by Rudy Wiebe
The barn granary had no cats and no window; only the open door let in the grey winter light. Helen was here. In motionless cold. Covered by a sheet that reached almost to the earth floor. The low bin with oats was behind her, the wheat and barley sacks, the white dust of chop swept into the corners. She was cold, hard, as rock. I seem to be alone in the granary, touching her shoulder perhaps. Not holding our barn lantern, that’s impossible, I couldn’t have opened that door alone in the dark; her body must have been inside the lumber box to protect it from the mice until they finished the coffin. But I saw her laid out, draped under a single sheet the length of her body and her face uncovered to her halo of long black hair, so perfectly black as my mother said hers had once been. My mind, though unconscious of it then, gathering the mass of indelible knowing that would seep through my life. In school Miss Klassen was letting me wander past grade four into five, keeping my mouth shut by stuffing my mind with words, numbers, maps, pictures, ideas and every day I knew that at home Helen lay all day on her cot with her feet near the wood heater whose tin pipes passed up through the ceiling and the peaked space under the roof, beside the sheet that separated Dan’s and my bed from the space where Liz now slept alone. And each day when I got home and did my chores and brought in all the stove and heater wood, Helen would sit in her bed and we could set puzzles together; me doing the edges and easy shapes and often, when I came from school next day, she had already ordered the shifting colours I could barely recognize, showing me where to place them. Each day she was there. On January 7 she wrote in her diary:
It’s three months I have been in bed today. Biechs
were over today. In the evening Rudy read stories
to me. Got a dozen oranges from Mrs. Biech.
Over the weeks we read Rock of Decision and Tom Sawyer, and then Mystery at High Hedges
out loud … till I came to a place where the Heel
Woman walks, then I made a short stop (boo!).
What an obvious book High Hedges is now when I look for it in a used book store: a wealthy heroine exactly Helen’s age whose life is filled with abrupt disasters always resolved so happily by amazing—often money—coincidences. But there is one chapter title I have never forgotten: “The Heel Woman Walks.” And Helen—perhaps she dreamed of a life chauffeured about between estates in big cars, lying on beaches and never, not even for an instant, feeling sick.
Saturday, Feb. 3: I started to knit the other sock while mom and dad went to school to wash floor. I helped Rudy make a scrap book on food in the evening.
Sunday, Feb. 4: Today nobody was over, and Rudy helped me learn the ten Bible verses by heart, which was terribly hard, He also stayed home with me at night for there was church.
Helen, much like Dan, had difficulty memorizing; sounds that aligned themselves as easy as swallowing in my mind seemed for her to evaporate, no matter how often they were spoken.
Wednesday, Feb. 21: Did some embroidery today, after school Rudy and I played crokinole and had lots of fun.
And the last mention:
Tuesday, Feb. 27: Felt pretty blue today. Never did much talking. Bill’s letter came today cheered me a little. In the evening Rudy showed me how to divide.
Who was Bill? No one who came to the funeral as far as I know, and Helen’s letters no longer exist.
It is impossible that her body lay on bare boards covered by a sheet. But that is what I remember in the granary. Cold like frozen steel, it skins you at a touch.
Liz, not quite thirteen, wrote in the diary what she heard said about Helen’s death: “Her heart tore off.” But why she would add “she had an easy death though” I cannot imagine. Were we all trying somehow to comfort ourselves? Mam always said that Helen’s medical condition, beyond her infant illnesses brought from Russia, was rheumatic fever, which affected her heart; bed rest was basically all Dr. Coghlan could recommend. And the entire community knew where her rheumatic fever started: with the frilly crepe-paper dresses the little girls wore for the Jack Pine School Christmas program in 1937 when we still lived on the CPR homestead. The school was packed with stage and audience; the only place the little girls could change into their cute fairy costumes was Miss Ferguson’s teacherage, then they ran through snow in the darkness and climbed up a ladder into the school window behind the stage curtain. Their wand and piano dance was so beautiful, everyone said, but Mam never called it daunce, dance, always “Soohn dommet e’romm’jeran,” such stupid running around—but that sprint through the fierce night cold dressed in nothing but underclothes and paper, my mother said, their arms and legs completely naked and running back they were sweaty as well, that was where our Helen, nine years old, caught her rheumatic fever.
