Peace Shall Destroy Many (17 page)

After a pause, Wiens placed the Bible beside him on the couch. “It’s after eleven. We’ll stand and I’ll pray alone tonight.”

His head bowed to his father’s prayer, Thom vowed, Immediately after I get back from the harvest crew, I’ll start the Bible class again. The Sunday after.

When his brief prayer was completed, Wiens shuffled into the bedroom. “Don’t stand around long. Mother, did you put the church papers in the cupboard?”

“Yes, you can lay them right tomorrow.” Mrs. Wiens picked up the lamp and moved into the kitchen for the alarm clock. Thom turned slowly to half lean on the radio. Through the open window, the sky looked clear like a great dusky band, but the scrolled clouds at the western horizon poised in a massive thunderhead.

Margret said, at his shoulder, “Storm?”

Thom shook his head, “Huh-uh. Too late—and not hot enough for a thunderstorm. No more ‘God talking,’ a
s Hal calls it.” They looked out across the garden and the
road allowance and over the tips of the spruce. “In a few days, comes the harvest.”

Margret said, “Poor Elizabeth.”

He had not thought of her part in the story before.

“Yeh,” he said. They crossed the room and ascended the ladder-like stairs in the corner of the kitchen, one by one. In the boys’ portion of the space under the rafters, Hal was breathing peacefully.

An owl-shadow flitted ghostly across the farmyard. Over the tree-tips, glaring like a red-faced giant, leaned the September moon. Frost faintly threaded the trough water and fingered along the rims of the poplar leaves. The owl call, weird, came shivering the silence of the clearing. High, wisped by some stratospheric wind, clouds fled through the night
.

In the autumn morning a wagon bumped northward behind two trotting grays. The road skirted a long yellow field immobile in the sun-sprayed hush. Balancing beside the man at the front of the wagon-box, the boy said
,

“I heard an owl last night.”

“You did?”

“Yah,” after a long pause. “In the middle of the night. I woke up and it was bright as anything and you were sleeping and then an owl hooted across the yard.” The boys stubby fingers edged along the man’s
trouser-leg. “I was scared.”

“In bed? Why?”

“I dunno. It sounded—like when we found Bowser with the tree fallen over him, and he died.”

The man said abruptly, pointing north, “See the geese—beyond the grain—there.”

The boy stared, fascinated, high into the morning sunlight. The V of the wild geese wedged through the autumn sky, honking south over the prostrate field that waited ponderously ripe for harvest
.

W
APITI
S
CHOOL
, two windows flankin
g its door, half-ruined steps below, peaked roof above, stared loggishly down the ro
ad, south over hills towards the church, s
outh over the bush towards the world. The yard bristled with weeds of the neglected summer; there was no one to disturb the ne
glect. Only the flag, collapsed on its slender pole, revealed summer gone.

The quiet broke with a rumble of feet. The door banged open and boys poured over the steps, spilling through the broken railing out towards the ball diamond. A few girls followed primly down the steps, lips curled at the screaming boys shoving about home plate. “Scrub one!” “Scrub two!” “Three, three, three-ee!” “I’m pitcher!” “You’re not!” Those late in yelling their number because of seats near the front of the school were already fist-backing their claims when a dark boy dashed through the gaping door, leaped from the steps and charged towards them, waving a bat and white ball. Chaos
merged into order at his barked commands. “I’m one. Who’s two? You, Hal. We’re up—you’re pitchin’, Jake—” and everyone filed to their positions, the more fortunate jabbing the others and racing off to dodge the flung fist. Some mouthed revolt, but no one argued with Jackie Labret.

“Children!”

All motion ceased. Jackie, waving the bat, turned slowly.

The new teacher stood on the porch, slender and stern. To the little girls standing just below her, she was the most beautiful lady they had ever seen. They had been awed beyond expression when they came to school that morning and saw that narrow face framed by sweeping yellow hair. “Just like a fairy princess,” Trudie whispered to Linda Giesbrecht in rapture.

“Boys, you know that when school is out at three-thirty, you are to go directly home. Don’t pretend you can stay to play after school. Your parents want you home. You can play again tomorrow at recess. Bring in the ball—Jake, isn’t it?—yes—and you the bat, Jackie. Why do you think I put them away in the cupboard? I’ll have no more sneaking like that, Jackie. Come along.”

