Sweeter Than All the World (45 page)

“So, what is to be done?”

“You ask me?”

“Can’t a person decide, something?”

He faced me sitting in my lap, our legs and arms joined around each other.

“You and your perfect Canadian ‘decide,’ ” he said. “You have to get inside yourself, and cut it out. Or encrust it.”

“What?”

“You carry it, but it is sealed off. Encrusted.”

“The English medical term is ‘encapsulate.’ ”

“Mine is short, and rougher.”

Jorge said. But I know only walking, always walking, away. Through devastating dust, past shade trees and irrigation canals like pencil marks drawn in the sand and paths made by goats climbing between rocks, like Greece but blacker, and piled into walls. I stop high above the twisted valley of Rio San Pedro—
every name here is conquering Peter, every solid rock on which to nail another Jesus—I am on a hill veined with the stone walls of the
pukara
where the Inca/Atacamas made their last stand against Pedro de Valdivia in 1540. The Atacamas did not have nearly enough either, of anything. Below are adobe walls, village roofs traced among the oasis trees, the distant flat of desert rises gradually to an endless, undulating skyline anchored in immense volcanoes. Superb in the moonlight, like altars. No, deeper … like rising prayers. If only.

I said to my mother. “Right,” I said. “Just right: a song for wounded living-dead Mennonites.”

“Trish, Trish,” she said then, quickly, “it wasn’t a Mennonite who wrote the words, it was—”

“Like a fuckinawful Hollywood movie,” I interrupted her because I already knew I knew everything it was necessary to know. “Sing ‘The Menno-night of the Li-i-i-iving Dead.’ ”

Under the clear moon this futile fortress of defence is spread over the mountain around me like a thick, dark Inca weaving. You are here now; so are they; they will certainly overwhelm you. What is to be done?

And my mother, Susannah Lyons Wiebe, is holding a book. I am leaning against her knee and watching the book, and slowly, like the book opening between her hands:

very slowly in the blue moonlight my mind opens.

Morning brightens behind the desolate mountains. I can walk only northeast, up the sharp river valley towards the spine
of Andes between Chile and Bolivia. Black-faced sheep with lambs surge out of high speargrass for their Boxing Day drink from the stream, the shepherds wait for them, a woman in dark trousers, a quick black-and-tan dog, a man, until they cross where the water clatters over rocks. An hour later there is an open stone sheepfold, gnarled branches bent over a corner shelter, and on the plateau above that a small tower. A church, set in wide and completely empty space, made of baked earth, the top of its red walls level with my head, a domed door fastened from inside. The white tower at its corner opens in the four directions for a hanging bell. I stoop into the tower, pull the rope, and the single toll rings along the valley and comes back faint with its thin edge of iron. Not the round, full “bo-o-o-om” of a Buddhist prayer log swinging back. Comes again.

Trish Wiebe.

I have heard my name. I wait. I turn carefully in every direction in the fierce sun around the small, red church. My name is Ann, do you hear, Ann Wilson.

Nothing moves. I slip into my pack and walk to the faint track switching back and forth up to the next plateau. I climb too fast, the church becomes a red and white flicker, impossible to see unless I blink and search for it, and I breathe my body down into a distance-climbing rhythm until at last the tiny building is gone; only desert cliffs and erosions and tiered plateaus of gravel surround me, empty as crushed paper.

Sky. Tremendous, eroded cliffs burning into high noon above me: there are the ruined fortress walls of Catarpe, built by the Incas so they could watch the valley in either direction. Their conquest and repression of the Atacamas only a shade less ruthless than Spain’s oppression of both, the eternal human litany of fear
at the core eddying around small ease and much, much pain. A narrowing barranca opens down, I clamber into it, feet and hands. The volcanic walls glisten with veins of minerals, feathered slabs of feldspar, and a gash split by rock-shift and water opens beside me. Deep, deep inside, where the black layers tilt together, from some narrow split sunlight gleams on odd, unrockishly knobbed, splintered, curved tan and white protrusions.

