by Rudy Wiebe
Nevertheless, while gobbling down Charles Wilbour’s turgid translation of Les Misérables, through prairie heat and aching, growing muscles and the quickly boring profanity of a Coaldale construction crew, the soaring thread of those five girls’ “ble–e–ssing” will sing some quiet and peace, some clarity in my head. Also remembered sadness.
Because in 1946–47 Speedwell was going away. Leaving. Not its land of course, not the long eskers of hills laid down by glaciers grinding and melting forward and back over the earth, the meandering swamps and creeks, the immovable erratics sticking up wherever you chopped down and uprooted trees to pile them in windrows, all your children helping clean up branches and brush, throwing them as high as possible so the windrows would later burn like long hills of fire leaping against the snow and winter sky, against the drift of northern lights flaming down upon you. In our small district more cleared land than ever nudged into the boreal forest, there were better houses and even, amazingly, a hip-roof barn built of lumber—but the depression of the 1930s was past and World War II was fought and won and over, Gott sei Dank, thanks be to God, and Canada offered much more than this labour subsistence in ice and mosquitoes and rocks and seneca roots. The neighbours who had already left wrote us that everywhere south in Canada there was a livable climate, there was electricity, there was work, there was money to buy a tractor, a car. The post office informed us of everything—so many letters from friends now gone and the Eaton’s and Simpson’s catalogues thicker than ever and weekly newspapers, the Winnipeg Free Press and the Family Herald and Weekly Star from Montreal and the Western Producer from Saskatoon—as we ourselves had seen that world during all those months in Vancouver.
And one Sunday Gustav Biech, for whom Dan often worked in winter feeding cattle, and who had built up the best and largest farm in the district, east of Jack Pine, close to the highway, one summer Sunday Gustav and Lydia Biech drove a pale grey 1946 Plymouth into the church yard, a vehicle that shone in the sun; that cost over a thousand dollars, it was said. Obviously only people in Sunday clothes would dare get into it.
A car. It is clear that over a year before, in May 1945, Dan came home with a car. It can be seen in a picture taken in our hay corral of me and my nieces Carol and Anne and five multicoloured (mostly Hereford) calves after I returned home from the North Battleford hospital: in the distant background, beyond the sod- and straw-roofed barns, between the usual small mountain of firewood, our buggy and the corner of our house, stands a roofless car. The engine is hidden by a corral post, but the straight, rectangular windshield is clear, as are the two front seats and the board box built behind them, between the high back fenders and their narrow wheels with wooden spokes.
Is there a yeast in memory that grows, knits our past into the timeless shapes we desire? Or do I now know events and times only from what I see in accidentally retained pictures, the exact Kodak instant focused on crimped paper, and I gradually remember … because in my hand I recognize I’m wearing my homecoming present after having survived my appendix: a bright yellow shirt, my favourite colour, with a gleaming black collar and button-line down my chest. And behind us children standing in our hay corral yard is Dan’s car: a worn, tattered roadster worthy of being a Depression Bennett Buggy.
But despite its absolute uniqueness in our Speedwell life, I don’t remember ever riding in it, nor whether Dan still had it when we returned from Vancouver. The nearest gas pump, cash only, would have been in Fairholme ten miles away—though John Harder must have had a barrel for his 1942 Chev truck hauling cream twice a week to Medstead—but for a car to be useful in Speedwell, even one with a platform for hauling sacks or boxed animals, it would have to be manoeuvrable on dirt roads and able to keep moving between all the mudholes. And a car would be completely helpless in winter snow, to say nothing of the radiator bursting in freezing temperatures. You could crank it till you were dizzy and it would still be a frozen dead machine; covering its hood with a horse blanket wouldn’t help any more than trying to build a house out of three walls. In Speedwell you could always lead horses to your well, stuff them with hay you cut in your own sloughs for nothing except sweat.
And I find my mother’s Gothic script on the back of another snapshot, “abgenommen den 28 Maerz 1947,” taken the 28th of March, 1947, six weeks before we left Speedwell for good, which shows Dan and me seated not in the car but in our creaky cutter in deep snow with his pride team of grey Fox and dappled Silver, their necks arched to race us out of there. Dan wears his dress overcoat, I shade my face against the sunlight with gauntlet gloves, I remember them now that I see them, my pride in those huge leather cuffs but I know all their warmth was in Mam’s knitted liners. Behind us the spiky spruce of the muskeg across the road allowance from our house.
