Peace Shall Destroy Many (25 page)

“So you, as a good Christian, can sit back and calmly accept your own comfort while—”

“No!” his earnestness precipitated him into violent interruption. “No. Certainly not that. But that’s just where I—like a bog—get nowhere. I’ve read and thought—perhaps a Christian is on earth for a different purpose—” he gestured almost pathetically.

She smiled warmly into his sad face. She had been not at all prepared for the torrent that spilled agains
t her, and now attempted a smooth shift: “Well, you seem to have thought about it a good deal, at any rate. You don’t sound much like the usual Mennonite—at least not Pete Block, but—”

He interrupted again, his face jerking up at her, “What did Pete say to you?”

She laughed for his sake, inwardly disgruntled that she had not drawn him from his preoccupation. She stretched slantingly in her chair, her legs brushing his under the table as she put her bare arms behind her head and stared up at the ceiling. Good old Jim at Normal School had once told her, in a moment of insane infatuation, that she stretched as sensuously as an alley cat.

“Oh, I can’t remember it too well, really. He muttered something last fall as he was putting up the aerial about his father having a big farm and he having to stay home to help—something like that. But about two weeks ago he came over
to invite me to their place for a supper of—what do you call it? bor—”

“Borscht, our Mennonite soup.”

“That’s it—we had a tremendous meal. They really miss Elizabeth there—Mr. Block said so as he drove me home in the truck. Anyway, Pete said something about non-resistance when he came to invite me. He said he was a Mennonite and the Mennonites taught their children not to resist their enemies and so he could not join the army to fight anyone. You sounded rather different—”

She knew immediately that she had lost him, somewhere. He was staring against the curtains of the windows, sinking into untrackable thought. She said, lightly, “In all my talking, you’ve finished your coffee. I’ll
get the pot.” Willowy as a whip, she rose and walked to the heater, the cellar hollow under her heels, but he said as she came with the coffee, not having noticed her motion,

“I guess he can say that’s his reason—if he wants. But it has to go beyond the mere teaching of the fathers—” Then he comprehended her standing beside him. “Oh, no,” smiling forcedly, “I really couldn’t have any more. Thanks.
” He rose towering beside her, and heaped his books together.

“Just one more cup,” she smiled.

“No, really. Could I have my coat please? It’s late and I should get home.” She knew then her hints had not found him. Recalling Herb’s vehemence, she made one last attempt to interest him as she held his parka while he pushed into it. “I’ve lived here for three months and I don’
t really know. Who is a Mennonite?”

He smiled wanly as he scooped up the books. “I doubt you’ll get an answer in Wapiti—or anywhere. Some say only
church members are Mennonites, others that we’re actually a race of people. Most who are born with Mennonite names but refuse to join the church don’t want to be known as Mennonites—guess they feel somehow it commits them.” Then he was gone into the frigid night, his low thanks hovering in the empty teacherage. Why, in the name of Heaven, had she come to Wapiti! One Mennonite fool was so smitten with her he could only use his eyes but not speak a coherent sentence, another knew nothing but animalism, and the third, with a body like a Greek hero, knew well enough where he could go for help with his mathematics but no more saw her as a woman than if she had been an icicle dripping from the roof. What a s
ink-hole! She wondered what little dove in Wapiti Thom’s manly coo had first roused to chaste emotion. She could conceive no other reason for his imperviousness. Probably some anaemic overworked “maiden” she had never seen! As she twisted the radio dial, her other hand groped behind the text-books for
The Sun Also Rises
. She scrounged for a pencil and, to a blaring fox-trot from the radio, leafed rapidly. She’d have to send him the book with significant places underlined! She laughed. The dunce would probably not even know what was going on. As a good teacher, she had better add footnotes. Detailed.

Thom, strapping on his skis, slid away from the teacherage. The school hill stretched away behind school and barn to lose itself in bush under the stars, somewhere. He recalled children’s voices all over the hill, so high then! and how he could barely breathe when flying down prone on a little sled, and how they came stamping in at the bell, and how forty mittens dripped steaming about the barrel stove as he sat and read. He had known everything, in those days. Now he did not even
know if a friend’s way of expressing himself was correct. Should one say, I act this way because my father tells me so? Should one talk about Mennonite tradition before one spoke of the only possible basis for that tradition: the personal commitment to Christ? Especially to a woman who knew little about Christ’s teachings and was ever telling the pupils in school that “everyone had to do his part to win the war”? His mind snagged there, at how Hal had come home to ask, as he forked hay to the stock, “What are we doing to help win the war?” Thom found small comfort in remembering he had at
least not said they were raising stock to feed the soldiers. Perhaps he would have been more truthful with Hal if he had.

