by Rudy Wiebe
She lifts her hand to touch the tree, her palm and fingers listening. “A tintinnabulum?” she asks. “Susurration?”
He hisses an echo in her ear, “Susurration.”
They draw it out into rhythm with the poplars high over them, their cloud of leaf voices singing.
Adam gestures up. “The voices of those who have died before us.”
Alison stares at him, and he tells her mildly, “I’m not crazy. Just a comforting way to think of leaves and wind. For me.”
Her smile returns, but uncertainly, as Joel comes crunching through brush around the corner of the frame house. He ducks under the branch spikes of a tree crashed into the caved roof. “Dad, this is wild,” he says. He runs his hands down the grey siding. “And beautiful clear cedar, so soft, it’s grainy as cloth.”
“Never painted,” Adam says, “just gentle Alberta weather.”
Joel laughs, patting the wall. “This house cost a lot, two floors, cement foundation—and you always bragged your homestead was so poor! Romantic crap.”
“No crap, that wasn’t our house. Orest Homeniuk built it, when we moved away and he bought the land for back taxes, one hundred eighty-seven dollars.”
Alison gestures to the black log mound beside them. “You didn’t live in here?”
“That’s where we lived.”
“Huh?” Joel takes four steps and he is beside her, the eave of the rotting roof comes barely to his forehead. “God, I thought this was maybe your chicken barn, or the pigs.”
“No no, that was our sweet little home in the north. Good thing Orest never tore it down, see how neatly the corners are fitted?”
“Sawn off so trim,” Alison says, fingering axe marks. “But the logs aren’t sawn … what is this?”
“Trimmed flat, by broadaxe. John could trim two sides of a log straight as a string. That wall’s stood sixty-five years and look at it: still straight.”
“Uncle John chopped all these logs flat?”
“Sixteen years old.” Adam taps Joel’s shoulder. “They don’t make them that way any more.”
“They don’t have to.” Joel bends down to the windowsill just above his feet. “The window’s low enough to walk through.”
“And the trees are so huge,” Alison says. “What happened?”
“That big frame house was never lived in, it was never finished. We left in May ‘46, and Orest started cutting spruce and sawing lumber and building—everything but the cedar is wood off this land—as soon as he got title, but he died just after Joe, his son, got back from the war. Heart attack.”
Beside them that tall, narrow, almost ghostly shell surrounded by the white trunks of trees swaying slightly, back and forth as if to bar the black openings where windows and doors have never been. Adam sees apprehension in Alison’s eyes; almost, perhaps, fear.
He tells her, “Joe Homeniuk fought for land, foot by bloody foot in Normandy and the Battle of Holland. He said he and his buddies were killed and killed for it, and when he came back land couldn’t be what it was for his father, or us Mennonites. Land was our living, our life and food, but for Soldier Joe land was what you either had or didn’t have, it was business. What land grows you sell, grain or trees or cattle, it’s all for sale, and you buy and sell land like shares on the stock market, buy low with borrowed money and mortgage and buy more and sell high and always make a profit. He wouldn’t live out here in the sticks, thirteen miles from the railroad. He built that castle on the bluff in Boyle and the Toshiba Products plant we passed in Rowand, he sold his lumber mill to them six years ago. Tens of millions, and he still owns half the country.”
Alison asks, “And you bought this back from him?”
“Yeah. One small piece, our homestead quarter, after two years’ negotiation. He cleared every square inch to grow crop—he did that to all the land he owned—he bulldozed the barn and the sheds and the trees, even the muskeg, all up in smoke, but he didn’t torch this little copse, these—houses.”
“So, how’d you persuade him?”
“We made a deal: I’ll never touch them either.”
“I don’t get it,” Joel says. “Why?”
“This is the last thing his father built. And I’m the only person born on this place.”
“A real good guy.”
“As the Cree say, ‘Blood runs thick and long and forever.’ ”
Joel guffaws. “Not on the Internet!”
Adam’s feet sink in half a century of leaves, the roof so low he can rub the end of the highest gable-log with the palm of his hand. The wood sifts dust on his fingers. Abruptly he leads Alison and Joel around to the gaping hole of the door in the centre section of the long log mound, and ducks in. The old house space is no larger than a granary, and crowded with long drapes of paper like tattered hides hanging from the ceiling. There is no place for feet: the floor has vanished, collapsed in debris into the cellar hole.
