Of This Earth Read online

  The man with his hands behind his back is my father. The spot of white shirt farthest from him in front of the screen door is me, with my mother and her Sunday white apron beside me. Liz is almost invisible, her dress so dark against the butt-ends of the house logs. The taller girl in white beside her is Helen, who died too young. Her hands are folded up together at her lips as if in prayer.

  The earth along that house is packed grey and bare, especially around the screen door of the kitchen lean-to. And I know Onkel Fout, Mr. Wilhelm Voth, the storekeeper, is very close to me. There are neighbours standing on the yard grass that slopes down towards the barn and the hay corral, the scraggly jack pine beyond the pasture fence; they are laughing, telling stories, but Onkel Fout is crouched down low, staring at me. Slowly he pushes his right hand into his mouth.

  So many people of all ages seem to be there, it must be Sunday afternoon, time for spezeare gohne, going visiting. Mennonites in Russia lived side by side in farm villages, but in Canada the Dominion Land Act requires homesteaders to live in a house built on the land they settle and so to us Speedwellers, isolated behind bush, visiting is as important as going to church on Sunday morning. I may still be wearing my Sunday white shirt and short black pants and Onkel Fout is the centre of attention. He owns a store filled with anything you could want to buy and also the only truck in the Speedwell–Jack Pine area; everyone has been listening to him talk about a place called Coaldale. Later I will understand that Coaldale is a town four hundred miles away in southern Alberta where many Mennonites live, where there is always good summer work which anyone can do for steady cash pay in sugar beet fields that stretch to the horizon, that Onkel Fout has taken a load of our young people, including my brother Dan, away to work there for the summer and has just come back, but now I understand nothing except “Coaldale,” a word I will never be able to forget.

  It is a place where apparently no one has to raka, slave himself to death, clearing trees to finally create one small field, stump by rooted stump dragged out by a team of horses throwing its full strength against a chain wrapped high around the stump while someone chops furiously at the cracking, anchoring roots, Coaldale where there are no trees at all, nor so much as a rock or slough whose moss can swallow you slow as torture in its brown stinking water. People just grow sugar beets on a steppe like in Russia—but without the terrible Communists—with water running between rows of plants whenever you want to open your ditch, everyone has the right to an irrigation ditch full of mountain water all summer long and a huge cash crop every year, sugar, sugar, not like our endless poplars, nobody will ever sprinkle spruce sawdust on their porridge for breakfast! But in Coaldale, land of sugar, far away, the world is completely sweet.

  Onkel Fout is shorter than my Pah, who is not as tall as my oldest brother, Abe, though broader, and I know my brother Dan is even taller: if Onkel Fout got into Dan’s clothes, more than half of Dan would be left over for sure. I know he has taken Dan away; Mam says Dan will be gone all summer. I watch Onkel Fout drink water out of our dipper from the pail standing ready for visitors on our best chair in the shade of the lean-to. Above the dipper rim his eyes shift, look through me, away south across our small stumpy clearing of potential grain field and the stones picked and already piled along its edges like walls. I say in Low German:

  “Will Dan be different?”

  “Na?” With a flip he throws the water beside me, so close I feel spray, and hooks the dipper back on the edge of the pail. Suddenly he looks down at me as if I were von jistre, born yesterday.

  “Different,” I say, “when he comes home … you don’t look different.”

  “Du tjliena Tjnirps,” he tells me: you little twerp. And he folds down onto his heels so close to me I see the grey sheen of his shaven whiskers. “Can you do this?”

  One after the other he pushes his hands, all his fingers, into his gaping mouth. Then slowly he pulls out the inside of his face. Teeth and pink flesh, first the top, then the bottom. His wide fingers hold all that under my nose.

  He says, “Can you do it?”

  His face is caved in, his words hiss. Appalled, I can only scream. My mother comes quickly, the people all over the yard are staring at me and I burrow my face against her thigh. She shakes me, her big hands grip my head and shoulder shaking me.

  “Be still, still! What’s the matter with you?”

  She has to push me away, pull both my hands out of my mouth before my howling stops and she can understand me.

  “Why can’t I do that! What’s wrong with my mouth!”

