Peace Shall Destroy Many

Book by Wiebe Rudy

CHAPTER ONE

The yellow planes passed overhead swiftly and in thunder. Thom Wiens had heard their growing roar above the scrape of the plow on stones, but the trees hedged them from his sight. Then suddenly, as he twisted on the halted plow to look back, they were over the poplars, flying low and fast. The sense of the horses’ sweated trembling was in his rein-clenched hands as he stared the yellow planes out of sight to the north.

Fly, you heathen, he was thinking. Fly low, practise your dips and turns to terrify playing children and grandmothers gaunt in their rocking chairs. Practise your hawk-swoops, so you can gun down some equally godless German or bury a cowering family under the rubble of their home. To get paid for killing. To be trained to kill more efficiently. If you shoot down five Germans you get a medal. If you kill twenty at once, you get a Victoria Cross and the King himself shakes your hand. What will you do when all the Germans have been killed and the only work you know is shooting men? Acclaimed murderers everywhere!

They were gone, flying in a tight triangle like ducks going north for nesting. Thom slid to the earth and worked his short crow-bar under the stone which had staggered the plow just before the planes appeared. Loosened, it came easily and he walked across the plowing, holding the heavy stone against his stomach. The heap of rocks along the fence ground together as he dropped it. With the edge of his hand he knocked at the dust on the white-worn front of his overalls.

Before him the fence stretched tight over the humped land. He could see a third of a mile of it bordering the open field, every post belly-deep in stones. The planes passed so quickly and, standing there with his hand raised for a last brush, Thom suddenly experienced, like a water-bucket emptied over him, the weeks and months spent gathering rocks from the field and piling them, one by one, along the fence until only enough post showed for a top wire. To grow something took a long time, and the machines for it were slow. There were no machines to pick rocks. But the machines for death were wind-swift. For a moment he felt he had discovered a great truth, veiled until now: the long growing of life and the quick irrevocableness of death.

The heaped rocks recalled him, and he turned to stride rapidly towards the plow. To just stand, thinking! He glanced about, happy for the rugged world that had hidden his dreaming. Pulling his feet up hard with each step, he sensed within himself the strength of his forefathers who had plowed and subdued the earth before him. He, like them, was working out God’s promise that man would eat his bread in the sweat of his face, not pushing a button to watch a divine creation blaze to earth.

As the four horses moved under his urging, he settled his broad limbs to the jolting ride. He cringed then as, with a flare of conscience, he recalled Brother Goertzen’s clipped German phrases: “We are to follow Christ’s steps, but we do not have pride. By God’s Grace we understand what others do not. As we cannot imagine Him lifting a hand to defend himself physically, so we, His followers, conquer only by spiritual love and not by physical force. Always only love: for those who love us, for those indifferent to us, for those who hate us, for those who would kill us, which is the same thing; all are included when He says, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another even as I have loved you.’”

Thom could not doubt such sermons. He had grown up hearing these statements and if someone had asked him when he had first known that Christ bade His disciples love their enemies, he could no more have answered than if he had been asked to consciously recollect his first breath. All week the stentorian voice had ruled the hushed church: “Have you not heard our country loudly proclaim that we must protect the innocent from the ‘trampling boots of tyranny’? The whole land is geared to destruction so that it will not be destroyed. The glorious end justifies any means we use to attain it. For the Christian, the righteous means are more essential than comfortable and apparently necessary ends. What do we gain if we retain our bodies here on earth an hour longer, but lose our everlasting souls? We can ignore the black power and his fiendish earthly workers who can destroy our bodies but cannot touch our souls.” There was no argument against that.

And truth necessitated following.

The horses were wheeling in their awkwardness at the corner of the field and stopped at his touch. Home was beyond the hill and a line of trees. Thom felt the ground warming with expectation, the ripeness of the earth’s belly pushing itself up against the steel of the shares. When he lay with his face in the sandy loam, arms and legs yearning, he was beyond himself. It seemed to Thom that every man must feel the smallness and the greatness, his face in the dirt when the clouds were sheep with their heads down in the sunshine of the open sky and the larks chanting from their post-perch and the burdened horses nodding their heads to earth with sweat black in straggles down their thighs. Lying there, he felt doubts settle in his mind like mud in the hollows of the spring-soaked land. He could not actually imagine that men should wish to kill one another; yet they must, for how else could they give themselves into the murder that was the Army? The earth holding him, he thought, If only there were enough trees and hills and rocks in all Saskatchewan or all Canada or even all the world to hide us from a Hitler who has tasted power like a boar’s first gulp of warm blood. But once a man has tasted power, you cannot pen up or dispose of him like a blooded boar, and he the greater danger. And Thom felt the persistent, recurring prick: sometimes you think you should help try, anyway.

