by Rudy Wiebe
Already he has crossed the river. In the silence of low, level light the prairie above cuts down into angled shadows. The valley folds open from the southwest like the wind lifting over him with a May whiff and whisper of sage, of wolf willow. He knows the stems of the water eddies reach down into the mud of the riverbed, but somewhere here too the Blackfoot forded, the Kutenai, the Gros Ventre and the Sarcees, many peoples and buffalo and finally horses, later a few manoeuvrings of paddle steamers carrying coal, and ranchers with tame cows and calves, a tricky ridge of stones always hidden by dense water or staggered ice. And above him—there—sheared clear as memory is the face of the cliff where the dinosaur bones emerged, first one vertebra bump revealed its small butt of stone with the next one fitted immediately against it, and then the next, he could feel the third, hey! I found something! He was burrowing bare-handed until the cliff shrugged and buried him to his shoulder in dry clay and Dorothy, leaning over him, screamed a little and vanished past him slick as mud slipping, she was clutching his foot. Saved.
And I shall see Him face to face,
And tell the story, Saved by grace!
A twist he never dared try on the male quartet, singing that, “Hey, where’s Grace? I need saving!”
But Albertasaurus rex was no teen joke: “Our congratulations, the first sequential dinosaur bones unearthed along the Oldman River,” the University of Alberta wrote them on letterhead. But Old Riediger, supposedly their high school science teacher, refused to think beyond his Scofield Reference Bible and the date carved at the head of Genesis, Chapter 1, B.C. 4004, or the engraved statement above it: “The events recorded in Genesis cover a period of 2,315 years (Archbishop Ussher).” So Dorothy bumped the petrified bones they had laid out in order on Old Riediger’s desk, with the Bible she dutifully carried to every class.
“These are there,” she insisted. “We found them in the earth. Bones of a once-living animal turned to stone, Adam dug them out, there’s more of them in the cliff, look, Scofield writes this—‘The first creation act “In the beginning God created” refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages’—so why can’t we say that?”
His distant cousin Dorothy Loewen so adamant, arguing absolutely like no girl ever did in the Coaldale Mennonite High School. “There’s a gap of geologic age in Genesis between verse one and verse two, and these bones are there, deep in the ground above the river, we can hold them in our hands. We have to, because they’re there.”
His antediluvian teen past. This motionless blue evening—light, heaven, water, earth, the completed Third Day—is enough: quiet wind and clouds and land lie folded like flesh, and perhaps tiny cactus are already opening yellow on the lips of coulees around this silent, slipping river he can never forget wherever he searches, even to the Little Uran River which he saw in the dinted steppes north of Orenburg, Russia, between the round Hills of Number Eight Romanovka where the Wiebe and Loewen families herded their village cattle and perhaps lay in the first May grass. Did the boys watch the spring animals mounting each other, wait for the girls to appear along the skyline in the noon heat with water and bread—even there he recognized this Oldman swirling his tricky fingers into the secret, moist cracks of the earth.
To try and not remember is silly. Why else has he come? The funeral, his only, oldest, sister; a funeral is never anything but a looking back.
The long curve of highway up the coulee from the river becomes the grid road leading straight south as it always has: these patterns of giant cottonwood windbreaks, rising like tankers out of the sea, imprinted his boyhood recollection. And the farmstead houses remain at every half mile, the Great War Veterans’ Colony farms weathering into grey behind the “modern” stucco bungalows that replaced them in the 1960s, or their steep, tiny barns—“Ready-Made” as they were advertised—all vertical boards and lean-tos as delicately gaunt as the Anglican church in gold-rush Barkerville. Canadian Pacific Railway land dedicated to what their designer circa 1919 may have considered bovine holiness—he never tried to milk a cow in a cloud of mosquitoes—the island farmsteads balloon in his head into picking long yellow beans in the heat, cutting green peas as the giant summer sun rose out of a rainbow of dew, irrigation mud and gumbo; breaking corn until his arms ran sticky with green milk; and beets, spring and summer and fall and forever bent over beets, thinning and hoeing and pulling and topping … there is simply too much detailed place for him here. He should just whistle on south until he hits Montana, Wyoming, curved Mexico, maybe Guatemala would be far enough, with its smoking volcanoes or the ball courts of Tikal, its narrow passages leading deeper into mountainous stone pyramids.
