by Rudy Wiebe
I forgot about the four-wire fence strung across the yard to keep the cattle away from the bundle stacks. Bent close over the wheel, roaring around the stacks and sprinting for the house, I drove headlong into the barbed-wire fence and ripped my face.
Screaming again. My sisters and mother came running, and this time there was blood enough to make it look frightful. But blood can be wiped away, Mam knew there was lots of it under my tanned summer hide. So, no desperate evening search for neat doctor stitches, just her tight bandages torn from sheets wrapped criss-cross over my face. Such wild running around! “Etj woa die aunbinje mett’n korten Strang,” I’ll tie you [to a post] with a short rope, she told my mummied head. She also knew I healed quickly, and when school finally began that year, there were no bandages left for our new teacher, Miss Hingston, to ask about.
But the body remembers, and some remembering is redrawn on your changing skin for as long as you live, visible to anyone close up and loving: the flat, disordered gnarl of an operation that begins under your ribs and vanishes in your crotch hair; the faint, white writing of barbed wire on your face, one line slanted across the bridge of your nose and a longer, deeper, couplet below your right eye, What’s that? A story that grows warmer the more intimately you desire to tell it.
For lack of a teacher, Speedwell School began late in 1942, on October 19. That was the Monday after the engagement of Mary Wiebe to Emmanuel Fiedler was announced in the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church. I know these exact dates because of Helen’s notebook. The engagement was announced on October 18 and the wedding held next Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m., October 25, in the middle of milking and chores, when fall darkness had already settled in and the two kerosene mantle lamps would need to be lit in church—why the sudden rush?
Not for the usual quick-wedding reason. In 1942, after Gust and Tina left and Abe and Gilda were married, our family moved our farm operation from the Franka land on Section 9 to Gust’s homestead on the southwest quarter of Section 5. Gust’s fields were as good and the house much better than the Franka place, and his well was known as the best in the entire Speedwell–Jack Pine area. I remember nothing of that move, but the October wedding picture of our reunited family is taken in front of the house Gust had built. He and Tina returned from Coaldale for this marriage of her sister and his brother.
The wedding photo shows baby Carol is old enough to sit erect on Tina’s arm and peek over Emmanuel’s shoulder. Our entire family is in the picture except for Dan, who is taking it. Wind and rain have washed the plaster coating off the logs to above the window sills and nothing has been done to prepare the house properly for a wed ding—was that also because of the rush?—leave alone for winter, but Helen and Liz and little Anne pose in their bare arm dresses. No one, not the bride, the groom, or even us little kids, looks particularly happy. My sister Liz insists that Mary cried all day.
As Proverbs has it, “The way of a man with a maid” was “too wonderful” for Agur of Massa to understand. It may be that Solomon the son of David, king of Israel, added Agur’s lines to his collected wisdom for very personal reasons; it certainly makes sense to me that with each new wife he added to the hundreds he is recorded to have had, Solomon might very well have understood less and less the delicate mystery that can be inspired, or embodied, between a woman and a man.
Understood, understand; I do not believe Emmanuel could, or tried to, make me understand anything that darkening afternoon as we ran behind the caboose inside which our family sat warm and patient for home. On either side of us leaned the walls of boreal forest, with stars brilliant as ice gradually appearing one by one in the narrow sky, but the winding trail led us true and with winter wilderness like cold steel in our nostrils, we might well ponder mystery and contradiction. I knew a mist of sadness drifted through our family talk: Mary was not happy at having married Emmanuel. The man she really wanted—the helpless, uncontrollable expression of “falling in love” does not exist in either Low or High German—was one of his John Lobe cousins. I was never sure which, there were several single sons, all tall and handsome and carrying themselves as if they knew everything worth knowing in the world and they would do it too, whenever they felt like it. But the Lobes had also left Speedwell—for Cold Lake, Alberta, where the Lobe sawmills were expanding as the war demanded more and more production—and something had happened, or hadn’t happened that should have, and Mary suddenly agreed, on the rebound as it might have been whispered, to marry Emmanuel who had tried to woo her for a long time and whom she just teased, laughing. She liked certain ways of laughter, very much, and he was forever telling jokes—not really witty or ironic, more folksy sayings or long, slow build-up stories that were sometimes okay but at other times she would simply snort her disdain and walk away, her lovely lips curled. But nothing discouraged Emmanuel Fiedler; he was irrepressible, not tall but we all thought him very handsome, and not cutting with words like the Lobes could be in their erect confidence: rather, he was unfailingly gentle, a considerate man of whom my mother was particularly fond because, she said, he was soo trü’hoatijch, so genuine, literally so true-hearted, a Christian. Moody, asp-tongued Mary would never find a better man. Which was probably true, but such a truth could not necessarily make Mary happy. Ever.
