by Rudy Wiebe
The goitre memory may be misplaced. Katerina and Dave Heinrichs had no children, but Dave had been on the school board since his brother Aaron died, and if he was in the yard when we crossed on our way home from school he would wave, sometimes call us in for a sweet, flavoured drink in that time of wartime sugar rationing, or perhaps a cinnamon roll. Dave’s big, permanently bowed body and rock-bottom bass anchored every hymn, every choir that sang in Speedwell Church; and I remember the wake packed two or three chairs and benches deep around their kitchen table, with Katerina Heinrichs seated there, mourning her aged mother while the community women served Tweeback and coffee—it may actually have been Katerina who had that moving, unforgettable, neck.
The second March death was sadder: Abe Fehr, only forty-seven years old, gaunt and handsome husband of Katie and father of Orville and Isola and Joyce and Troy and Delano and Mildred and Carolyn, a man who played western or Hawaiian guitar with a sliding silver bar until your body shivered in rhythm, who sang his singing family into country gospel harmony the radio Carter Family could barely match. But he always had weak lungs, they said, and he died of tuberculosis. So my only friend left in Speedwell, Troy, who once explained the ways of dictionaries and forced a devastating translation from stallions and mares to Emmanuel and Mary upon me, Troy, only fifteen, his face shattered, was partnered at the head of the coffin with his big brother Orville who had been a soldier in the Canadian Army, carrying the heavy body of their father through the snow around the leafless poplars to the graveyard with four other Fehrs and related Nords. I remember one summer day behind all the teams tied up at Harder’s General Store when Troy shot his pressured urine higher and farther than any boy in Speedwell, an arc of sunlight over three grain wagons: it was no contest, and for a few years he kept up, as it were, a standing challenge. Who could have guessed that such a tough boy, who already seemed to know everything on the edge of manhood, could also cry.
During Abe Fehr’s burial, Helen’s white gravestone was photographed. Mrs. Katerina Martens, Katie’s mother, stands with arms folded on the left, and the tall, stooped shape of Leslie Nord bends away from it towards the new grave they are filling.
Abe Fehr died on March 27. In that March 28 picture which Mam carefully labelled in ink, it may be that Dan and I were going to the Fehrs to help them prepare for the funeral. Within six weeks Dan and Isola Fehr, who had once given Helen her own new, unworn dress to be buried in, would be married: on Mother’s Day, May 11. Four days later Pah, Mam, Liz and I would leave Speedwell for good.
My mother labelled two other pictures in March 1947, but neither of them is of the funerals. They seem typical homestead work pictures, but as I study them over days they change, they begin to slip from focus to focus, as if these ordinary Brownie Box snaps were shape-shifting
One was taken in our yard; half the picture is blank snow and a quarter is poplar and spruce sticking up into blank sky; on the narrow band between the two lies a long pile of logs, as high as a man, which is being sawn into firewood. Six men labour around a stationary steam engine that plumes a white cloud against the far spruce: two men lift each log, pass it to two others who shove it against the saw-blade, while the fifth seizes the cut block and throws it behind him on the growing heap of firewood; the sixth man—from his shape and the cap pulled low over his ears it must be my father—seems to be coming towards the camera, walking away from the workers. My big brother Dan, legs wide apart and arms cocked in lifting, is unmistakable against the white burst of steam. Who the other men are or who owns the saw outfit I don’t know.
The saw blade, hidden by the working men, would be a metre in diameter and spinning so fast one cannot see its teeth. On and on through the winter afternoon its screams burst in the wood. The sawdust heaping up below will be used to cover the fresh ice already cut and hauled from the slough and stacked in our ice cellar dug into the ground behind the house to keep our cream cool for shipping throughout the coming summer; the woodpile Dan will split block by block—Pah will be gone, looking for work and a house in Coaldale—in the lengthening light of spring thaw, and Liz and I will stack the pieces in neat rows to dry. Next winter this great mound will all be burned, it will warm the house for Dan and Isola throughout the bitter cold: it will become fire, this white poplar, Populus tremuloides, trembling aspen.