“It’s just rotten paper,” Adam says to the two hesitating in the doorway. “Wrapping paper, paper bags, newspapers, we pasted them all together with flour and over the walls and ceiling the last winter, to try and keep the wind out.”
Alison murmurs, “It’s an installation. A tight space of art hangings.”
“And you can read it!” Adam laughs, and feels a surge of happiness that she is here. “Look at this one, the Zionsbote, ‘Mittwoch, den 22 März, 1938’—Mom always saved the Zionsbote, she must have been desperate, pasting them all over.”
“This is amazing.”
“It wasn’t then, we were just cold. This one centre room was the house they built first, fall 1930, five people living in it. Helen was always away working, and then she got married. Kitchen and living and sleeping room all one, then two years later they cut out doors in opposite walls and added the bedrooms at either end. That one is where we kids slept, Margaret in there on a cot behind a sheet hung exactly to the middle of the window so we all got some evening sun, and John and me on this side in a double bed, me against the corner wall and no reading in bed at night, no light anyway. When Abe or Helen came home they’d sleep on Margaret’s cot and she either on a mattress on the floor, here, or in Mam and Dad’s room over there.”
Alison and Joel are halfway in, leaning around the tattered, hanging papers, peering into the dark space of the bedroom. Their arms are tight around each other and they are so close to Adam, their presence so vivid in this tiny place, his first home, that he is filled with sudden, wonderful longing. And he hears the voice of his mother remind him in this waiting air—she is frying potatoes, she is scrubbing clothes, she is ironing, he is turning the milk separator where the milk and cream arch out of opposite spouts and the wood she thrusts into the firebox of the stove sprays sparks against her hand. “Little children,” she repeats the Watchword, “play and trample in your lap, big children walk on your heart”—some, Mamma, yes, but not every one. These grown children are now so near to him, he recognizes what he is feeling is contentment; almost as if he can, finally, stop thinking he must make up his mind.
Joel has turned and is bent past him, peering between the tatters. “Where did Margaret lie? When she was sick?”
“In this room. Her cot was against that wall, the kitchen table over in the middle.”
“God, it’s all so tiny…”
“Actually, it’s very good for a long-term patient. Never alone, in here she was always with the family, right in the middle of what’s going on.”
“I mean the whole … five, six people living in here, fifteen years?”
“It was close and warm in winter, in summer you mostly lived outside, cooked…” His son staring at him. “Like Mam said, we always had enough to eat, and at night no Bolshevik ever hammered on the door, not even a Mountie!”
After a silence Alison says, almost at his ear, “You were born in this room?”
“No,” Adam says, and sees the black space in the middle of the right wall, past where the stove and the woodbox he had to keep filled under the
washbasin stood in the corner. He gestures, “In there.” The ground has heaved up inside the darkness that all afternoon moved deeper into the small room with its eastern window. Four times he has returned here and he has never yet gone into that room, nor asked himself why; his mind, when he looks there, is simply blank, and he thinks perhaps it is because this is the first time he has come here with someone alive. There is no smell inside these ruined walls with their gaping doors and windows, the long spaces of mud fallen from between the logs: during fifty years of trees and night and day and every weather the kitchen sank, the bedroom rose as if the earth must turn, adjust itself into some comfort after their momentary existence here, his fleeting birth. His mother and father there in bed, once upon a time, holding each other.
Once this was their home. Each time he has now returned more of his child’s family memory is packed into this space, and it is Margaret’s room. Dead at sixteen, but she is sitting there on her cot, he is trying to brush out the tangles of her long, black hair.
He says aloud, “We better go around outside. It’s easier to look in the bedroom, from the window.”
Joel says, walking beside him, “When Grandma got that picture from her brother, in Russia, with him in the pointed army cap, they were living here?”
“Yeah, they had cleared a few acres in the bush, and used the trees for this little starting house. That was good, Orenburg has no trees to build anything, and this cost nothing, just work.…”
“Wasn’t his name Heinrich?”