They shuffled back. For one day at least they would have had an excuse for playing after school. Heavily they filed up the steps past her to get their jackets and books. Jackie lowered the flag and, as he came up the steps, alone, the teacher said confidentially, “I’m counting on you, Jackie,” and her hand rested momentarily on his grimy shoulder. Startled, the boy glanced up, eyes black and fathomless; then he ran quickly into the school.

Razia Tantamont watched them straggle from the yard, shouting, pushing, swinging their lunch pails. The breeds vanished north and west, the Mennonites east and south. Seeing
Jackie and Hal Wiens trot together towards the east, she wondered for a moment if th
e former lived in the Mennonite area. She remembered Mr. Block’s explanations to her as they rode in the rough truck from the
railway on Friday. All about half-breeds, and what Mennonites believed. Her luck to be dropped two hundred miles from nowhere when she wanted a city school! In the bush, as quiet as a midnight graveyard.

Slightly panicked, she turned on her pointed shoes and, leaning against the door-frame, flicked her eyes over the vacant school with its homemade desks, dinted gas-barrel heater, stove pipes sagging from wires, blistered blackboards, library of coverless books tilted against the wall. These poor bush-buried kids: there was plenty to teach them about the world. Reading and the radio would conquer her loneliness. She pirouetted at the thought, proud of her grace, and walked carefully down the steps towards the teacherage. The head trustee, so grimly handsome with splendid steel-like hair! He would be about fifty-five. And so concerned to explain things. Competent as she felt herself, Razia sensed, very strangely for her, that she had few resources to cope with the oddness of the community she was beginning to understand from his words and the behaviour of the Mennonite children, where one glare from the oldest in the family quelled any young rowdiness in the classroom. And, though many travelled by at the crossroads, no one except Mr. Block and his tired-looking wife had visited her—on Sunday afternoon. The woman had not voiced a monosyllable, even when they inspected the school. While leaving, the trustee seemed oddly embarrassed, which she could hardly have suspected him capable of, when he mentioned they could not invite her to the Sunday evening church service because it was held in German. He had added, careful,
“Of course, we do not side with Hitler, though we speak G
erman. As I explained—killing is never right.” She puzzled momentarily, then she swept the pirouette again. The people could not possibly be as staid as Mr. Block tried to impress on her. Surely they would hold some dances—she would be the first to start them, if nothing else. And if Peter Junior, who was to come to string up her aerial, was as striking as his father! She swung the cabin-door wide.

The mirror had just smiled her reflection when she heard the hoofbeats. She patted her hair, brushed the chalk-rim from her skirt, and turned to rummage about in the wood-box. When the knock came, she paused, then opened the door, a piece of wood as if forgotten in her hand. She said, “Hello.”

The man outside the screen-door nodded, as somewhere behind him a horse snorted. He said, through the sheer maze of the screen, “Hello, Miss Tantamont. Papa said I—ah—” The words caught on his heavy tongue.

“You’re Peter Block Junior, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes—Pete, really.”

“Do come in, Pete—I’m so happy to see you. Goodness—I’ve still the wood in my hands! I was trying to make a fire in the stove, but really—you just don’t know what a job it’s been getting that stove going. I’m
sure there must be a simpler way of making it burn—do come in.”

She held the door wide for him, smiling, his face directly opposite her as he hesitated an instant. His mother’s expression drooped his rounded face, but the bruising body was certainly his father’s, even the beetling brows that hunched together as his eyes accepted the contours of
her face. He was dressed decently in the checked shirt and heavy denim of a farmer. If only he were a bit taller!

She stepped to the stove, three paces from where he stood near the door, cap clumsy in his hands. “I don’t want to keep you from your work, but,” she paused, “could you show me a bit about this stove?”

“Sure.” He was at the wood-box, motions purposefully quick. “You need kindling and split wood. I’ll get some,” and he was out the door. While she rummaged for the coffeekettle in the cupboard, she was annoyed at leaving herself vulnerable to his thought of why she had not asked his father to explain the stove. She glanced swiftly out of the window; he was chopping wood with great strokes. She barely had time to busy herself at the cupboard again before he was back with a heaping armful of wood, kindling grasped in his hand. His shyness vanished while he worked, actions suiting words.

“First, you set the draft open. Then crumple paper—once you know how, you can use wood-shavings just as well if you haven’t paper—then small kindling, bigger stuff, a few pieces of wood. Always make sure the first bunch is dry. Close this and light from the front. Don’t look at it—listen.”

