Of This Earth (37 page)

And then, when I step back out onto narrow Noorder Haven Street in Harlingen, I have a sudden, overwhelming, sense that this water glittering in this canal passing this hotel door and being pumped up into the North Sea, is, molecule for molecule, cycle for cycle, the very water my ancestor Wybe Adams
van Harlingen last saw here in the town of his birth, when he sailed away to Danzig in 1616.

It may be that our bodies, despite our minds, retain what we have neglected to notice; or even undermine our ability to forget what we long not to know about ourselves. For a survivor of the fire-bombing of Hamburg, the sudden drone of a plane overhead can convulse the body in shudders; a midnight pounding on the door awaken a Gulag survivor into uncontrollable screams. Even when all facts seem lost, the bodily effects remain, as the poet Dionne Brand details in her memoir,
A Map to the Door of No Return
. When she lists for her grandfather the names of all the African peoples she knows, he tells her none of them are their people, but “he would know [the name] if he heard it.” However, he never does remember and because of that, Brand writes, “A small space opened in me … a tear in the world … It was a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.” It seems that when you have lost the place on earth where you come from, when your ancestral name has been ground out of existence, you suffer damage.

Memory as psychic and physical evanescence. As I wrote and rewrote these words, gradually a memory of my Speedwell nightmares returned to me. A
betrayal by sleep: the child life I lived somewhere in the Land of Sleep would on occasion be ripped open, exposed frightfully in my physical bed. There were many nightmares, beginning, I know, when I first began to walk because my mother would awaken to pick me up in my wanderings and lay me back in bed, but now I first remembered knowing the name. Not Low German, which is simply a modification of Droom, dream, like beesa, bad, or gruselja, repulsive, frightful, but English knew better: “nightmare,” a gigantic horse that suddenly burst with you into darkness, you were clinging to its bare back, no reins or even a halter shank, its neck too huge for your arms to reach around and you could only clutch the short tufts on its withers as it rushed you into terror. Like Bell, always uncontrollable and now gone suddenly berserk. The shape of only one nightmare came back clearly, a smeared apparition from the spring of our leaving. I had to do something, Right now! and it was of course already too late, I would burn in Hell from all ages to endless ages for this, fire and ice burned the same, there was no difference, but someone was pounding on the door downstairs and I had to answer, Now! I was out of bed and backwards down the ladder stairs in the darkness and something tried to stop me, someone and someone else, but I was fighting them—
I have to do this!
and the door
opened to no one on the porch, I could see, so they must be waiting in the yard, a wagon and a team of horses, a car! I am outside in the spring night burning my feet like ice and fire and past the summer kitchen through the slab fence gate, Etj mot! I have to! and I’m halfway down the empty slope to the barn,

But it is my mother, out there. Even as I lunged from the house I had sensed something double, I both knew
I had to!
and also that there would be nothing to do—there never had been—and my mother clasps me tight around the shoulders and I am afraid and enraged at the same time, I
should
have done something but there
is
nothing, I am barefoot in the cold night yard in my spring underwear, my warm Mam murmuring in my ear and I shake her off and walk back past Pah at the slab gate doing nothing as usual, just watching, I hate them for seeing me act so stupid again, I love them, there
was
someone and
I had to
and I’ll show them, I’m Tüss, home, I’ll go upstairs and sleep. And I do it.

Years later I found those three lines of split image for being inside a nightmare, “And I feel that
‘I’ is too little for me …” in the long, raging poem by the Georgian/Cossack poet Vladimir Mayakovsky called
A Cloud in Trousers
. A close friend said to me, “You’re always reading Russian writers, are you sure you’re not half Mennonite and half Russian?” and I could only mutter, “To be so lucky.”

With every passing day our memory is what we can still find in it, or cannot avoid, and no doubt Gao Xinjian is correct when he comments in
Soul Mountain
that losing particular memories is a form of liberation. But there are many we would wish never to lose: the more precise they are, the more they comfort us. Liz wrote nothing in her 1947 diary after her sixteenth birthday, not even of Dan and Isola’s wedding on May 11, but suddenly on Thursday, May 15 she recorded these facts:

The former Speedwell storekeeper Wilhelm Voth with his removable teeth had returned to our
Saskatchewan bush for hire in a dusty car to carry Pah, Mam, Liz and me 470 dirt and gravel miles (756 kilometres) to Coaldale, Alberta. We held no public auction, that community burial of all things farm and family, gathered bit by bit in the fourteen years—almost to the day—of our Speedwell living. Rather, we shipped a few household possessions by train, packed in two wooden boxes Pah built, and left the farm, all its animals and machinery to Dan and his marvellously good-natured wife, Isola. Mam went to Helen’s grave on Wednesday and we started at sunrise on Thursday to drive it in one day and save ourselves overnight expense. On Friday, before Mr. Voth took us to Lethbridge to shop for furniture, I washed the various layers of my wind-and-sun-hardened travel vomit from below his right car window.

