Grandmother, Laughing

by Armin Wiebe

  I heard clothes rubbing together, and then Dad said, “Only if you didn’t get too burned to touch.” It was very quiet for a minute.

  Then Mom said, “Maybe you could talk to your father again. What can it hurt?”

  “Did you lock the house door?” Dad said. Their feet stepped to the front door so I hurried around the corner. When the door opened, Mom stepped out with Dad’s glove in her hand and then Dad came out with the gold envelope in one hand. In his other hand he carried the heavy old bat with the chipped-off knob that he wouldn’t let the children use, not even the big boys.

  Talking with Grandfather didn’t put Dad into a better mood and for sure it was a little scary when he shooed Mom and me into the car and drove away so fast he almost ran over a chicken that had got out of the pen. The old bat and Dad’s glove lay on the floor where I sat in the back seat. I stared at the crest on Dad’s blue and red baseball cap on the seat beside me—two red birds sitting on a bat. Mom tried to talk to him but he looked so black at her that she closed her mouth and didn’t say another word until we parked behind a long line of cars on the road close to the pasture where the picnic was. Dad got out of the car and leaned the seat-back forward to let me out, then he reached in and pulled out the bat and glove and we walked into the picnic together. First we stopped by the little store that had been made with planks between four trees and Dad bought ice-cream cones for us, and then we walked over to the baseball field where big girls already out of school were having a game.

  Dad left Mom and me with our ice-cream cones alongside the baseline where some women Mom knew were sitting on blankets. Then he carried his bat and glove over to join his team. That’s when I saw that Dad had forgotten his baseball cap. His team didn’t have uniforms yet, but the men all had the same caps. Without asking Mom, I flitzed back to the car to get his cap. For sure the car was unlocked, in those days nobody locked their cars except if they went to Winnipeg. Most people left the keys in too. I hurry got the cap and slammed the door shut. I heard a motor noise on the road and when I looked that way I saw Grosspapuh’s truck coming along the road. Goody, I thought. They have come to watch Dad play ball. But I didn’t want to be late with Dad’s cap so I flitzed back to the picnic just as the big girls were cheering hip hip hurray. Dad took the cap from me and patted me on the head. I felt proud and embarrassed at the same time. Then he told me not to stand too close to the game.

  But what else do I remember? I remember running around and playing tag with a boy called Jakie. I remember Dad and the other team’s pitcher catching a bat between them and climbing their hands up the bat to see who would get the field first. Dad’s hand fit in the top place just under the knob. I remember watching wide-eyed as Dad pitched three strike-outs in a row that first inning. The first two batters on Dad’s team hit grounders but got thrown out on first base. Dad was up next and he carried the old bat with the chipped-off knob to home base. He spit on his hands and rubbed them together, then he gripped the bat and looked at the pitcher. The pitch was high and Dad let it go. Dad got ready again. The pitcher started winding up.

  “Hey, get off the field!”

  I saw Blatz inside the backstop shuffling toward Dad. “Dad, Blatz!” I yelled. The pitcher let fly. Dad swung his bat. He missed the ball and the bat flew from his hand and hit Blatz on the side of the head. And then Blatz was on the ground with blood running out of his ear. It all happened so fast I can’t say if Dad heard me or even knew that Blatz was there. I can’t say. I just can’t say.

  But should I tell Grandmother Susch what I really remember? What I never even told my mother? Five years after Blatz died Dad hired on to teach in Gracefield village, where they had a teacherage with a picket fence around it and the school had a piano. The first day of school Dad asked the pupils if any of them knew how to play piano and when nobody could, at recess time he made the big boys shove that piano into the storeroom, where it was soon buried under school supplies and old textbooks. Mom seemed happier with a bigger house and she knew people in the village, which wasn’t quite so English as New Darwin. Dad seemed happier too, what with having lots of big boys, even some grade niners, so that with the big girls too he had enough players for two baseball teams, and a few spares yet. Recess often went longer than fifteen minutes, but not so often that villagers complained. Still, even to me then when I was ten, it always felt like there was a drizzle shadow even behind the sunshine that made me feel tight and stiff, like I couldn’t quite let myself go all the way loose, even when I was sleeping. Mom and Dad never talked about Blatz, and we didn’t go visit Grossmamuh Susch and Grosspapuh Obrum so often as we used to.

