Peace Shall Destroy Many (30 page)

Jarred from his thoughts, Thom slowly peeled out the hot centre of another bun. “I tried, Mom.”

“Would he listen?”

“At first,” recalling the light that he had seen, the door he had rapped. “I stopped by that night last week when I got my correspondence explained. He seemed friendly enough for once, but when I mentioned about coming from the school he changed just like that.” Thom flicked his hand. “Wouldn’t hear a word I said—just called me two-faced and swore at me to get out. I don’t know what it was I said—he even asked me in at first. Mom, he lives in filth—unbelievable.”

“Poor Herb—his poor mother.”

Thom recalled Block’s words about the Ung
er family two days before; he voiced his disagreement now. “Ah Mom, I sometimes wonder if Mrs. Unger cares much about Herb,
one way or another. Hank’s the precious boy.”

“Thom, she’s deeply grieved her son has gone that way in the Air Force. She—”

“Her words say she’s sorry, but not the look on her face when she makes sure everyone knows how many Germans her ‘lost sheep’ has shot down. If she’d do a bit more for the son she has here—”

“Thom! We better be concerned about how we act.” After a pause, “It’s good you tried, anyway.”

Thom could return nothing. Again quick to attack, and yet so fatally vulnerable himself. He remembered the quickening stir of his temper as Herb had seized the brown bottle and bellowed, ‘Beat it before you get brained!’ As Annamarie had told him once, glancing at him from under her brown-soft eyebrows, he was still trying suppression.

Times innumerable he had sat in that stove-corner when a child, watching her shape white buns on the table. “Mom,” he said, wistful, “Why does God allow such a thing to sit beside us and bother?”

“What?”

“Like Herb. On the quarter next ours. If he were even half a mile farther away, it would not be so bad. But our nearest neighbour.”

She was silent for a long time, knowing he knew the answer perhaps better than she, her hands flying from pan to floured table, forming the buns, row on row, doubled with a dimple in the top. She said then, as she often had, “To become mature in Him, God requires you to overcome obstacles. You can overcome this, but not while you go to Herb with your mind made up. You ha
ve to love him with all his mistakes in all the power of Christian love that you have. Your love for him should overpower your anger at what he does. If you really loved him, you would have no time to be angry; rather see him as the poor man he is, alone, miserable in his dirt.”

Thom crumpled the shell of the bun in his fingers, staring at the worn orange floor. The question pushed from him, “How can one person love another?”

There was only the crackling of wood in the stove.

“And why must we in Wapiti love only Mennonites?”

His mother looked up then, “Don’t always be on the
attack, Thom. No one has said that. The reason our men aren’t in the Army—”

“But Mom, what about those people north of the school? Shouldn’t our love for them as lost human beings overpower our revulsion at their squalor—rather help us to teach them something better?”

She said simply, “You know neither your father nor myself objected for a moment to your teaching those children.” She worked silently, then continued, “You don’t fit so well any more with the other young men, do you? I’ve seen you, after church, standing in their circle, without talking, where you used to lead the laughter. And then they go off to visit and you come home and eat without saying anything and take your books and drive alone to Wapiti School.”

Thom said, knowing her prayers for him, “The quartet did come last Sunday.” After a moment, reaching for another bun, “But it’s all over.”

“Why?” unsurprised, head bent.

“Mr. Block has bought Moosomins out. And he will the others too, before spring.”

She asked, on the superficial level both of them knew held no meaning, “What does he, with one son, want with all that bush? There’s no decent acre of breaking in the lot.”

“Just to get rid of them! He told me as much on Thursday when I talked with him in the hay-meadow. Louis’s being in jail just proves his point that nothing can be done with them. They’ll just—somehow—infect us with their sin. He didn’t outrightly mention Herman, but there’s obviously the beginning. And my teaching those—” Thom stopped.

“What did he say to you?”

Thom hesitated, fearful for her as he had been, and was, for himself. But there was no avoiding it. He said, baldly, “Could we have half-breeds joining our church?”

She said nothing. Thom, drawing his finger through a bump of flour on the oil-cloth, pushed on, “What have I been doing? Trying to salve my conscience for a half a year with a salve that doesn’t exist?”

She spoke then, quietly, considering only his first question. “I cannot see how it would work, either. Perhaps we would—somehow—be fit to cross that bridge
once it had faced us for a time.”

