Of This Earth

by Rudy Wiebe

  Silence filled the church like prayer. Then he turned and walked back to his chair. The black tips of his feathers almost touched the floor between his tan moccasins. Before he could seat himself the piano began plinkering a frill, the evangelist had uncrossed his legs and was riffling his Bible in anticipation and the male quartet already stood breathing, stretching their mouths open. For me it was over.

  That evening, beautifully, there was no Vancouver rain. Riding home on the trolley I recognized that the city had both names and numbers for its night streets. And so much light: night barely gained a shadow between blazing lights. I saw myself in the trolley window, and through myself the brightness of the street lights outside where they labelled the corners, first with tree names—Spruce, Willow, Ash—and then suddenly Yukon, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec; they skipped Saskatchewan probably because they couldn’t spell it, as no one in grade six at Lord Selkirk School could, except me, and then the trolley was singing its wires down the light corridor of Kingsway bright as day, the driver droning “King Edward” and “Victoria Drive,” and I waited and pulled the cord for Gladstone because that was closer to Brant than Nanaimo Road, only four short blocks, but running ahead on the concrete I saw that the lights of the city were doubled against the hanging clouds overhead and night was a thin, bent line between two immense blankets of light reaching to the unchangeable North Shore Mountains with their pale silhouette of stars. Where was the moon? Tomorrow, Saturday, I would help Tony distribute the weekly flyers in his area along Nanaimo and then we would follow the creek ravine under the tram trestle to Trout Lake and build a log raft and paddle out onto the lake and in the evening we might take the trolley to the evangelistic campaign again, but the Indian chief would not be there, he had spoken tonight and that was sufficient. I ran faster through the shadows and light of the street wishing there were no bright windows beside me, wishing for the heavy darkness of a trail worn between poplars to run into but there was none and I was happy, very happy.

  Tony and I did push ourselves out onto Trout Lake next day, too far out, and after some time we believed we would drown because several logs got away from our raft and our poles were too short to find bottom in the mud and we gradually sank so deep we could only hand-scoop ourselves by submarine inches towards the nearest swampy shore. Sometimes Tony, sometimes I crouched in cold water over our shoes trying to balance. I knew I hated water, there was no trusting so much water and though this was not the ocean it was close enough and it would be even colder the deeper you sank and we would most certainly sink. But we didn’t drown, not quite, and in the general relief at our coming through the door we were no more than yelled at for the soaked clothing and mud we brought home, and next morning we went as usual to the Sunday service at the Mennonite Brethren Church off Fraser Street. Gust took all ten of us in his car.

  This church gathered underground; only the basement was completed, with heavy roofing paper and tar where the floor would be when they had collected enough money to build more. From the top of the outside steps you could look south down the slope of city houses to the Fraser River flats, the grass and silos of dairy farms on Lulu Island (now Richmond and Vancouver Airport) and far beyond to the pale blue snow of Mount Baker across the border in the United States of America. No one simple name for that country would do, it had to have a title. I wondered what changed, what new world happened when you stepped over the line drawn so straight on maps; if you stood with one foot on either side would you suddenly split because the USA could do anything it wanted? But, close as it was, we never crossed to find out.

  Everything in the basement church was High German, as was proper for Russian Mennonites in Canada then, especially those who, with the war ended at last, were beginning to move into the crowded city from the isolation of their stony immigrant homesteads on parkland and prairie. As usual I sat with the other boys on the backless front bench of the men’s side, directly below the pulpit. My legs were now long enough to comfortably triangle myself to the floor and I could sing all the hymns from memory—it seemed I knew hundreds of them—but Tony beside me didn’t sing, and neither did Gust. Tina had a beautiful soprano, like our mother, but she could never sing duets with Gust like Mam did with Pah when they were working together in our bush home, or outside in the garden, or in the cattle corral milking or anywhere on the farmyard: if they were within earshot of each other my father would lift his lyric tenor to her soprano:

  O mein Jesu du bist’s wert

  Dass man Dich im Staube ehrt,

  Dass man Dich beständig lobt und ehrt.