I cannot doubt my mother’s handwriting. But where were Dan and I going in our Sunday clothes on a winter Friday morning?
We were the only Speedwell Wiebes ever—though it’s the second most common Russian Mennonite name on earth—one small family and still proud of our magnificent horses that could run us to church or post office or town through any mud or snow, harness bells ringing. In the picture you can see the bells on Silver’s breeching. But people were leaving; by March 1947 the Speedwell–Jack Pine districts were three-quarters empty of people. People had come and gone since before I ever noticed, especially young people going away to work—spring sugar beets, summer railroads, fall threshing, winter lumber camps—or to Bible school in Hepburn, but even if they married and moved to isolated village mission churches, they always came back to visit and remained part of their local family. True, before the war whole families had moved away permanently, but other families arrived then to take over their log houses and sod-roofed barns, to break larger fields out of the poplars. But that changed during the war; now whole families—the Henry Friesens, the Paul Poetkers, the Wilhelm Voths, the Otto Dunzes, the George Koehns, the John Schroeders, the John Dycks, the David Loewens, the Jacob Rempels, the Peter Bergs, and then by 1942 the entire Fiedler–Lobe–Racho–Dunz–Leischner–Biech clan (except stubborn Gustav Biech) had left for the southern prairies or British Columbia; trucks heaped high, growling slowly away on our stony roads; and not a single family came to take up the empty places.
Their farmyards stood bare; log buildings leaned, sank, collapsed into their cellar holes. Sometimes the farmers nearby would not even bother to work the laboriously cleared land; poplars sprouted along the edges of fields and soon the only crop you could find there were patches of early summer strawberries, wild and tiny as hidden drops of blood. I was no good at picking them, though my sisters could pluck a syrup pail full in an hour: I had to brush over the weeds and leaves with my fingers to reveal their berry shape before I could see them.
Leaving, the air of all seasons was filled with leaving. A rumour in church or at the post office this week was a fact the next, and when we four Wiebes arrived back from our unexpectedly long Vancouver stay in April 1946, Mrs. Sam Heinrichs and her family too were gone. For four years Liz and I had hiked the mile and a half to their yard and then the last mile and a half to school with Wilfred and Louise; in fact, Wilfred and I had scouted out the shortest possible route to school and had even convinced the girls to use it, despite their fluttery shudders about “bush animals!” What animals? “Maybe a cow, a squirrel, a slinky weasel!” Their apprehensions of course made us merely braver and we followed the Heinrichses’ field trail northeast from their yard to cross a corner of Jacob Rempel’s big field, where we picked up a cow path tramped deep between the tall poplars, angling through Grandpa Daniel Lobe’s bush—the old man’s grave was in the church cemetery, a perfect white picket fence around it with the tips and corner posts curved into bright orange—until we found the bare height above Grandpa Lobe’s creek and followed that down to the slough and skirted its swampy edge, where there were always lots of spring frogs croaking, their gelatinous egg masses floating in brown water, and blackbirds building nests in the bulrushes
, singing relentlessly as the stalks bent and wavered under them; finally, we came out between the willows just across the road from the school. The trail saved us half the walking—well, maybe a third—through Dave Heinrichs’ yard and past Old Stewart’s decaying cabin, though you couldn’t ride a horse on it, too many rusted barbed-wire fences. Now the Sam Heinrichs family was gone and the house where we often sat around the kitchen table talking and looking out of its unique bow window was empty; no one took the windows for salvage because no one was building anything. The blacksmith shop door hung on one leather hinge, the forge with its smoke canopy gone, nothing but a whiff and crunch of coal near the blackened wall. On the path between house and barn, where Sam Heinrichs’ coffin had leaned open with the family mourning around it, only a deepening mat of chickweed was growing quick.
