by Rudy Wiebe
“Oh, you,” she said, “you dictionary.”
I had discovered how a dictionary worked when our school visited neighbouring Jack Pine School. Troy Fehr, who though two years older would later become my best friend because of the friendship between our sisters Helen and Isola, noticed me turning pages in their school’s huge dictionary, the heaviest book I had ever seen, and he said with a quick twist of derision, “Don’t you know how to find anything?”
I blurted out, “This one’s so big!”
And he took pity on naive me. After I understood the simple sequence of alphabet, a further realization hit me: “But what if I can’t spell it?”
“Then you ask somebody smart!”
So drag was easy to find, easier than its fourteen different meanings; the first was all I wanted: “to pull along with great difficulty.” I didn’t notice the etymological Old Norse draga at the end, but in repetition I heard the echo of Low German droage, which in English meant “carry,” which in High German became tragen—neither meaning “necessarily physically difficult” but they could be; and I began to notice how words in sound and meaning slid closely over each other, though slightly changed, like wind over an oatfield, through the tops of trees. Fun.
The three languages I lived played between themselves, especially in the long church services where possible games in a hymn—hymns mostly High German, but an occasional “special song” sung inEnglish by a small group of young people on the pulpit platform—could easily carry me the length of the Reverend Jacob Enns’s slow, meandering sermon, always full of being good and loving God who was always so loving to us, but he rarely told a story to imagine. With the other little boys I dangled my feet off the front bench directly below his benign eye, and of course there was Pah two benches behind me and Mam’s everlasting attention from the women’s half of the church across the aisle to my right, but certain hymns could play games with my mouth and then my mind; not even the sharp edge under my thighs made me squirm while our log church filled with magnificent four-part harmony, four verses of “Er Bedeckt Mich” (“He Will Hide Me;” literally, “He blankets me”):
Wenn des Lebens Wogen brausen,
Wenn der Stärkste kaum held Stand,
Will ich ganz getrost mich bergen,
In dem Schatten seiner Hand.
When life’s billows roar and thunder,
When the strong can scarcely stand,
I will confidently hide me,
In the shadow of His hand.
In the chorus the deep men’s voices repeated the women’s rising “Er bedeckt mich” after three beats like the crests of waves foaming in to shore, and the High German Wogen was like Low German Woage, which was English wagon—but how could wagons braus—roar and smash like whitecaps on the rocks around Indian Point at Turtle Lake—or was there a different meaning in one of the three? Berg-en must mean many Bergs, which was Boajch in Low German, hill like big Peeta “Boajch,” Peter Berg, thumping bass behind me, whose daughter Julia was in my grade and sitting across from us on the girls’ church bench with her hair like mist flowing about her face; she laughed so easily, or cried, when she was asked something in school, no, Julia was no Berg in that way, no English mountain—but mountain couldn’t mean “hide,” well, maybe berg in English could be like ice-berg, could God hide you, “berg” you in ice, shelter you from the roaring ocean?—but berged and buried in ice you’d freeze, and then you would really stand firm and strong, frozen stiff, buried and stone dead all right—the song couldn’t mean that, it ended with “in His hand”!
But Schatten—Schaute—shadow, and Hand—Haund—hand were so alike, you didn’t even need God’s actual hand. Everyone was singing, the tremendous lilt and harmony resounded from the plaster walls, off the timber ceiling, and tripled this amazing image of refuge into incredible, hierophantic power: to be completely blanketed, protected, you needed no more than the shadow of God’s outstretched hand—no hurt or hit in that hand, only goodness and shelter you could feel folding over you—and then if you stepped out into His sunshine—why would you need to be protected there, in warm loving sunshine? My multiplied imagination, unhoned by biblical desert heat, staggered: God was forever high in His bright heaven and only the towering clouds or occasional hawks or the great black ravens rowing themselves whiff! whiff! whiff! whiff! through air shifted light shadows, passed over me soft as breathing … and now in church gentle Präedja Enns’s devotional voice was lowering itself into his usual murmur of closing prayer.
