Menno Moto
Page 14
Looking outside the Mennonite circle for love was strictly forbidden so they weren’t the only ones to find partners close to home.
“Ben, he was seven years younger than Klaas, and he married my sister’s daughter,” Greta said. “And then Kerneels came along, another younger brother, and he married my brother’s daughter. And then the baby girl came along, and she married my cousin. These marriages weren’t any closer relations than anyone else, but they’d just come to know each other as family, so it felt a bit different sometimes.”
Marriages between distant cousins are still common today. When romantic sparks fly, calculations are made, family trees consulted. People who share grandparents are first cousins, while sharing great-grandparents makes you second cousins, at which point most cultures view marriage as acceptable.
“Sometimes we’d be happy when someone would move to Canada, so that there wouldn’t always be all this intermarriage,” Greta says. “They moved to Arborg [an area with several Mennonite communities in Manitoba, Canada] and found second cousins there to marry. At least it was a bit farther away.”
And what if it were to happen in their own home, now? What if one of their sons had taken a fancy to one of their adopted sisters—Kenia, eighteen, or Evelin, fourteen, and proposed marriage?
“Well, what would we be able to do? Is it wrong?” Klaas asked.
“This is different. We were adults when we became part of the same family, and then got married,” Greta said. “These girls have lived with us since they were young children, they grew up with our sons.”
“It would be far better to marry someone from far away, from Hong Kong,” Klaas said, winking at me.
“Who might also be a second cousin!” Greta exclaimed, chortling at my discomfort.
CHAPTER 10
Belize
Blue Creek Colony
The garden swing creaked softly, its movement hidden by the falling darkness. Ed’s voice caught in his throat. He gave a wet sniff and paused to regain his composure.
“He was a special guy. Just the way people were drawn to him, the way the younger kids looked up to him. He was unique, no doubt about that, and we were lucky to have him for as long as we did,” he said.
We were sitting on the concrete veranda of Ed Reimer’s home on Blue Creek Colony. I was tired. I’d ridden several hundred sun-baked kilometres from Spanish Lookout, north towards the Mexican border, the last forty kilometres on a rutted dirt road with wallowing mud holes, to get here.
Near the door grew a field of workboots and sports shoes, all of them large, dusty, and scuffed. The covered carport was cluttered with a jumble of 4x4 pickup trucks, ATVs, motorbikes, and sporting gear. The land sloped away from the house, trees casting the lawn in deep shadow at the bottom of the hill. As the cooling air sank to the ground it dispersed the smell of earth, woody bark, and grass. A cicada trilled from high in a tree, echoed by a cricket hidden somewhere in the lawn, giving rhythm to the silence.
I couldn’t remember having met Ed before, although he had come to our farm when I was a child. He was a tall, athletic man in his mid-fifties with greying wavy hair and a tanned face. He spoke English with a familiar Canadian Mennonite accent. We had exchanged a few emails as I’d tried to predict the timing of my arrival, but I knew nothing about him until a few months before I had departed on this trip.
Ed’s father and my father were friends, farming next to each other in Manitoba’s Interlake region in the 1960s. Ed and Leroy, my second-oldest brother, attended the three-room Mennville Mennonite School together, decades before I started classes. They formed a deep friendship, dreaming that someday they would have neighbouring farms, just like their fathers. However, Ed’s family moved to Belize when he was a teen, and here on Blue Creek Colony was where he’d become a man, working on his father’s successful construction and farming business.
In 1978 my brother Leroy was twenty-one and engaged to be married. He was driving his new Mustang Cobra sports car down the highway on a windy autumn afternoon when he collided with an oncoming car. He and two people in the other car were killed. My family was reeling with grief when a letter of condolence arrived from Belize. Thirty-five years later, while sorting through my mother’s papers after her death, I found the letter written by Ed in a bundle of condolence cards she had saved all these years.
I am certain that the loss of one of my dearest friends, the destruction of the dreams we had and the sorrow and regret that it brings, are minute compared to the anguish you as his family must have suffered, and continue to bear…As friends seldom are, we were closer than brothers, knowing each other’s mind in all the things we did in those early years. I only hope and pray that we meet again in Glory.
Shortly after, when Ed was back in Canada on a cross-country honeymoon trip with his bride, Carolyn, they stopped at our farm to comfort my parents. It was a gesture of kindness my father would never forget but that I could not remember.
I was only four years old when Leroy was killed. I remember the accident and the following days in short, faded scenes. The cry of my mother when my father came in from the fields and broke the news to the family, his face still blackened with dust. My mother throwing herself across the bed with a scream of anguish. The texture of the bed covering, small furry bumps in patterns I could feel on my cheek as I lay beside her, crying like everyone else but not understanding. The busyness of the house as relatives and friends gathered to offer support. Being held in my father’s arms so I could look into Leroy’s casket, reaching out to touch his cold hand. The blueness of Leroy’s funeral suit. And then years of sorrow. With my older siblings at school or working on the farm I was left alone in the house with my mother, watching her cry, hunched in front of her sewing machine.
