by Rudy Wiebe
Abe’s recitation pages have a wreath of apple blossoms glued above his name and dedication. Its title is “Gnade nichts als Gnade,” “Grace Nothing but Grace,” and like Dan’s poem it contains not one actual detail of our parents’ lives, how they met, survived years of separation, world war and civil war, revolution, anarchy, plague, starvation, persecution, statelessness and flight that forced them halfway around the world. The only memorable image comes in stanza three, where they are told that today their life’s journey together lies before them like a necklace of twenty-five pearls: a rich testimony of God’s grace, nothing but Gottes Gnade.
Knowing my parents’ profound, humble piety—especially my mother’s on memorial occasions—they must have been deeply moved by these verses; and perhaps most by Abe’s because it is possible the poem was written for this occasion by “Dijchta” Friesen, as he was called all his life, “Poet, Composer” Heinrich D. Friesen, who with his wife Katherina and ten children tried to farm for several years in the Speedwell district. Years later when we moved to Coaldale, Alberta, I would know him as a short white-bearded ancient, with a startling, direct gaze from under bushy eyebrows, the classic Russian Mennonite village bard who, on the occasion of a wedding, anniversary, dedication or funeral, would be asked to compose a commemoration, and at the appropriate moment he would step forward and declaim with magnificent intensity, eyes closed and head thrown back, the gathered words that could focus the emotions of the community. It was said that often verses came to Dijchta Friesen in dreams by night, and he would rise to write them on the whitewashed plaster of his house walls so he would know them exactly when he awoke in the morning.
Heinrich Friesen’s grandson Ed tells me their family left Speedwell in 1937, but my brother’s faded ink is, I believe, a Dijchta Friesen original. Abe could have written him a letter, and no Mennonite bard who (as Friesen narrates in his personal memoir) had felt since childhood that he was called of God to poetry would have refused such a request.
A 1939 box camera could take no pictures inside; our four silver wedding pictures show our family in January snow in the Franka yard. One is a vertical close-up of our parents standing apart, with my father’s body angled towards my mother and his eyes as usual fixed somewhere in the distance, as if he were about to walk away in front of her, over continents and oceans—back to Russia perhaps. But she is unconcerned; she looks directly at the camera. She is forty-three years old, her folded face fixed in resolve.
We nine children, including Gust and grandson Tony but not baby Eldo, huddle together tightly, almost as if we were being threatened by the huge expanse of snow and sky, the spray of poplars and a bristle of spruce along the horizon spread behind us. We are backed against the rail fence; the decrepit Franka house is to our left and cannot be seen. Over the garden fence behind us hang frozen bedsheets.
Why would bedsheets be hung out to freeze dry on a day of celebration? Was someone in our family a bed wetter? Not likely Liz, almost eight; it could only have been me. Or Helen throwing up sick per haps; a year later she would begin chronicling all our family illnesses in a tiny notebook, beginning with herself in the third person:
1940. Helen Wiebe got sick 5 of Jan. On her
birthday [her twelfth]. was sick quite a while
had to go to hospital [North Battleford] on 13 of
Jan. got operation the same day 13 Jan. at 5 P. M. was very sick got water about 15th. got meals
on 16th, then came home on 24 of Jan. still was
very sick then on night about the 26 of Jan got
very sick got heart trouble and stayed in bed
4 months and on Mother’s Day [May 12] Schroeder [with his truck] came over and
brought me too church & after she was well.
That 1940 operation was an appendix removal, but as an infant Helen already carried those lurking “heart troubles” with her during our family’s flight to Canada over Moscow. The “troubles” worsened as she walked to school for miles in every Saskatchewan weather, and they would end only with her death.
But that spring she could still smile out of our living-room window with little Eldo faintly beside her; and the outside world, where she could not walk, reflected in the glass that protected her.
I remember no little-boy bedwetting, nor was I ever teased about it by the family. In winter my parents always had a covered chamber pot under their bed which both they and we smaller children used at night, and before the accidents that would happen to me on the Franka yard, I remember only the church balcony as a place of possible affliction: the murmur of people talking among the benches below after Sunday service and the huge hands of Onkel (“Mister”) Aaron Heinrichs.
