Peace Shall Destroy Many (23 page)

“He leaned over me, clothes looking as if he’d slept in them every night he had them, and whispered, ‘Brother, are you saved?’

“I think I managed a ‘huh?’

“ ‘Brother, the Bible says that everyone must be saved from the wrath of God to escape the fires of Hell. You’re goin’ inte death, soldier and you’ve gotta be sure you’re not goin’ to end up in that fiery lake that burneth forever. The Devil’s just waitin’ to stoke you—’

“I knew him then. I got him by the collar and out the door, but not before he bellered a few snatches of ‘eternity in Hell’ and ‘sin-ridden drunken soldiers.’ Thinking of it, I’m sick. Bum from one army camp to another, shout ‘Be saved! Be saved!’ and imagine your job done. How utterly simple; and you are guaranteed to find enough persecution to make you a martyr! But where do the teachings and life of Christ come in?

“But I suppose a Mennonite should not complain. We don’t appear in army camps to tell, or show, these men anything.

“I’m writing this in the heat. Don’t jump to the conclusion that only the Mennonite branch of the Christian
church has made mistakes. No church shows up here—only the chaplain, and all he does is speak about ‘our glorious opportunity to die for our country.’ What a travesty of religious position! Other churches seem to be bound as rigidly by tradition as our Mennonite church: they in insisting that, if there is a war, their members should use force to end it, we in holding to ‘peace’ at all costs. Our tradition is made more obvious by being in
opposition to that of the majority. I am convinced that their position is contrary to Christ’s teaching, but am not sure that ours is very much better.

“We make great use of the word ‘peace.’ We quote Matthew glibly: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.’ Yet how can we ‘make peace’?

“I dug around a bit in some books I bought. In the English Bible, ‘peace’ is often used in a general statement ‘to hold one’s peace’—that is, a state of restfulness which includes silence. Our people, reading Luther’s German translation, may not know of this specific meaning of ‘Frieden,’ but certainly you’ll find it frequently applied in our church meetings when a difficult point arises. As long as everything goes smoothly and they themselves cannot be blamed, ‘peace’ is being maintained.”

(Thom did not have to be reminded of such a meeting.)

“Secondly, the word ‘peace’ means a state of safety and blessedness. This was one of the blessings promised Israel by God if they followed Him. ‘Peace’ to most Mennonites has, besides that mentioned above, only this Old Testament significance, if it has any distinct meaning at all. As lo
ng as God gives us good crops and we don’t have to fight in any war we are at peace. We can squabble with our neighbour as much as we please. Or we can neglect him entirely.

“Yet the ‘peace’ of the New Testament is quite different. The angels sang ‘Peace on earth’ and shortly after all the babes of Bethlehem were slaughtered because of the birth of Christ. Explain ‘peace’ there, if you will! It sounds as if God was playing a horrible joke on mankind.

“According to Christ’s teaching, peace is not a circumstance but a state of being. The Christ-follower has the peace
of reconciliation with God and therefore the peace of conscious fellowship with God through God in Christ. Peace is not a thing static and unchanging: rather a mighty inner river (read Isaiah 48:18) that carries all outward circumstances before it as if they were driftwood. This was the peace Christ brought; he never compromised with a sham slothful peace, as we want to. He said, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ He brought no outward quiet and comfort such as we are ever praying for. Rather, he brought inward peace that is in no way affected by outward war but quietly overcomes it on life’s real battle-field: the soul of man. By personally living His peace, we are peacemakers.

“But I must stop preaching! I’m tremendously happy that you see the necessity of carrying on the Bible class after harvest. It may be a bit tough in the hard winter, but don’t be discouraged. If it gets very bad, perhaps you could hold it in one of their cabins—they live close together—if the parents let you. It would be a wonderful way to get them to listen too. If the beginning goes well,
why don’t you try that? I found two books that I think may help you in your preparation and I’m sending them along separately.

“I can’t afford extra postage! Answer when you can: I enjoy your letters tremendously in this barren camp. Tell me especially about the class. I cannot give specific advice, but I think perhaps that Herb’s persisting in being angry towards you, as with the other matter, centres around your relationship to the Christ-given peace I mentioned above. Thom, who can help Herb but you? God help you. Joseph.”