The loss of a child was a gulf my parents would spend the rest of their lives trying to bridge. The sadness was always there, just under the surface, brought back by the mention of Leroy’s name, by an object he had once held in his hands, one of his doodles found inside an old book, the mention of his unrealized dreams. We had a place at the back of our farm, a clearing in the woods, that was a special place for Leroy. With time it became a refuge for the entire family, and especially for my brothers and me. We set up a simple cabin and firepit and it became the place where we gathered. His spirit still lived in the spruce and birch trees, in the sunshine that filled this spot where he had once been. Leroy’s name was not always mentioned when we went there, but we went, in part, because we knew that there our family could be whole again.
Ed went on to live the life Leroy had lost. He did well in Belize, building upon what his father had started. Blue Creek Colony was about seventy kilometres north of Spanish Lookout by air, but several hundred kilometres by road. It was just across the Hondo River from La Unión, Mexico, and the Guatemalan border was just to the south. The porous borders were a part of daily life; smuggling was common, with beef, corn, and rice finding its way into Guatemala and Mexico, while goods such as fuel came into Belize.
Blue Creek had operated its school in English, Belize’s official language, for twenty years, and many of its young people went on to university—a point of pride with Ed. The community reminded me of Mennonites in Southern Manitoba. Hard-working, churchgoing, successful farm folk.
Ed and Carolyn raised five sons, naming their first-born Leroy in honour of my brother. Now young men, Ed’s boys were maintaining the family ties to Canada through education, summer work trips, and marriage. His son Leroy was in Canada, preparing a home with plans for his pregnant wife to join him shortly.
Then, almost thirty-four years after my brother’s death and just months before I was to depart on my motorcycle journey, my family received the terrible news. Twenty-two-year-old Christopher, the third of Ed’s five sons, was killed in a micro-light aircraft accident at an airport near their farm.
Chris had loved flying his micro-light, a passion he’d le
arned from his father and his uncle Albert, who both flew their own light aircraft. He was out early on a Sunday morning, making the most of the still air. A brother and a friend were there, watching from the end of the runway. He steered the aircraft into a turn in preparation to land when, at around five hundred feet, the wing crumpled, and he plummeted to the ground. He was pronounced dead at the colony hospital. The brothers insisted that Chris be buried on the family farm. His grave was almost in sight of the house, in a small meadow, in the shade of a towering tree with branches that spread broad and strong.
“He loved to do things, whether it was on his bike, his quad, his hang-glider. He loved his work. He loved to swim and he just loved life. He loved the people and it’s so unfortunate that he fell from the sky that day. We are forced to mourn but we are not mourning without hope,” Ed told the local newspaper after the accident. “We know that Chris fell from the sky because his man-made wings failed him but God picked him up and gave him the wings of angels.”
My aged father heard the news through the Mennonite grapevine; the news struck a raw chord with him. He told me about it as I prepared my motorcycle for my journey. “Ach, it’s terrible,” he said, tears coming to his eyes. “I know how he feels, to lose a young son like that. It’s something you can’t imagine if it hasn’t happened to you.” The years and distance meant they hadn’t kept in close contact, but the ties were still there, part of a diaspora that stretched up and down the Americas, linked by letters, churches, prayers, and intermarriage.
“You should go there, to Ed’s place,” my father said. “Tell him we heard about the accident, that we’re sorry it happened, that we’re praying for him and his family.”
I was honoured to do so, but I also had my own reasons for wanting to meet Ed. As I grew into a teen in the years after Leroy died, I took on a stronger and stronger physical resemblance to him. People commented on it. The same colour of hair, similar eyes, my nose was a bit smaller, but the rest of my face was very similar. There were exclamations from friends of his when they’d see me. Tears came to the eyes of the woman he was to wed each time we met, even after I’d lived far beyond the age Leroy had reached. There was a look I’d sometimes see in my parents’ eyes, a bittersweet mix of remembrance and hope. My father’s emotional warning when I was a teenage driver: “I’ve already lost one son to the road—be careful.” Sometimes it made me proud, that I was like my big brother, but as I grew older it became constrictive, an identity that I didn’t want to own, or be beholden to. It was the identity of someone I mostly knew through the stories of others, stories that became family legends, the facts of which were often massaged in order to keep alive the good memories. Now I’d have a chance to meet someone else who had known Leroy as a child, but from outside the family. Someone whose stories of him—I hoped—would be different from all those I’d already heard.
But on that first night on Blue Creek we sat on the darkened veranda and I instead listened as a grieving father searched for comfort in stories about his own dead son. The stories were all interrupted by the inelegant, desperately restrained sobs of a grown man. Ed’s stories wound in circles between anecdotes of him revelling in the wildness of the Belizean outdoors and boasts of Chris racing his ATV.
“The rest of the guys, well, there were some serious racers in it. From all over the area. Chris, he was just having fun,” Ed said, a smile in his voice. “Carolyn and I, we were standing beside the track watching, before the race, and the mother of one of the top guys, she was next to us. She told us about all the races her son had won, and we thought, Oh man, Chris won’t have a chance.