It was typical of Emmanuel that he would leave the warm caboose to keep me company, running in the snow. The summer before I had briefly lived with them at their mission in Livelong near the south end of Turtle Lake, and during a week of daily vacation Bible school with him I had memorized all the names of the books in both the Old and New Testaments. I can recite them to this day, the Major and Minor Prophets a delightful ramble of galloping Hebrew names. On that winter day we ran together, talking, travelling a wilderness trail that would eventually find our farm clearing. I had never lived in or even seen any other place on earth: this was home. The syncopated “hoo hoo hoo—hoo hoo” of a hunting owl floated over us as we passed a small glade bright with the moonlight, and Emmanuel said, “God made everything good, anything a man and a woman want to do together is very good.”
The horse bells and harness rang, the runners creaked over the snow and a hymn circled its rising music in my head,
Lord Jesus, I long to be perfectly whole;
I want Thee forever to live in my soul …
to the chorus with its indelible contradiction of Jesus’s warm, cleansing blood,
Now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Whiter than snow, yes whiter …
The Lord Jesus already for me the lifelong hunter, always circling, relentless, always there pouring out his blood—here, wash—that’s not enough—as long as you live it may never feel enough—here, wash cleaner.
Emmanuel talked on. What stallions did to mares with their massive bodies, what bulls and dogs and boars and calves and roosters did was the way the Creator had created them. And it was the same for people, but even more so because God had shaped people out of the mud of this earth with his own hands, in his very own image, every single bit and part of them. So when people loved each other, whatever they did or wanted to do together, spirit and mind and body, that was good, he said, it was very good.
What if they don’t love each other?
Only with love.
My brothers did eventually find some water in the deep hole at the Franka place beside which little Tony tried to act out that, at the time unbelievable, story. But the water did not taste good, nor was there much of it, and one major reason we moved to Gust and Tina’s land when they left was because it had such a marvellous well. Only twenty feet deep, it tapped a spring and so the level in it remained at eight feet of water no matter how much you hauled out. Always fresh, a living spring inside the earth.
During winter, of course, a good well was not quite so urgent. Your horses could eat snow easily enough if you fed them well and under the deepest slough ice there was always water; if you chopped a hole and kept it open every day, water rose to the rim so all your animals could trail out f
rom their sod-and-snow covered barns, both morning and evening, to drink. As for people, the world was thick with trees; we could simply build larger fires inside the big stoves we needed to cook food and warm our houses anyway, and melt snow.
And there was my job, now I had turned eight and was in grade two: bringing in firewood every day. The wood had been sawn to stove/heater length, we had split and stacked it across the yard, long rows piled high for good drying, and now it waited for me under the snow. When I had dragged enough loads to the door with my sled, I gathered up an armful and went in, toed off the rubbers covering my felt boots and began stacking it behind the heater in the living room and beside the stove in the kitchen. I had to open and close the outside door fast so as little heat as possible would escape. Mam would be cooking supper, Helen assembling the milk separator parts together for that evening’s milk, Liz setting the table, and when I had piled up enough wood for the night I would sluff to the stove while they worked and talked around me and raise the front firebox lid with the coiled-steel lifter and push in a triangled piece of split wood. On the bright bed of coals its pale edges leaped into light, before my eyes the frozen wood was transformed into running flames, into thin smoke curled towards the draw of the flue, into flakes of ashes.
