the cloud shifted, became a hint of higher meaning, like the ghost handwriting on the wall above King Belshazzar’s banquet table: numbered, numbered, weighed, divided. Above me, all around me, the earth kept speaking, sending messages from a story that began in Eden and ended in Armageddon, authored otherworldly. When my brother and I fought over the last Fudgsicle in the freezer, and no amount of verbal wrangling could sway either of us from our respective cries of “it’s mine,” my mother raised a knife above it and said, “Remember Solomon?” Of course we did. No child easily forgets the two mothers arguing over the one baby left alive, both claiming that it’s hers, that the dead baby belongs to the other, until Solomon calls for a sword to divide the living baby in two—one half for each mother. In our illustrated Uncle Arthur’s Bible Stories, the wise king holds a gleaming blade above a swaddled infant, while the true mother’s eyes widen in horror and the false one’s narrow to smug slits with one raised brow. In the light of my mother’s allusion, the bickered-over Fudgsicle, sweating in its paper jacket, looked a little more forlorn, but neither my brother nor I surrendered. Instead, we let my mother’s knife do its work and slice cleanly down the middle. We sulked away, each licking a melting chunk of chocolate ice cream on a wooden stick, tasting the splinters in what we’d been handed.
When my mother, at the edge of her childhood’s deep hole, tossed in her box of trinkets and watched her father backfill that hole with dirt, she had no knowledge of the story that was to come. When they left behind their Oregon farm with its fields and barns and apple orchard, its forest full of climbing trees, when they auctioned off the tools and horses and milk cows to neighbours, church folks, and kin, they held the firm conviction that their family was meant to travel north. My grandpa believed it possible that the Mennonites were one of Israel’s lost tribes. With this belief, every trial and persecution made sense. No wonder our people were chased out of Holland, he said, out of France, out of Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Austria, Russia. No wonder the Bolsheviks came after us with swords and guns, burned down our houses, stole back our land. No wonder our story always leaned toward exodus.
A month earlier, when Grandpa and Grandma had driven to the central interior of British Columbia on a spiritual hunch that their future lay in the Nechako Valley, sign after sign greeted them. When they arrived in the town, a stranger chopping wood in his front yard welcomed them in for lunch. He invited them to an evening service at one of the local Mennonite churches. His wife offered them a place to sleep for the night. They knew of a farm for sale. I had a feeling about that north country, Grandpa always said. All that land. All those trees. The river flowing through the town, feeding the dirt.
ALREADY IN THAT small interior valley town, my dad rose early every morning and headed to work on his uncle’s dairy farm. He was the eldest of nine, wore thick glasses and slicked back his brown hair like the other boys with fast cars, and though he still sat in the wooden pew on the men’s side of the church every Sunday and sang the hymns in German, he snuck cigarettes and gin behind the barn, cussed behind his father’s back. He was a baby when he arrived on the first train full of Mennonites, held on his mother’s lap as they travelled from Swift Current, Saskatchewan—Speedy Creek, he always called it—across the flat and open prairies, through the Rocky Mountains, and into a province of trees, trees, trees. Until his own father found a house for them, they lived on the train, baked bread over a fire beside the tracks, along with the other families who’d made the journey to begin a new life in a new land, enacting all over again the Mennonite story of exodus and arrival, of picking up the pieces and putting them back together.
As if in aerial view, I see their lives converging—my dad heading west on a train across the prairies, my mother moving north, each year and mile a stitch drawing one story to the other until, at last, they meet. As my mother walks the rural road to school, my dad drives by in his Kenworth logging truck, honks the air horn, slows down, and through the rolled-down passenger window calls out and offers her a ride. In their wedding photograph, she’s veiled and gauzy and shy-smiling in white. He’s lean, black-suited, and turning his face away to keep the camera’s flash from flaring off his coke-bottle lenses. She wonders how she got here. He wants a cigarette. She rises in the night to fix his coffee and fill his lunchbox for another night-shift long-haul logging trip down narrow black-ice roads. He brings home a stray husky and names him Butch. She lies beneath the bright overhead lights on a hospital bed and breathes until my brother slides into the world. He drives back from the bush camp to see his firstborn son. She lies beneath the bright overhead lights on a hospital bed and breathes until I slide into the world. He stands on the other side of the nursery glass and declares me the ugliest baby he’s ever seen. She holds me up to the window to see the snow falling over the yard. He tosses me in the air, catches me, tosses me again. She presses her cheek against my forehead, checking for fever. He blows a scrawl of smoke into the air above our kitchen table, slams his empty milk glass down. She hums “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” while she washes the floor on her hands and knees. He cranks the volume on his pickup stereo when Johnny Cash sings “Ring of Fire.”
So much seems fallen, burned, forgotten. So much tossed into the flames. But like the creed in all our scriptures, all our stories, all our songs, beauty comes from ashes, and nothing is unworthy of being redeemed. In the bread broken at the table, in the remnants of the fabric rag bag and the butchering shed’s scrapings of flesh and bone, in the town dump’s junk heap and the rummage sale’s castoffs, memory offers its fragments. At the edge of what seems gone and lost, I want to reach back and down, take up the scraps, and buy them back with words that name them worthy.
To fit the broken bits into the bigger story—that’s how my grandma pieced her quilts, with scraps salvaged from old clothes and fabric remnants. In the pattern of one patchwork, the family appeared materially in a rainbow of prints: an aunt’s retired maternity dress, Grandpa’s Sunday slacks, floral satin borrowed from a cousin’s graduation gown. At her long dining room table, Grandma with her silver scissors cut out strips of cloth in every size and shape. Slivers of calico. Diamonds in stripes and plaid. Half-moons of flannel. Afternoons, no matter the season, when we stopped by for a visit on the way home from school, Grandma sat bent over the table, her thin grey hair combed back and coiled into a bun beneath the black mesh head covering pinned like a cap to her hair.
While Grandpa Funk sipped his black coffee at the head of the table and tapped his home-rolled cigarette into a beanbag ashtray, Grandma sat at the other end, puzzling over the material, lining up colours and prints, pinning the pieces together to make a larger square. She stitched the blocks, then sewed the blocks together into rows, and the rows became the quilt top. In her patchwork crazy quilt, every block looked different—purple stripes on yellow stars on flowers on plaids, reds on blacks on whites in tiny triangles, diagonal strips crisscrossing in a gridwork of fabric. On a sheet of broadcloth, Grandma laid a thin layer of wool batting and spread the quilt top over it, then sewed all the layers together, turning what began as scrap and remnant into a covering for one in need of rest.
Even now, I sleep beneath a patchwork crazy quilt stitched from the denim of my dad’s grease-stained, worn-out jeans, the corduroy of my brother’s school pants, my mother’s closet full of skirts and slacks and blouses—all those flowers, all those greys and greens and blues—and my childhood Sunday dresses, salvaged, cut, and finally made to fit.
Even now, I lay myself down in pieces, become the handiwork, and hear that psalm sing back to me, fearfully and wonderfully made, as if a glowing needle pulls a thread through all the childhood years, binding all the broken parts—dead dog, lost tooth, weird hymn, burnt hand, beer breath, sad eyes, torn shirt, bloodstain, cracked bone, split lip, hard smile, junk pile, flat tire, black ice, road home, locked door—each fragment lifted from the ash and dust, set right, and given back to wonder.
AUTUMN
O Little Town
I KNEW NOTHING OF my hometown’s history. That the tall white wooden letters on the welcome sign at the top of the hill bore the name of the Chicago newspaperman Herbert Vanderhoof was beyond my child’s mind. I had no clue that this valley town was his dream, but a failed