Of This Earth (6 page)

I hear this story inside our summer Waunztje tent behind the CPR house on the knoll. We lived there only four years; we had not yet cleared thirty acres of cropland—all the men had to work for pay whenever they could to support the family, and there was no time to clear bush; perhaps we had not even paid the CPR any more than the down payment—and though it seems our mother did not want to
leave, in 1938 Pah insisted we move. John Franka had proved up on a quarter near Speedwell School, but he was moving away: that was better, more cleared land, and we should go there.

This happened before I turned four, and I remember nothing about chickens roosting and laying eggs in the log shack in which the local midwife Mary (Mrs. Gottlieb) Biech once assisted my mother to give birth to me. I do not retain the faintest image of a room inside that good CPR house, not a curtain or a windowsill, nor can I recall whether the interior walls were nailed over diagonally with slim willows and smeared smooth with plaster for whitewash. Nevertheless, this detailed story is as sharp a memory as I have of our first homestead: ducklings, a fox, the tent in the hollow under poplars, our house sealed thick with poison gas, the bush vermin my mother detested: Waunztje.

The story is like a folktale Mam might have known from her High German Mennonite school in Russia, but the only stories she told were either about her life in Russia or from the Bible, and there are no talking ducks in the Bible, leave alone in a Mennonite village. It seems only Helen could have
told the duckling story; she must have found it in a Jack Pine School book. Did I know that much English before I was four?

Nonetheless, the story continues:

Mother Duck returns to the horror of her door hanging open, her house empty and furniture thrown around like feathers, oh-oh-oh, she is crying her worst fears for her children, lost forever because of horrible Red Fox—but the sixth duckling bumbles against the curtain, drops to the floor with stubby wings beating, Oh smart little Sixth! He’ll tell Mother everything, together they follow the tired tracks to the bank of the river where Red Fox lies snoring. With his belly bulging … and they see it ripple, yes, it is stirring a little.

Mother Duck does what a mother has to do: she takes from her apron pocket her scissors, her needle and thread. Swiftly she begins to snip Red Fox’s belly open, the first duckling already has its head out and, as she snips more, all five hop out one by one. Then Mother sends them down to the river for stones.

This first story I remember being told is a story completed by stones. My father groaned there were
stones like lice on that CPR land, and even as a toddler I knew that when he and my brothers had finally cleared the first ten acres, chopping trees and brush and digging at roots and leaving tall stumps to give leverage for tearing them out with chains and straining horses, even after John Lobe’s steam tractor with steam-lug wheels as wide as I was long had blasted itself over the land and its giant breaking-shares had ripped the sod over into stripes glistening with more peeled roots and clay, I knew that when Pah worked the breaking down with our smaller plows and disks, more and more stones would emerge. We heard the crack! of steel on stone all day long.

Thirty acres was too much everlasting labour, how could you ever grow a saleable crop? My sister Mary remembered that land angrily all her life, uggh, good for nothing but mosquitoes and stone soup!

“I think,” John Lobe told Pah sadly beside his panting steamer, “you found one of these real good stone quarters, like me. Nine years we’ve plowed, and every year there’s a new crop of stones to pick. They grow even better than the weeds.”

Sixty years later I again find the cellar hole of the house on the knoll. Every farm building long vanished: the aboriginal bush is grown back as tangled and tall as aspen will grow. What was once yard, hay corral, fields, is now so thick with trees I can sometimes only wedge myself through sideways. My son Chris discovers a crushed, rusted Stelco waterpail where the willow fence once marked our quarter boundary, and also the edge of the field my father and brothers cleared south of the farmyard: a wide, pyramidal ridge of gathered stones with poplars sprouting through it, a ridge winding out of sight into seemingly untouched boreal forest like the relentless esker of a human glaciation momentarily passing.

