Of This Earth

by Rudy Wiebe

  But I watched it, Dan rowing back to the beach at Indian Point where Mam already had a fire burning in a ring of stones to fry it. The Fiedlers were gone, there was no picnic of fresh fish and potato salad to spread out for all of us families; only a few children, Liz and Helen and our neighbour Herta Klassen, who was no fun at all, played on the golden sandbars where the lake stretched so thin it seemed they ran on bright water. No Tony no little Eldo and Annie to tease and bury. I had to sit in the heat and bail water in this leaky creaky lumber; watch this shining fish die. Slick as a finned bullet; its torn jaws kept moving slightly, there were fish words, fish stories to be told from the black depths of the lake, stories stranger than castles and popes if only I had the right kind of ears to hear. How many stories there must be here in Turtle Lake—no one, they said, had ever been able to measure how deep it was—and how many more beyond the spruce that disappeared everywhere west over the Thunderchild Hills into sky.

  Years later I would hear that people in Livelong at the south end of the lake still tell of a monster that someone they know has seen, once, and which may appear again out of the depths of the lake, at any time; also, the Cree people of the Thunderchild Reserve west of the lake know why it was called “Turtle,” the animal on whose back, their stories tell them, the entire continent rests. But I knew nothing of this then, my school and the books in it told me nothing about my place on the earth. I was where I was, here, a solitary child seated on a few boards between air and water, rocked in a numinous world as immense as any unknown ocean.

  What I saw, so close I could have touched it: Dan rowing with his brown back to me and the shore: his bend and pull, his long arms reaching and then his blond head heaving back made the muscles of his back flicker under his tanned skin. For me, my big brother was the biggest, strongest man in Speedwell, his shoulders as wide as any bull, and I saw against the blazing lake an enormous bull’s head of tight black hair anchored by two shining horns—he was the Minotaur! If he opened his mouth and bellowed as he reared back, the world would shiver.

  Our hammer and the skinning knife lay in the water gathering around the fish. Dan’s foot splashed. “Hey! Get that can going!”

  Theseus fighting the Minotaur, with one hammer-smash on the head and one knife-stab between the shoulder blades he’d be dead in the boat before he could say another word, he’d never devour another young maiden, not one!

  A story in a book in the school library. The low winter sun picked out the small book almost hidden between readers on the shelf, a book as blue as Highroads to Reading but the stories were longer, more complicated, Greek heroes, and Theseus was the greatest. He followed a ball of string like my mother’s ball of knitting wool into the labyrinth of the Minotaur and tore the beast apart with his bare hands, no hammer or knife needed. But at night in bed under the roof with Dan breathing in sleep beside me, it was Theseus’s meeting with Procrustes that kept me awake: was Procrustes’ iron bed like Dan’s and mine upstairs under the rafters, a spindly coiled iron bedstead with a straw pad on bedsprings so hollowed towards the middle that Dan shoved me away without either of us waking up? Slowly the peaked rafters darkened above me, and I pulled the sheet over my face. Dan’s thick smell, sleeping. He would be too long, and I would certainly be too short. Procrustes would hack Dan off top and bottom, the chopping would be quick as the swing of an axe, but I would be roped tight by neck and ankles, drawn out straight as a log and slowly, slowly I was being stretched creak by creak until the pain of longer and longer became unbearable, I stuffed the sheet into my mouth to catch my scream.

  How long was Procrustes’ bed? Only one man had ever fit it perfectly; a little longer and I’d be that man, the perfect size—what did it matter if you lived only to be Procrustes’ slave forever? You could run away, in Speedwell that was quick and easy as the nearest bush, in the muskeg only an Indian could track you, it was said. Indian wagons sometimes drove past on the road allowance but they never stopped at our place, but all the sheltering trees … I was already asleep.

  “Good-for-nothing,” Dan said, folding up the oars. We were on shore, I seemed to be sitting on a board of water. “Get out before you drown.”

  I never liked fishing. A fish was too beautiful to torture, to drag up out of the lake and kill. And yet, and yet, spiny jack that it was, after Mrs. Fiedler or Mam had fried it, you tasted again that you could never imagine how delicious it would be.