  One day the school from the next village came to play ball. When their team was warming up on our diamond, their teacher was batting. I remember he had on a white straw hat, and glasses too. Anyway, the pitcher pitched a fast one and the teacher swung so hard that his bat flew out of his hands, all the way over the school fence into the neighbour’s yard. Some kids laughed, but I saw that Dad was very quiet. Usually, if he wasn’t umping, he would be cheering and coaching loud, but this game he hardly said anything, and then only quietly. In my mind I kept seeing Dad’s bat hitting Blatz’s head.

  I had gone home after school and was reading a cowboy story in the Family Herald in my room when Mom told me to go tell Dad that supper was ready. I didn’t go right away because a bunch of bad cowboys were riding after a good cowboy, and there was shooting too, but Mom told me again so I went. When I got into the school I heard quiet piano playing. I stopped in the hall before I opened the classroom door. I wanted to listen because this music was different from the piano music in church, so I stood there and breathed in the smell of sweeping compound while the piano played quite quietly. Somehow I knew it was Dad, and I knew too that I shouldn’t go in to see. The storeroom was on the other side of the girls’ coatroom, so I tiptoed into there and stood with my ear against the wall. All of a sudden the piano music changed from quiet and slow to loud and fast and my mouth hung open at how Dad’s fingers could wribble and wrips over those keys like that. It was a song like I think I had heard on the radio by Willie Elias’s place. Of course, now I know Dad was playing the slow part of the Moonlight Sonata and then some Jerry Lee Lewis songs, but I didn’t know that then. Dad was doing something that he didn’t want me to know, I thought. And I thought too that he was thinking about that teacher letting the bat fly over the fence.

  Then the music stopped. I heard the lid close over the keyboard. Dad’s footsteps slowly creaked the floor. I stood frozen in the shadow of the coatroom. The classroom door opened and Dad came through. He closed the door behind him and slowly walked out the front door without looking sideways. I didn’t move, even after the front door clinked shut. I didn’t know how long to wait, because I didn’t want Dad to know that I had heard him play, that I now knew that he could play, and play well too.

  I heard the car door open and close. Then the motor started up. I heard the clang of the gear shifting and then the crackling sound of the tires as they slowly moved over the gravel and turned onto the village street. I waited for the sound of the car speeding up but Dad drove slowly until I couldn’t hear the car at all.

  “Where did your Dad go?” Mom asked.

  “He didn’t say.” I couldn’t say any more. I couldn’t tell her about the piano playing. Even then, I just felt like it was something I shouldn’t talk about. I don’t think Mom slept that night. I for sure didn’t, even after I read through the cowboy story again and Mom told me already to turn off the light.

  The Buckingham cigarettes song on the radio woke me up. Outside, a car door clinked. I listened to the footsteps on the wooden porch and the creak as the door opened.

  “Well good, then,” Mom said. “Breakfast ready is almost.” Then she called, “Charlie, breakfast!” I never heard Dad say where he had been that night and I never heard Mom ask him. And I never told anyone about that piano playing. If I am honest w
ith myself, I must confess that I didn’t think Dad was going to come home. Now I think about the scribbled Sonata 15 in C Der Sohn. On his last day, Beethoven Blatz was composing a sonata about my father.

  26

  Susch

  Darpslied Elders Villa/The Schpikja House

  Oh Koadel, you did come. And Michelena! Come, take me around with your arms. How much you liken your father and your mother.

  You have the wheelchair. To the schpikja house? Holem de gruel—that will be something to see. I haven’t been inside that schpikja house since Isaac nailed it shut. Why did me and Obrum leave it boarded up? What were we afraid of? We had told our stories with looking in each other’s eyes.

  Thank you, Michelena. I can step to the wheelchair. Just put the brakes on. My old bones you don’t want on the floor. My walking stick too. Who knows? Maybe I’ll want to walk on the prairie. My eyes are still good—from walking on the prairie and looking far, I think, and close too. You know, Koadel, I was reading in Beethoven Blatz’s books. I can still read his scribble without eyeglasses. Ach, that Mensch had a trüarijch life.

  You told the nurse that you’re taking me out?

  It’s good to breathe outside air. Blatz talked about the thick air in his Russian village. Our village air was too thick for Obrum. And me too. Even if it was lonesome sometimes, I always breathed better when I got back to the prairie after the village. Not just nose and lungs, no, the head—and the heart and soul too. Not so tight.

