Peace Shall Destroy Many (15 page)

Annamarie, the fading hoof-beats drumming in her ear, looked after Thom’s tall figure retreating to
the wagon with the berries, and she could only think, You’ve started, Thom. But you will have to let go more—much more.

T
HIS IS THE TRANS-CANADA NETWORK OF THE CBC. CBQ, SASKATCHEWAN
.

“We bring you now a re-broadcast of the
BBC
reports on the liberation of Paris. This is a compilation of various programs heard during the past three days. The program is transcribed.”

Overseas static blared, then martial music, triumphant and stately, poured out of the brown radio. Thom stretched and twisted the volume lower, conscious of Hal sleeping above him with only the saggy paper of the living-room ceiling and the floor-boards above to absorb the sound. Head profiled against the western window by the sun sinking livid behind black spruce, he sat in the worn corner-rocker, listening. Up from the floor, from the depths of the corners, shrouding the organ-hulk, edging up the sewing machine with its crested flower-pots by the double window, wrapping the squat heater next to the bedroom door, along the tin-pipe reaching into the
ceiling, crept the summer darkness. Only at a blotch of sunlight did it hesitate, tentative as a leaf-flicker on the whitewashed plaster, then moment by long moment it seeped in darkeningly. His eyes unseeing on a fading sky beyond the silhouetted flowers, Thom listened.

A high English voice was speaking: “At six o’clock this morning of the 25th of August—a
day to be remembered—we were in an American jeep behind General Leclerc’s armoured car, moving into Paris. Ahead of us, the tanks cleaned up a few pockets of the enemy. By nine o’clock we drove through the Porte d’Orleans. We were in Paris at last! It is quite impossible to imagine how the French people …”

Meaningless names shrilled from the radio. The Germans had finally been pried from Paris. As Old Lamont had said in the store, gaunt arm reaching for the baking soda on the shelf, “Germany kaput!” As if he were spitting. And Block echoed, entering at that moment, “It looks that way,” regret faint in his voice. Thom felt the regret too, for he knew his family had been among the few last to escape the Communists in 1930 because of German government pressure. But that had been President Hindenburg, not the Hitler regime. Yet regret persisted, faintly.

The Deacon would doubtless be speaking a great deal in church tonight. For a moment Thom wished he was twenty years old. When he thought of all he knew about what was being threshed through that evening, he could almost have laughed at his staying home because he was too young, supposedly, to know about the problems that arose where a man and a woman were concerned. As if at one magic moment, you could suddenly freely discuss people’s intimate affairs. They had to set the line somewhere, he supposed. How Mom hated
the meetings, where, layer by layer, private affairs were scratched open until only enough was left hidden to provide certain imaginations with lurid possibilities. But she had gone, with Pa and Margret, for the church had to decide what stand it would take. And he, within six months of the age, was sitting at hom
e while knowing more of the matter than any church members. They would soon know enough.

“ … merci, merci, merci!” A massive swelling of sound like the prayer of an innumerable multitude, then the voice of the announcer: “Those were the people of Paris, shouting their welcome to us. I wish you could see them! All around the square below me, everywhere embracing soldiers and newspapermen, tears streaming down their faces. And everywhere the solid chant, ‘Merci.’ It is en
ough to make …”

Not understanding the word, it seemed oddly out of place to Thom when they had just been freed from four years of German control—but he could not concentrate. His own thoughts, liberated at last, dominated. Both he and Herman Paetkau had wanted it known what Herman had done, but neither of them expected it to be seven long months before another Mennonite visited Herman and found out. All the breeds knew, for Herman was their friend, but they never told the Mennonites anything. Knowing the Mennonites’ rigidity regarding man-woman relations, the breeds had probably had many a laugh at Mennonite expense during those seven months. Thom could still see Herman’s face that frozen day in February when he had ridden into the bachelor’s yard to warm himself after the futile hunting of wolves that wandered around the rim of their corral every night. Thom could not remember having been in that yard more than twice in his life. In the northwest corner of the district, a mile beyond even the
breed homesteads, the bachelor lived on his half-section for reasons Thom could not imagine. Herman, having heard the dog bark and the crack of frozen saddle-leather, tumbled from his snow-
heaped cabin, pulling on his sheep-skin parka, face open with welcome. And Thom had perhaps spoken to him ten times in his life. Not only the cold made him clumsy in dismounting and leading Nance into the smoking barn and rubbing her down while Herman broke into a bundle of green-feed. It was amazement at the hospitality.

