The View from Castle Rock (33 page)

The names were nearly all German, and many of the inscriptions were entirely in German.
Hier ruhet in Gott.
And
Geboren,
followed by the name of some German town or province, then
Gestorben,
with a date in the sixties or seventies of the nineteenth century.

Gestorben,
here in Sullivan Township in Grey County in a colony of England, in the middle of the bush.

Das arme Herz hienieden

Von manches Sturm bewegt

Erlangt den renen Frieden

Nur wenn es nicht mehr schlagt.

I always have the notion that I can read German, even though I can’t. I thought that this said something about the heart, the soul, the person buried here being out of harm’s way now, and altogether better off.
Herz
and
Sturm
and
nicht mehr
could hardly be mistaken. But when I got home and checked the words in a German-English dictionary—finding all of them except
renen,
which could easily be a misspelling of
reinen
—I found that the verse was not so comforting. It seemed to say something about the poor heart buried here getting no peace until it stopped beating.

Better off dead.

Maybe that came out of a book of tombstone verses, and there wasn’t much choice.

Not a word on the crypt, though we searched far more thoroughly than we had done before. Nothing but that single, amateurishly drawn cross. But we did find a surprise in the northeastern corner of the cemetery. A second crypt was there, much smaller than the first one, with a smooth concrete top. No earth or grass, but a good-sized cedar tree growing out of a crack in the concrete, its roots nourished by whatever was inside.

It’s something like mound burial, we said. Something that had survived in Central Europe from pre-Christian times?

In the same city where I was to have my biopsy, and where I had the mammogram, there is a college where my husband and I were once students. I am not allowed to take out books, because I did not graduate, but I can use my husband’s card, and I can poke around in the stacks and the reference rooms to my heart’s content. During our next visit there I went into the Regional Reference Room to read some books about Grey County and find out whatever I could about Sullivan Township.

I read of a plague of passenger pigeons that destroyed every bit of the crops, one year in the late nineteenth century. And of a terrible winter in the eighteen-forties, which lasted so long and with such annihilating cold that those first settlers were living on cow cabbages dug out of the ground. (I did not know what cow cabbages were—were they ordinary cabbages kept to be fed to animals or something wild and coarser, like skunk cabbage? And how could they be dug up in such weather, with the ground like rock? There are always puzzles.)

A man named Barnes had starved himself to death, letting his family have his share, that they might survive.

A few years after that a young woman was writing to her friend in Toronto that there was a marvellous crop of berries, more than anybody could pick to eat or dry, and that when she was out picking them she had seen a bear, so close that she could make out the drops of berry juice sparkling on its whiskers. She was not afraid, she said—she would walk through the bush to post this letter, bears or no bears.

I asked for church histories, thinking there might be something about Lutheran or German Catholic churches that would help me. It is difficult to make such requests in reference libraries because you will often be asked what it is, exactly, that you want to know, and what do you want to know it for? Sometimes it is even necessary to write your reason down. If you are doing a paper, a study, you will of course have a good reason, but what if you are
just interested
? The best thing, probably, is to say you are doing a family history. Librarians are used to people doing that—particularly people who have gray hair—and it is generally thought to be a reasonable way of spending one’s time.
Just interested
sounds apologetic, if not shifty, and makes you run the risk of being seen as an idler lounging around in the library, a person at loose ends, with no proper direction in life,
nothing better to do.
I thought of writing on my form:
research for paper concerning survival of mound burial in pioneer Ontario.
But I didn’t have the nerve. I thought they might ask me to prove it.

I did locate a church that I thought might be connected with our cemetery, being a couple of country blocks west and a block north. St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran, it was called, if it was still there.

In Sullivan Township you are reminded of what the crop fields everywhere used to look like before the advent of the big farm machinery. These fields have kept the size that can be served by the horse-drawn plough, the binder, the mower. Rail fences are still in place—here and there is a rough stone wall—and along these boundaries grow hawthorn trees, chokecherries, goldenrod, old-man’s beard.

