Of This Earth (28 page)

The first picture taken inside our house shows what we did together: Gilda and Mary could not sit motionless quite long enough not to blur, but Dan and Tina, especially Tina, mother of five, are as focused as Abe reading from his preacher’s leather Bible. Above Abe’s head on the organ tilts a mail order dress box full of the family photos they have been telling each other stories about, and on the left hangs the small oval picture of a high tropical waterfall which I remember contemplating often. be of good courage it stated with biblical conviction—but why, I wondered, would you need courage when facing such beauty?

At some point I returned to school, where Nettie Enns had carried on perfectly well alone in grade five. The annual school picture had been taken without me, but I did receive a copy of it. The tiny snapshot—twenty-seven kids whose every name I still know clustered together against the grey bush, the boys in overalls and the girls in skirts and blouses—is autographed on the back in wide, black pen

Liz played with Gracie and Tina and Mary’s new babies Rosie and Gerald; Anne and Carol and I chased the spring calves around the hay corral; Tina and Mam planted the garden; we took pictures of each other, either in the yard or under the spruce across the road, of us and our friends and our family in variable combinations. One shows our mother seated in our rocking chair in front of the house with her grandchildren Gerald and Rosie wrapped in blankets in her arms; she is smiling, but sadly. Behind her tiny Grace hugs a blanket to her face while I’m on the porch beside the house door, chewing my fingernails as usual.

From Eaton’s catalogue we ordered a white marker for Helen, the first gravestone rather than the usual wooden grave fences in the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church cemetery. Sixty years later it is there still in the clearing of thirty graves hemmed in closely by brush and deadfall, small and weathered but indelible, with a tiny angel face surrounded by wings worn into the centre top, and below that

Also, plans were made. That fall, after the district threshing was over between squalls of snow and all the vegetables had been stored and canned and
shelved in the cellar below the kitchen, after two months with a new teacher at Speedwell School—Liz was in grade eight and I in grade six—we were back in North Battleford again. We drove past the hospital, laughed at Dan’s fire escape story and continued down the long hill to the sprawling station of the Canadian National Railroad that overlooks the panoramic North Saskatchewan and Battle River valley. There Mam, Pah, Liz and I would board the daily passenger train west for Vancouver, the enormous city across the Rocky Mountains on the Pacific Ocean where Tony lived and where, he wrote me, winter never came.

Hey, I told Mam, I won’t even need a jacket there! But she laughed and bought me one anyway in North Battleford: full zipper, black sleeves and a kind of shifting blue body; very nice.

Except for two weeks in Notre Dame Hospital, I had never slept anywhere but in a log house in the boreal forest where the single bit of modern technology was a battery radio. Despite all my reading, I did not yet imagine that I would live my entire adult life in cities.

T
o ride a train was beyond anything I had experienced. Forget about horses and wagons on dirt roads, or a slow car or jerky bus grinding over gravel, lurching around holes and mud; this amazement of leaning back in a cushioned seat beside an immense window while the world whirled past without so much as a bump or twitch, you could choose it coming at you or going away, fast as lightning, always the shoulder of the railroad embankment at the lip of the window and the hard clickity-click of steel coming faster and then, suddenly! you flew off a cliff, there was no earth under you, the train ran
out on air—the North Saskatchewan, that must be it!—far below the thick and braided river, wide water, and in a flash poplars there bristling like weeds and wuhh! cliffs leaped up into solid earth under you again and the steel sound ran deeper, carrying you faster—all this just leaving the river hills and bush of North Battleford. Vancouver beyond mountains by the ocean would be—your eyes were too full to imagine. Just look.

Day into night, coppice and parkland and rolling hills, farmyards and long fields, towns, grain elevators barely glimpsed and gone, sometimes five or six of them shuddering past, the sprawl of Edmonton lights slower and slower until you stopped completely, the twisted milky rivers sometimes boiling as it seemed under the wheels and sometimes far, far below, moonlight and hours of trees, swamp, muskeg—snow, there would have been snow, always in my Speedwell years there was massive snow and here through the train window it covered the startling mountains against the night sky. For two days and a night—or was it two nights?—we must have tried to eat and sleep on the day coach seats, but I do not remember that as I do the flying-gable roof of the Jasper CNR station, and from its platform the crested mountains spread out along distance like a knobbly hand, pointing. I realized I had not at all
been able to imagine mountains from pictures in books or calendars, nor even when, with my fingers, I tried to push them together for the dough landscape Nettie Enns and I made in geography.

