by Rudy Wiebe
—what is this nonsense branded in my brain? I imagine “sigh” means “scythe,” because that’s the way we pronounced it at the time. Obviously a hillbilly radio riff about “Old Dan Tucker” was banjoing through me as Prince plodded along trails he knew so well he needed no rein, my mind flipping, looping around words, sounds: “one big slug of his double-jointed scythe”? Well, it’s ridiculous, almost scat, but under certain farming circumstances “double-jointed scythe” might be as funny as “died of a toothache in his heel.” That morning any rhythmic sound that floated me away in the sunlight, the winter poplars barely tipped with buds, was good.
Memory is whatever you find in it, a rhythm, a wisp; Theodore Roethke says it perfectly, though in a slightly different context:
Love is not love until love’s vulnerable…
All who remember, doubt.
So I will lay out this particular, for me a lifelong, doubt in the way I first tried to order it at age twenty-one, eleven years after Helen died. Not the story as published, but my first fumbled draft, a stained holograph barely decipherable now, scribbled and crossed out in a notebook written on both sides of the page sometime during January 1956.
Eight and the Present
In the darkness under the rafters he awoke to the screaming.
It seemed he had heard it a long time, as if it reached back endlessly into his sleep, even as if he had heard it forever—the swift crescendo, the high plateau of sound and then the moaning fall of it down to a whimper. It was like the dream he had of being crushed by a huge tree and when he forced himself awake his brother’s big arm had been on him, inert and heavy in sleep. Only now he had had no dream, only felt this endlessly before he awoke, and heard it.
It had been quiet for a moment as he felt these things and suddenly he knew that his brother was not beside him on the straw tick. Fear seized him. He rolled under the cover over into the other hollow and it was warm from the big body. He noticed as he moved that the stovepipe seemed surrounded by light, and he sat up in bed, forgetting the darkness, and saw the light from downstairs coming through the hole around the stovepipe. He could hear movement. Were they all up, with the light burning?
Then, inhumanly, the screaming came again. It was like a pointed … he could hear and feel nothing, just the searing scream, as if he and it were the sole inhabitants of a universe. It drowned his brain until he could not hear it for the sound, and then it fell horribly, as if stretched beyond itself, down to a burbling moan.
He jerked the quilt up and over himself, but the warm darkness was not enough. He wanted to go downstairs to the warmth of his mother. His small bare feet were cold on the rough boards as, huddled against the darkness, he felt for the top of the ladder-like stairs near the oblong shade of grey that showed light below. Then he felt them and slipped down, feet quick on the familiar steps. The moaning had almost died, and he could hear movements beyond the curtain of the living room. He crept over and pulled it aside.
He did not know what he saw, for a long moment. It wasn’t that lamplight was too strong for his sleep-roused eyes, but rather that his sister, who had lain in bed in the corner of the sitting room for months because of an enlarged heart, was now in the middle of the night sitting up so stiffly nailed to a chair and his father and brother seemed to be holding her down. He had never seen her face like that before. It didn’t look like a face, more like the Hallowe’en mask he had once made. Her black hair hung in damp strings over her forehead as his mother wiped her face with a cloth, and then he saw the clothes pin stuck in her mouth and the blood trickling down her chin from her lips where she had bit herself. In the wonder of it, he stared and suddenly the sound within her seemed to rip loose and he heard that scream again, saw it torn from her throat and he saw how the muscles in the men’s arms bulged and knotted as they tried to hold her on the pillowed chair.
He was suddenly afraid. He looked here and there as the sound seared him and he was relieved beyond measure when his sister Toots, four years older than himself, who was sitting crying by the door, reached up and clutched him to her.
The scream was not as long, and he looked up as his father, face beaded with sweat and tears, said desperately, “Mother, we have to do something, we can’t stand this,” and his brother Dan, maddened by his own impotence and love for his sister, hissing fiercely,
“Do something! We can’t stand this! How can she stand it? What’re you thinking about us for? She’s burning up.”
