Of This Earth (16 page)

My childhood nausea was not limited to extremely rare rides in cars or buses; it also churned my stomach in winter when we drove in our horse-drawn caboose, a sleigh enclosed in canvas with a tiny wood heater to warm us on long trips in the cold. By the time I was eight I learned it was often better to get out and walk behind in the sleigh tracks, or balance on the runners when the horses trotted, clutching the canvas. I preferred frigid air, the immense frozen trees and fields to the thick
warmth in the caboose, everyone knee to knee and talking, breathing. The open cold clamped onto your bare face, licked up your nose like ice and you knew every bit of your body was working inside your hooded parka and underwear and wool pants and felt boots and double leather-and-knitted mitts, you were strong, alive, the bitterest arctic could never hurt you. Mam would open the caboose door a crack, “Na?” but I’d wave her off, running.

I was riding the left iron runner one winter Sunday, coming home fifteen miles on cross-country trails from Livelong where my sister Mary and her husband Emmanuel Fiedler served a mission church, when Emmanuel got out of the caboose and walked in the right sleigh track and told me more about what Tony had started.

“The Bible calls it ‘the way of a man with a maid,’” he said, talking King James English. Winter twilight shone gold over the snow between the pale stems of the poplars, the wind and sun circles hollowed at their base. “Even the wisest man in the Bible can’t explain it, it’s so wonderful.”

Wonderful? Little Tony had told me two years ago that men stuck their pissers into women and I still thought that stupid. Why would they do that? Where? And Tony had not really answered those questions with his simple: “Because they want to,
and women have a big hole and they like it.” I refused to believe anything so abominable; pee was poison, my mother said, and since before I could think I had been taught to take my Schwenjeltje, little handle, out only in private, to pee in our chamber pot or toilet or behind something where no one was looking; at the very least to take a few steps like a big man and turn my back. So how could a grown woman be so crazy, to let a man do that?

Tony had spoken with more confidence then, he knew this: because men make them lie down, I’ll show you—a man lies down to piss? Whatever language we were speaking, we were using one word because all three languages have the same possible structure: “piss” as both noun and verb. So Tony lay down and spread his little legs wide in the air, come on, he said, women have nothing to aim but you have—aim?—sure, the woman has a hole and the man gets down on top of her and sticks his pisser in it, you want me to piss into you? no I haven’t got a hole there, sure boys have a hole too you have one, that’s too small but women have another one …

Tony lay against the clay mound by the dry hole where my brothers tried to find water, on the side hidden from the house. His bare legs and feet waving a little, inviting me. We couldn’t actually do much
of it: he wore his summer shorts, but he wanted me to open my overalls and pull out my little handle, he wanted to show me as much as possible, the woman flat on her back and the man between her legs, that’s what they really like to do, he said. That was when I ran away, across the yard and under Bell’s belly and she stepped on me.

I knew the world, even on our bush farm, was as full of differences as I could endlessly discover. And I knew my sisters had no penis like me, but I never suspected they might have a large opening. When they stepped into the washtub to bathe after me, what I saw was barely a fold. As for bulls, the bags between their hind legs grew bigger, but cows’ bags got way bigger, and bulls’ hung differently, they never grew teats like cows to get milk out of them. By the age of seven I knew all about the heat of cows against the side of my face and shoulder, the swollen warmth of their four teats alternating in the rhythm of my small fists that soon ached but grew stronger and stronger squeezing them; my work was milking the two easiest milkers morning and evening, they needed only a last stripping from Mam to make sure they were completely empty.

Cows were huge, but with Carlo helping you could easily yell them into a herd and even a small boy could warm his bare fingers in a winter barn milking, you could squirt milk into your mouth and swallow as much as you wanted while the cats climbed down from the barn beams where they slept and sat in the aisle begging for a turn, meowed please! But a bull was useless, what did he do? He had nothing you would want to touch or hold, a big hanging sack and always spraying himself dirty in the middle of his stall, not like the cows hunched properly over the gutter behind them. And horses rubbled you with their noses, soft as fingers, but studs—a stud must be something out of nightmares. That was the word for a female horse, mare, and nightmares could be terrifying, I knew.