  Behind me Onkel Fout is laughing. Mam looks up at him, all around us our neighbours are laughing and gradually she smiles just a little.

  I ask, “Why can’t I take my mouth out?”

  When she smiles my mother’s teeth do not shine white like the perfect curves in Onkel Fout’s hand. They are mostly brownish stumps, almost grey, with gaps; she cuts her meat very small and when she chews I have seen that she holds the food mostly at the front of her mouth, when it shifts back she grimaces. My stern and loving Mam always so afraid of sin for her children, arms warm and tight around me, is in dreadful pain when she eats, though she says nothing. Sometimes she says, “Nu mot etj wada beize,” now I have to again—but I don’t know exactly what beize means, she has never done it to me and I watch her place a lump of salt carefully in a particular spot inside her mouth and I do not know she is pressing it against an eroded stump to try and destroy its relentless pain, I only see pain move in waves between her hands as she clutches her head. Sometimes she even uses a cloth soaked in kerosene. This is poison, she tells me, never you do this! but she holds it inside her mouth with her finger until tears run down her cheeks and after that she spits it out, washes her mouth with water from our pail and spits: beize is something too horrible to ask about, or to explain. It means something like killing.

  I tell her, reasonably enough, “I want them too. Coaldale teeth.”

  Behind me Onkel Fout says quietly, “No no, you have all the luck. Born in Canada, the youngest, you’ll never need them.”

  Before they leave for their own evening chores, our Sunday afternoon visitors will eat Vaspa with us—the Mennonite custom of “late afternoon tea,” which, Onkel Fout has told us, the fancy Englische do too only with a different name—taking turns crowded around the kitchen table where the screen door offers some protection from summer mosquitoes. Tweeback, doubled buns, to eat and Pripps, roasted barley brewed like coffee, to drink, probably with rhubarb stems cooked to a dessert puree, the first edible spring plant to sting your winter-blah mouth, but add a heaping spoon of sugar to your bowl, or even two—“Benjeltje! Dauts jenuag!” You little imp, that’s enough! and a slap hovering above my hard head—with a thick swash of whipped cream and you could never gulp enough.

  Eaten with Vaspa Tweeback, those inexpressible buns baked of butter and flour, two cups of one to ten cups of the other and mixed between Mam’s powerful hands in milk and boiled-potato water, a food carried over four centuries from the Netherlands to Poland/Prussia to Russia/Ukraine, often roasted to preserve them for long journeys over land or sea, gnawed dry or dipped in Pripps or tea or coffee if there ever was any money to buy them. And now when neighbours visited here in bush Canada, Tweeback could be opened, parted completely, and both parts skimmed over with wild cranberry or pincherry jelly, blueberry jam. My first solid food: roasted Tweeback crushed to crumbs and mixed with warm milk: Tjreemel senn uck Broot, crumbs are also bread, and the enduring proverb of the poor: Broot schleit den Hunga doot: bread strikes all hunger dead.

  Our house in the clearing on the CPR knoll was built of white spruce my father and brothers cut on our 160 acres of bush. They selected the trees tall and straight from various spruce stands scattered among the dense poplars, cut them down with a two-man crosscut saw and dragged them through bush to the knoll with our team of horses; nothing to pay but sweat. Peeling was easy: the trees were so strong with sap that a strip cut loose at one end could
often be tugged off the complete length of log, round golden wood drying in the sun. It seems I was born while they were notching and stacking the cured logs up into walls, round by round, until they reached eight feet and could lay the ceiling beams across the width of them.

  In a family photo taken several years later, the log ends of those ceiling beams protrude from the house wall, and clearly the roof rafters above these beams are thin peeled poles as well, probably black spruce or lodgepole pine. From the width of the two windows you can estimate the house was either twenty-two or twenty-four feet long, with an eight-foot lean-to kitchen added on the eastern gable end. No picture shows the width of the gable. The house is eleven logs high to the ceiling beams, and either two or three logs above that to the pole rafters and the roof of tarpaper and rough-cut slabs, so my bath memory could be right: there was plenty of space for sleeping under the roof, and with six children at home (Tina married Gust Fiedler and they moved onto his homestead the winter before our house was built) the two oldest boys at least would have wanted to.

