Of This Earth (11 page)

Mam turned eighteen in September 9, 1913. At the time her youngest half-brother, Heinrich, was
three years old and that may have been one more reason why Daniel Knelsen tried to discourage my father: “Ploag die nijch. Met onse Tien loohnt sijch daut aul nijch.” Don’t bother yourself. With our Tina it [marriage] isn’t worth it.

His Tien knew how to work hard, oh yes, but she was always sickly, always complaining about something or other, all her life, why bother marrying someone who would die quick on you anyway?

How many times our father recalled that story of enduring love and ugliness. There Grandpa Knelsen sat, in the one picture we had of him, bald and bearded on a polished chair beside his final, third, wife, Lena Hiebert, less than half his age, both big fists bunched on his thighs and gleaming knee-high leather boots crossed at the ankles—boots he may have made himself because, Dan told me, he probably was a cobbler. And, strangely, there is what seems to be a slim notebook clutched in his left hand while he stares straight as pins into our eyes. For of course my father did “bother” (ploage: literally “to plague yourself”) himself with “his Tien.” They were married on a steppe winter day, January 15, 1914, and all those years in starvation Russia, war, revolution, Communism, the months of flight via Moscow and trains and refugee shelters and ships and trains again and the endless labour of Canada together and
eventually seven children, by 1975 all (except the one who died) married, with twenty-eight grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren and over sixty-one years of life together, Pah laughed aloud in his final, Alberta, hospital bed:

“Na Tien, some Ploag!”

“Sssshuh,” Mam gently, weeping. “All those old stories.”

When during World War II our father drove to Fairholme to sell a box-load of grain or several fat pigs, perhaps leading a calf behind wagon or sleigh, he always returned with what Mam had listed for him: food staples, clothing, farm or household items. But sometimes he brought a surprise as well. Once I remember a finely stitched double set of horse harness, complete with back breeching, of which we already had one set for road driving; they weren’t needed for field work. In fact, we had six sets of harness, enough for every working horse we owned, but my father said these were extra strong, Storekeeper Rempel had sold them as a special bargain and he’d store them in the granary so they’d be ready when other harnesses broke, as they always did. Yes, my mother said, someday we would need new harness,
but now we really needed a harrow! What was he thinking, to pay so much for what we might need someday?

Such arguments live deeper in a child than hearing; the rough strands that lengthen the wide weave of a family. The harness went back; I don’t know whether my father eventually drove to Fairholme, whether my mother went with him or if she went with Dan, but their disagreement about our neighbour Johann Martens’ cattle was worse. I remember Liz and I, perhaps Helen too, thirteen or fourteen at the time, crying about Martens’ perpetually gaunt cattle in our grain field and our father chasing them out again, not confronting Martens and his sons, just accepting the trampled crop, wait and see, it can come back, it’s still early in the season. But once the cattle have been in there, those scrubs, they’ll just come back! But the Martenses are church members, you can’t just go yell at them. Who said yell? Well, that’s all that will happen with Martens, you know that. Yes, yes, but …

And finally Mam, hoarse from arguing, going with Helen down the trail through the trees to the Martens farm and coming back beaten down and shamed in her anger by Johann Martens who had ut je’brellt, bawled Mam out, horribly Helen said, sobbing aloud: What business had my mother coming to
him to say anything, this was men’s cattle business and they’d gotten them out as soon as they noticed and if we couldn’t keep our rail and wire properly in place then that was our poor farming, they had fenced their share. Which made Mam even more indignant because she was convinced the Martenses had not done their full share; that had been an earlier and much longer argument but once, long ago, Pah had conceded that fine, fine, maybe the Martenses had done their share, so why, Johann Martens now demanded, did souhne Fru, such a woman! come yelling at him? If you know so much, go back where you belong and show your man how to build a fence. Our mother, such a woman!

The fight over Carlo was worse. Our black dog with a white bell of fur at his neck and white-tipped paws. The perfect dog for herding cattle, for playing in brush and yard, hunting gophers, wrestling around the two big trees on the yard, his thick tongue slipping like laughter over his black lips between dazzling teeth. We children were screaming and crying: Carlo had dragged himself home with his leg slashed and throat torn open, we thought we could see right down into his beating heart! Only the two Martens brutes could have done this and Carlo wouldn’t back down, never, and Mam told Pah he had to go and say something to Johann Martens about those animals,
we had to drive through their yard to get to the road, how could we say nothing and have our good cattle dog torn apart by those vicious beasts? But Pah would not go; dogs were dogs, he would not jacht, fight, with someone who sat on the same church bench every Sunday over a dog. Who said fight? Just go and tell them, explain, look at poor Carlo!