  I should stop this flapping tongue. Can you help me into the car?

  My, it rides smooth. It’s not schtookering like that Model T used to when we could feel every knubbel in the road. The train to Peace River schtookered like that too. Obrum had not said a word about Peace River after he brought that piano home. So much happened that I forgot what he said about maybe moving there. So here, years later, he comes home with the mail and there is a letter from Peace River. It’s from the Lutheran carpenter’s wife. Maria, her name is. She is telling Obrum that she is very sick and hasn’t long to live. She still remembers him even if she hasn’t seen him since her man moved her to Peace River. She asks if he still has her piano. She wonders if his wife learned to play. She writes that she never had any children. “Try we did, oh we tried, but such blessings were not willed for us.”

  Yes, Obrum, the letter you let me read. You sat me beside on the lawnswing and you told me about the two winters you lived by the Lutheran carpenter. The wedding dress had been Maria’s—the piano too. You had tears in your eyes when you told me that Maria told you about her husband’s mumps and well … one thing led to another. But you never told Maria about the bad mumps you had had. You stayed at Maria’s house during the storm. The carpenter was home. I believe you that.

  Where are we? Oh, the village. Those cottonwood trees I still know. There used to be more. Can you drive slow? There’s Schallemboych’s Tien’s yard, I think. It must be. The house barn is gone, but I can see Yelttausch Yeeatze’s machine shed behind those caraganas. It sure could use fresh paint. And there, I think that’s the Nickel yard but I can’t see the twenty-five-foot well. Holem de gruel, that little house still stands—and painted too. And there’s my mother’s garden—and the oak trees on the end where I saw my grandmother Glootje Susch. Laughs she still? Ach, yoh, everything comes to an end, except a sausage, which comes to two ends.

  Obrum, you still can make me laugh.

  Oops! Did we just go down a little hill? I see the wire gate. Michelena, have you been here before? No? Just you, Koadel? Is it … no, don’t tell me yet. I still like a surprise. That’s what kept my heart bouncing all those years with Obrum Kehler—one schtooks after another. Koadel, that gate still holds good after all these years.

  How high the grass is. I liked the colours best in August. Softer. Not so bright. Warm, not hot. Beethoven played piano like that. After a long walk on the prairie and the piano stayed in tune. I could feel it—if he was hearing good music when I walked with him. Warm shivers over my skin. In my bones. Crazy, not? Warm shivers. How can such be? He would go try the new music on the piano, and on the lawnswing I would listen with my skin. Warm shivers. I would taste earth cherries on my tongue.

  Ach, the house still stands. Obrum built it. Koadel, do you remember looking out from the see-out window? Upstairs? If you looked just right it would seem like the tall grass reached all the way to touch the sky.

  But here, the schpikja house. The roof is still on. For sure, I want to get out. You think you can just leave me in the car? Your Grossmamuh still feels her oats more than that. Can you drive close to the door? Then I can just use the walking stick.

  So much happened in these two grain sheds. Warmer the sod house would have been. Two years only, but they take up the most room in my head. The world is really inside a person’s head, isn’t it? The head flies through the years while I move these old bones to schtiepa myself on this cane.

  Thank you, Koadel. I think I can do it now. Maybe hold me by the other arm. I see you have those boards pulled off the door. Isaac was so hetzed up that day—such weight on his shoulders—his weight was the heaviest, for sure, the heaviest.

  Thank you, Michelena. How kept this door the snow out in winter? Holem de gruel, dishes still on the table. For an eyeblink I saw the rocking chair with the red ribbon. But no, we moved that into the new house. I rocked Isaac in it—and you too, Koadel. Can you believe it, Michelena? Not even five pounds when he was born.

  What is wrong with me? I can’t look where the piano is. What don’t I want to see? Found you the notebooks Blatz scribbled in on the prairie? They were smaller than the Tagebücher you brought me to read. When he heard sounds he liked he would say, “Ich muss schreiben! Ich muss schreiben!” And he would write down what he heard.

  What said you, Koadel? You found Beethoven’s sonatas in the piano bench? Sonata nummer eins für Susch. Sometimes für Sonia. Someone could play them? I’m almost frightened to think such could be true. Is my heart strong enough to hear it?

