Of This Earth Read online

  PRAISE FOR of this earth

  “Wiebe is one of Canada’s most prolific and most esteemed writers… The poetic memoir traces both the growth of a young man and the growth of a writer… Wiebe is wonderful at capturing the forbidden wonder of a boy discovering the mysteries of life—that is, sex, procreation and birth.”

  —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “[A] gentle and evocative look back at Rudy Wiebe’s childhood … A beautiful read … The genius of Wiebe’s writing [is his] ability to take what is a single event in a community’s life, relate it to the world at large, and make it as personal as possible.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “A thoughtful, captivating memoir of [Wiebe’s] childhood … His boyhood anecdotes and stories are a delight… His charming memoir is filled with family antics, barnyard sex education, wonder and curiosity—and some sadness, too.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Wiebe has an unerring eye and ear for locating stories that deserve retelling… Engrossing … Of This Earth is a fine memoir.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Of This Earth … is an autobiographical account by a skilled writer able … to enter imaginatively into a vanished way of life, and to convey it with both vividness and eloquence… It is a book for anyone who cherishes the elusive virtues of original and vital English prose.”

  —Literary Review of Canada

  ALSO BY RUDY WIEBE

  FICTION

  Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962)

  First and Vital Candle (1966)

  The Blue Mountains of China (1970)

  The Temptations of Big Bear (1973)

  Where Is the Voice Coming From? (1974)

  The Scorched-Wood People (1977)

  Alberta / A Celebration (1979)

  The Mad Trapper (1980)

  The Angel of the Tar Sands (1982)

  My Lovely Enemy (1983)

  Chinook Christmas (1992)

  A Discovery of Strangers (1994)

  River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (1995)

  Sweeter Than All the World (2001)

  Hidden Buffalo (2003)

  NON-FICTION

  A Voice in the Land (ed. by W. J. Keith) (1981)

  War in the West: Vices of the 1885 Rebellion (with Bob Beal) (1985)

  Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989)

  Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman

  (with Yvonne Johnson) (1998)

  Place: Lethbridge, A City on the Prairie (with Geoffrey James) (2002)

  DRAMA

  Far as the Eye Can See (with Theatre Passe Muraille) (1977)

  THIS BOOK IS FOR

  Rocio Michaela

  Camilo Aaron

  Anna Helen

  What do you do for a living? I asked. I remember, she replied.

  —ROBERT KROETSCH,

  The Snowbird Poems, “Conversation #2”

  Daut wia soo lang tridj, daut es meist nijch meea soo. That was so long ago, it is almost no longer so.

  —Russian Mennonite proverb

  CONTENTS

  Prologue NOW

  1. HOMESTEAD

  2. MOTHER TONGUES

  3. WRATH

  4. STUD

  5. STALIN

  6. MANSIONS

  7. CHIEF

  8. ASPEN

  Epilogue THE COMING WIND

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  NOW

  “Nu es et Tiet,” my mother would say in the Russian Mennonite Low German our family always spoke together. Now it is time. And my father would get up to wrap his bare feet in foot-cloths and pull on his felt boots with rubbers over them, hook his heavy mackinaw and fur cap off the pegs by the door and go outside with the neighbour we were visiting. They would lead Prince and Jerry out of the barn and hitch them to our bobsled and we would drive home to a rhythm of harness bells, always, as I remember it, in blue darkness and covered by blankets and stiff cowhide in the sledbox.

  We are travelling between winter poplars, momentarily open fields, along massive black walls of spruce; the horses feeling in the snow the trail of their own hoofprints home like the narrow path of sky above us, bright heaven sprinkled with light but sometimes, abruptly, flaming out like an exploded sun, a shower of fire and frightening until it swims away into waves fading out in rainbows: there, God lives in such light eternally and so far away I may never get there beyond the stars. Though my mother certainly will, and also, perhaps, my father.

