Of This Earth (13 page)

But … if you lay flat on your back in the furry snow staring straight up, the grey columns reached high, they sprayed out over you and their countless
fingers moved in a canopy of grey on blue: a blue ocean of continuous, circular rhythm; all the trees over the whole earth were always and continuously moving. They creaked, they groaned, but in summer they would whisper as well. Or shiver. Something too immense to imagine was always breathing over them. That could only be God.

It might be, if you could lie still long enough, you would feel God moving in the air. In the snow.

There are elements of myself that have not, in a lifetime, changed much; grown a little perhaps. I did not need stones along the church road screaming at me. Before I was born my mother’s blood and breath formed me to know that God is everywhere. Whatever and everything “God” may mean, the presence is.

If I had asked, my brother Abe could have given me some Christian explication concerning God and Eternal Wrath and being born human and soaked in sin from which I needed “saving;” a bit of which I might have, at six or seven, understood. Abe was seventeen years older than I, thirteen when the family arrived in Canada; he received barely three years of education before he had to go “work out” wherever he could: on farms for his keep, for less than a dollar a day
at sawmills or laying track for the railroad or, steadiest work of all during the Depression, thinning, hoeing and topping sugar beets—a whole growing season of work—in southern Alberta. But Abe also persisted in learning; he was in the first winter Bible school class in 1937 when the Reverend George Thiessen came from somewhere in the south to teach sixteen young people in the two-room Speedwell cabin where he and his wife also lived. For three winters after that Abe attended Bethany Bible School in Hepburn near Saskatoon, which had over one hundred students. Both schools were taught in High German, but gradually some classes were also taught in English; the Bible was the main text, and it was taught as True: literally, word for word, “God’s Word.” If some instructors and students, who could read both Luther and King James, discovered a doubleness or, worse, an apparent contradiction in the same texts, they could only attribute it to their lack of understanding and go on to what was indubitably clear, for the Word of God could only be one: it was and is always and forever one and the same.

My experience as a child of this teaching in the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church was simple enough: what was read from the Bible, what was preached or sung, that was the way good people who longed to do God’s will believed and lived. This experience is focused by the number six, which has
shimmered in my head for more than six decades: six was my age that winter—I know it was winter because the coal-oil lamp was lit, its light glinting on the oilcloth of the kitchen table and we had come home from church and I told my mother—there was no one else there—I told her I wanted to be good, I wanted to stop being bad and have Jesus in my heart. She asked me, what had I done bad, and I said I wanted to feel good with Jesus in my heart.

Mam led me to the big room we had built onto the south end of the Franka house. The roof of the entire house was now shingled, no ceiling dripped rain any more, and in this lovely plastered room you could look out the large window and first see the snow melting off the enormous boulder thrust up in the yard where our wagon road bent south up the hill past the root cellar into the trees; it was the room, all whitewashed, where my brothers slept and I slept beside them on a cot when they were at home from working out or Bible school, and where I had once seen the naked breast of a woman sitting on the edge of the bed with her baby in her arms and I asked her what the baby was doing.

She said, “It’s drinking.”

“What?”

“Milk.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Me, out of here, the baby sucks here and it comes out.”

And I could see the bubbles where the milk came out of her into the baby’s mouth, so I asked her if she was all milk inside. She laughed and said, “No, only in here,” and she lifted the baby a little and I saw the full curve of her breast.

In this room my mother knelt down and I knelt too with our hands folded before our faces, my elbows wide on the edge of the bed, and she asked the dearest Lord Jesus to come, come into my heart, and then I said that too. Since before I knew I heard it, I had spoken our evening prayer and now together we prayed that as well, though that evening it felt lightly different:

The prayer continues:

It was said no one had seen the mysterious stranger painting, nor had he spoken to anyone. He left his only words red along the central community road, especially on the rocks below the church, for everyone to see until the coming winter slowly wore them away. And Abe spoke their English aloud to me, explained “Jas. 4:4” so that I could make that rock code into my nonsense rhythm,

He also found the verse for me, and read it out loud from his Scofield Reference Bible, required by Bethany Bible School for its dense, cross-coded index of “all the greater themes of Scripture”:

Too many words, I couldn’t sing them; nor understand. Abe said it meant things people did, “adults, older people” but I was too small to have to know about things like that yet.