Adam says, before he thinks, “My name was once Heinrich.”
“What?”
He regrets his words, but now he must continue. “For about eight years. My dad registered my name that way, though I didn’t know it.”
Joel asks, even more puzzled, “Were you named after that uncle?”
“I don’t know. Maybe after eight weeks of my yelling Dad figured out I’d always be jaejenaun too.”
“What’s that?”
“Always against, against whatever’s going on, you never want to do what you’re told.”
“Oh yeah,” Joel says. “I can see that.”
“Never mind,” Adam says, “that’s another story, don’t scare Alison too much on her first visit—anyway, they never told me anything about me and that name. But my Loewen relatives in Russia have now got more information about him. It seems by 1945 he was a Red Army officer, and he was killed by a sniper while they were taking Berlin. Your great-uncle Heinrich was Colonel Genrich Lvov, a Soviet war hero.”
Joel has stopped, and so has Alison; they hear the distant rush of a vehicle approaching on the gravel road that passes the copse.
“Crazy,” Joel says at last. “Did they hear for sure what happened with that other brother, on Sakhalin Island?”
“Peter David Loewen,” Adam says heavily, and leans against the ancient wall whose very grain he remembers; if there were no trees, it would be deeply warm from the spring sun. He has avoided telling Joel about Elizabeth Katerina’s letters, and he especially does not want to talk about them here … but something must be said. He says, carefully, “Teacher Loewen they called him. They say he was solid, with wide shoulders and thick black hair like yours, a hard handgrip, but the—Genrich Lvov going there, to see him in prison … carrying a knife … Maybe that never happened.”
“Onkel David in Paraguay said Grandma had heard it,” Joel insists. “She told him for sure … but it’s a lie? Brother killing brother? Mennonite killing Mennonite?”
His mother had doubtless said those Lowgerman words, Massa, knife, and spetje, stab. But words about facts happening half a world away—especially Lowgerman words—could change, grow, slant, lean into a more cruel and relentless form of torture. In words carried across continents you meet them all somehow, both the living and the dead. Sometimes even yourself.
Adam says, slowly, “I wouldn’t say it was a lie. Family stories … names … the facts can get a little changed, shifted, but they’re based on something that happened. Usually true enough.”
“But killing is killing.”
“Maybe Heinrich never carried a knife—but by working for Stalin’s system, he did kill his brother.”
The gravel roar of the car has passed away on the road north. The road was always two tracks leading to Boyle, he would stand here half-hidden by this corner of the house and watch the slow wagons draw past, steady farm schrugge nodding in the sun, the grind and thud of wheels on stone. His hand touches a clump of chinking still caught between the house logs. He mixed it, tramping the mud down in the pit with his small naked feet, Margaret too, and John, and Pa brought forkfuls of straw … now this bit rubs to dust under his fingers, dribbling away.
He says aloud, “My father told me I yelled a lot, when I was a baby. Screamed, I guess, often at night. Maybe he named me Heinrich because for me something seemed to be always wrong too, like my uncle, I was jaejenaun.”
“Jaejenaun,” Joel repeats, as if tasting it.
“People who somehow aren’t satisfied, who always look for ‘different.’ ”
Alison sings, “ ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’ ”
“That’s it, contrary.”
Alison says, “My mother always says she should have called me Mary.”
“Hey!” Joel says in mock alarm. “You never told me that!”
They are around the low bedroom window, laughing a little, and they hear a car door thud. Somewhere outside the brush of the copse that hides them. They straighten up, listen. Above them green sunlight cuts streaks between the tall, pale trees.
“Adam? Are you there, Adam?”
Adam had not wanted to talk about his uncles at the homestead. He had wanted to look through the window space with Joel and Alison, into the little, dark log room where his mother had given him birth; he wanted to walk out across the open field with his children and up the hill, to show them the beaver dams on the height of land.
From the field below, that long hill he wanted to walk up on the Waskahikan homestead looked like the Orenburg steppes, where he and Young Peter walked with Elizabeth Katerina, talking, the day before they drove to the city of Orenburg and went to the Grey House. Then she had led them down the great staircase into the valley, and over the walking bridge across the Ural River from Europe into Asia, led them under the giant cottonwoods of the park until they came to the murder trenches.