Coaldale was the first stop east of Lethbridge on the railroad originally built in 1885 by Sir Alexander Galt’s business consortium to haul the coal they mined along the Belly (now Oldman) River below Lethbridge to the new transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad at Medicine Hat. In 1947 Coaldale’s main street, where Highway 3 led us from Medicine Hat, ran parallel to the track and its stores and houses clustered around three grain elevators, but our “new home” was in Nortondale, an outgrowth on the town’s west side.

There were two streets of Nortondale houses and, though I did not recognize it at the time, Second Street Nortondale—now Coaldale’s west Twenty-third Avenue—was as close to a Russian Mennonite village as my parents ever found in Canada. With two exceptions, all the thirty-odd families living there had arrived in Canada during the 1920s and spoke Low German. Our small lumber houses set on two-acre plots faced each other across narrow irrigation canals on either side of the gravel road; each yard had a huge garden and many, like ours, had small buildings where we could raise chickens and feed a pig or sheep for butchering. By fall Pah had even bought a milk cow, which he staked out to graze on our back acre or along the irrigation ditches like other families since there was of course no Russian herdsman to take our animals to a communal pasture. I did not realize that, until I left for the University of Alberta six years later, it would be my daily chore to milk that cow morning and evening in the small shed that hid our family outhouse from the street. She was a good cow, Guernsey at least in her soft beige colouring, and we sold the extra milk to neighbours for ten cents a quart.

Standing on the high bank of the main irrigation ditch whose muddy water flowed east just beyond the houses and plots on the south side of
the street, I could look over farms, fields and pastures leaning up the vast slope of the plains to where the Front Wall of the Rocky Mountains appeared and vanished again into mist beyond the Milk River Ridge. The ridge separated the continental rivers flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico from those flowing north to Hudson Bay. Over it the square peak of Chief Mountain hovered like the snow and granite profile of a man lying on his back. But it was too distant for me to discern clearly, nor had I any notion yet of the Blackfoot stories about Old Man and Thunderbird surrounding that awesome place.

Coaldale was not landscape for Mam; it was cautious hope. Though not quite fifty-two, her years had been too difficult for outright optimism. Her life’s mottos had always been “Harre auf Gott,” wait for God, and “Den Mutigen gehöert die Welt,” to the courageous belongs the world, and now, by moving to southern Alberta, it seemed her patient hope gradually was becoming more than a glimmer in the distance. Here there were steady wages for Pah, he no longer needed to struggle with farming decisions—let Dan do that in Speedwell, he was much better at it and could explain himself in English—and for her last two children there was a huge church with over a hundred Christian young
people to become friends with, to attend Sunday school and sing in choirs. Indeed, the Coaldale Mennonite Brethren Church offered a fine three year Bible school and, even more amazing, also ran an Alberta Department of Education–approved sep arate high school on the north edge of town. Here, in Coaldale, it might very well be possible, Mam thought, for both Liz and me to be saved from the endless, subversive temptations of the post-war world. And there were many older Mennonite women for her to talk to: they understood this Canadian world in ways she never would.

Pah did not waste time staring across southern Alberta prairie which looked so much like the steppes where, as a boy he had carried lunch to their
Bashkir herdsman grazing the village cattle in the Number Eight Hills. He was happy for the well-shingled house—though it had no foundation, it merely sat on stones in the brown earth—happy for the street with its ditch of running water, the huge Coaldale Mennonite Brethren Church north of town, his job on a dairy farm where every day someone would tell him exactly what to do.

“Hia oppe Stap woa wie aundasch läwe,” he said. Here on the prairie we’ll live differently.

And my lengthening bones knew he was right; truly aundasch, different.

EPILOGUE
THE COMING WIND

1947. Monday, May 19: Dad went to Lethbridge today to work. Rudy went to school and mother and I worked in the garden. Then went to town a little bit yet.