In his stride, he was about to push into the road when he noticed a fast-approaching team and he slid to a stop. The growing moon shone full in his face, he could not discern the driver’s face, but as the horses came opposite he recognized the shiny bay even as the clear voice greeted, “Good-evening, Thom.”

“Good-evening, Mr. Block,” he returned in Low German, then glided into his tracks for home. Where could the Deacon be going late on a December night? No one but breeds lived north of the school. Unconnectedly, a thought fell into his head: I should go see Herb Unger. The words of Joseph’s letter had often stirred in him, but there were always possible excuses. Get that triviality cleared away, whatever it was, and perhaps even find some basis for friendship. Do it and done with, before easy alternatives lured. His heart pounded: if there’s a light, I’ll go in. His skis slipped swiftly over the drifts.

His horses trotting past the teacherage northward in the sleigh-tracks, the Deacon mulled over Thom Wiens’ moonlit
emergence at the school-gate. What was he doing there at this hour? The teacher? Yet there had seemed no embarrassment in his greeting. But he filed the thought away. For certain men the slim teacher with her narrow face and skimpy dresses would be very attractive. Despite her worldliness, her teaching was excellent: after that one request for a dance, she seemed finally to understand what was needed in his community. If that foolish boy
now upset—he would talk to Thom. There were enough Mennonite girls in Wapiti.

With the formed decision, his thoughts turned. Face rigid to the night’s stiffening cold, he drove because of the rumour he had heard that morning in the store. Again, as ever again, he endured that last hour of Elizabeth’s life. He should have forced an acknowledgement, yet—he shifted abruptly. In the five weeks since her burial he had studied the people of his community as never before. He knew them, every one. Sexual immorality was for all Mennonites the nadir of sin; it was equivalent to murder. There was not a single Mennonite man or youth who could have fallen so low as to accept the embraces of—as they all considered her in their Mennonite way—his elderly daughter. His thoughts fled to their only refuge. Perhaps she had not—perhaps it had been the terrible shame that had sealed her death.

Perhaps. Bare face deliberately defiant into the streaming cold, dreadingly poised on the slim pin of hope, he turned his team down a snow-hemmed trail. In a short minute he crossed from the shadow into the clearing where the Moosomin shacks squatted in the hard moonlight.

Three dogs tore over the drifts in raucous greeting. Pulling the horses into the shelter of the house where the Moosomin sled stood, he stepped down, kicked the dogs aside,
and tied up the horses. Straining heads interrupted the light at the tiny window, changing every instant as he moved methodically. No one emerged to welcome him; he had expected no one. He pushed through the snow that veiled whitely the litter of the yard, the lean hounds at his heels. Scurrying inside ceased abruptly at his fist-knock.

Old Moosomin himself creaked open the lop-sided door, his grease-shined face blinking up out of the feeble light at Block in the pale-blue cold. The Deacon said loudly, into the stares which could not comprehend him outside, “Evening, Moosomin. I’ve come to see Louis. He’s home, isn’t he?”

“Oh—Mr. Block,” snuffily, a tattered sleeve drew itself across the crumpled half-Cree face. “Yah, he’s home. Jus’ got here yesterday.” There was a flurry of women and half-naked children in the room; several in rags peered from beds and trapping gear. The Deacon did not glance at their furtive movements.

“Tell Louis to get a lantern and come to the barn. I want to talk to him.”

“The house warm—” the man gestured.

“I want to talk to Louis, alone.”

“They were huntin’—I think maybe he’s sleepin’ jus’ now.”

“Get him up. I’ll wait outside.”

“Okay. Sure Mr. Block. What you say.”

Block’s feet moved back out of the circle of yellow light and the door scraped slowly shut. The stale smell of small children through the open door had been enough. He pulled the heavy horse-blankets into position under the harness, hearing the agitation inside the cabin. There must be about twenty people living in one room: with miles of bush all
round. Laziness: it saved them wood-cutting. He leaned against the bay, face uplifted to the open sky that cut like ice, waiting for the man he prayed had raped his daughter.

