Stories keep on

Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest Rudy Wiebe. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2006. 416 pages.

For decades, Rudy Wiebe has been fashioning stories from the rich ground of Canadian history, both aboriginal and European. His latest book is his own story, a delightful and often moving memoir of the first 12 years of his life, lived on a homestead in northwestern Saskatchewan.

As one would expect from the two-time winner of the Governor General’s award for fiction, Wiebe takes the stuff of memories, interviews, family photographs, and diaries, and weaves a self-portrait charged with the same lyrical energy, humour, and compassion as his fiction.

The bare facts of the narrative have much in common with the stories of many Mennonites of his generation. Wiebe is born in a log house in 1934, the youngest in a Mennonite Brethren family of six children that fled the purges of Stalin’s Ukraine several years earlier. The Wiebes live in a tight community of immigrants carving farmland out of the forests north of North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

The spiritual and social hub of the Wiebes’ life is the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren church, which worships in High German and visits and tells stories in Low German. School is in English, and it introduces Wiebe to the wonders of language and literature.

Wiebe’s childhood is full of typical pioneer pleasures and experiences. But these are woven together with tragedy and sorrow. Especially heartbreaking is sister Helen’s death at age 17 after a long illness – an event Wiebe recounts from several angles. There is also Wiebe’s awakening to his own frailty when a draft horse steps on his stomach.

The historical context also gives the narrative a backdrop of realism. Topics of conversation and prayer include one uncle serving in Stalin’s army and another whom the same army has caused to disappear in Siberia’s gulags. The raging of World War II dominates newscasts on a battery-operated radio.

But Of This Earth is more than a poignant autobiographical account of life in Canada’s hinterland. It is also an exploration of Wiebe’s spiritual and artistic roots as a writer. The book is important reading both for folks who love his writing and for any remaining skeptics – usually fellow Mennonites – who strain to understand where Wiebe’s literary voice is coming from.

Unlike other recent literature by people with Mennonite roots, this memoir actually celebrates, with both humour and realism, a robust and sustaining Christian faith. Religious imposters do show up in the book – the unwelcome transient who paints “wrath of God” messages on rocks and fences, or the fire-and-brimstone evangelist Wiebe’s family goes to hear while on a visit to Vancouver.

But these only serve to highlight the genuineness that seems to mark the church Wiebe belongs to, whether it’s the four-part singing, sermons on the love of God, or long sessions of prayer from the heart.

Wiebe says he never saw his parents kiss, but they “sounded like lovers” when, hard at work on the farm, they would sing duets of those soaring hymns that had sustained them and their own parents before them. “Before I was born my mother’s blood and breath formed me to know that God is everywhere,” he writes.

At age six, he tells his mother he wants to “stop being bad and have Jesus in my heart” and the two of them kneel to pray. In an act of childhood repentance, Wiebe decides never to set rabbit snares again.

This earthiness in Wiebe, captured in the book’s title, comes out in something of a theological meditation near the end of the book, where Wiebe describes the family’s preparations to leave Speedwell in 1947 for better opportunities in Coaldale, Alberta. Wiebe contemplates a photo of a sled full of aspen logs that his father and brother are clearing from the land.

The image of this tree species evokes centuries of lore linking the aspen to the crucifixion of Christ. The cross may have been made of aspen trunks, and the leaves of aspen trees are said to have begun their trembling at the moment Jesus was crucified. They continue to shiver as a sign of the Spirit’s movement in creation.

Just as the roots and seeds of this icon of Canada’s boreal forest spread themselves underground across large tracts of space and time, so stories grow and spread. The aspens soon reclaim the land that the Speedwell community eventually abandons. “When a written story ends,” Wiebe muses in the retelling of Helen’s death, “others are always continuing.” This is a book where one feels those stories multiplying, even long after it’s back on the shelf.

Byron Rempel-Burkholder works with Faith & Life Resources, a division of Mennonite Publishing Network, as editor of Rejoice!, a daily devotional magazine co-published with Kindred Productions. He lives in Winnipeg.