by Rudy Wiebe
In fact, the photo of our house on the knoll shows that our kitchen lean-to was less than ten feet from Louis Ulmer’s grain field. The border between us was a rail fence interwoven with vertical willows where clothes on washday could be draped to dry, and the Süa’romp, sorrel leaves, for soup and the sour-sweet rhubarb stems for Plautz, open-face fruit pastry, both the first green plants that could be eaten in spring, grew along the fence down the slope where the late April sun could best brighten over their unfolding underground shoots.
It seems to me now that Louis Ulmer was a short stocky man who often lent us his machinery when ours broke on our stony land. Because of “Louis” we thought for a time he might be related to the Metis Briere family that lived a mile north of us and stayed in the Speedwell district almost as long as we did, or even the many Naults farther south, but “Ulmer” doesn’t fit with Metis names and Louis disappeared before I could remember him personally. Nevertheless, his name remains indelible; when I hear “Louis,” “Ulmer” follows like a distant, Low German echo of “Just wait, we’re almost home,” and between the swinging heads of our horses I see the bright notch in the sky made by the poplars where the road allowance cuts over the esker ridge towards his cabin, and it may be the sky is burning, shifting with northern lights and I know the wagon track that begins there on his yard will end half a mile farther west, deeper in the darkening forest but the sky will still be aflame with light. Tüss: home.
Tüss es Tüss, Enn hinj’rem Owe Es tweemol Tüss.
Home is home, And behind the stove Is doubly home.
3.
WRATH
It was said a stranger had been seen, walking on the road past the Mennonite Brethren Church. The Watkins or Raleigh medicine pedlars, the studhorse man leading his giant dapple-grey Percheron stallion, the knife-and-axe-and-scissor sharpener with his many grinding stones, even an occasional pedlar of used but clean clothes would appear in the district at some time every summer, but always with a good trotter pulling a buggy; and travelling evangelists or the Dispensations Bible teachers who drew timelines and beautiful chalk pictures of die Entrückung, the Rapture, on charts usually arrived in someone’s Model T or even Model A Ford. From where would a solitary man come to Speedwell on foot? Why?
By 1938 our Wiebe family had lived and worked at every available labouring job in Canada during eight years of worldwide Depression. The five children born in Russia were learning to speak English so well that all their lives they spoke it without an accent. And even while trying to homestead on land never cleared before, we managed to feed ourselves for years with barely a bit of government relief; besides Dan’s fifteen dollars a month earned cutting railroad ties, we may have received, at most, two or three twenty-five-dollar vouchers to order winter clothes. And once I remember standing in a lineup of farmers with Pah during an early autumn snowfall when he was handed a wooden box of red Nova Scotia apples—the end-label with beautiful, shining apples was right!—out of a boxcar beside the Fairholme Pool elevator.
Our family was fortunate to have two grown sons; they worked at everything from cutting cord-wood for groceries to hoeing sugar beets, working on threshing or railroad building crews, to logging and cattle feeding. But clearing the CPR quarter for a crop was too hard, there was other land already cleared available, and in 1938 we moved all our Oam’seelijchtjeiten, our paltry possessions, and few cattle four miles from our CPR homestead north into Township 53, to the John Franka land half a mile east off the road between Speedwell and Jack Pine.
That main road itself could not follow the surveyed road allowance very often because of the rolling terrain: it was mostly wagon ruts worn wide and winding around hay sloughs and along ridges or hills to avoid muskeg, but in short sections it was cut as straight as the surveyors marked it; it was even ditched and graded, especially where it led down to plank culverts crossing two creeks that ran in spring or prolonged summer rain. The road’s surface was whatever the land offered: black topsoil, clay, sandy hillsides, swamp, gravel ridges and mudholes. Your horses simply had to be strong enough to haul your wagon through or around these mudholes that widened and deepened with the seasons, especially during spring thaw. In winter tracks could be hard, but breaking through drifts blown by heavy blizzards with a cutter or family caboose or sleigh-rack loaded high with hay was even harder.
My mother remembered the exact day that our family for the first time, drove north along this road. May 9, 1933, she told me when I was writing Pah’s obituary; in a small rented truck. They wanted to be farmers, but after three years in Canada they did not own a single animal, not a cow, not so much as a dog. They were coming from Kelstern in southern Saskatchewan where since May 1930 the family had worked on the large grain farm owned by Mam’s uncle Henry Knelsen, who had emigrated to Canada early in the century. Like all of southern Saskatchewan, the Knelsen farm was being buried in the blowing dust of the thirties.
Dan tells me—he was then thirteen—that around Kelstern it was so dry that if anyone dipped a pail of water out of a slough, a hole was left in the slough. “So we left, the whole family with our little stuff hardly filled a ton truck, and we drove down a street and Dad was standing in the back eating a chicken leg and he waved it at people on the sidewalk, ‘See!’ He was so happy in Canada we still had something to eat.” I presume Mam and baby Liz, born at Kelstern, were in the truck cab and did not hear this declaration, the only story that remains of the more than three-hundred-mile travel up the desert length of Depression Saskatchewan, and which ever after was told in our family as a bit of laughter or chagrin. Apparently “See!” was our father’s one English word after three years in Canada; very useful, he said.
Pracha’oam, de tjenne nijch e’mol den Hund von hinj’rem Owe locke.
Beggar-poor, they can’t so much as lure a dog from behind the stove.
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 t
able 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:
BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT
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:
Ihr werdet eurer Sünde innewerden, wenn sie euch finden wird.
which in literal English means:
You will become aware of your sin, when it finds you.
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:
BEWARE THE WRATH TO COME
THE WRATH OF GOD ABIDITH ON YOU
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:
JAS. 4:4
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 aw
ay and “verse” rhythmized itself into nonsense and I was chanting:
James four, ver-si-ty four
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.”