The town of Coaldale was dominated by English names like Graham, King, Handley, McCann, Foxall, Greer, Fairhurst, though there were a few main street businesses with Mennonite names like Martens and Thiessen on their false fronts. In Mrs. Jinty Graham’s classroom of thirty-seven students Principal Roy Baker assigned me the end corner desk
nearest the cloakroom door: as if I’d slipped into grade seven very late, perhaps accidentally, and might be gone if someone noticed me. That was fine with me; my seat was beside the tall windows and I could look out through the huge branches of the cottonwoods to the gravel street, where cars passed and people walked in shiny leather shoes on wooden sidewalks even when it rained.

And soon I discovered that I was totally unique in school for wearing blue denim farm overalls, particularly since the buttonholes at my hips were so worn the metal buttons did not hold the side flaps closed as they should. Though school ended in a few weeks, there was more than time enough for the poetic English class wits, playing with “Rudyard” I think, to cross-label me “Barnyard.” A particular fit for the more general names like “bohunk” or “schmo.”

As Big Bear says, “A word is power, it comes from nothing into meaning.” I could add that some words are so powerful they are fixed in us beyond any possibility of forgetting.

The Frank and Helen Wiens family lived beside us in Nortondale, eight children—four in their teens like Liz and me—Mennonite neighbours happy to help us learn how to live and work in hot summer Alberta. The oldest son, Abe, farmed eighty acres of land east of town; they had a contract with Canadian
Sugar Factories for sugar beets and soon we joined them hoeing the endless rows, those straight, flat lines etched by bright threads of irrigation water reaching, as it seemed, beyond the treeless horizon.

Before the fifties, beet seed was still unsegmented: the tiny sprouts came up in clusters and they had to be thinned to single plants one hoe width apart so each beet could mature into a thick, swollen root. Actually, hoes were fine for weeds but not much help for thinning: only on your knees with your bare fingers could you properly single them down. Bent down into long acres of sugar beets, you gradually became a distant bump, nameless under the scorching sun.

Coaldale’s sweet gold. In the forties it was the Japanese Canadians, forced inland by the Canadian government from their Vancouver homes during World War II, and the immigrant Russian Mennonites, adults and children alike, who provided most of the labour that nurtured 30,000 acres (12,150 hectares) of beets grown in the Lethbridge district. As Joy Kogawa, a grade behind me in Coaldale School, would later write in her novel
Obasan:

…
the heat waves waver and shimmer like see-through curtains over the brown clods and over the tiny distant bodies of Stephen and Uncle and Obasan miles away… then on my knees, pull, flick flick, and on to the end of the long long row … it will never be done… It’s so hard and so hot that my tear glands burn out.

I whined but never wept, though I know my mother did: the pain in her misshapen bunioned feet, her bent back. Between beet hoeing sessions we children picked green and yellow beans when they matured in late July and August. All along the Nortondale streets were small plots of “cash crop” assigned by the Broder Canning Company, on our back acre as well. One cent a pound for first and second picking, two cents for third, but you had
to strip your row carefully, and clean, no tearing up plants or grabbing clusters from other rows. Sometimes a day in a good field paid almost $2—imagine that, when before the war Dan worked that long for fifty cents.

In September Liz entered grade nine (not a word in her diary) and for me in grade eight “Barnyard” revived immediately. But I had begun to learn something about clothes and walking away from names in silence. And Murray Robison, one of the finest teachers I ever had, further undermined the label by grading me between seventh and ninth in the class of thirty-five, not so far behind Bob Baker, the lanky, good-natured son of the principal who was invariably first. Other vestiges of bush-farm bumpkin disappeared when, as a spring drama event, Robison had us stage A. A. Milne’s delicate one-act fluff,
The Princess and the Woodcutter
, and to my happy astonishment assigned me to play the Yellow Prince, the most garrulous and foppish of the three princelings vying for the Princess’s hand. It was performed in our classroom, for ourselves and families, in full costume.

Of course the Woodcutter ultimately wins the Princess, and I’m not sure whether we prairie plodders captured much of the upper-class English filigree the play is meant to convey, but the Yellow
Prince is there with the Woodcutter—Shirley Smith, the prettiest girl in class—looking over his (her) shoulder at me with classic profile disdain while I, in the yellow knee pants and vest Mam had sewed from a dyed flour sack, flick my hand at him (her) in whatever princely condescension I can manage.

