by Rudy Wiebe
From Eaton’s catalogue we ordered a white marker for Helen, the first gravestone rather than the usual wooden grave fences in the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church cemetery. Sixty years later it is there still in the clearing of thirty graves hemmed in closely by brush and deadfall, small and weathered but indelible, with a tiny angel face surrounded by wings worn into the centre top, and below that
HELEN WIEBE
1928-1945
FOREVER WITH THE LORD
Also, plans were made. That fall, after the district threshing was over between squalls of snow and all the vegetables had been stored and canned and shelved in the cellar below the kitchen, after two months with a new teacher at Speedwell School—Liz was in grade eight and I in grade six—we were back in North Battleford again. We drove past the hospital, laughed at Dan’s fire escape story and continued down the long hill to the sprawling station of the Canadian National Railroad that overlooks the panoramic North Saskatchewan and Battle River valley. There Mam, Pah, Liz and I would board the daily passenger train west for Vancouver, the enormous city across the Rocky Mountains on the Pacific Ocean where Tony lived and where, he wrote me, winter never came.
Hey, I told Mam, I won’t even need a jacket there! But she laughed and bought me one anyway in North Battleford: full zipper, black sleeves and a kind of shifting blue body; very nice.
Except for two weeks in Notre Dame Hospital, I had never slept anywhere but in a log house in the boreal forest where the single bit of modern technology was a battery radio. Despite all my reading, I did not yet imagine that I would live my entire adult life in cities.
7.
CHIEF
To ride a train was beyond anything I had experienced. Forget about horses and wagons on dirt roads, or a slow car or jerky bus grinding over gravel, lurching around holes and mud; this amazement of leaning back in a cushioned seat beside an immense window while the world whirled past without so much as a bump or twitch, you could choose it coming at you or going away, fast as lightning, always the shoulder of the railroad embankment at the lip of the window and the hard clickity-click of steel coming faster and then, suddenly! you flew off a cliff, there was no earth under you, the train ran out on air—the North Saskatchewan, that must be it!—far below the thick and braided river, wide water, and in a flash poplars there bristling like weeds and wuhh! cliffs leaped up into solid earth under you again and the steel sound ran deeper, carrying you faster—all this just leaving the river hills and bush of North Battleford. Vancouver beyond mountains by the ocean would be—your eyes were too full to imagine. Just look.
Day into night, coppice and parkland and rolling hills, farmyards and long fields, towns, grain elevators barely glimpsed and gone, sometimes five or six of them shuddering past, the sprawl of Edmonton lights slower and slower until you stopped completely, the twisted milky rivers sometimes boiling as it seemed under the wheels and sometimes far, far below, moonlight and hours of trees, swamp, muskeg—snow, there would have been snow, always in my Speedwell years there was massive snow and here through the train window it covered the startling mountains against the night sky. For two days and a night—or was it two nights?—we must have tried to eat and sleep on the day coach seats, but I do not remember that as I do the flying-gable roof of the Jasper CNR station, and from its platform the crested mountains spread out along distance like a knobbly hand, pointing. I realized I had not at all been able to imagine mountains from pictures in books or calendars, nor even when, with my fingers, I tried to push them together for the dough landscape Nettie Enns and I made in geography.
“There, you can see it,” Mam said. “God’s wonder of creation.”
One morning our long train curved to a stop on the side of a mountain where there was neither station nor siding; all the passengers were allowed to climb down to the gravel shoulders of the narrow grade and stare across the valley. There, shouldering out of range upon crumpled range, stood the unbelievable face of Mount Robson. The highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, they said, and maybe the highest sheer cliff in the world. God had made that in Canada too.
There were no dome cars on passenger trains then, nor could we, with the cheapest tickets, have entered one if there had been. I have only a single memory from inside the train: the big man who came to sit across the aisle from us a day before we reached Vancouver. He had flowing hair that curled at his broad shoulders and a large gold ring hanging from a smaller one stuck through his ear lobe.