And his mother, wiping the tortured face again, saying, “Dan, don’t, that doesn’t help. She bites herself so much, if we could only stop the fire in her … maybe we should get the Thiessens…”
“Mrs. Thiessen would know something—do something. Get Rudy up to ride and get her.”
They noticed him then where he huddled with his sobbing sister, not knowing whether to cry or not. He didn’t want to, here in front of his big brother, crying was sissy, so he was relieved when Dan said, “Rudy, get on Prince and ride to the Thiessens, quick.”
His mother, tear-stained, bent over him. “I have to leave this house, I can’t stand to see her like this, Toots, get some colder water and wipe her face, I’ll take the lantern and go to the barn with him.”
In a rush he was dressed and out in the coolness where the spring frogs croaked through the morning darkness. Near the barn they heard the scream again, but it seemed far away and unattached to him, almost like a coyote howl when he was in bed at night. He jerked at the barn door and the warmth from the horses wrapped him in its living smell. Straining, he reached up and looped the bridle off its peg. His mother wept silently as she stood in the open door holding the lantern.
“Whoa,” he said softly. “Easy there, Prince old boy,” as he touched the black object in the single stall. Prince moved over, waking up, and he went into the narrow stall murmuring quiet words as Dan had taught him to do in the dark to animals. He had some difficulty in getting the bridle bit into the soft but resistant mouth, so he scrambled up on the manger and strained over to force it in, then slipped the bridle over the soft ears, snapped the strap, unsnapped the halter shank and, grabbing the long mane, half swung, half jumped to the bare back. Prince began to back out and he said,
“OK, Mom, get out of the road.” He saw the lantern light swing away and he backed the horse out of the stall, then wheeled it sharply and rode out the low door, hanging over on the left side, right arm and leg curled and clinging.
“What shall I say, Mom?” he asked.
Her voice was half choked, “Tell them Helen’s dying—to come quick, to help.”
Somehow her expression of these few words made him feel her sudden need for someone to share this horrible night with them—he didn’t know how he’d ever get them up, but he knew that he was supposed to do something and he kicked Prince sharply, and as the horse began to move he could hear her say, “Be careful, my little Sonny,” and then how her voice fell into a moaning prayer even as she started away from the barn. He was so busy getting Prince into a gallop that he didn’t hear the scream again as he swung through the gate and out on the road.
The clouds raced across the moon, its light flicked over the landscape as if whipped by fierce winds, but down among the trees all was still as he heard and felt the rhythmic clop of hooves carry up through him and into the night. He didn’t like the spruce at night, they were solidly purple and grasping, and he kicked the horse to get him past the muskeg faster. When the moonlight flickered spasmodically, the black gobs of shadows seemed to leap up and at him and pour around him, and when it did not, the darkness was over all. The last bit was an opaque tunnel, with the horse’s withers rocking up at him, solid and living, in the choking fear that wrapped him. Just at the end the scream seemed to ring in his ears out of the blackness of the trees, and he was terrified, and then he galloped around the corner, out of the forest, to where poplars bordered the road on one side and the level blackness of the Thiessen field stretched out against the lighter blackness of the moving sky.
/> With the lighter darkness about him, his thoughts raced on with the galloping horse. This was like he had sometimes dreamed, racing through the night for help—all by himself, just as he had read in Black Beauty. Not many boys, not even most men had ever done this—ride alone to the rescue, Helen must really be sick if she screamed like that, Thiessens would sure help, and he’d get them.
There was a patch of trees now, then the wooden bridge over a rushing spring creek between two sloughs where frogs croaked with self-inflated importance. The hooves clunked hollow twice, then he was over and in an instant saw the outline of the Thiessen gate. Prince turned there and he rode up the lane. The farmyard lay dark and mysteriously violet and grey.
The dogs barked raucously out of their sleep as he banged on the door. “Mr. Thiessen!” If it had not been for the noisy dogs, he couldn’t have opened his mouth against the night. Finally footsteps came and the door creaked curiously.
“Mr. Thiessen—” then he saw the long night dress “—Mrs. Thiessen … Helen’s awful sick, Mom says you’re to come and help.”