Bones. It must be. I drop my pack, I face the gash and lay myself face down along it, stretch myself thin and wriggle in. I feel my shirt hook, rip along my back; one bra-strap snags on rock but loosens and scrapes past when I squeeze lower, squirming forward, reaching until the rock lowers to clamp itself onto my head. My fingertips can almost touch them, long ends knotted, leg bones perhaps, they are set immovably in a runnel of sand washed hard as concrete. Through split rock the sun’s finger of light is pointing,
look here, look for me here—

I pull in a long breath, twist to lay my head flatter, sideways, and hunch ahead, squeeze the last centimetres until I can feel them, feel and see my fingers just at the corner of my eye, the knobbly grain of their age and surface impressed like the cellular filigree of a leaf. My left shoulder and breast are crushed, a volcanic tip is hooked down into my left ear, but my reaching left hand can still move and if I stare straight ahead to where the rock closes on darkness, at the peripheral edge of vision I can see the shadow, even as I feel the edge, the slender fluted comma of a human rib.

Genesis, my father Adam says. Even the Hebrew pun replicates itself in English. His square face, the heavy Wiebe jaw lightens into his surprising smile. So suddenly gentle it might seduce anyone, if only for the moment it may last. Truly a DNA story, you lovely bone of my bone.

I am your daughter.

You are. And so, scientifically speaking, more bone of my bone than your mother can be. As you are hers more than I.

I am, I will always be, a double daughter.

It seems the Chilean earth has shrugged softly, tighter, and I am held without breath, held firm and immovably at last. Or at least long enough, by the earth encrusted. No more deciding.

T
O GET INTO THE COPSE
they have to push between brush over their shoulders, scrub willow, saskatoon, sharp, scratching rosebushes and wild cranberry, their berries freeze-dried by winter; but after a few crunching steps the bush opens suddenly, upwards, and there are the tall aspen. Their white, branchless trunks crowd around the two grey buildings, bend over them in the giant curves of the perpetual northwest wind, so tall the sky is spring green, a tropical canopy drawn above them.

Adam thinks again, How can they be here, these immense trees? The yard was clean as a swept steppe, the chickens grazed the grass to the ground and the only tree nearer than the shelter strip north of the garden was the huge spruce beside the outhouse where the magpies squabbled while you sat—there is no spruce. Beyond where it grew is the thickest tree of all, a black poplar—
schundt
his father declared them, trash, the roots suck
up every drop of water, the first tree to clear away and never bring into the house, no heat in that wood, just pulp leaking soot from the stovepipe—but there it grew, on the edge of the space where the sod-roofed barn once was; almost a metre at the base. Fifty years.

There is a bluster of wind, too high to feel but he can hear the rush of it as the aspen flicker far above him and bend east, swing, circle back in their rooted give and return and, staring up, it seems he is standing on a tall ship, its great masts heel as he leans to remain erect on the tilting deck, the green-blue sails bulge before the wind and he staggers, his hand finds a balance on the nearest mast of a tree and instantly he feels the earth’s motion, even as he hears and sees it; as he leans again with the white mast and is carried, driven hard through the heaving sea.

“Sir?”

Ground returns, solid beneath his feet. He has never travelled on a sailing ship.

“Mr. Wiebe? Are you all right?”

Alison beside him; she is a tall, heavy woman, but her hand is lighter than a leaf on his shoulder. He turns to her small smile: he had not met her before she and Joel arrived in Edmonton last night, and he thinks again that maybe Joel is lucky, really lucky—no, not luck, Adam’s mother said when she first saw him through the maternity window, so broad and black-haired and heavy and roaring loud enough they heard him through the thick glass, your boy is blessed.

“Thanks, thanks, I’m fine—” Adam hesitates before Alison’s steady gaze. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ ” he tells her again.

“I know…”

She shrugs, and he smiles with her. He says, “I was feeling … Flickering aspen, when the wind comes and you touch them, you can … seem to … feel their sound.”

She lifts her hand to touch the tree, her palm and fingers listening. “A tintinnabulum?” she asks. “Susurration?”

He hisses an echo in her ear, “Susurration.”

They draw it out into rhythm with the poplars high over them, their cloud of leaf voices singing.

Adam gestures up. “The voices of those who have died before us.”

Alison stares at him, and he tells her mildly, “I’m not crazy. Just a comforting way to think of leaves and wind. For me.”