Pah said, very quietly in Low German, “If he had that in his nose, he might be tame enough to lead.”
I didn’t dare laugh, but I watched him. The man read, dozed, got up to walk down the aisle and returned again as if he were normal. God had made him too—but the hair and the ring were his own doing.
Monday, November 5, 1945: Arrived in Van.
10 A. M. had a good time all day.
Brant Street, Vancouver, British Columbia: Gust had built a small house there covered with tarpaper on a lot at the edge of an old cherry orchard. The original Rice orchard house was still there, tall, two-storeyed with two brick chimneys on busy old Nanaimo Road, but new Brant Street was a dead end, only a block long with barely built houses on either side and a cement sidewalk up the short slope to 27th Avenue. The world that crammed my head was so strange now that I could not look at the blocks of houses spread down the valley to the edges of the mountains: I was outside, alone, and I wanted to play with Tony’s wooden wagon, hold a handle I could feel in my hand. Tony would be home from school soon, just stay off the street, Tina warned me, and I pulled the wagon up the sidewalk looking at the smooth concrete under my feet, pulled it up, rode it down the incline, again and again.
So the first thing Tony did when he appeared at the top corner of the street was laugh at me riding with my legs splayed wide on either side of the wagon. Like a baby he said.
“You kneel on the right leg and push with the left going up, and then you come down the same way—push! really get up speed.”
Okay so I did, and came down twice as fast as before and dumped myself into the street, wheels spinning. The pavement scrape on my knee did not bleed very much, but the hole ground through my pants bought for the trip was worse: a patch to wear the rest of the winter.
As for Tony, even though I was taller and two grades ahead, it was obvious he would always know more than I and be better looking. He had the lean face and sharp nose of a Fiedler, not my mother’s round Knelsen stubbiness.
I began to recognize this strange world. North of 4160 Brant there were no houses: the grass field of the former Rice farm sloped down to the B.C. Electric tracks. Two- or three-car trams climbed up there from downtown on the rising wooden trestle to the Nanaimo Road station, two shelters perched on steps above the street overpass, and from there continued, they said, on to New Westminster or Chilliwack. Beyond the tram line the city sprawled into the valley to the CNR tracks and Grandview Highway and then up over the next line of long hills: you could see a gleam of ocean inlet and the North Shore Mountains blazing in the low winter light and the air came up from the sea moist, like nothing I had ever breathed, a faint tinge in your nostrils. Salt, said Tony the know-it-all, and rain, Vancouver never had snowdrifts, it just rained, you never needed a parka. A city surrounded by snowy mountains but with no snow on the streets in winter, and really, still part of Canada? You’ll find out, Tony said.
Vancouver was vaster, louder than I could think. Wherever we travelled, by tram or bus, in Gust’s almost-new car, or on trolleys singing from wires, there was forever more of it and more people, how could there be so many people on earth? I could not know that Vancouver was one of the most beautiful cities in the world, its great muddy river branches and long fingers of the sea, delta and hills always green with trees and the perfect cone of Mount Baker south in the United States trailing wisps of smoke from its volcanic crater; what I saw at first was unending houses and cement sidewalks and street lights, and houses, cars and immense fir trees—they�
��re not spruce, Tony said—and more people and more houses in which even the smallest, while they were being built like Gust and Tina’s, had electricity and hot water pouring out of a tap. And no Betjhüs to find in the dark somewhere among the gnarled cherry trees.
Overwhelming as it was, Vancouver was in a way ridiculously simple: nothing to do for light or heat or water, just find a switch or sit on a toilet and everything happened. Gust’s car even had a starter inside it, you got in, stepped on the starter and the motor turned over, there was nothing to crank. It was a Schlarafenlaunt, a fool’s paradise, my mother said, all you needed to live here auls eene Mohd emm Schmäah, like a maggot in fat, was money.