The warmth of people living in our home shrouded under boreal winter; the hot water always singing in the steel kettle ready for Pripps or tea; the warm water in the attached stove reservoir from which we scooped one dipperful each into the washbasin to warm and clean our hands and faces; the oven where Mam baked golden Tweeback, our ancestral double-decker buns carried for centuries across three continents; the huge pot of borscht simmering on the back of the stove, a superb soup the Ukrainians had taught us to love and which, with Groffbroot en Jreewe’schmolt, coarse brown bread and crackling lard, constituted an entire meal for a winter day—though we preferred it made with Mennonite cabbage rather than Ukrainian beets—in the open firebox I was forced to see that Hell itself lived in the wood I carried.
The fires of Hell, though hidden, stood thick around us in the Speedwell forest I loved. Like the eternal, looming Word of God coiled black in our German Bible lying closed, so innocently on top the pedal organ beside the rocker in the living room. Always there, ready to flame out. And yet, inside our heater, inside our house stove around which we sat eating, laughing, dozing, reading, arguing, playing Chinese checkers, visiting with neighbour families every Sunday afternoon and often in the long winter evenings as well, always talking—inside stove and heater, fire was so strangely, so marvellously, good. Life, happiness, the gentillesse of family and community were impossible without it.
5.
STALIN
DAILY REGISTER
FOR
RECORDING THE ATTENDANCE
OF
PUPILS IN
SPEEDWELL S. D. NO. 4860
FOR THE YEAR BEGINNING JULY 1, 1942,
AND ENDING JUNE 30, 1943
Over sixty years ago the Speedwell mice found our school register in Miss Hingston’s desk drawer sweet chewing. They gnawed away the bottom of it, I recognize now, into a pattern like the west-central Arctic Ocean coastline of Canada. On the left spine of the register the pattern begins high at the Baillie Islands of the Amundsen Sea (71 degrees North) and flips down and up and meanders east and south over the Perry Peninsula, along the coast of the Melville Hills down to Coronation Gulf and finally falls off the right bottom corner into the depths of Bathurst Inlet near the Arctic Circle (66.5 degrees North). I was marked north early long before I knew it.
The mice are the reason I have a complete copy of that register: the regional inspector of schools refused to accept the gnawed one; how could he send a mouse nest to the Department of Education in Regina? He made our teacher Miss Hingston recopy the entire register—two days of meticulous work, she told me, kept after that in a tin box—and so she still had the damaged one to show me in 1971 when we met again, both of us laughing then at the compulsive ways of mice and of men.
Thirty-two students in eight grades are recorded in that register, including the Wiebe family children: Helen in grade seven, Elsie (Liz) in grade five and Rudy in grade two. We knew nothing about Miss Hingston’s other names as recorded there, Elizabeth Frances Georgina, or that she had a temporary student teacher certificate from normal school in Saskatoon and that her “Length of teaching experience” was “1st. yr.” The world had been at war for over two years and teachers for the thousands of one-room schools in Saskatchewan were almost impossible to find for a “Present annual rate of salary—$800.” In October 1942, Trustees Sam Heinrichs, Chairman, Peter Berg and Big John Dick knew a mere seven weeks’ delay in beginning school meant we were very lucky. Especially as I discovered for myself, with a teacher like Miss Hingston.