“What’s the matter?”
“She’s—she—” he did not know how to say it, “she bites herself, sitting in a chair…”
“Ride home quick, tell them we’ll come right away. George …” she turned to her husband who had now appeared behind her in the little porch.
In a trice he led Prince close to the wagon in the yard, climbed up, jumped to his back, and was heading home. He was colder now as the excitement waned and the eastern treetops just tipped in gold foil. Prince knew the way home and galloped with a will, so he closed his eyes to it all and hung on. The clippety-clop seemed endless, the horse seemed to run hard and he felt shaken apart and terribly sleepy. He did not see the spruce now.
His mother was waiting in the yard. “They’re coming right away,” he said. She met him as he came out of the barn and she took his hand.
“I went in once, but it’s so terrible—oh my Sonny, she’s burning up, and I can’t do anything. It came just like that—so quick—and she’s burning up. Oh Lord, Lord, be merciful.”
They were near the woodpile and she dropped to her knees beside the blocks, and he could feel her desperate clasp on his small body as she wept and prayed. He tried to say something, “Aw Mom, she’ll get better …” but he did not know what to say. What was there to say? He was terrified—he had never known his mother like this, she who could do everything. Then his crying rose and fell with hers, at the great unknowing fear and the helplessness he felt from her. The scream, as he heard it through his tears, was very weak and did not come again for a long time.
Suddenly he heard the jingle of harness, and in a moment the Thiessens were there. As Mr. Thiessen tied the horses, Mrs. Thiessen came over to his mother standing near the woodpile and put her arm around her. His mother, still holding his hand, sobbed, “She was getting so much better, and suddenly, in the night …”
“We brought a bit of laudanum, perhaps it will help.”
They went towards the house. Sleep kept pulling his head over, even as he walked, and he did not know what happened after they got to the house.
In the late morning when he awoke and came downstairs, his mother told him Helen was dead.
The house did not smell right, and everyone seemed as if struck dumb, and cried unexpectedly. He could not find Dan anywhere. He did not want to go into the living room, and he could not think of anyone as dead. “Mom,” he said, “I want to go to school.”
His mother made no answer, did not seem to hear him in fact. After she had told him she turned away and was washing dishes, unhearing and wrapped in her grief for the girl she had nursed for months.
He went out, and the early spring sunshine was fresh and good. No one noticed him as he sneaked into the barn, bridled Prince, and rode off.
Yet, somehow, school was not right either. When he got there he did not want to tell about his ride, or even why he arrived during recess. He sat in his little desk in the one-room school and the teacher said, “Take out your Healthy Foods scrap books.”
He opened his desk and there it lay, the book he and Helen had made for Health in school. Actually Helen had done all the work: he had just watched. That was why his book had been first in class. There on the cover was the round red tomato she had cut from one of her tomato juice labels, and there was the kink she had made when he bumped her because he was leaning so close as she sat in bed cutting it out. Then he said, half aloud, “She’s dead.” And he knew that “dead” was like the sticks of rabbits he found in his snares.
And suddenly he began to cry. Everyone stared, but he could not stop.
When a written story ends, others are always continuing. What did our neighbours Elizabeth and George Thiessen actually bring, what did they do when they came to our house that harrowing night? What was I doing all of Wednesday, until Helen finally passed beyond her pain at two in the afternoon? Did I ride Prince to school the last morning while she was still alive, humming those Old Dan Tucker words, or did that happen on Thursday, or several days after the Sunday funeral? I have no idea. But there is one memory of Helen’s dying not in the story: a memory of my oldest brother, Abe, who had come home from distant Pierceland when Helen’s illness grew worse in March. He was also in that room that night; a memory I sorted through only fifty years later, and spoke for the first time as Abe’s obituary:
It is the middle of the night … the lamps are lit and we are crowded around Helen in her narrow cot in the living room: my sister Elizabeth and I, Mom and Dad; my brother Dan sits on the cot behind Helen, holding her upright in his arms as she struggles for breath between gasps, between cries of pain. And Abe kneels before her: he holds her hands so tightly between his and he is speaking calmly, steadily into the weeping that overwhelms us all, speaking the words of Jesus:
“Let not your hearts be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions … I go to prepare a place for you. And I will come again, and receive you unto myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
The words that have comforted Christians for two millennia, which also reflect Helen’s feelings:
February 28: I feel just as bad today as ever. And did a bit of crying about it too. Between 4—5 I got terribly sick I really thought I was going HOME. And longed for it too. March 1: … Had a few heart attacks again.
