Of This Earth (12 page)

Why do we say the sun rises in the morning? (No one dared say anything, and when we were outside later Katie said that was a stupid question because
you could see it happen every day but of course Mr. Bush had never in his life been awake that early.)

The floor between the outside door, the table and the stove was bright linoleum, very clean because we left our worn footwear on the step outside, with lots of space for all our feet and derrieres. But one of us always lounged against the table under the window; we took turns because on the table stood a row of yellow cans of MacDonald’s Fine Cut Tobacco with the oval picture of a young woman wearing, as Mr. Bush explained once or twice a week, a sash of MacDonald tartan, the greatest of the Scottish clans. A Miss Harriet MacDonald, he elaborated at length, had taught at Speedwell School in 1938–1939, the year after Mr. Edward Lachner Diefenbaker whose nephew was Mr. John Diefenbaker, a brilliant lawyer in the city of Prince Albert on the North Saskatchewan River but, Mr. Bush continued, he thought Edward Diefenbaker too elderly and sophisticated for Speedwell. On the other hand, Mrs. Bush was very experienced with farm kids, as any trustee could see instantly and we all knew perfectly well, the very best teacher any one-room Saskatchewan school district could possibly find. And of course we seven agreed.

We took turns standing against the table because on top of the tobacco tins perched balls of chewed
gum, sometimes two or even three shining pink in the sunlight on a single lid. Jackie Trapp insisted every ball we borrowed one day and returned the next had lots of flavour left, Mr. Bush—or perhaps Mrs. Bush whenever she wasn’t teaching—liked mostly Dentyne but sometimes we suspected it was Wrigley’s Spearmint, and Elsie Koehn even recognized Doublemint because, she said, once Mr. Schroeder had given her half a stick at the store, for sure that was Doublemint! But the flavours were too faint for me; I chewed, but I remember better the touch and smell of the closed cedar door, the bedroom behind it must have been so small and Mrs. and Mr. Bush seemed so large to us, how could there be a bed inside big enough for both? Katie laughed, she said they had a room smaller than that where all their five boys slept. Jackie Trapp did not laugh, but smiled so hard his forehead wrinkled and his pale hair lifted, smiled as if he could tell us a few things about his house as well, but he never said a word about that. He was the oldest in his family, I the youngest, but oddly we were the same age; perhaps, I thought then, that’s because his parents are Roman Catholic—whatever that was.
Speedwell School existed because Trajchtmoaka Aaron Heinrichs, who now “rested” in the Speedwell Cemetery, in early 1930 had applied for a school building grant to the Saskatchewan Department of Education. He filled out the application map of the school district he called Pearl Lake after the small lake less than a mile east of the “Proposed School Site,” and by writing the “Name of each Resident Ratepayer” across every quarter section in a nine-square-mile block of land. Then under every name he added the “Number of Children of School Age residing on each Quarter Section.” He named twenty-four landowners on his 1930 map, including two Metis Briere families and grizzled bachelor George Stewart half a mile west of the proposed school; all the rest were Mennonite Brethren Church families who had thirty-five children aged seven to fifteen between them. The August Fiedlers and the George Lemkeys each had six children waiting for school; Aaron and Anna Heinrichs had five.

There was no more time to lose. The earliest settlers had filed on Township 53 homesteads in 1925/26 and, with Jack Pine School in Township 52 four to six miles away, five school-less years was more than enough. By the summer of 1930, apparently before they even got the usual $500 provincial
grant to start, the Township 53 homesteaders had already dug a full basement, ordered desks and decided they would build with local logs to save money. The regional inspector of schools from Mervin, D. L. Hicks, wrote a peeved letter to Regina concerning what he now called “Speedwell School District No. 4860”—where did that peculiar name come from? Plant books report that small blue flowers called marsh speedwells grow throughout the western boreal forests, but no one ever identified such a plant for us in our district. Mr. Hicks complained:

The chief inspector of schools in Regina received this cover-your-ass report on January 3, 1931. But by September of that year Annie Born, a Mennonite young woman from Hepburn, Saskatchewan, had come north to teach thirty-five children in eight grades in the completed log schoolhouse. Trajchtmoaka Heinrichs and his renamed community had, by hard work in the best co-operative pioneer (and Mennonite) tradition, solved the building problem.

“Annie taught in Speedwell one year,” Gust tells me in 1995. “And then she married my cousin Albert Lobe, but she had to keep teaching another year till they could find a new one, that was really hard in those days, the Depression.”

“Do you remember them building the school?”

“I ripped the logs for it, flat inside and out! I had my steam engineer papers and we ran them through our sawmill, big jack pine, we had them there, forty-foot jack pine.”

