Peace Shall Destroy Many (21 page)

He need not have rushed.

Then the doctor was there, and in one smooth gesture had whipped back the corner of the sheet and had his hand on the
wrist. Block waited. Far away he could hear the threshing and the indistinguishable cries of the men. Dr Goodridge turned his wrinkled face up to the Deacon.

“I’m sorry, Peter.” He pushed the bag he carried among the towels on the sewing-machine. “It was really only luck that your son caught me coming from a call in Calder. I don’t know if I could have done much. I have to check—for the papers. If you’ll go—”

Block turned to go, and found Pete standing directly behind him in the doorway of the tight room, staring towards the bed. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and they went out together. They sat down by the long table. Pete put his head down on his arms, wide shoulders heaving. The Deacon stared at nothing.

The doctor was not long; he said merely, “Could I talk to you, Peter?” and Pete got up, tear-marked, and went into the kitchen. As the outside door banged, Goodridge said, “You know what she died of?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think it would have gone badly, except for the hemorrhage. The women did their work. It would have taken a doctor—maybe a hospital—to get her through the other.” He paused, and Block said nothing. “Who knows of this?”

“My wife and Mrs. Wiens.”

“Pete?”

“No.”

“Did you know it was coming?”

“No.”

“It must have been the worry—and the work that brought it on. Did she work in the harvesting?”

“Yes, but my wife—”

“I know—all your wives do, but it’s the worry above that that does it. This will really hit your people here, Peter.” The doctor’s arm gestured; he knew Block as none of the Mennonites could.

“What do you have to say?”

“The official report has to state everything. But nobody here sees that. Otherwise, I don’t have to say a thing. She’s gone now; there’s no need to drag her through the mud. That—man—shouldn’t talk much.”

“What do we say?”

“Whatever they believe.” The doctor turned on his heel and went into the kitchen where the two women were trying to finish the evening meal for the threshers. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Block.” She nodded dumbly, weeping as she peeled the potatoes. She could not have replied, even if he had spoken
German.

Thom was waiting at the doctor’s car, but Pete was nowhere in sight. The youth said, “Is she better?”

The doctor paused, as if pondering. “What’s your name?”

“Thom Wiens.”

“Is your mother in there?”

“Yes. Is Elizabeth—”

“She’s dead, Thom.”

Thom stood without breathing as the doctor pushed his bag across the seat and eased himself wearily down behind the wheel. He said, “Was it—work?”

The doctor squinted up at him in the fading sunlight, then looked slowly across the yard at the toiling men. “People don’t die from working.” Goodridge turned the key slowly and placed his finger on the starter. “It was just an internal disorder that got out of control. The thread of life is sometimes very thin. Good-bye, Thom.”

As Thom nodded, numb, the doctor backed his car around swiftly and drove from the yard. He moved back toward the outfit. He could only think: The person I ate dinner with is now dead. He pulled out his watch: ten past five. An hour ago he had stood beside her drinking coffee.

Block could not endure the house. After a few words to the women, he went out and walked down the hollow path to the well. The stupor settled on him; his talk with the doctor had been an involuntary mental reflex. Then, before he could comprehend, he was at the well and there was Unger, filling the threshers’ water-pail. The cheerful voice rang high above the threshing.

“Well Peter, your harvest this year is the best you’ve ever had!” The older man lifted his heavy face, “Oh—Thom said something about Elizabeth. Was that the doctor’s car? Is she—?”

“She’s dead.”

The Deacon left the other man there, mouth agape. He moved away from the threshing, across the yard into the empty barn. He could hear the chickens singing as they scratched in their enclosure. He gripped the rail of the manger and, tilting forward, slowly bumped his forehead against the smooth-worn logs of the wall.

T
HE GREY CLOUDS OF AUTUMN
tumbled low that Sunday afternoon as the Mennonite people of Wapiti drove into the church-yard for the funeral. They arrived in silence; the women and children clambered over the high buggy-wheels at the church-door and walked up the steps while the men drove to the barn and put the horses away. Except for the cry of an infant or the voice of a youngster, sharply hushed, there was only quietness and sorrow in the yard. In the church, the people sat down, shook hands gently with their neighbours, and waited, gazing at the floor. At a suggested song-number from one of the congregation, their warm German voices lifted a hymn of comfort.

