The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  I was born in what had been a Red Cross outpost hospital in the town of Nipawin, a good thirty miles from our home in the bush—a distance, in those days, given the often impassable roads and the poor-quality vehicles we had, that was near impossible. But despite the difficulty, all five of us were born in hospitals.

  Alex, born April 20, 1939, was the only child often to be born in a hospital, in nearby Canora because Endeavour didn’t have a hospital. Her mother had had some difficulty with her second-last birth (Alex’s sister Ann, five years older), and everybody agreed that a hospital delivery would be safer for both Alex’s mother, Aneta—or Anna, as she was mostly called—and for the new baby. In fact, although the birth was normal, Anna had a vision in which she saw her new baby suspended above her and with wings, an infant angel. She thought, for a few terrible moments, that Alex had died.

  The Wiwcharuk family was embedded in that community: Alex’s father, Alexander, was a ratepayer and one of those who helped to organize the school district and to build the school that Alex would attend when she was ready. It was called Bear School (no question about why), and it was two miles from the Wiwcharuk farm, a long walk for a little girl. She would attend it until she was ready to start high school; in fact, it would be 1959, a year after she had finished high school, before the town of Endeavour acquired a school large enough for all the country children to be bussed to, another measure of the remoteness and perhaps even of the poverty of the community. If Alexander Wiwcharuk did the things responsible men do in a new community—serving on boards, making decisions about public buildings and services—Anna did what the women did: cooking for community events, making arrangements for the welfare of the children who would attend them, helping the priest with his duties and making sure the church and the halls were clean and well-appointed, and that the children learned the church rituals and their prayers. There were plenty of relatives nearby—aunts and uncles and cousins—and all of them living the same hard, determined, pioneer life.

  It was wartime, too, that Alex and I were born into; it was the background to our lives. The men listening solemnly to an armchair-size radio set in the parlour or the living room, the women knitting or making bandages to be shipped off to “the front.” The ration books were guarded as fiercely as the Bible, voices became hushed when children entered the room. And the strange events: a young man in his heavy khaki-coloured wool uniform and puttees, invited to supper at our log house, who sat motionless, booted feet placed neatly together on the bare wooden floor, face pale and drawn, hands folded on his lap (a picture that to this day, over sixty years later, I have not forgotten), as my mother and aunt moved around the kitchen making the meal, and them saying afterwards, when he had gone, The war ruined him, and us wondering what that appalling remark meant: our mother bustling us home angrily in the darkness from the ball diamond where a fire sent flames high above the backstop from a burning effigy of Hitler. When we asked if it was a real man on fire, she had bitter words for the young men who had spoiled the day—although I have no memory of what the day was.

  My family had one advantage over the Wiwcharuks: we were already Canadians, had been on my father’s side since the seventeenth century, and on my mother’s since the early nineteenth. War and political oppression were not things we knew much about, it was all so far in our families’ pasts, while the Wiwcharuks would have had in their family background all too much of both. If we children were very glad that this mysterious event called “the war” was somewhere far away from us, the Wiwcharuks must have been immensely grateful that they had escaped it—both the second war and the first one.

  During the First World War, six thousand Ukrainians in Canada were interned, and any of them who had been naturalized Canadians fewer than fifteen years lost the right to vote. Alex’s father had arrived as a child in 1912 and so would have fallen under this ruling. Nonetheless, there were a lot of Ukrainian Canadians who did, and it is quite possible that members of Alex’s family, or at least some of their neighbours, did. This has to be a part of Ukrainian-Canadian lore, its history in this country, but I suspect that it is not the first thing Ukrainian children are taught in those classes they are sent to, or used to be when I was young, every Saturday morning, where they learned, among other things, to read and write Ukrainian. The elders of an oppressed group, judging forgetting to be the best way, don’t always want their young to know about such past discrimination. Nor would they want their Canadian-born children to know about the suffering they and their ancestors had endured in Ukraine, nor family stories of who betrayed whom, who was tortured by whom, who was hanged, or murdered, or went over to the other side, back in the old country.