When the pallbearers carried the coffin out of the church on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, they set it at the foot of the church steps and opened it for the last time. Our family stood around it, our community surrounded us. Helen’s long hair lay about her shoulders, her lips slightly open to her perfect teeth, arms crossed among the few bright roses and ferns my brothers could only have brought from North Battleford.
Es geht nach Haus, zum Vater Haus,
Wer weiss, vielleicht schon morgen
We’re going home, to our Father’s home,
Who knows, perhaps tomorrow.
We sang that plaintive song following Helen’s coffin to the cemetery in long procession. Abe and Dan and four neighbours carried it; Emmanuel was not there, nor Gust, and I was too small.
At the grave Abe Fehr unscrewed the handles and then the black coffin with the white declaration still fastened to its lid—
SAFE
IN THE ARMS
OF JESUS
sank into the hole, down so slowly on ropes in the silence you could hear them creak, the coffin bumped and settled into the box waiting at the bottom for it. Arms lowered someone down, the box lid was tipped shut, pale straw thrown over it and as Reverend Jacob Enns prayed the young men seized the shovels and the rumble of earth falling began, passing spades swiftly from one to the other, frozen clods pounding hollow, fill it quickly, quickly, the sheltering earth, beyond pain, safe in the arms, at home, at last. I stood tight against my mother, but that was no help.
Three days later, on Wednesday evening, Mary and Emmanuel with Gracie and their new baby Gerald drove into our yard in their Model T. They had had not the faintest hint that Helen died on Mary’s twenty-first birthday, that she had been buried on Easter Sunday; not one of all the messages and telegrams we sent had reached them at their isolated mission near Mayfair, Saskatchewan, and they had simply come for a regular visit, praying to find Helen improved. Mary’s shock, her frantic, wailing despair was as harrowing as another funeral.
When I add up the distances now on a provincial map, Mayfair is no more than a hundred kilometres from Speedwell as the raven flies. Why could they not be reached? Tina and Gust, who had moved from Alberta over the mountains to Vancouver, received our telegram within hours of its being sent. But to penetrate the lakes and boreal forest of Saskatchewan during the last months of a world war—who can be blamed? What cannot be changed, must be endured.
Anne Klassen, our Speedwell teacher, was at the funeral; fifty-eight years later she tells me that she remembered Helen very well, such a “lovely, lively young girl.” And also, that after Helen’s death I “became troublesome” in school, so she took me alone into the teacherage. “I talked gently to you,” she says, and on the telephone her voice at eighty-eight is so gentle still I feel my whole body shiver. “And you burst into tears.”
I see in the diary Liz continued that on the day after the funeral, Easter Monday, April 2,
Rudy was sick & didn’t go the church, but we went to the Heinrichs in afternoon. Had a good time singing etc.
She notes I wasn’t well enough to go to school on Tuesday either. I was ten years and six months old, and my loving sister who had read and told me stories until I could read them back and forth with her—what was she doing in heaven? She’
d be without pain, and the Bible said they sang praises there forever and ever, as we did in church and at home, hymns that ran through my mind in an endless echo:
How beautiful heaven must be (must be),
Sweet home of the happy and free (and free),
Fair haven of rest for the we-e-eary,
How beautiful heaven must be.
Helen loved to sing, smiling even when she could not breathe well enough to join in with Isola on her guitar or Mary pumping our brown organ. And singing with angels and harps, that would be even better—but all the time? She liked stories, would God let them tell stories, not just sing, in the Bible Jesus told lots of stories, would he do that in heaven too?