I cannot recall his face, though sometimes a drift of it, large and open, seems to shimmer unfocused in my searching memory. His daughter Gilda, Abe’s wife, gave me a grainy photo of their family surrounding him in his half-open coffin, but even that stirs no certainty. He obviously had the long Heinrichs nose, but he was a tall man and the coffin, tilted sideways, hides his folded hands. His Trajchtmoaka hands, “to-make-correct,” healer’s hands, had very short, very broad thumbs, which by some combination of knowledge, goodness and subliminal intuition, over time and with relentless application, wherever they placed themselves and worked warmth into your body, could soothe and manipulate it out of painful confusion into perfect order. Like the village poet and midwife, the Russian Mennonites had a tradition of Trajchtmoaka that went back through Prussia to medieval Friesland, and in ages when doctors were rare—and even they had little science to make diagnoses—the confident and inexplicable hands of a healer were the mercy of God upon us. Aaron Heinrichs was a Saskatchewan wilderness shaman—though the people of Speedwell, with the possible exception of the Metis Naults and Brieres, would not have called him that. If you broke a bone or developed an unbearable rotten tooth, you drove to his homestead; if your body had some persistent problem you could no longer endure, you finally talked to him after church and then with him you climbed the open stairs behind the men’s pews, up into the privacy of the balcony. Sunday after Sunday.
Apparently I stuttered. I was four and a half when Aaron Heinrichs died, unexpectedly and to everyone’s deep sorrow, in April 1939, but it seems my early speech often sounded, as my siblings have told me, laughing, “like an empty hayrack clattering over Speedwell stones.” And however long it took for his great thumbs to reorder those stones in my shoulders, the length of my neck, the roots of my skull, I have no memory of stuttering, ever. Perhaps it was the passing affliction of a quick child pouring out words faster than his larynx could shape them, and the cure was already happening when the silver wedding pictures showed me in my first suit and tie—the jacket a bit tight for my shoulders—but I retain no sensation of my body changing, lengthening under hands I know I saw and felt; no shadow of a huge man bending over me. Only the faint apprehension of three-tiered rows of backless benches in a narrow balcony, two windows with trees flickering in light beyond the sloping porch roof, and those hands, already curved by their indelible thumbs, approaching.
When you live by farming, land comes first, house last. The Franka house was no more than three one-room shacks built end to end, logs cobbled together at different times with a closed porch stuck on at the kitchen. The ceilings were so low only three logs lay below and two logs above the single window in each room; from inside, the pole roof rafters were visible outside as level with each window-top. The roof had a centre peak of barely three feet, and its tarpaper was so tattered, its slabs so curled and rotting, that during the first rain we discovered disaster. The only dry place inside the house was under the oilcloth of the kitchen table. I have a memory of crouching there with Liz while Mam and Mary and Helen run around placing pails, basins, bowls, cups, under the worst of the steady, or pouring, drips. The twisted floorboards with their wide cracks in all three rooms were covered with utensils.
Our mother loved order; her house was always opp’jiriemt, cleaned up,
and she was very unhappy at having to live and work in such an endless mess. But she accepted that we had to leave our new, well-built CPR house, its high upstairs for sleeping under a watertight roof, for these shacks because of the Franka fields. There were three, about sixty acres wrestled clear of the bush; the largest opened east of the house, upward on a slope tilted into the spring sun, and beyond a small draw to the north, where water ran through willows in the spring, lay another field almost as large. The third bordered the open farmyard on two sides and part of it was the garden, convenient and as large as you wanted to plant it close around the house.
The barn of slim logs hunched even lower than the house, its roof was flat and covered with sod that grew bush weeds as high as our grain fields in summer, and leaked long after any rain ended. There was no well on the yard, but a slough good for watering cattle lay a hundred yards beyond the trees behind the barn, and a seepage well dug beside it filtered swamp water that was drinkable—if that was all you had. Pah insisted our Pripps, the roasted, ground barley brew all Mennonites drank instead of unaf-fordable coffee or tea, for him tasted even better made with water from that well. But it was a very long carry in pails to the house, and cattle heaving themselves through spongy moss to reach open water in sloughs sometimes get stuck; if they sink to their heavy bellies, they may struggle until they disappear in brown water seeping up around them before anyone knows they’re in trouble. Certainly no cow can save another from a Saskatchewan slough or muskeg; nor any unharnessed horse.