  By the time the Second World War began, and Alex was born, only new immigrants from Eastern Europe were forced to report once a week to the local post office so that the government could keep tabs on them. But that must still have rankled in the Ukrainian community, and left a residue of determination that children born in Canada would prove the value of the Ukrainian community by joining the middle class, and becoming full-fledged Canadians.

  I’m struck now by the way that old people talk about those days, telling you not about the hardship, but about how much fun they had—about the schoolhouse dances and parties, about coming home after midnight under the stars in the horse-drawn sleigh and falling asleep and the sleigh tipping and everybody falling out into the snow, about the picnics with the homemade ice cream, and the sack races and the fiddle music. As if that is all they can bear to remember. Although one very old lady, resting in a chaise longue in the nursing home, a brightly coloured crocheted afghan drawn up over her fragile body, murmured to me, “There were too many babies,” daring to say it out loud at last.

  That is what Alex and I came from: from wilderness, and from physical hardship. But we also came from a reverence for education, at least for girls, who wouldn’t inherit land and who might not be lucky enough to marry it. Our mothers didn’t want us to marry it. They knew all too well what marrying land, at least in those days and in that place, would mean for us: a life of hard work, without frills, or holidays, or even the slightest touch of glamour. They wanted better for us, and they knew we would have to get that “better” on our own, out of our sheer determination. So that much, Alex and I also had in common. The good life, for girls, would be had elsewhere, and we would have to get it ourselves.

  Still, I had been convinced when I began my hesitant search to find out what had happened to Alex that we hadn’t had much in common other than being in the same high school at the same time. But my curiosity had to have been growing: I’d gone so far as to make a date to meet the retired police officer, the one I’d been told was “obsessed” with Alex’s case, and I felt that I’d better go to that meeting equipped with more knowledge about who Alex was and what our connection may have been. That was why I visited our old high school, the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate Institute—now the board of education’s offices, the school having been defunct since the seventies—to try to track down some yearbooks from 1954 to 1958, my own having long since disappeared.

  I was lucky to find a room devoted to Tech memorabilia, and a cardboard box full of our old yearbooks. The woman who took me in left me alone with the box, and I searched through it for the books covering the years we were students there, while black-and-white photos of all our old “Senior Pins” and “Senior Rings” gazed down at me. (These were the student body presidents, one male, one female each year, whose symbol of office had been either a pin or a ring.) I recognized most of them, remembered something about them even if they hadn’t been friends of mine. It was an odd sensation, sitting and flipping through those books while those young men and women hung, frozen in our mutual teenage past, all around me.

  There she was—Alex—a teenager, staring solemnly out at the camera in most of the shots, black-haired, round-faced, with a pretty, well-shaped mouth as her distinguishing feature, and nearly black eyes. I found myself, too, and if I thought A
lex was an amorphous-looking person, neither adult nor child, caught between two life stages, I thought this was even more true of me. That timid mouth, those dark eyes that seemed to see the world without certainty or love. I confirmed that Alex was the girl I remembered, that we had been in choir and drama club at the same time. Alex didn’t seem to have done much in the way of extracurricular activities and I couldn’t find any indication of her being a serious scholar or an athlete or anything beyond her drama club membership to distinguish her. Maybe I couldn’t remember much because there wasn’t much in the way of high school social life to remember. I could never say that I had had a successful time in high school, although I did have lots of good memories.

  Bemused, satisfied to be a grown-up, I put the yearbooks back in the box and walked out of the building, not knowing it would be my next to last time in it. Back in my car, I did a quick review of my notes on the facts of her murder as reported in the newspaper. Although I was glad to be about to speak with somebody who’d been in a position to know a lot more about the murder and its investigation than a reporter would know, there is no denying that I was intimidated, and I already had a sense that I would be expected to be shrewd and capable. Feeling anything but, I was gearing myself up to give that impression.