And of course we had none. We intended to visit only for a few weeks, but suddenly we did not feel like leaving immediately, even though the little house was more crowded than our house in Speedwell when the entire family came home. And we stayed five months, because one day in November Pah walked across Nanaimo Road to the long foundry that belched smoke and blazed fire pounding steel opposite the Rice house and to Gust’s astonishment, for Pah spoke only a few words of English, the foreman understood what he wanted and gave him a job. Shovelling up messes on the foundry floor, helping lift what needed to be lifted: anybody could tell him what to do and he’d do it; exactly the kind of work my father would do well and faithfully, forever.
The job paid enough for us to live and save for the trip home, so Pah helped Gust finish the frame-and-tar-paper addition to the house where we could have two rooms to ourselves. One bathroom for ten was a dream for Speedwellers; true, the three-burner propane camp stove in our rooms was no wood oven spreading thick heat like a blessing, but it cooked, no wood-carrying for me, and we had enough to live and could pay the doctor, only a tram ride away, to help Mam with her strange, continuing stomach illnesses. Whatever they were, we children knew no more than the various pills and medicine bottles now standing on the shelf above the sink where we washed dishes and also our faces, with a twist of the wrist the water poured out, hot or cold, and not a slop bucket in sight. Despite the chill of our tarpaper rooms, and the cold I had to crawl into on my iron cot—which seemed so … thin, so alone, not deep, thick straw with Dan, already asleep, a muscled, breathing heater beside me under the quilt our mother had sewn with wool we all helped to card—despite that, Vancouver was continuously amazing. Drizzle, shifty fog, the creek in the ravine between Brant and Gladstone always running a brown stream under dark brush clotted with moss, snow that sifted through the air but melted on your hand or as it touched sidewalk or street, wet but never icy—when the sun shone in the sharp air, November, January were unimaginable. City, sea, golden snow mountains.
Tony and little Eldo, grade two, led Liz and me to Lord Selkirk School a block west of Brant. Down a dip and over a small ravine bridge, then along 27th Avenue and there it was on Gladstone, four storeys of brick, shingles and enormous windows, with separate entrances for boys and girls, high double doors with long opening handles—no latches here, nor even knobs—and more than six hundred kids, maybe a thousand, how could I tell. There were any number of grade six rooms, you had to remember your code because each had a teacher all to itself who taught only your class, except when you went up to the auditorium in the top floor for gym. Several classes would be there at once, throwing balls, kicking them against the wall right inside the school! Some boys in grade six were really big, and the girls had so much curly hair you’d think they were women; and longer bare legs than I had ever seen. When the sun shone at recess, it seemed more children than there could possibly be on earth were playing in the schoolyard.
And across Gladstone Street, directly in line with the concrete walk from the school’s entrances, was a small store. Tony showed it to us first, even before we heard the school bell buzzing like an enraged wasp and we had to go line up. The store’s two front windows were packed with chocolate bars.
I had seen them for years. In Speedwell the maps of Canada and the world often hung down unrolled; even when you concentrated on the teacher, on the rim of your vision crouched the subliminal presence of haunting words:
Neilson’s, the Best Chocolate Bars in Canada
and:
Neilson’s milk chocolate—
The Best Milk Chocolate Made
Not just words, worse, pictures of the chocolate bars themselves, four different kinds, floated on the blue of both Canada’s and the world’s oceans; only the unmarked, spinning globe, which both Miss Hingston and Miss Klassen insisted gave us the true picture of our earth in space, could stop us imagining that the entire Arctic Ocean above Canada and Alaska was overlaid by a monumental Neilson’s jersey milk bar, all of Siberia by a Neilson’s JERSEY NUT. The ornate capitals were embossed in gold—really, how could you doubt it?
We believed, fervently, but throughout four years of war we never actually saw a single one of those map bars in Schroeder’s or Harder’s store or even in the rare spaces of Jacob Rempel’s store in Fairholme or Dart’s in Glaslyn: not one bar to touch, leave alone taste.
