by Rudy Wiebe
Even Tina had no explanation when we talked about our varying ages years after our mother’s death. She did not remember Mam nursing any baby very long in Russia—there was never enough good food, and she knew she held the bottle for baby Abe when she was three, she thought, or at most four—but she did have one particular memory about me, from before I was born. The summer our mother was pregnant with me, Mam was ashamed.
“What?”
“Ashamed to go to church, to be seen. Here I was, her daughter, young and married seven, eight months and still thin as a stick, nothing, and here she was, an old woman and sticking out”—Tina’s hands shape an impossible mound over her lap—“you ’were big!”
“Old? She just turned thirty-nine.”
“It’s true.” Tina laughs high and quick. “So we had to get going.”
Gust snorts happily. “And we caught up, seven kids too!”
Tina’s smile fades a little. After a moment she says, “That wasn’t so easy. Five children under fifteen and then all of a sudden two more in a year and a half, when I’m close to forty.”
Gust’s elbows are propped on the table, his head in his hands. “Always good kids though,” he says quietly, “all seven.”
Tony was the first, born in late August 1935, nearly eleven months after me. But he is not in the family picture, nor is his father; only slender Tina standing between our broad brothers, her hair pulled severely back, her body angled away from the shadow reaching across the ground.
Judging by my size and the height of the ornate chair, I believe those first family pictures were taken in the spring or early summer of 1936, when I was one and a half years old. Gust clicked the camera—he would have bought it—in the low evening light and baby Tony perhaps nine months old, was somewhere behind the window curtains thankfully already asleep.
2.
MOTHER TONGUES
Saskatchewan tried, wherever possible, to ensure that all its children between the ages of seven and fifteen had access to a public school within three miles of their home, and so our cul-de-sac community off Highway 4, still being chopped as farmsteads and fields out of the forest, was divided into two school districts. The boundary between them was the east–west township road allowance: everyone living south in Township 52 attended Jack Pine School, while those who lived in Township 53 went to Speedwell School four miles north (see map, p. vii). Each school was a one-room building for grades one to eight, together with space for a playground, a horse barn for students driving or riding to school and a small teacherage where the teacher could live if she or he chose not to board with a local family.
The road connecting the two schools was the busiest in the community, not only because there were settlers on every quarter section but also because the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church, the Speedwell post office—which served both school districts—run by the postmistress, Lucille (Mrs. Joe) Handley, and also Schroeder’s (later Harder’s) and Voth’s general stores were on that road. At the Jack Pine corner the road turned either east to the highway or continued south through the Clarkville School District, past homesteads and the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church, which we sometimes attended for harvest and mission services, to the hamlet of Fairholme on the Canadian National Railroad with almost a hundred people, two elevators and a tiny red passenger station, nine miles of twisting road allowance from Jack Pine School, thirteen from Speedwell.
Our CPR homestead was half a mile south of the school district boundaries and so, beginning in spring 1934, Helen, Mary and Dan attended Jack Pine. By the time I grew to consciousness Liz would soon be going too, but Dan was no longer at school: he was nine when they arrived in Canada and when he turned fifteen on January 26, 1935, he was a six-foot bony boy struggling and uncomfortable in grade five. And Pah said now the Canada school law was passed, he could leave and go work. And he did: John Lobe had a government contract for cutting railroad ties and he received a relief grant of $15 a month for every man he hired: $7.50 was to pay the wages for the worker and $7.50 his keep. So Dan joined Lobe’s crew; they chopped down spruce in the snow, sawed them into eight-foot tie lengths and then flattened them on two sides with a flat-face broadaxe: nine-inch face for a grade 1 tie, seven-inch face for a grade 3. Exhausting, heavy labour for a fifteen-year-old, but John Lobe was a good man: he paid Dan the whole grant and fed and boarded him besides, so Dan had the whole fifteen dollars to bring home to our family.
Dan never attended school again. “But I wrecked my back lifting logs, always the heavy end,” he tells me, retired from a lifetime of ranching in northern Alberta. “I had a lot of trouble. I went to chiropractors till I was about seventy-five years old, then my back must have fused, now I have no back problems, praise the Lord.”
The language in both schools was of course English, but no one spoke it at home except Joe
Handley’s family and perhaps the Metis Brieres and Naults—and Old Man Stewart who lived alone in his cluttered shack and, it was said, talked very fancy English to his dog and had been seen walking back and forth preaching something incomprehensible to the trees. The Fiedler–Lobe–Dunz clan from Bessarabia spoke mostly High German—or sometimes Swaebisch between the elders—but everyone else in a community of about three hundred people was Mennonite, 1920s immigrants or refugees from the Soviet Union and their day-to-day language was the one we Wiebe children spoke to our parents all their lives: Russian Mennonite Low German.
A comic, self-deprecating poem brought from Russia was sometimes recited in our homes when neighbours visited each other on long winter evenings, heard always with laughter and more laughing stories. I remember one verse:
MIENE MUTTASPROAK Daut disse Sproak dee baste es, Wea haft duat wohl besträde? Sest haud dee Mutta gaunz jewess See mie nie leahd too räde.