The ducklings, little Sixth too, each bring a stone as big as they can carry up from the river. They lay them neatly inside the opened belly and Mother sews it shut so lightly Red Fox will never dream he has so much as a scar. And then they’re off, up the hill, inside the house, lock the door and talk, oh! all at once:

“I got stuck half-way down …” “He’s so greedy, he just gulped …” “I was really cozy between …” “The gurgling, ugggh! his stomach …” “I felt sour all over!” and beside the river Red Fox wakes up. He has a dreadful thirst and, strangely, his stomach feels so heavy, so hard. He staggers to the river and bends down and opens his long mouth to drink; the heavy stones slide forward, he tips over headfirst, he falls, he drowns.

On our homestead we had many chickens but never ducks or geese like the Russian villagers always had, Mam said. Nor were there any foxes in our area. However, we and all our neighbours scattered throughout the bush had farm dogs: never as pets in the house, but working dogs who remained outside or in the barn like every other farm animal. Sometimes towards evening our black dog Carlo—or

Louis Ulmer’s or David Loewen’s dogs in their yards far beyond the darkening trees—would answer the howls of the coyotes hunting in the free range west of us, in the tangled deadfall and hills and muskegs that stretched for miles, it was said, until they disappeared into the white sand beaches of enormous Turtle Lake. At four I had not yet seen Turtle Lake often enough to remember it, but I recognized the high laughter of coyotes easily, in the same way that I heard and recognized our several cowbells far away in summer on the free range. I knew what our cowbells meant, and our calves and cows bawling: they were hungry, they were thirsty, they wanted each other. But what did coyotes cry in their strange, yip-ping language, and what did Carlo answer?

Their wild ululations rise like mist where the last twilight fades against the western clouds; I go into the house and pull the door shut. And perhaps it is because Mary has read aloud from her blue
Highroads to Reading
, Book Four that I lean my ear against the inside of the slab door:

Some one came knocking At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I’m sure—sure—sure;

I listened, I opened,

I looked to left and right,

But nought there was a-stirring

In the still dark night…

I do not lift the latch to open the door, nor do I look to left or right. I am listening for a knock: our farmyard is so completely alone at the end of a winding trail that no one ever is just “passing by,” no one ever visits us except on Sundays; and I know if I open the door the summer night will not be still. Outside there is breathing high among the aspen leaves; small creatures scurry past your feet; somewhere in the darkness robins scold an owl fiercely and then, before you can sense it coming, the owl has passed with the
swish!
of its feathered body tilting huge and gone between branches. You trust the dark around the house, it always remains in the same place, the same shape, your bare feet feel the hollow path you need to walk along shifting pale or greyer, and certainly ahead is the black Betjhüs, literally “house for bending,” with its two high ovals in the seat for big people and a little bench beside it with an opening rounded perfectly for my small buttocks.

Often I don’t need to go as far as the toilet, I’m a boy, just around the corner of the house is enough to swing my Stengelji, my Zoagel, my little Schwenjeltje, my little stem … tail … handle/clapper, Low German
has all kinds of sounds for it, every one a giggle when a sibling says it out loud, probably so many because sometimes it changes in your hands, funny how it will feel different though you are always doing one thing, standing there, pushing, letting it pour. You’re a boy, when you feel full you don’t need to find a bush to crouch behind like your sisters, day or night you just turn your back and point, wave, shoot, spray anywhere among the weeds and low brush and go in to sleep feeling just fine, you’ve acted as direct and manly as any big brother.

Like Mam says, smiling a little, “Doa räagent daut aus haulf maun-huach.” It’s raining there half-a-man high.

The fox and ducks story comes of course from
Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm
—
The Grimm Brothers’ Folk Tales
. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered two hundred of them, and published them in 1812. “Diese unschuldige Hausmärchen …” these innocent little house stories, through which flows “… jene Reinheit um derentwillen uns Kinder so wunderbar and selig erschienen,” innocent stories … through which flows that purity that makes children appear so marvellous and blessed to us.

I read these editorial comments now in a collection of the tales I bought in 1958 while I was a student at the University of Tübingen, West Germany. And even as my memory insists on three children snug in blankets around a lantern in a tent hidden in the Canadian boreal forest, I try to disassemble what I cannot forget: the Grimms’ story number four is “Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen,” “The Tale of One Who Went Out to Learn How to Be Afraid,” and number five is our tent story, but different: “Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geisslein.”