He rose quickly and the horses heaved in unison. He knew the shape of every tree along the rock-heaped fence without lifting his eyes from Jerry’s hocks treading the furrow. Why must something as remote as being required to kill another human become as forcibly real as the plow’s hump against stone beneath him. But it had become so. Could he but know himself strong, like Peter Block! To stand alone before the judge in a courtroom crowded with gimlet-eyed women whose husbands and lovers and sons were flying like yellow hawks, somewhere over the bend of the world, and to say clearly, “It is against my conscience.” Never having considered even for an instant that there might be another way. If he could but know himself strong!

The whoop behind him perked the horses’ ears. As Thom turned on the iron seat, the tow-headed “Indian” transformed himself into a small fighter-plane, and with arms outstretched, lunch-pail rattling, bare feet flashing in the turned earth, came soaring in gasps to trip and sprawl beside the slow plow. The boy was up even as he rolled.

“The planes–we saw ’em, Thom! Three big ones flyin’ low and makin’ the biggest noise! Boy, they were ’way longer than Wapiti School–longer than Beaver even–and they were bangin’ like anythin’. Maybe they’ll bang apart, huh? When I’m real big I’ll fly some–wow!”

Thom looked down on Hal walking in the following furrow. He said, brotherly casual, “Why do you want to fly one if it might bang apart?”

“Oh. I’d get one that goes smooth, like brrrsssh–” and the small boy spread his arms, made several rolling swoops with the upper part of his body, and then, to avoid running into the plow, threw himself beside it as he tipped forward.

“You’ll spread your nose all over the plow-wheel if you don’t watch. You were to wear shoes to school.”

Hal was up and behind the plow again. He rattled his battered syrup-pail. “It’s too hard walkin’. An’ the Indians came past today–I saw ’em first through the big window, even before Jackie Labret, and I put up my hand real fast an’ Mr. Dueck saw it even before Jackie raised his hand–”

“Were the Indians packed for the summer?” interrupted Thom.

“Uh-huh. Mr. Dueck said, ‘All right, Helmut,’ before he saw the wagons an’ I went out an’ all the other kids had to sit down again to read their books an’ Jackie was real mad after school ’cause he got hardly one look an’ almost–”

“Who was moving?”

“Ol’ Two Poles. An’ Hankey was there on the wagon. He waved. There were lotsa squaws an’ more wagons. But Ol’ Two Poles an’ his pinto were on the front wagon goin’ to the Point.”

“The pinto wasn’t on the wagon, it was hitched to it, not? Fishing will be good if they move this early.”

“Uh-huh. Jackie said the muskrats have been real good. We would ha’ followed their trail back but they just use the main road now an’ don’t go on the trails like they used to–Jackie says they’re mostly fenced shut anyhows an’ we were comin’ home by Martens an’ we saw the planes goin’ north like hell Jackie sa–”

Thom swung round on his seat. “Don’t you say that or I’ll trim you. Not once more!”

The little boy’s eyes dilated with sham innocence. “But I didn’t. Jac–”

“Okay, okay! Never mind that. And tell Jackie he needn’t talk like that. It’s bad–for him as well as you. If you say that again, you’ll walk home by yourself from school. You’re not going to swear like a half-breed.”

“Half-breed” to Hal was merely a species of being that did certain things he himself was not allowed to do because they were “bad.” Usually when talking near his elders, he was careful to avoid phrases that might catch a sensitive adult ear but then he always forgot what they had termed “bad” before. Puzzling now, no really good method of describing the thunder of the planes struck him–except Jackie’s way, with a pleasurable push on the “bad” word. The furrow was cool to his toes. He curled them as he walked, leaving bunched ridges of sand behind the scoops where his toes had been. He stopped and lifted one foot carefully. Like a row of tiny pigs sucking. He ran to catch up.

“Anyway, we’re gonna fly ’round in yellow planes when we’re real big an’ just fly an’ fly. Why don’t you fly, Thom?”

