by Rudy Wiebe
The boxes had no grips. He had to clutch the top one with both hands, and lift, and pull; he felt the muscle in his back tweak, almost heard it come apart. There were more boxes and also a full trunk in the cabin at Aspen Creek, clothes, bedding, not books, he had vanished them among his own—not the blue truck bedding … but here were the personal papers, piled envelopes and spiral notebooks and diaries—no, not the diaries yet—a small green-bordered book bound with plaited cord and “Gabriel” written above three tiny children: Bible Lessons for Kindergarten Children, Year II. Across the top of the book lay four yellow pages of black handwritten words. Labelled by Yo: “Rec’d Oct 6/85.”
Dreaming of Gabriel
When I heard the news my first reaction was a powerful desire just to be with Gabriel one more time. I wanted to go somewhere … where? … and cry out to the sky, demand that he be there. God! But as the news sank in, and gradually became reality, I slowly accepted more and more. So seeing Gabriel in a dream last night came as a comforting surprise, lovely. Though from the moment I awoke I have never been certain how much was in the dream, how much was in what-the-dream-meant-to-me, how much was what-I-wanted-the-dream-to-be.
I was observing from the sidelines, and Gabriel was being asked to show other people some gifts he had received, and he was obliging. The gifts were rings, jewellery. I felt like an outsider—not at all a part of what I was witnessing.
Then Gabriel looked at me, smiled warmly, and beckoned to me; he wanted to show me something.
I was surprised, and pleased, for this was the Gabriel I knew, always considerate but he seemed happier than I’d ever seen him. He said, “Come,” we turned a corner and we were alone.
He said, “Look at that,” and gestured downward. I looked and saw a coffee table covered with pamphlets and books, magazines neatly arranged. And suddenly I was grief-struck. The table was the shape of a coffin.
Gabriel continued, gently mocking me in my hypocrisy (or so it seemed), “How can people say that?” It seemed he referred to something written on the cover of a magazine—but which one? His words did not make sense to me. What suddenly made sense were my thoughts in my grief, thoughts such as, How could you leave all this, and, How could you do that, or just, Why? Gently mocking my grief-thoughts for their irrationality. Is grief rational? I looked at him to see his meaning.
His eyes seemed to say that things were better for him now—but immediately the dream pulled itself back to where it had been: “How can people say that? What’s the point of saying it?”
I tried to see the magazine on the dreadful table, to respond to his questions, and I woke up.
After a time I found this dream somewhat comforting.
Oleg
Oleg, the one university friend Gabriel had still met for the occasional coffee after three years, who studied graduate philosophy very hard while Gabriel avoided his university lit classes by repeating movies afternoon and evening. One of six pallbearers.
Under “Dreaming of Gabriel” was a single folded sheet lined with large looped handwriting: William’s, superb organist William.
GABRIEL W
Funeral Tuesday, Sept 10/85
Mennonite Church Edmonton
PRELUDE: — CHORALE BACH (Intro. to B.)
Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring
Schmuecke dich, o liebe Seele — Intro. to B.
(Soul Arise, Dispel Your Sadness) — p. 6
(A tendentious translation; really: Adorn yourself, o dear soul)
The King of Love My Shepherd Is — Hymnal 60
Vater unser im Himmelreich — Intro. to B.
