Of This Earth by Rudy Wiebe Page B

doing fun stuff no one else thought of, crazy stuff I couldn’t yet imagine. They climbed trees to grab magpie eggs out of nests while the huge birds dived at them, screaming; they stuck their bare arms down gopher holes we had filled with pails of water, to clutch the gopher as he struggled to come gurgling out and if he curled up and bit them, what’s a nip in tough hide, they had him, their hands hard and black-rimmed as iron traps and his tail was worth two cents at Voth’s store, cut it off and let him run, he might grow another two cents’ worth for next summer.

    On my first day of school, the Wednesday after Easter, April 16, 1941, Katie Martens sat across from me at the kindergarten table in the back corner of Speedwell School. It may be she knew less English than I but, much like her twin brothers, her unself-conscious words always turned up in a kind of unexpected wonder that easily became a round smile and laughter. Or at recess a teasing tag song:
    Jriepa, Piepa
Jript mie nijch:
Ess so fuel
Enn deit daut nijch.
    Catcher, piper,
Catch me not:
He’s so lazy,
And won’t do squat.
    Except for Jackie Trapp, who lived northeast of the school near the highway and whose father was German from Romania, all seven of us beginning kids came from Low German homes. Our parents understood we needed an English education because Canada had accepted us in our flight from thatgodless Stalin, but it did not permit living in exclusive, segregated colonies. So we six- and seven-year-olds came to school with our siblings on the day appointed and sat where we were told, on benches at the long table three pine boards wide while the eight grades of regular students found their rows of single desks along the five west windows and surrounded the wood heater forged by Sam Heinrichs from two gasoline drums and protected on three sides by tin sheeting: over thirty desks crowded to the blackboards and the library cupboard against the east wall. All ruled by Mrs. Lucy Bush.
    She was an omnipotent blaze of bright hair swirled into shapes we had never before seen, a manifestation inexplicably everywhere in the room with a voice always about to sheer away into space. Though that never quite happened while we seven sat around the table because after “God Save the King” and the Lord’s Prayer and roll call we were ordered to leave the school building and walk across the yard, past the girls’ two-seater toilet and what remained of the long winter woodpiles, to the teacherage and sit down on the floor around ancient Mr. Bush. Not a single word, silence!
    The log teacherage consisted of two tiny rooms, with a neat brick chimney on a shelf above the centre stove going up through the ceiling. The bedroomdoor was never open, narrow with beautiful grooved boards that left an unforgettable wisp of something sweet on your fingertips; years later, in Vancouver, I would recognize cedar. Mr. Bush sat in an armchair beside the table; if he turned his head a little, he could look out the window and down the road leading between pussy willows over the slough and the notch in the trees on the nearest hill, south towards the church and beyond Speedwell into the world. Mr. Bush rolled cigarettes—sinful, our parents told us, but they could do nothing about the war and so few teachers—in a little machine whose handle he turned on the table, and then he cut each in half with a Valet razor blade because, he said, he could only smoke half as much as he had before. He smoked at the ceiling while he asked us questions.
    What happened on the Plains of Abraham? (Katie and I knew Abraham was in the Bible, but that wasn’t the answer.)
    What is the biggest number you can think of? (If someone answered, he wrote that number on a sheet of paper, and then the next, which was always one bigger.)
    Why do we say the sun rises in the morning? (No one dared say anything, and when we were outside later Katie said that was a stupid question becauseyou could see it happen