There they stood, silent. Adam looked down row upon row of memorial birch, walked between them in a daze, trying not to think of earth ripped open for bodies, bodies not neatly laid out side by side like a hand gesturing over a bed but bodies exploded, thousands of bodies crumpled on top of each other as they crashed backwards, blown apart by a single exploding bullet, marvellous human bodies like those he had once cared for so tenderly, sprawled in deep ditches here; brutally disconnected. And then he saw the beaver stump, at his very feet.
Where the edge of the undercut bank dropped into the Ural River turning past, the gnawed stump of a tree. Not birch. Adam touched the tooth marks, felt the scalloped striations, the tuft and splinter of the centre break. Just where the river turned towards Orenburg City high on the distant cliffs. Not birch, an alder stump, where on the river’s edge in the eighties the human bones were first washed out. He had taken a picture of the river and the bend and the stump. Beaver would not cut down birch but they might learn to gnaw bones, his cousin Young Peter told them as they stood together beside the Ural, who could say what even the animals had to do to stay alive in the Soviet Union.
But when Adam returned to Edmonton, in his developed picture he found only the edge of the muddy clay bank and the water and the summer wall of green trees across the river. Neither of his cousins was there, nor the beaver stump he remembered more certainly than anything else. Maybe there had just been too much, first the story of the building and then the murder park and then the river and the bones exposed and the birch trees, and finally his own discovery of the beaver—that stump w
as in his camera viewfinder; of that he was absolutely certain. And Young Peter too, and at least the edge of Elizabeth Katerina’s dress, they were there in several other pictures, he took rolls, but somehow after all those stories, each one worse, his camera had avoided them both beside the beaver stump, that was too much. But the stump was still right there; if he could shift the picture half an inch left you would have to see it, and both of them standing beside it. All he could do now was remember that, and believe it.
Alison had never in her life, she said, seen more than a picture of a beaver. So come, he intended to tell her and Joel now, walk across the field and up the hill at the back of the homestead, where they’ve dammed up ponds along the height of land. Lots of trees fallen the wrong way and left to rot, and more than enough black poplar and blackening aspen stumps among all the beaver paths and deep dug canals that you can look and put your hands on. When they dammed up the water to protect their houses, the beavers revealed that it is a true height of land.
Which he never knew as a child. Then the swamp beyond the hill only drained away north, every spring, but now the beaver dams had caught and contained the water that became Firebag Creek where it fell away north to Firebag Lake and the Athabasca River, Great Slave Lake, finally the Beaufort Sea, and in the opposite direction a series of backed-up sloughs and islands and much longer southern dams made the water muddle south through muskeg and swamp and finally into White Earth Creek to the North Saskatchewan River and Hudson Bay.
When he was a boy he could not know this. There was no map he could read to tell him that their homestead land and the long eastern hill were folded over the continental divide, but now that the beavers had revealed it, he would build a new log house on the hill, he had told Joel and Alison driving up from Edmonton. A beautiful house, long and safe, with room enough for everyone to look in all directions, and a veranda along the front facing east so that every day they could look out over water that flowed in two directions, north and south; any raindrop or flake of snow could split and slip into seas a continent apart.
And he would plant lanes of birch trees on the whole quarter-section of poplar and spruce and clumps of willow Joe Homeniuk had bulldozed clear into one huge field; plant rows, avenues like those leading back from the Ural River where the Orenburg people strolled on sunny holidays. Young Peter said the orders had come from Moscow to open the river valley as a park for the faithful citizens who had helped destroy the Fascists in the war, though the German armies never got near Orenburg, but then the river washed out the bones and they discovered they were walking on layered, murdered people and they built a high iron-picket fence around them and planted birch trees inside. After Adam took what he thought was the beaver stump picture he turned his back to the river and took another one, which did show exactly what he believed he remembered: the path worn through a gap in the black iron fence and the long lanes of bright birch opening far away to Elizabeth Katerina and Young Peter, very tiny against the triangle of sunlight and the heaped memorial of round, grey stones gathered out of the river and mortared together: