Free Of This Earth by Rudy Wiebe

that during the first rain we discovered disaster. The only dry place inside the house was under the oilcloth of the kitchen table. I have a memory of crouching there with Liz while Mam and Mary and Helen run around placing pails, basins, bowls, cups, under the worst of the steady, or pouring, drips. The twisted floorboards with their wide cracks in all three rooms were covered with utensils.
    Our mother loved order; her house was always opp’jiriemt, cleaned up, and she was very unhappy at having to live and work in such an endless mess. But she accepted that we had to leave our new, well-built CPR house, its high upstairs for sleeping under a watertight roof, for these shacks because of the Franka fields. There were three, about sixty acres wrestled clear of the bush; the largest opened east of the house, upward on a slope tilted into the spring sun, and beyond a small draw to the north, where water ran through willows in the spring, lay another field almost as large. The third bordered the open farmyard on two sides and part of it was the garden, convenient and as large as you wanted to plant it close around the house.
    The barn of slim logs hunched even lower than the house, its roof was flat and covered with sod thatgrew bush weeds as high as our grain fields in summer, and leaked long after any rain ended. There was no well on the yard, but a slough good for watering cattle lay a hundred yards beyond the trees behind the barn, and a seepage well dug beside it filtered swamp water that was drinkable—if that was all you had. Pah insisted our Pripps, the roasted, ground barley brew all Mennonites drank instead of unaf-fordable coffee or tea, for him tasted even better made with water from that well. But it was a very long carry in pails to the house, and cattle heaving themselves through spongy moss to reach open water in sloughs sometimes get stuck; if they sink to their heavy bellies, they may struggle until they disappear in brown water seeping up around them before anyone knows they’re in trouble. Certainly no cow can save another from a Saskatchewan slough or muskeg; nor any unharnessed horse.

    Pah loved that land. He sits on our eight-foot disk with reins taut, the four horses alert and ready: the matched sorrels Prince and Jerry, which were his pride, hitched on the outside with wide Bell and her white-faced yearling Floss between them. The sod-roofed barn squats in the distance, the poplar trees along the horizon are sprigged without leaves, but he is already disking the big field beside the house, cutting and turning last year’s stubble over into a new seedbed. The season is so early he still wears his knee-high winter felt boots inside low rubbers. Surrounded by grey soil and mulched clumps of straw, with only two fist-sized stones visible anywhere. The Franka place, as we always called it even after we had moved away from it too, on the southeast quarter of Section 9, Township 53, Range 17, west of the 3rd meridian.
    We lived there from the fall I turned four until the summer before I turned eight. I of course didn’t know its legal geographical coordinates, nor saw the surveyor mound already unnoticeable under fallen leaves and young aspen, its black iron rod pounded square with those numbers incised into it, and the warning:
    It is unlawful to remove this marker.
Maximum sentence: 7 years imprisonment.
    Not red “wrath” from henceforth and forevermore as the stranger had painted, but scary enough; in its cut iron as foreign as sudden words on stone.
    Years later Dan found such a corner marker for me. And I certainly felt no implied threat; much more how utterly flimsy the thin pin seemed poked away in this massive, incomprehensible bush; as if, in a flit of surveyor passing quick as the
ping
of its pounding in, the pin’s very minuteness could assert possession on this folded earth and force it into deliberate mile grids like the roads built by Roman Empire engineers; as if a single human being