(Our Father in the Kingdom of Heaven) — p. 14
Erbarm’ dich mein, o Herre Gott p. 20
(Have Mercy on Me, O Lord God)
The Lord’s My Shepherd — Hymnal 101
Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ — p. 46
(I Cry to You, Lord Jesus Christ)
If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee — Varsity 129
— FUNERAL SERVICE —
POSTLUDE: — When Peace Like a River — Hymnal 327
O “Suffer God,” “Suffer little children to come …” suffer indeed my soul, suffer O sufferer!—a multitudinous word worthy to be included in Gabriel’s long notebook columns of definitions, necessary, he must surely have written it out there, somewhere in his re-appearing lists of words with his particular, selected and augmented meanings, ignoring all others, lists he continued to extend as month by week by day his handwriting twisted into steady illegibility—indeed, here was one—
Romantic - having no basis in fact, imaginary
- impractical in conception or plan; visionary
- the imaginative or emotional appeal of the heroic, adventurous, remote
- mysterious
- idealized beyond reality
Hal hunched down in the crowded basement with Yo’s first large box uncovered. Suffer … peace … river so deep below that high … romantic … beyond reality. He had simply picked up the top papers, held them, and already ominous Gabe definitions glared at him—and on the instant another spike of memory leaped from a sheet lying there, nothing on it but a blue date:
Wednesday May 19, 1971
He hadn’t so much as brushed a notebook and already that date stared at him, a birth date, like its incarnate “definition” written out again and again, he knew it would be, everywhere inside that opened box; he remembered it the instant Gabe’s blue handwriting hit his eyes:
Ailsa - from Ailsa Craig, Gaelic meaning Fairy (Elf), Rock or possibly Elizabeth’s (Ealasaid’s) Rock, an island between Scotland and Ireland off s. Ayrshire
- Elizabeth—consecrated to God
- Fairy/Elf—an imaginary being, ordinarily of small and graceful human form, capable of working good or ill to mankind
Working good or ill. Dearest God.
The definitions softly hummed the agonies of the funereal organ, suffer good or suffer ill, it is well with my soul, which is imaginary and consecrated to suffer God to guide me, O Ailsa. Suffer Ailsa.
Suffer - to feel pain or distress
- to undergo punishment, especially to the point of death
- to bear, endure
But to bear, endure, God’s pain? Pain God endures, or the pain/punishment that God hands out in “guiding”?
- to allow, to permit (obsolete)
The song sang easy as chimes in his memory. Seventy years ago, when Hal was a child, their Mennonite congregation in Wapiti, Saskatchewan, sang the “Suffer God” hymn often, always in its original German. Ancient Singer-Heinrich’s rising wail guided them so steadily into their insatiable longing for reassurance:
Wer nur den lieben Gott laesst walten
Whoever allows the dear God to rule over/
govern—control?—him as He pleases
Und hoffet auf Ihn allezeit
and hopes in Him at all times …
For refugee families from Russia in Depression Saskatchewan no seventeenth century prayer could ever be obsolete. But the word was not really obsolete for Gabriel, either. In the King James English he first heard, Jesus repeats and repeats, “Suffer little children to come … come …” And had he … had he not … suffered, endured “the dear God” to do as He pleased—as he pleased? With Ailsa as good-or-ill fairy, with Ailsa as “Elizabeth” and consecrated to … what? Dearest Father in Heaven, in the top pages of this box there already were so many intersections of pain. How would he ever be able to endure all that was still piled below?
Okay okay, leave this one, lift the second box from the shelf, heavier, waiting—and don’t think of those others stacked in the cabin above Aspen Creek—Yolanda O Yolanda, all this labelling, all this never throwing anything out and gone despite everything we agreed over and over about the past. Always this gathering and filing and piling into neat boxes and stacking one on top of the other to sit waiting forever and ever after devil damn it!
Have mercy on me.
A booklet: the Manitoba Golden Boy
as if running with torch and wheat sheaf:
VINCENT VAN GOGH
VAN GOGH TREASURES COME TO MANITOBA
On behalf of the Winnipeg Art Gallery Association … We are greatly indebted to the Queen and Government of the Netherlands … The Golden Boys are happy to have assisted the Art Gallery in bringing this exquisite Van Gogh Art Exhibition to Manitoba December 20, 1960–January 31, 1961
A catalogue of 140 numbered pictures, oil, pen and ink, oil on canvas, on wood, on paper, pencil, charcoal (washed), watercolour, black chalk (washed), charcoal heightened with white, pencil and brush, reed-pen, black crayon on … The Hague, Nuenen, Arles, Saint-Rémy, Arles, Antwerp, Paris, Auvers-sur-Oise … Yolanda and he gazed in stunned amazement, at one after the other. Vincent van Gogh ablaze in the deepest Canadian prairie winter.
