Of This Earth (25 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
No one had ever seen a wolf in Speedwell, but like a body explosion that shattered all reason I was terrified. I scrambled into the brush behind the stone pile along David Lobe’s field; if it attacked I could hurl stones, I would barricade myself, I’d dig down … the animal trotted by on the worn wagon track without a twitch: Old Stewart’s miserable dog. It had looked so huge chasing me!—its hide rubbed raw in spots from its endless fight with fleas.
The dog lay on the bed of gunny sacks the only time I was inside George Stewart’s cabin. One summer Sunday afternoon three of us boys somehow dared to walk in from the road, around the trees, and he saw us through the open door—it had no screen—and beckoned that we should come in. Henry Enns, the minister’s son who limped a little on his elevated shoe, was the tallest of us and the old man asked him the question,
“You’ve taken history, haven’t you?”
As if “history” were a single pill swallowed at will. When Henry quickly nodded, old Stewart continued,
“History says the Stewarts were once kings of England, right? And I’m a Stewart, right? My name is George Stewart and that means I have the right to
be king, eh, maybe more right than George Windsor because I’m George
Stewart
, eh?”
It had never entered my mind. But then I knew nothing about Stewarts once being kings of England, leave alone George the Sixth’s family name—did kings have to have one? Henry, who apparently knew, nodded, but for a moment I was so startled that I might be in the presence of a king whose clothes and skin were seamed with dirt that I backed against a trunk near the door and knocked a horse harness tug to the floor, its chain clanging. The log shack buzzed with huge Modeschietasch, as we called them, maggot-shitting flies, and so crammed small with stuff I can’t remember any of it; only the clang of torn harness and the small dog—completely useless for cattle—heaving up on the dirty sacks of the bed and scratching himself furiously with one hind leg.
Stewart continued talking as if to himself, the way he always did: “Now I’m not saying nothing against King George, I wouldn’t do that, but I don’t think he’s running the war right, look at what Hitler’s doing to the poor buggers. I’m not against George, but if he came up from England and said to me, ‘Stewart, will you come and take over?’ well, I wouldn’t refuse him. First I’d stop the war and I’d say to Hitler, ‘Listen here, we’ve got to talk this over!’”
To talk things over rather than shooting made perfect sense to me—but King George coming to see Old Stewart? Living in this filth and walking the roads with his gunny sack, to whom my mother often gave a heel of bread and some sausage? And what about Mr. Churchill? He made all the war speeches, wouldn’t he have to come too? When we got back to the road none of us could believe it and, as we discovered, most adults in Speedwell had already laughed at that story many times.
“If all the George Stewarts in the world were kings of England,” my brother-in-law Emmanuel said, “they’d fill the cow pasture with thrones.”
Then on January 2, 1945, Dave Heinrichs came to tell us Old Stewart was dead: apparently frozen to death during the four-day snowstorm before New Year’s. Dan got the RCMP in to his place, our team and sleigh breaking through the heavy drifts. They must have brought the body out past our yard but Helen notes nothing about that, nor do I remember. His poor dog had frozen to death as well.
Nevertheless, such a dream; such a human death alone in the wilderness of this world. Ten years later the first story I wrote for my university writing class was about George Stewart, and it didn’t make him funny or ludicrous as it easily might have. Rather, it tried to grapple with a boy’s inchoate sense of “the
fleeting stuff of human majesty.” And F. M. Salter, my writing professor at the University of Alberta, who years before had mentored W. O. Mitchell to his first publication in the
Atlantic Monthly
, found my effort “a very remarkable picture … indeed, when polished up, publishable.” And so it was, about a decade later as “Tudor King;” several years after that the National Film Board made an eleven-minute film of it.
The seriousness—one might well say deadly seriousness—of my early attempts at writing fiction continued. My first published short story, in
Liberty magazine
, Toronto, September 1956, was about my sister Helen.
It was also a story I had written for Salter’s university course the winter before. At the time I couldn’t look through Helen’s five-year diary, but when Liz showed it to me years later, the many tiny details in it that corroborated my story only strengthened my trust in memories I had that were not recorded there. The diary provided five lines of space for each day, and Helen wrote her last entry in early March 1945. Throughout February she had often noted how her illness was growing, how she
could do nothing, “just lie and think.” Then, her last diary words:
March 5, Monday: Today I feel better, so good I had to spill ink on Jan. 31. That will stay there as long as the book exists.