While he read, Thom had distantly sensed his mother coming back from upstairs, but had really comprehended
nothing beyond the letter before him. The letter invaded his thinking more each time he read it, yet now he was numbed. Some days had too much.

Far away his mother spoke to him, “Go to bed, Thom—tomorrow comes so quickly.” She placed her hand on Wiens’ shoulder; the older man still pored over the family Bible. Thom looked at them as he slowly folded the letter into its envelope. He pushed it into his breast pocket, turned and climbed up the narrow stairs. His mother’s “Goodnight” drifted through the lones
ome music of the radio.

Hal’s body a ball of warmth beside him as he lay abed, he stared into the blackness of the rafters. How could everything, after many years of existence, in one short summer be so suddenly wrong in church, about Block? There was no finer man to work for; others’ interests always came first; yet Elizabeth—

He was sick of it all; sick and deadly tired. He heard Margret creak the stairs, and soon her tick rustle
d. Safe in bed on a still night, miles away through the bush from the loud world of many men. He curled over against Hal and the little boy instinctively snuggled tight in his sleep. For the quiet of sleep after a harrowing day, Thom wearily thanked God.

Immediately he was lost in the bush that separated Wapiti from the world. The trees loomed about him like walls. He could not move around them for numbing weariness. Wild animals roared at him; he could not inch aside. He knew somewhere that it was a dream: he should wake himself, but his mind had no strength to force consciousness. A great brute with gaping maw leaped at him. He fell, despairing. The beast was snuffed away like a candle-flicker in the wind. The bush held him, bottling his spirit within itself so that he knew no escape from the terror and sin and the tiredness that he had
never imagined existed, yet now found within himself. He fought endlessly, but knew he did nothing. The bush drew closer. Single trees merged and the bush-mass wrapped him away from all, cloaking his own evil and sorrow about him in tight-wound clutches until he sank in suffocation like a birth-heaving animal that cannot throw off its young in a final tearing of tissues.

Then all was gone. He was above the bush, as if standing on a high tower whose limbs did not reach down into the ancient trees below. Through misty air he saw dim outlines and far vanishing shapes. Abruptly, a pin-prick of light flickered at him, so tiny that he could not have seen it except in the blackest of nights. He looked away: another light pricked at him, then another and another, until the boundless black of the bush was split like the night with cracks of light while he stood on the legless tower, watching. An
d the lights grew fearsomely, drawing nearer, the lines of their growing as if distended in terror. Wind whiffed his cheek. Sparks winged up to fall on dry needles. Fire blossomed below him like a flame-rose. Then he saw sparks falling as hail and where each fell flames burst. The wind jelled with smoke. He saw the trees like patriarchs, limbs now yearning in petition where they had stood triumphant half a thousand years; and they moaned in terror, rooted immovable before the scourge. Then they blistered in light as fire raced to the tip, and dripped orange and blood-red into the black swamp-water as branches dropped hissing down. The fires ran together in gruesome patterns until all before him was a furnace moaning and crashing and hissing and breaking where the very light blotted his vision to blackness.

When he opened his eyes in his tower, not a tree stood between Wapiti and the world. Only the black spines of the
patriarchs humped splintered, broken in dead-fall. A spiral of steam twisted here and there from a glazed swamp pool.

He heard a pop! Before his eyes an enormous spark arched through the air to fall at his feet on the tower. He could not stir while he stared in fascination as the glowing spark spread wider and wider its black circle to leap into flame with a tearing sound. Then the fire surrounded him on the tower he had thought limbless, and he could only grip the peeled-poplar rail blistering in the heat as the holocaust caught him. As his heart balked in terror, he was wiped away.

He was awake in bed. He lay rigid while the death-fear dripped torturously from him, but long minutes passed before he could open his eyes at the d
arkness. He pulled Hal tight, but the sight would not leave. The sight of the wide miles of burned bush that opened Wapiti to the world. And the sight of the widening circle about the glowing coal before it burst into flame at his feet.

It was in the thin sunlight of the next day that an idea hit him. If they ever did have such a fire, they could clear the rubble, jerk out the stumps and really farm! He swung his hammer in a great arc at the corral-rail he was replacing and roared with laughter. When he thought of it a second time, he stopped laughing.