And Mam’s best remaining friend, Gilda’s mother, the Widow Anna Heinrichs who was the finest seamstress in Speedwell, now talked British Columbia as well. After all, Bill Poetker and Rosella, her oldest daughter, had left several years ago to run a big dairy farm in B.C., on Lulu Island, and they wrote it was getting bigger—what was it like there by Vancouver? Mam and Pah had of course visited the Poetkers and could explain what big was, black-and-white cows the size of bone-hipped horses dragging udders like bulging barrels. But rumour in Speedwell had it that the Widow’s oldest son Arlyss—where did they find such a name?—liked Speedwell teacher Sarah Siemens very much; the big question was, how much did she like him? She had boarded at the Heinrichses’ for a year, she should soon know. And if they did get married, would they stay so she could teach another year? No one had ever taught in our school three years in a row, but Isaac Braun had stayed for four at Jack Pine after the school burned down—it was said that George, the youngest son of the Jack Pine School chairman, Joe Handley, had started the fire, though no one knew why young George with his handsome, often scowling, face had done it and Mr. Handley had the school rebuilt so fast in the middle of winter it hardly caused a problem, perhaps wasn’t even reported. What Joe Handley did to George was beyond Mennonite rumour, but George joined the Regina Rifles before he was eighteen and was severely wounded, they said, fighting in France—but Ike Braun had stayed in the district because he married Doris Heinrichs and now they had a beautiful little girl, Gwen—where did they get those names?—so anything was still possible. The Widow Heinrichs might stay and if Arlyss and Sarah got married they might stay and then the Brauns probably would stay too and Doris continue to be a Sunday school teacher (she had been mine when I was a little kid) though there were now so few children in church left to teach. Even in Speedwell School there were only twenty-three pupils in eight grades to perform the Christmas program.
Friday December 20, 1946. A heavy winter night, the two Coleman mantle lamps were hung high on their hooks, hissing brightly; the stage curtains were closed and the ceiling radiated twisted crepe-paper streamers, pink and red and white, centred at the stage by a large crepe-paper bell. I must have done something on the program, perhaps many things because, except for Edward Funk and Jackie Trapp, at twelve and in grade seven, I was the oldest boy in school. But I remember nothing.
Or … it may be I do. The title of a school play hovers in my Speedwell memories: “Wanted: A Housekeeper.” If it was performed in 1946, I would have played one of the two ancient bachelors who advertise for a housekeeper, but the only words I recall are those of the first applicant for the job; she can cook nothing but “Cabbage soup and fried pork,” words repeated throughout the play to great laughter. Would Miss Siemens drill us in a bumpkin comedy for Christmas?
I remember so little of that last year. After the city noise of Vancouver, did I long to be gone? I don’t remember that either, not like reading Jean Val Jean beside the school heater. But by some fortuitous family exchange after Mam’s death in 1979 I have seven box-camera photos of that time, and four are labelled in my mother’s handwriting. One says: “den 1 Januar 1947.” It appears that on New Year’s Day, a Wednesday, Reverend and Mrs. Jacob Enns and their family visited us and the photo shows the four parents in front of the winter-shredded plaster of our house where snow is banked up for heat as high as the living-room windows. Pah and Mr. Enns stand on the outside in vests, suits and ties, while Mam and Mrs. Enns, who is even broader than my mother, stand between them wearing scarves and collared winter coats. The sled I use to haul wood from the woodpile sits behind them, half loaded, and beyond that the snow slopes across the garden past the well to the grey poplar knoll at the horizon. There is driven snow on the roof and on the windowsills behind my father’s right elbow but, strangely, the windows themselves are unclouded by frost. In fact the glass is so clear that the looped window curtains can be seen inside; and also something deeper, it may be shadows on the glass thrown by the bright sunlight or a presence standing there, peering out.
Three of the people in the photo smile directly at the camera; perhaps because they are good friends; perhaps because they have decided that this year, or next year at the latest, they will leave Speedwell for good; perhaps because they have already told each other as much. Only my father does not smile; he squints into the winter sun, searching distance as if he has already gone south, far away.
The tiny spaces of Liz’s five-year diary (which began as Helen’s) are, for the first few days of 1947, filled with details of a teenage girl’s life no memory could retain:
January 1, Wednesday: Dad, Rudy & myself went to church. Mom made dinner [i.e., the noon meal]. For dinner all of Enns were over, after dinner Heinrichs kids came, we took some snaps.