And it has, a shapeless blot with a strong stroke tilted right, fading for sixty years.
March 6 to 28, 1945, are blank. Helen’s final written words are on a torn bit of paper when she could no longer speak, her neat writing collapsed to a slanted sprawl:
I want to go to bed
lets all pray
I can have more
breath and sleep
She must have been sitting up, held in someone’s arms in an attempt to help her breathe. Someone has written “March 27th” below the first line, and across the bottom of the paper is Liz’s handwriting:
Helens last writing on March 28. 2.00 oclock P. M.
Those are the same words with which Liz’s thirteen-year-old handwriting continues the five-year diary:
March 28 Wedensday: Sister Helen died on 28
of March. Her heart tore off she had an easy
death though died March 28, 1945 2.00 P. M.
Dates, times, contradictions. Visible words that fix memory despite decades of forgetting and impossible recall.
How to tell such a story. Sing? I can’t compose music … I’ve never learned to dance nor wanted to … I’m too colour “challenged,” as they say it now, to paint a picture—but I once did try to hum a song into existence. The first morning I rode Prince to school after Helen’s death. I was alone.
I never wrote down a word of it but I know them, I can yodel, bump them together without a thought:
Old Dan Tucker in the grand old days
Swept the floor in the bachelor ways
He could knock the stuffing out of any guy
With one big slug of his double-jointed sigh
—what is this nonsense branded in my brain? I imagine “sigh” means “scythe,” because that’s the way we pronounced it at the time. Obviously a hillbilly radio riff about “Old Dan Tucker” was banjoing through me as Prince plodded along trails he knew so well he needed no rein, my mind flipping, looping around words, sounds: “one big slug of his double-jointed scythe”? Well, it’s ridiculous, almost scat, but under certain farming circumstances “double-jointed scythe” might be as funny as “died of a toothache in his heel.” That morning any rhythmic sound that floated me away in the sunlight, the winter poplars barely tipped with buds, was good.
Memory is whatever you find in it, a rhythm, a wisp; Theodore Roethke says it perfectly, though in a slightly different context:
Love is not love until love’s vulnerable…
All who remember, doubt.
So I will lay out this particular, for me a lifelong, doubt in the way I first tried to order it at age twenty-one, eleven years after Helen died. Not the story as published, but my first fumbled draft, a stained holograph barely decipherable now, scribbled and crossed out in a notebook written on both sides of the page sometime during January 1956.
Eight and the Present
In the darkness under the rafters he awoke to the screaming.
It seemed he had heard it a long time, as if it reached back endlessly into his sleep, even as if he had heard it forever—the swift crescendo, the high plateau of sound and then the moaning fall of it down to a whimper. It was like the dream he had of being crushed by a huge tree and when he forced himself awake his brother’s big arm had been on him, inert and heavy in sleep. Only now he had had no dream, only felt this endlessly before he awoke, and heard it.
It had been quiet for a moment as he felt these things and suddenly he knew that his brother was not beside him on the straw tick. Fear seized him. He rolled under the cover over into
the other hollow and it was warm from the big body. He noticed as he moved that the stovepipe seemed surrounded by light, and he sat up in bed, forgetting the darkness, and saw the light from downstairs coming through the hole around the stovepipe. He could hear movement. Were they all up, with the light burning?
Then, inhumanly, the screaming came again. It was like a pointed … he could hear and feel nothing, just the searing scream, as if he and it were the sole inhabitants of a universe. It drowned his brain until he could not hear it for the sound, and then it fell horribly, as if stretched beyond itself, down to a burbling moan.
He jerked the quilt up and over himself, but the warm darkness was not enough. He wanted to go downstairs to the warmth of his mother. His small bare feet were cold on the rough boards as, huddled against the darkness, he felt for the top of the ladder-like stairs near the oblong shade of grey that showed light below. Then he felt them and slipped down, feet quick on the familiar steps. The moaning had almost died, and he could hear movements beyond the curtain of the living room. He crept over and pulled it aside.