There are neither fox nor ducklings in it, rather a wolf and seven young goats, kids. The wolf gets into the house not only by threatening the grocer for chalk to soften his dreadful voice, but by frightening the village miller into giving him flour to whiten his black paws; the smallest, seventh, kid escapes the wolf by hiding, not behind window curtains, but high in the clock hanging on the wall. When the wolf awakens with his belly sewn shut, he staggers to a well (not a river) to drink, and as he walks the stones inside him clatter together. And then that Bösewicht, that devil of a wolf, bursts inexplicably into song:

Was rumpelt und pumpelt In meinem Bauch herum?

Ich meinte, es wären sechs Geisslein, So sind’s lauter Wackerstein.

What rumbles and pumbles Around in my gut?

I thought it was six little goats’ bones, But actually it’s stony stones.

Amazing. At the moment of his death, the villain is granted an epiphany; before he drowns, the murderous wolf sings a song of profound self-recognition. I don’t think gentle Helen sang the wolf’s rumble song. But the mirrored, multiplied differences between my memory and the text echo perfectly our pioneer community of three hundred people isolated by landscape, language, belief and custom. There every child knew by instinct that, whatever had literally happened, the story of that happening, if you wanted to listen, would be told by any mouth into any ear in any of three different languages: an endlessly circulating stew of gossip and humour and “Shush!” and implication and malicious or jealous or hilarious laughter cavorting through an immensity of detail only a literal contortionist could attempt to reorder. Stories were facts for retelling.

The light and dark I lived in as a boy were the day and night of the sun; it was changed very little by barn lanterns or the solitary kerosene lamp with its elegant glass chimney on our kitchen table. But wherever I was, I was inside family and the kitchen, lit or unlit, shifted its shadows however I moved, behind the stove or the wood piled there, in the corners by the curtained cupboards and under the benches and table or beside the waterpail and wash-stand by the door: the light and the dark of the house, inside or out, held no fear. Not even the startling
crack!
of a wall log splitting as it dried in the winter cold. Wherever I walked or sat, whatever happened I had already seen or heard it before, smelled, or at the very least touched.

But every child, no matter how beloved, discovers some unknown to fear, and the earliest I remember was not the dark, or the wild weather of thunderstorms or blizzards, and certainly not the rustling boreal forest; it was fear of the bull. On a thirties homestead where no electricity or engines existed, the work and food animals can be as much fun and chaseable as a dog or squawky, scolding chickens, as frisky as calves sucking your fingers for milk or a mousing cat curled around your leg, but
some farm animals are squat, thick, immovable as pigs, or enormous like cows and horses. One slight movement of their huge legs or heads, to say nothing of their gigantic bodies, can be unexpected and disastrous for a child. The horses I first became aware of were usually harnessed, attached to a wagon or farming machine, always haltered and bridled for control and you learned before you knew it from the very movements of adults, from the way father or brother handled them, your mother and sisters walked wide to climb into the wagon far from the huge heads tossing themselves against flies and mosquitoes and bulldogs (as we called biting horseflies), stomping hooves and the endless slash of tails, you understood these bodies had such immense, startling power that you would never climb through the barbed-wire fence into a pasture where they were grazing loose. Even at three you were not that stupid. Nevertheless, farm animals were not necessarily easy to control. We lived on the outermost edge of the community and in summer anyone could herd their cattle on the unsettled free range west of us, wherever they found a hay slough or open clearing. Some even let their animals graze unattended for days because there were sloughs for watering everywhere, no large wild animals to fear and no possible thieves. So we’re CPR lucky again, Pah said, forever
optimistic, a quarter right beside empty land, no need to chase our cattle for miles, all the free range we want right beside us. Nah yoh, well yes, our Mam was inclined by nature and grim experience to anticipate the worst, and so we also have the endless trample of neighbours’ cattle across our land to and from the free range. And they were both right.