The door complained, and then the swinging light of a lantern preceded a dark figure around the corner. His mittened hand trailing off the nose of the bay horse yearning after him, Block stepped across the snow. He could not discern the face of the man, the lantern hanging low at the end of his arm, the peaked cap shading the visage. He stopped, “Louis?”

His voice, “Yeh.”

“We’ll go to the barn.”

Without a sound the other turned into the path towards the barn, Block following. Suddenly the black shape stopped before him, doubled over in a tearing cough, spat violently, and then limped on. Block could not restrain a shudder.

As the Deacon pulled the low door shut behind him, Louis was hanging the smoked lantern from a cross-beam. The meagre warmth of two cows and four rake-like horses barely blunted the cold in the littered barn. Block saw only the face of the man before him, leanly dark, hair projecting from the cap-edge. Thinking of him so often, the Deacon had almost forgotten how Indian-like was his face. It was impossible that she—hope springing, without preliminary he said, as Louis stared beyond him at nothing, “When did you get out?”

“Friday.”

“How did you get back so quick?”

“Bus.”

“They give you a ticket to Hainy?”

“Yeh.”

Block stood like a rock on the filth of the barn-floor, glaring. “No criminal works for me. You worked two months this
spring and I paid you ten dollars when you went to town. You’ve fifty coming.”

Louis said no word, and Block made no motion to give him the money he had earned. There was no sound in the shadowed barn except the cattle breathing thinly in the cold.

“What are you doing now?”

He knew immediately the question was wrong, for Louis shrugged and turned away, the glance no longer holding him. The Deacon knocked aside a dung-heap at his feet; it rolled clumsily into the frozen gutter. Without warning,

“You know Elizabeth died in October.”

Louis swung at him, fear flicking across his face, then the stolid hood dropped back over his eyes. His voice was flat. “Yeh. They said.”

The flash was enough. Block calculated coolly; in the three years of work he had learned to know this breed. He could overflow with words when something exciting happened; his terror of what he did not know or understand was clear from that hinted betrayal. Jail had not changed
that
a great deal, perhaps even added a little. Block said,

“How did you get on in jail?”

The abrupt change in questions caught Louis nicely off-guard. “Oh, it wasn’t so bad.”

“Have you been working hard—digging ditches and things?”

“Yeh—that was really nuts.”

“Guards all right to you?”

The other seemed now to have forgotten the previous trend of the questions. His face hardened in hatred as his eyes unmasked at remembrance in the yellow light. He hissed, “Suckers! Standin’ around with their guns that they sure as
hell didn’t know how to shoot and forever yellin’ at us to work an’ work—” Block, watching his face eagle-like, saw the skin taut over the high bones shade livid and he lashed out:

“What did you do to Elizabeth last spring?”

The whipped sound jerked the horses in their stalls; Louis stuttered, staring open-mouthed. Instantly his look twisted away: “Huh?—nothin’—wha’—” Block’s glare shrivelled the thin film of resolve acquired in loud bragging sessions in the penitentiary. His force caught him:

“Don’t you dare lie to me. You did it, didn’t you, you miserable—”

“I didn’t do anything! Not a damn—”

“Stop swearing! You forget yourself.” The breaking cough erupted in Louis’s chest, allowing him to bend away from Block rigid between him and the door. When the younger man straightened, spittle flecking his face, Block rapped, “You won’t talk? Suppose I tell the Mounties. You know what happens to a half-breed that bothers a white woman? They don’t just send him to the rock-pile—they take him to the whipping room first to see what they can do there. You ever been whipped in jail?”

Fear suffused the other’s face, “No! Not the whip—I—” and then a thought seemed to click into conscio
usness. “I don’t even know what you’re yellin’ about. If you know so much, why don’t you go—”

Block broke in, having thought of this long before, his voice tense, low, “She’s dead now, you know. I’ll leave all as it is. The dead are everywhere—you told me yourself, remember we were scrubbing last spring? They’re the spirits that dance the northern lights in the long winter; they’re the spirits that drive the werewolf to stalk you on the trail; they’re everywhere.
When you sleep, she’ll come in your dreams; when you’re hunting, you’ll sense her behind you. Everywhere. Maybe she’s right in here with us—now.”