  My mother told me she bore me in a log hut, a temporary, first-summer shack with earth for a floor they built on the site before starting the house, so they could move onto the homestead in 1934 as fast as possible. The hut stood in the hollow west of the knoll and later, she said, was used as our chicken barn. My birth certificate states I was born at the Canadian geographical co-ordinates of “S. W. 31–52–17 West 3rd” on Thursday, October 4, 1934, and they must have been building the house very fast so late in the season, perhaps they just barely got the roof slabbed horizontally over the pole rafters, tarpapered and slabbed again vertically and the walls chinked with plaster in time to move in before winter hit. If they were very lucky the frost and snow came really late that fall, and my three sisters, aged ten, seven and three, would have helped make the mud plaster in the way my father had learned on the Russian steppes, how to mix water and clay with straw and cow manure and grass by tramping it out in a mud pit with their little bare feet, bare legs shivering under their skirts lifted in the autumn air of wet mud and coming cold. There is unbelievably much labour to building a house by hand in Saskatchewan bush, so you can live safely through the long northern darkness of winter with a daughter who is often ill and a final, squalling, son.

  But no matter how hard or long the work, you needed to buy almost nothing. You could even work at the Fiedlers’ sawmill to earn the floorboards and roof slabs, so only the windows, the tarpaper and nails and stovepipes actually cost money. And, Gott sei Dank, thanks be to God, there was also no need to build house walls from Pautzen, clay bricks, as my father did in 1917 after the Russian war offensive collapsed into disaster and he rode freight trains back to the treeless steppe of Romanovka village, and built, at the landless-worker end of the settlement, an entire house of sun-dried clay bricks for himself, Mam and their two infants. Though Canadian bush was hard labour to clear for grain fields, it did provide superb wood for farm buildings, endless fuel to keep you warm in winter and dense shelter from the wind and driving, white-out blizzards of the open steppe.

  And here and there on our quarter square mile of mostly tall trembling aspen lay small water sloughs hidden by willows that nubbled into silver pussy willows in spring long before leaves appeared; and also clumps of paper birch. Birch, Pah said, like the great forests where he had served for three years as a Mennonite conscientious objector during the Great War on the Kiva River near Zurskoi Lienichstvo in central Siberia; cluster birch I would see all my Canadian life spraying up from the blue silence of snow, suddenly there, like hoarfrost spirits among the winter aspen.

  The south wall of that CPR house on the knoll was the background for the first photograph of our entire family.

  Angled against the logs so as to face into the light, Mam and Pah sit on high-backed chairs whose carved rungs are visible between their legs. We seven children circle around and between them under the overhang of the pole-and-slab roof. The slab door of the kitchen stands open behind my sister Helen’s left shoulder, beyond her face squinting into the evening sun. The heavy shadow of the photographer—someone who seems wrapped in a heavy cloak—is thicker than any of us; the shadow reaches across the bare foreground and up the right side of the picture, it cuts a black angle through Helen’s legs just above her ankles and the shapeless bump of its head blots the corner of her skirt. Helen will be the first of us to die, in late March when World War II in Europe is at last coming to an end, and thirty years before our father seated beside her, who will be next. The shoulder bulge of the long shadow barely misses Pah’s left foot so close to Helen’s right, but his large worker hands lying on his knees are already balled into fists, and ready.

  The click of a box camera exposed my slightly unfocused family in a place and position no memory could retain so absolutely. An image to fit in your palm, several aged cracks across its surface. All proper in our Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church best, Pah and Abe and Dan in suits and ties, Tina, Mary Helen and Liz in dresses and stockings, Mam in a flowered dress with triangular dark collar and a black cloche hat whose buttons shine above her forehead lifted high into the sun. No one faces the low light as openly as she.

  I stand at her knee. Or it may be I am being held tight against her knee, because my mother’s right leg is angled against my chest, her right arm tight around my back, her right hand grips my right elbow and her left hand holds my right hand down on her thigh as if, were she to relax for an instant, I would vanish. Aus du tjleen weascht, she often told me, when you were small you never crawled; you walked, you ran before eight months.