  Niemand ist so gut wie Du,

  Meine Seele jauchzt Dir zu,

  Meine Seele jauchst Dir freudig zu.

  O my Jesus you are worthy

  To be honoured in the dust,

  To continually be honoured thus.

  There’s no goodness like to you,

  My soul lauds and praises you,

  My soul shouts to you for happiness.

  When together they sang such a soaring hymn, carried by heart for centuries across continents and oceans, they sounded like lovers, though I do not remember seeing them kiss.

  During my evenings in the Fiedler living room Zane Grey had, by means of brutality, tried to confirm what Emmanuel told me running in the snow behind our caboose: love between a man and a woman was stronger than death. In his books nothing, not even the most vicious, relentless violence, could break it. I never associated Zane Grey love with my parents—they were too old, too Mennonite fixed for that—but I tried to see if something was perhaps happening in Liz on the verge of fourteen, so vivid and alert, so laughing when we all played softball in the Rices’ grassy field in the warm March (March!) sunlight when the cherry trees, not the spruce, were as if dusted with snow; the way she ran into Alvin Fiedler trying to get back on base before he could touch her with the ball in his hand. Though if that happened it seemed fine too, she’d grab his hand and wrestle him for the ball and finally whirl away from him and throw the ball to the pitcher, laughing. Alvin was as tall and handsome as he had to be, but often he looked merely dour, grumpy like his aged father often had, and happy, passionate Liz seemed to be laughing at the wrong guy. Julius maybe, but he was far too old, over twenty. Even when Alvin tuned her guitar—Liz took guitar lessons and I violin because our mother insisted that in a city with music teachers we each had to learn to play a good, portable instrument—Alvin never told funny stories like his brother Emmanuel did. When I teased Liz with, “You really like Alvin, huh?” she wrinkled her nose and contorted her usual sisterly aphorism, “That’s for me to know and you not to find out.”

  The Fiedler–Racho–Wiebe gathering was our only community for five months in Vancouver—the Lobes had scattered across Saskatchewan and Alberta cutting lumber and trucking, not even Mrs. Fiedler knew exactly where most of them were—and I do not remember visiting anyone else. After we tired of spring softball in Rice’s field, we ate ice cream. No endless churning in a bucket filled with crushed ice, no slurping a semi-liquid mess, you could buy a miracle of ice cream bricks at any store on Nanaimo frozen hard as stone and cut them with a knife and let chunks melt off a spoon freezing your tongue. Vanilla or strawberry or chocolate, or all three at once, striped Neapolitan, whose layered existence was impossible to imagine until you actually ate it. Chocolate was best. I couldn’t know that chocolate revels were still to come.

  Not a face or a name remains from Lord Selkirk School, neither student nor teacher; or from the church we attended every Sunday, or of the storekeepers on Nanaimo or the doorways where Tony and I laid our weekly flyers—what were they for, groceries? One person I do remember: a young man with fierce black hair who came leaping down cottage steps on Brant Street and yelled at me over their fence to stop standing there staring in their living-room window! Doubtless I was staring, but the curtains were open and so I assumed it was invited. That happened on the day we arrived, before Tony came home from school and found me riding his wagon up and d
own the sidewalk. I had never before seen the inside of a fancy city house—as it seemed to me then.

  I must have passed that house hundreds of times in five months and looked through its huge single-pane window every time, but I never stopped walking and I remember nothing at all of what was inside.

  Lord Selkirk had an auxiliary building with a high half-timbered peak set at right angles to the school where groups of classes were sent to watch movies. I had never seen a movie before, though by 1945 I was allowed to listen to “Lux Presents Hollywood” every Monday evening on radio station CFQC Saskatoon. I’d never heard the clicking flicker of a projector, seen the beam of light in a shuttered room and shadows twitch and tumble over a screen. Sometimes I watched the pupils, over a hundred of them on stacking chairs, every face turned to that rectangle of light, every face as grey as the faces they watched. Shadow stories for eye and ear. Both smart and simpler, somehow, and never to me as fascinating as written words. When you told movie stories to someone who had not seen them, they seemed flat, even stupid. But the continually reordered alphabet of words: that went far beyond smart or flat, into mystery.