They had tried to consider, however impossible, each image very carefully, trying in one concentrated moment—there were so many viewers pressing them forward—to catch at least some flicker, comprehend some … it was the exhibit’s last weekend, Friday, January 27, 1961. The strangely small pictures, like a thin line of flame seared at eye level around the blank walls of a government administration building. Yo gasped aloud, her hands clasped low around her abdomen. She was staring at—what? Café Terrace at Night? The Peach Tree in Bloom? Road with Cypress and Star? Several of the last magnificent 1890 paintings were there, Fields and Blue Sky and Wheatfield with Crows—no, not facing the crows. Where she gasped would have been #67, Old Man in Sorrow. The ancient body bent forward into the agony of a question mark, seated in an orange—Orange—chair, worn ragged in blue and thick fingers clawed into eyes. Also named On the Threshold of Eternity. Painted between seizures two weeks before Van Gogh killed himself. Yes, there, on the orange threshold.
Gabriel was born next morning. 5:27 a.m. in the Winnipeg General Hospital Women’s Pavilion, ten days early.
Hal lay in their wide bed, the night table light on and two pillows, one doubled, under his head. He would read himself as always into sleep, he had two Van Gogh biographies and four massive picture albums beside him, if necessary he could insulate himself all night in desperate genius facticity, and against his knees his random hands opened one album not to any dazzling image but to words: theological, perhaps reasonable, words. Young Vincent as a Dutch Reformed Church lay pastor among the poorest coal miners of south Belgium writing his brother Theo:
I must try, I will understand the real significance of what the great masters tell us in their masterpieces: that leads to God. One man tells it in a book, another in a picture.
O yeah Vincent, Hal thought, at age twenty-five you are able to write this, but within twelve years your own long-suffering masterpieces will lead you to the God of a botched bullet in your head—stay away from that! At twenty-five years of age, in January, 1961, Hal himself was studying theology at Winnipeg Mennonite College in order to become, perhaps, a Mennonite pastor, but also cuddling his second child in his arms while beautiful Yo and small Miriam talked to the crocuses blooming on her bedside table, and within twenty-five years that tiny sleeper—Gabe wasn’t even twenty-five—don’t go there, no, he will not allow that streak of Orange Downfill to break down—read something, anything—the funeral program that lay just below the Van Gogh catalogue in the second GABRIEL box, the folded paper he could not face in the basement, not standing, not endure the scrolled “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is …” But also incapable of letting it go, of dropping it once he had stupidly picked it up, he held it in his fingertips climbing two flights of stairs and managed to drop it on the bed so he need think of nothing in the bathroom, concentrate on doing: count the seconds to electric-brush each rock-solid tooth that remains in your head, fold and hang the towel exactly square above the toilet, seat yourself on the toilet and Kegel push to drain, you feel nothing but there’s the tinkle clear as summer rain, drain every two hours, never more than two: twenty, so minimize the thin leakage that will now be there until the day you—
Blessed … Blessed … eight pale sandy Jesus blesseds. And inside, black words on greying white:
Funeral Service of
GABRIEL THOMAS WIENS
Mennonite Church Edmonton
Tuesday, September 10, 1985, 3:00 p.m.
… Following the service everyone is invited to a fellowship coffee in the church hall. Gabriel’s wish was that his body be cremated and his ashes be scattered on Aspen Creek.
He was reading words he himself had once written and which Herbert, their pastor then, had spoken from the pulpit after the congregation sang “Children of the Heavenly Father”; reading very deliberately now, alone at night in their house on the last bed he and Yo had shared, seeing word after word distinctly and then he began to hear them, they were gradually growing louder between his ears, his mouth and face were contorting themselves into every necessary passage of his living breath, speaking aloud:
EULOGY
Gabriel Thomas Wiens was born in Winnipeg on January 28, 1961. The first flowers he saw were the purple crocuses standing beside his mother’s bed. His sister Miriam, already two years old, quickly became his closest friend. He began kindergarten in Illinois, USA, and attended public school there, in Victoria, B.C., and three schools in Edmonton until he graduated in 1979. He further attended the Winnipeg Mennonite College for one year and the University of Alberta for almost three.
