Sweeter Than All the World

One Speaking Waskahikan Waskahikan, Northern Alberta 1942 In summer the poplar leaves clicked and flickered at him, in winter the stiff spruce rustled with voices. The boy, barefoot in the heat or trussed up like a lumpy package against the fierce silver cold, went alone into the bush, where everything spoke to him: warm rocks, the flit of quick, small animals, a dart of birds, tree trunks, the great fires burning across the sky at night, summer fallow, the creek and squeaky snow. Everything spoke as he breathed and became aware of it, its language clear as the water of his memory when he lay against the logs of the house at night listening to the spring mosquitoes find him under his blanket, though he had his eyes shut and only one ear uncovered. Everything spoke, and it spoke Lowgerman. Like his mother. She would call him long into the summer evening when it seemed the sun burned all night down into the north, call high and falling slow as if she were already weeping: "Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo . . . ." And when he appeared beside her, she would bend her powerful hands about his head and kiss him so warm his eyes rang. "Why don't you answer, you?" she would say against his hair. "Why don't you ever answer? The bush is so dark and I listen and listen, why don't you ever say a word?" while he nuzzled his face into the damp apron at the fold of her thigh. And soon her words would be over, and he would feel her skin and warm apron smelling of saskatoon jam and dishes and supper buns love him back. His sister laughed at his solitary silence. "In Waskahikan School are twenty-seven kids," Margaret said, "you'll have to talk, and English at that. You can't say anything Lowgerman there, and if you don't answer English when she asks, the teacher will make you stand in the corner." "R-right in f-f-f-f-ront of people?" he burst out fearfully. "Yeah, in front of every one of them, your face against the wall. So you better start talking, and English too." And she would try to teach him the English names for things. But he did not listen to that. Rather, when he was alone he practised standing in the corners of walls. Their logs shifted and cracked, talking all the time like happiness; logs were very good, especially where they came together so hard and warm in winter. Outside was even better. He followed the thin tracks of a muskrat that had dented the snow with its tail between bulrushes sticking out of the slough ice, or waited for the coyote in the field along the hill to turn and see him, one paw lifted and about to touch a drift, its jaw opening to its red tongue smiling with him. Then suddenly cock its ears, and pounce! double-pawed into a drift, burrowing deeper. In summer he heard a mother bear talk to her cubs among the willows of the horse pasture near the creek. He did not see them, but he found their tracks in the spring snow behind the spruce and his father said something would have to be done if they came any closer to the pigpen. The boy knew his father refused to own a gun, but their nearest Ukrainian neighbour gladly hunted everywhere, whatever he heard about, and so he folded his hands over the huge pawprints and whispered in Lowgerman. "Don't come here, not any more. It's dangerous." The square school sat at the corner, below the hill where the road allowances crossed south over the creek and bent around the spruce muskeg towards their Mennonite church, and the store. Inside the church every Sunday there were hands waiting for him. At the top of the balcony stairs which led up from the corner behind the men's benches, under the sloped roof with tWiebe, Rudy is the author of 'Sweeter Than All the World', published 2001 under ISBN 9780676973402 and ISBN 067697340X.