Of This Earth by Rudy Wiebe

she was grown up, eighteen, “old enough to get married” as Mennonite wisdom had it.
    Mam turned eighteen in September 9, 1913. At the time her youngest half-brother, Heinrich, wasthree years old and that may have been one more reason why Daniel Knelsen tried to discourage my father: “Ploag die nijch. Met onse Tien loohnt sijch daut aul nijch.” Don’t bother yourself. With our Tina it [marriage] isn’t worth it.
    His Tien knew how to work hard, oh yes, but she was always sickly, always complaining about something or other, all her life, why bother marrying someone who would die quick on you anyway?
    How many times our father recalled that story of enduring love and ugliness. There Grandpa Knelsen sat, in the one picture we had of him, bald and bearded on a polished chair beside his final, third, wife, Lena Hiebert, less than half his age, both big fists bunched on his thighs and gleaming knee-high leather boots crossed at the ankles—boots he may have made himself because, Dan told me, he probably was a cobbler. And, strangely, there is what seems to be a slim notebook clutched in his left hand while he stares straight as pins into our eyes. For of course my father did “bother” (ploage: literally “to plague yourself”) himself with “his Tien.” They were married on a steppe winter day, January 15, 1914, and all those years in starvation Russia, war, revolution, Communism, the months of flight via Moscow and trains and refugee shelters and ships and trains again and the endless labour of Canada together andeventually seven children, by 1975 all (except the one who died) married, with twenty-eight grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren and over sixty-one years of life together, Pah laughed aloud in his final, Alberta, hospital bed:
    “Na Tien, some Ploag!”
    “Sssshuh,” Mam gently, weeping. “All those old stories.”

    When during World War II our father drove to Fairholme to sell a box-load of grain or several fat pigs, perhaps leading a calf behind wagon or sleigh, he always returned with what Mam had listed for him: food staples, clothing, farm or household items. But sometimes he brought a surprise as well. Once I remember a finely stitched double set of horse harness, complete with back breeching, of which we already had one set for road driving; they weren’t needed for field work. In fact, we had six sets of harness, enough for every working horse we owned, but my father said these were extra strong, Storekeeper Rempel had sold them as a special bargain and he’d store them in the granary so they’d be ready when other harnesses broke, as they always did. Yes, my mother said, someday we would need new harness,but now we really needed a harrow! What was he thinking, to pay so much for what we might need someday?
    Such arguments live deeper in a child than hearing; the rough strands that lengthen the wide weave of a family. The harness went back; I don’t know whether my father eventually drove to Fairholme, whether my mother went with him or if she went with Dan, but their disagreement about our neighbour Johann Martens’ cattle was worse. I remember Liz and I, perhaps Helen too, thirteen or fourteen at the time, crying about Martens’ perpetually gaunt cattle in our grain field and our father chasing them out again, not confronting Martens and his sons, just accepting the trampled crop, wait and see, it can come back, it’s still early in the season. But once the cattle have been in there, those scrubs, they’ll just come back! But the Martenses are church members, you can’t just go yell at them. Who said yell? Well, that’s all that will happen with Martens, you know that. Yes, yes, but …
    And finally Mam, hoarse from arguing, going with Helen down the trail through the trees to the Martens farm and coming back beaten down and shamed in her anger by Johann Martens who had ut je’brellt, bawled Mam out, horribly Helen said, sobbing aloud: What business had my mother coming