You can hear trembling aspen leaves shiver. At the slightest breeze the dark green leaves flicker into their underside paleness and a sigh like great sorrow flows through the forest. In that distant picture of the long stack of logs being sawn I feel something strange, a perception that refuses to focus, but in the close-up of the other picture my mother labelled in 1947, a gradual recognition emerges.
Our strongest horses, mismatched grey Silver and brown Jerry, their heads cocked to hold the traces taut on the whiffletree, are hitched to a bobsleigh piled high with poplar logs. Dan balances forward on the logs, tall and powerful with the two reins in one fist and the other arm bent, ready to lift; behind him our father stands tilted sideways, peering down, content as ever to be a labourer on his own land, expecting nothing.
But now, looking, it is the thick, knobbly logs with their axed ends thrust at me, each of them moments before living trees, chopped down by my father and brother as they stood with their sap frozen in their veins waiting for the spring sun, it is the long poplars with their tips dragging in snow behind the sleigh that quiver in my mind. This is more than simply the endless human labour of survival in the Canadian boreal forest: poplar forests grow from Canada to Russia to England and Israel (Populus alba, or libneh in Hebrew), and ancient legend has it that aspens around the circle of the earth have been trembling since that moment when the hands and feet of Jesus were nailed to a poplar cross, when his flesh was smashed against its wood. No aspen trunk will ever again grow straight enough to form a cross, and the heart-shaped leaves on their narrow stems will never again stop shivering, for shame, for endless, endless sorrow.
Stories create feeling beyond reason or guilt; in story we understand, even as we hear and sense it, that wind can be an image of the divine moving within us. When wind runs high in the crowded aspens, we see them bend their thin, pale bodies down again and again like homage, like worship, and we hear and see their flat-stemmed leaves shiver as they turn their whiteness into sighing, groaning together. The long sound of creation, grieving. And sometimes too they do not straighten up again but remain bowed; the youngest, tallest, will grow year after year bent round until their tips touch the earth. And even stooped in such sorrow, in shame and respect and adoration, they also declare themselves unendingly alive: chop down as many poplars as you will, clear any field to the last stick or twig from the surface and out of their roots searching everywhere through the earth new shoots will push up; year by year you will have to labour to contain them at the edges of your field. In fact, scientists tell us that clones of a single aspen seed can occupy up to eighty hectares of land, literally thousands of trees growing through thousands of years from one seed on land first exposed to sun and wind when the Pleistocene ice sheet melted here 12,000 years ago.
The aspen in Canada’s boreal forest are the largest living organisms growing on the earth; every one a link in our boundless circle of life.
Perhaps that is why—who can explain how—the death of Jesus for me always was, and will always remain, indelibly more than an historic act of brutal execution. When aspens bend, sighing pale, my body feels fact beyond any sight, or hearing; or denial.
That contradictory, unfathomably comforting awareness: the fire that burns in the soul like ice, the ice like fire.
It may be that one of the books I brought home from the Aaron Heinrichses’ on January 2 was Elsie Dinsmore by Margaret Finlay; that 1869 classic of the faithful Elsie who, after the death of her angelic mother, tries desperately to live the thirty-eight godly character traits (I read the book, but never tried to list the virtues) while her godless father, who does not attend church but amuses himself reading novels
(!) on Sunday and whom Elsie is forced to love and honour because he is her father and yet reject because he is so grievously godless, tries chapter after chapter to break her adamant Christian resolve. All at the age of eight. It is the kind of book Aaron Heinrichs could have brought along when he emigrated to Canada from Colorado, to benefit his four growing girls learning to read English.
But perhaps, thanks to Arlyss, I also found a few Zane Greys there, more of those eighteenth-century Ohio forest whites and savages, of the “long low sound like the sigh of the night wind moaning through the gloom.” Except for Grey’s unrelieved brutality and killing—which, oddly enough, was one of the easiest aspects of adult behaviour for me, a loved and innocent child, to imaginatively slide over without discernment; I had no sense that Speedwell forests were dangerous—Grey’s forest world was as close to mine as any I had yet found in a book. And during the final winter of 1946–47 I was alone in it even more than usual.