He did not know what he saw, for a long moment. It wasn’t that lamplight was too strong
for his sleep-roused eyes, but rather that his sister, who had lain in bed in the corner of the sitting room for months because of an enlarged heart, was now in the middle of the night sitting up so stiffly nailed to a chair and his father and brother seemed to be holding her down. He had never seen her face like that before. It didn’t look like a face, more like the Hallowe’en mask he had once made. Her black hair hung in damp strings over her forehead as his mother wiped her face with a cloth, and then he saw the clothes pin stuck in her mouth and the blood trickling down her chin from her lips where she had bit herself. In the wonder of it, he stared and suddenly the sound within her seemed to rip loose and he heard that scream again, saw it torn from her throat and he saw how the muscles in the men’s arms bulged and knotted as they tried to hold her on the pillowed chair.
He was suddenly afraid. He looked here and there as the sound seared him and he was relieved beyond measure when his sister Toots, four years older than himself, who was sitting crying by the door, reached up and clutched him to her.
The scream was not as long, and he looked up as his father, face beaded with sweat and tears, said desperately, “Mother, we have to do something,
we can’t stand this,” and his brother Dan, maddened by his own impotence and love for his sister, hissing fiercely,
“Do something! We can’t stand this! How can she stand it? What’re you thinking about us for? She’s burning up.”
And his mother, wiping the tortured face again, saying, “Dan, don’t, that doesn’t help. She bites herself so much, if we could only stop the fire in her … maybe we should get the Thiessens…”
“Mrs. Thiessen would know something—do something. Get Rudy up to ride and get her.”
They noticed him then where he huddled with his sobbing sister, not knowing whether to cry or not. He didn’t want to, here in front of his big brother, crying was sissy, so he was relieved when Dan said, “Rudy, get on Prince and ride to the Thiessens, quick.”
His mother, tear-stained, bent over him. “I have to leave this house, I can’t stand to see her like this, Toots, get some colder water and wipe her face, I’ll take the lantern and go to the barn with him.”
In a rush he was dressed and out in the coolness where the spring frogs croaked through the morning darkness. Near the barn they heard
the scream again, but it seemed far away and unattached to him, almost like a coyote howl when he was in bed at night. He jerked at the barn door and the warmth from the horses wrapped him in its living smell. Straining, he reached up and looped the bridle off its peg. His mother wept silently as she stood in the open door holding the lantern.
“Whoa,” he said softly. “Easy there, Prince old boy,” as he touched the black object in the single stall. Prince moved over, waking up, and he went into the narrow stall murmuring quiet words as Dan had taught him to do in the dark to animals. He had some difficulty in getting the bridle bit into the soft but resistant mouth, so he scrambled up on the manger and strained over to force it in, then slipped the bridle over the soft ears, snapped the strap, unsnapped the halter shank and, grabbing the long mane, half swung, half jumped to the bare back. Prince began to back out and he said,
“OK, Mom, get out of the road.” He saw the lantern light swing away and he backed the horse out of the stall, then wheeled it sharply and rode out the low door, hanging over on the left side, right arm and leg curled and clinging.
“What shall I say, Mom?” he asked.
Her voice was half choked, “Tell them Helen’s dying—to come quick, to help.”
Somehow her expression of these few words made him feel her sudden need for someone to share this horrible night with them—he didn’t know how he’d ever get them up, but he knew that he was supposed to do something and he kicked Prince sharply, and as the horse began to move he could hear her say, “Be careful, my little Sonny,” and then how her voice fell into a moaning prayer even as she started away from the barn. He was so busy getting Prince into a gallop that he didn’t hear the scream again as he swung through the gate and out on the road.
The clouds raced across the moon, its light flicked over the landscape as if whipped by fierce winds, but down among the trees all was still as he heard and felt the rhythmic clop of hooves carry up through him and into the night. He didn’t like the spruce at night, they were solidly purple and grasping, and he kicked the horse to get him past the muskeg faster. When the moonlight flickered spasmodically, the black gobs of shadows seemed to leap up and at him and pour around him, and when it did not, the darkness was over all. The last bit was an opaque tunnel,
with the horse’s withers rocking up at him, solid and living, in the choking fear that wrapped him. Just at the end the scream seemed to ring in his ears out of the blackness of the trees, and he was terrified, and then he galloped around the corner, out of the forest, to where poplars bordered the road on one side and the level blackness of the Thiessen field stretched out against the lighter blackness of the moving sky.