Her smile returns, but uncertainly, as Joel comes crunching through brush around the corner of the frame house. He ducks under the branch spikes of a tree crashed into the caved roof. “Dad, this is wild,” he says. He runs his hands down the grey siding. “And beautiful clear cedar, so soft, it’s grainy as cloth.”

“Never painted,” Adam says, “just gentle Alberta weather.”

Joel laughs, patting the wall. “This house cost a lot, two floors, cement foundation—and you always bragged your homestead was so poor! Romantic crap.”

“No crap, that wasn’t our house. Orest Homeniuk built it, when we moved away and he bought the land for back taxes, one hundred eighty-seven dollars.”

Alison gestures to the black log mound beside them. “You didn’t live in here?”

“That’s where we lived.”

“Huh?” Joel takes four steps and he is beside her, the eave of the rotting roof comes barely to his forehead. “God, I thought this was maybe your chicken barn, or the pigs.”

“No no, that was our sweet little home in the north. Good thing Orest never tore it down, see how neatly the corners are fitted?”

“Sawn off so trim,” Alison says, fingering axe marks. “But the logs aren’t sawn … what is this?”

“Trimmed flat, by broadaxe. John could trim two sides of a log straight as a string. That wall’s stood sixty-five years and look at it: still straight.”

“Uncle John chopped all these logs flat?”

“Sixteen years old.” Adam taps Joel’s shoulder. “They don’t make them that way any more.”

“They don’t have to.” Joel bends down to the windowsill just above his feet. “The window’s low enough to walk through.”

“And the trees are so huge,” Alison says. “What happened?”

“That big frame house was never lived in, it was never finished. We left in May ‘46, and Orest started cutting spruce and sawing lumber and building—everything but the cedar is wood off this land—as soon as he got title, but he died just after Joe, his son, got back from the war. Heart attack.”

Beside them that tall, narrow, almost ghostly shell surrounded by the white trunks of trees swaying slightly, back and forth as if to bar the black openings where windows and doors have never been. Adam sees apprehension in Alison’s eyes; almost, perhaps, fear.

He tells her, “Joe Homeniuk fought for land, foot by bloody foot in Normandy and the Battle of Holland. He said he and his buddies were killed and killed for it, and when he came back land couldn’t be what it was for his father, or us Mennonites. Land was our living, our life and food, but for
Soldier Joe land was what you either had or didn’t have, it was business. What land grows you sell, grain or trees or cattle, it’s all for sale, and you buy and sell land like shares on the stock market, buy low with borrowed money and mortgage and buy more and sell high and always make a profit. He wouldn’t live out here in the sticks, thirteen miles from the railroad. He built that castle on the bluff in Boyle and the Toshiba Products plant we passed in Rowand, he sold his lumber mill to them six years ago. Tens of millions, and he still owns half the country.”

Alison asks, “And you bought this back from him?”

“Yeah. One small piece, our homestead quarter, after two years’ negotiation. He cleared every square inch to grow crop—he did that to all the land he owned—he bulldozed the barn and the sheds and the trees, even the muskeg, all up in smoke, but he didn’t torch this little copse, these—houses.”

“So, how’d you persuade him?”

“We made a deal: I’ll never touch them either.”

“I don’t get it,” Joel says. “Why?”

“This is the last thing his father built. And I’m the only person born on this place.”

“A real good guy.”

“As the Cree say, ‘Blood runs thick and long and forever.’ ”

Joel guffaws. “Not on the Internet!”

Adam’s feet sink in half a century of leaves, the roof so low he can rub the end of the highest gable-log with the palm of his hand. The wood sifts dust on his fingers. Abruptly he leads Alison and Joel around to the gaping hole of the door in the centre section of the long log mound, and ducks in. The old house space is no larger than a granary, and crowded with long drapes of paper like tattered hides hanging from the ceiling. There is no
place for feet: the floor has vanished, collapsed in debris into the cellar hole.

“It’s just rotten paper,” Adam says to the two hesitating in the doorway. “Wrapping paper, paper bags, newspapers, we pasted them all together with flour and over the walls and ceiling the last winter, to try and keep the wind out.”

Alison murmurs, “It’s an installation. A tight space of art hangings.”