Peace Shall Destroy Many (33 page)

“You should have asked
Papa
what to do!”

Her hiss hung like stench in the air. Herb barged in without pause, “What’s go—” the scene stunned him. Hank gestured groggily, trying to sit up, his hand at his face where the blood pushed a gleaming line from his mouth.

“He hit me. Pete, he—”

He tilted sideways against the girl. Only the horses stirred; the thudding footsteps, which none heard, raced nearer. To the two, silhouetted like marble in the shadows by the open door, the words filtered to consciousness through the habitual pattern of their thinking. Hank, in numbed amazement, stumbled a curse.

Herb’s righteous rage erupted as he moved, “Pete, you damn hypocrite—” and his long unreleased hatred against his brother for ever gaining in a moment what he himself had never won in a lifetime of desire, against the Mennonites whose actions and looks had always condemned him, spilled from him in a flood of filth as he leaped. Pete turned, his light waist high, with no motion towards defence. Herb never touched him.

Pete! Thom’s mind gasped the cry as into his void of splintered dogmas violence surged to brute strength. His left hand clamped on Herb’s shoulder and yanked him round.

It was the first time he had hit a man with his fist. Herb crumpled, pole-axed, on the straw beside his brother.

On the instant the barn was full of men, hundreds it seemed, with more jamming and craning in the doorway. Lights probed. The horses reared in their stalls, terrified, but the men put out strong hands to calm t
hem, staring at the tableau in the aisle. Pete’s flashlight still held the group unknowingly, but now the added light showed Herb twisting over on the scattered straw with Hank sitting as half-bemused between him and the crouching Razia. Thom and Pete stood on either side, the presence of the men slowly registering on their faces as they turned towards the door. Backed against the barn-wall, at first glance they looked like a group of friends casual for the photographer.

Block rammed his way through the crush. Breathing heavily, he spoke like thunder as he stepped forward. “What’s going on here?”

Razia began to laugh. She was convulsed. She leaned over Hank, then tilted up towards the sod roof, her high laughter lashing the dumbfounded men. She staggered to her feet, straw in her hair and sticking to her crumpled dress, face abandoned. “What went on here! You’re too late for this show—” and the laughter flared through again, and then, between gasps, “Pete found things not quite Mennonite!
You
hadn’t told him what to do—so he smashed Hank—and then Thom smashed Herb—all these loving Mennonites smashing!” She could not gasp another word, her laughter a howl, and then it ebbed abruptly and snapped. She saw the light of
a dozen flashlights poking at every wrinkle on her dress, the shadowed men, faces blank in staring silent amazement, and her figure seemed to shrink into its shame. Her look flashed about, frantic for escape. With a bursting sob she hid her face in her hands and ran towards the one door. The men parted before her like a wave, not one touching her, and her crying could be heard as she floundered out of hearing. In the
barn there was only the breathing of men, the stamp of horses, and Block’s ha
lf-whisper, like a cry, “Peter, Peter.”

Pete had not said a word since he had started to speak to Razia. He had stood looking steadily at his father after he entered. His voice sounded as if he were speaking
for the first time. “Pa, you have to do what you think right.”

The Deacon bowed his scarred grey head to his hands, and the men of Wapiti community, Métis and Mennonite, standing in an old barn, heard the sobs of a great strong man, suddenly bereft, and broken. They heard, terrified.

•      •      •

The two horses swung into the road, muscles straining at going home. As he stood in the cutter, the packed snow from their hooves thudding on the dash, Thom sensed dimly other teams trotting behind them. There was no hint of the carols that usually rang from sleigh to sleigh. The half-breeds had vanished quietly, awed in incomprehension yet sensing a great break. No Mennonite had looked at another. Shame acknowledged and bare on each face, they had hitched their teams, gathered up their families, hushing the jolly children with one clipped word, and driven off as from a funeral where
each had contributed the corpse of his silent agreement with Block. Thom’s only mind-controlled act had been to speed his hitching so that the Lepps would not be out before he drove up to the school.

Block had been led away by Pastor Lepp, with Pete following silently.