That year I became the only child going to school from the southwest area of the district. The Lobes and Heinrichses were gone, and Liz had completed grade eight so there was nothing left for her to do in Speedwell School. Three miles twice a day, going and coming home through the trees and around the swamps and across the empty farmyards; I walked, rode, and in the dark winter morning I harnessed Prince and drove alone in our smaller cutter with an oat bundle under the seat to feed him at noon in the school barn. Our single track, which Prince had to break again and again all winter through the clearings and their shifting blizzard banks of snow, was the only trace on the trail. Sometimes I walked ahead of him holding his bridle with my left hand, so light in my felt boots I could walk on the hard drifts, but Prince never could; his big hoofs broke through at every step and he would be panting white jets under my arm, his nostrils and slobbering lips hoared thick with frost. If I could walk on the drift, the cutter could ride over it too, but Prince always had to muscle through, poor beast.
Prince was sturdy and amiable, but I didn’t actually like horses. Few farm kids did, as I remember; the horses we had were so big and slow, so stupid, too immovable for our childish whims and shifts of mind. I remember riding Bell to school, who once crushed me as I ran under her belly, and getting so enraged at her unalterable pace when I wanted her to trot that I beat her as wildly as I could with the reins over ears and head until I was exhausted. But she simply shook her head and plodded on; there was nothing I could do to make her move faster than she had decided. At a certain point she stopped moving altogether and stood, with me lying stretched out on her broad back crying in fury. I know exactly where it happened: on the road allowance north along the top of the hill above Jake Dorn’s place, beside the long mudholes in the road that Dan finally banked up and repaired with a two horse earth scoop, to pay a bit of our land taxes.
The winter before our leaving: in our snowy yard I am about to unhitch Prince. I wear my first fur trimmed parka, breeches, knee stockings and winter boots. Our last dog—black Carlo is dead, what was this one’s name?—faces the camera and the single poplar beside our well beyond Prince seems to be growing out from between his ears like an immense spine of black antler. Behind me lies the wooded knoll with a scraggly jack pine where I disappear when I don’t want to do some chore; where one spring after the snow had disappeared from the thickest bush I was stunned to find, under the leaves, two heavy rifles.
Gust buried them there before he and Tina moved to Coaldale in 1942; half a century later in Lethbridge he will still remember them exactly: a double-barrelled shotgun and a bolt-action .43 Mauser, the kind used for almost a century by armies from Europe to Chile to South Africa, especially in the German trenches of World War I and, Gust tells me, he did not dare take it along to Coaldale—a German-speaking person with such a gun? But for me they became exciting toys I played with every day, especially the heavy Mauser with its steel barrel grooved in brown wood and big enough to stick my finger down. I played from tree to tree aiming at our weed-sprouting barn or board granaries—never the house—and our slab toilet barely visible in the bush, snapping off shots and sprinting to dive around cranberry and rose bushes, from tangled saskatoons, aiming at our road gate in case a huge car with its top down should appear there and Joseph Stalin in the back seat smiling that smile under his Schnur’boat, moustache, and just when the chauffeur got out to open the barbed-wire gate I would pick the Beast off, I had the sights lined up dead on, a between-the-eyes shot …
Would God’s wrath abide on you forever for shooting Stalin?
I played until I was, inexplicably to my mother, dirty and sometimes scraped bloody; until my father discovered the rifles where I hid them too carelessly and they were gone. I never dared ask and never knew until fifty years later, when Gust told me, that Pah had buried them to rot in the spruce muskeg across the road allowance, buried them off our land. He never said a word to me about it, nor was one necessary. I knew I had to keep them hidden because my parents refused to allow a gun on our place no matter what a Fiedler or Dan, when he owned the farm later, might do. Guns did nothing but kill people.