“But Mom, can you see Old Rempel—or Unger—Block—”

She interrupted his groping. “No. Look at yourself—or me—” She shook her head, almost shuddering. “Too many things would have to break. It would be fearful.”

Eyes unseeing on her work, she murmured, “And Christ left us no easy way out. Only love. Hard. Probably impossible. After having seen as good an example of impossible love as ever there was in the world. Elizabeth. For all the unhappiness that came to her; all that one may think her father did wrong towards her, she loved him to the end. Her whisper as she lay dying.”

“Mom!” The question leaped up in Thom, “What really happened to her?”

He saw his mother start, as if his presence, forgotten, had betrayed her. She did not look up at him, han
ds forming buns for which there was no room on the pans. “Was I speaking aloud? What do you mean—what happened?”

“What did Elizabeth die of so suddenly?”

“You said the doctor had told you, not?” she wearily evaded.

“He said ‘of an internal disorder that got out of hand’—which could mean anything except that she was knocked down by a falling tree.” As he stared at his mother’s mute figure, he suddenly comprehended that somehow Elizabeth was vital for unsnarling his confusion. Intensely, “Mother, I don’t want to know because I’m curious or because I want to blame anyone. I
have
to know for myself.”

She silently opened the oven door to her baking. He could not know that she saw nothing there as she bent to look. His eyes followed her into the tiny pantry and out, while she placed another pan on the table. She stooped to her work, wordless.

“Mother,” in his need he used the strange word a second time, speaking in heat no longer, “I talked to her—that day. I had to eat dinner late, and so did she. When she came with the lunch and coffee later, I was all alone with her at the box and she said, ‘Thom, get out of Wapiti!’ And I had never once talked to her alone before that day! I can’t comprehend why she said it; she just told me that I would be buried by rules if I stayed and I could only stare at her worn face. Then she burst out; Mother, it was like her death-cry, ‘God in Heaven, can’t you see what’s happened to me?’ I still hear it sometimes, at night, even though I helped bury her. What did happen to her?”

“Thom, my son—”

“I have to
know!”
He was standing now at the refusal in her tone, like a giant above her, hands clenching massively on the table, crumbs dribbling. “On Thursday—I was angry—I told Mr. Block to take care of his own children instead of bothering about other people’s, and he turned white to fainting.” The black hair seemed to bristle on his fists. “You have
no right not to tell me. How can you keep me ignorant when everything is falling in ruins? There is something wrong and I must know!”

She stared mutely at his face above her, and she was the child before his tyrannically grasping maturity. She did not cry easily, but now her sobbing fell uncontrolled in the hot kitchen as she stood before him, tears pushing down her cheeks. Dumbfounded, he took her stooped shoulders in his hands and pulled her tight to him. “Mom.” The top of her head reached the middle of his chest. “Mom, why do you cry so much?”

She pushed away, not using her hands for they were white with flour, and returned blindly to her work. “Thom, I promised never to tell. But for you I must say: what happened to Elizabeth was brought on her by her father’s strictness as well as her own failing. It cannot matter to you what it was. They were both partly to blame.”

“Okay. They were both partly to blame. But no one in Wapiti has heard Mr. Block say that he had a large share in bringing his daughter to her grave. He is still the great man, getting rid of undesirables, running church, store, school, all our business with the government: he is Deacon; everyone’s quiet and peaceful when he speaks. He—”

“Thom. I did not say that for you to get angry. He did get us a farm here, all of us, when we came from Russia with not a cent but only debts to our name. And he has been right—”

“So he helped us! We would have survived somehow in this land without him. Others did. Even if he is a great business man and can run this district like no one else, does that mean that on every subject he must place the only word in every man’s mouth and they go home and re-chew it for their family? What has he done to own us? He tells us what is good and
what isn’t good for us. He keeps us behind this bush away from all the world as if he were one of those mind-scientists who takes rats and puts them in cages and sees how they jump when he sticks them with pins. Behind all this bush, do we have to be the rats of Block and our forefathers? Whenever they jab us, we know what to believe? We don’t owe them our souls!”

“Thom—it’s because he shows us how to live the Bible—”

“Everyone keeps saying that! But where does the Bible say you must torture your daughter to death if she wants to mix her sacred Mennonite blood with—”

“Thom!” his mother cried, distraught in the face of his raging, “It was because she did just that that she—” she gagged at the dawning comprehension on his features.