The first week of April 1945 was so cold that on Friday Liz records “Didn’t go to school today [on ac]count of the weather … Got a letter from Tina.” Even with Mary and Emmanuel there, our small house was empty. I remember we sat in the lamplight around the kitchen table, looking at the worn oilcloth.
April greyness dragged into brighter, thawing spring, and a sharp physical ache suddenly hit me. At gradually increasing intervals, a swift punch in the stomach that hung there like a rock growing longer and sharper until it slowly dematerialized. And an hour or a day later, without warning, it punched me again in the same place. Soon I could sense it all the time hovering like a shadow about to shift into solid agony.
This was much harder than the frequent gut pains I already knew about. For my nausea, vomiting was simple relief, and as for doing “Number Two,” as we laughed about it in school, I remember telling Liz, who was forever trying to improve me,
“I can hold it, I don’t have to go to the toilet for three or four days.”
“You’re stupid, that’s why it hurts.”
“It doesn’t hurt there, this is here,” I fingered my lower right side gingerly, “But that—if I don’t really want to, I don’t go.”
I had worked it out: if my bowels tried to move, I’d go if it was convenient, sure, like going for a slow stroll in the fresh air to the boys’ toilet, but if not I’d just hunch up tight and soon the feeling would vanish and I wouldn’t have to; especially not during the long evenings in winter, all the way to the frozen toilet across the garden among the trees near the icehouse.
“You’re so dumb.” Liz was disgusted, I knew, even to be talking about that. “You’ll get sick worse if you don’t … go … every day.”
“Go-o—go-o—go-o,” I chanted. Since the vivid English word was ultra-boorish and forbidden in any case, as swearing, I rocked all the more on the pale euphemism, “go-o-o, in the ice and sno-o-ow!” and then, to give her a dig with my boorishness, I sang the German rhyme Pah would repeat when he saw a woman mincing along on high heels, someone, as he said, laughing, who really “meant herself something”—“Yeah, yeah, you Fraulein, von hinten, scheisst ka-ka-rinten!” Lady, from the rear, [you] shit cu-cu-currants.
“Rudy, you be still,” Mam was worried. “Dit es tjeen Sposs.” This is no joke.
And it wasn’t. Though I now “went” whenever my body demanded, the sharp pain came more often. Then on May 2 the radios of the world announced that Adolf Hitler was dead; on May 7 and 8 the last German forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. I must have heard some of these announcements on the CBC news because I remember thinking, Now the World War is over, there will be no more news to broadcast; no more Big Ben tolling “This Is London Calling,” or Matthew Halton talking while Germans shoot at him, the only thing left would be Elton Britt yodelling once again, “Wave to me, my lady, as I roll on down the line.” If the war was over, all the news was over. But according to Liz’s diary:
Friday, May 4: Ma went to Battleford with Rudy today he stayed to have an operation.
And I know that as soon as I got to North Battleford, where Dr. Coghlan had sent me fast from Glaslyn, I was on the operating table and doctors were looking for my appendix. They finally found it, one of them told me some days later on his morning round, rearranged and grown against my stomach where it had no business being, and that was one reason my incision was so big; they had done a thorough abdominal search and found it among the confused organs just before it ruptured. Why had I waited so long, in pain?
Doc Coghlan was a country doctor and no hospital surgeon, but had known our family for ten years; by 1945 he was a legend far beyond his love of fishing, and today a room in the Glaslyn CNR Station Museum is filled with his memorabilia, including the huge buffalo coat he wore as he climbed out of the cutter when Dan brought him from the highway where he left his car in winter, and the black satchel of doctor mysteries he always carried, including I suppose scalpels he might have used in a desperate emergency to open and explore me. Though he could not save Helen, among hundreds of others he certainly saved Dan’s life, and Mam’s and mine, and Isola Fehr’s as well, so she could marry Dan in 1947 and they could raise a family of five and love each other for over fifty years.
