by Rudy Wiebe
The will of uns leewa Gott, our loving God. Bell had crushed me and Trajchtmoaka Aaron Heinrichs, whose hands would have felt and known everything, was two years in the graveyard. And yet my family cried and prayed, I was always so thoughtless, so impulsive, oh God have mercy.
I curled into a ball, not even my mother should so much as touch me—Loht mie toch, leave me alone! But she washed my face with water, she kept me awake and screaming, and someone galloped to the store for John Schroeder, who came immediately with his truck—or was it his car—and there is a shadow moving like trees upside down in the thick window of a vehicle, I am coiled in the soft, useless warmth of my mother’s lap and we are bumping into the yard of the Reverend George Thiessen south of the railway tracks in Fairholme—what good could he and his sobbing wife do?—and then driving somewhere east but we find no one who can help beyond weeping, there is a yard with a slavering dog where they send us away and another, and I have no idea why they can’t find Doc Coghlan in Glaslyn—is he away fishing?—but we do grind over all the bush trails and gravel that far, until it is finally summer dark and we are home again in the north room of our house, I am twisted in my parents’ bed and who knows how “very sick” I am for the “first weeks,” but I never do see the doctor about it, particular pain rarely leaves a memory beyond screaming, and it would seem after time I recover completely.
After all, I’m not yet quite six. Running around the yard and bush and animals and barns every sunny day at that age I will do stupid things and accidents have to happen. God in his mercy was there with his Schitzenjel, guardian angel: it was only the stomach and not my back or head.
Five years later a surgeon in North Battleford would find my appendix unnaturally grown onto my stomach. Bell’s hoof had apparently rearranged my stomach cavity, and my immediate experience of that was nausea. I began throwing up in the back seats of cars the rare times I was in them, just climbing in made acid nudge up in my throat but in our almost carless world no child ever rode in front; the best I could ever do was sit beside the back door and, at the critical moment, stick my head out the window and try to project far enough not to splatter the car. Which for me wasn’t at all difficult. A crowded bus to North Battleford was worse, and years later the ultimate adult body humilation in propeller-driven planes. But my mother, who endured much lifelong body misery herself, had a sentence for all uncontrollable physical voidings, no matter where they caught and shamed you:
Bäta enne wiede Welt auss emm enjen Buck.
Better in the wide world than in the tight stomach.
My childhood nausea was not limited to extremely rare rides in cars or buses; it also churned my stomach in winter when we drove in our horse-drawn caboose, a sleigh enclosed in canvas with a tiny wood heater to warm us on long trips in the cold. By the time I was eight I learned it was often better to get out and walk behind in the sleigh tracks, or balance on the runners when the horses trotted, clutching the canvas. I preferred frigid air, the immense frozen trees and fields to the thick warmth in the caboose, everyone knee to knee and talking, breathing. The open cold clamped onto your bare face, licked up your nose like ice and you knew every bit of your body was working inside your hooded parka and underwear and wool pants and felt boots and double leather-and-knitted mitts, you were strong, alive, the bitterest arctic could never hurt you. Mam would open the caboose door a crack, “Na?” but I’d wave her off, running.
I was riding the left iron runner one winter Sunday, coming home fifteen miles on cross-country trails from Livelong where my sister Mary and her husband Emmanuel Fiedler served a mission church, when Emmanuel got out of the caboose and walked in the right sleigh track and told me more about what Tony had started.
“The Bible calls it ‘the way of a man with a maid,’” he said, talking King James English. Winter twilight shone gold over the snow between the pale stems of the poplars, the wind and sun circles hollowed at their base. “Even the wisest man in the Bible can’t explain it, it’s so wonderful.”
Wonderful? Little Tony had told me two years ago that men stuck their pissers into women and I still thought that stupid. Why would they do that? Where? And Tony had not really answered those questions with his simple: “Because they want to, and women have a big hole and they like it.” I refused to believe anything so abominable; pee was poison, my mother said, and since before I could think I had been taught to take my Schwenjeltje, little handle, out only in private, to pee in our chamber pot or toilet or behind something where no one was looking; at the very least to take a few steps like a big man and turn my back. So how could a grown woman be so crazy, to let a man do that?