Pah loved that land. He sits on our eight-foot disk with reins taut, the four horses alert and ready: the matched sorrels Prince and Jerry, which were his pride, hitched on the outside with wide Bell and her white-faced yearling Floss between them. The sod-roofed barn squats in the distance, the poplar trees along the horizon are sprigged without leaves, but he is already disking the big field beside the house, cutting and turning last year’s stubble over into a new seedbed. The season is so early he still wears his knee-high winter felt boots inside low rubbers. Surrounded by grey soil and mulched clumps of straw, with only two fist-sized stones visible anywhere. The Franka place, as we always called it even after we had moved away from it too, on the southeast quarter of Section 9, Township 53, Range 17, west of the 3rd meridian.
We lived there from the fall I turned four until the summer before I turned eight. I of course didn’t know its legal geographical coordinates, nor saw the surveyor mound already unnoticeable under fallen leaves and young aspen, its black iron rod pounded square with those numbers incised into it, and the warning:
It is unlawful to remove this marker.
Maximum sentence: 7 years imprisonment.
Not red “wrath” from henceforth and forevermore as the stranger had painted, but scary enough; in its cut iron as foreign as sudden words on stone.
Years later Dan found such a corner marker for me. And I certainly felt no implied threat; much more how utterly flimsy the thin pin seemed poked away in this massive, incomprehensible bush; as if, in a flit of surveyor passing quick as the ping of its pounding in, the pin’s very minuteness could assert possession on this folded earth and force it into deliberate mile grids like the roads built by Roman Empire engineers; as if a single human being with a tiny instrument could, no matter what the land’s unalterable physical meanderings, quarter it down smaller than square miles, notch its crested trees with road allowances across long glacial eskers and swamps and dense poplars and thicker spruce, over water and valley straight as the eye could see no matter where the eventual trail would be forced to turn, so that horses driven by people could actually haul loaded wagons down ravines, around bottomless muskegs, up steep hills. And imagine they could declare: This land belongs to me! An iron peg half an inch thick hammered into boreal forest: if you can ever find it to take away, you may have to endure seven years in a six-by-eight-foot cell.
Our father lived his last forty-five years in Canada and laughter was always his best evasion for ugly memory. “Nä, nä, nijch hia!” No no, not here. No police ever pounded on our door in the dead of night. In Speedwell I remember seeing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police once, when I was nine. The two scarlet men turned their crested cruiser slowly into our yard in bright sunlight—we had heard it coming for half a mile—and we all came forward to meet them. They got out and both put on their hats perfectly. A neighbour had applied for citizenship and, after a few questions confirming certain facts, which we children translated both ways, the policemen accepted the hospitality of a glass of cool water from the well, folded themselves back into their car, and drove away.
On our new farm I gradually became aware of the powerful differences between my parents. It was not just the miserable house and all the money and time we needed to make this Koht, this hovel, livable—as we did—at five or six you do not think about such things. We lived where we lived, and though this farmyard had no slope to gather speed rolling a discarded wheel down towards the corral where the cows were being milked in a haze of mosquito-smudge smoke, this yard did have more wide, flat space with two tall poplars to centre it and a log laid crooked between their branches from which you could hang ropes for a long swing, or where a dead pig could be hoisted up with a pulley and sliced open. But the family felt different now that the three older children were gone most of the time and our parents had to work more closely together on our growing farm.
Tina and Gust had three preschool children by then and were working a homestead themselves, three bush miles away. Abe and Dan, like most Speedwell young men, “worked out” from early spring to late fall in the beet fields of southern Alberta, earning hard cash for the family; during the winter Abe went to Bible school while Dan went logging for the Lobes. But better weather, good crops on better land as Canada’s Depression economy shifted into World War II called for decisions about buying another cow to raise more calves—did we have enough cows to keep our own bull?—or more sows, to sell more pigs, or ways to breed better horses.