“That’s good. Give her a nice rest where it’s warm. Now come in and we’ll thaw you out with a cup of coffee.” Herman led across the small yard and Thom slid off his rubbers to step from the lean-to through the board door that Herman drew open and there, putting a stick of wood into the top of the stove as she turned to smile at him entering, had been Madeleine Moosomin.

“ … Eiffel Tower, and the great open area before it, the crowds were almost overwhelming the small cavalcade of cars. High above, the Stars and Stripes and the Tricolor waved side by side. The Germans were almost rooted out. Only here and there a sniper fired from a window, and immediately F.F.I. would fire back with their old rifles while others rushed in. No sniper could stop the crowds from spreading. A little girl handed us a Tricolor as we eased past, and one of the soldiers in the car leaned over and kissed her laughing face. The people were cheering, ‘Merci!’ ”

Thom had gone in and sat down at Herman’s gesture. He opened his parka, bewildered. It was not that he did not know the woman, for when he entere
d grade one she had been
struggling in an upper class in Wapiti and had left school shortly after. For years, behind barns the white riff-raff of Beaver district had spewed rumours, smirking, of why she did not marry. Thom had seen her only occasionally, at a Christmas concert or a picnic, where her clean healthy appearance always surprised him. He had assumed, with the other Mennonites who noticed, that she was too young to show her degeneracy; that the years would clamp down in abrupt harshness as they did on all half-Indian faces. Yet there she stood at the stove as if she belonged.

Herman said, his voice warm, “I guess Madeleine being here rather balls you up. It’s okay, we both understand. She’s been here since the blizzard in January.”

Thom ventured quickly, “It’s just that I figured you’d be alone and, since I was so far from home and about chilled through—those crazy wolves—”

“Goodness sakes, you’re welcome! Don’t get me wrong. Haven’t the nerve myself on a hard day like this to ride out after those robbers, though they bother me more than you people. I haven’t had a Mennonite visit me since a good while before Christmas.”

“What?” Amazed. “They don’t come to see you—not on Sunday afternoon?”

“Oh, they usually have relatives or close friends to visit. I’m old, and a bachelor—or rather was” (with a ringing laugh) “—and it’s a long way up here.”

“It’s not really so far, just three miles from the school—”

“Far enough if you don’t want to come. But never mind—you came. Must be about the first time—no, once David came out years ago, just before he left for India, and you came along then, a little shaver. I was sorry in a way when David left—sorry
for myself, I guess, mostly. Everyone must do the work given him.”

They talked for some minutes of David and his wife. Because of the war, instead of returning to Canada on furlough, they had had to accept a brief holiday in northern India, and were now on their second five-year term. And as they talked, Thom could not contain his wonder that all the Mennonites, even his own parents, seemed to avoid the lonely bachelor. Herman was a grown man when he came to Canada, thirty-seven or -eight years old, as Wiens told him evasively later; he really belonged among them. And Herman, calmly smiling as the coffee-breath richened in the room, had told him.

“… General de Gaulle’s day, this 26th of August, 1944.” The radio voice was different now. “While the shooting of snipers and the French return-fire is heard down the streets to the right, the General has laid two wreaths of gladioli on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Arc de Triomphe. They are marching now toward Notre Dame.” After an interval, the voice changed again. “The procession is coming down the Champs Élysées. At the head is General de Gaulle, marching briskly. They are now entering cars to proceed to the Cathedral. Cars piled high with people, tears and laughter evident everywhere. Listen to the cheering—” And the great voice of the Parisian people blos
somed in the room. Thom could not help but listen. To be free after four years. The idea held little meaning for him.