“Chris had problems with his four-wheeler. He had to make some repairs at the last minute, so we thought, well, there goes his chance. And the rest of the guys were all far more experienced.” Laughter crept into Ed’s voice. “So he was out there, and he beat them! He won! And he was just there for fun, just riding hard, but he was fast.”
Ed’s large rice farm and processing plant created jobs for his sons, and their social circle was mostly other young Mennonites from the region. They drove motorbikes and ATVs, boats, 4x4 pickups. They hunted wild game and swam in the rivers. Chris was sometimes the odd one out among his brothers, less aggressive, more creative and introspective. But the brothers had always backed one another, always acted as a unit, constantly together, with shared circles of friends.
“Chris loved going barefoot. Whenever he could, he’d leave his shoes at home. After the accident, some of the young people from the church went barefoot. They said it was to honour him…”
The story trailed off into hard swallows and choked sobs as he was overwhelmed by the memory. In my head the stories and memories of Chris and Leroy mirrored each other, became each other. More than three decades and thousands of miles apart, different countries and families, but the story was the same, and I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Has all of this, the accident, Chris’s death, has it reminded you of Leroy at all? ‘Cause it sure brought up a lot of memories for us,” I said.
“A bit, sure. When you contacted me and said you’d like to come visit, sure I thought of it.”
I waited. Hungry for a story, something about Leroy. A memory, an image, a morsel of Leroy’s character. But Ed said nothing more, and I didn’t want to prod a grieving man.
We were sitting enjoying the quiet of the night when Carolyn opened the door, padded barefoot across the cool concrete, and put a hand on Ed’s shoulder. Carolyn was friendly but quiet, offering up a cautious smile. She was a pretty blond woman, but she looked tired, her eyes wounded with grief.
“Are you hungry?” she asked Ed softly, and then looked at me. “Have you eaten?”
They soon settled on taking me to a local restaurant. “Are you going to stay the night with us? You’re very welcome to,” Ed said.
“Yes, I’d like that. I’m not sure what my plans are for the next few days, to be honest.”
Ed picked up one of my bags and turned to carry it inside, waving off my explanation with his free hand. “It doesn’t matter. Stay as long as you like.”
When I awoke the next morning Ed and his sons were already out of the house, working on the farm. I felt a tinge of embarrassment as I realized I was the last out of bed, by a long shot. I found Carolyn in the kitchen, softly singing along to the radio as she did the dishes.
“You must have been tired,” she said as she poured me coffee.
My sleep had been filled with dreams. Sentimental dreams, faces I recognized but didn’t know, tragedies that I felt but couldn’t quite understand. Stories that didn’t have endings, ones that I wasn’t sure were false or true.
I felt raw and hesitant as I nursed my coffee and watched Carolyn work. The kitchen and the dining area were full of good smells and tidiness, a refuge of femininity in a house otherwise filled with masculinity. Just outside her range of influence lay a rifle, on a shelf above the stairs. Tools and random spare machinery parts were scattered around the entrance.
“It’s an all-boys house,” I said.
She laughed. A light, girlish laugh. “Ya, I guess it is. That’s why I’m so excited when the boys get married, because I get a daughter out of the deal.”
I spent the morning at the table with my laptop, catching up on emails and writing as Carolyn moved around the kitchen, humming, clattering pots and pans. The peace was broken when Ed and two of his sons returned for lunch, filling the house with heavy footsteps and loud voices once again.
After lunch we relaxed around the table and laughed as Ed teased a parrot they had taught how to speak.
“Hello, hello,” the parrot squawked, gnawing on Ed’s fingers as he playfully batted it on the beak.
“I need to go check on a few things out on my fields,” Ed said, pushing his chair away from the table and returning the parrot to its cage. “Why don’t you come along and I’ll give you a bit of a tour.”
“This truck was his pride and joy,” Ed said, one arm dangling out the window, the other hand whirling the wheel back and forth as we hammered down the road. “It’s a good truck, and I didn’t want to sell it, so now I drive it. Reminds me of him all the time I’m in it.”
The hills here were a bit steeper and more tightly wound than on Spanish Lookout. Blue Creek colony was also much smaller, with only about eight hundred people. But still, the farms stood out from the surrounding area, with rutted Belizean roads improving to hardtop as soon as you crossed onto colony land.
Ed raised cattle in addition to rice, although he had recently sold a large number of cattle when prices had spiked. We stopped at the corral, where he found one of his favourite horses standing under a tree, its tail swishing to and fro in a battle with the flies. Ed climbed over the fence and slapped its neck to say hello. The corral was part of a larger ranch station, with outbuildings and equipment, as well as a small house.
“I like coming out here for a week at a time,” he said. It wasn’t far from home, but staying at the house allowed them long days of working the cattle and a sense of escape.
He drove the 4x4 truck across the wet pasture, tires spinning on the turf, in search of his hired cowboy. We crested a small hill and found him riding the fence by horseback. A sun-blackened Belizean about Ed’s age murmured quiet answers to Ed’s questions in Spanish. He’d worked for the family a long time, a trusted employee, and their exchange was relaxed and friendly. Ed hung out the truck window, swatting at the occasional fly, while the cowboy stayed on his horse, surrounded by grazing cattle.