Peace Shall Destroy Many (20 page)

“Ah well—” They forked steadily. Thom thought, There should be more to living than work, and more work. Friendship perhaps? He could as well forget about trying to regain that deep serenity he and Pete had known, past now as an age, before Joseph had come and gone. Pete, plodding in his father’s ways, never changed. But Pete’s activities somehow lacked the edge of brilliance that, despite growing conviction, attracted Thom to the Deacon. When he was near Pete, Thom found it increasingly easier to discover flaws in the Deacon’s methods. Savagely, Thom speared a bundle one-handedly, as no harvest worker ever would. Work. What had work given Elizabeth, for example? A pain in her stomach?

“Hal like school?”

Thom looked up, surprised. Pete pitched st
rongly, dust ran in stripes down his shirt-back. “Oh yah. I guess so. Haven’t been home for two weeks before last nigh
t. Mom said last night they’re doing all sorts of things. Things he likes. Like making Indian villages in class. Don’t know what good that does—”

Pete did not answer as he expected. “Yah. Guess the kids would like that.” The words hung in the air as if begging another question. Thom could not imagine why Pete should ask about Hal. “He like the teacher?”

“Oh yah. Mom says they all do a lot.” They worked silently for a time.

“Annamarie left yet?”

Thom hurled two bundles on the half-filled rack and walked to the next stook. “Yes,” he said casually, “about a month ago. She’s in training at the Battleford Hospital.” Pete knew this as well as he, but Thom could not stop himself. If
he could only tell someone about Annamarie; merely talk about her in an uninhibited manner as about anyone else. There were so immensely many things he wanted to know: he had racked his mind trying to remember all he could of her in the lower grades at school, but she had been just some faceless little girl below him. If people would just mention things about her, so he could feel he had known her before last June, but single Mennonite men did not talk at length about girls to one another. He did not want to ask Margret who, since having been announced with Annamarie’s brother Sam, occasionally flicked a roguish wink at him. It was no winking matter for Thom.

“Does she like it?”

“Guess so. Hasn’t come home yet anyway.” Despite himself, he had sealed the topic. Minutes later they were jolting back towards the farmyard, talking
casually about the harvest, both longing desperately to speak of something else.

As the afternoon ebbed away, Elizabeth came from the house with the cardboard box of lunch. The men, one by one, gulped food hastily and returned to work. Her face was pallid as she poured coffee in the lee of the granary. Thom, his teeth crunching through a thick bread-crust, saw her hand hover repeatedly over her abdomen. Except for the incident at dinner, he would not have noticed. Reaching for a last cookie, he said, “Soon the harvest will be in and the peaceful winter here.”

As he picked the cookie from the tin in the box, her hand reached out almost as if she was reaching for his. Then it paused, and she whispered, as if there had been anyone to hear in the threshing,

“Thom—go away from here!”

“Wha-a—” His hand could not rise with the cookie. He
was nonplussed, as if an elderly woman had kissed him. She did not notice his confusion but rushed on:

“Go away from here—Wapiti—for a few years. You’re thinking right—to teach those children from the Bible—Pete told me you want to take correspondence school again, like last winter with Joseph—you’ll be buried here under rules that aren’t as important as this chaff. Go! while you can!” A terrible urgency suppressed her voice; she seemed to see to the bottom of his soul as if it were water.

“I—I don’t know—” Stunned, he found no protest for an echo of his thought.

“Your brother David couldn’t work here—Joseph had to go—Pastor Lepp—Herrn—Aaron Martens—look what they are! A church is supposed to be a
brotherhood
—all equal—that gets its direction from Scripture—not rules!”

“Elizabeth, to go—” he knew not a word to add, his hand holding the cookie, her eyes transfixing him. He stared, crouched forward in his tallness before her.

“God in heaven! Can’t you see what’s happened to me?” The passion of her voice was as a surge to heave him from Wapiti. Her face was old.

He straightened up, stuffing the cookie into his mouth without thought, the eyes he could not face holding him as at a consecration. Abruptly Block turned the corner.

“Thom, get those few sacks out of the empty bin—the other’s nearly full.” Thom was gone before the Deacon had finished speaking.

Block swallowed coffee. “There’s two teams in the field. Leave the box here and I’ll tell the men. Better get the cows before supper, otherwise it will get late. And bring that limping steer in too.”

