Swing Low (8 page)

A nurse has entered my room. She is my least favourite nurse and I have decided that I will continue to write while she fiddles around with things rather than do my usual smiling and chatting. She is looking at my feet as I write. She has just said, Mr. Toews, why won’t you stay off your feet? Why don’t you call us when your blisters open? I am not answering. Mr. Toews, she says in a loud, impatient voice, I’m talking to you! I am not going to stop writing. Mr. Toews! Put down your notepad and look at me!

I noticed, in my youth, that the women of my community could easily be identified as Bergthalers or Chortitzer or E.M.C. or M.B. or E.M.B. or Kleinegemeinde or Schrodenfitzer depending on their hair. Chortitzers wore wraps or nets over their heads, and they were considered very conservative; Kleinegemeinde women had tight shiny rolls along the edges of their hair, less conservative; and M.B.ers wore all-purpose buns. Landmark women, on the other hand, never wear wraps, nets, rolls, or buns. They have wild uncombed hair that sprays out from the head at all angles, wispy and tangled, and rather alluring in an alarming unconventional way. Landmark women remain a mystery to me, although Elvira befriended one or two of them in her younger days. Once I asked Elvira about the Landmark hairdo and she said, Oh, they have less time to deal with it. Which made me wonder what they do over there in Landmark, Manitoba.

I believe there is an extremely conservative Mennonite church near Landmark called the Sommerfeld Church, where singing in harmony is not allowed. Perhaps that’s changed. Or is it the church in Lowe Farm? At any rate, the
singing is, of course, unaccompanied by piano or organ. (Instruments are worldly.) There is a group of men who lead the congregation in song. They are called
the ferzinge
, the front singers, or the lead singers. They will set the key and begin to sing, and the congregation will follow half a note behind. At times the
ferzinge
will stop and start again if the congregation is not in the right key.
Wada aunfange
, they will say. From the top!

The nurse is rebandaging my feet now, muttering as she does so about my lack of cooperation and how hard it is for her to do her job with patients like me. I haven’t looked up from my notebook, and I’m desperate for something to write, I can’t let my pen stop, or have her think I’m only scribbling, and so …

Speaking of school days, I shamefully recall the day I stabbed Elvira with the sharp end of my compass. I suppose I was seven or eight and just beginning to have feelings, unknowable, inexpressible feelings, of … love? No. Infatuation? I’m not sure, even today, what you would call that vague need for approval from the opposite sex. In any case, I wanted Elvira to like me, and in my mind though not consciously at the time, I thought I could spur that approval on by … stabbing her? No, not the actual stabbing, but the display of nerve and timing and discernment (I chose her, after all) that the stabbing act required (I got her in the rear end as she walked past my desk). Let me explain before I go on that stabbing is really too strong a word: no blood was drawn, no stitches required, no charges laid, and I certainly yanked my hand back immediately after my compass made the slightest contact. Elvira said, Ouch! and hit me, and I
was made to stand between the sink and the waste paper basket with my face to the wall.

But this, of course, started something between the two of us, even though it was a mixture of hostility and disdain on Elvira’s part. I was thrilled. I had been noticed! This act of so-called love and bravery was quite a remarkable achievement for a shy boy like me, at least I thought so. Elvira was the feisty one, after all. (She began school at age two because she was tired of sitting around at home all day, although she was made to repeat kindergarten three times until the rest of her peers could catch up to her.)

Somewhere in my collection there is a school photograph of our kindergarten class. Elvira is wearing a short brown dress, thick knit stockings, sturdy leather shoes, and, unfortunately, two fierce braids (I loathe braids) and is sitting on the grass in the front row with her legs spread, her elbows out like two handles on a teacup, her neck craned forward and her face jutting towards the camera. She is taking up far too much room (in the photo her head is twice the size of everybody else’s), and the girls on either side of her are squished in and trying to hold their own for the shot. She has that expression on her face that seems to say, I’ve just done something extremely naughty and I’m as pleased as punch about it.

I, on the other hand, am standing nicely and sedately and unobtrusively (this photo was taken two years before the compass incident) in the back row, just to the left of Elvira. My short blond hair is wedged firmly over to one side with the help of my mother’s spit and I am wearing a smart beige sweater with two wide horizontal stripes. I’m smiling,
slightly, and nervous. Elvira and I were to be classmates virtually for the rest of our school days.

