Peace Shall Destroy Many Read Free

crossing their faces, and people like Hank Unger sent pictures of themselves casual against fighter planes with the level waste of Africa beyond and left the faith of their fathers to do—what?
    There was a point of thought beyond which Thom could not go. Since Joseph Dueck had come to teach at Wapiti School the fall before, his friendship with Thom had unlocked new thought possibilities of which Thom had formerly had no conception. He had been astonished to find that, with arduous effort, he could follow most of Joseph’s thinking. On a winter Sunday afternoon, as the heater glowed red and the peaceful sounds of Pa’safternoon sleeping drifted through the curtain of the bedroom door, Thom had stumbled after Joseph’s rambles regarding the meaning of existence, the nature of Christianity, the Christian’s relationship to his fellow men. During the week, while cleaning the cow-barn or hauling hay to the stock, he would grope through the newly discovered labyrinth of his mind, alternately enchanted and intimidated, but, despite the varying paths he chose, he always arrived at the same ultimate point. He could no more have denied what he held to be the basic tenets of his belief than he could have straddled the sun. He was at that point again: he had been told the truth. The church—the Deacon—they knew. Believe;questions were often simplest if not answered. When the plow jerked in the earth you could truly know, but when a man went his way, the surmise of whether for good or evil, if perhaps correct, told little of why. And Joseph said the “why” was most important. But why not leave simple at the simplest? Must he always wonder and try to explain? Why not accept like Pete Block? It was probably better not to know, not to have to think about it. Perhaps no one could know, anyway. Joseph! “Leave it to the fathers,” he said abruptly in German. He kicked the plow-frame and flexed his cramped legs forward so that they dangled nearly to the ground. It was sheerest comfort.
    His head hung, dulled from plowing all day alone with his mind. On the last round, when the horses moved with the knowledge of coming rest, he liked the earth as it unfolded itself like the roll of a filleted fish to a thin knife. Packed by the snows, it twisted free and lay open, crumbling at the edges, intruding no questions, offering itself and its power of life to the man who proved his belief with his calloused hand. And the believers went on turning its page, while round the world it was wounded to death by slashing heathen tank-tracks. Plowing, he watched the furrows turn and settle.
    The best of the day for Thom was when he drove the unhitched horses towards home and, above the jingling of harness and shuffling of feet, heard the last birds chirp themselves to rest on their branches. Faintly the sounds of the world shutting itself away for another day, a dog barking, the call of a boy to his cows, a calf bawling, the slam of a screen-door, drifted on a breeze now warm on the hillock, now cool in the coulee. He turned the corner of the hay-yard with the worked horses and looked north past the edge of the barn to the house facing him on the knoll. To the right stood the summer-kitchen; tinmilk-pails blinked on the points of the slab fence separating the two buildings from the yard. As he closed the wire gate behind him, he could hear the pigs oinking to be fed in their huge pen. When he stopped the horses by the horse-barn, he was already in the smooth groove that was “doing chores.”
    For the past five springs, since he had finished grade eight, Thom Wiens had followed the same evening pattern of unharnessing the horses, watering them, stacking their manger with hay, dumping chop into their boxes, filling the trough for the coming cattle. Every spring he knew his bare arms and the drip drip of the rising bucket. Except for more land to plow each year, there were few changes. Across the well-mouth, Thom could now see the bent figure of his