Of This Earth (26 page)

When a written story ends, others are always continuing. What did our neighbours Elizabeth and George Thiessen actually bring, what did they do when they came to our house that harrowing night? What was I doing all of Wednesday, until Helen finally passed beyond her pain at two in the afternoon? Did I ride Prince to school the last morning while she was still alive, humming those Old Dan Tucker words, or did that happen on Thursday, or several days after the Sunday funeral? I have no idea. But there is one memory of Helen’s dying not in the story: a memory of my oldest brother, Abe, who had come home from distant Pierceland when Helen’s illness grew worse
in March. He was also in that room that night; a memory I sorted through only fifty years later, and spoke for the first time as Abe’s obituary:

The words that have comforted Christians for two millennia, which also reflect Helen’s feelings:

She died on March 28, 1945, the day the German Army collapsed on the western front; her funeral took place on Easter Sunday April 1, the day the US Marines landed again on the beaches of Okinawa. I’m certain we did not notice these “great” world events, as no one beyond our tiny community noticed our single death. Towards the end of the war Dr. Coghlan’s practice was so enormous, distant country calls for his help were endless; then, after Christmas 1944, Helen became too weak for her to be taken to the North Battleford hospital in Harder’s truck, and though Dan may have brought the doctor to our house several times in our cutter from the highway, with his huge buffalo coat and black satchel, I don’t know whether they tried to have him come during that last month of hard winter. It seems a kind of peasant Christian fatalism had settled over our family: Helen had been sickly, sometimes gravely ill, from the day of her birth; the Lord gives, yes, but there also, always, comes a time when the Lord takes away, especially after years of giving notice—so finally what could a doctor do, even wonderful Doc Coghlan? Blessed be the name of the Lord.

The community did what it always did. On Thursday March 29, Anna Heinrichs, who with her daughters and oldest son had run their bush homestead as efficiently as any man since Aaron Heinrichs died eight years before, came over with her daughter Rosella Poetker, as did Elizabeth Thiessen again. They helped my mother prepare the body clothe it in a new white dress Helen’s best friend Isola Fehr gave them, a dress Isola had just received by mail order and not yet worn, and then they carried the body into the cold March air and laid it out on boards in the granary. No one worked on Good Friday, March 30, but there was a church service and neighbours came by; the yard was full of sleighs. On Saturday, March 31, Dave Heinrichs and Abe Fehr, Isola’s father, came to help Dad make the coffin, while the women hand-sewed its black cloth covering and Anna Heinrichs the padded, ruffled interior. The painted silver coffin handles used at every funeral were brought from the church, while in the iron ground of the cemetery just south of the church barns other men were chopping, digging out a grave down to the unfrozen earth below the snow. And Abe and Dan drove to North Battleford, probably in Gustav Biech’s car, for whom Dan was working that winter, to register Helen’s death and telegraph Mary and Emmanuel in Mayfair again.

The granary in which Helen’s body lay was built against the east end of our sod-roofed cow barn. The granary walls were log, its roof rough-cut boards and tarpaper. When you opened the barn door in winter with your lantern and pails for milking, the mousing cats were coiled in the warmth under the roof, waiting on the low beam for you to get yourself settled between the cows, to wipe Nelly’s udder and teats clean, and when they heard the first spurts of milk ring in the pail, they’d come down the posts quick as weasels, come seat themselves close in the aisle and meow at you, tails twitching. Their tiny mouths opened in such delicate plaints, a sound threading into the blackness where the larger animals moved in the thick, vivid heat of their bodies, their slab-like teeth gnawing at hay or the wooden manger beams. You could walk along behind them and touch each one, their tough hides always exactly there, huge as their great bones beyond the lantern-light, the smaller calves nuzzling over their pen to try and suck your fingers as you fumbled for their curly heads—but the cats were crying, they would break your heart, and you pulled Nelly’s udder around, aimed her right teat with your right hand and clenched and clenched: the cats leaped at the white beam of milk, it splashed into their mouths,
washed their faces with hot, fat milk and for an instant you streamed it straight into the yellow cat’s gaping gullet and then it dropped, knocked down by too much—there, you got it, lick yourself clean and be happy—and you tipped forward again tight against Nelly, grappling to clutch both of her teats, the bulge of her great belly gurgling comfort along your arm and shoulder, the whole side of your head so warm, so good.