My beautiful blonde sister Mary married Gust’s brother, Emmanuel Fiedler, when she was eighteen. As Helen wrote in her tiny notes:

But before the marriage this had already happened: Troy Fehr and I had stood in the aisle of the Fehrs’ barn staring at the massive, dappled-grey hindquarters of a Percheron stud. The great rear fold of the horse was covered by a short, docked tail, but his huge stockinged feet and legs were spread wide and inside the heavy notch of his thighs, just where the double bulge of his testicles nestled, hung the unbelievable length and thickness of his penis spiralled grey and white and purple to its knotted head. He had finished urinating, a yellow stream that smashed on the stall floor and splattered his legs and the plank wall. Troy leaned forward to get a better look, and I could not resist doing so too: that huge column of meat always there, hidden inside the stud’s body. It was like a long beast curled and dangling around the Tree in the Garden of Eden as the travelling preachers declared, now fully revealed in the hot stench of the stall: the rimmed purple head with its slit mouth dripping poison, thicker than my leg and swinging under that immense belly, waving hello. Frightening to watch … and impossible not to.

Troy grinned sideways at me bent forward, staring. He had once explained the ways of the dictionary to me and now he was full of much more astounding information.

“What he does to mares,” Troy said in his familiar dirty-secret voice, “with that schlong—you know Emmanuel wants to do to your sister.”

From around a barn corner, where I was not supposed to be, I had seen this massive beast mount our mare Bell, his yellow teeth clamped onto her neck and haunches pounding against her as though he would hammer her into the ground while she braced herself, every hoof gouging in. Was that what they meant by “screwing,” the stud’s “schlong” screwing itself into the mare’s hole while he tried to screw her whole body into the ground like a massive four-legged screwdriver—Emmanuel, and Mary? She’d never put up with it!

“That’s stupid! What’re you talking about?”

Troy laughed out loud at me. “Squirt, you don’t know nothing. They want to do it in bed, all the time.”

“They’re gonna get married!”

“Well yeah, and that’s how you make babies! Where’d you think they come from?”

I hadn’t thought about it much. Mam said they came from God, okay, but what did people babies have to do with this thick club sliding back into its hiding? The horse shifted, immensely, his haunches adjusted themselves as he dropped his enormous head to the hay in his crib. Our family didn’t stand
around watching animals urinate—though we had to see it often enough on long trips when our horses would trundle to a stop, no shouting helped, and the gelding would hose down onto the road or the mare pour out right over the wagon hitch—no more than we stared after people when they went into the bush. There was something unspoken, an aura of both privacy and indecency about acts of elimination. Beyond the obvious foulness of what came out of your body, there floated a smell inexplicable as sin: your body did these dirty things, yes, but you did them alone and as quick as possible as though they never happened, you just closed or pulled up your pants and wiped your hands if you could and your body was contained again, clothed and clean, nothing had happened. But like any child, I also knew it wasn’t that simple: voiding felt good, in your body, felt good somehow beyond the relief of it, and especially around the parts you covered most carefully. To urinate properly a boy has to hold his penis and sometimes mine started to change shape even as I held and emptied it, I felt it thicken a little in my hand and then something more, like a touch whispering through my body until I knew my bare toes had curled; as if they all wanted to clutch the earth, harder.

Vaguely I may already have sensed that in life “fair and foul are near of kin,” but that love should
“pitch his mansion in the place of excrement” was beyond me; and far beyond Troy to explain, other than the crudest snickering mechanics of it. A stud’s dangling penis, a mare’s anus or multifoliate vagina—both of which I had seen under uplifted tails in all shapes and functions—surely that could not explain what would happen in bed between my beautiful, irascible sister and her husband, the gentlest, most exuberant man in my short life.

But. That massive, doubled-horse screwing I had been forbidden to watch; the “schlong” disappearing between the stud’s legs as if loading his immense body for its next assault into another mare: my own penis briefly stiffening. Where had that come from? Sometimes in the morning when I awoke it was so erect I could barely bend it down to urinate. Why? Was it like that wherever I was when sleeping, so hard I couldn’t forget it once I noticed? In the land of sleep did everyone go around stiff like that? And a boy couldn’t even hide it, like any stud.

It came to me then that perhaps that was why people did do it in bed, in the dark at night—and from behind too, like animals. Little Tony got it wrong, I thought, lying there facing me. If people did that, they surely wouldn’t want to look at each other and feel even more ashamed.

But the winter when I was nine, Emmanuel laughed in the cold while riding the iron runners of the caboose with me during that drive home from Livelong. He cracked jokes, and explained that “the way of a man with a maid” was a lot more complicated than John Vallentgoed bringing his stud into the yard once or twice a year and letting him jump a few mares. And more beautiful. Mary was a high-strung woman, he said, and whatever he meant I knew she had the quickest tongue and sharpest temper of any of us, and he loved her so much, he said, he wanted to live with her forever. That was what happened between people; they loved each other, truly love without end, because that was the way God had made us: to love each other.

I had heard that all my life: God and love without end. Mam kissing you with a long cuddle, Pah’s smile and big hand on your shoulder—but apparently when you got older, love started to change its shape. As far as I could imagine, now, it got downright brutal.