He would not go. It seemed to me then, at no more than six, that my father was hopeless, perhaps even a coward. I had seen Johann Martens’ eyes turn into needles behind his glasses, his mouth under its handsome moustache roar in a way I had not heard an adult speak; it was terrifying. Mrs. Martens was slim, bent, and with the incredible ability, it was said, of making Plümemoos, sweet plum soup, for her entire family out of two plums and four raisins, but she never did any family arguing. That was the man’s job and stocky Johann Martens did that very well—but not our father. He was quiet, always agreed with whatever anybody yelled and, even worse, expected his family to accept everything as he did. Mam was excessively forgiving, she wanted peace with her neighbours, but it had to be a somehow equal, orderly, mutual peace—not simply suffering silence endured by us. That was not proper behaviour of Christians among themselves; especially for children to learn.

I knew nothing then about the centuries Mennonites had searched to find a peaceful community; particularly among themselves. Nor did I know the long Low German maxim common among our people which might well have been applied to Johann Martens:

Watching Helen search Carlo’s bloody fur for slashes while I held the round Watkins salve tin open for her, I was convinced of one thing: our Pah had no backbone.

Carlo healed fast back to his original toughness, scars hidden under his long fur. Carlo, whom I sat on, whom I tried to ride around the yard before I could climb our heavy farm horses. In a summer photo, probably 1941, the two white socks of one of those horses gleam in the doorway of the weed-overgrown Franka barn, I’m barefoot and in big-buttoned coveralls astride Carlo, clutching his fur for a gallop. But he has braced himself, set his rump solidly on the bare yard, and is waiting in dogged patience for me to get off. He will not move.

And actually, I liked the directness of the Martens family. They hid nothing, what they did was what they were, head on. The Martens twins, Abe and Henry, were five years older than I, not quick in school but always doing fun stuff no one else thought of, crazy stuff I couldn’t yet imagine. They climbed trees to grab magpie eggs out of nests while the huge birds dived at them, screaming; they stuck their bare arms down gopher holes we had filled with pails of water, to clutch the gopher as he struggled to come gurgling out and if he curled up and bit them, what’s a nip in tough hide, they had him, their hands hard and black-rimmed as iron traps and his tail was worth two cents at Voth’s store, cut it off and let him run, he might grow another two cents’ worth for next summer.

On my first day of school, the Wednesday after Easter, April 16, 1941, Katie Martens sat across from me at the kindergarten table in the back corner of Speedwell School. It may be she knew less English than I but, much like her twin brothers, her unself-conscious words always turned up in a kind of unexpected wonder that easily became a round smile and laughter. Or at recess a teasing tag song:

Except for Jackie Trapp, who lived northeast of the school near the highway and whose father was German from Romania, all seven of us beginning kids came from Low German homes. Our parents understood we needed an English education because Canada had accepted us in our flight from that
godless Stalin, but it did not permit living in exclusive, segregated colonies. So we six- and seven-year-olds came to school with our siblings on the day appointed and sat where we were told, on benches at the long table three pine boards wide while the eight grades of regular students found their rows of single desks along the five west windows and surrounded the wood heater forged by Sam Heinrichs from two gasoline drums and protected on three sides by tin sheeting: over thirty desks crowded to the blackboards and the library cupboard against the east wall. All ruled by Mrs. Lucy Bush.

She was an omnipotent blaze of bright hair swirled into shapes we had never before seen, a manifestation inexplicably everywhere in the room with a voice always about to sheer away into space. Though that never quite happened while we seven sat around the table because after “God Save the King” and the Lord’s Prayer and roll call we were ordered to leave the school building and walk across the yard, past the girls’ two-seater toilet and what remained of the long winter woodpiles, to the teacherage and sit down on the floor around ancient Mr. Bush. Not a single word, silence!

The log teacherage consisted of two tiny rooms, with a neat brick chimney on a shelf above the centre stove going up through the ceiling. The bedroom
door was never open, narrow with beautiful grooved boards that left an unforgettable wisp of something sweet on your fingertips; years later, in Vancouver, I would recognize cedar. Mr. Bush sat in an armchair beside the table; if he turned his head a little, he could look out the window and down the road leading between pussy willows over the slough and the notch in the trees on the nearest hill, south towards the church and beyond Speedwell into the world. Mr. Bush rolled cigarettes—sinful, our parents told us, but they could do nothing about the war and so few teachers—in a little machine whose handle he turned on the table, and then he cut each in half with a Valet razor blade because, he said, he could only smoke half as much as he had before. He smoked at the ceiling while he asked us questions.

What happened on the Plains of Abraham? (Katie and I knew Abraham was in the Bible, but that wasn’t the answer.)

What is the biggest number you can think of? (If someone answered, he wrote that number on a sheet of paper, and then the next, which was always one bigger.)