Ve Präedjasch Sähns enn dolle Bolles saul eena op’pausse.
Around preachers’ sons and raging bulls, be careful.
Präedja and Mrs. Enns had four sons. Abe Enns, my own brother Abe’s best friend, and Jake and Henry and little Johnny in short pants on the bench beside me. Henry, three grades older, wore a strange shoe with a layered, three-inch sole on his shorter left leg, and limped a little on that side—I liked the Enns boys, all of them.
“Amen,” Präedja Enns said. His head was bowed, but sitting directly below the pulpit I knew his eyes were quite undevotionally wide open. Already ready for after-church Low German.
The joys of Speedwell Church services were powerful four-part hymn-singing and story-filled preaching, but the highest drama was Gebetstunde, the so-called prayer hour, which might easily extend to fifteen or twenty minutes because anyone in the church could pray aloud for as long as they were moved to do so. When Präedja Enns said, “Jetzt wollen wir Zeit nehmen zum Gebet,” now we want to take time for prayer, the entire congregation rose, turned around and knelt down on the floor, bent into the benches they had been sitting on.
Since the benches had only a narrow top back support, you faced directly into the backsides of the row behind you. A completely different view of your church community: shiny trousers worn thin almost to the point of seeing underwear, frayed cuffs, cracked and broken shoe bottoms, even holes in socks became visible, which Mam would never have allowed her family to wear to church—she would rather have spent half a night darning. And the smells; feet wrapped in foot clothes inside felt boots all week do not change their yeasty, over-powering odors for Sunday.
But sight and smell could not compare to the sound of the prayers rolling through the church. The person praying stood, speaking out to God over the kneeling congregation, and the prayers of the women especially, able now to speak their need aloud in the church, moved everyone with their thankful praise, their pleading with God, often in profound weeping, for healing in sickness, for a loved one still disappeared in Russia, for children wandering and lost “in the ways of sin.” O God help, O Lord be merciful. Prayer after prayer, this became utterance beyond words, beyond persons. I remember the whispers, the cries passing over us as we knelt on that board floor often moved even us little boys, bent over the front bench, to tears.
In church Gust and Tina always sent little Tony forward to sit beside me on the front bench with the other small boys. Our early family pictures invariably show us two together, beginning at the CPR homestead where Tony is dressed in baby white and laughing in the lap of a neighbour girl while I, in tan shorts buttoned onto my shirt, am twisted as if to walk away grumpy, annoyed at his receiving so much baby attention. A year or so later we’re both in tan summer shorts on the homestead Gust already owned before our family arrived in Speedwell: standing at the corner of the house he built of logs sawn square in his sawmill, the corners neatly dovetailed. Tony is looking aside as we stand close together, but we are holding hands as if to prevent either of us from running. We played endlessly together, our yards were huge to hide in and scare each other from behind machinery, among the haystacks of the corral or tangled willows in the bush. My sister Mary often watched us; she preferred trailing us about the yard to washing those eternal dishes in a grubby basin.
She had us motionless, tight on her arms among the spring aspen: just back from Sunday church, she knew for the moment where we were.
So of the three languages in our world,
which did Tony and I speak? We had our own, fourth, child language, to exclude everyone else, one of gesture and body more than specific sounds. He and I simply learned the three adult languages simultaneously, from my parents, from his Fiedler grandparents who spoke only High German in their family, from my sisters telling us both English school stories and then, when we two played together, we used whatever words in whatever language occurred to us and concocted our own as we wanted. An orality now as vanished as our childhood.
For me Low German remained fixed, and always the easiest; a phrase, a comment, a quip on my lips all my life and spoken even while I thought it. The clearest way to speak, no worry about grammar or vocabulary and always a direct act of making yourself understood face to face. A language that could not be written down, nor corrected by being made visible.