Into the numb days of November, dulling to greyness under the leaden bowl of the heavens, the blizzard tore. One day hung wan, the next howled in whiteness. The blast streamed and eddied round house, bam and bush; men ventured their lives to feed stock in barns and straw-sheds; they staggered indoors to thaw their faces. The storm squirmed through door-cracks, between window and sill in granular curls, prying at the people piling deep with wood their roaring heaters. It blurred pale the frozen face of night
.

Abruptly, after three days, it ceased its showy violence. The wind dropped; hoar-frost blistered the tree skeletons. As the mercury huddled to the depths of its bulb, sun-dogs glared doubly through the crystals of the sky. Indoors, beside the blazing stove itself, wall nails stood capped every one with white fur hats of rime. At night wolves moaned under the faintly bloody sprawl of northern lights. On November 29th the mercury stood fifty-three degrees below zero
.

Now barns seeped cold, thick straw-sheds gave no protection. Bunched together, the stock crouched inside their heavy hides, stiffening
,
or stumped across the squawking snow to watering, stirred only by the desperate beating of men. The trough-heaters, under prodding pokers, plumed smoke into the air; without them each pail of water had spread solid in the trough. Every breath drew a kn
ife-wound down the throat. No one thought of the howling blizzard now. The men, dumping hay in mangers and heaping straw under the bellies of their stock, knew that the silent malignancy was far more deadly
.

T
he school, sparkling in blackish smudged shadows, hulked in the clearing as Thom slid out of the trees at the crossroads. Etched by moonlight, all was hazed in cold, save where the teachera
ge dropped its yellow light through the tight-curtained windows
like damask on the blued snow. Smoke curl
ed fearfully from the warm chimney into the clear of the hard sky as he kicked loose his skis and crunched on the step. He knocked.

He heard her steps above the radio music, the inside door opening, and the door pushed open before him. Her face appeared in the crack, as if she were ready to jerk it shut at any sound.

“Yes?” clipped, like a frozen branch snapping.

He cleared his throat, “Miss Tantamont, it’s Thom Wiens. I was wondering if—”

“Oh, of course. I couldn’t see your face with that big parka in the dark.” The door swung wide, “Come in! It’s terrible
outside. Do come right in,” and she stepped back as he entered, huge in the Indian parka. She smiled as he pushed back the hoared hood. “You look like an Arctic expedition. Please let me close the door—it’s bad enough keeping that heater going when it’s closed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” In the warmth and strangeness of her tiny kitchen he had not noticed that he still held the inside door open. He backed it shut, his hand on the knob. “
I hope my coming’s all right tonight. I don’t want to keep you from your work, but as I said last Sunday, some of these correspondence courses—”

Her laugh pealed like bells. “If I can help you! What grade did you say you were taking?” She remembered well enough. Since he had begun the Sunday classes with the children in November, she had been planning some occasion or reason for him to come to see her alone. She had even listened to two of his lessons but his tremendous seriousness and the distant invariable politeness he presented towards her speared duplicity before it could develop. She had been forced to the very strange position of wondering how she could attract this man when he had abruptly approached her himself. He said now,

“Grade nine.”

“I should know something about that! You didn’t forget to bring your books?”

“No—they’re in my knapsack outside. I skied out. If you’ve a broom, I’ll clean my feet outside.”

“It’s by the door—there behind you. But don’t bother so much.”

He was gone, his head bending under the door-jamb, and she could have laughed for joy. He had the gentility of great strength. Her glance flew about the room: she tossed
The Sun Also Rises
behind a pile of texts on the shelf above the table. In the tiny bedroom she kicked off her slippers, stepped into the pumps which were the marvel of the girls in school, dabbed away a trace of lipstick, whisked the brush down the curve of her hair and paused, the kitchen light on the mirror wrapping her figure warmly in the darkness
of the bedroom. As he fumbled for the door she called, “Come on in, Thom,” and then from the bedroom she saw the cigarette box on the table beside her lamp. Tapping over, she dropped box and ashtray behind the texts with Hemingway. She turned as he entered.