  I still have the notes I reviewed that warm afternoon sitting in my car: I see I’d also attempted to come up with some questions to ask, but really, I knew so little that my questions even then seemed silly and ineffectual. I see with some amusement that I hadn’t even started a new notebook, as I always do when I start a new book, that the reverse side of the page on which I’d made my notes is covered with scribblings from a lecture I’d attended about the bedrock geology of Saskatchewan. Beneath my quick review of my notes was that abyss of my uncertainty. Why was I doing this? Strangely, I see now, there was a measure of childish glee at being taken so seriously. As if I had at last been accepted into the ranks of the adults. That was my mood when I took my first hesitant step toward discovering Alex’s story.

  Chapter Three

  Being Ukrainian

  Alex and I were raised in rural Saskatchewan during wartime and at the tail end of the pioneering period which so defined and shaped all of us, and the generation or two before us, in Western Canada. I thought of the things we would both have known when we first arrived in Saskatoon, the big city, the exciting place where our lives would finally begin. A pair of simple country girls—children, really—unacquainted with a need to be careful of or afraid of anything much but wild animals, with nature as enemy: the ice and snow of winter, swollen, wild streams, bogs and swamps. Country life had, has always had, a kind of transparency to it. We knew nothing of the way that cities, even small ones in the middle of nowhere, pull apart family life, sending each family member off in a different direction each day, each in some way and without meaning to, leading a secret life. I was thinking of how Alex and I grew up in this city, each in our separate ways.

  Alex was wholly a Ukrainian girl, which is not to say that she hadn’t been born in Canada, or had somehow escaped all the influences of the English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon world in which she was raised—in which we were all raised, even half-French Canadian me. But, when we were growing up in Saskatchewan, it was a much better plan to have an Anglo last name such as Smith or Mc-something-or-other, instead of Le Blanc—my own surname—or worse, the unpronounceable Wiwcharuk, which was Alex’s. Some Slavs bowed to the pressure and Anglicized their last names, including one of the men initially suspected, but innocent, of Alex’s murder and whose Anglicized last name would cause endless trouble for him, linking him, as it appeared to do, with a prominent Anglo family, and further confusing an already confusing investigation. I notice in the Saskatoon phone book that some Wiwcharuks, in an attempt to simplify the name, have dropped the second w, which was the letter that tended to confound non-Slavs. And after as much as one hundred years in Canada, why not such a minimal concession?

  But Alex had come from the Yorkton—Canora area, which was one of the many areas where Ukrainians had settled in large numbers around the turn of the century and where it was possible to grow up speaking fluent Ukrainian, as she did, to be a devout Ukrainian Catholic or Ukrainian Orthodox churchgoer, as Alex was, and to be perfectly versed in Ukrainian culture, or at least that which could be transported from Ukraine and maintained in the face of some hostility and unspoken prejudice. Ukrainians in Saskatchewan take a tremendous pride in their Ukrainian heritage, and over the years in Canada, they maintained it as they slowly made their way from a position somewhere near the bottom of the social ladder to one where they are able to boast a governor general (Ramon Hnatyshyn), two provincial lieutenant governors (Stephen Worobetz and Sylvia Fedoruk in Saskatchewan), and a provincial premier (Roy Romanow, 1991-2001), among their ranks of well-educated, middle-class professional people. Alex was of the generation that still suffered from prejudice, although it was lessening because most of her generation could speak unaccented English. But even someone as gifted as Roy Romanow, in high school in Saskatoon when we were, spent hours with a tape recorder when he was an adolescent working to rid himself of his Ukrainian accent, which he did so well that while still a teenager he was able to be a broadcaster at a Saskatoon radio station.

