by Rudy Wiebe
I heard a leaf fall when I died
Who said that?
And then it was
I could not see to see
When?
Straight snow-flecked gravel south to the notched Pigeon Lake Hills. Emmanuel Lobitski still cultivated the earth his great-grandfather from Bessarabia had homesteaded, and at the moment his fields were too close to Aspen Creek to be ripped open for the next human exploitation. Thirty years ago the Alberta Government had promised there would be no more strip-mining within two miles of running water; a promise that could be changed in a legal instant. Hal drove slowly, his lights off, past the farmhouse, past the seven oil donkeys pumping steadily on either side of the road allowance; Manny and Belinda and their children and cows and calves and hay and grain were long accustomed to that spin and sucking. And here at the T-intersection stood the No Through Traffic sign. Beside bare mottled trees which the Alberta Government declared were Hal and Yo’s—he had words on a piece of paper that declared it, the oil and coal companies believed it—the tips of the trees a shimmer of green. Patches of May snow on the forest floor. DEAD END.
Hal pulled in tight under the spruce and aspen behind the cabin. Even if someone at the road saw his track in occasional snow and heaved the locked gate off its hinges and drove down the triple-bend driveway, they would not see the dark Celica unless they walked around the cabin. He lifted the Bible off the passenger seat, hoisted himself out and closed the door. He breathed sharp, fresh spring. Listened.
He heard the aspen groan. No frogs, no valley coyote song and echo. But the creek, the chuckle of melted snow far below in the rapids.
He did not walk to the edge of the cliff to look down at the ragged path of water gleaming in evening light, down at possible vees of beaver swimming upstream. Nor the path to the shed, behind which they had after cut away the towering aspen and young birch to clear a small meadow for playing thoughtless games, for a narrow garden where every spring the tips of carefully planted saskatoon bushes were gnawed by hungry moose into stark, flowerless brush—but with the single birch they left growing at the spot, bushy now and tall, at least twenty-five feet. No need for even a glance; it was axed in his memory.
Goodbye then. The pickup is serviced, both tanks filled with gas, there is all the time in the world to drive the five hundred kilometres to the Oldman River. But you will not drive there, to park where you can be found only by strangers. You come here: to be found by the ones you love, who love you. Too bad, Dad, you’re in Montreal. I love you. Okay Dad, goodbye then.
Hal was walking towards the front door of the cabin. Along the wall, each golden Douglas fir log grooved, notched and stacked and holding its place. The pale aspen hovered over him like ceiling columns branching into the high darkness of a cathedral nave, thin snow muffled his steps, he felt himself walking through the wilderness of this world with a book in his hand and a great burden upon his back.
At the corner of the cabin the setting sun burst between the black western trees: flamed orange to red against burning clouds.
And, suddenly, there were bats flitting over him, here, there, an instant flutter of black that flopped into darkness, chirring like tiny sprockets, darted one instant there and gone and here and gone again, such twitching swoops of summer! Gabriel said, Must be nice to be a bat, the sounds of darkness help you see. But it was too early, too cold for mosquitoes … yet it seemed the benevolent bats were there over him, for this instant.
He stood listening to the flaming sky. What is to be done?
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never
Through the bars of trees the sun burned into the horizon. Last fall, after Yo’s funeral, Dennis and Emma walked there at the turn of the road; so tall, so slight against the last light.
Bats have no feathers. But they do sing their own song. What shall I do.
He sits in the armchair beside the wood heater. Thick warmth from the fire he has laid wraps him like a feather blanket: his mother beside him sewing, Margret rustling above them in her space under the rafters, Thom’s big body bent to the muted radio. Hal can hear them all over the static snarking in the small log room, “… the Shadow knows what evil lurks in …” and the laugh sinister, a radio program he is not allowed to listen to—a mutter of spring thunder coming—the carded layers of wool his mother has laid out on cloth held in a wooden frame that fills the living space as she sews the quilt for a mission auction, sewing she sings:
Schlop, Kliena, schlop.
Sleep, little one, sleep.
Buete senn de Schohp,
Outside are the sheep,
De Schohp mett witte Woll;
The sheep with their white wool;
Nu drintj dien Bukje voll.
Now drink your tummy full.
Seventy-five years of his singing memory. Human song must have begun with the howl of lament; which became prayer; which became hope. O Living God, let your mercy shine on us pitiful sinners.
Gabriel’s blue Bible lies in his lap. His fingers touch a tab and there opening is Jesus, Matthew chapter 4, four heavy underlines in half a column:
Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil
And he fasted forty days and forty nights and afterward he was hungry All these I will give you if you fall down and worship me
God and him only shall you serve
and behold, angels came
The Spirit leads Jesus straight to the devil: the Tempter, the Accuser. Forty days and forty nights and he is most certainly hungry. Well, twenty-four years and seven months and ten or eleven days: how hungry are you then? What if you live searching what is written and filmed and sung and preached for years and face the Tempter, the Accuser every day and every day you starve? Why are the angels who come to you always, only, a terror?
But you know a possible place,
a place of security in the face of an experience
still frightening even once chosen
He unhooks the heater door, wide, and lays in three more splits of aspen. He watches the fire run, leap higher along the raw edges, cower and leap everywhere again into innumerable vanishing and reliving colours, spires and falls and flows of light. Gradually, steadily, the tracks of its running waft upward into the chimney, down to the floor of livid grey ash. This is what remains. In fire we confess our ashes.
His unanswerable questions list themselves like blessed Yo writing herself reminders on the scrap paper pads she bundles together with paper clips:
Why am I alone?
How can I confess?
Why don’t I look in the basement storage for the Orange Downfill?
Why didn’t I ask Owl to come with me?
How could you become so fearless as to plan that small truck ending?
Why do I try to freeze Yo in the final order of our house?
Why do I refuse to have a cellphone?
How could you lay your body down like that?
Why do I not visit Dennis or Miriam?
How could you imagine we could ever get over this?
Why did you come
The questions mirror themselves, he is surrounded, wherever he turns they repeat themselves into endless distance. Like the small ceremony held here with that urn. Thursday, September 12, 1985. Such a small container to contain all this.
Who am I to doubt fire and smoke and ash?
When will I confess and ask forgiveness for the evil I have done?
Gabe, you had such unimaginable strength to come here to park among the trees. Why couldn’t you use that strength to
And from his staring incomprehension of the flames before him, of the open book in his lap, he gradually recognizes a pencil touch in the margin at the bottom corner of the page. The third verse of Matthew chapter 5:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The burni
ng wood in the heater collapses with a soft crush. From where he sits, without lifting his eyes from the words he can feel the shadows deepen beyond the stacked log archway into the living room. He sat here, in this body-molded armchair, the evening after they poured the ashes on the rapids and he raised his glance and saw Gabriel leaning against the left corner of the arch. Watching them all huddled around the heater. The round butt of a log haloed his head perfectly. Hal jerked erect: in the living room there was only darkness.
There is no need to look up, not now. He contemplates the message of the pencil touch. Night wind whistles in the chimney. He listens, yearning for a piano, and he hears the words of a letter that once came to him from Edmonton Prison, from a woman or a man he can never recall he had visited there:
For many of us, our families have deliberately
forgotten the sound of our names
But you know God does hear
the cry of the poor
Does he know? It may be he is not poor enough. Not yet.
Was Gabriel?
He waits.
RUDY WIEBE’S novels, stories and non-fiction stand at the forefront of Canadian literature. He is widely published internationally and has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction twice, for The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers. Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, which Wiebe co-authored with Yvonne Johnson, was awarded the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, among numerous others. His memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was a national bestseller. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and lives in Edmonton with his wife, Tena.