Tony had spoken with more confidence then, he knew this: because men make them lie down, I’ll show you—a man lies down to piss? Whatever language we were speaking, we were using one word because all three languages have the same possible structure: “piss” as both noun and verb. So Tony lay down and spread his little legs wide in the air, come on, he said, women have nothing to aim but you have—aim?—sure, the woman has a hole and the man gets down on top of her and sticks his pisser in it, you want me to piss into you? no I haven’t got a hole there, sure boys have a hole too you have one, that’s too small but women have another one …
Tony lay against the clay mound by the dry hole where my brothers tried to find water, on the side hidden from the house. His bare legs and feet waving a little, inviting me. We couldn’t actually do much of it: he wore his summer shorts, but he wanted me to open my overalls and pull out my little handle, he wanted to show me as much as possible, the woman flat on her back and the man between her legs, that’s what they really like to do, he said. That was when I ran away, across the yard and under Bell’s belly and she stepped on me.
I knew the world, even on our bush farm, was as full of differences as I could endlessly discover. And I knew my sisters had no penis like me, but I never suspected they might have a large opening. When they stepped into the washtub to bathe after me, what I saw was barely a fold. As for bulls, the bags between their hind legs grew bigger, but cows’ bags got way bigger, and bulls’ hung differently, they never grew teats like cows to get milk out of them. By the age of seven I knew all about the heat of cows against the side of my face and shoulder, the swollen warmth of their four teats alternating in the rhythm of my small fists that soon ached but grew stronger and stronger squeezing them; my work was milking the two easiest milkers morning and evening, they needed only a last stripping from Mam to make sure they were completely empty.
Cows were huge, but with Carlo helping you could easily yell them into a herd and even a small boy could warm his bare fingers in a winter barn milking, you could squirt milk into your mouth and swallow as much as you wanted while the cats climbed down from the barn beams where they slept and sat in the aisle begging for a turn, meowed please! But a bull was useless, what did he do? He had nothing you would want to touch or hold, a big hanging sack and always spraying himself dirty in the middle of his stall, not like the cows hunched properly over the gutter behind them. And horses rubbled you with their noses, soft as fingers, but studs—a stud must be something out of nightmares. That was the word for a female horse, mare, and nightmares could be terrifying, I knew.
My beautiful blonde sister Mary married Gust’s brother, Emmanuel Fiedler, when she was eighteen. As Helen wrote in her tiny notes:
Emmanel and Mary got engaged 18 October 1942—there marriage was held in church 25th Oct. 6:30 P. M. and drove away 9 of Nov. to Stump Lake for mission work.
But before the marriage this had already happened: Troy Fehr and I had stood in the aisle of the Fehrs’ barn staring at the massive, dappled-grey hindquarters of a Percheron stud. The great rear fold of the horse was covered by a short, docked tail, but his huge stockinged feet and legs were spread wide and inside the heavy notch of his thighs, just where the double bulge of his testicles nestled, hung the unbelievable length and thickness of his penis spiralled grey and white and purple to its knotted head.
He had finished urinating, a yellow stream that smashed on the stall floor and splattered his legs and the plank wall. Troy leaned forward to get a better look, and I could not resist doing so too: that huge column of meat always there, hidden inside the stud’s body. It was like a long beast curled and dangling around the Tree in the Garden of Eden as the travelling preachers declared, now fully revealed in the hot stench of the stall: the rimmed purple head with its slit mouth dripping poison, thicker than my leg and swinging under that immense belly, waving hello. Frightening to watch … and impossible not to.
Troy grinned sideways at me bent forward, staring. He had once explained the ways of the dictionary to me and now he was full of much more astounding information.
“What he does to mares,” Troy said in his familiar dirty-secret voice, “with that schlong—you know Emmanuel wants to do to your sister.”