With the lighter darkness about him, his thoughts raced on with the galloping horse. This was like he had sometimes dreamed, racing through the night for help—all by himself, just as he had read in
Black Beauty
. Not many boys, not even most men had ever done this—ride alone to the rescue, Helen must really be sick if she screamed like that, Thiessens would sure help, and he’d get them.
There was a patch of trees now, then the wooden bridge over a rushing spring creek between two sloughs where frogs croaked with self-inflated importance. The hooves clunked hollow twice, then he was over and in an instant saw the outline of the Thiessen gate. Prince turned there and he rode up the lane. The farmyard lay dark and mysteriously violet and grey.
The dogs barked raucously out of their sleep as he banged on the door. “Mr. Thiessen!” If it had not been for the noisy dogs, he couldn’t have opened his mouth against the night. Finally footsteps came and the door creaked curiously.
“Mr. Thiessen—” then he saw the long night dress “—Mrs. Thiessen … Helen’s awful sick, Mom says you’re to come and help.”
“What’s the matter?”
“She’s—she—” he did not know how to say it, “she bites herself, sitting in a chair…”
“Ride home quick, tell them we’ll come right away. George …” she turned to her husband who had now appeared behind her in the little porch.
In a trice he led Prince close to the wagon in the yard, climbed up, jumped to his back, and was heading home. He was colder now as the excitement waned and the eastern treetops just tipped in gold foil. Prince knew the way home and galloped with a will, so he closed his eyes to it all and hung on. The clippety-clop seemed endless, the horse seemed to run hard and he felt shaken apart and terribly sleepy. He did not see the spruce now.
His mother was waiting in the yard. “They’re coming right away,” he said. She met him as he came out of the barn and she took his hand.
“I went in once, but it’s so terrible—oh my Sonny, she’s burning up, and I can’t do anything. It came just like that—so quick—and she’s burning up. Oh Lord, Lord, be merciful.”
They were near the woodpile and she dropped to her knees beside the blocks, and he could feel her desperate clasp on his small body as she wept and prayed. He tried to say something, “Aw Mom, she’ll get better …” but he did not know what to say. What was there to say? He was terrified—he had never known his mother like this, she who could do everything. Then his crying rose and fell with hers, at the great unknowing fear and the helplessness he felt from her. The scream, as he heard it through his tears, was very weak and did not come again for a long time.
Suddenly he heard the jingle of harness, and in a moment the Thiessens were there. As Mr. Thiessen tied the horses, Mrs. Thiessen came over to his mother standing near the woodpile and put her arm around her. His mother, still holding his hand, sobbed, “She was getting so much better, and suddenly, in the night …”
“We brought a bit of laudanum, perhaps it will help.”
They went towards the house. Sleep kept pulling his head over, even as he walked, and he
did not know what happened after they got to the house.
In the late morning when he awoke and came downstairs, his mother told him Helen was dead.
The house did not smell right, and everyone seemed as if struck dumb, and cried unexpectedly. He could not find Dan anywhere. He did not want to go into the living room, and he could not think of anyone as dead. “Mom,” he said, “I want to go to school.”
His mother made no answer, did not seem to hear him in fact. After she had told him she turned away and was washing dishes, unhearing and wrapped in her grief for the girl she had nursed for months.
He went out, and the early spring sunshine was fresh and good. No one noticed him as he sneaked into the barn, bridled Prince, and rode off.
Yet, somehow, school was not right either. When he got there he did not want to tell about his ride, or even why he arrived during recess. He sat in his little desk in the one-room school and the teacher said, “Take out your Healthy Foods scrap books.”
He opened his desk and there it lay, the book he and Helen had made for Health in school. Actually Helen had done all the work: he had
just watched. That was why his book had been first in class. There on the cover was the round red tomato she had cut from one of her tomato juice labels, and there was the kink she had made when he bumped her because he was leaning so close as she sat in bed cutting it out. Then he said, half aloud, “She’s dead.” And he knew that “dead” was like the sticks of rabbits he found in his snares.
And suddenly he began to cry. Everyone stared, but he could not stop.