“Oh.” What he experienced at that moment drove too deeply for anger. He said, slowly, “And who else but Louis could it have been? Right on their farm. Elizabeth, bound by her father’s will—”

In the dreadful silence of their thoughts, they heard the ring of the harness outside.

Mrs. Wiens no longer wept. Her eyes followed her son as he strode to the living room, ashen-faced. She said, “Yet she loved him. Thom, she said that as she lay dying. If she could forgive, surely you can.”

The drapes twitched.

The outside door was jerked open and a small body bumped against the inner. Hal crashed in, tugging a huge drab-covered parcel with a familiar red-and-white sticker in one corner. Margret’s laughter spilled into the room after him. She was trying to hold the other end of the parcel while gripping a huge box under her arm as Carlo leaped against her on the porch. All was laughter and cold air and shouts and barks.

Hal’s voice flew above Margret’s joy, “We got the Parcel! Look—bi-i-i-g! An’ Hank Unger’s comin’ home for Christmas—Danny Unger told me at the store. Maybe he’
ll bring his big plane along for us to see—come on Margret! Let’s get the string off!”

The flurry and shouts drowned all else, for Wiens was pushing in behind them with another armload of boxes and Margret was gasping, “Oh, what a crowd of people at the store!” Thom sat in the rocker beyond the drapes, dazed, his nursed suspicions never having hinted such horror.

His reason told him this should not affect him so, but as remembered details fitted into the design only too smoothly, he could not deny that something had crashed within him. In the past six months he had questioned almost the man’s every act: surely his own Christian faith should not now be affected. But the one log that held the jam had been jarred and he could sense within him only the numb void that remained after the rush had vanished. Distantly he heard Margret’s clear voice, “Yes, Mom, Hank Unger is coming for Christmas on leave,” and he thought vaguely, Well, the War is finally coming home to Wapiti. Good. We’ll find out what it’s like—not just imagine things.

He could not bear his emptiness. He twisted the dial of the radio and it slid in immediately with a smooth voice:

“We have a news bulletin just handed to us. Reports from the Allied Front in France would indicate that a German counter-offensive has begun. Reports are still vague and unconfirmed, but it is clear that in the Ardennes area of the Western Front massive offensives are now taking place. American troops in the area have been caught off-balance and the Germans, moving in massive armoured thrusts, could
possibly break through back into Belgium. The stalemate of the war would appear to b
e over, one ranking military observer commented upon hearing the reports. He added that a major break-through to the Allied supply depots in Belgium and western France might well prolong the war another year. Our eventual victory however, he concluded, is certain. This is the German last gasp. We shall have peace within the year.

“Stay tuned to this station; we will keep you informed as reports come in.

“To return to the regular news. The dreaded V-2 buzz-bomb attacks against London are becoming steadily worse. Loss of life and property are now reaching greater proportions than during the height of V-l blitz last August…”

Thom did not listen. He was thinking of the new German offensives, the first in many months, and a pattern shaped in his mind. They announced full overseas conscription in Ottawa at the end of November. They need another sixty thousand men to send over to get shot; my number is coming now. Probably next Friday—three days before Christmas. What a present! Three months to train, and then just in time to get into the thick before it’s over. To move at last in harmony with all the world. After the summer of futile and, in the light of what he now knew, evasive thought and action, the answer in his blackened mind seemed reasonable, finally.

Hal’s voice quavered from the kitchen: “Ain’t there anythin’ in here for me—at all?”

I
N THE FROZEN AIR
around the Wiens family bundled in the rocking cutter the harness-bells rang. His f
ace livid from the cold, Thom stood to gui
de Star and Duster in their steady trot, their breath like clouds erupting from their nostrils. As they crested the hill, the far lights of the school, sharp in snow-dazzled moonlight, winked in the valley. The winter sun was long gone; in the north-west the Northern Lights glimmered faintly; the trees on the roadside slid by in the silver-black world, weighted, cracking in the iron frost. Cold burning in their noses, the family was caught up in the old tradition of a frigid drive to the Christmas concert. The world was white, purified by snow: a world into which it could be believed the warmth of Heaven had once come at Bethlehem. Thom almost forgot his dull resignation.