From around a barn corner, where I was not supposed to be, I had seen this massive beast mount our mare Bell, his yellow teeth clamped onto her neck and haunches pounding against her as though he would hammer her into the ground while she braced herself, every hoof gouging in. Was that what they meant by “screwing,” the stud’s “schlong” screwing itself into the mare’s hole while he tried to screw her whole body into the ground like a massive four-legged screwdriver—Emmanuel, and Mary? She’d never put up with it!
“That’s stupid! What’re you talking about?”
Troy laughed out loud at me. “Squirt, you don’t know nothing. They want to do it in bed, all the time.”
“They’re gonna get married!”
“Well yeah, and that’s how you make babies! Where’d you think they come from?”
I hadn’t thought about it much. Mam said they came from God, okay, but what did people babies have to do with this thick club sliding back into its hiding? The horse shifted, immensely, his haunches adjusted themselves as he dropped his enormous head to the hay in his crib. Our family didn’t stand around watching animals urinate—though we had to see it often enough on long trips when our horses would trundle to a stop, no shouting helped, and the gelding would hose down onto the road or the mare pour out right over the wagon hitch—no more than we stared after people when they went into the bush. There was something unspoken, an aura of both privacy and indecency about acts of elimination. Beyond the obvious foulness of what came out of your body, there floated a smell inexplicable as sin: your body did these dirty things, yes, but you did them alone and as quick as possible as though they never happened, you just closed or pulled up your pants and wiped your hands if you could and your body was contained again, clothed and clean, nothing had happened. But like any child, I also knew it wasn’t that simple: voiding felt good, in your body, felt good somehow beyond the relief of it, and especially around the parts you covered most carefully. To urinate properly a boy has to hold his penis and sometimes mine started to change shape even as I held and emptied it, I felt it thicken a little in my hand and then something more, like a touch whispering through my body until I knew my bare toes had curled; as if they all wanted to clutch the earth, harder.
Vaguely I may already have sensed that in life “fair and foul are near of kin,” but that love should “pitch his mansion in the place of excrement” was beyond me; and far beyond Troy to explain, other than the crudest snickering mechanics of it. A stud’s dangling penis, a mare’s anus or multifoliate vagina—both of which I had seen under uplifted tails in all shapes and functions—surely that could not explain what would happen in bed between my beautiful, irascible sister and her husband, the gentlest, most exuberant man in my short life.
But. That massive, doubled-horse screwing I had been forbidden to watch; the “schlong” disappearing between the stud’s legs as if loading his immense body for its next assault into another mare: my own penis briefly stiffening. Where had that come from? Sometimes in the morning when I awoke it was so erect I could barely bend it down to urinate. Why? Was it like that wherever I was when sleeping, so hard I couldn’t forget it once I noticed? In the land of sleep did everyone go around stiff like that? And a boy couldn’t even hide it, like any stud.
It came to me then that perhaps that was why people did do it in bed, in the dark at night—and from behind too, like animals. Little Tony got it wrong, I thought, lying there facing me. If people did that, they surely wouldn’t want to look at each other and feel even more ashamed.
But the winter when I was nine, Emmanuel laughed in the cold while riding the iron runners of the caboose with me during that drive home from Livelong. He cracked jokes, and explained that “the way of a man with a maid” was a lot more complicated than John Vallentgoed bringing his stud into the yard once or twice a year and letting him jump a few mares. And more beautiful. Mary was a high-strung woman, he said, and whatever he meant I knew she had the quickest tongue and sharpest temper of any of us, and he loved her so much, he said, he wanted to live with her forever. That was what happened between people; they loved each other, truly love without end, because that was the way God had made us: to love each other.
I had heard that all my life: God and love without end. Mam kissing you with a long cuddle, Pah’s smile and big hand on your shoulder—but apparently when you got older, love started to change its shape. As far as I could imagine, now, it got downright brutal.
During the later thirties and the first years of World War II a number of families, including the store owners William Voth and John Schroeder, left Speedwell.
The world seemed to be emptying, trickling away south nearer the circle of the sun where the weather was obviously warmer. And then August and Pauline Fiedler with their four sons and one daughter still unmarried moved to Vancouver; they had helped Pah find Speedwell, given us a house to live in for the first year, they were our in-laws twice over and Mam and Pah’s best friends. How could we go to Turtle Lake for our annual summer picnic without them?