She died on March 28, 1945, the day the German Army collapsed on the western front; her funeral took place on Easter Sunday April 1, the day the US Marines landed again on the beaches of Okinawa. I’m certain we did not notice these “great” world events, as no one beyond our tiny community noticed our single death. Towards the end of the war Dr. Coghlan’s practice was so enormous, distant country calls for his help were endless; then, after Christmas 1944, Helen became too weak for her to be taken to the North Battleford hospital in Harder’s truck, and though Dan may have brought the doctor to our house several times in our cutter from the highway, with his huge buffalo coat and black satchel, I don’t know whether they tried to have him come during that last month of hard winter. It seems a kind of peasant Christian fatalism had settled over our family: Helen had been sickly, sometimes gravely ill, from the day of her birth; the Lord gives, yes, but there also, always, comes a time when the Lord takes away, especially after years of giving notice—so finally what could a doctor do, even wonderful Doc Coghlan? Blessed be the name of the Lord.
The community did what it always did. On Thursday March 29, Anna Heinrichs, who with her daughters and oldest son had run their bush homestead as efficiently as any man since Aaron Heinrichs died eight years before, came over with her daughter Rosella Poetker, as did Elizabeth Thiessen again. They helped my mother prepare the body clothe it in a new white dress Helen’s best friend Isola Fehr gave them, a dress Isola had just received by mail order and not yet worn, and then they carried the body into the cold March air and laid it out on boards in the granary. No one worked on Good
Friday, March 30, but there was a church service and neighbours came by; the yard was full of sleighs. On Saturday, March 31, Dave Heinrichs and Abe Fehr, Isola’s father, came to help Dad make the coffin, while the women hand-sewed its black cloth covering and Anna Heinrichs the padded, ruffled interior. The painted silver coffin handles used at every funeral were brought from the church, while in the iron ground of the cemetery just south of the church barns other men were chopping, digging out a grave down to the unfrozen earth below the snow. And Abe and Dan drove to North Battleford, probably in Gustav Biech’s car, for whom Dan was working that winter, to register Helen’s death and telegraph Mary and Emmanuel in Mayfair again.
The granary in which Helen’s body lay was built against the east end of our sod-roofed cow barn. The granary walls were log, its roof rough-cut boards and tarpaper. When you opened the barn door in winter with your lantern and pails for milking, the mousing cats were coiled in the warmth under the roof, waiting on the low beam for you to get yourself settled between the cows, to wipe Nelly’s udder and teats clean, and when they heard the first spurts of milk ring in the pail, they’d come down the posts quick as weasels, come seat themselves close in the aisle and meow at you, tails twitching. Their tiny mouths opened in such delicate plaints, a sound threading into the blackness where the larger animals moved in the thick, vivid heat of their bodies, their slab-like teeth gnawing at hay or the wooden manger beams. You could walk along behind them and touch each one, their tough hides always exactly there, huge as their great bones beyond the lantern-light, the smaller calves nuzzling over their pen to try and suck your fingers as you fumbled for their curly heads—but the cats were crying, they would break your heart, and you pulled Nelly’s udder around, aimed her right teat with your right hand and clenched and clenched: the cats leaped at the white beam of milk, it splashed into their mouths, washed their faces with hot, fat milk and for an instant you streamed it straight into the yellow cat’s gaping gullet and then it dropped, knocked down by too much—there, you got it, lick yourself clean and be happy—and you tipped forward again tight against Nelly, grappling to clutch both of her teats, the bulge of her great belly gurgling comfort along your arm and shoulder, the whole side of your head so warm, so good.