  They are singing. My father’s favourite hymn, which they have carried with them from their Mennonite villages on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia to sing in Saskatchewan’s boreal forest:

  Hier auf Erden bin ich ein Pilger,

  Und mein Pilgern, und mein Pilgern währt

  nicht lang…

  Here on earth I am a pilgrim

  And my pilgrimage will not be very long…

  In the crystalline cold my mother’s soprano weaves the high notes on “Pi-il-ger” back and forth into my father’s tenor like wind breathing through the leaves of summer aspen. My oldest sister, Tina, is married and my oldest brother, Abe, in Bible school, they are not there, and Dan is standing at the open back of the sledbox, tall and silent; but we four younger siblings are humming inside our layered clothes under the covers, Mary especially because she can already thread alto between Mam and Pah’s voices, make three-part harmony, and if only Dan would open his mouth, as Mary tells him often enough, we could have a family quartet even if Helen and Liz and I are too little for anything yet except melody.

  We are driving home in the boreal forest that wraps itself like an immense muffler around the shoulders of North America; the isolated spot where once my particular life appeared. A physical place in western Canada not difficult to find: north of North Battleford halfway to Meadow Lake, west off Highway 4 where the Saskatchewan Official Highway Map is blank except for tiny blue streams beginning and running in every direction; not a settlement name north of Glaslyn, for ninety kilometres; in the space cornered by Turtle and Stony and Midnight lakes. The ground of whatever I was or would be, root and spirit.

  There, before I could speak any language, I heard Psalm go, a Prayer of Moses, read aloud, and recited at home and in church:

  Herr, Gott, du bist unsere Zuflucht für und

  für…

  Lord, God, you have been our refuge in all

  generations.

  Before the mountains were brought forth,

  or ever you had formed the earth,

  from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

  All our days pass away under the shadow of your

  wrath,

  our years come to an end like a sigh.

  The years of our life are threescore and ten,

  or perhaps by reason of strength fourscore,

  yet their span is but toil and trouble,

  they are soon cut off, and we fly away.

  Threescore and ten years ago my life began on the stony, glacier-haunted earth of western Canada. Seventy years of refuge, under the shadow of wrath. As my mother said, “Now it is time.”

  —On board MS Dnieper Princess,

  the Black Sea, October 4, 2004

  1.

  HOMESTEAD

  An arc of water spouts from a steel kettle. It steams against the darkness under the roof rafters like a curve of light. And a scream. My sister Liz—she is five years old, or six—has stepped into the family washtub too quickly at the instant Helen, certainly nine, began to pour boiling water into the tepid, slightly scummy bathwater I have just scrambled out of. The boiling water slaps down Liz’s leg, that’s her scream, and with a cry Helen drops the steel kettle to the floor, the water splashes out with the crash, pours over the bumpy boards
as the kettle lid rings away and I am screaming too.

  Our mother would have been there in a second. Kettles with long spouts are a dangerous story in our family; even as a baby I knew how in Russia my oldest brother, Abe, at six, ran in from play outside and inexplicably tipped the spout of the kettle boiling on the stove into his mouth for a drink and scalded his tongue and throat almost to the point of death. Steel kettles squatted on every kitchen stove, Russia or Canada, often steaming and dangerous, but they were as necessary as continuous fire in the grate.

  This must have happened on our CPR homestead before I turned three, certainly in summer when we had washtub baths on Saturday evening, though we washed our feet, dirty from running barefoot all day, every night before bed. First I hunkered down in the tin tub used for washing clothes, then my three sisters bathed in the order of their ages, just adding more hot water each time to what had already grown cold around the person washing before. Until Mary, thirteen with curly blond hair, who would sometimes seize the tub by its handle, drag it to the kitchen doorstep and dump it out, she’d rather wash herself in a cup than sit down in everyone else’s Schwienarie, piggish filth!

  My first memory: water arcing and the length of Liz’s small leg scalded; which is not as dreadful as Abe’s throat, but why are the rafters there? Why would we bathe upstairs in the sleeping loft? Where is Mary? The extremely hot, very heavy kettle would have had to be hoisted up the ladder stairs you needed two hands to clutch and climb—hoisted somehow by Helen who was always sickly, never strong? This should have happened in our lean-to kitchen, as usual, beside the woodstove where Mary would simply swing the kettle around by its handle, off the firebox and tilt it over the washtub.