  As I grew aware of the world beyond family Speedwell, there was war, only war. That was de groote Welt, the big, the great world, my parents said, and it fit right in with the brutal, starving stories I heard our visiting neighbours tell again on Sunday afternoons or winter evenings about the Russia we had all, by God’s mercy, been able to flee. And even here, hidden deep in Canada’s silent boreal forest, we could not escape the worst century human beings had ever violated themselves to endure: it roared into a reality we heard and saw, from out of the sky.

  It seemed that isolated Speedwell School was a point on the training grid for war pilots. The planes of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, based at an airfield near Battleford, thundered up from the southern horizon of trees and low over our school as if the tiny goggled heads inside that contraption hammering itself through the air had somehow planned to glare down on us children scattered frozen and staring from the softball diamond at recess. This happened numerous times, and the smallest of us were terrified, running inside to hide under our wooden desks. No one ever waved; to me, such a machine controlled by men going where they pleased in air seemed less likely than a Minotaur.

  Bullets or bombs, suddenly, out of nowhere in the clear blue sky: those were the most terrifying of all machines made to kill people. “De groote Welt,” our mother was almost weeping, “so es daut”—that’s the way it is.

  Nevertheless, my nearest memory of flying is not those training planes, nor the horror of what they were trained for; rather, it concerns seeing and feeling a new pair of royal blue pants with the sharpest creases I had ever worn. One spring day, perhaps early May, I walked to the boys’ outhouse past what remained of the stacked woodpile after a long winter burning in the school heater; and I contemplated my new pants as I sat on the planks worn so smooth by years of boy derrieres. I had asked to be excused in the standard, silent way by raising my hand with both first and middle fingers extended—a signal Mr. Churchill made famous as a victory salute, but for us it still necessarily meant “Number Two, quickly please!”—and therefore I had legitimate extra time to pause and hum, as I walked back, “Hmmm-hmmm Pilot.” It was not so much the sharp crease of the pants as the golden label sewed over their left pocket: FUTURE PILOT.

  I was singing that, walking back, and I don’t know why “future” had sound-shifted into “hmmm hmmm,” perhaps it was merely the rhythm of the hum that allowed me to sing at any pitch, high or low, and repeat myself as feeling demanded, but it was pilot that carried all the meaning even as I had no concept of what pilots actually did in war, they “flew planes” and that was more than enough, they could go anywhere in air faster than a hawk, sit there and streak over farms and fields and bush and in a minute they’d be over Turtle Lake, “Hmmm-hmmm Pilot.”

  In 1942–43 our family received a High German church weekly, Mennonitische Rundschau (“Mennonite Observer”), which always carried one brief column of “world” news, but within the year Dan would subscribe to the Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer and bring home a battery radio because he wanted to know what was happening in the war. Perhaps Miss Hingston explained some facts about the air devastation of the Battle of Britain, but I am certain Miss Anne Klassen, who arrived to teach us in January 1944, could not have told us anything about Canada’s RCAF Bomber Group which was sending great fleets of four-engined Stirling and Lancaster and Halifax bombers across the English Channel every evening in massive night bombing of German cities. In any case, few Canadian civilians knew that they carried not only explosive bombs, but also the far more deadly fire bombs newly d
eveloped for total destruction by saturation burning. No men from the Speedwell or Jack Pine school districts were in those planes, but no civilian could then know that more than 10,000 Canadians would die in those raids—pilots, navigators, bombardiers, tail gunners—and even if no gravesite existed, each individual name would be listed in government records and would eventually be engraved on community honour memorials, as was proper. On the other hand, no one would ever know the number of children—say those my age at the time, eight or nine or ten—who were killed by burning or explosion or flood or crushing when those fleets of relentless planes dropped their “eggs” on a terrified city; to say nothing of knowing their names.

