Of This Earth

by Rudy Wiebe

  And a notebook hint of something else:

  Nov. 18, 1943 John Koehn got an operation

  John was the fourth child of George and Liese Koehn, a year older than Helen. What had happened—or not happened—between them that she should mention him? What could happen, with Helen so much in bed, barely able to step outside the house for a brief picture? Pencil dreams in a tiny notebook. One blank line later, on the same page, she adds the only other words that do not refer directly to our family:

  Koehns moved away March 15th 1944 from Speedwell to Swift Current

  In fact, by 1944 more people had moved away from Speedwell than remained. Adult church membership in 1936 was 114 but by 1944 it was less than sixty. And that year my sister, again after the fact, wrote her longest personal entry:

  Helen Wiebe took sick in April 1944 with heart trouble then had to go to the hospital on the 26th of April and stay there till May 19th 44/with Mr. Harder [Did the storekeeper take her there in his truck?]. Was at home for a month and was not feeling very good. Had to go and see the doc in Battleford on the 21. Had to stay home a whole month and on 21 June went to see the doc.

  At dawn, June 6, 1944 the Allied invasion of Normandy began. By then Dan had insisted on bringing home a radio; it sat on its heavy battery under our living-room window beside Helen’s bed, the aerial leading out through a window crack to a high wire he had strung between white insulators from the peak of the roof to a tall lodgepole post beside the garden. When he twisted the black button, snap! instantly voices spoke English. It seemed that even over our cul-de-sac homestead the empty air was filled with endless human voices, and a bare wire could find them. When I peered at the back of the radio I saw glass fingers—tubes, Dan called them—each with a tiny spark glowing inside it: words in air, I thought, are infinitesimal lights this small machine can translate into sound.

  I was allowed to hear only certain broadcasts, and the “News” was one. I remember hearing the deep, doom voice of Lorne Greene announce the Normandy landings on “CBK, Watrous, Saskatchewan,” and then, “This is Matthew Halton of the CBC” reporting directly, his voice said, from Juno Beach with the Canadian soldiers, his precise, crackling words almost lost in the roar of war, of weapons and men screaming around him.

  Helen was certainly there on her living-room cot where she lay for nine months, listening as intensely as I. Later, in 1945 when the radio was sent away on January 24 “to be fixed,” she notes in her diary, “I miss it very much.” She particularly missed the daily “Dominion Observatory official time signal … the beginning of the long dash, following ten seconds of silence, indicates exactly eleven o’clock, Mountain Standard Time.” But I have no memory of her listening with me to the invasion of Normandy, nor is there any picture of her in bed.

  The remaining pages of Helen’s tiny notebook are blank, except for the numbers of our family wartime food ration cards. The list begins with “A.J. Wiebe—SN-102949” and ends with “Rudy Wiebe—SN-102954.” Mine adds up to 21 and ends in 4, perfect numbers for a Saskatchewan refugee bush kid: Christian 7 × 3, Aboriginal 4. And because of Canada, neither Liz nor I can say we were ever hungry; unlike the rest of our family.

  6.

  MANSIONS

  Daut halpt tjeen Mül spetze, daut mott jepiept woare.

  It doesn’t help pursing your lips, you have to whistle.

  Low German in the daily spoken life of Speedwell could be as sardonic or friendly or hilarious as any vernacular on earth, and as I grew older I found rolling that sense of oral comic over into English could be as flip as opening my mouth; I knew intuitively how words fashion easy group laughter. There came a time when my friends expected to laugh whenever I paused—I expected it myself—but, when in my late teens I began to write stories, I discovered they were rarely funny. It seemed that stories carefully worked on over and over, alone, searching within your self, stories as words on paper were not a passing moment of convivial wit, repartee, outrageous extrapolations, punch lines or throwaways. “We read to know we are not alone,” C. S. Lewis once said, and it may well be that a writer writes for the same reason.