  But in this, the first undeniable memory of my life, nothing is more fixed than that low, open jaw of roof rafters and three of us screaming. Childhood can only remain what you have not forgotten.

  The pole rafters were in the log house our family built on our original Saskatchewan homestead. It stood on a quarter section of land my father acquired in 1934 from the Canadian Pacific Railway—the CPR owned every odd-numbered section in the area—by making a down payment of “Tien dohla fe daut wille Bosch,” he told me: ten dollars for that wild bush.

  According to Gust Fiedler, my sister Tina’s husband for over sixty years, the first people to clear land for farming in the northernmost area of what would become the Speedwell school district were his cousins the John Lobes. The Lobe–Fiedler–Dunz clan were not Mennonites but ethnic Germans originally from Bessarabia (now in Moldova) who had emigrated to Harvey, North Dakota, before World War I. However, they were extremely poor there and wanted better land, closer together for their extended families, so several clan sons, including Gust, moved again, north into Canada to look for the “free” homesteads Saskatchewan was advertising. By 1925 they found what they wanted north of Glaslyn on the highway to Meadow Lake, west and north on the Jack Pine School Road: a whole township of land available for homestead settlement. Within the next five years they filed on some twelve to fifteen quarters north of Jack Pine School. As Gust said, “We were close together and the land really cost nothing, just work.”

  “But solid bush wilderness?”

  “We weren’t scared of work, clearing land! There was some good bottom land and hay sloughs and lots of big spruce and pine, so we Fiedlers set up a sawmill, John Lobe brought in a steamer and breaking plow to bust sod and Otto Dunz a good threshing machine. And in ’26 and ’27 lots of Mennonites were coming too, immigrants, everybody wanted land. Poplars can be chopped down and rooted out.”

  Jack Pine School had been organized in 1920 by the Joe Handley (English) and Elie Nault (Metis) families for the few homesteaders who already lived in Township 52, northeast of shallow Stony Lake, but north beyond them, in Township 53, the Lobe–Fiedler–Dunz clan began settlement and Russian Mennonite immigrants from the Soviet Union followed them. Area population grew fast during the Depression because immigrants prefer to settle land in language and racial groups—a practice Canada has always encouraged for stability and development—and also because the Saskatchewan government wanted farmers in its aspen parkland north, away from the dried-out prairie south. As Maclean’s Magazine reported on April 1, 1932, in an article called “The Trek to Meadow Lake”:

  Starting gradually in spring, the Northward flow of farmers increased as the failure of the 1931 [prairie area] crop became certain, until the movement became the greatest internal migration Canada has seen… Before winter set in some 10,000 persons had moved from the prairies to find new homes in the Northern bush … It was to a greater extent a pilgrimage of the middle-aged, beaten once but trying again. Number Four Highway of Saskatchewan was the main channel of the northward stream.

  So Township 53, where the Speedwell School had been organized in 1930, grew quickly into a cul-de-sac community of log and mud-plastered houses, of sod-roofed barns and tiny fields surrounded by boreal forest west and north and east. A single trail led in, cleared more or less along the road allowance survey line over the esker hills and around the swamps north from the Jack Pine School corner. When my family arrived from the dusted-out Saskatchewan prairie in May 1933, every quarter-section homestead along the only road between Jack Pine and Speedwell schools (see map, p. vii) was, except for Joe Handley settled by the Lobe–Fiedlers or Mennonites. Dad found our “CPR quarter,” as we called our 160 acres, at the end of a bush track a mile and a half west of the main road.

  Boreal forest continued endlessly west of us, but walk on “our” land in any direction and aspen, black poplar, birch, clumps of spruce towered over you, here and there a ragged jack pine or a tiny hay slough rimmed by willows with spring water for singing frogs and mosquitoes. A quarter square mile of basically flat land—good to clear for fields—except for a long esker knoll that ran across our neighbour Louis Ulmer’s west field and over our eastern boundary to end in a shallow slough. A well beside a slough was always good for watering cattle: my father and brothers cleared that knoll of aspen to make our farmyard.