The fire caught and roared. She laughed, “I always look to make sure!”

“And then it goes out,” his laugh grumbled in his chest. The stuffiness in the kitchen had evaporated. “Once it’s really burning, put on more. Close the damper to ke
ep the heat in the stove. But you have to chop a lot of wood.”

She looked out at the sprawling mound of blocks. “Doesn’t someone—the janitor—?”

“The kids take turns doing janitor work. Didn’t Papa tell you?”

“Yes, but cleaning the school—”

“Aaron Martens’ family does it every month—wash and stuff. They’re half a mile east of here.” He looked at her slender figure, carefully, and it astonished her unpleasantly that she could not read his thoughts on his face. He said, surprisingly, “You should have boarded out.”

“No,” she returned, too quickly, and recovered. “It’s not that there aren’t nice people here—I’m sure I’d like to live in one of those cosy log houses” (he’ll think me a fool—why do I muddle into such drivel), “but I want to live as I want to. Not bother other people—have friends visit me when they wish—you know—”

Looking at her, he said nothing, as if the thought she expressed had never occurred to him before. He became aware of his glance and his eyes shifted towards the door, a slight redness creeping up from his collar.

Her laugh cut across the tension. “I’ll have the children chop wood for me instead of having them stand in the corner doing nothing!”

He grinned without looking at her. “Papa said you wanted your aerial put up?”

“Oh, yes. Looks like the radio will be my only contact with the world. You people seem to have moved as far away as you can.” She laughed again, but his answer, as he examined the coil of wire on the table, was quite serious.

“It’s still too close, usually. You want it here on the table-corner?”

While she began her supper, he worked with quickness that amazed her. Once he asked her for help. While he held the pole steady, she pulled out the bottom bolt of the two that held the flag-pole erect between its two supporting posts. He then lowered the pole to the ground, attached the wire to the
tip above the flag pulley, and again hoisted it aloft. The other aerial pole was wired to the teacherage. She could hear his ponderous tread on the roof. One slight redness! she was piqued at her inability to touch him. He appeared so different from any men she had ever met, almost as if he did not know how—or did not quite dare—to look at her as a woman. Before he went he would betray some acknowledgement. So she did not invite him to a cup of coffee, as she had first intended. She said nothing at all; merely thanked him seriously and, as he was about to wheel his mount and she leaned in the open doorway, his glance slid down her figure. She said, half-joking, “How does a big man like you stay out of fighting the Germans?”

She knew then that the falling sunlight from beyond the school framed her as it should. He sat motionless on his horse, look riveted for a gathering moment. Then he muttered, rapidly, “Papa’s got a big farm—I’ve got to get milkin’—so long—” and he broke his glance from her with a jerk of the reins and galloped from the yard.

As the hoof-beats faded over the south hill, Razia watched the dust-swirl settle before her, a smile tinging the corner of her lips. That was not quite what “Papa” had explained so carefully.

On his home quarter two miles from school, the Deacon was bindering the last of his green-feed. The horses moved steadily as the heavy oats shuddered under sweep and blade to the rolling canvas. Though the field was almost completed and they would start cutting the ripe crop in two days, he could find little of his usual joy at the harvest. He passed Elizabeth, slowly stooking, her back bowed under the green bundles,
skirts sweeping the stubble. He thought, in a sort of parenthesis, Tomorrow there will be no interruptions: she and Pete will get more done.

A snip of a girl: skirts almost to her knee, face whitely smiling. The way the Superintendent had written, it had appeared they were sending a sedate older teacher with fine teaching ability. Her recommendations were excellent, but—his frown deepened as the binder clattered down the field. There had always been Mennonite teachers available before, but now the war disrupted that also: it forced some to camps, some to a denial of their fathers’ pacifist position. A limited knowledge of the world was necessary for the children, but what would this worldly girl, fresh from training, emphasize in her teaching? In the unmolested prosperity they had enjoyed at Wapiti, he had almost forgotten the fury that in 1927 drove him to the wilds of Saskatchewan, or why he had begged the first Mennonites to join him there in the desperate hope of perhaps again building a community such as their fathers had known in the golden days of Russia. The need for the community had grown to be a driving imperative to him as his dread increased that if he were left alone to grub at a homestead for the rest of his days, he must sink under the thought of what he despaired to forget. No girl would disrupt the community
he had built up; she could be dismissed after a month if necessary. He shifted his thoughts to the necessities of the coming weeks of threshing work.