Magnificent pine trees grew on that glacier-scoured land inhabited until then by sparse generations of hunters; utterly unlike the antediluvian boneyard of warring Europe where, as George Orwell writes, every granule of earth has been soaked with human blood several times. And though today the Speedwell land has for decades been bulldozed bare for cattle pasture, nevertheless those particular sawn and stacked trees remain. The teacherage and the toilets, the school roof, its ceiling, floor, windows, doors, its tall brick chimney are gone, the mud plaster long held in place by buried shingle nails has finally been broken by snow and washed away in rain, but the weathered rectangle of grey jack pine within which I learned to read English remains piled log by log upon the cracked concrete basement, corners beautifully dovetailed, immovable
as rock. And every May the leaves of aspen now sprouting close around it gradually dapple the walls into flickering green. Almost as if this man-made extrusion on the long landscape were alive and, like a rabbit or ptarmigan, was once again shifting to summer colours in the spring light.

The board table marked by pencils, crayons, knives and razor blades; Mrs. and Mr. Bush; pink balls of tasteless, re-and-rechewed gum; sheets of paper; a short alphabet that could be arranged into
“rudy wiebe” or “jack trapp” with only one r repetition: that was two and a half months of kindergarten at Speedwell School. If red wrath grew on the road stones leading towards school, I do not remember it; I did not need the threat of God to see, to feel the gathering power of words.

Two months of kindergarten remain vivid, yet I remember nothing of an entire year of grade one. The 1941–42 records show our teacher was Mr. Isaac Braun, and that the following year he moved four miles south to teach at Jack Pine School, so he did not leave our area; indeed, he married Doris Heinrichs, Aaron’s daughter, in our church where Doris was my Sunday school teacher. I surmise Isaac Braun was so good a teacher that his year at Speedwell simply disappeared into learning everything I loved and wanted; as if I had fallen into enormous Turtle Lake where we drove our horses and wagon once or sometimes twice a summer, seven miles west by bush trail, to play, fish and picnic under the trees above the rocks and hot banks of white, dazzling sand. That year of begun language, reading, writing, numbers, reading, companions, spelling, traumas, anger, impatience, reading farther and farther ahead is an immense void
bottomlessly gone. But the residue of first reading remains a lifetime, like breathing.

Words that splashed in my mouth walking home the daily miles from Speedwell School with the crescent moon in the sky opposite the westerly sun, waves of words singing in my head, knowing them by heart:

And I remember the aspen poplar forest, exactly. A mile and a half to school from our house: the trail began behind the snow-covered barn, the east end where in fall Dad and Dan had built a log addition to protect the younger cattle in winter and kept heaping manure higher against the walls to keep in their warmth. It began where that morning’s fresh manure steamed off the logs in the dizzying cold, led narrow and deep along the cattle tracks through trees, past the seepage well and pulley and cattle trough hung with ice at the edge of our slough that extended north into Pearl Lake, an oval opening of sky against the winter horizon; the hard, grey world changed into soft, blazing cold. And the school path led west, narrow as our footprints between the trees, gradually bending north.

I’m seven, I’m big, I carry my Rogers syrup pail (five-pound size) of lunch—two slices of Bultje, white bread, spread with jam or syrup if I’m lucky, salty Jreewe’schmolt, crackling lard, if I’m not—and turn off the track Helen and Liz are breaking one behind the other. I thump my own trail between trees alongside a rabbit path run shallow on the snow, tracks spraying everywhere, ending and beginning again in hollows hidden by deadfall down to the dried leaves where the rabbits had perhaps rested or slept, huddled in fear of coyotes, here and there a heap of tiny turds piled so prettily you might pick them up to chew if you didn’t know what they were. Rabbits were beautifully neat, not like ugly porcupines plowing through snow and seeding the V of their trail with jelly beans of shit. One rabbit trail ran tight between young poplars, a perfect place for a snare. The Martens twins had told me there were so many rabbits this year they had caught hundreds and even at eight cents a skin that added up, but squirrels were better, fifteen cents to eighteen, and weasels, wow! a weasel could be thirty-seven or even forty-five cents if you skinned and dried a real good one right, that was just about a day’s wages for a man before the war. For rabbits all you need is wire, you make a sliding loop like this and they run right into it, see? You just remember how many snares you make and the bush where you set them.

I made and set snares, and when I went back the caught rabbits had thudded down a great circle of snow to the length of the wire. Their white fur riffled softly dark at its roots, their strained bodies were frozen hard and flat as sticks, I could have broken any leg off. The wire was cut too deeply into their necks to undo frozen, you could only untwist it from the two trees. The four-footed track in the snow of a running rabbit was easier to read than a word in a book because it was always the same and told you one thing, or perhaps two, but words … words … the four shelves of our school library were stacked tight with words, in school our eyes and ears are filled with words and even here under the trees someone a hundred years ago or a thousand could have shouted, a bear stood up and roared and you would be able to feel the air frozen hard with that sound if you had the right fingers—the forest was snow and trees, silence. Only the faintest creak, barely audible, like the memory of a groan heard once, long ago. The great poplar trunks stood everywhere around you, one by one by one and gradually, finally, they became grey poplar and air as far as you could see in every direction; this earth is a ball, wherever you look you are enclosed in a globe.