He enjoyed family travel: across Canada and the United States and to South America when he was five; there he examined the rock fortress of Machu Picchu and the feathers of a tame parrot in Paraguay with equal interest. At fifteen, with younger brother Dennis added to the family, the castles, cathedrals, rivers, highways and mountains from Italy … to the Netherlands and Scotland … Scotland … filled his eyes. In 1984 he made his own longer Europe trip, living for a time in Ath—
The words were gone. As if his voice, his mind had crashed black … Hal realized his eyes were grimaced shut. When he forced them open, for an instant a new sentence uttered itself:
The image moving on a screen, or caught by the still camera: more and more his life was devoted to film. He saw over a thousand movies and wrote comments on—
But the words on the sandpaper would not hold; his eyes leaped to:
For music was another great love in his—
and the words were there but his voice staggered, broke completely on “love” … another … another … far beyond music as the “great love in his life,” more like “love possessed,” no no, “obssessed,” his sudden sobs crumpled aloud into a rage of “desecrated, terminally infected by that little snit of a …” those words were not in the eulogy, they never would or could be. Only those other words that were possible to utter before family and friends. Spoken by a minister at a funeral, the rigid, controlled words that glared at him from the paper unchangeable as rock; his rage had laboured them together into control, weeping then too through that September night:
Music began with hymns and the Beatles, moved on into both heavy rock and classics. One great favourite was the Miserere Mei by Gregorio Allegri, Psalm 51:
Have mercy on me, O God,
in your great tenderness
purify me from my sin,
for I am very well aware of my fault.
This magnificent, heartbroken prayer would echo through his apartment—
Hal was blind, washed beyond words. A vehicle passed on the street, and another close behind, their lights arcing around the ceiling together like collisions waiting … a pickup and a long body, it couldn’t really have been related to that thin child of a girl, let it go let it all go for tonight, how could you fault someone so young then, so unaware … could you ever wipe away—let it go, he would never be able to sleep. He had to stop this stupid, more than stu … he must go back to the street. Tomorrow. Sleep now, search tomorrow, tomorrow avoid the certain police and the certain consequences of his—no, not what he had started—no he had to watch and wait for something he could not now dare thin
k he had to find to see … sleep now, avoid and search tomorrow, he was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet again, his urine seeping out. He felt only a kind of gentle aura radiating from the soothing trickle he could hear, he could clench it off without effort and start it again; all the exercises he had practiced for months after the operation where the blank hospital wall stared at him day and night while its enormous electric clock twitched at each, interminable, second. Yolanda force-rescued him after four days: longer time than his seventy years, those jerked seconds, Yo Yo sweetest love of my limp un-prostated life. Two more sleeping pills, not three more, no, that could over-reach into dream, nightmare. Two, temporary blank at least. Was death blank?
English had two words: dead and death, German only one: tod/Tod. The German meaning distinguishable only by the capital when written, but not when spoken. What did Rilke write—no, it was Nietzsche—Gott ist tod or Gott ist Tod?
Say it aloud: both.
The piano was playing. He could hear it with his better right ear snuggled in the pillow, Yo touching the keys gentle as dust:
Though he giveth and he taketh,
God his children ne’er forsaketh.
’Tis his loving purpose solely
To preserve them pure and holy.
THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 2010
The sun stood high over the square brick buildings, heating the north sidewalk of Whyte Avenue. Owl sat on his heels against the wall beside the Le Café door, one of his several places. The last clumps of shaded snow were melting over the curb into the gutters. Hal stopped in front of him.
“Hey. Have you eaten?”
“Not today.”
Hal reached out; Owl took his hand and in one light motion was on his feet.
“May be good, frog legs today?” Owl asked deadpan. “Coming up to Frog Moon.”
They were walking through the shop door. “That’s Cree,” Hal said.