  In any case, for me stories truly well written were stories seen, were stories heard in your head through your eyes, exactly. They must be worthy of contemplation and pondering, echoing in the imagination; at best “a work too hard for the teeth of time.”

  I always associated this concept, even before I read it in Sir Thomas Browne’s unforgettable phrase, with profoundly serious matters. Why “serious matters” should for me only rarely include the gossip and laughter that rumbled everywhere in our community, especially during our neighbour visits which were continuous throughout our years in Speedwell, I still do not understand.

  Though clearly the Bible carried some of that heavy weight. The Bible, as I heard its stories told and was taught to read it, at home and in Sunday school and in church, was not funny. The Bible is God’s Word, and the only book my mother ever gave me, other than the Bible, was Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible which she ordered for me from Eaton’s when in grade two I began to read so endlessly: “The Complete Bible Story … Told in the Simple Language of To-day, for young and old / One Hundred and Sixty-eight Stories … Forming a Connected Narrative of the Holy Scripture.” The first story begins so beautifully, but within a few minutes the lovely garden and its four rivers are gone, and immediately after that Cain kills his brother Abel, and then there are cities, floods and endless family fights and wanderings in the wilderness until Moses comes down the mountain with the Ten Commandments chiselled into slabs of stone: God Almighty, the judge of the quick and the dead: that’s no joke. And not even Jesus, who can transform any human situation into brilliant story, ever really tells an outright joke. Life is serious, especially for Mennonites having fled a world destroyed by Communism; God’s divine revelation only underscores the heavy, mostly murderous, history of mankind.

  And if my father tended to grasp the ironies and ignore the inexplicable brutalities of his past, as he often did, my mother had their lifetime of hard memories of which to remind him and cut his laughter, his defensive anger quick. Years of suffering rarely make people gentle comics; beyond irony or gallows humour, their defence can often only be sorrow or forgetting. There was much in her hard life my mother could never forget, nor, in fact, could my father, and with age he came to weep as easily as he had ever laughed.

  Äwrem Hund send wie aul; nue mott wie bloss noch äwrem Zoagel.

  We’ve gotten over the dog, now we just have to get over the tail.

  So, despite all the happiness and laughter and good work and play in my childhood, for me nothing could be more serious than life itself; as ultimately every death declared.

  Death is part of daily life on a bush homestead. From the regular, on-demand axe-decapitation of chickens—whose headless bodies pound themselves against the chopping block as if refusing to die and, if you don’t hang on tight, will hurl themselves across the yard in reflex spasms of spraying blood—to the pig you’ve fed for months which is one fall morning shot, its throat cut and blood caught in a pail, hung from a log between two trees and slit open so its viscera spill out in a fall of pink, coiled organs steaming in the cold air, death lives with you. By evening you are grinding tender, aromatic flesh between your teeth with no more sentiment for it than for the cabbage you hacked off its stalk, peeled and boiled.

  “Ein Mensch ist wass er isst,” August Fiedler would laugh, a person is what he eats, his wide mouth full of meat and belly shaking, an excellent butcher who often helped us slaughter our animals and would then eat a gargantuan meal to complete the day before he drove home. But since in spoken High German “is” and “eat” are a pun, the joke was that he could also mean “A person is what he is,” or again, “A person eats what he is.” The latter is how I first understood him: a homestead child in 1940s Canada saw and felt and smelled exactly all the stages of what he was; there was no supermarket Saran wrap to delude him.

  Life and death
and every possible variation of health or damage between them were not confined to plants and animals. Births, accidents, weddings, celebrations, parties, deaths: everyone in Speedwell knew what happened to anyone. On January 5, 1945, on Helen’s seventeenth birthday, she got up from her bed, put on her best dress and came out of the house briefly to have her picture taken on the steps with Liz and me; her birthday present was a five-year diary, bound in faux leather with a small clasp and rudimentary lock and key She wrote of the Eaton’s catalogue delay:

  Sat’day January 20: I recieved this diary today, it was a belated birthday present. I had always wished for one, and I will be Thankful many years after.