Jeld, Jeld schrijcht de gaunse Welt.
Money, money, screams the whole world.
By 1941–42 there was more money, even in our bush world, but, Mam said, our Pah could not always be trusted with it.
Money had nothing to do with how they met. In 1897 Russia, in the cemetery of their Orenburg Mennonite Colony village, tiny Katerina Knelsen stood weeping as the coffin of her mother Susanna Knelsen née Loewen, aged twenty-five, was lowered into the muddy ground. And then Abram Wiebe, the Jakob Wiebe boy from the farmstead across the village street from the Knelsens, came beside her and comforted her. She was two years old, he nine.
Exactly a century later I am for the first time in that village, once named Number Eight Romanovka after the Czar. Behind the single long street lined by worn houses, sheds and unpruned orchards and immense trees scruffed with massive raven’s nests, the cemetery lies on steppes opening south to a horizon of the gloriously folded Number Eight Hills. Our family beginning here has few explications: did my father pick my mother up, crying hysterically, or did he stand close beside her, perhaps take her hand, warm it between his own in the autumn air? What Mennonite village boy of nine would call such attention to himself, surrounded at a funeral by everyone he knew? Mam was surely too small to remember; Pah must have told her, much later, or the family or community teased her—but then where were all the aunts and cousins, what was my grandfather Daniel Knelsen doing while his smallest child cried? Somewhere here, where these late May lilacs grow dense as purple perfume among sprouts of grass, depressions that reveal only earth enduring collapse, bodies decayed, somewhere under my gaze is the literal century of my grandmother Susanna Knelsen’s grave, and I try to balance decades of family story with what happened on this ground a moment before the village young men seized shovels and began to heave the earth down, covering her coffin: of a tiny girl weeping at her mother’s grave and the approach of her future husband; of an anticipating warmth and tenderness I do not, in my childhood, remember between my parents.
My mother said to me, cool and distant, “Wie weare je mau tjliene Tjinja.” We were just little children.
As if she remembered perfectly well, but it no longer mattered. This coolness did not enter the stories about her father Daniel Knelsen, who remarried within two months of Susanna’s death and whose Mennonite patriarchal discipline verged on a brutality she recalled for us all her life with regret and warning. A father from whom she remembered not a single kiss. But that grave—she insisted she had lovely memories of her delicate mother who died when she was barely two, and then little but folk-classic misery with her first stepmother Tina, who favoured her own children Maria and Heinrich (two others died as infants), and who worked my mother as maid and servant to them all. At six she was milking the family cows—traditionally Mennonite women’s work, but rarely at that age—caring for babies and working all day in house or garden or barn. She scarcely attended the village school, but she was quick and learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic very well. Her father’s unpredictable and endless punishment, for whatever reason he thought she had earned it, was always, she told us, a hard hand or cane or horse-harness strap or rope, often a beating that left her battered, even bleeding.
There is even a family rumour, faint but persistent, that Grandpa Knelsen was a drinker. This was then all too common in Mennonite villages, but anyone who could speak with certainty about my grandfather is no longer alive.
In late 1913, at the age of twenty-five, my father returned to Romanovka from four years of unpaid Russian national forestry work, which as a baptized Mennonite Brethren Church member he had done in lieu of the compulsory military service then required of all young men in Russia. He immediately began to court my mother, then barely eighteen. Was part of his attraction Mam’s dawning hope of getting away from her father and stepmother? Perhaps the memory of her mother’s open grave was one they found together; perhaps he told her something she did not know but loved to hear; the weeping girl and his instinctive child comfort, a feeling for her he had never forgotten, or a touch, as he watched her for years growing up across the street. As I saw for myself in 1997, their village farmsteads were almost directly across from each other. Abram Jakob Wiebe was a seventh child, a fifth son, with no land inheritance possible, and unaggressive, dominated by his older brothers Jakob, Klaus, Peter and Franz. He had not seen Katerina Knelsen during four years at Great Anadol near the Black Sea two thousand kilometres away, nothing but men in camps and endless dumb-ox work planting the Czar’s forests. But he had not forgotten, and now she was grown up, eighteen, “old enough to get married” as Mennonite wisdom had it.