Thom drove, reins clenched in his left fist, his right throbbing dully, forcing his thoughts back. His body revolted in barely controllable nausea at the remembered crash on Herb’s face, the oozing blood. Beastly. One taste eclipsed a thousand imaginings. He, with his months of oh-so-noble questionings, had plumbed the pit.

He gazed unseeing between the greys’ heads, nodding in their trot. The evening overwhelmingly upon him, it would be long before he could conceive of how much had been sloughed aside that night in Wapiti. Then, Jackie Labret, bending down to lead the way to the manger, stood before him. There must lie the way. Not the paths of conscienceless violence or one man’s misguided interpretation of tradition. They brought chaos. But the path of God’s revelation. Christ’s teachings stood clear in the Scriptures; could he but scrape them bare of all their acquired meanings and see them as those first disciples had done, their feet in the dust of Galilee. He must. And, seeing Jackie again, a long-forgotten statement by Joseph rose to his memory. “We are spared war duty and possible death on the battlefield only because we are to be so much the better witnesses for Christ here at home.” Comprehending suddenly a shade of those words’ depth, he realized that two wars did not confront him; only one’s two faces. And he was felled before both.

No. If in suppression and avoidance lay defeat, then victory beckoned in pushing ahead. Only a conquest by love unites the combatants. And in the heat of this battle lay God’s peace. “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth.”

Wiens was praying. “God have mercy on me, a sinner—in silence.”

Hal cuddled against his mother. They were all so quiet. Even Margret only stared at the blankets. The boy said, for the tenth time, “Mom, what happened in the barn?”

Her voice was old. “You’ll know, some day. Now we’ll soon be home.” She held him close, weeping without a sound, for it had come as hard, and harder than she had feared, and the end was not yet.

Hal’s mind flew. “Anyway, I sure liked our concert. ’Specially the Three Kings. We sure worked on that. You know what part I like best? Just the last where we all follow Jackie into the barn one by one to see the baby Jesus—’course there’s nothin’ really in there, but after the four fellas go I always feel like there was.” The horses turned east into the poplars and scattered pine of the Lepps’ south quarter. The pines were massive. “Mom, ’member I used to believe it when you said there were pines all
’round the edge of the world?”

“We just said that because you were too little to know about it.”

“Yah. The world’s really round, eh?”

“Yes.”

After a pause, “They’re nice and green—like in spring. It’s sure cold. Wish it was spring so we could go lookin’ for frogs’ eggs again.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Wiens said, holding her little boy tightly.

Thom stood huge before her, staring skyward. As she looked up at him, it seemed momentarily that he was driving them towards the brightest star in the heavens.

Harness ringing, they drove on, late in the winter night. Around the world the guns were already booming in a new day.

Peace Shall Destroy Many
was imagined during the glorious Edmonton summer of 1959: a creature—then unnamed—which I hoped to submit to the University of Alberta, as they say, “as a thesis … in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.” Six years before, on the brink of leaving high school at last, I had confessed to the publisher of the
Lethbridge Herald
that “I like writing very much…. There is nothing I would rather do than make a living by writing.” He told me very little about news writing, but simply encouraged me by all means to attend university if I could afford it. Now here I was with a scholarship to support my wife, infant daughter and myself, and nothing more required of me every day than to run the narrow switchback of stairs down into the Rutherford Library catacombs and scribble, scribble, scribble. After a week I carried down my portable typewriter.

To plan a novel in tidy workmanlike thesis fashion necessitated inventing a plot summary chapter by chapter (eventually
nine typed double-spaced pages, eighteen chapters) and major character outlines (three pages, eleven characters—including an entire Wulf family that my working notes describe as: “3rd generation Americans … a rather dirty family and their whole effect is animalistic,” which, perhaps unfortunately, disappeared between plan and draft). I remember great happiness, I remember apprehension, excitement, fleeting despa
ir, fearful hope, rushes of “anything-I-can-imagine-is-possible” and always a wild and concentrated obsession: a beginning perhaps of comprehending the power of trying to become “a maker.” In a word whole worlds could appear, or vanish.

