by Rudy Wiebe
The sand was hard, but yielding too, you ran sinking deeper than at Turtle Lake into bits of shells and seaweed and unrecognizable creatures stirred by the shifting edge of the sea. Giant posts stood out in the bay, a grey-and-white bird always crowned every one, motionless as a totem, and though I had seen lake water disappear into horizon, this greyness was alive in a different way; the heavy dark sky and the sea created a smell where they touched, something breathable on the surface between them, there where you placed your naked feet; and the waves had no pattern, were tiny spurts and riffles to the headlands of the bay and far mountains, like snow flickering over the surface of a drift, yes, almost tiny pointed animals playing under the flexible skin of the sea.
But on the outer rim of Stanley Park, down on the shingle below Siwash Rock, the sea’s calm riffles swelled and smashed against the boulders, with foam cresting in tiny curls and fading away, innocently but heaving up to crash again. A huge bird dingy white flew by—a gull, Tony said, they eat anything—then slid sideways at me on the wind so close I jerked back, if I had lifted my hand its yellow bill would have gouged me. The blunt lines of ships perched far out between cloud and sea.
Perhaps my mother liked the sea, and also our many visits with Widow Pauline Fiedler, who lived now without her August just past the school on Gladstone with three unmarried sons, and her daughter Olga Racho with her five children settled nearby. Their father Gustav Racho had been left behind in Coaldale, Alberta, living, it was said, alone like old George Stewart in Speedwell, but not begging; he was no possible king of England.
Pah visited Mrs. Fiedler with Mam, but sat silent, nodding his head as he drank coffee—the Fiedlers in Vancouver certainly no longer drank home-made Pripps—perhaps ruminating on Old August’s mantra: “Leave Speedwell, there you can kill yourself working in the cold and you’ll still die with nothing.” Old August had known how to turn things, he always landed on his feet despite being so stout that he walked only with difficulty; and even after a brief time in Vancouver he had not died with nothing: Mrs. Fiedler had a very nice insulated house sided with cedar shingles—not big and expensive like some you could get here, nah! but good—on a good street without running outside for anything.
I sat in a soft armchair in that comfortable living room, listening with barely half an ear. Son Fred worked far away, logging, and Julius and Alvin were much too old for me to visit, but Liz, who was almost fourteen, regularly wrote in her diary “In the evening went to Fiedlers and had a swell time with Alvin haha”—whatever that “haha” reminded her of. And I begged to go too because in the Fiedler living room I had discovered Zane Grey.
Four books on a shelf beside a fireplace they never used—what, still carry wood into the house? with a furnace in the basement and a coal chute?—each book cover had a man embossed in black, holding a gun in an alert posture, sometimes mounted on a horse, and Mam, unable to read English and necessarily judging any book I opened by its cover, insisted I was not to read Schund, trash, garbage, like older boys often, sadly, did. But I argued, carefully translating titles, that the Fiedler boys weren’t Lobes, they wouldn’t read really bad books, these were just about cowboys and hunting, cowboys had to protect their cattle from thieves like Mormons and Indians in Riders of the Purple Sage—I didn’t mention the stolen women they were viciously fighting about—and I’d only read the books there, sit quietly and read. My mother did not quite trust the reading taste of the remaining Fiedler boys; they didn’t go to church like Emmanuel, the perfect son-in-law even if Mary was never the perfect wife, always so sharp-tongued and crabbily annoyed about something, but the living room on Gladstone was warm and seemed innocent, me buried in a book as usual, so there I ran deep into the savage Ohio forests of 1777 with The Spirit of the Border, a book I would never find in a public school library. I read swift as falling the overwritten he-maleness of Wetzel “assume gigantic proportions … a magnificent statue of dark menace” before he “plunged into the forest” on the trail of the hideous villain Jim Girty. And “as he disappeared, a long, low sound like the sigh of the night wind swelled and moaned through the gloom.” I could only shudder with ghostly anticipation, flip the page to Chapter xxiv.