Nothing to be found years later, to hold in your hand and see. Everything my parents and I told each other in the first twelve years of my life, gone. So unlike the wonder of Helen’s neat English still here on the paper of her tiny notebook with its delicate circles over every “i,” coverless now on my desk and string binding lost, outlining our sequence of family sickness in a revelation beyond memory. On the first fold of a page:
Mrs Wiebe got sick on Friday afternoon. Lay in bed for quite a while then had to go to the hospitale on 5 of aprial. got aperaichon on the 8 of aprail. was very bad first week then came home. 20 april was pretty good
On the second and third folds:
Helen Wiebe got sick 5 of Jan. On her birthday was sick quite a while… etc.
And on and on until:
Dan Wiebe got sick on Fri 9 P. M. November 1 was very sick taken to hospital 2 nov got operation [appendix] … Mom went to visit him on 19th he was very well then. Then the same day mom went to the doctor about her fals teeth and got them on Monday … Dan came home on Christmas eve … etc.
A cryptic litany of “got sick” that eventually includes me:
Rudy Wiebe got sick on Sat July 22 about [number indistinct; could be] 5 whent to the Doc on the same day and he was not home so to the nurse and she was not home either so they came home in the night. was very sick for first weeks.
Beyond all odds in my older sisters’ relentless opp’rieme, cleaning up, after our mother died, Helen’s notebooks have survived, though not so much as a letter in High German—which my mother wrote very well, my father never—exists from before the 1950s. It may well be these notebook words exist because they were Helen’s; her life was so short and we had so little to remember her by; and she lived such a continuous illness that the repeated litany became her solitary solace. In our horse-and-wagon world so far from medical care, she timed our life by sicknesses, like a family heart beating. Her own “heart troubles” written down on pulp paper, but in durable ink.
Helen’s little notebooks actually record “Rudy Wiebe got sick” twice, but they are exactly the same words and there is a contradiction in the dates. One note says it was “1940” and “Sat July 22,” the other “1939” and the day “Sat July 27.” But these dates are reversed: in 1939 Saturday fell on July 22, and in 1940 on July 27 and therefore both dates are wrong So, which year was I sick once? Was I almost five or almost six years old when I was dragged uselessly from “Doc” to “nurse” to be brought back “home in the night” and be “very sick for first weeks”?
If only my sweet sister, now sixty years gone, had left a single descriptive word about my sickness. I remember being seriously ill as a child only once, and it happened because of what Tony told me, the inexplicable story he tried to act out on the clay by the dry hole of our well.
Our best, most powerful farmhorse at the time was a broad sorrel mare named Bell, and the summer after she foaled I discovered a game with her. Whenever she stood in the yard, waiting to be hitched up or ridden, I would duck down and run through between her front and back legs, under her belly.
For me, farm animal babies simply were there: calves, colts, chicks, kittens, squirmy piglets. As a child I never saw any being born—there are certain things Mennonite children are kept from seeing—but I saw them tiny, saw them growing larger, and also saw our big animals, in the monotony of their continual eating, drinking, shitting and pissing do some ludicrous things. Sometimes a cow would heave itself up onto another and stagger along on two legs, holding on tight and trying to keep up with the mounted, then drop aside, only to have others inflict that leaping again and again on the same suffering beast. When a bull was let loose in the herd, the ridiculous mounting heaved itself through the herd, violent attempts to ride one another despite their huge bellies and stubby, straining back legs. It was what cattle did to each other, like one calf head-bumping another between its back legs and trying to nurse where there were no teats.
