Peace Shall Destroy Many (12 page)

The Wiens’ farm being nearest the haymeadow, Thom knew he should have been out first, but he was not; Pete had rattled by while he was coming out to hook up. Star and
Duster now trotted in the wagon-tracks across the Block lease to the next quarter north, which Wiens had leased for the past ten years. Farther north and south other Mennonite families had land for haying, so that in the middle of summer half the people of Wapiti and Beaver districts laboured the length of Eight Mile Lake putting up their winter feed. Thom could hear the clatter of Pete’s mower cutting into the last strip of hay bordering the rushes of the swampy water that stretched in a wrig
gling line down the middle of the once-huge lake. The long stacks settled here and there, waiting for the winter that would whittle them down one by one. Thom thought of Pete and himself hauling hay each day, of the cold, and of the hoar-breathing horses. Would he be there to haul? Passing a stack, he saw Pete had halted; he aimed his team across the meadow towards the bending figure.

The rhythm of the horses’ hoofs on the stubble was like dry bread under a rolling-pin. Stems popped, dew flashing in sun-flung crescents before the running feet. It was too wet for anything except cutting. At the hay-edge he pulled up, swung over the rack-rail, and crunched along the cleared border of the single swath.

“Hi, Pete.”

“Hi, Thom. Thought you’d never make it.” Pete finished kicking the great jumble of jammed hay over the bar into the swath. His blue-denim trousers were black to the knee.

“Some of us have work to do at home too. Pretty wet, isn’t it?”

“Almost too.” Pete brushed a long series of spring-green insects from the cutter-bar. “Think I’ll walk ahead and see how far we can go. Papa said go as far as possible.”

The youths passed the horses who, swishing their tails idly,
dreamed belly-deep in the slough-hay Thom, each step into taller grass, could feel the wet coming through his trouser leg. He paused, looking at the cut in the trees across the marsh before them, then back at t
he slash half a mile behind them. “Seems to me you’re edging over, Pete. Want our hay too?”

“Never know—those extra two fork-fulls may see us through the winter.” The yellow-throated blackbirds leaped hoarsely as they neared the rushes. Even while treading on the knife-like grass, which they knocked down in showers of dew, the ground began to ease away under the men’s feet. When they looked back, water seeped into the footprints while grass-blades bent ponderously erect, one by one.

“No good. The horses would go out of sight. Besides, it would never dry.”

“I guess we can go about as far as here, but it angles east sharply just in a ways. Our chunk is big yet.”

“Papa says there’s about as much hay on your one quarter as our two.”

“This year maybe. Last year the water was higher—that big stretch of ours is low. You’ll be done before us.”

“Even without Louis, it’s gone better than Papa hoped at first.”

“Elizabeth really worked.” For a moment Thom thought of her, tramping and setting stacks like a man for weeks. He ventured, “Isn’t it a bit hard—?”

Pete nodded his head slowly. “In a way, I guess. But Papa says that women in Russia worked like that all the time. She and Ma did when we first came to Wapiti too. If you’ve got stock, you’ve got to feed it.” Thom could not deny that. If it was true that there was nothing to the Mennonite life beyond hard work, as the English mentioned now and then, it was
especially true in the Block family. He thought fleetingly of worn Mrs. Block. And of his own mother. Hacking a farm out of the wilderness demanded women strong as men,
but once comparative security was reached—in work where did virtue end and cupidity begin? He could not remember anyone ever having shown him the line: it was never even mentioned.

He glanced at Pete, who stood looking south, absorbed in gauging the contour of the marsh and how far he should stay away from the seeping water. After a moment they pushed back, their teams waiting, the still-cool day seeming to hesitate over the ancient lake-bottom to see what they would do with it. Thom stumbled suddenly, feeling something abrupt against his boot. He bent to see. Pete, peering with interest, said,

“Shouldn’t be any rocks here in the swamp,” as Thom felt the broad turn of the horn. He tugged hard and it came up with moss and roots dangling. The lower nose had rotted away; the roll of bone at the skull-top and the thick jutting horns were all that remained.