And Liz in the wide arch beyond the Fiedler dining room—they had a separate room just to eat in—playing Chinese checkers with Alvin and looking up, her mouth open to laugh at me: Haha I’m your big sister and there’s nothing you can do about it haha!
The fingers of my small, rounded mother made her four steel knitting needles flicker in the electric light, a wool sock growing in her hands while she visited: there was nothing I wanted to “do about” her. One glance from her and “Le vent de la Mort,” the bloody revenge and re-revenge of Zane Grey seemed too grotesque to page through, much less read—though of course I kept on reading—the known warmth of my head cradled in her lap, her fingers sometimes brushing my hair, her light hand sheltering me the way a hen in a thunderstorm covers her chicks with her body though she is beaten by ice. My loving mother prayed “without ceasing” to an infinitely loving Father in Heaven, yes, but also, I knew, to a terrifying one. Perhaps that was another reason she liked Vancouver.
Mam’s favourite verse in the Bible said, “For God so loved the world;” that was her life motto. And the evangelists that she, Liz and I went to hear in the various halls and churches of Vancouver almost every weekend—Pah sometimes too, but he said he couldn’t understand English well enough; neither could Mam, but for her that didn’t matter—the evangelists began their sermons with that phrase too, all the time. But they immediately rushed on from there as if love was just the quick opener to a far more significant aspect of God’s character, as if “For God so loved the world that he gave …” was merely a plank sticking out over the huge lake of your life that you ran up as fast as you could and it was only at the last instant, when you were about to leap high and dive off the plank of love, that you realized the Lake of Life all around you was actually horizonless, depthless, Wrath.
The molten steel wrath of God; no one, neither Jacob Enns nor the travelling summer Bible teachers ever preached like this in High German at the Speedwell Church. They were reassuring, comforting, God wanted all sinners to repent and none to perish; but this was THUNDER: “You cannot stop at verse 16! You have to read to the end of the chapter!” For there, after the magnificent declaration that God loved the whole world and all that is in it, John the Evangelist, the disciple whom Jesus particularly loved, concludes:
he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.
That was the verse the English evangelists in Vancouver rushed towards, where they spent most of their sermons elaborating every horror text they could find in the Bible, every example in the history of the world or in their own personal stories which were always full of shameful sin, dreadful suffering: God’s wrath is like that, only worse. And not only worse, but it also “abideth on you for-ev-er.”
Since the stranger had passed through Speedwell and left his red words on our fences and roadside stones, “wra-a-ath” had been a lovely sound in my mouth, yet I could not understand it. I knew anger, I had occasionally been punched and knocked down, I had been in fights and given as good as I got; I had been spanked a few times—by Mam, never by Pah, that was never necessary my mother said, because it was not in my father’s nature to strike anyone unless he was totally enraged and that was not good discipline, Mam said—but those were brief school or home emotions that came and went, everybody got mad at someone sometimes and it went away. But Wrath? No one had ever beaten me, certainly not in a continuous rage, and this sounded a lot like that. In the Speedwell Church, when sin, sinners and judgment were preached about, der Zorn Gottes, the Wrath of God was, at most, mentioned in passing; rather, the sermons dwelt on suffering and its consequences because of sin, sorrow, a deep sorrow at the blindness, disappointment at the wilful bullheadedness of rejecting God’s love.
“Zorn” did not sound so dreadful to me. In High German sermons the text from John was “der Zorn Gottes bleibet über ihm,” which I understood to mean the dark anger of God abides over (not “on”) him, sort of like a black cloud hovering above you, following you all your life and always raining a bit, or like having poor luck because you weren’t an August Fiedler who knew how to turn things over and over and always make a little more than sufficient money happen. Sometimes I almost thought about my father this way: he worked very hard but we never seemed to have quite enough money; when Dan went away to work or ran the farm with Mam everything seemed to be easier—but surely my father was too mild and good to suffer Zorn, leave alone Wrath.
Good as it felt in mouth and ear, the English word was dreadful. And I didn’t want to live in a High
German world; after Hitler everything German was despicable.