The Martens twins always claimed they had eaten a Neilson’s Milk Chocolate bar, once when they were very little. You had to peel away the white-and-golden paper to a skin of solid silver, unfold that and the deep brown chocolate revealed itself: divided into beautifully ridged rectangles so each person would have an exactly equal share, just count, nothing to quarrel about. And taste, it was …
Taste could not be described, especially by the twins, but for this I wanted no words; chocolate longing was a white-and-gold wash on the world’s blue oceans. Cocoa was listed in our ration booklets and there were times when a yellow tin of Fry’s Pure Breakfast Cocoa, complete with its royal coat of arms, stood momentarily on a shelf behind a store counter. If by a miracle it arrived in our house with the ninety-eight-pound sack of Robin Hood flour and Mam spooned that ineffable emanation into fresh, hot milk and stirred—a resurrection out of the brown dust! In a church Christmas bag I had once found a brown bud. “Don’t chew!” Liz yelled at me, “suck, make it last!” And in June 1944 when Speedwell had a closing school picnic at Turtle Lake and in our class race I came in second by half a step to a snotty brown girl from Turtleview School—she must have practised for weeks running on the hard, ribbed beach—I had the choice of either half a Sweet Marie bar or half an O Henry. I’d never seen or heard of either, and I didn’t like my second name so I took half the Sweet Marie and the older boys snickered at me taking the “girlie” prize. Who cared, my mouth was full, as I showed them, and they were swallowing spit. The crunch, the texture, the taste—I would have eaten Sweet Marie again if they had named it Stalin.
But Vancouver didn’t need Neilson maps in school: the bars themselves lay piled up in the store window. All you needed to eat them was money.
They cost five cents. Which was the price of a quart of milk, my mother told me, delivered at the door, and the bigger bottles with the bulb on top for settling out the cream were eight. Dad earned twenty-five cents every hour in the smoking foundry.
There came a day when I persuaded Tony to let me help him deliver his weekly flyers in exchange for half a nickel; he bought a Neilson’s Milk Chocolate for the two of us to eat hidden in the ravine, away from Liz and little Eldo. The Martens twins were right: you could divide it exactly rectangle by rectangle laid out on the silver paper; nothing to quarrel about. As for taste—even in all the years of staring at ocean and Siberia, I had not imagined it.
Mam was a superb worrier, and in Vancouver that’s what she did for Dan suddenly left alone to take care of everything for the whole winter on the farm in Saskatchewan. She wrote him many letters of course, which have not survived, but there is one city photo which she sent Dan with a German note on the back: “Here you can see a picture of when we go into town on Saturday, they come on the street as we walk and take our picture.”
The street photographer from Souvenir Snaps, 512 W. Hastings St., caught three of us in mid-stride. Mam with her best black hat and imitati
on fur coat buttoned up to her scarf; Pah on her left, wearing his Sunday suit, and me on her right, bareheaded and mouth open, something half-eaten in my right hand. As I explained in blotchy ink after Mam on the back of the picture: “I was just eating a bar.”
Pah walks as I remember him: eyes shaded by his hat-brim, mouth shut and head down; life and his place in it is what it will be. But Mam is smiling, in fact she looks truly happy, and it is possible she is. I don’t know when the picture was taken; perhaps the bright light on the clustered store signs stretching behind us and me capless means it was an early spring day, perhaps the cherry trees along Cambie and behind our house were already in full bloom and soon we would have saved enough and be on the train travelling back to our Saskatchewan home in the snow where Dan, oama Betchla, poor bachelor, had worked so hard alone all winter.
Where we also belonged. As Mam always said, “Speedwell es goot jenaug fe daut Läwe daut wie läwe.” Speedwell is good enough for the life that we live.
But it may also be she truly liked Vancouver, that she liked the grey sea at English Bay as much as I did when we walked there. The long changing rooms below the street were of course closed, no one swam under glowering clouds, the swimming rectangles and diving platforms were heaved up on the beach for winter just below the enormous logs that lay about everywhere, some of them almost as thick as I was tall. Sometimes long dark men in nothing but swimming suits leaned against them, or lay sleeping in the pale sunlight. Soldiers, Tony said, they’re resting after the war.