  Tjleene Tjinja klunje o’pe Schoot,

  Groote Tjinja klunje op’em Hoat.

  Little children trample your lap,

  Grown children trample your heart.

  In our meagre photo collection from various times on two continents, this is the first in which I appear. It must have been an important event—someone’s first box camera?—because we have four photos taken on the same spot on the same day.

  In the other three photos, all without the shadow, I have been released, small me, to stand on one of the ornate chairs. Once I am flanked by Abe and Dan, who are so tall that my head barely reaches the crooks of their elbows; then again I am surrounded by six girls, three of whom are my youngest sisters but the other three I do not recognize. All the girls look into the camera, except Helen, who is exactly my height on the chair and looking at me, her mouth open. Perhaps she is already telling me a story.

  In the fourth photo taken that day, I stand alone on the chair. My mouth is opening, my right arm rising as if I am about to orate. Compared to the standard height of a chair, I could be seventy-five centimetres—thirty inches—tall. How old is that?

  I contemplate the four photos; gradually I am drawn to my oldest sister, who appears only once, in the picture with the shadow. Tina stands at the back, so slender between Abe and Dan, her face tilted down and it seems her eyes are closed. Or it is possible, to judge from the angle of her head, that she is looking down over Mam’s shoulder at me, and it comes to me that memory in these images is like the ineffability of the love she and I gave each other, oldest and youngest, always separated except for a few days, or a few hours, of visit year after year; a love we felt that needed no comment or overt demonstration.

  There were either twenty or nineteen years between us: twenty if you accept the “1914” written on Mam’s February 1930 German refugee camp identity papers, nineteen if you accept Tina’s personal word. “Anyways,” she shrugged, “what does it matter, a year so far back?” She was simply Katerina and Abram Wiebe’s first child, born in Village Number Eight, Romanovka, Orenburg Mennonite Colony, near the Ural Mountains in eastern European Russia, and I, their last child, was born in a place that was nameless but profusely numbered, the southwest quarter of Section 31, Township 52, Range 17, west of the 3rd meridian in Saskatchewan, Canada. Born on the same latitude, 53.5 degrees north, but on opposite bends of the globe, she October 25, 19
14, and I October 4, 1934.

  And there is, as well, a photograph of infant Tina standing on a chair. But taken in a studio, in Russia. She balances herself, not as I do against the chair back, but by hooking her right hand into the cummerbund of a woman who stands beside her in a floor-length dress trimmed with white lace, her hair and eyes black, her face calmly beautiful, someone I would never recognize as my careworn mother. But when I receive this picture in 1997 from the aged daughter of Mam’s half-sister, who has lived out her Soviet exile life in “stony Tajikistan,” as she calls it, she declares that this sweet, elegant woman truly is my mother at twenty, and the tiny girl on the chair my oldest sister.

  Tina herself was staggered by the photo. She saw it for the first time in her memory the year before she died at the age of eighty-four. When we together pondered where our mother might have gone to get such a studio portrait—it must have been in the city of Orenburg over a hundred kilometres away, a journey possible only by horse and wagon—Tina thought it likely was taken to send to Pah, who served out the First World War in the Forstei, the Czar’s forestry service, and who had never yet seen his first child.

  The young, handsome woman and man in these photographs were my parents, married in Romanovka on January 19, 1914; Tina was born there in October 1914, and she married Gustav Fiedler on January 15, 1934, in stony bush Canada. I was born the following October, so my mother must have conceived me about the time of Tina’s wedding. Seven children in twenty years, all evenly spaced with never a miscarriage or infant death: how did my mother, working ceaselessly and often ill with stomach, leg and teeth ailments, manage that? Most of her contemporaries who survived middle age gave birth fifteen times in twenty years with barely half their babies living past infancy. Mam was not one to talk about such things as birth control: the birth of children was not “controlled,” they were “a gift from God,” and after I became a parent myself and jokingly told her I thought that nevertheless she had had quite a bit to do with it, to say nothing of Pah, she turned to the potatoes frying on her stove with a curt, “Jung, sie doch jescheit.” Boy, do be decent.