When classes began in mid-September I had to retreat to our small apartment on 109th Street. Tena, my wife, now worked evenings as a private-duty nurse and tiny Adrienne had decided to skip the normal crawling stage; she began to walk at eight months—four times a day every book from my short shelves lay splayed on the floor—and so during my working day I retired into our only space with a lock. I placed a broad board between tub and toilet for my typewriter; by Monday, October 5, 1959, I had written the last chapter first and after that it was easy because I knew exactly where the novel must go. I could begin at the beginning: “The yellow planes passed overhead swiftly and in thunder.”

I find now, on the inside of a “Made in Canada” file folder, the varying numbers and dates of
that completed draft:

Finished just in time to leave for Christmas. We drove our black VW Bug south for a few days of Banff mou
ntain snow and then on to my parents’ in Coaldale, Alberta. I have no memory of that Christmas except the return journey when we three almost froze in the fierce cold which sprouted frostlike flowers on every steel protuberance inside the car and congealed ice on every window. Three hundred and fifty miles of scraping the windshield: unless we stopped breathing, we could not see the road. By the end of March, 1960,
Peace Shall Destroy Many
had been completely rewritten again, all 257 pages neatly typed in multi-carbon-copies for the university examiners; it was accepted on April 14. Now what?

You make a list of all possible publishers, my supervisor Professor of English F. M. Salter told me, and then you start mailing it off with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, beginning with the best. On May 30, the first publisher I sent it to, McClelland & Stewart of Toronto, acknowledged receipt of the manuscript; on August 18, Jack McClelland himself sent me a letter that said, if I would work with their editors on the manuscript, he would like to publish it. A letter so hoped for, and nevertheless more startling than any I have received since. After what then seemed to me like lengthy rewrites—they seem fast today—Jack and I signed a contract on November 27, 1961, and on October 4, 1962,1 held the first copies of the book, published in both hardcover and paperback. For my 28th birthday, the gift of a small explosive device.

The circumstances of how I—a Mennonite Saskatchewan homestead kid who spoke no English before I went to school and seemingly had no intellectual nor artistic heritage, beyond church rhetoric and singing and family story-telling—dared to try writing a novel in t
he first place, is outlined in a lecture I gave at St. John’s College, Winnipeg, on the 25th anniversary of the book’s publication. “The Skull in the Swamp” (later published in
River of Stone
by Vintage Canada) also details some of the uproar the publication of
Peace Shall Destroy Many
started among the Mennonites in Canada.

To understand that uproar, one needs to know that over 25,000 Mennonites—my family included—had come to Canada since 1920 to escape atheistic communism in Russia. They were largely settled together on the prairies in farm communities, they spoke German at home and in their churches. This language, and their traditional pacifist refusal to join the armed forces during the Second World War, had often made their entry into Canadian society difficult. Now a novel appeared where, as its dustjacket declared in vivid red and black: “a young theologian writes of prejudice and bigotry erupting to destroy the people of a small Canadian community.” And the people in it were Mennonites. I had objected to the words “young theologian” being displayed on the cover, but to no avail. (No first novelist designs his own cover.) But worse still, I already had a controversial reputation across Canada because I was the editor of a new, English language, weekly Mennonite Brethren Church paper published in Winnipeg. In person and by letter and telephone, from ministers and lay people, I was confronted with:

“You wash our dirty laundry in public—what will they think of us?”

“You have dragged our young people through the mud.”

“If it was just written for church members—well, okay, but in English, spread all over Canada?”

“It’s like going to the bathroom with the door open.”

“This book will make further immigration of our people into Canada much more difficult.”

Many Mennonite readers strongly supported the novel, but for a time the negative outcry won the day. In March, 1963, I resigned as editor of the paper and that summer we left Winnipeg. A condensed version of the novel, to be published in the weekly
Winnipeg Free Press Prairie Farmer
in fall 1963, was stopped by the combined efforts of church leaders and southern Manitoba Mennonite businessmen, who threatened to withdraw their substantial advertising from the
Free Press
if the serialization ran.