“Must have been a wood-buffalo. Man, look at that, eh!” he held what was left of the skull at arm’s length, a finger on each horn-tip. They looked. The top was a perfect bow-line turning almost back on itself. One horn was clean, the other mud-grained, but both were scarred with rot. Below the gnarled horn only a broken suggestion of the great blade of the skull remained. Thom gripped the clean horn at the base with his hand and, huge as they were, his fingers did not go half-way round. He wished he had seen that horn when it gleamed in ponderous dignity below the massive shoulder.

“How long has it been lying here, you think, Pete?”

“Don’t know. Not too long here—the water would have rotted it quick.”

“These haven’t been around for at least fifty years. Must have worked its way in with the spring run-off, year by year. Odd you haven’t hit it with the mower.” Staring at the broken skull, its heft heavy in his hands, a vista opened for Thom. Why was Canada called a “young” country? White men reckoned places young or old as they had had time to re-mould them to their own satisfaction. As often, to ruin. The memory of the half-Indian woman he had met last winter in a house where he would never have dreamt to find her forced itself upon him. As he thought unwillingly, the aura of impenetrable consciousness of her own being that she carried like a garment somehow enveloped him, now as then. His enforced habit of avoiding that scene asserted itself and, still holding the skull, he welcomed the thought of Two Poles at the picnic. Perhaps some lone ancestor of his had lain all day under the willows with the insects and bugs, spear or gun in hand, waiting for this buffalo to graze closer.

Pete moved forward and Thom followed. The horses were shaking their heads as the sun tipped higher over the meadow.

“You know, Pete, it’s funny. There are stacks of European history books to read, yet the Indians—a people living in nearly half the world—lived here for thousands of years, and we don’t know a single thing that happened to them except some old legend muddled in the memory of an old crone. A whole world lost. Not one remembered word of how generations upon generations lived and died.”

“If you look at what’s left on the reserve, we haven’t missed much. A couple o’ them came to buy eggs yesterday. Told Papa they were out digging seneca roots. This morning we were missing five chickens. Just a bunch of thieves now.
Until the law came West, Papa says they were nothing but packs of cut-throats: whoever killed most was greatest. They would kill now too, only they’re scared of the Mounties.”

They were beside Pete’s mower then. Abruptly, Thom hurled the skull as far as he could into their own quarter where the hay quivered untouched.

Pete said, “You’ll run into it with your mower now. Why did you do that?”

“That’s okay.” He strode to his waiting team. “I better get cutting.”

The sun blazed towards its zenith. On the clattering mower, Thom squinted through the shimmering heat that rippled the distant walls of trees. Wherever his eye probed over the meadow, blotches of figures moved: cutting, raking or pitching hay, bucking it towards their stacks, setting stacks, beginning others. He was part of the world of work that eddied all about him, a world he could comprehend by instinct. A hawk soared in lurking majesty.

Relax as he would, Pete’s callosity crept ever back into consciousness. For a deep look into a uniqueness of the Canadian world to be blacked out by conventional triviality! So they were missing five chickens! Any silly hen could repair that. It seemed to Thom he had offered a wide new world that they could explore together and
his friend had worse than ignored it. They had once had such times! They had spent every Sunday last summer together. His mind reverted inevitably to the early fall, almost a year ago now, when they had spent the Sunday afternoon inspecting Block’s new steellug tractor. Though he was conscious that he could somehow never return to such a Sunday afternoon, in his memories it
remained a delight. Even when Pete, having rallied his courage to advance on the house and ask, had been refused permission to start the tractor, yet the pleasure had grown as, in the shelter of the granary, they had cranked to test the “kick,” muscled the heavy steel steering wheel around, and in every imaginable way edged to the very point of starting it. When Mrs. Block halloed from the house, the signal for changing and getting the cows, they had paused, their only white shirts grease-streaked and Pete’s forehead slightly gashed where he had stumbled against a lug, and grinned at each other. Where now was that friendship?