MY MOTHER TONGUE This language is the very best,
Who ever could dispute it?
Or else my mother certainly
Would never have taught me to speak it.
The Mennonite variation of European Low Country German is rooted in Old Saxon and was carried by our ancestors from Friesland, Holland, where the Mennonites originated during the religious disputes, wars and martyrdoms of the early sixteenth century. Die Wereloose Christenen, the “Defenseless Christians,” as they called themselves for their committed discipleship to the teachings of Jesus and their pacifism, carried their language with them on their journeys—which were often flights from persecution simply to stay alive—along the European Lowlands of the North Sea, always borrowing more vocabulary and practices from surrounding languages over four centuries, from the Netherlands to Poland/Prussia to Ukraine and Russia, and eventually to North and South America. It grew into a distinct language as closely related to English as it is to modern Dutch and German.
In the spring of 1938, when I was three, our family had been in Canada for eight years, but my parents had learned only a few words of English. Like many other Canadian immigrants, they had always lived in communities of their own people: several months with relatives in Didsbury, Alberta, when they arrived in 1930, three years working on the dryland farm of my mother’s uncle Henry Knelsen in the Kelstern dust bowl of southern Saskatchewan, and now five years in Speedwell. In all the strangeness of Canada and “de Englische,” the English, which to them meant anyone who did not speak Low German, they found groups of Mennonite people they could live and work with and, even more important, a church where they could worship. This was the most powerful way in which they came to feel at home in Canada.
But school in western Canada is only English, and when Helen and Mary got home late in the afternoon from their three-mile trudge back from Jack Pine School along road allowance and cow trails and said something English to me, I knew it as easily as anything my mother spoke all day. Because different languages meant nothing to me, words were sounds made with your mouth that meant whatever anyone said they did, and I swallowed them whole without thinking. To a child of three or four, words are a continuing
revelation of arbitrary mysteries that everyone older agrees about, and I learned to make the right sounds so that everyone understood me and no one would laugh: my parents simply made certain sounds, my siblings at times others.
And even better, my sisters could show me what their words looked like in the school readers they were sometimes allowed to bring home for one evening—they could not leave the reader at home for me to look at all day, never, school rules! I can still feel the ribbed, heavy blue covers of Highroads to Reading, Book Two under my fingertips, see the smooth, beautifully tinted pictures inside, and the exact shape of English words:
If the moon came from heaven, Talking all the way, What could she have to tell us, And what could she say?
“That’s moon” ten-year-old Helen points up with the same finger that has led her voice and my eyes across the page, speaking out loud the tiny black tracks on the perfect white paper. In the long northern evening light she is multiplying meaning from sound to sight and back again. “It’s almost like Mohn, just a little different.”
And of course I believe her instantly; I will understand these shifty differences for the rest of my life. For Helen and me anything can have as many names as it wants: that giant ball of light rising out of the black aspen across the field on Louis Ulmer’s homestead can change its sound from Mam’s Low German de Mohn to the church preacher’s High German der Mond to school English “the moon” as easily as it will, I already know, change its shape night after night sailing across the sky There are marks on its orange face now, they could be eyes—or scars, maybe from torture like they do in Russia, maybe the moon has a Russian name too, Pah could name it in Russian if he wanted to, and Mam as well, but they never do, never, not another word in that Communist Stalin language now be still about it.
Perhaps, if Mam dared to ask it in Russian, the moon would say something nice about her youngest brother Heinrich Knelsen, the terrible Communist, but so sad-eyed, who sent her his picture from Russia wearing that Red Army uniform, a huge red star on his pointed military cap. Or tell us something, anything, about her older brother Johann, whom Stalin’s police have disappeared. If only she dared ask—would God answer her about her brothers and horrible Stalin if she prayed in Russian? She never does, nor in Low German; my mother prays only in High German, and weeping.
The poplar leaves shiver like fear in the night wind, their branches groan above us in the moonlight. And it comes to me now that Helen and I, and Liz as well, yes, we are in a tent under the trees in the hollow behind our log house. In the dark where any sound could suddenly shift into a different, dangerous story. But there are three of us and we are safe together on our CPR homestead, warm, we have our barn lantern burning under the sloped canvas, a tiny flame enclosed by glass among our good sheets and quilts and pillows piled high around us safe as our bed. Safe from everything. Today we helped carry all the family bedding out of the house into the yard as we do every year, we stripped our fingers tight down every quilt and pillow seam, we opened all the mattresses and shook out their oat straw—crushed fine by a winter of sleep—into a heap and watched as the quick bonfire flamed it into light, air and ashes. Work all day and now the story can start, a story just a little bit scary but not too much, okay now, start:
It is time. Mother Duck has to go out of the house for food. She warns her six ducklings once more about the red fox: they must stay inside, they must lock the door behind her and not open it, no, never, only when she returns and they hear her voice call, only her voice. Then she goes out and instantly the six ducklings slam the house door shut behind her. And they lock it!