So a child asks why, and a cryptic answer is easily caught; an adult evasion is always more intriguing than relaxed information. Farmyard chickens for Mennonites are housewife concerns: she feeds them and in summer, when they graze for food, their clucks and squawks and chortling float over the yard like wild bird songs from the trees and the children must keep watch so that when the chickens are counted in the evening, none has wandered away, and also search for their eggs wherever they try to hide and lay them under the granaries or among the haystacks or even under the low willows at the edges of the bush. Eggs were not eaten: Mr. Schroeder would buy them, eight or nine cents a dozen against our running bill at the store—good money when a man might earn a dollar a day if he found work with a CPR track crew, or mom and kids forty to fifty cents a day for dried seneca roots if they found a good patch to dig in spring—so we watched every chicken closely. And of course one day I asked why the rooster sidled with lowered wings against a scratching hen, who would either edge away and leave him to his silly posturing or, inexplicably, squat at his feet and let him leap onto her, his immense claws trampling her wings and his beak clamped onto the back of her head, and he’d hunch his body tight around her, mashing her against the ground, until in a flurry of awkward balancing and flapping feathers he uncoiled and hopped off. And after this grotesque attack, the hen would lift herself out of the dust, give a shudder that shook her feathers back into place, and continue her calm search for food. But the rooster would rear his head high, stare about as if he had certainly been missed while not strutting about the yard, and his neck would arch, his beak gape and he would crow; a tiny animal in a wide yard screaming into the sky.
I asked, “Why does he do that?” The oblivious hen was pecking the earth, singing as before.
Mam said, “He’s just saying hello to her.”
Hello? Clawing himself onto her, squashing her down and biting her head? The hen was near him all morning.
On the other hand, horses belonged to the world of men. I was not allowed to see what happened after the studhorse man drove his buggy into our yard with his enormous animal tied behind it and whinnying, all arched neck and bulging muscles, but within two years I learned how to disappear behind the barns before I was sent into the house, to peer around a shed corner and be astounded at what I saw. And become aware of my own body inexplicably shivering at that violence; like a fever, but almost, faintly, pleasant. At six I could not imagine where Floss came from, how she could be a lighter, more beautiful sorrel than Bell, have a white left hind stocking and a wide white blaze down her face from ears to nostrils. Even Floss’s lips were white, and she would walk alongside, tilt, thrust her head under Bell’s belly between her huge thighs and suck at her black udder. Bell’s udder was tiny, her teats stubby compared to our cows, but there seemed to be enough milk for Floss, she grew fast, her hide slick when I ran my hands over her flanks warm as white baked Bultje. She nuzzled my armpit with her soft lips, but I had nothing there she wanted. Floss and I were small together in a world filled with giants, and perhaps it was her smooth movement of going alongside her mother, of her sleek head gliding down and open mouth reaching while Bell stood motionless, waiting for her lips, probably that began my game of running
under.
Farm animals are for work, not play. If a family adult had seen me do anything so uselessly stupid as running under a horse, I would have been yelled at, whacked once for emphasis and sent howling. Tony and I were alone in the yard when he tried to explain what men and women did, and I knew nothing to tell him—absolutely nothing astounding like that—and I leaped up, I had to show him something I knew he wouldn’t dare do after me, he was nearly five but I was way bigger, almost six and I’d never be scared like he was, of anything, I would always have nerve and know first. Bell was loose in the yard near the granary and this is what I can do, Tony, just watch me.
Bell stood with her long head stretched down, cropping the yard grass in a tight semicircle as horses do; I ducked and ran under her. But at that instant she moved—was she reaching for more grass or did I brush her full udder?—she moved a step forward, she knocked me down and her huge hind hoof landed on my stomach, the full weight of her next step.
Thank God it was not my back, but at the moment no one thought of that.
It was obvious I would die. There was no bleeding, no bones seemed broken, I was simply crushed and dying in dreadful pain. Any homestead family hours from any possible medical care would recognize that, especially Mennonites from a Russian steppe village: children live, children die, who understands the inexplicable ways of God? I had been named Rudy for a six-year-old Speedwell boy who died on the operating table in North Battleford Hospital when he finally arrived there after a week of stomach agony and swelling: when the doctor made the first incision, his brother Paul Poetker told me years later, pus spurted across the room. He was bloated from the infection of a ruptured appendix. Who could anticipate or prevent that?