Of This Earth (9 page)

Abe’s recitation pages have a wreath of apple blossoms glued above his name and dedication. Its title is “Gnade nichts als Gnade,” “Grace Nothing but Grace,” and like Dan’s poem it contains not one actual detail of our parents’ lives, how they met, survived years of separation, world war and civil war, revolution, anarchy, plague, starvation, persecution,
statelessness and flight that forced them halfway around the world. The only memorable image comes in stanza three, where they are told that today their life’s journey together lies before them like a necklace of twenty-five pearls: a rich testimony of God’s grace, nothing but Gottes Gnade.

Knowing my parents’ profound, humble piety—especially my mother’s on memorial occasions—they must have been deeply moved by these verses; and perhaps most by Abe’s because it is possible the poem was written for this occasion by “Dijchta” Friesen, as he was called all his life, “Poet, Composer” Heinrich D. Friesen, who with his wife Katherina and ten children tried to farm for several years in the Speedwell district. Years later when we moved to Coaldale, Alberta, I would know him as a short white-bearded ancient, with a startling, direct gaze from under bushy eyebrows, the classic Russian Mennonite village bard who, on the occasion of a wedding, anniversary, dedication or funeral, would be asked to compose a commemoration, and at the appropriate moment he would step forward and declaim with magnificent intensity, eyes closed and head thrown back, the gathered words that could focus the emotions of the community. It was said that often verses came to Dijchta Friesen in dreams by night, and he would rise to write them on the whitewashed
plaster of his house walls so he would know them exactly when he awoke in the morning.

Heinrich Friesen’s grandson Ed tells me their family left Speedwell in 1937, but my brother’s faded ink is, I believe, a Dijchta Friesen original. Abe could have written him a letter, and no Mennonite bard who (as Friesen narrates in his personal memoir) had felt since childhood that he was called of God to poetry would have refused such a request.

A 1939 box camera could take no pictures inside; our four silver wedding pictures show our family in January snow in the Franka yard. One is a vertical close-up of our parents standing apart, with my father’s body angled towards my mother and his eyes as usual fixed somewhere in the distance, as if he were about to walk away in front of her, over continents and oceans—back to Russia perhaps. But she is unconcerned; she looks directly at the camera. She is forty-three years old, her folded face fixed in resolve.

We nine children, including Gust and grandson Tony but not baby Eldo, huddle together tightly, almost as if we were being threatened by the huge expanse of snow and sky, the spray of poplars and a bristle of spruce along the horizon spread behind us. We are backed against the rail fence; the decrepit
Franka house is to our left and cannot be seen. Over the garden fence behind us hang frozen bedsheets.

Why would bedsheets be hung out to freeze dry on a day of celebration? Was someone in our family a bed wetter? Not likely Liz, almost eight; it could only have been me. Or Helen throwing up sick per haps; a year later she would begin chronicling all our family illnesses in a tiny notebook, beginning with herself in the third person:

That 1940 operation was an appendix removal, but as an infant Helen already carried those lurking “heart troubles” with her during our family’s flight to Canada over Moscow. The “troubles” worsened as she walked to school for miles in every Saskatchewan weather, and they would end only with her death.

But that spring she could still smile out of our living-room window with little Eldo faintly beside her; and the outside world, where she could not walk, reflected in the glass that protected her.

I remember no little-boy bedwetting, nor was I ever teased about it by the family. In winter my parents always had a covered chamber pot under their bed which both they and we smaller children used at night, and before the accidents that would happen to me on the Franka yard, I remember only the church balcony as a place of possible affliction: the murmur of people talking among the benches below after Sunday service and the huge hands of Onkel (“Mister”) Aaron Heinrichs.

I cannot recall his face, though sometimes a drift of it, large and open, seems to shimmer unfocused in my searching memory. His daughter Gilda, Abe’s wife, gave me a grainy photo of their family surrounding him in his half-open coffin, but even that stirs no certainty. He obviously had the long Heinrichs nose, but he was a tall man and the coffin, tilted sideways, hides his folded hands. His Trajchtmoaka hands, “to-make-correct,” healer’s hands, had very short, very broad thumbs, which by
some combination of knowledge, goodness and subliminal intuition, over time and with relentless application, wherever they placed themselves and worked warmth into your body, could soothe and manipulate it out of painful confusion into perfect order. Like the village poet and midwife, the Russian Mennonites had a tradition of Trajchtmoaka that went back through Prussia to medieval Friesland, and in ages when doctors were rare—and even they had little science to make diagnoses—the confident and inexplicable hands of a healer were the mercy of God upon us. Aaron Heinrichs was a Saskatchewan wilderness shaman—though the people of Speedwell, with the possible exception of the Metis Naults and Brieres, would not have called him that. If you broke a bone or developed an unbearable rotten tooth, you drove to his homestead; if your body had some persistent problem you could no longer endure, you finally talked to him after church and then with him you climbed the open stairs behind the men’s pews, up into the privacy of the balcony. Sunday after Sunday.

Apparently I stuttered. I was four and a half when Aaron Heinrichs died, unexpectedly and to everyone’s deep sorrow, in April 1939, but it seems my early speech often sounded, as my siblings have told me, laughing, “like an empty hayrack clattering over Speedwell stones.” And however long it took for
his great thumbs to reorder those stones in my shoulders, the length of my neck, the roots of my skull, I have no memory of stuttering, ever. Perhaps it was the passing affliction of a quick child pouring out words faster than his larynx could shape them, and the cure was already happening when the silver wedding pictures showed me in my first suit and tie—the jacket a bit tight for my shoulders—but I retain no sensation of my body changing, lengthening under hands I know I saw and felt; no shadow of a huge man bending over me. Only the faint apprehension of three-tiered rows of backless benches in a narrow balcony, two windows with trees flickering in light beyond the sloping porch roof, and those hands, already curved by their indelible thumbs, approaching.

When you live by farming, land comes first, house last. The Franka house was no more than three one-room shacks built end to end, logs cobbled together at different times with a closed porch stuck on at the kitchen. The ceilings were so low only three logs lay below and two logs above the single window in each room; from inside, the pole roof rafters were visible outside as level with each window-top. The roof had
a centre peak of barely three feet, and its tarpaper was so tattered, its slabs so curled and rotting, that during the first rain we discovered disaster. The only dry place inside the house was under the oilcloth of the kitchen table. I have a memory of crouching there with Liz while Mam and Mary and Helen run around placing pails, basins, bowls, cups, under the worst of the steady, or pouring, drips. The twisted floorboards with their wide cracks in all three rooms were covered with utensils.