Sharply, he recalled that Joseph had arrived in Wapiti a week later. And that now, with the Bible class at school, he no longer had time to visit on Sunday. The mower-clamour called him back. He had to acknowledge that now his own lightning annoyance which, in the moment of throwing the skull he had scorned to disguise, concerned him more than Pete’s dullness. Anger: in any slightly rousing situation it clawed at him. He looked up at the circling hawk. Anger like the eagle that descended daily on—he could not recall the name of the Greek giant. Memories flooded him of his school days when, ransacking the scrawny library for books, he had dug into some pale-blue booklets buried on the bottom shelf and discovered Gr
eek mythology. He remembered reading, crouched in the awkward desk as the sun flashed on the snow outside, repelled yet unable to leave those blue books. There were only three, and the stories, in their gruesome fascination, made no sense to him. But now one opened into meaning. The giant, defying all Omnipotence and stealing divine fire to bring to man, still meant nothing, but the punishment: the robber crossed gigantically upon a mountain’s scraggy finger
and the eagle’s daily ravaging of the writhing body, seemed to him suddenly like his anger forever tearing his own Christianity that was chained at its mercy.

He shook his head dizzily on the bumpy mower. The image horrified him, yet it fitted with fearsome perfection. Perhaps that was what a myth was for: to show man to himself; if he knew enough about himself, could he comprehend the whole story? Lifting his cap, he rumpled his sweat-soaked hair. A man might go crazy in this sun: it seemed he was already, trying to fit heathen stories into Christianity. He shuddered in his sweat.

The mower staggered and balked abruptly in the tall hay, the cutter-bar wedging back hard. As he jerked quickly on the reins, he heard a crack.

“Whoa, whoa there! Back Star! Back!”

He slipped the machine out of gear, slid off and kicked the hay aside. His foot hit hard, and he cleared the shrouding hay with his hand. A gnarled tree-root stuck up, jammed between knife-tooth and finger. It had snapped the latter off at the base.

In the silence of his mower, he could hear the nearing clatter of another. He looked up to see Pastor Lep
p cutting towards him some distance away on the Lepps’ quarter. As he unhooked the traces so that some inadvertent jerk of the horses would not injure him, he heard the other machine stop. He was loosening the pitman when the preacher crunched up, smiling.

“Good morning, Thom. Troubles?”

“Morning. I don’t know how that root got so far into the slough, but it broke off a finger. Seems like it didn’t bother the knife.”

“A person never knows how trouble gets around the way it does, but it manages to keep most people occupied.” Thom
had the pitman unbolted and the Pastor hunched down beside him. With a heave, they jerked the knife a great length out of its groove. Thom said,

“That’s enough. The break is near the top. Thanks. It would have been hard, alone.”

“Yes.” The Pastor stood erect, watching Thom scrabble in his kit for a spare finger. “Everything’s easier, done together. Maybe your knife’s bent.”

“Could be. Do you think we should draw it out altogether?”

“Yes. And it would be easier to work on that finger if you had the bar upright.”

They heaved in unison again. The older man said, “You go ahead with the finger—I’ll check this.”

“Okay.” Thom went around and lifted the bar erect. They worked.

The Pastor said, “There’s just a bit of a kink. Odd: the finger must have snapped very easily. T
he hammer should fix this.” Having laid the viciously gleaming mower-knife on the pole, he rapped strongly, then sighted again. “Should do.” He leaned it there and went round to where Thom, a knuckle barked from a slipped wrench, was tightening the dull finger into its shining phalanx.

Without warning, without looking up, Thom said, “Pastor, what are the traditions of the fathers?”

Startled, the older man said nothing, then, “Why do you ask? Surely you, having grown up here, know about—”

The short and almost chilly question brought Thom to himself. The Pastor’s friendly assistance and workday clothes had not invited rudeness.

“I’m sorry, sir, I just asked the question out of the blue like that. It was rather rude of me. But living here all my life is just
the problem. I’ve grown up here and readily talk about acting in the traditions of the fathers, but when I think about it, I don’t know really what that means. For instance, our fathers never knew Indians so they could not tell us how to behave towards them. How do we act according to the fathers in many things of which they knew nothing?”

Lepp looked thoughtfully across the bird-haunted marsh. “Odd you should ask me now, Thom. I’ve thought about this a great deal, sitting on the plow, the mower. It seems to me we have to organize our ideas a little.” In the sunlight, the wide hat-brim shadowed the long jaw. Thom rapped the bolt, listening. “The fundamental teaching our fathers followed was that the Bible is God’s recorded revelation to man. Whatever commands the believer reads in it are sacred to him. If Christ in its pages co
mmanded them to turn the other cheek, then they did so.”