Elizabeth leaned forward and placed the empty mug in the box. Block turned to go. As Thom at that moment rounded the corner to ask about the chute-extension, his eye snagged on the motion of Elizabeth as she crumbled soundlessly to the ground. Seeing her in the fall, it was as if she had been falling always and the last instant of it had been revealed to him.

“Mr. Block!” he gasped.

The Deacon swung about. “What—Elizabeth!” he was beside the motionless heap, and then, with a lurch, she rolled over, straightened rigid in spasm, shameless in pain. “Elizabeth, what is it?” Block pulled her skirts over the coarse stockings, kneeling beside her.

“It’s—here.” Her hands groped, face contorted to the sky. An animal groan twisted between her clenched teeth.

Block rapped at the paralysed youth, “Get Pete—before he drives to the field,” and bent back over his daughter. He smoothed her hair straggling from beneath her kerchief. “Elizabeth,” he soothed, leaning forward as the threshing thundered on, “is it your stomach?”

“Yes.” Bitten short in pain. “It’s—in jerks.”

“I’ll help you get up—get you to the house.” He put his hand under her shoulder, but her head shuddered a s
ilent “no.” The chaff from the blown-straw drifted down on her face. She was lying pole-like; “Is it so bad?” helplessly.

Pete ran around the corner, Thom at his heels. Block, sensing his son, did not look up. “Take the truck—get Mrs. Wiens. Tell her Elizabeth has stomach trouble.” The usual sickwords sounded inane to him, looking at the face of his daughter. “Bad. Tell her if she’s got anything to bring
it to kill the pain.”

“The team—”

“Right now! Thom can tie it up.” They were gone in the lash of his voice. He bent down. “Can you get up if—” and then he realized she had fainted.

He looked at her an instant, her face fallen over against the box. Heavenly Father, what can this be? He
gathered her clumsily into his arms and pushed erect. The threshing hammered on unabated as he started towards the house. The truck roared off. Somewhere, far from his thoughts, he sensed Thom run up behind him.

“The bin—” Thom could not pull his eyes from her face bumping against the grime of the checked shirt-sleeve. Merciful Father, he prayed.

“Yes,” answered the Deacon automatically, “Sweep it—get the extension from the box-wagon. Use it when the first’s full. You’ll have to stop the machine a minute.” He walked on with his burden draped in his arms. She seemed oddly lumpish and ungainly, almost as if—the thought was too absurd to be considered. She stirred; he quickened his step. As he passed the well and strode up the path, quite irrelevantly it became essential to remember when he had last carried his only daughter. His mind had no idea where to grope in his memory.

He kicked the gate open, and at that moment his wife emerged from the kitchen with a pail. She stared, frozen.

“Elizabeth’s very sick. She’s fainted—hold the door.” He bent the limpness through into the house, and again the suspicion—but he sloughed it aside.

Mrs. Block said, “Put her on our bed—it’s bigger,” and for the first time in his life he unthinkingly obeyed her. Under the cooling cloths she brought, Elizabeth began to stir on the bed. He passed his hand over his face, dashed at the sweaty glue of grit and chaff.

He said, “Get her undressed. Pete’s gone for Mrs. Wiens. I’ve got to get to the threshing.” But when he stood there, alone, in the kitchen cluttered with
supper preparation, he felt oddly useless: the work outside no longer seemed so important. He stared a moment at the half-filled water-pail on the wash-stand beside the door, then he dumped the water into the basin and strode to the well. The tractor puffed on while men yelled above the din as they pitched.

“Don’t let the machine run empty. Pitch!”

“Hey, get your team movin’!”

“John, drive to the east field, this one’s done.”

Block did not hear them for his praying.

In the house again, he was setting down the empty dipper when his wife broke into the kitchen, eyes wild.

“Peter!” The proper name startled him as much as her look. “Peter! Elizabeth’s in child-birth!”

Blood burst on his scar: “Woman, you’re mad! It’s imposs—”

“Peter, I’ve seen it all my life.”

“It can’t be true!” and a faint-wrenching oath tore from him. But even as he wheeled towards the bedroom, he knew it true. Her ungainly body.

He took only one step. His wife thrust past him, “She’s in it now. Stay here! Pitching from the stack this morning!” She was gone.