Our house has no lock, only a latch, but we are not inside. In the long summer twilight we youngest, Helen and Liz and I, crowd together around the globe of light, so safe and cozy under all our bedding in a tent set up near our root cellar and the various well holes now filled back in again because my brothers could not find water in them, and actually we’re under the tall poplars close to the Betjhüs, the toilet; it won’t be far to go in the dark if one of us has to. Our log house is sealed as tightly as possible, every crack closed with mud or rags, and there will soon be nothing alive inside, not even the mice who will have all scurried out by now, Helen says, because the horrible stink of formaldehyde is burning slowly in pails, it must burn for at least three days to kill all the Waunztje, the lice, bedbugs, that hide in every mud-plaster crack, the log joints and splits where they wait to come out at night to bite us, suck blood from the folds of our necks, from behind our ears and around our eyes when we’re asleep against the straw mattress and the deep pillows made of feathers plucked from our chickens.
My straw and feather bed is soft and very warm, but the lice and wood fleas are worse than mosquitoes because they creep in, Mam says, unstoppably day and night from the endless bush all around us. The lice like the warm seams of our bedding too and they hide in every fold, waiting there for our warm blood; sometimes I wake up at night crying in pain. But no fox can sneak out of the bush to get into a house where the door is wedged shut, and the ducklings won’t open when a fox knocks, most certainly not when they hear his voice. Never.
“Go away!” they all shout. “Our mother has a sweet voice but your voice is rough! You are the red fox, go away!”
And Red Fox will go away—to the grocery store. He says to the grocer, “Give me a big piece of chalk, I want to eat it!” The grocer is worried; he thinks this fox wants to trick someone again, but he is also very afraid and so he gives him what he wants. That’s the way it is with people who are afraid.
Red Fox chews the chalk and goes back to the ducklings again. “Open the door, my darlings,” his voice now so soft and sweet, “I have a present for each of you!”
And of course the ducklings know such a sweet voice can only be their mother, they unlock and open the door—but there are the horrible teeth of Red Fox! They scatter in every direction, hide among the firewood, inside the stove, even behind the chamber pot under the bed but Red Fox finds them, wherever they are, and gobbles them up, gulp!
Yes, every one—well, no, only five, because the littlest duckling is so smart it jumps up on the window sill and hides behind the curtain. Red Fox’s stomach is stuffed with five fat ducklings but he wants the sixth too, foxes never leave a scrap or feather, and he looks and looks, but the littlest duckling stays so perfectly still, barely breathing, that finally Red Fox thinks, why bother, such a little Tjnirps, I’m sure he doesn’t even taste good!
And he wobbles out of the house, he’s so-o-o full, lies down on the grass beside the river, it’s such hard work catching lunch, he stretches out and falls asleep in the warm sunshine.
I’m the littlest in our family so I’m often called du Tjnirps, you little twerp! and I know for sure I’d be the smart duckling and I’d save everyone, no fox would ever find me behind the window curtains. Though I have never seen a river. Sometimes in spring, when the snow melts, water runs past for several days like a creek through this hollow below our locked house with formaldehyde smoking through it. The ugly scrabbling Waunztje will be falling inside, out of the cracks and mud plaster between the logs like snow, my mother and sisters will sweep them into black drifts and shovel them out when we open the doors and windows wide, let the wind whistle through and blow out the stink.
I hear this story inside our summer Waunztje tent behind the CPR house on the knoll. We lived there only four years; we had not yet cleared thirty acres of cropland—all the men had to work for pay whenever they could to support the family, and there was no time to clear bush; perhaps we had not even paid the CPR any more than the down payment—and though it seems our mother did not want to leave, in 1938 Pah insisted we move. John Franka had proved up on a quarter near Speedwell School, but he was moving away: that was better, more cleared land, and we should go there.
This happened before I turned four, and I remember nothing about chickens roosting and laying eggs in the log shack in which the local midwife Mary (Mrs. Gottlieb) Biech once assist
ed my mother to give birth to me. I do not retain the faintest image of a room inside that good CPR house, not a curtain or a windowsill, nor can I recall whether the interior walls were nailed over diagonally with slim willows and smeared smooth with plaster for whitewash. Nevertheless, this detailed story is as sharp a memory as I have of our first homestead: ducklings, a fox, the tent in the hollow under poplars, our house sealed thick with poison gas, the bush vermin my mother detested: Waunztje.
The story is like a folktale Mam might have known from her High German Mennonite school in Russia, but the only stories she told were either about her life in Russia or from the Bible, and there are no talking ducks in the Bible, leave alone in a Mennonite village. It seems only Helen could have told the duckling story; she must have found it in a Jack Pine School book. Did I know that much English before I was four?
Nonetheless, the story continues:
Mother Duck returns to the horror of her door hanging open, her house empty and furniture thrown around like feathers, oh-oh-oh, she is crying her worst fears for her children, lost forever because of horrible Red Fox—but the sixth duckling bumbles against the curtain, drops to the floor with stubby wings beating, Oh smart little Sixth! He’ll tell Mother everything, together they follow the tired tracks to the bank of the river where Red Fox lies snoring. With his belly bulging … and they see it ripple, yes, it is stirring a little.