That spring our teacher Sarah Siemens must have arranged the annual Speedwell School picture for early May, before we left, because I am in it. Twenty-one pupils huddle around the flagpole with her, and one family, the Doerksens, makes up seven or perhaps eight of the total. This family appeared from somewhere and settled into our Franka place after we moved to Gust’s homestead for its well in 1942. The Doerksens were handy bush-farm people; the eldest in school, Glen, told me his dad and brothers had made a two-horse bobsled that winter using their axe, a saw and the kitchen butcher knife for carving holes in the runners to set uprights. Every morning I raised the Union Jack on the pole which disappears above us. Children of the stony field and boreal bush, we look like ragamuffins, though everyone—except perhaps tousled Barbara Trapp—seems to be wearing some sort of shoes. I am still there, but barely: only my hair, forehead and the edge of my eyes are visible in the fold between Nickie Sahar’s and Helen Doerksen’s heads. Helen has a white patch over her right eye, and everyone else’s face is completely visible, especially Annie Sahar with her towering hair on my right and lean Edward Funk on my left; he is taller than Miss Siemens.
The school’s peak roof rises over us, the mud plaster between its logs almost completely washed away by weather. One railing on the steps is broken away and the door stands open, inward. You can see through the west window to the shadow of the hill behind the school where in winter we slid down on home-made sleds and occasional board skis, or wrestled and had snow fights and rolled down when pushed hard enough, pretending to be logs, spruce and birch and deadfall poplar we had known intimately all our brief, thoughtless lives.
I am almost gone; not even my grin is left under the Speedwell flagpole. But on the outside edge of our grey huddle, away from the school, there Katie Martens stands complete, hair pompadoured high, mouth open, white blouse and black bell-bottom slacks. She will not disappear meekly. When her family leaves Speedwell in 1948 she will walk away exactly as she pleases and everyone will see her do it plain as day.
I am lying on the bed where Dan and I sleep, under the angle of our house rafters beside the steep steps that open to the kitchen below; Liz sleeps alone in the other half of the attic, beyond stovepipe and a white sheet. I am reading, lying on Dan’s two-thirds of the bed to be nearer the tiny gable window. Outside is brilliant May, the towering clouds barely interrupt the sun, but I am lost in a book—is it another Elsie Dinsmore book, or a Zane Grey, or Rock of Decision again, which over a year ago Helen and I read to each other? A book read out loud is very different from one read silently, especially with Helen, and it may be I miss her to the point of tears and that is why I am rereading it alone, aloud would be too much—
“Sonny!” my mother shouts from outside through the screen door. The slough frogs are croaking, it’s warm enough for mosquitoes.
More likely I am avoiding her with the last book I haven’t read in the Spee
dwell School library, so thick with its heavy cover: The Toilers of the Sea, by Victor Hugo. After Jean Val Jean and the winter ocean of Vancouver, I have to read this Guernsey book standing on the narrow shelf—had anyone ever touched it?—set on an island hidden against the map outcropping of France. It is thunderously boring but I plow on, words in books exist to be read, and for six decades I have forgotten everything except the last scene, which I remembered as a man chained to a post on an immense beach and gradually the tide approaches, rises as he struggles, roars his terror until the sea swells above his gaping mouth and he disappears. However, when I scan the book now, I discover my memory is almost totally reversed: there is no external power of post or chain in the last chapter. Rather, the protagonist Gilliatt seeks out a natural declivity among the ocean cliffs, seats himself there and waits until the woman he loves—can only the French love this way absolutely and forever?—sails past with the man she loves, and he remains seated, rock upon rock, watching the ship vanish as the tide slowly rises to his waist, his shoulders, his neck, until, when the vessel fades on the skyline, “the waters covered the head of the watcher, and there was nothing visible but the waves of the sea rippling against Gild-Holm-’Ur.”
Perhaps I am fortunate that my closest memories cannot be overturned so easily in a used book store.