The hospital doctor in North Battleford tried cracking jokes about my wandering appendix; he and the nursing sister laughed, but I was thirsty. I was dying of thirst, water was all I wanted—I didn’t care where I vomited or if the sisters in their stiff grey and white shoved bedpans under me somewhere or took them away or offered me a long-necked pisspot or noodles on a plate or taped a new bandage over my stomach that looked worse than trying to sew a butchered pig back together. Mam could have sewed stitches far neater and not such thick string either. “I want a drink!”
“Just be thankful,” the sister said, “you didn’t need clamps and buttons to hold you together.”
And the doctor, who in a hospital controls the world and everything in it, told me, “It’s the ether. When you’re over the ether you can drink all you want. Just wait a little, it won’t be long.”
An hour was a day! The spring hours dragged on forever and finally I got tiny sips, not even a decent swallow, a sip through a paper straw! A bent grey man in a white hospital gown kept walking past in the corridor, back and forth, the sister told me he had cancer, poor man, and I asked her if he could drink water and she said of course he could. I told her I wanted to have cancer, then I could drink and walk around bent. She gave me another sip and I was burning up. Just wait she said, you’ll heal perfect, all healed up.
After mother returned home I had visitors, including Abe and a Bible school friend who grinned without stopping and told funny stories, but I clearly remember only the old man with cancer and my thirst. And also the room: not anything inside it, but the brick outside because Dan brought me a postcard of Notre Dame Hospital, North Battleford, and pointed out my room window to the left of the main entrance on the second floor. A beautiful three-storey brick hospital with what looked like an iron grating up its right side; I knew nothing about fire escapes, I asked why did they have what looked like shelves there and Dan told me, that’s right, they were shelves for storage, that’s where those Catholic sisters put all the sick stuff the doctors cut off or out of people, the legs, the fingers, the gall bladders, the appendixes. So my hospital window remains unforgettable: it was half the brick building away from where they stored the body parts.
Tina arrived in North Battleford by train from Vancouver. She brought little Anne and Carol and baby Rose, born a month before Helen died, with her, and she got me at the hospital and all together we took the Greyhound bus north on Highway 4. On Wednesday, May 16, Liz admitted to her diary,
We went to Fehrs to see if Rudy + Tina came +
sure enough they did boy was I glad too.
My stitches were out, I was healing fast, but it took a while for me to recover. During late May and June our entire scattered family came to Speedwell, except for Gust who had to work, and Tony and Eldo who were in school. We were all still grieving: Tina who could not come to the funeral, Mary and Emmanuel who had so tragically not known about it, and all of us who had been there, especially our mother for whom Helen had prayed so much, often ill herself with Helen lying there for months, helpless
to help.
The first picture taken inside our house shows what we did together: Gilda and Mary could not sit motionless quite long enough not to blur, but Dan and Tina, especially Tina, mother of five, are as focused as Abe reading from his preacher’s leather Bible. Above Abe’s head on the organ tilts a mail order dress box full of the family photos they have been telling each other stories about, and on the left hangs the small oval picture of a high tropical waterfall which I remember contemplating often. be of good courage it stated with biblical conviction—but why, I wondered, would you need courage when facing such beauty?
At some point I returned to school, where Nettie Enns had carried on perfectly well alone in grade five. The annual school picture had been taken without me, but I did receive a copy of it. The tiny snapshot—twenty-seven kids whose every name I still know clustered together against the grey bush, the boys in overalls and the girls in skirts and blouses—is autographed on the back in wide, black pen
To: Rudy Wiebe
From: Miss A. Klassen
your teacher
Liz played with Gracie and Tina and Mary’s new babies Rosie and Gerald; Anne and Carol and I chased the spring calves around the hay corral; Tina and Mam planted the garden; we took pictures of each other, either in the yard or under the spruce across the road, of us and our friends and our family in variable combinations. One shows our mother seated in our rocking chair in front of the house with her grandchildren Gerald and Rosie wrapped in blankets in her arms; she is smiling, but sadly. Behind her tiny Grace hugs a blanket to her face while I’m on the porch beside the house door, chewing my fingernails as usual.