  What did we watch in that high, black-beamed hall? Tony tells me on his seventieth birthday that he remembers clear as today seeing a magnificent Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Colman as the Prisoner and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Rupert of Hentzau, whereas I retain nothing but a possible Mickey Mouse or Snow White cartoon. But most certainly I saw plenty of “Our Gang” films (The Little Rascals); the big-bolted rafters of the hall rang with laughter at the Gang’s endless bad antics. I find now that 221 “Our Gang” films were made between 1922 and 1944. We may even have seen Our Gang number 197 (1941), in which Mickey’s mother is pregnant for the fourth time and Mickey becomes very worried because he’s read that every fourth child born in the world is Chinese. Whatever we saw, Liz and I told our parents nothing about it, they might have forbidden us such worldliness; which may be another reason I’ve forgotten them so completely.

  And I remember a song very well, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”—was that in a movie?—and the marvellous lines,

  If you go down to the woods today

  You’re sure of a big surprise …

  You’d better go in disguise …

  What an evocative word, “disguise”: your reality concealed, perhaps cancelled, shape-shifted. A profound word for a writer, I could feel that already, though not yet know it; not then.

  The war was over, and slowly the world was changing. Wood carefully carpentered was no longer needed to cover a house: Gust simply nailed wide slabs of red asphalt pressed to look like bricks over the tarpaper walls and brown asphalt shingles on the roof and instantly our poor house was disguised into class. Every afternoon the Vancouver Sun arrived at 4160 Brant thicker than ever—the surrender of Japan certainly didn’t end the news!—a mass of paper folded neatly into itself and tossed onto the wooden deck along the front of the house where one March Sunday we lined up after church to take our last Vancouver family pictures. Mrs. Fiedler agreed to join us.

  The one Sun front page I remember was a large picture of a woman in high heels at a bus stop, standing on one leg with the other bent up high and bare, pulling on a stocking. The caption read that she had bought the first pair of nylons for women ever sold in Vancouver—price $1.75, when a quart of milk cost 5 cents—and she could not wait to get home to put them on. Her usual lisle stockings lay puddled on the sidewalk beside her shoe and her skirt was flipped up so high, if you looked long enough it was possible you might see the two nubs of her garters against her long, naked thigh.

  “That’s how it is in the big world,” Pah said. “Ohne Shomp.” Completely shameless.

  I had tried to fit a three-quarter-size violin between my chin and shoulder and fingers for several months; it was a stubborn, squeaky thing. On Monday, April 1, 1946, we left Vancouver without it. Mam said Speedwell was where we belonged, uns Tüss, our home.

  The CNR passenger train steamed east through the Rockies, over Alberta hills and through the long parkland forests into Saskatchewan smooth as a dream, and then the bumping Meadow Lake bus. North of North Battleford, Highway 4 dragged itself up between the round drumlin hills surrounding Cochin until the great ice sheet of Jackfish Lake lay below, slowly softening under the sun. In April 1946 I was eleven and a half years old, and I had no idea we were travelling alongside large Indian lands (at that time reserves were not allowed to declare their presence with highway signs) nor had I the faintest premonition that 120 years before, the brilliant Plains Cree leader Big Bear had been born here to a Cree mother whose name is forgotten and a Plains Saulteaux chief named Black Powder, born right here, on the shore of this lake, only forty kilometres from my own birthplace as the raven flies. But there was no raven to fly an omen across the spring sky which I could then have comprehended: that Chief Big Bear, who died on January 17, 1888, would someday inhabit half a century of my personal, my writing, life.

  8.

  ASPEN

  It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself… The wounded man on his shoulders did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether what he was carrying away in this grave was alive or dead.

