Seasons of Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #4) (16 page)

The pink spots brighter on her cheeks than before, Alice Hoy took the small packages and quickly stuffed them in the string bag hanging on her arm. Turning away, she called in a shaky voice, “Come, boys, it’s time to go.”

“Aw . . .” they each resisted, loving the strangeness of the place and enjoying wandering around the piles and stacks of goods, sucking their candy.

“Have you forgotten that Robbie will be over for supper? All right, then!”

Stricken, Tierney saw the pleasure leap into the eyes of the boys, and they turned, happily enough now, to leave. Going home—to Robbie Dunbar.

A
nation, a democracy, was being born from a sense of adventure. It was in the very air. The pioneers—those who trekked across country by prairie schooner, Red River cart, bumboat, wagon, or on foot—breathed free and found it exhilarating.

The population—growing slowly at first, then with greater impetus—was made up almost entirely of people whose causes had been lost elsewhere. Most had faced injustice, degradation, hopelessness; almost all bore wounds of bitterness and scars of despair. These wanderers—of widely differing nationalities, with strongly held religious convictions and greatly divergent ideologies but bonded at heart by experience and understanding—were slowly but strongly being welded into a united people.

These people knew that the real tragedy of life was not in living where men differed sharply but rather to dwell where differences of opinion were forbidden. In Canada there was room enough to absorb the differences—the backgrounds, the characteristics, the idiosyncrasies, the ideas of all; enough room to fulfill the dreams and the desires of all, and sympathy enough to know that your neighbor had suffered even as you had, dreamed as you do, and both of you need tolerance and brotherhood.

Their very northern-ness was significant, settling them a long way from ease and warmth and softness. It made them tough; it made them tenacious; it caused them to work hard. It made them know their need of each other.

Their satisfaction came from rare experiences: biting a plow through sod that had lain virgin ever since time began; clearing away bush whose tangled resistance gave ground reluctantly but promised much; throwing up living quarters from sod or logs that were captured in their nativeness and tamed or tussled into obedience and usefulness; building their own churches . . . electing their own school boards . . . educating their children.

For them all—their Canadian beginnings were full of harsh suffering and adversity; it was what they had in common. It welded them into a people unique—proud of what they were accomplishing, proud of what their children would become.

For all of them, the church was central, vital. Usually it began in a home that was a simple soddy or cabin—people gathering together for worship, for fellowship, for the strength they needed, and received—from the Word and from each other.

The church was the one institution that gave hope when, to all appearances, there was no hope. It gave encouragement where there was sheer, almost insurmountable discouragement as people struggled to keep body and soul together. The body might know great deprivation, but the soul—thank God!—would be fed. And weary shoulders, having come bent and bowed into God’s house, would be lifted; faltering feet would
turn back, with renewed strength, to the seeming impossibilities of the task.

Most of their social life was within the church—all-day meetings, revivals, church suppers, Sunday school picnics, youth programs, children’s Bible-memorization competitions, quilting bees.

Song fests! Was ever singing heard to compare with the sounds—musical or tuneless, tremulous or sepulchral, harmonious or strident—that swelled within the sanctuary of God? Be it log or sod or green lumber, it reverberated to the lifted voices of the people of the prairie and bush as they gave vent, in song, to their joy, their pain, their longings, their strivings, their victory.

In the community of Bliss, as in many other districts, the schoolhouse did double duty—it was both the place of learning and the place of worship. A white frame building, it had four windows down each side, placed high to discourage the daydreaming of children seated at desks but yearning to run free. The entire front wall was blackboard. In front of it stood the teacher’s battered desk, the children’s scarred desks. The entrance area was an open space; here the young ones donned and removed cumbersome wraps and bunglesome pacs or overshoes, here was a cupboard for lunch pails—syrup pails with their names scratched on them; just inside the door was a wood box, and on a shelf nearby sat a water pail with a communal dipper hanging beside it.

Between the open cloakroom area and the school proper, a black and nickel monster reigned—the massive Radiant Sunshine heater. “By closing the upper sliding mica doors,” the catalog advised, “the stove can be used as an airtight surface burner.” This was important, because in the winter, large kettles of milk were heated there and either canned tomatoes were added to make soup for the children to have with their noon lunches or a mix of cocoa and sugar for the favorite drink of all—hot cocoa.

The engineering that had gone into this stove was a marvel: “Thoroughly mounted. Elaborately ornamented. It has full nickeled skirting and nickeled swing dome, an elegant and expensive urn, nickeled and tile door ornaments, nickel foot rails, nickel nameplate, two check dampers in feed doors and one in collar. Vibrating grate with draw center, and sheet iron ash pan.” This burning, belching, wood-guzzling blast furnace stood on a “Crystallized Stove Board,” made of wood, lined with asbestos, and covered with tin. Here the children, in winter, spread their wet mittens to dry, and the room reeked with the combined odors of barn and wet wool.

When fed with poplar and roaring its pleasure, the Radiant Sunshine parboiled those seated nearest to it while, on the coldest of days, children in the far corners of the room rubbed chilblained hands together and attempted, with stiffened fingers, to sensibly record the day’s lesson in their scribblers.