So just stay on the plank Domma’john, idiot, why jump in the lake! No! the evangelist thundered, you have to jump! And then you will be saved if you believe on the Son! It says so right here, John 3 verse 36, and you prove you believe by jumping, because when you believe and jump, the lake that looks like God’s Wrath to the sinner, for the believer it becomes the Lake of God’s Love the instant he hits it! We have warned you, the evangelists repeated, the soft piano lifting the Percy B. Crawford Male Quartet to their feet and into the relentless, double-edged hymn,
Almost persuaded, now to believe;
sing the mellifluous harmony right to the bitter end of the third verse,
Sad, sad, that bitter wail, “Almost—but lost!”
“Come,” whispered the evangelist. “Come now.”
They called this “the altar call,” and I had never seen it in Speedwell either. It went on and on. Stand up now and come forward to the altar, come here with all who are coming, and kneel. Repent. Not the Lake of Fire forever.
Some people always walked down the aisle, going forward, but never enough to suit the evangelists.
And I was thinking: until you actually hit the lake, how could you tell? I did believe, I wanted to believe, I did, my mother wanted us all to believe and Liz was tilted forward on the church pew praying with her hands clenched and Helen looking down on us from her Heavenly Glory … what about Stalin?
The most horrible person on earth was de Kommunist Stalin, every Russian Mennonite story I ever heard listening to our families visiting told me that. He was even worse than Hitler, who murdered people quick and he was dead now, but Stalin lived on, and as long as he lived every Mennonite knew he tortured you as long as he could keep you alive, first by starving, then with armies and robbers raping, sabring, then he took your land away and your Bible, you could never go to church again, all your men began to disappear, the ministers first, and the teachers, and then one night when you were asleep the secret police, who everyone knew arrived every evening and sat in their Black Maria at the edge of your village, sat and smoked and waited, faceless in the gathering darkness—until one midnight those Onn’jeheiare, monsters hammered on your door and then you saw their stone eyes, heard their terrifying Russian and your father and your brothers were gone, or your whole family to the smallest child dragged into the night while your neighbours stared through their window curtains terrified, their turn tomorrow, and if you survived cells and midnight torture and cattle cars you would be in a Vorkuta or Siberian taiga camp, you wouldn’t know where, digging a canal or chopping down trees in snow, starving and worked to death. Forever? No, not even Stalin could do that. Only until death in its mercy came, as it always does, our mother said, and you went to heaven. Not even Stalin himself could create a Lake of Fire for All Eternity.
The evangelist explained very quietly, during the altar call, that All Eternity was a bird coming to Mount Robson every thousand years to rub its beak against the rock. When, from that rubbing, Mount Robson was worn level with the prairie, then one minute of All Eternity would have passed.
And it hit me: I believed and that was fine, but if you didn’t believe, God would be inexpressibly worse to you than Joseph Stalin.
Could I believe that? I didn’t want to. How could Mam? How could Jesus be good if God was really like that?
I noticed the evangelists never talked about “the wind blows where it wills,” or “the light shines in the darkness,” which were there in John chapter 3 as well; I noticed how they skipped over “for God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world” so fast I’d have forgotten it was there if I hadn’t looked for it in my English Bible in my bed at home. But I had no philosophy to grapple with their simplistic, pounding dualism, no ability yet to puzzle over the strange doubleness, the “both/and” feelings I felt—black or white! no or yes! that’s all there is to believe!—though the marvellous world and its stunning intricacy of creation made me wonder.
And particularly the organ music.
The evangelistic campaigns we attended in Vancouver were sometimes held in huge churches whose dark balconies circled over wooden pews and faced great silver organ pipes. When these pipes were played, which was only occasionally but it was enough to hear them even once, I was inhabited by sounds beyond comprehension: could that be a hymn? Could you sing words with that, even loving ones? You could certainly never make an altar call for people to walk forward and kneel at the feet of the evangelist in repentance. The held bass of the organ shivered the bench and the floor under you, until you felt it marinate your bones, soak like golden, molten rock into your head. An organ made you forget everything but sound.
