Free Of This Earth by Rudy Wiebe Page A

with a tiny instrument could, no matter what the land’s unalterable physical meanderings, quarter it down smaller than square miles, notch its crested trees with road allowances across long glacial eskers and swamps and dense poplars and thicker spruce, over water and valley straight as the eye could see no matter where the eventual trail would be forced to turn, so that horses driven by people could actually haul loaded wagons down ravines, around bottomless muskegs, up steep hills. And imagine they could declare: This land belongs to me! An iron peg half an inch thick hammered into boreal forest: if you can ever find it to take away, you may have to endure seven years in a six-by-eight-foot cell.
    Our father lived his last forty-five years in Canada and laughter was always his best evasion for ugly memory. “Nä, nä, nijch hia!” No no, not here. No police ever pounded on our door in the dead of night. In Speedwell I remember seeing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police once, when I was nine. The two scarlet men turned their crested cruiser slowly into our yard in bright sunlight—we had heard it coming for half a mile—and we all came forward to meet them. They got out and both put on their hats perfectly. A neighbour had applied for citizenship and, after a few questions confirming certain facts, which we children translated both ways, the policemen accepted the hospitality of a glass of cool water from the well, folded themselves back into their car, and drove away.

    On our new farm I gradually became aware of the powerful differences between my parents. It was not just the miserable house and all the money and time we needed to make this Koht, this hovel, livable—as we did—at five or six you do not think about such things. We lived where we lived, and though this farmyard had no slope to gather speed rolling a discarded wheel down towards the corral where thecows were being milked in a haze of mosquito-smudge smoke, this yard did have more wide, flat space with two tall poplars to centre it and a log laid crooked between their branches from which you could hang ropes for a long swing, or where a dead pig could be hoisted up with a pulley and sliced open. But the family felt different now that the three older children were gone most of the time and our parents had to work more closely together on our growing farm.
    Tina and Gust had three preschool children by then and were working a homestead themselves, three bush miles away. Abe and Dan, like most Speedwell young men, “worked out” from early spring to late fall in the beet fields of southern Alberta, earning hard cash for the family; during the winter Abe went to Bible school while Dan went logging for the Lobes. But better weather, good crops on better land as Canada’s Depression economy shifted into World War II called for decisions about buying another cow to raise more calves—did we have enough cows to keep our own bull?—or more sows, to sell more pigs, or ways to breed better horses.
    Jeld, Jeld schrijcht de gaunse Welt.
    Money, money, screams the whole world.
    By 1941–42 there was more money, even in our bush world, but, Mam said, our Pah could not always be trusted with it.

    Money had nothing to do with how they met. In 1897 Russia, in the cemetery of their Orenburg Mennonite Colony village, tiny Katerina Knelsen stood weeping as the coffin of her mother Susanna Knelsen née Loewen, aged twenty-five, was lowered into the muddy ground. And then Abram Wiebe, the Jakob Wiebe boy from the farmstead across the village street from the Knelsens, came beside her and comforted her. She was two years old, he nine.
    Exactly a century later I am for the first time in that village, once named Number Eight Romanovka after the Czar. Behind the single long street lined by worn houses, sheds and unpruned orchards and immense trees scruffed with massive raven’s nests, the cemetery lies on steppes opening south to a horizon of the gloriously folded Number