  As the people of the Thunderchild Cree or Saulteaux Indian reserves might have told us, whose ancestors had hunted animals and gathered berries and roots and collected poplar sap on that land for hundreds of generations, we Russian Mennonite Wiebes were the first people since creation to build a house of wood on that place; to try and live there by farming. But the Cree and Saulteaux people were isolated by Treaty Six, restricted to live on their reserves twenty miles apart, in bush beyond Turtle Lake to the west and Midnight Lake to the east. I don’t know if anyone in my family ever met them, or even exchanged a word with one of them when they drove by on the road allowances in summer, their wagons filled with children. I know I never did. And though I waved, only the man driving waved back.

  We lived on the edge of white settlement with only endless “empty” bush, as it seemed to us, west of our CPR land, but we never trapped wild animals or hunted them for food. My parents would not have a rifle in their house, not so much as a .22 for rabbits or the partridges that burrowed into the grain stooks when the snow caught us in fall before Otto Dunz’s threshing machine reached our place, and we had to haul the oats through the snow for cowfeed and wait with threshing what was left of the barley till winter was over. One spring we heard that Alex Sahar, a Russian homesteader beyond the Aaron Heinrichses near Highway 4, had shot four thousand rabbits that winter, sold the pelts for eight to ten cents each and fed the carcasses to his pigs, but no, our Pah said, we’re Mennonite farmers, we raise our food, we grow gardens, grain, raise chickens for eggs and meat, pigs for meat and cows for milk and cream. Daut Wille enne Wildnis es nijch fe uns, animals in the wild aren’t for us.

  Nevertheless, like the Cree and Saulteaux, we did eat jackfish caught in Turtle Lake when we went there for summer picnics with the Fiedlers; we traded eggs and chickens for frozen fish when occasional pedlars came around in winter. And we certainly picked wild berries, especially blueberries and saskatoons, ate them with cream
or baked them into Plautz, open-faced fruit pastry, or canned them for winter—though we did not know how to dry them and pound them into dried meat to make pemmican the way the Cree had once preserved their food. And, like them, we also dug seneca roots. We knew nothing about making medicines from them, but Voth’s or Schroeder’s store paid thirty cents a pound for dried seneca roots which, they said, a company bought from them to make into cough remedies. Robin Hood flour cost two dollars for a one-hundred-pound bag: if we found enough good seneca patches in early summer, Mam, Mary and Helen could maybe dig and sun-dry eight pounds in three days, or four. That was a burlap sack full of tiny sun-wrinkled roots, and Liz and I were too little to dig but I could find the plants as easily as anyone; their flowers were instantly recognizable, a ring of tiny white spears among all the green, like two hands cupped upwards together with flowers on every fingertip. And at their centre the unseen root: the thicker the flowers, the bigger the root.

  Seneca plants grow best at the moist edges of aspen groves, and by the time I was big enough to dig them out, my brother Dan had made us diggers from the cut, sharpened leaf of a car spring bolted to the broken spoke of a wagon wheel. I have one still, though I have never found a seneca plant in the aspen forests I wander west of Edmonton. I know I would instantly recognize that ring of flowers, delicate white and low against the earth; it is an image painted on my memory like the face of my mother bent down, smiling, her broad fingers sifting the earth for every gram of root that will buy her one more handful of flour to feed her family.

  Our CPR house was built of peeled spruce plastered with mud. The only complete photo of it is a distant side view from the south: a bare yard with the bush a ragged wall peering over its vertical slab roof. A man with his hands behind his back and wearing a hat stands against the left window; on the right five children and a woman wearing an apron are lined in a row up to the lean-to door; between them, stretched out on bare ground, two men lie on their elbows in the Russian Mennonite style of taking group pictures, a white-and-black dog at their feet. A two-horse cutter stands beside the willow fence in the right foreground, something we certainly used in winter, but I have no winter memory of that yard; everything is green summer.