“There, you can see it,” Mam said. “God’s wonder of creation.”

One morning our long train curved to a stop on the side of a mountain where there was neither station nor siding; all the passengers were allowed to climb down to the gravel shoulders of the narrow grade and stare across the valley. There, shouldering out of range upon crumpled range, stood the unbelievable face of Mount Robson. The highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, they said, and maybe the highest sheer cliff in the world. God had made that in Canada too.

There were no dome cars on passenger trains then, nor could we, with the cheapest tickets, have entered one if there had been. I have only a single memory from inside the train: the big man who came to sit across the aisle from us a day before we reached Vancouver. He had flowing hair that curled at his broad shoulders and a large gold ring hanging from a smaller one stuck through his ear lobe.

Pah said, very quietly in Low German, “If he had that in his nose, he might be tame enough to lead.”

I didn’t dare laugh, but I watched him. The man read, dozed, got up to walk down the aisle and
returned again as if he were normal. God had made him too—but the hair and the ring were his own doing.

Brant Street, Vancouver, British Columbia: Gust had built a small house there covered with tarpaper on a lot at the edge of an old cherry orchard. The original Rice orchard house was still there, tall, two-storeyed with two brick chimneys on busy old Nanaimo Road, but new Brant Street was a dead end, only a block long with barely built houses on either side and a cement sidewalk up the short slope to 27th Avenue. The world that crammed my head was so strange now that I could not look at the blocks of houses spread down the valley to the edges of the mountains: I was outside, alone, and I wanted to play with Tony’s wooden wagon, hold a handle I could feel in my hand. Tony would be home from school soon, just stay off the street, Tina warned me, and I pulled the wagon up the sidewalk looking at the smooth concrete under my feet, pulled it up, rode it down the incline, again and again.

So the first thing Tony did when he appeared at the top corner of the street was laugh at me riding with my legs splayed wide on either side of the wagon. Like a baby he said.

“You kneel on the right leg and push with the left going up, and then you come down the same way—push! really get up speed.”

Okay so I did, and came down twice as fast as before and dumped myself into the street, wheels spinning. The pavement scrape on my knee did not bleed very much, but the hole ground through my pants bought for the trip was worse: a patch to wear the rest of the winter.

As for Tony, even though I was taller and two grades ahead, it was obvious he would always know more than I and be better looking. He had the lean face and sharp nose of a Fiedler, not my mother’s round Knelsen stubbiness.

I began to recognize this strange world. North of 4160 Brant there were no houses: the grass field of the former Rice farm sloped down to the B.C. Electric tracks. Two- or three-car trams climbed up there from downtown on the rising wooden trestle to the Nanaimo Road station, two shelters perched on steps above the street overpass, and from there continued, they said, on to New Westminster or Chilliwack. Beyond the tram line the city sprawled
into the valley to the CNR tracks and Grandview Highway and then up over the next line of long hills: you could see a gleam of ocean inlet and the North Shore Mountains blazing in the low winter light and the air came up from the sea moist, like nothing I had ever breathed, a faint tinge in your nostrils. Salt, said Tony the know-it-all, and rain, Vancouver never had snowdrifts, it just rained, you never needed a parka. A city surrounded by snowy mountains but with no snow on the streets in winter, and really, still part of Canada? You’ll find out, Tony said.

Vancouver was vaster, louder than I could think. Wherever we travelled, by tram or bus, in Gust’s almost-new car, or on trolleys singing from wires, there was forever more of it and more people, how could there be so many people on earth? I could not know that Vancouver was one of the most beautiful cities in the world, its great muddy river branches and long fingers of the sea, delta and hills always green with trees and the perfect cone of Mount Baker south in the United States trailing wisps of smoke from its volcanic crater; what I saw at first was unending houses and cement sidewalks and street lights, and houses, cars and immense fir trees—they’re not spruce, Tony said—and more people and more houses in which even the smallest, while they were being built like Gust and Tina’s, had electricity
and hot water pouring out of a tap. And no Betjhüs to find in the dark somewhere among the gnarled cherry trees.