  Early December, 1946. In front of the wide windows of Speedwell School, on a temporary stage built by the school board secretary, Dave Heinrichs, the girls from grades five to eight are practising “Good King Wenceslas” for the Christmas concert. There are only five of them, and the school has no piano or pump organ—nor could anyone have played it if there was one—but Miss Siemens’ voice anchors a note here and there, her waving arms guiding the girls along the melody so that momentarily they sound like one, full and clear as an evening owl among the trees gliding over the little bump of “gath’ring winter fu–ooo–el.” Miss Siemens wants a bit of harmony whenever possible, and on several lines Katie Martens and Nettie Enns, who have sung in our church longer than they can remember, slide into an alto that deepens, broadens their sound into another colour, while Annie Sahar and Vera Funk and Helen Trapp can only remain true on the melody, softer then, almost a hush in your ear.

  I am scrunched sideways in a desk, leaning against the warm galvanized surround that guards the gas-barrel heater in the centre of the room. It may be I have just stacked it with split poplar because the heat of wood burning fondles me, heat unlike any other I know, having lived for five months with propane in mouldy Vancouver, thick wood heat you can smell in waves even before you feel it nubble your body like dense fur. As usual, I am thoughtlessly chewing my fingernails as I sit with a book opened into the low winter sun red between the sheets draped over wires around the stage.

  The book is Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The wavering carol of cruel cold and snow and deep footprints—so Canadian bush—and the beatific heat, the level light are so brilliant, I hear Javert’s conscience finally split and burn crimson on the page,

  “Javert, what are you going to do with this old man?”

  “Why I’ll arrest him and he’ll go down to the galley prison at Toulon…”

  “What! The man who saved your life today?”

  Indelible childhood. I cannot know that fifty years from now I will literally walk in the Seine River sewers of Paris with this song, this warmth, this story light my shadow still, walking with me.

  And at barely twelve I am not quite reading Hugo’s massive novel either; I am reading Solomon Cleaver’s drastic diminution of it into Jean Val Jean, a sanitized text approved for Canadian children by both the public and the Roman Catholic school boards; in it, the thirty pages of Les Misérables’s intricate cloacal history is eviscerated to one subordinate clause:

  Standing in the great sewers of Paris—some of whose mighty tunnels are ten feet in diameter and which, like the giant trunk and branches of some hollow tree, stretch mile after mile under the city streets—[Jean] gazes into the black darkness, wondering if he will ever find a way out.

  Hugo summed up his cloaca chapters with the Parisia
n proverb, “To descend into the sewer is to enter the grave,” and, “The sewer is a cynic. It tells all.” Such understandings become in Cleaver simply an image of “some hollow tree, stretching for miles”—hollow tree, horse apples! Even in 1946 that doesn’t fool me for one second. I have lived in a city; after my lifetime of plopping outhouses I have studied the spiral of water in a toilet bowl swirl my turds down into the bowels of sewers—but I never dreamed sewers could be huge enough for a man to walk in, much less carry a body.

  I do know that, no matter how large the sewer, what Jean Valjean will be wading in is no sweet raindrop seeping through a hollow tree. Five years later when I find my first good summer job helping build the water and sewer system under Coaldale, Alberta, population 800, the biggest pipes we will lay are barely large enough for a slim teenager to slither along on his toes and elbows; and I will spend half a day’s wages buying the Modern Library of the World’s Best Books edition of Les Misérables and read its 1,222 pages from first to last. I will come home brown and sweating from shovelling, hoisting pipes, measuring levels in the prairie summer sun and the long section of “The Intestine of Leviathan” will fascinate me, not only because of the clay sewer pipes I wrestle with every day in the deep trenches below the streets of my hometown, the houses of my neighbours, but also because by working on that construction crew I am forced to wade, all day, every working minute, in what to me are the sewers of the English language. I will be forced to understand that a head-on shit or bugger or fuck are the least of our superb language’s intricate, endlessly branching combinations of filth to smear on every conceivable human experience; especially on town girls I know from school and church passing on the sidewalk in their summer shorts.