  As for me, I walked to school in my creased blue pants humming “Hmmm-hmmm Pilot” for a few days, and the isolated bush world I knew continued its cycle of day and night and work and inevitable weather as it always had. Slow spring was coming at last, the drab poplars bristled leaf-tips and the sunny sides of hills sprouted grass until one morning the world had rolled over into bright green to the music of frogs singing between the rushes of every flooded slough. The creeks ran loud as ducks gabbling under the plank culverts, and before I was aware of it my creased pants were crumpled from not having been rolled up far enough when I waded in the mossy sinking slough, muddy and slimed with frogs’ eggs. After my mother’s powerful arms had drubbed them through tub and washboard, and I had crunched them through the wringer turning the handle, they never regained that first, so essential, military crease. But the golden label shone: FUTURE PILOT.

  I did not know it then, but I could never have been a pilot; my recognition of red and green variations was slow at best, sometimes lost completely in the finer shades of either, with green sometimes edging towards blue. How does a person actually see colour? No colour-literate person has ever usefully described it. For me yellow was marvellous, my favourite because it was absolutely recognizable; goldfinches remain the loveliest of birds.

  “These are the reds,” Katie Martens would say with not a second’s hesitation and of course there they would be, in her hand and offered to me while I had been doing a comparative search by spreading out the twenty-eight wax crayons over the table and studying at least seven other possibilities: yellow and black and white and dark purple were obvious enough but some of those—what were they? Why weren’t the colours named, printed on the paper wrappers to see and read, then I’d know for sure!

  With over thirty students in eight grades, and several taking provincial correspondence courses for grade nine, Miss Hingston did not notice my colour problems. I was too busy reading, scribbling, colouring maps in whatever colours—I could recognize difference perfectly well even if I couldn’t name it—of possible worlds to need much help. And she could not teach in Speedwell a second year; she had promised to go to a school nearer North Battleford, though Samuel Heinrichs, the Speedwell board chairman begged her to come back; he knew a fine Christian teacher when he had one.

  Sam Heinrichs was also our community’s blacksmith, a tall man beaked forward from a lifetime of hard work and listening carefully to people shorter than himself. Liz and I cut across their land and home yard every day to walk to school, and the Heinrichs kids, Esther who was in grade eight, Louise and Wilfred, walked with us the last mile and a half. The log blacksmith shop at the south corner of their yard had the widest, blackest chimney I had ever seen, and I had often been inside its double doors where the forge fire glowed under a tin canopy to catch the smoke. There was no split wood in his open tray, but coal, big black lumps of it hard as stone, not crumbly like the bit Abe found in our Franka well.

  “This comes from deep mines,” Sam Heinrichs explained in Low German. “Men work in the dark all day, breaking it into pieces, shovelling it.”

  He showed me how to turn the bellows, and slowly I whirred the coal piled in the centre of the forge into solid chunks of fire; no flame, my fists circling the handle of Sam Heinrichs’ mysterious forge revealed coal for what it was: intense light that burned in my eyes until I could see nothing, only light that blazed bright even behind my clenched eyelids. Not at all like wood fire, which flickered, ran, burst in unpredictable and leaping colours anywhere it pleased, and back again: this fire coiled black inside coal released itself more and more fiercely, gradually changing the dull plowshare thrust into it into the same blazing intensity; as if transforming the steel into itself.

  And then, without warning, he lifted the share out of the forge with tongs onto his anvil and began to hammer it. The huge hammer in his right fist pounding the bright share back into the glowing blackness of the original coal, the sound of steel on hot steel on steel ringing like an iron bell. I had never heard a church bell ring. The Roman Catholic church in Fairholme had a bell tower with a bell donated by the Canadian National Railway, but we were never there on Sunday to hear it ring and no Mennonite church, since their first persecution in the sixteenth century, had had bells to announce their prayers and gathering—I thought a church bell in a tower must sound like Sam Heinrichs hammering a plowshare on his anvil. A sound like molten, hardening steel, shivering the poplars and your body too.

  In Sam Heinrichs, with his long ridged nose and leather apron hunched over and running sweat in that smoke of iron heat, I gradually recognized Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire and the forge. And I read the story again in the blue book and understood why laughing, golden Aphrodite, the irresistible goddess of love and beauty, born of foam out of the wine-dark sea, could love someone as bent and blackened as Hephaestus: with his hammer he could shape anything imaginable from glowing steel.

  In August 2004, Frances Hingston Cotcher, now eighty-eight years old and living in North Battleford, tells me, “In spring 1943 Sam Heinrichs begged me to come back in the fall. He was already ill then.” And in the Speedwell Church Cemetery list I find his name in the men’s row of graves, the second last from the north:

  SAMUEL HEINRICHS

  Dec. 3 1900–Sept. 9 1943

  Parallel to his grave, four feet east in the women’s row, my sister Helen is buried.

  Perhaps the remaining two men on the school board could not find another teacher before his death; perhaps, as some former Speedwellers think they remember, a young woman named Friesen was hired from somewhere in the south who “did not work out.” It might be that the Christmas concert went wrong, something happened between a soldier on leave and the teacher, in the barn, while Santa Claus was handing out Christmas bags to us little kids—that may well be a shadow incarnation of the ending of my first novel—but the fact is I can remember neither teacher nor problem; nor if we had any school whatever from September to December in 1943. I do remember Sam Heinrichs lying in his coffin like his elder brother Aaron, the man who brought Speedwell School into existence and whose legacy Sam and then his youngest brother Dave carried on. Sam, the last man in Speedwell who knew the mysteries of fire and steel. After his death we had to drive ten miles to Fairholme where stood a false-fronted building with the name “A Tanguay” painted on it and below that the words, blocked out in letters made of three rows of beer-bottle caps:

  BLACKSMITH

  FAIRHOLME • SASK

  Mam would not enter a place that flaunted such evidence of drunken sin, but luckily, she never had to; Pah or Dan got our plowshares sharpened.

  Somehow the school board found Anne Klassen, and she came to be our teacher in early January 1944. Fifty-five years later, at a Saskatoon reception after I have given a fiction reading, we meet again. Her gentle face widens in a smile as she greets me emphatically with: “You were a naughty boy!”

  Everyone standing crowded about, listening, laughs with me. It seems it was I, not mice, who got her into trouble with the all-powerful inspector of schools. I always did classwork very fast and since, she explains, I had already read all the books in the library, I had time for mischief. Nothing serious of course, such a nicely behaved little boy (more laughter), so when she returned for a second year of Speedwell, she simply kept giving
me more assignments; by June 1945 I had finished all the work of both grades four and five and she promoted me into grade six. The inspector declared that no one skipped grades in his jurisdiction, he wouldn’t allow it, but when Miss Klassen proved to him that I hadn’t skipped anything, that I’d really done two years’ work in one, he grudgingly accepted. But he didn’t like it, and said so in his report.

  All I can say to her in 1999 is, “He should have got you more books for the library.”

  Though I remember that “skipping” very well; it moved me into a class where the only other pupil was Nettie Enns, the quiet eighth child of our church minister, who if she didn’t already know everything necessary, certainly knew how and where to find it. Three years in classes with her, only two of us, and I was never first again. With time I could only comfort myself with the thought that Nettie would always come out ahead just because she was so schratj’lich je’neiw, dreadfully neat.

  Except for the five German Trapp and the three Russian Sahar children—by my time the Metis

  Brieres had none of school age—all of us in the Speedwell School district were Russian Mennonite and attended the Mennonite Brethren Church. That included the Speedwell teachers Isaac Braun, Anne Klassen and later Sarah Siemens. Community dances were sometimes held in Jack Pine School, which had a larger, more mixed population—including the English school board chairman Joe Handley, whose youngest son one summer burned down the school on a dare or, as rumour had it, so there would be no school for him to be forced to attend—but it seems nothing so ungodly as dances with their inevitable drinking and fights and fornications ever took place in Speedwell School building. Rather, the Mennonite Brethren congregation, established in 1926, met there from 1930 until 1933, when the log church was completed; after that, the school Christmas program and an occasional bazaar or taxpayers’ meeting were the only community events that took place in the school, and the church was the centre for all other happenings.