Personal problems sometimes fade as simply as they arise in an enjoyable, learning classroom. That we Wiebes were a poor worker family on the edge of a hardscrabble prairie town dominated by several influential businessmen and wealthier irrigation farmers did not yet register very strongly. Our life was so different from isolated bush Speedwell—with electric lights, coal delivered by truck, a cistern storing irrigation water, which we hand-pumped in the
kitchen (it never tasted as good as our former well). There was a huge church of over seven hundred adult members, a brick school, streets, stores and houses in what seemed to me a crowded town—life was so changed that I barely noticed we had no car or telephone, and it would be four years before anyone in Coaldale had running water, sewage services or natural gas. The euphoria of leaving a dreadful war behind and the end, at last, of the Nuremberg trials, smudged wealth and class distinctions, especially among teenagers. We were told the world was clean and new for us, we began to think we could do, could become, anything we wanted: “Work hard, the sky’s the limit!”

And in fact Alberta’s enormous “sky” was expanding. On February 13, 1947, just south of Edmonton, Leduc No. 1 Discovery Well blew in with an enormous explosion of gas that rained oil on ecstatic, dancing drillers; the first of thousands of wells in hundreds of square miles of deep Alberta oil reefs. For most of us the fifties and sixties would grow far beyond any teen imaginings.

But more than obvious opportunity, Coaldale Consolidated School proved to be a daily Canadian multicultural manifestation more than twenty years before Ottawa named that an official policy. In 1948–49, when I was taking grade nine, I see in my
yearbook that Coaldale Consolidated High had 108 students; of these, 37 were of Russian Mennonite ancestry (22 of them girls), 23 were British, 17 Japanese and the remaining 31 a potpourri from everywhere, largely central Europe. When the new aluminum-covered R.I. Baker School was opened in March 1950, some one hundred students from twelve grades performed a rainbow “Pageant of the Nations” written by English–French teacher Edna McVeety and directed by Murray Robison. Greetings were printed in twenty languages and twenty-two different nationalities made presentations, often wearing traditional clothing. We Mennonite kids together sang “Glaube der Väter,” “Faith of Our Fathers,” in four-part harmony.

Gaining some peer acceptance and good marks were not the most memorable benefits of living aundasch, different, in Coaldale. More significant for the solitary kid I gladly remained—I discovered how to disappear in a crowd—more crucial were books. The 1948–49 CCHS Yearbook was prescient beyond all wit when it analyzed Rudy Wiebe’s ambition as “To own a library” and his “Weakness: Fiction.” The latter has obviously proven to be a lifelong pun.

Shelves of books from floor to ceiling in the school library, and also in the new (1945) public library on Main Street. Between them these small
rooms contained perhaps two thousand volumes, but after vacant Speedwell the very sight of so many book spines was both miraculous and evocative. The public library even allowed you to take out two books at a time, almost enough for a weekend.

And beyond books there was the land: open, visible to every long circle of horizon. The earth, the sky, the unfailing wind. Anywhere in southern Alberta you could see for miles, nothing to bristle from the green vistas of land except trees planted in careful rows, lonesome shelterbelts or windbreaks as they were called, huge cottonwoods lined up along streets or protecting farmsteads, and sprouting alone on the elevations or in the hollows of irrigation canals, but they always stopped abruptly, turned square at corners like leafy walls. Nowhere were there overwhelming spruce or aspen forests hiding the land completely, bending in groves to the muscle of the wind, no whitening flicker to the sad sigh of their leaves. In contrast to the world where I was born, or the river and forested mountains of Vancouver where we briefly lived, on the prairie everything man-made—houses, farms, towns, elevators, even the small city of Lethbridge along the edge of the Oldman River coulees—was exposed, poised on a long, open cliff of often staggering wind, a wind that could run ice in summer with hailstones, or hot in
the depths of winter to lick every flake of snow into mud when Old Man sent the “snow biter wind,” as the Blackfoot people called it, of his winter chinook blowing up over the incline of the Rockies and sweeping east down the frozen prairie.

A seemingly endless land forever open to the visitation of wind. Bracing myself into that breathing wind, I would grow to feel it: a land too far to see, fathomless to the looking eye—but, perhaps, touchable by words. Words strung out with utmost care, like the thin, high steel of the railroad bridge at Lethbridge stretching itself across the immense canyon of the Oldman River, words forged and bolted together into the living architecture of story.