  A Ukrainian woman also raised in Endeavour, but slightly younger than Alex, told me that in her hometown, “You always knew who counted and who didn’t, and that the English (the Anglos) mattered and we didn’t.” We were drinking coffee in the kitchen of her big, bright, modern house, the kind of house our mothers would barely have been able to dream of, living as they did most of their lives in log houses and settlers’ shacks, or the small houses I’ve described on the west side of Saskatoon, and then winding up in a single room in a nursing home with one red geranium or a flourishing African violet on the windowsill. She laughed wryly, adding, “Even though there were more of us than them.” That she had married a relative of mine on my mother’s side, perfectly British Isles in background, amused us both.

  My half-French background didn’t cause me any trouble that I can remember because we didn’t speak French at home, and so I grew up without an accent, and because we hadn’t a French mother, there seemed not to be anything identifiably French about us beyond our French surname. (And I was called Sharon, not Yvette or Germaine.) It was more of a problem to be a Roman Catholic, and my memories of discrimination were not the result of the French background—this wasn’t true of my father, though, whose accent, which he never lost, gave him away—but of being poor and, especially, of being Roman Catholic. But, of course, to be a Slav was to be lower on the pecking order than to be half-French, and how could having a fixed place near the bottom of the social ladder not affect you for the rest of your life?

  The thing about being Ukrainian or half-French or Chinese or whatever was that wherever you went, except when you were at home with your family, or gathered with other Ukrainians or Chinese at your church or at a cultural event, you were always Other, you were never quite the real thing, and you knew it. And no matter how much it chafed, there was also always a part of you that accepted that designation, and that yearned to be whole and real.

  If I often felt it, despite my mother being the real thing—Irish on her father’s side and Scottish on her mother’s—how very much more Alex must have, as a child, how much she would have been forced back, again and again, for validation, into her own Ukrainian community. Even today, Roy Romanow tells of Anglo neighbours the Romanows had for many years who, despite being polite, even friendly, never—in all the years the two families lived next door to each other—invited the Romanows into their home for lunch or dinner or even a cup of coffee. He told me this without rancour, but as an illustration of how it was to be a Slav in the Saskatchewan in which we all grew up.

  Ukrainians settled the Yorkton area as early as 1897, but as the province’s population began to urbanize—this trend, which goes on today, began even before the Depression of the thirties—Saskato
on also became a centre of Ukrainian culture and life. At its peak, its Ukrainian population was at something like twelve percent, and it stayed at about this level into the early fifties. This was out of a population of 53,000; but by 1956, only three years later, it was 73,000, a thirty-four percent jump. The bulk of the Ukrainian population lived on the west side, where I lived when we first came to the city, and where housing was cheap but decent. Most of the immigrants to the city, Ukrainians included, were working class people, and with their farms gone or abandoned, and without university degrees or the kind of training that city people tend to have available to them, the men supported their families by working for the railroads, or for the city or municipality as labourers, or in any number of other manual jobs a new city needed men to do. My own father was a mechanic in a series of garages. This hard work was to be the foundation on which all those country people would learn to live in the city, to take advantage of its schools and hospitals, its cultured and learned people who understood music and world literature and everything there was to know about science, and who would teach their children to be doctors, lawyers, artists, architects, and teachers.

  But Alex’s father had managed to hang onto the family farm, and so when Alex came to the city it was not with her mom and dad and siblings, but to live with her oldest sister, Marie, who had married a non-Ukrainian, a tall, handsome man with an Anglo surname, who ran a successful plumbing and refrigeration business. They lived in the Exhibition District, another of the areas where housing was relatively cheap and the lots small, and where families trying to establish themselves would often begin. Still, Alex and her sister’s family had to go over to the west side to attend church. They were Ukrainian Orthodox, and the main church of the faith was the Holy Trinity Cathedral, which still sits, well kept-up and attractive and in full use, on 20th Street at Avenue J, another of those places I used to pass every day on my way to St. Mary’s School. Alex’s priest at the Holy Trinity Cathedral was Father Bodnarchuk.