His fingers running the familiar groove in the wooden rocker-arm which he had ground there with a long nail once many
years before during a small-boyish fit of temper, he remembered Herman over his coffee in the scrubbed kitchen. “It’s a long time to live fourteen years alone, even in the bush of Canada. But you get used to it—or think you do, and then something happens and you know that you’re really not at all.” Madeleine sat on a stool beside the red stove knitting, her serenity like his mother’s late on a winter Saturday night when the heater cracked, and they all had finished bathing in the tin tub on the kitchen floor and the buns lay under the clean tea-towel in a great heap on the side-table, high, where Hal could not sneak the brownest as handily as he might wish. “You know that storm about a month ago? It hit here just like that!” and Herman slammed his hands together. “The Moosomins get milk from me all the time. Madeleine usually came to get it every two days or so. She came early on Wednesday because the storm looked bad in the north and they needed the milk badly for the baby—Jacq’s, I think, isn’t it?—but that storm hit with a screech while I was filling her pail, and I had trouble getting her horse to the barn for shelter, leave alone her riding home.” Herman thought for a moment, then added, “She liked it here, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” She spoke gently, without looking up. It was the first word she spoke, but her silence
was not really noticeable for she seemed to be taking part in their conversation.

Thom, sitting now in the living room with an occasional lost mosquito droning on the screens in the last flicker of day, wrestling with that day when he had sat in the small kitchen, brilliant from sun on snow, caught a vestige of the human depth the bachelor had suppressed into a sentence. Herman had lived alone since his aunt and uncle died in their first year at Wapiti. For him to have another person in the house, one
who did not leave hurriedly but peeped into his neat cupboards and fingered the cotton window-curtains, a woman who had just been there as slowly he must have grown conscious of her whom, as he had laughingly put it, he had before merely considered as the “Moosomin-girl-who-gets-the-milk,” the raging storm must suddenly have seemed a thrust into humanity As he watched her, perhaps with the comb from his wash-stand soothing her black hair to gentleness about her face, the deft movements of her woman’s shape began to stir the long-buried longings in him, longings whose very existence he had probably forgotten.

The remembered look on Herman’s face had said that, and more. What the “more” was, Thom could not capture, but Herman’s words hammered now as they could not before because he had promised to forget the whole incident: “Those three days of the blizzard, I read the Bible with her. She knew nothing of it, really. Yet she’d kept herself clean—those rumours were just the jealousy of the men with whom she would have nothing to do. I asked her. And Thom, every night, when I heard her stirring there in the bedroom as I lay here on the kitchen floor, I k
new that that storm shrieking outside was God’s blessing on both of us.”

On that February afternoon, not having then thought about these matters, Thom had only felt instantaneous revulsion at the man’s action. Looking at Madeleine, he could not recall having seen a more noble woman, yet his conscience insisted. Herman was a member of Wapiti Mennonite Church; church members did not live alone with and then marry any half-breed woman that rode into their yards. Though his reason could formulate small argument why a man, as good as avoided by his community for fourteen years
and never visited except by accident, should not return the affection of a woman who, once she heard clearly, accepted Christianity and whose keenest delight after thirty years of squalor was to learn more of what Christian living entailed, his conscience reared, violated. Herman said, noting his face darken, “We drove to Hainy when the storm let up and the J.P. married us. You’re the only Mennonite in Wapiti who knows.”

That had exceeded all limits. To call himself a Christian and be married outside the church. His thinking
had bogged, blind to its own illogic. Even now, his mind rebelled, blindly.

“ … Notre Dame. The procession is before the main entrance. On either side of General de Gaulle are Generals Leclerc and Koenig. The General is being presented to the people. They are receiving his salute—” From the radio a sudden rattle crashed, and the announcer’s voice tensed to hysteria, “Machine-guns! They’ve opened fire from the Cathedral! Down on the General, the people
—they are rushing—crushing to get in—” The radio buzzed a moment, then the voice of the announcer: “That was the most dramatic scene I have ever seen. As General de Gaulle walked down the main aisle, thrusting aside all who would detain him, there was a hail of fire from above
in the Cathedral!
No one could stop him—it was as if he walked into a curtain of bullets. Yet his life was charmed. His shoulders thrown back, he never missed a step. Even now as the organ plays the Te Deum, bullets spit from a few corners—one smashed into the cornice by his head!” The organ music, rolling, was staccatoed by cracks. There was the buzzing for a moment, then, “The short service is over. The General is marching up the aisle. The guns have been silenced. The people stand huddled about. This is the most
extraordinary display of courage I have ever seen. General de Gaulle has taken Paris.”