Mrs. Fiedler knew how to clean and fry jackfish perfectly on a fire between stones, and her sons knew where to catch them by the boatload. Even Mam’s wonderful potato salad and Schnetje, layered biscuits made with thick cream, without Mrs. Fiedler’s fish would be like trying to celebrate Christmas without a candy.
Then, in spring 1942, our family itself began to separate. Helen recorded it in her first notes that did not begin with “got sick.”
Gust and Tina drove away the 30th of Aprail
12:30 A.M. were a week at home yet
Like his father, Gust had given up on Speedwell farming for the lure of another place: Coaldale, Alberta. He acquired a 1927 Graham truck by trades and barter and, as Helen notes, they spent a last week with us carefully loading it.
We took pictures with our box camera, family or couples lined up alongside the truck being loaded, my sisters about to cry holding the new baby, Carol, wrapped to her tiny nose in blankets with Annie or Eldo or Tony peering up beside them. We loved them, they were us and they were leaving. Everyone, even Gust, wept, but inevitably the packed truck slowly ground itself through the ruts and washouts up the hill south past the root cellar and disappeared between the grey April trees.
We stood in the yard, listening. That stupid truck. Past the empty Dunz yard, past the Biech place, like smoke drifting away they were gone … no! they were climbing the church hill … and then they were gone. Gone.
Life without Tony couldn’t be imagined. After a week of carrying Annie and baby Carol, suddenly Helen and Liz had no babies to play with; they cried abruptly and disappeared somewhere. My sisters had never been much fun in the sandpile anyway, but what was there for me to do alone? Chase Carlo, try to grab a cat, run through cowpies, splat!
Nonetheless bright spring came: blue sky and hot sun turned the grey world green with a wedding. Helen laconically records:
Abe Wiebe and Gilda Heinrichs [Aaron’s
daughter] got engaged the 15th of February
and 1942 Abe went to Pierceland and stayed there
till May 1st, and on 24 of May was thei
r marriage
then went to Hepburn they stayed there a while
Pierceland was an isolated village in the boreal forest beyond Meadow Lake; Abe and Gilda would pastor a Mennonite Brethren mission church there for the next eight years.
I remember their wedding only as one black-and-white photo: Gilda in her amazing (to small me) long dress and tiara veil and Abe in dark-striped suit coming out onto the Speedwell Church steps crowded with everyone in the community. Later a studio portrait was made of them in Saskatoon, posed again in the same clothes, but that May Sunday must have been dazzling. The trees, the road and the small clearings of the hill and valley below the church where the creek ran through willows and poplars shimmered golden green as if the heavens and the earth had just been spoken into existence. In God’s seven twenty-four-hour days, as Abe preached Genesis all his life. “And, behold, it was very good.”
The crops were excellent that year I turned eight, and to save the expense and to keep the bundles dry until the threshing machine appeared, Dad and Dan hauled our early barley and oat bundles from the fields and stacked them in the yard. Bundle stacks were different from the long, breadloaf haystacks behind the barn; they were temporarily piled round as beehives near the granary for easy pitching into the thresher, and I discovered a new game to play between them. Gust had given me a worn-out tire for playing which I hoisted and rolled endlessly around the yard, down the small hill from the root cellar, jumped it over logs and bumped into trees, fence posts, even slammed it against the barn door when no one was listening. Then I found an iron machinery wheel with spokes. If I stuck a stick through the axle hole, I could bend down and, holding the stick with one hand on either side, my arms were just long enough to keep it clear of my face as I rolled it around the yard. Not like rolling a heavy tire and watching it crash wherever—this was a wheel I could control and I bent low over it, roaring, wheeling figure eights between the round stacks like the Fiedler or Lobe brothers who always had everything interesting like guns and bucking horses and a motorcycle like a little colt to follow their big car, the first anyone had ever seen in Speedwell—head down, running as fast as I could, I was spinning circles on my single-axle motorcycle around the stacks and across the yard, bbrrrrrrmmmm!