Nurse still here. Still muttering. Must think quickly of something to write. If she dares to take my notebook away from me I’ll hit her. No, no I won’t. I don’t know what I’ll do. Keep writing.

For some reason I recall a conversation Elvira and I had a few years ago. We were driving home from the city, and it was snowing.

How do you feel? she asked me. Well, it’s different, I said.

We were quiet for a minute or two.

In what way is it different? she asked me.

Well, I said after a lengthy pause, it’s not the same.

Mel, she said finally, you teach language arts. You teach children how to write. I haven’t heard you use a “feeling” word.

We smiled. I enjoyed her teasing. We were quiet for another minute or two.

Are you sad? she asked, knowing.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make. It’s just a recollection and I can’t quite remember what we were talking about, what was different and making me sad. I suppose … No, I don’t know. But why didn’t I say more? For a man
who loves words, why can’t I speak? Why don’t I talk? What will I talk about? Myself? I probably haven’t said the right things, or the things, in any case, that help to explain who I am. I haven’t talked about myself. Is that ungenerous or self-effacing? Is it bad or is it good? What comes from talking about oneself? Is there a reason for it? Have I withheld words in anger? And if so, who am I punishing with my silence? And why? Or is it the Depression that lodges its evil self within my throat and blocks my speech? Is depression anger? And if so, what am I angry about? Can anger cause a chemical imbalance in the brain (because that is what depression is generally regarded as being these days)? One talks (if one isn’t me) to one’s psychiatrist for approximately fifty minutes, and then is given a prescription for a drug that will, with any luck, make all the talk, the talk of sadness and hopelessness, unnecessary. Eventually, the talking becomes a kind of scripted warm-up exercise, a quick prelude to the real cure, the drug. The talking becomes a means to a better end, that is, the elimination of the need to talk. Doctors are very busy individuals, after all, and a prescription requires less than a minute of one’s time. I should add, however, that I was without a doubt one of the least cooperative psychiatric patients on my doctor’s roster (we’re quite a team), not that I behaved like Jack Nicholson in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(I didn’t get the hype) but because I was consistently pleasant and upbeat. And dishonest. Everything is fine, I assured my doctors, just fine. This was one of the reasons that Elvira had such a difficult time convincing doctors that everything was not fine. That’s why she became so tired. Nobody believed her
because I lied and said everything was fine when it wasn’t. It’s how I killed her.

Mr. Toews! It is time for your medication. You’ll have to stop writing … Mr. Toews!

Go back to the beginning, Mel, write it all down, write anything, anything at all. I love … No, not that, write down what you remember. A new life strategy? No, no, too late for that. Go back and start again, and this time be honest.

T
he story of my grandfather, the youngest person in the group of Mennonites that came over, in 1874, to Canada from Russia. Queen Victoria saw to it that we Mennonites would be given free farmland in the Prairies, and the Canadian government assured us that we’d be able to live the way we wanted to, apart from the world. His is a very romantic tale of shunning (Mennonite policy of ensuring sinner feels ashamed) and elopement that begins, sadly, with a death.

My grandfather and my grandmother were a happy young couple way back in the early 1900s. He farmed and she kept house. In short order, while still in their twenties, four children were born, my father, Henry, being the second. My grandmother would complain from time to time of headaches, but naturally there wasn’t much she could do for them other than rest, and with four little children and a
multitude of household chores unheard of today, rest was at a premium.

One day, while preparing a noon meal for her family, my grandmother fell to the floor and died. Later it was determined that she was the victim of a brain aneurysm. Or perhaps, at that time, it was thought that she had a blood clot in her brain. My grandfather, still a young man, was left to raise the four young children on his own, in addition to his full-time farm work. As I recall, the youngest of the four children, a baby named Abe, after his father, Abraham, was soon moved into his grandparents’ home, where he remained permanently and became known in the community as Groutfodasch Abe, or “Grandparents’ Abe.” Every Sunday, my grandfather and the other children would go to my grandfather’s in-laws’ home for a good meal and a visit with Groutfodasch Abe.

During the day the three remaining children would tumble along behind my grandfather in the field, or ride two or three at a time on top of the plowhorse, while my grandfather did his best to prevent them from being injured. Late in the evening, they would all return to the (increasingly untidy) farmhouse, and my grandfather would cook a large meal of fried eggs. According to the story told to me, it was always fried eggs.