Sweeter Than All the World by Rudy Wiebe

Author:Rudy Wiebe [Wiebe, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36621-4
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2001-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Thursday, January 17, 1863:

Diedrich Wiebe came with Deacon Dietrich Franz. I heard Diedrich Wiebe tell Foda he is sick unto death and he dirtied himself with cattle. He was so sorry, for a long time. Foda prayed, Jesus son of David have mercy, cover us with your robe of righteousness so we can stand before you naked.

We were eight Mennonite families living in Novovitebsk with forty Jewish families. I had never heard anything when men came to our door, always two together and sometimes with their sons or even wives but never daughters. I wouldn’t have heard what Bigbelly Diedrich Wiebe said either, but I was washing the top of the oven in the big-room when they came in and shut the door. I shrank down still as a mouse. Diedrich Wiebe sat with his stomach spreading rounder than a washtub against the table. A big man crying, after a while he stuttered that. I wrote the words down—it was all so strange—and hid them behind the loose brick below my bed. What did that mean? I dirtied myself with cattle.

But Foda’s prayer about standing naked was perfectly clear. In prayer, or preaching, things that were sin if you actually did them were often reversed into wonderful salvation, like being washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb, though the blood spraying from the neck of a chicken whose head I chopped off made me anything but clean. So prayer to be covered with a robe from Jesus to make you both clean and naked was fine. But not Bigbelly’s cattle—that I didn’t understand then. It was winter, the frozen ground under snow, cows were not muddy. Or smeared with thin shit from spring grass so you got more than dirty when you were milking and they hit you with their tails. Anyways, Bigbelly Wiebe never milked, only Mrs. Wiebe and their girls. What was this?

I sit now with my box of little pencil papers in my lap. I look out of my window at the village street of Gnadenthal, Colony Baratov. Every day, seeing mostly trees. In the evening the glass reflects my old face, folded together by so much to remember, but I can look through it easily. I will not waste oil for a lamp to light up every wrinkle.

The trees are tall again, rows we’ve planted four times over in my lifetime. During the horrors after 1918 we dug them down to the roots to burn in our stoves. Four armies overran us then, all at the same time, as they pleased. The Czar’s White Army, the Communist Reds, the Ukrainians’ Independence Army, Nestor Machno with his terrifying Anarchists. After the three united to destroy the Whites, they fought and killed and starved each other until the Reds had slaughtered the other two, and almost all our men, sons and fathers and husbands, including my Benjamin … I will not remember. Trees grow and get chopped down and grow again as they can.

Sixty-nine years in Gnadenthal, this so-called Valley of Grace.

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