Peace Shall Destroy Many Read Free Page A

father re-shovelling a heap of grain, his face half-covered with a red handkerchief against the formaldehyde. Thom dumped the bucket over into thetrough, gripped by the consciousness that his family was carrying on their ancestors’ great tradition of building homes where only brute nature had couched. Saskatchewan, in the spiraling heat of the Depression, had acted wisely in opening up this rock-strewn northern bush to the Russian Mennonites.

    He caught back the bucket with about a cupful of water left, lifted it, and drank without dripping as his older brothers had taught him years before. The water tasted pure as ice.
    “Thom.” He turned to see his mother outside the kitchen. “We need some water.”
    His mother watched him a moment as he came towards her; then she turned back into the log kitchen. He was her son. To her, despite the fact that she had four sons, tall dark Thom was different and, somehow, more important at this moment than the others. She had first known this feeling of special importance with young David, when coming toCanada on the crammed ship. Then it had been Ernst in the early back-breaking years in the Wapiti district. Now David was in India, across more oceans than she could imagine, Ernst was married and had his own farm two miles away, but Thom was at that age. And she felt more than ever that she was helpless before new manhood’s unshackling of itself. Thom, stooping wide-shouldered to enter the door, reaching for the water pails on the wash-stand, had little notion of the prayers breathed for him in the heat of the kitchen wood-stove. He saw the fresh bread and dropped the pail-handle, eyes searching for the knife.
    “Cut the cooler one—this will burn you.”
    He cut a chunk carefully. “What did Carlo bark about just after dinner?” They talked in Low German. The peculiar Russian Mennonite use of three languages caused no difficulties for there were inviolable, though unstated, conventions as to when each was spoken. High German was always used when speaking of religious matters and as a gesture of politeness towards strangers; a Low German dialect was spoken in the mundane matters of everyday living; the young people spoke English almost exclusively among themselves. Thought and tongue slipped unhesitantly from one language to the other. Now, as the pale butter melted into the bread and its warm aroma rose to Thom’s head, his teeth crunched through the crust as his mother answered.
    “Mr. Block came to collect for that new church in Alberta. Even in the busy season he always does church work first.”
    “We haven’t anything to give now.”
    “We promised when the hogs go. We have to help, others helped us. And you know Mr. Block; he would never leave his farm now except for the church.”
    “Uh-huh.” With his mouth full, he heard the cow bells nearing; he picked up the pails and went out. Deacon Peter Block had been the first Mennonite to come to Wapiti: he cleared the way for the others. When he had come, the wilderness, now thinned every winter for firewood and better grazing, stood as forest, and the only settlers were several Englishmen grubbing a few acres from the fastness. The Wiens family came three years later, in 1930, and together with Block and the others who followed, formed the Wapiti Mennonite Church. Swinging the pails to his stride, Thom thought of the good land that was left. The hamlet of Calder was only twelve miles south of the church, but to the highway on the east, Poplar Lake on the west, and to the Indian reservation across the Wapiti River to the north, all around the Mennonite settlement lay virgin sections, heavily wooded, enough for children’s children. And there would be more, when the last breeds were bought out.

    “How much left?” his father asked, passing towards the kitchen.
    “Half a day maybe. Is the disc ready to take out tomorrow morning?”
    “You’ll have to use the hitch from the plow—I haven’t fixed the other.”
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