Where have you run to lately? Susannah will ask him at the funeral home, there will be a viewing, the usual mild curiosity in her voice after almost a month of not talking. And there’s Coaldale, so quickly, one elevator cupola emerging above the red earth as his car lifts over an irrigation ditch embankment—stuck there by this arrow of prairie road once mud, then gravel, now Alberta-slick pavement and tar.
Nowhere, Adam will tell her. I told you, not this year.
You’re finally motionless?
I’m not dead, I’m trying to think different.
They used to say thinking different was conversion.
I don’t know, maybe they still do.
Coaldale spreads out more visible at its edges than he remembered, wider in trees and roofs along the hollow horizon of glacial Lake Lethbridge. One spring between university terms he walked field angles for weeks all around the town, counting each three-step swing of his measuring rod to triangulate the contract area of sugarbeet acres for the Canadian Sugar Factories Limited. The reason so many Mennonite people came here from Russia in the 1920s was the irrigated farmland with its labour-intensive beets—one winter evening they gathered to discuss, “Is the Mennonite Destined for Sugarbeet Cultivation?” and came to no further conclusion than that their Russian village past of wheat fields and cows and sheep gave them little, if any, guidance. But Adam’s father, as usual, arrived there too late from their rocky homestead in the northern bush: by 1946 all the former CPR lands were already owned as certainly as if the Russian law of primogeniture were absolute in Canada as well and there was nothing he could afford to buy, he could only be a labourer for whoever hired him.
Na oba mien Jung. His mother’s voice so earnest in Lowgerman, where the words for “boy” and “son” and “young” were all one, and her anxiety about his eternal soul’s salvation unrelenting: But now my boy, the youngest, you go to school, become a good doctor, you go to the Mennonite High School where they teach the Bible too, not like the godless school in town and you miss your Eternal Life. Dearest loving mother, how had he so widely, even spectacularly, missed it? Years of unstoppable Charles E. Fuller Back to the Bible Hour preaching on the radio, with George Beverly Shea singing “I’d rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today”—no, that was thundering upstart Billy Graham—but certainly the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium with Rudy Atwood at the piano; his sweet mother watching from heaven would know exactly all he had missed in his half century since.
And on his right, past a windbreak, the field where the Coaldale Mennonite High School once stood flips open like a book, a ploughed field waiting to grow something as blank as his thought that for years he’s missed being a doctor too—though he hasn’t at all missed being one. Not one bit of the old conglomerate, dragged-together school buildings left; which included the first 1926 Readymade District Mennonite Church as long and straight as three two-by-four granaries nailed together end to end in one day of communal work; nothing left of the ball diamond or the open hockey rink gritted with dust from the west wind as everlasting as prayer, or the sound of singing, “Hallelujah! For the Lord God omnipotent…” not even magnificent Handel could lift his immovable monotone into music. Every trace of school gone, seeded-to-salt gone. My dear sister Helen is gone, gone home—but there it still is: the immense roof of the old Mennon
ite Brethren Church, “no Sistern included,” as he used to tease Dorothy. Shedding its cracked shingles above a few disoriented trees, sold when the church removed itself into town for a cinder-brick factory and an occasional kennel to harbour dogs; where he had heard a thousand sermons and could not remember one—but the songs, the Heimatleeda begun without introduction by the Väasenja and within a phrase multiplied into harmony by hundreds of throats, those songs scrolled through him still, more than ever. There his mother and father were “laid to rest,” as it was said in English, but in Lowgerman they “had gone home,” in the cemetery behind the church; his parents whom he had, with his “high and learned” behaviour, confused more and more in their old age.