January 2, Thursday: Rudy went to Aaron Heinrichs today cause we want to butcher pigs tomorrow. Dad is getting everything ready. Rudy brought books home.
January 3, Friday: Today is a very busy day for all. Enns and Heinrichs are here butchering. I washed dishes almost all day, at night we drove to the mail in moonlight.
January 4, Saturday: Didn’t do very much Sat. work today except clean up a little and iron a bit.
January 5, Sunday: We were all at [Abe] Fehrs today went skiing and did we ever tumble & had lots of fun. We kids did the chores then went to church [hill] & toboggan.
January 6, Monday: We were washing today and I was reading “Stately Mansions,” I surely enjoyed it too & hope I can be a girl like Garnet some day.
January 7, Tuesday: I did up my hair for church tonight. Had quite some adventure in the [church] cellar to, a nice chat after & a lovely ride home in the moonlight.
January 8, Wednesday: I ironed all day long today. Read some in bed at night. I also washed my hair and curled them.
January 9, Thursday: Did some more ironing today & and finished for once. In the evening we all went to church except mom, had a nice service.
January 10, Friday: Today has been a rather dull day a storm out & Mom got sick. When the mail came I was glad to get [from Eaton’s?] a good pair of stockings & print dress. Oh diary I bawled for Helen tonight.
January 11, Saturday: Moms feels better today for which we’re very thankful, washed floors and cleaned up. Took a nice bath at night.
January 12, Sunday: We went to church and came home where we were all day. Listened to the radio & slept part of the day.
January 13, Monday: Cold today went to the mail with Rudy came home & went to bed. Had my first knitting lesson today.
Liz leaves the next twenty-two daily spaces blank, until abruptly:
February 5, Thursday: We cleaned up part of the wash today. At 3:30 we turned to N. B. [North Battleford radio station CJNB?] and heard Dan’s voice, it was too good to be real.
February 6, Friday: We heard that Dan was coming home today was I ever glad. Dad got him from the highway.
February 7, Saturday: Today is a day like others except Dan’s home, he’s so swell too. Played Chinese checkers.
February 8, Sunday: Today Rudy & I went to the church. Came home, had a good dinner, played Chinese checkers. Went to church for Y. P. M. [Young People’s Meeting]
April 27, Sunday: Today I’m (sweet) sixteen. We went to Fehrs, played ball and in the evening had a bonfire at our place. Boy I’ll never forget my first real kiss & Leslie.
April 28, Monday; Seems very gloomy adays The weather warm Les. was over for hay got only one smile sort of blue today.
What books did I bring home from the Aaron Heinrichses’? Five church meetings in twelve days to begin the New Year, getting the mail twice a week, visiting the Abe Fehrs, playing Chinese checkers, listening to the radio—CJNB North Battleford must have had a community message program for Dan to speak on, to let us know he was coming home from wherever he was working; a marvellous service in that bush country without telephones or electricity—and for Liz washing floors, endless ironing, learning to knit. But also a book dream of growing up beautiful, nice dresses, and above all an actual “real kiss.” And Leslie Nord? A cousin of Isola and Troy Fehr, tall, hardworking, well over twenty—really too old for my sweet-sixteen sister, but there was no teenage boy left in Speedwell to dream about. How often did Liz cry, alone now in her bed under the rafters, for Helen with whom she might have talked about real kissing? Helen, who may never have kissed any boy, though she dreamed of John Koehn after the Koehns left Speedwell in March 1944.
Through all of March 1947 Liz’s diary is blank, though the Speedwell Cemetery records show two funerals within a week of each other, the first since Helen’s death two years before. One was for Maria Dorn, an ancient, wrinkled lady who lived with her daughter Katerina (wife of Dave Heinrichs), and who had a superb goitre under her chin—what a tantalizing, gurgling word, “goitre,” not like the Low German “Kropp” as harsh and ugly as “chicken gizzard,” which it meant too—a goitre large and smooth as if she had swallowed a great turtle and it remained permanently moored in her neck.