The difficulty Thom found in answering his brother’s simple questions always reflected to him his unstable faith. Like his elders, he believed life’s answers explainable to a child; even if the answer grew more complicated as the child grew, it could never basically change, for the basic answers were known. So he said, on his confident level, “Because the people that fly those planes do nothing good with them. They fly in the war and try to kill as many people as they can. And remember what you learned in Sunday School? How the Lord Jesus said we weren’t to bother anyone, but love them all, like you love Mom? We are to do good, not hurt.”

“Why do they want to hurt and kill people?”

“I suppose because the others are trying to do it to them first.”

“Why?”

So Thom explained as he had known it himself since he was a child, working the religious idea, among Mennonites always expressed in High German, into the unaccustomed suit of work-day English. Somehow, while he was plowing, he could not suddenly speak to his small brother in the smooth German of the church, not even regarding non-resistance. “The Bible says that when men live in sin they do sinful things. They do not love but hate. They don’t trust each other. They turn around quickly and hurt you when you’re not looking because they care only for themselves and wish to get all they can without working for it. Finally, if they can’t get away with their evil any other way, they try to kill the other person.”

“Why don’t the police get ’em?”

What next! Yet why not? A long-submerged argument rose in his searching mind. He spoke before he thought, sensing his deviation only as he proceeded: “Because there are whole countries of these people, and the police are few. So other countries feel they have to join together to kill those who are doing bad, so that they themselves and their families won’t be hurt and killed–”

Hal did not sense his hesitation. “Does Hank Unger fly a plane to kill people so we won’t be hurt and killed?”

The horses began their turn at the corner where, through the white stems of the poplars, the house looked south and east. Hank Unger. Thom pulled out his watch.

“What with snooping after Indians and watching planes and gabbing, you’re late for the cows before you get to the house from school. Now move.”

“Is Nance in the barn?” The question broke across Hal’s serious face.

“I got her in at noon.”

“Oh boy!” the lad fled over the plowed land. “An’ maybe it’ll rain tomorrow so I can ride to school!” He was out of hearing among the trees.

The sky was empty as a tipped cup. As the horses eased their pull edging down a small ridge, over their backs Thom could see hills of poplar and birch, with coned pines among the willows along the creek between them. There was no longer enough bush between themselves and the world. There had once been, for during the first nine years of their settlement at Wapiti when, as the English were bought out and moved away, as the breeds settled back farther into the wilderness, only an occasional rcmp officer, coming the thirty miles of dirt road from Hainy to check their passports or eventually to bring their naturalization papers, had even reminded them of the world. But now into weather and crop reports the radio blurted statistics of people killed. Children could not walk home barefoot from school without a plane shadow crossing their faces, and people like Hank Unger sent pictures of themselves casual against fighter planes with the level waste of Africa beyond and left the faith of their fathers to do–what?

There was a point of thought beyond which Thom could not go. Since Joseph Dueck had come to teach at Wapiti School the fall before, his friendship with Thom had unlocked new thought possibilities of which Thom had formerly had no conception. He had been astonished to find that, with arduous effort, he could follow most of Joseph’s thinking. On a winter Sunday afternoon, as the heater glowed red and the peaceful sounds of Pa’s afternoon sleeping drifted through the curtain of the bedroom door, Thom had stumbled after Joseph’s rambles regarding the meaning of existence, the nature of Christianity, the Christian’s relationship to his fellow men. During the week, while cleaning the cow-barn or hauling hay to the stock, he would grope through the newly discovered labyrinth of his mind, alternately enchanted and intimidated, but, despite the varying paths he chose, he always arrived at the same ultimate point. He could no more have denied what he held to be the basic tenets of his belief than he could have straddled the sun. He was at that point again: he had been told the truth. The church–the Deacon–they knew. Believe; questions were often simplest if not answered. When the plow jerked in the earth you could truly know, but when a man went his way, the surmise of whether for good or evil, if perhaps correct, told little of why. And Joseph said the “why” was most important. But why not leave simple at the simplest? Must he always wonder and try to explain? Why not accept like Pete Block? It was probably better not to know, not to have to think about it. Perhaps no one could know, anyway. Joseph! “Leave it to the fathers,” he said abruptly in German. He kicked the plow-frame and flexed his cramped legs forward so that they dangled nearly to the ground. It was sheerest comfort.

His head hung, dulled from plowing all day alone with his mind. On the last round, when the horses moved with the knowledge of coming rest, he liked the earth as it unfolded itself like the roll of a filleted fish to a thin knife. Packed by the snows, it twisted fre...