They had always thought, like most Mennonite parents—not thought so much as lived in blind, inexperienced hope—that no matter how many schools their child might attend, it would learn to know more in good Canada, but nonetheless continue to think in exactly the same way about its “soul’s salvation” as it had when it heard only numberless repetitions of “born again” in this vast building, or the English Reverend Charles E., or Charles Templeton briefly, or Bob Simpson or Billy Graham or Ernest C. Manning droning weekly from the Prophetic Bible Institute in downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada—parents hopeful but also confused and concerned. And then more and more silently, sometimes desperately, worried. But loving you, praying to love you enough to lift you by God’s inexplicable mercy to the heaven of life everlasting they knew awaited them, raise you to glory whether you knew enough to want to go there or not.
They were buried in that cemetery invisible behind the mass of the church. Not in family plots but, in the equality of their dying, laid under hundreds of tombstones no more than ten inches high: all equal in the eyes of God and safely gone home. Or to hell; there would be some of those too, burning fearfully and forever.
Helen certainly heaven-bound, already there and “waiting on the golden stair,” Trish’s song—where would Helen be buried? She and Joe had moved to Lethbridge and an English Baptist church decades ago.
The stucco face of the neglected, sadly desecrated building, its tiny Gothic-window eyes and the high, arched mouth of its separate men’s and women’s entrances curving down and outward in a bend of crumbling steps: broken concrete like every staircase he’d seen in Russia. Those men’s steps, where once after the double Sunday sermon an older church “brother” he barely knew had drawn him aside and said very quietly, You’re smart, if you want to go to university and need money, come see me.
You’re lucky to be a Mennonite, Susannah said to him when he received the letter with five hundred dollars that helped him finish his last year of medicine. Mennonites help each other, they’re good people.
Well, Adam said, John Martens certainly is good.
So … why do you always complain about them?
In the shadows of the setting sun, Adam sees the empty mass of the church gradually stare past him.
Dorothy lifts the coffee cup to her narrow lips and Adam can only think, Has she ever had a lover? Ever been unable to avoid the faint thought of desiring one? A question impossible for him to speak aloud to her—her hair has been coiled and tied into that severe control since … since the day after they both left high school, the few times he has seen her since then.
“Where’s your handsome son now?” she asks.
He knew she’d start with family, but since when has “handsome” mattered to her?
“Joel.”
“Vancouver,” he says, laughing a bit, “at least that’s where he said he was, I haven’t got the bill yet.”
“That’s good, he calls at least, collect.”
Her voice fades with her eyes rising to his, as sharp as he remembers them even after forty-five years and he thinks, Now she’ll shift to Susannah, no, since Trish she writes to Susannah herself, maybe even phones, or visits her, she’s too hopelessly thoughtful to probe about Susannah and me, she’ll go straight to our mutual cousin David Loewen in Paraguay. Or to Russia, the most general comment, like “You were in Russia last summer, how was that?” She’ll never say the only time we see each other is at funerals … but her glance crumples Adam’s silly thoughts. In Coaldale Mennonite High School they understood each other like the books and maps they both swallowed whole.
“I always accept collect calls,” he says, “no matter where from. One Christmas morning the phone rang so early…” Her singular attention holds him still, and he has a sudden desire to explain things, some small part of what has happened to him, moving as close as he dares to the acceptable edge of his unacceptably broken life, knowing that with her careful, considered understanding—that’s what she always was, direct and profoundly considerate—she will answer him, Yes, it’s all right, yes. No matter how many years it’s been since he’s seen her—and recognizing that, he can only laugh and toss up his hands, he must finish what he began: “—a call from Tierra del Fuego, she—Trish—called once, Christmas morning at 5:30 and I was of course sleeping and—”
He gets himself stopped before he explains who he was sleeping with … dearest god, into this brunch he himself has dragged Trish.
But she accepts him on the least threatening detail.
“Was it from Argentina, Ushuaia, on the Beagle Channel?”
They are no longer at a restaurant table in a hotel in Lethbridge; they are bent over an atlas and the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the narrow library of Coaldale Mennonite High School and she’s already reached the tip of South America while he’s still reading Uruguay and so he can ask her:
“Why do they call it Tierra del Fuego?”
“ ‘Land of Fire.’ ” And she smiles. “The earth burning at the last place on earth, maybe the Spaniards thought it was hell!”
“No, no, Magellan was sailing around the world, why?”