No one was to be seen as the funeral procession turned into the yard. Only the empty buggies lined before the long barn and the song from the church reaching out in greeting.

Thom halted the truck at the church steps and got out. The two buggies were close behind. Pete sat on the edge of the truck-box, steadying the coffin with one hand. They waited as the teams drew up and the others descended. Pastor and Mrs. Lepp, Wiens, Mrs. Wiens, the wives of Ernst and young Franz together with Margret went silently
into the church. The rest stood bleak, the black box swallowing their thoughts.

“It’s time we went in, brethren,” Block said.

The men eased the narrow coffin from the grey blanket on the truck-box; they were ready to enter: Jake and John Rempel at the feet, Franz and Ernst in the middle, Thom and Pete at the head. Usually there was a long procession of relatives after the coffin, but here only the Deacon and his wife followed. The congregation was singing as Thom and Pete stepped through the opened doors and into the church:

Razia Tantamont, inside the church for the first time, turned with the others as the short procession entered at the doors under the balcony and filed down the aisle towards the pulpit where the Pastor waited, head bowed. She could understand no syllable of what was being sung, but the tune spoke their sorrow. She scanned Pete’s face. For once it was not her near presence that sentenced him speechless, she thought with grim humour, then pity welled in her. Elizabeth had been his one sister. Razia’s glance shifted: Almighty stars, she thought,
what a striking face! She could see only the man’s profile as he walked beyond Pete, but she did not notice the homemade coffin that Mrs. Block had herself draped. She noticed nothing then but the broad back, as she arose with the others at the gesture of the minister. The sounds of the prayer tumbling past her ear in the stilln
ess, she thought, What a body he must have under those out-dated clothes!

The coffin had been placed upon the bench before the pulpit, and as the congregation sat, she watched him step up into the last row of the choir. His head loomed above them all; he made the others seem puny, she noticed with delight. If he only wore some decent clothes! And a profile like a Greek. He doesn’t look like a Mennonite at all. The choir sang some mournful tune she had never heard: at least she had someone to watch during the service she could not comprehend. But really—this was a funeral. She bent her mind to consider Elizabeth. On Razia’s one visit to the Block’s for supper, Elizabeth had seemed even more colourless, if that were possible, than the Mennonite women of Wapiti. She had been truly kind and gentle, but she had carried an incomprehensible aura of old-maidish resignation about her. Yet, considering Block’s age, Elizabeth at most could not have been much over thirty. Listening to the chatter of the older girls at school, Razia had sensed that if a Mennonite woman was not married by twenty-five, she could look forward to nothing but spinsterhood. The corner of her eye caught the woman beside her. Hat seven years old. And hair like coiled slough-hay. No wonder.

Pastor Lepp was speaking: “We had planned that this Sunday should be our annual Harvest Thanksgiving Festival. God, in His Wisdom, has seen fit to move in a very different
way. We cannot know why, but we must accept. We are far removed from the rest of the world here, and when sorrow strikes one of us, it comes to us all. How often our brother Deacon and his family have helped us in our trouble and in our grief! It stands written: ‘As
for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.’ We cannot know when our days are numbered, we only …”

Pete, sitting beside his mother in the pew opposite the coffin, stared at it, thinking. It was almost as if she had known. He remembered the long days they had worked together that summer and autumn: milking cows in the smoke-choked corral, caring for the stock, hauling bundles as the geese flew south overhead and leaves drifted from the poplars. Tired, they occasionally lay in the stubble while the horses nosed the stooks with their ham
pering nose-baskets. She said once, out of nowhere, “Are you going to farm here all your life, Pete?”

He was amazed, “Why sure. Where else?”