War, Tjrijch, the very word hissed. Our parents said it was like the Communist Revolution in Russia, men killing each other, as many as they possibly could to see who had the most dead first; then that one lost. I could not understand. I was born into a world where I saw countless animals killed quick for eating, like chickens and large pigs, and was taken to funerals where dead people dressed in their best clothes lay in coffins and were prayed over in church before being carried, surrounded by sadly singing people, out to the churchyard where they were shovelled under the ground while everyone wept. But groups of men attacking, killing other men, I could only think of the Martens dogs and Carlo, naked teeth … I could not imagine it. Don’t try, my mother said, don’t think about it.
That was, of course, impossible. The war stared at us every minute we were in school. When we entered the door, hung our outdoor clothing on the hooks—boys left, girls right—and stood at attention beside our desks, the war faced us on the front blackboards: the Union Jack flag, the world map, the picture. After we had honoured both God and King by reciting aloud the Lord’s Prayer and singing “God Save the King” together, we sat down to say “Present” at roll call, and it was the picture that focused the war like a flash of light.
Not a large portrait of King George VI as there once had been, Helen said. Rather, at the top corner of the blackboard beside the western windows, a framed picture under glass of the King standing in naval uniform with Queen Elizabeth all in white at his left and Winston Churchill in a black suit beside her, short and stocky, his heavy face fixed like stone into inexpressible courage. We had been told that on June 4, 1940, a month after he became Prime Minister and thirty-six days before the Battle of Britain began, Mr. Churchill had made the first of his greatest speeches:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans … we shall defend our Island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
Mennonites did not “go to war to kill people,” my father said. But what if war came to them, as the teacher said it had to King George and Queen Elizabeth and Mr. Churchill?
Mr. Churchill, it was said, had the face of a bulldog. I had never seen a bulldog; I sat in the front desk in the second row, between the west windows and Miss Hingston’s desk, and the picture was directly in front of me. Mr. Churchill’s face was the face of war.
No one in Speedwell, neither parents nor teacher and certainly not any pupil, could know that by late October 1942 the tide of World War II had almost reached its turning point in Europe. We knew very little about Japan—it was there on the world map, curved like a scimitar to slit the bulge of China, but the massive blue Pacific was too scrambled with islands for us to understand what was happening even if we Wiebes had had a radio—which as yet we did not—though the worst disasters did eventually reach us via the Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer, which Mrs. Lucille Handley who ran the Speedwell post office, received from Winnipeg, and the news of the fall of never heard-of countries like Indonesia and Burma to the Japanese soldiers was frightening in some incomprehensi
ble way, those brown men with eyes like slashes and screaming mouths on posters Mrs. Handley kept adding to her post office walls. Two of the English Handley boys, Archie and Charlie, were already gone in the Canadian Army, shipped overseas with guns to England and, it was said, young George, only sixteen, could hardly wait to join too.
But the lightning advance of the German army into the Soviet Union raised fearful awe in the hearts of Mennonites who had so recently escaped Communist Russia. Magnificent St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, was enjetjätelt, literally “kettled in,” besieged, and Moscow almost surrounded, the Mennonite settlements of Ukraine were overrun to the western banks of the Volga: how could unstoppable Hitler be stopped? And should he be? Why? Stalin himself, that worse-than-devil, certainly deserved Hitler, if only the poor Russian people … and with all our relatives still there. But no one had received a letter in four years. Outside the post office—they didn’t want to get Joe Handley talking England—at Harder’s store, or after church when the men hitched up their horses at the church barns, bits of rumour were exchanged as everyone worried about all those relatives we all still had in Russia, whom everyone had prayed for for years, that they might somehow live despite revolution and collectivization and starvation and purges and secret police and no preachers or church but Siberian labour camps, ach, and now invasion by millions of soldiers killing with guns and tanks, and bombs exploding out of the clear sky—would there never be an end to the world getting worse? And we Mennonite Canadians, far away and safe from that Land of Terror for no reason except God’s inexplicable mercy, would eventually hear about those events; decades later, personally from the few aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who had endured it all and yet survived, somehow. Though often with their bodies, and minds, torn beyond fathoming.