He had not heard the truck, but Pete jerked the door open at that moment and stepped in, Mrs. Wiens with her satchel behind him. Pete blurted, “How—”

“She’s in there,” and he shoved the woman across the corner of the living-room toward the drapings of the bedroom, her face like a pale streak in the harvest afternoon.

“Is it bad?” Pete hunched forward in his anxiety.

“Drive to Calder. Phone Dr Goodridge in Hainy—tell him who you are and that Elizabeth’s—sick—very sick. No matter what he’s doing, he
has
to come. Now. Drive!”

“Can I see her just—”

“Drive!” His son was gone at the blast of his voice. As the truck burst into life, the Deacon blocked the doorway of the living-room, staring at the door-curtain, hearing, his mind blood red.

Mrs. Block appeared finally, her face ashen. “It was a boy—or almost.”

“A boy. And Elizabeth?”

“It was dead. Six months perhaps. All the chores and hauling bundles—”

“Elizabeth?” seething.

Mrs. Wiens came out, wiping her hands on a bright towel, not looking at them:

“Elizabeth, we should wash—”

She broke off as he jostled her aside. He strode blindly through the drapes. He comprehended nothing save her, lying under a grey sheet pulled to her chin. Her long dark hair seemed glued across her forehead. Her eyes did not change under his glare.

“Elizabeth,” voice flatly mad, “who is the father?”

A spectre of pain seemed to brush along her form, but her face remained graven. His terrible rage burned his eyes; he blinked and glared, seeing the face dissolve slowly in pain.

“You are no child of mine. When you
can walk, get out of my house. I will never look at you again.” He wheeled and strode out: his wife confronted him beyond the door.

“Peter, you’re not talking to your only daughter like that.
It’s your fault as much as hers. If she goes, I’ll—”

“You get out too—both you and your whore of a daughter!” Mrs. Wiens was a blur as he stamped from the house.

Down the path, into the melee of threshing, his mind a chaos and only one thought, Get back to work—you can do something about this yet, he fled to the normalcy of labour. As he rounded the granary, Thom stepped before him. “Is Elizabeth all right?”

“Yes.” He spat the lie from him. “Second bin going?”

“Yes, just after—” Block left the youth with the bared question still on his face and, ducking under the heads of the near team, made his usual round of the machine, around the back, away from the men and the racks, checking chains with his eye, opening vents to stare at the grain-straw shaking past. But it was no use. The racket and the dust and the grit was like the swirl of his mind where only one item whirled like flotsam to the top. Who was the father? After all he had kept her from, who could have dared? No one had ever been around the farm except Lou—not that scum of a half-breed gutter!

The vent he was holding crashed shut. He would get it out of her, if he had to beat her within an inch of her life. Louis left the second week in June—his mind caught in a moment of startling calmness. How many assaults had he withstood in the community? He had wonde
red about the new teacher, but that was turning out well; he himself had harboured the snake. His own daughter and a half-breed! The Devil would not break him, nor the church and district he had built for his son. Pete need never know; it would be worked out, somehow. Let the Devil take her—and his wife too. No towel-wrapped bundle on a chair was going to wreck this separated community.

His mind frothed. He strode into the granary, swung wildly over the bin-door and, seizing the grain-scoop that leaned against the wall, began shovelling. The small heap and the slow run of the grain from the spout made shovelling quite unnecessary, yet he laboured fiendishly, slamming each scoopful against the far walls and corners of the bin. The sweat burst from his livid face. If the man had stood before him, he would have bare-handedly torn him limb from limb.

He did not know how long he worked. Once Thom looked in and he bellowed, “Get to work! You got nothing to do but look around?” and the youth’s frightened face vanished before he could catch himself. The grain was cleared to the floor under his feet when he heard the sound lik
e a sob. He wheeled, the few kernels ground under his boots.

“Peter! Peter!” His wife’s face wept uncontrollably above the half-boarded door as he floundered up the wheat towards her. “The hemorrhage—we didn’t know, and then we couldn’t stop it. She’s dead.”

Stunned, he said, “Dead?” There was too much to this afternoon. Comprehending, “Dead! Pete’
s getting the doctor. She can’t be!”

He was through the opening in a shower of wheat and running up the path to the house in the thunder of the threshing machine and the chugging tractor. The truck whirled through the gate with the doctor’s grey Ford behind it, but he had no time to wonder at the sudden arrival as the screen-door slammed behind him. Mrs. Wiens, tear-blurred, left without a sound as he charged into the bedroom.