“Wouldn’t you like to see something of some other place? Wapiti is so small and away from everything in the bush. Don’t you sometimes wish you could get away from here like Lou—Louis and do some—”

“Talk about that breed! Just a good for nothin’! Why should a Christian want to run everywhere in the world like a heathen? We’re here to prepare for the next world. We should be happy that we have such a separate place to stay as this, where we’re protected. You see what happens to Louis—gets thrown in jail for six months.”

“Things can happen to you here too.” She spoke strangely, looking beyond the patch-work trees edging the field at the wind-wisped clouds.

“What?”

She returned nothing; then, “Well, people die here too. You can’t go on just working forever.”

He had not understood her as she pulled herself up against the wagon, and now, he thought, he never would. He believed as the other Mennonites: people died, sometimes for a discernible reason, sometimes because God took them away and not even a doctor could explain how. She seemed to have known, somehow. He had never known what life was like without her: she was there, to care for him, as far back as his memory could stretch. When his father disciplined him sharply, she would slip him a cookie and hold his hand until he slept. Grown up, he had not thought about her presence in any particular way, for she was still always there, occasionally speaking a helping word. Last night he had gone into the cleaned tool-shed where they had laid her, there being no room in the house, and he had looked at her stone face in the black box under the lantern-light. Home was unimaginable without her. He felt tears starting deep inside him; he could force them back no longer. He bowed his head to his hands.

“ … gone on to be with God, was an example in her Christian walk to us all. Not one of us will have the remembrance of a bad or vicious action she did. Since our church began, she taught her Sunday School class here with true devotion. Could we but live as she did, that when we are called Home, the memory of what we have done will be an uplift and a happiness to those we leave …”

Mrs. Block’s thoughts were chaos. No one knew or suspected. Mrs. Wiens had promised, but it would remain the open scar upon their conscience, festering to their l
ast day. As she had never really comprehended the massive mental power
of her husband, she now had no idea what he thought. He was as steel in everything he did. But the subterfuge: to unscrew the coffin-lid at night and place the towel-wrapped bundle in the empty lap. Had she but persuaded him on that night years before when Herman had asked for Elizabeth. If she had died in childbirth married to Herman, it would only have been the lot of a world of wives before her, but now—she could not think of it. It was inexpressible even in her thoughts. Had she but been able to move him that night when Elizabeth begged him for Herman and he was as ice that finally, abruptly, blazed facts like fire. She had thought, There will be another man. But never; only at the final brink of her daughter’s womanhood, this. She had to live with the thought, tomorrow and tomorrow—

The Deacon took her arm as she sobbed, drily. She shuddered at his touch.

“ … but she is not silent, even in death. Though her spirit has gone to be with her Lord, her body here before us teaches us a solemn lesson. It says to us, ‘You must all die. You have no dwelling place here, but through the Grace of God you can triumph over Sin and Death at last. You need not…”’

Block heard no word that was being said. He was staring at the bench-back before him, his eyes ashen-dry. In the three days, the stupefying shock had worn away. Those three days he roved in madness, for Elizabeth had said no word before she died and he could not but see her as eternally damned for her sin. If she had only confessed and asked forgiveness when it first happened
—or when she knew—before the work and the silence ruined all. He set his mind: the matter was beyond all change. Yet, despite the racking longing that he might have had the opportunity to forgive her, whenever his mind
led him to what must have occurred that spring on his very farm-yard (he could have no idea how long the affair lasted)—how she must have stolen away to that room in the barn-loft when all were sleeping and there, on the sheets his wife washed every Monday, they must have taken their carnal lust of one another—he knew that if he had discovered them in that animal embrace he would himself have sent them to the deepest wallow of Hell. Or perhaps they had met during the day under cover of the silent bush. As he sat in the pew by her coffin, the scar blazed at his temple. He leaned on his hand to cover it.

The breeds must go. Too many years he had allowed them to remain on the edge of the settlement, where their dark wolfish faces could betray weak women. It must have been Louis. There was no other man possible. He would buy them out personally, every one of them, and send them all to wherever their animal natures could destroy themselves without involving others. His fist clenched at his temple.