But I did think of them. “Enemy of God,” my head bulged with words, “adulterer, adulteresses,” that was almost a singable song, I had “Jesus in my heart” and so I was “saved” though from what I did not know, I was wiedergeboren, born again, though I knew nothing about being born in the first place and Jesus felt good in my heart, as the preachers said so often, come to Jesus and a stone will be rolled from your heart.

“Good,” Abe said to me, “good. Dann kaunst du nü frooh senne.” Then you can be happy now.

Had I been unhappy? Ever? I could not say, in three languages.

The snow-covered earth held me as gently as falling asleep with my head in my mother’s lap while she was knitting. The tall aspen stood over me, great pillars reaching for heaven, every one so thick and hard … but I could feel the trunks sway between my hands, against my face … under the snow they were rooted deep in the frozen earth and yet they moved; not only their tops were dancing. I untwisted every rabbit snare and never set another.

T
he best water is wherever you can find it, my father joked. But water on a bush homestead is never for laughing, and on both our CPR and Franka farmyards my brothers searched deep in the earth for it. Holes about four feet square, a good space for a short-handled spade and easy cribbing; one man below filling a bucket and one hauling the clay up to dump on the growing mound. The third person was me, tjleena Schnäatjat, little rascal, five, almost six years old and fondling every clay clump for dampness, which I always found and quickly shouted down into an echo below. Invariably my moisture was mere coldness.

That black, sounding hole, the sharp rim of it, my head edged into a square gap in the earth and I saw only the bent back of my brother in a shaft that day by day narrowed deeper into darkness. I did not dare get lowered in that bucket—not that my brothers would have done it—what would the next stab of the spade uncover? Best would be a burst of water like a dam breaking—the Martens twins told stories like that, but then they would—or even a foot of muddy seepage in the morning. But once I found a harder lump in my hands, that emerged out of reddish clay crumbling into broken angles between my fingers, and inside gleamed sharp, black, like the visiting preachers intoned sadly, “Hidden sin.” At my sudden cry Dan glanced over, his hand on the pulley dropping the sticky bucket down, and calmly explained it must be some stray bit of coal, who knew how it got down there, in Coaldale they burned that all the time in their stoves, nothing scary about it.

But if it burned, there was really black fire inside! Dan laughed. “Better than wood, but don’t worry, Abe won’t find hell down there.”

What came up was simple enough; after the first thin layer of earth not even any stones—too bad we couldn’t farm underground, my brothers joked, heavy clay but at least no stupid stone picking—and for me the damp clay mouldable into houses, castles,
even people and horse shapes that slowly hardened in the sun. Brittle soon, not like warming sand, clay down as deep as you could dig, and one day I thought: I never have felt exactly this fistful before; no one in the world would ever even have seen it deep under our feet as we walked past towards the toilet at the edge of the trees, never if we hadn’t decided to dig for water exactly here. Every bit of every single thing was always so
particular
, even if there was endless amounts of it, like ground or trees. Moist, my fingers the first to ever touch and squeeze it, like this. And now exactly
this
ant was feeling its way over my bare toe. If my toe wasn’t here, what place would it have to crawl? Maybe be pecked by our rooster crowing near the granary.

If my brothers had not decided the dry hole near the western trees on our yard was hopeless, if they had not already partly filled it back in and the clay mound not been there beside the boards covering the hole, my little nephew Tony, Tina’s son, and I would not have been playing there one summer day. And perhaps then he would not have tried to tell me what a man and a woman do between each other’s legs when they are alone together.

But as it was, Tony did try. What he told me on the dry clay, what we tried to act out there when I could not understand and he himself did not seem to understand
well enough to explain—was it my amazement, his limited information, or language, or simply the incomprehensibly ridiculous act he was trying to describe? It was an astounding moment, and unforgettable; though I don’t know what language we spoke.

Do we ever remember how we grow into language? Not specific words, but the immersion of words a baby falls into at birth, of the giants that surround you laying a sheen of seeming order over endless confusion by making sounds with their mouths? I came to English through my child’s comprehension of family Low German and, to a lesser extent, through the more formal and careful High German—it was the language of the Bible and therefore of God—and it may be that learning to hear, to understand, to speak and to read English more or less at the same time was the reason I have not the faintest memory of learning any of the three. For a child, language may be less a learning than it is a ceaseless circulation of blood through flesh and brain and bone, caught like an apprehension, perhaps an instinct that develops all the more powerfully before you are conscious of it. Caught especially, and most intensely, from other children.