And once, only once, an Indian chief wearing feathers around his head and down his long back like a picture book stood behind the pulpit in front of those magnificent organ pipes. He raised his arms, wide, so the long fringes of his white leather jacket swayed gently, and told us he had been invited to visit King George and Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace. While he was there he had asked them if they believed in God. And the Queen had told him, “Yes. We do.”
The enormous church exploded into applause, cheering, whistling! I had never heard such a sound in a church before, but this was so amazing I may have joined in: in London, England, the great capital of the British Empire that had been victorious in the greatest war ever fought in history, London where Mr. Winston Churchill spoke and Big Ben kept on tolling throughout the world, throughout the war, there in Buckingham Palace the Queen and the King believed in God! How could a little Baulch of a Saskatchewan Mennonite bush brat like me not believe?
This Canadian Indian chief stood below me on the podium in the church of St. Giles, patron of cripples, and he had talked to them, and I suddenly knew that if this man asked them a question like that, they could only answer truthfully. He didn’t walk around the platform waving his arms and shouting, he spoke calmly with a profound dignity that had no need to either yell or threaten like evangelists; he told you what had happened to him and then you knew. He had asked, the Queen herself had answered. “Yes.”
The man in St. Giles Church looked nothing like the Cree men slumped in their wagons slowly driving past our yard on the Speedwell roads in spring, women and children staring over the sideboards. One of our talky neighbours, who always knew everything, told us road allowance Indians were as quick at stealing as any Russian Bashkirs, when they’re heading for Turtle Lake or digging seneca roots or picking saskatoons just make sure your chickens are behind the barn and your dog tied up; they’ll take dogs too if they’re hungry enough. Sure, you need the dog to warn you they’re coming, just don’t let him run out to the road.
Do Indian people eat dog? Katie Martens and I didn’t know any Cree to ask when in grade four we prepared our “Historical Indian Project” on the wide table in the Speedwell School basement—it was a real basement with poured cement walls, not simply a hole in the ground like the cellar with its barrel heater under our church—and I liked to hear her talk about anything, whether she made it up or not. Katie easily stitched a piece of flour sack over the three peeled sticks I leaned toge
ther for the teepee (I didn’t know enough about the Cree to bring four) and Katie said it was too bad the Indians didn’t live in teepees any more, they were so poor now, and I told her I couldn’t understand why their horses and wagons looked so miserable, worse than ours who were refugees, and especially their clothes. The school books said they’d been here since before anyone and lived wherever they wanted everywhere in Canada, why were they so poor? Katie didn’t know any more about why than I did, but she thought a teepee would be fun with a campfire burning in front of it so we added that, wood splinters over shredded bits of red crepe paper, and our camp did look very neat among the flour-and-papier-mâché hills and spruce tips standing on them with strands of blue wool creek winding by over the cardboard earth. The basement was empty except for us two working and Katie laughed her cheerful bubbles of a laugh; we could be chief and squaw, she said.
I remember that project, and her words, as exactly as anything in my childhood. We were below the tiny northwestern basement window, where afternoon sunlight fell brightest, away from the open plank stairs onto the earthen floor. We could hear Miss Klassen walk overhead among school children slurring their feet. We never had classes in the basement, not that I recall; it was a freezing cave in winter where the risers for the annual Christmas concert stage lay stacked along with broken desks and the kindergarten table we no longer needed upstairs because there were fewer children. The entrance above the stairs was a heavy lid you had to heave up and lean against the wall where the boys hung their coats. But once Katie and I were down there working together on an “Historical Indian Project.”
When the Indian chief in Vancouver had spoken, he lowered his arms. He looked around at the people in the lower pews, and then he lifted his face to us in the circled balcony. He turned fully towards me clenched onto the brass railing nearest him over the pulpit, and stopped. His face was folded and gentle, like my mother’s, but also hard, not threatening but fixed; like a hillside boulder exposed during the building of a road, deeply immovable.