An hour before church or schooltime, someone had to start the fire, shaking down the grate, perhaps emptying yesterday’s ashes, crumpling paper, striking a match to it, and blowing on the first few flickers, carefully feeding in the kindling, chunking in ever larger sizes of wood, adjusting the drafts for proper draw and a minimum of smoke. This task fell to the teacher during the week and to the pastor on Sundays.

Accustomed to going early—even though it was summer and no fire was needed—Parker Jones found himself arriving at the schoolhouse long before his parishioners; it was a fine time to meditate and pray, to go over his sermon, to make any last-minute changes, to wipe the road’s dust from his shoes, his coin-toed shoes. In summer, between rains, it was easy to see why foot-washing had been a practice in the Lord’s day, and a blessing.

Parker Jones had no trouble with the concept. In all honesty he could think of no one in the Bliss congregation or in the entire area whose feet he would not willingly have washed, should he be called upon to do so. Parker Jones felt, essentially, humbled by the task set before him.

Was it possible to be too humble? And was humble the term? Was he, instead, uncertain?

Now, with this thought presenting itself, Parker Jones had new fuel for his doubts. Standing in the center of the room, he spent a long time gazing out the window at the motionless treetops surrounding the school yard, his mind full of conflict and his heart wrestling heavily with the same old problem: Was he worthy of the responsibility charged to him? Was he, indeed,
called?

The Mudges were the first through the door. With a start Parker came to himself, turned, and greeted Kay and Woody. Woody was shiny of face and slick of hair, and his Sunday suit strained over his big arms with their hardworking muscles, and his shoes (no coin toes here) squeaked on the oiled floor. Kay was self-conscious in what seemed to be a new floral-patterned dress, which sported, Parker Jones noted, a strange train, of sorts, down the back, from neck to floor. The Mudge boys—all three of them—could be heard outside shouting and tussling over the teeter-totter. Momentarily Parker harked back to the month spent in the Mudge home and the close quarters with these same rowdy boys and was able, from this distance, to smile at the memory of the constant hubbub in the small house.

Sister Finnery tottered in, quarterly in hand and Bible under her arm, her creased old face softened in anticipation of the blessed experience that awaited her, and all of God’s children: Parker Jones’s sermon.

The Popkinses arrived, and the Zumwalts, finding their favorite seats and settling down happily, glad it was Sunday and the day of rest—there was very little arguing, on Bliss homesteads, with the Scripture advising a workweek of six days.

With the arrival of the Dinwoodys, their organist had appeared. Florence Dinwoody looked at the list of hymns Parker Jones had prepared and frowned or smiled as the difficulty or ease of each became known to her.

“You’ll do just fine,” Parker encouraged, as he did each Sunday.

And when the service opened, with the congregation on its feet singing, soaring into blessed heights, Sister Dinwoody, with no hesitation at all, thumped out the melody, having pulled out the Dulciana, Bass Coupler, Principal Forte, and Vox Humana for maximum effect. Her generous hips churned, and her feet pumped magnificently, and perhaps the Lord looked down and said, again, “Behold, my servants shall sing for joy of heart” (Isa. 65:14).

“O sometimes the shadows are deep,” they sang with great feeling,

“And rough seems the path to the goal;

And sorrows, sometimes how they sweep

Like tempests down over the soul!

“O sometimes how long seems the day,

And sometimes how weary my feet;

But toiling in life’s dusty way,

The Rock’s blessed shadow, how sweet!

O then to the Rock let me fly . . .”

Oh, the meaning, the feeling, the cry that lifted from tested souls, troubled hearts, burdened spirits, weary bodies. And oh, the surcease, the rest, the assurance!

Standing before the group, leading the singing, Parker Jones felt his questions and concerns lift on wings of faith and fly away. And he sang with true fervor the ancient hymn, “I love Thy kingdom, Lord!/The house of Thine abode—/The Church our blest Redeemer saved/With His own precious blood.”

With no spire, no stained glass, no robed choir, no swelling pipe organ, in an insignificant building in the heart of the bush, with a few wildflowers in a mason jar at his elbow, and before him a congregation of work-worn, hard-pressed homesteaders, Parker Jones felt himself fulfilled, blessed, content.

“Take your Bibles,” he said eventually to his people, “and turn to Romans, chapter eight, starting with verse thirty-five.”

And to people—who went home to a chicken dinner from a flock they had first nurtured by hand in a box by their range; potatoes and vegetables from a garden patch of ground they had dug out of the bush with painstaking effort; bread baked from their own field’s hard-won grain, all earned by backbreaking work, sheer grit, and determination—he read, triumphantly, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?. . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”

Old Sister Finnery whispered “Glory!” and her hearers—knowing that she had lost her husband to a winter’s blizzard and hobbled around on feet crippled by the same storm—nodded earnest agreement.

Anything Parker Jones said was an anticlimax; good, true, precious though it was, the singing of the hymns and the reading of the Scripture had worked their miracle. What they had come for, they had already received. Sensing this, Parker Jones spoke simply and briefly; the Word and Spirit did the healing.

And people who knew firsthand about “all these things” experienced long ago by the apostle Paul, tightened their spiritual belts and lifted their heads one more time, and knew themselves to be, with divine help, “more than conquerors.”

H
aw there, haw!”