The barn granary had no cats and no window; only the open door let in the grey winter light. Helen was here. In motionless cold. Covered by a sheet that reached almost to the earth floor. The low bin with oats was behind her, the wheat and barley sacks, the white dust of chop swept into the corners. She was cold, hard, as rock. I seem to be alone in the granary, touching her shoulder perhaps. Not holding our barn lantern, that’s impossible, I couldn’t have opened that door alone in the dark; her body must have been inside the lumber box to protect it from the mice until they finished the coffin. But I saw her laid out, draped under a single sheet the length of her body and her face uncovered to her halo of long black hair, so perfectly black as my mother said hers had once been. My mind, though unconscious of it then, gathering the mass of indelible knowing that would seep through my life. In school Miss Klassen was letting me wander past grade four into five, keeping my mouth shut by stuffing
my mind with words, numbers, maps, pictures, ideas and every day I knew that at home Helen lay all day on her cot with her feet near the wood heater whose tin pipes passed up through the ceiling and the peaked space under the roof, beside the sheet that separated Dan’s and my bed from the space where Liz now slept alone. And each day when I got home and did my chores and brought in all the stove and heater wood, Helen would sit in her bed and we could set puzzles together; me doing the edges and easy shapes and often, when I came from school next day, she had already ordered the shifting colours I could barely recognize, showing me where to place them. Each day she was there. On January 7 she wrote in her diary:

Over the weeks we read
Rock of Decision
and
Tom Sawyer
, and then
Mystery at High Hedges

What an obvious book
High Hedges
is now when I look for it in a used book store: a wealthy heroine
exactly Helen’s age whose life is filled with abrupt disasters always resolved so happily by amazing—often money—coincidences. But there is one chapter title I have never forgotten: “The Heel Woman Walks.” And Helen—perhaps she dreamed of a life chauffeured about between estates in big cars, lying on beaches and never, not even for an instant, feeling sick.

Helen, much like Dan, had difficulty memorizing; sounds that aligned themselves as easy as swallowing in my mind seemed for her to evaporate, no matter how often they were spoken.

And the last mention:

Who was Bill? No one who came to the funeral as far as I know, and Helen’s letters no longer exist.

It is impossible that her body lay on bare boards covered by a sheet. But that is what I remember in the granary. Cold like frozen steel, it skins you at a touch.

Liz, not quite thirteen, wrote in the diary what she heard said about Helen’s death: “Her heart tore off.” But why she would add “she had an easy death though” I cannot imagine. Were we all trying somehow to comfort ourselves? Mam always said that Helen’s medical condition, beyond her infant illnesses brought from Russia, was rheumatic fever, which affected her heart; bed rest was basically all Dr. Coghlan could recommend. And the entire community knew where her rheumatic fever started: with the frilly crepe-paper dresses the little girls wore for the Jack Pine School Christmas program in 1937 when we still lived on the CPR homestead. The school was packed with stage and audience; the only place the little girls could change into their cute fairy costumes
was Miss Ferguson’s teacherage, then they ran through snow in the darkness and climbed up a ladder into the school window behind the stage curtain. Their wand and piano dance was so beautiful, everyone said, but Mam never called it daunce, dance, always “Soohn dommet e’romm’jeran,” such stupid running around—but that sprint through the fierce night cold dressed in nothing but underclothes and paper, my mother said, their arms and legs completely naked and running back they were sweaty as well, that was where our Helen, nine years old, caught her rheumatic fever.

When the pallbearers carried the coffin out of the church on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, they set it at the foot of the church steps and opened it for the last time. Our family stood around it, our community surrounded us. Helen’s long hair lay about her shoulders, her lips slightly open to her perfect teeth, arms crossed among the few bright roses and ferns my brothers could only have brought from North Battleford.