  Michelena, you will play? Wait, I must sit down before you play. My walking stick won’t hold me up when that piano showells through my ears.

  Stands that lawnswing still outside? Can you help me to sit out there? Thank you. Michelena, can you play loud enough so outside I can hear? You have such a good heart. You can start playing. Ach, even the first notes shiver me through.

  So high this grass is grown. Obrum said buffalo used to graze here and keep the grass short—and fire he said, big fire would burn the dead grass so that the new grass could grow. Good thing such fire never came here—the schpikja house and the piano would have burned—and this lawnswing too.

  How Michelena plays that piano! Beethoven Blatz’s music, yes, I remember it. My fists sink into the dough while my heart lifts up. Never thought it would happen again—so trüarijch was my life after you died, my dear Beethoven Blatz—had I not had Obrum’s arms around me in the night, I don’t know how I could have lived. Oh Obrum, this swing, that brought us together, it helped. Blatz never sat on the swing beside me—such was not for him and me—no Obrum, some things were only for us. We just knew.

  One time when Blatz played piano I was embroidering a bird on a dishtowel. Three hoops lay on the table, one over another so that each ring shared space with each other ring separately. Only one space in the centre had all three rings sharing space together. That’s how it was with me and you and Beethoven Blatz. We three shared weighty things, but some things I shared only with you and some things I shared only with Beethoven. Some things I pondered only in my own heart.

  Ach, Obrum, I knew you would come to schuckel with me. Can you hold me around with your arm? The swing creaks, but like you said, grease would just get full with dust. Hear you that music? Blatz’s old fingers can yet wribble and wrips over those keys like a long-legged spider running away from a flyswatter. He always let his hands get too cold in that vekjlämtet piano room, so
I knitted him finger gloves, but the next thing I knew he had cut the fingers off. Well, yes, when a man has his mind set on something there is no use trying to talk sense to him. You probably didn’t even get a chance to hear all these sonatas that Beethoven scribbled down while you were carpentering away. You know, Obrum, sometimes I was angry with you for leaving me alone with Blatz. How I wanted to reach for you in the bed at night—for sure that, but not just that. I mean, with Blatz and that piano I heard such wondrous sounds, out on the prairie, and inside the schpikja house. I wanted you to hear that music too. I wanted you to know what I was feeling when I heard Beethoven Blatz play the music he was finding in the tall grass.

  And yes, Blatz never forgot where it had started for him. Almost every day he would play that Moonlight Sonata through—all three parts. When he played Moonlight Sonata I stopped what I was doing and schlikjed over to the lawnswing with my ears open so wide a person might have looked inside my head. My ears would feel Sonia in the air like a thin cloud or a sniff of roses and a violin would play so softly that maybe the bow wasn’t quite touching the strings. Oh yes, with Baby Isaac in my arms I would schuckel and feel Grandmother Glootje Susch almost close enough to wrap herself around us like a crazy quilt, and I would feel almost together—except for the cool side where I wished you could be to warm me.

  Oh, Koadel, forgive me. Your old grossmamuh slips away into old dreams with that music. You say Isaac played piano in the school? Your mother sent you to call him for supper and you heard him playing piano? What then did he play? You think he was playing Beethoven?

  Ach, Obrum, I hear it in my head how our son played Beethoven even better than Blatz. Do you hear him, Obrum? Our son is playing that Moonlight Sonata. It makes me think of that story Blatz told me about how Beethoven made up that music for a blind girl in a poor house where the candle burned out and his friend opened the window so the moon could shine on the girl’s poor little piano. Oh but now a schtooks, and Isaac plays that wild music pounding harder and faster than even you did standing up with “Chopsticks” when the piano crashed down from the wagon. Such swelling waves he makes, raking his fingers over the keys from one end to another, high to low and low to high, and then the low schtooking schtooking schtooking like a bouncing heart while the fingers dance on the high keys and Isaac sings this shouting song and I see Blatz’s head get so red I think he will explode, and then as smooth as a baby’s finger on a mother’s cheek the piano playing slides into a sonata again, only now it is one of Blatz’s sonatas, für Sonia, für Susch, mourning dove, meadowlark, wind through the tall grass, fuscheling smoky pink flowers, black and orange butterflies, gophers standing up, rabbits bounding through the pepper bushes, garter snakes winding between flower stems—oh, Obrum, such music that cuts my heart still.