Of This Earth

PRAISE FOR
of this earth

ALSO BY RUDY WIEBE

FICTION
Peace Shall Destroy Many
(1962)
First and Vital Candle
(1966)
The Blue Mountains of China
(1970)
The Temptations of Big Bear
(1973)
Where Is the Voice Coming From?
(1974)
The Scorched-Wood People
(1977)
Alberta / A Celebration
(1979)
The Mad Trapper
(1980)
The Angel of the Tar Sands
(1982)
My Lovely Enemy
(1983)
Chinook Christmas
(1992)
A Discovery of Strangers
(1994)
River of Stone: Fictions and Memories
(1995)
Sweeter Than All the World
(2001)
Hidden Buffalo
(2003)

NON-FICTION
A Voice in the Land
(ed. by W. J. Keith) (1981)
War in the West: Vices of the 1885 Rebellion
(with Bob Beal) (1985)
Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic
(1989)
Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman
(with Yvonne Johnson) (1998)
Place: Lethbridge, A City on the Prairie
(with Geoffrey James) (2002)

DRAMA
Far as the Eye Can See
(with Theatre Passe Muraille) (1977)

“N
u es et Tiet,” my mother would say in the Russian Mennonite Low German our family always spoke together. Now it is time. And my father would get up to wrap his bare feet in foot-cloths and pull on his felt boots with rubbers over them, hook his heavy mackinaw and fur cap off the pegs by the door and go outside with the neighbour we were visiting. They would lead Prince and Jerry out of the barn and hitch them to our bobsled and we would drive home to a rhythm of harness bells, always, as I remember it, in blue darkness and covered by blankets and stiff cowhide in the sledbox.

We are travelling between winter poplars, momentarily open fields, along massive black walls of spruce; the horses feeling in the snow the trail of their own hoofprints home like the narrow path of sky above us, bright heaven sprinkled with light but sometimes, abruptly, flaming out like an exploded sun, a shower of fire and frightening until it swims away into waves fading out in rainbows: there, God lives in such light eternally and so far away I may never get there beyond the stars. Though my mother certainly will, and also, perhaps, my father.

They are singing. My father’s favourite hymn, which they have carried with them from their Mennonite villages on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia to sing in Saskatchewan’s boreal forest:

In the crystalline cold my mother’s soprano weaves the high notes on “Pi-il-ger” back and forth into my father’s tenor like wind breathing through the leaves of summer aspen. My oldest sister, Tina, is
married and my oldest brother, Abe, in Bible school, they are not there, and Dan is standing at the open back of the sledbox, tall and silent; but we four younger siblings are humming inside our layered clothes under the covers, Mary especially because she can already thread alto between Mam and Pah’s voices, make three-part harmony, and if only Dan would open his mouth, as Mary tells him often enough, we could have a family quartet even if Helen and Liz and I are too little for anything yet except melody.

We are driving home in the boreal forest that wraps itself like an immense muffler around the shoulders of North America; the isolated spot where once my particular life appeared. A physical place in western Canada not difficult to find: north of North Battleford halfway to Meadow Lake, west off Highway 4 where the Saskatchewan Official Highway Map is blank except for tiny blue streams beginning and running in every direction; not a settlement name north of Glaslyn, for ninety kilometres; in the space cornered by Turtle and Stony and Midnight lakes. The ground of whatever I was or would be, root and spirit.

There, before I could speak any language, I heard Psalm
go
, a Prayer of Moses, read aloud, and recited at home and in church:

Threescore and ten years ago my life began on the stony, glacier-haunted earth of western Canada. Seventy years of refuge, under the shadow of wrath. As my mother said, “Now it is time.”

—On board MS
Dnieper Princess
,
the Black Sea, October 4, 2004