  My sweet sister, carefully levering ink from the squat little Waterman’s bottle up into her fountain pen. Afflicted with sickness all her life, she had already spent the previous six months in bed, but her hope for “many years” did not falter.

  After she received it, Helen filled in what had happened during the first nineteen days of 1945. The vicious blizzard that lasted through New Year’s Day brought this entry:

  Tuesday January 2: We heard Mr. Stuirt was dead. Mr. D. Heinrichs came and told us. All I did was set puzzels together all day long.

  George Stewart was for us a bleiwet Wunda, a blue wonder. Where had he come from? Why to dead-end Speedwell? Who was he? Aaron Heinrichs’ 1930 district map already marked his homestead half a mile west of the proposed school. In the centre of our Mennonite community of large, related and intermarried families, on the east–west road behind a coppice of gangling pine, there stood his log shack surrounded by the junk he collected walking the district roads with his small, hairless dog, his own grizzled hair and whiskers spraying from under his cap, a sack on binder twine hung over his shoulder. A man who spoke English clear as any teacher through his decaying teeth was both a bachelor and a gentle, uninsistent beggar. When he wandered into a yard, our mothers gave him food while his dog cowered between his feet for terror at our enraged, barking brutes; and at the same time we children watched him closely, especially when he bent over yard bushes where foolish hens tried to hide their eggs. George Stewart, no family, always hungry, always alone … strange. And English. Why didn’t Joe Handley from Jack Pine help him?

  When Liz, I and Sam Heinrichs’ kids walked to school, we often followed the trail across Dave Heinrichs’ and onto the road allowance directly opposite Old Stewart’s clump of pine. His one field, which Dave farmed, lay open to the sky over the long northern esker that ran out as our sliding hill behind the school; we could not see his cabin though sometimes the smoke from his stovepipe was visible. One spring afternoon as I started home from school alone, I came up on the rise where that long hill branched across the east–west road and I glanced back: an animal trotted there, following me. I had walked home alone hundreds of times—but that could be a wolf, its long nose lifted so strangely it seemed to be running slanted, coming closer—coming after me.

  No one had ever seen a wolf in Speedwell, but like a body explosion that shattered all reason I was terrified. I scrambled into the brush behind the stone pile along David Lobe’s field; if it attacked I could hurl stones, I would barricade myself, I’d dig down … the animal trotted by on the worn wagon track without a twitch: Old Stewart’s miserable dog. It had looked so huge chasing me!—its hide rubbed raw in spots from its endless fight with fleas.

  The dog lay on the bed of gunny sacks the only time I was inside George Stewart’s cabin. One summer Sunday afternoon three of us boys somehow dared to walk in from the road, around the trees, and he saw us through the open door—it had no screen—and beckoned that we should come in. Henry Enns, the minister’s son who limped a little on his elevated shoe, was the tallest of us and the old man asked him the question,

  “You’ve taken history, haven’t you?”

  As if “history” were a single pill swallowed at will. When Henry quickly nodded, old Stewart continued,

  “History says the Stewarts were once kings of England, right? And I’m a Stewart, right? My name is George Stewart and that means I have the right to be king, eh, maybe more right than George Windsor because I’m George Stewart, eh?”

  It had never entered my mind. But then I knew nothing about Stewarts once being kings of England, leave alone George the Sixth’s family name—did kings have to have one? Henry, who apparently knew, nodded, but for a moment I was so startled that I might be in the presence of a king whose clothes and skin were seamed with dirt that I backed against a trunk near the door and knocked a horse harness tug to the floor, its chain clanging. The log shack buzzed with huge Modeschietasch, as we called them, maggot-shitting flies, and so crammed small with stuff I can’t remember any of it; only the clang of torn harness and the small dog—completely useless for cattle—heaving up on the dirty sacks of the bed and scratching himself furiously with one hind leg.

  Stewart continued talking as if to himself, the way he always did: “Now I’m not saying nothing against King George, I wouldn’t do that, but I don’t think he’s running the war right, look at what Hitler’s doing to the poor buggers. I’m not against George, but if he came up from England and said to me, ‘Stewart, will you come and take over?’ well, I wouldn’t refuse him. First I’d stop the war and I’d say to Hitler, ‘Listen here, we’ve got to talk this over!’”

  To talk things over rather than shooting made perfect sense to me—but King George coming to see Old Stewart? Living in this filth and walking the roads with his gunny sack, to whom my mother often gave a heel of bread and some sausage? And what about Mr. Churchill? He made all the war speeches, wouldn’t he have to come too? When we got back to the road none of us could believe it and, as we discovered, most adults in Speedwell had already laughed at that story many times.

  “If all the George Stewarts in the world were kings of England,” my brother-in-law Emmanuel said, “they’d fill the cow pasture with thrones.”

  Then on January 2, 1945, Dave Heinrichs came to tell us Old Stewart was dead: apparently frozen to death during the four-day snowstorm before New Year’s. Dan got the RCMP in to his place, our team and sleigh breaking through the heavy drifts. They must have brought the body out past our yard but Helen notes nothing about that, nor do I remember. His poor dog had frozen to death as well.

  Nevertheless, such a dream; such a human death alone in the wilderness of this world. Ten years later the first story I wrote for my university writing class was about George Stewart, and it didn’t make him funny or ludicrous as it easily might have. Rather, it tried to grapple with a boy’s inchoate sense of “the fleeting stuff of human majesty.” And F. M. Salter, my writing professor at the University of Alberta, who years before had mentored W. O. Mitchell to his first publication in the Atlantic Monthly, found my effort “a very remarkable picture … indeed, when polished up, publishable.” And so it was, about a decade later as “Tudor King;” several years after that the National Film Board made an eleven-minute film of it.

  The seriousness—one might well say deadly seriousness—of my early attempts at writing fiction continued. My first published short story, in Liberty magazine, Toronto, September 1956, was about my sister Helen.

  It was also a story I had written for Salter’s university course the winter before. At the time I couldn’t look through Helen’s five-year diary, but when Liz showed it to me years later, the many tiny details in it that corroborated my story only strengthened my trust in memories I had that were not recorded there. The diary provided five lines of space for each day, and Helen wrote her last entry in early March 1945. Throughout February she had often noted how her illness was growing, how she could do nothing, “just lie and think.” Then, her last diary words:

  March 5, Monday: Today I feel better, so good I had to spill ink on Jan. 31. That will stay there as long as the book exists.

  And it has, a shapeless blot with a strong stroke tilted right, fading for sixty years.

  March 6 to 28, 1945, are blank. Helen’s final written words ar
e on a torn bit of paper when she could no longer speak, her neat writing collapsed to a slanted sprawl:

  I want to go to bed

  lets all pray

  I can have more

  breath and sleep

  She must have been sitting up, held in someone’s arms in an attempt to help her breathe. Someone has written “March 27th” below the first line, and across the bottom of the paper is Liz’s handwriting:

  Helens last writing on March 28. 2.00 oclock P. M.

  Those are the same words with which Liz’s thirteen-year-old handwriting continues the five-year diary:

  March 28 Wedensday: Sister Helen died on 28

  of March. Her heart tore off she had an easy

  death though died March 28, 1945 2.00 P. M.

  Dates, times, contradictions. Visible words that fix memory despite decades of forgetting and impossible recall.

  How to tell such a story. Sing? I can’t compose music … I’ve never learned to dance nor wanted to … I’m too colour “challenged,” as they say it now, to paint a picture—but I once did try to hum a song into existence. The first morning I rode Prince to school after Helen’s death. I was alone. I never wrote down a word of it but I know them, I can yodel, bump them together without a thought:

  Old Dan Tucker in the grand old days

  Swept the floor in the bachelor ways

  He could knock the stuffing out of any guy

  With one big slug of his double-jointed sigh