“The Yaghan people who lived there wore almost nothing, but they kept big fires burning on the beaches, and had wood fires in their canoes when they fished, the women dived in the icy water for shellfish. It really scared Europeans, the English too after the Spaniards, narrow straits and mountains covered with snow falling straight into the sea, and such naked people, their bodies shining with seal grease and fire.”
He can now only look at Dorothy, the plain Loewen fourth or fifth cousin he once, for a year at least, tried crazily to imagine he wanted to marry and live with forever. That was what “marry” meant, then.
“You’ve gone there, haven’t you,” he says. Her hair is pulled back, gathered in a knot. Like my mother, he thinks. Trish never cut her hair like that.
Dorothy speaks into his thoughts. “I couldn’t resist, when I was in Paraguay with Mennonite Missions. I took off two weeks and flew to Ushuaia, it’s a green city on the blue Beagle Channel surrounded by white mountains. It’s beautiful.”
“ ‘Beagle’ as in Charles Darwin?”
“Yes, the great Charles whom Old Riediger tried all through high school to avoid. In 1834 he said the difference between the Yaghans and Europeans was greater than that between wild and domestic animals.”
“Hey,” Adam says, and they both bend forward, smiling at each other. “Do you still read the all-English and white-superior Britannica?”
“Not much.” She laughs a little. “The University of Lethbridge Library is better. The Yaghans are like the Newfoundland Beothuks, all dead. Disease and hunting.”
“Hunting?”
“Business and good sport. The English said they raided their sheep farms, so they paid a bounty of one pound sterling for each pair of Yaghan ears, matched.”
“Shit,” is all he can say.
“Only the wind blows forever’ is one of their few sayings that’s still known,” Dorothy says, and drinks a long swallow of cool coffee. “The wind’s worse there than here in Lethbridge. An English missionary, Bridges, worked his whole lifetime on a Yaghan dictionary, 34,000 words, the last people on earth.”
“Can anyone speak it?”
“No. I was
reading a map, like we used to. Guess what I noticed, about Ushuaia, Argentina.”
It’s the old line of their old game; he grins at her, but for some reason he suddenly feels too sad for this, and much too ancient.
“I’ve lost all my guesses.”
Her eyes catch his longing. “Latitude,” she says. “It’s halfway between 55 and 54 degrees south.”
“Oh. The opposite of Waskahikan, ‘home’ in Cree, Miss Hingston wrote that my first day in school, that’s 54.4 degrees north.”
Dorothy smiles. “Too bad I wasn’t there that day. I would have hid under your desk with you.”
They both laugh at the memory of his English beginning with the terrifying planes. She lifts the last bit of eggs Benedict to her mouth as the waitress appears with a coffee pot and dips refills into their cups. Outside the May wind ripples long, dead stems over the coulees down to the Oldman River and the cliffs beyond, over the green grass sprouting where streets of whorehouses once waited for miners and cowboys and all the city men with their hats bent down to their noses.
Their silence together now is as empty, as easy as friends smiling; but then Dorothy disrupts it.
“David Loewen sent me two letters from Paraguay.”
“I keep writing I’ll send him a ticket,” Adam says, “telling him to come to Alberta, come visit once more, but he says he’s too old and I say, what’s old, one day flying? He says now the only way he wants to fly is go to heaven.”
She lays an envelope beside his plate. “He’s heard more about the David Loewen brothers, and Sakhalin Island, from some relatives in Russia.”
“He? Elizabeth Katerina told me she was trying to find out more from the KGB now, but she’s said nothing in her letters, not about them.”
“I think maybe they heard some lies.”
“Lies? She would never lie.”
“No no, not her—you read these. I made you a copy.”
His fingers touch hers as he reaches across, their fingers curl together. Her grey eyes contemplate him with such, he recognizes it, profound concern. These letters will tell him another bit of that story and he will fly there, walk through the prisons Chekhov saw a century ago, and consider the outline of Sakhalin’s burning hills his name-uncle could see from his cell window when his half-uncle Heinrich—he would have been Joel’s age then, twenty-six—Heinrich the Communist, travelled four thousand miles to find him.