Such fields are unchanged because there is no profit to be gained in opening them up. The crops that can be grown on them are not worth the trouble. Two big rough moraines curve across the southern part of the township—the purple ribbons turning here into snakes swollen as if each of them had swallowed a frog—and there is a swampy spillway in between them. To the north, the land is clay. Crops raised here were probably never up to much, though people used to be more resigned to working unprofitable land, more grateful for whatever they could get, than is the case today. Where such land is put to any use at all now, it’s pasture. The wooded areas—the bush—are making a strong comeback. In country like this the trend is no longer towards a taming of the landscape and a thickening of population, but rather the opposite. The bush will never again take over completely, but it is making a good grab. The deer, the wolves, which had at one time almost completely disappeared, have reclaimed some of their territory. Perhaps there will be bears soon, feasting again on the blackberries and thimbleberries, and in the wild orchards. Perhaps they are here already.

As the notion of farming fades, unexpected enterprises spring up to replace it. It’s hard to think that they will last.
SPORTS CARDS GALORE
, says a sign that is already weathering.
TWO-DOOR DOGHOUSES FOR SALE
. A place where chairs can be re-caned.
TIRE SUPERYARD
. Antiques and beauty treatments are offered. Brown eggs, maple syrup, bagpipe lessons, unisex haircuts.

We arrive at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church on a Sunday morning just as the bell is ringing for services and the hands on the church tower point to eleven o’clock. (We learn later that those hands do not tell the time, they always point to eleven o’clock. Church time.)

St. Peter’s is large and handsome, built of limestone blocks. A high steeple on the tower and a modern glass porch to block the wind and snow. Also a long drive shed built of stone and wood—a reminder of the days when people drove to church in buggies and cutters. A pretty stone house, the rectory, surrounded by summer flowers.

We drive on to Williamsford on Highway 6, to have lunch, and to give the minister a decent interval to recover from the morning service before we knock at the rectory door to seek out information. A mile or so down the road we make a discouraging discovery. Another cemetery—St. Peter’s own cemetery, with its own early dates and German names—making our cemetery, so close by, seem even more of a puzzle, an orphan.

We come back anyway, at around two o’clock. We knock on the front door of the rectory, and after a while a little girl appears and tries to unbolt the door. She can’t manage it, and makes signs for us to go around to the back. She comes running out to meet us on our way.

The minister isn’t home, she says. She has gone to take afternoon services in Williamsford. Just our informant and her sister are here, looking after the minister’s dog and cats. But if we want to know anything about churches or cemeteries or history we should go and ask her mother, who lives up the hill in the big new log house.

She tells us her name. Rachel.

Rachel’s mother does not seem at all surprised by our curiosity or put out by our visit. She invites us into her house, where there is a noisy interested dog and a self-possessed husband just finishing a late lunch. The main floor of the house is all one big room with a wide view of fields and trees.

She brings out a book that I did not see in the Regional Reference Room. An old soft-covered history of the township. She thinks it has a chapter about cemeteries.

And in fact it does. In a short time she and I are reading together a section on the Mannerow Cemetery, “famous for its two vaults.” There is a grainy photograph of the larger crypt. It is said to have been built in 1895 to receive the body of a three-year-old boy, a son of the Mannerow family. Other members of the family were placed there in the years that followed. One Mannerow husband and wife were put into the smaller crypt in the corner of the cemetery. What was originally a family graveyard later became public and the name of it was changed, from Mannerow to Cedardale.

The vaults were roofed with concrete on the inside.

Rachel’s mother says that there was only one descendant of the family living in the township today. He lives in Scone.

“Next door to the house my brother’s in,” she says. “You know how there’s just the three houses in Scone? That’s all there is. There’s the yellow brick house and that’s my brother’s, then the one in the middle, that’s Mannerows’. So maybe they might tell you something more, if you went there and asked them.”

While I was talking to Rachel’s mother and looking at the history book, my husband sat at the table and talked to her husband. That is the proper way for conversations to go in our part of the country. The husband asked where we came from, and on hearing that we came from Huron County, he said that he knew it very well. He went there straight off the boat, he said, when he came out from Holland not long after the war. In 1948, yes. (He is a man considerably older than his wife.) He lived for a while near Blyth and he worked on a turkey farm.

I overhear him saying this and when my own conversation has drawn to a close I ask him if it was the Wallace Turkey Farm that he worked on.

Yes, he says, that was the one. And his sister married Alvin Wallace.

“Corrie Wallace,” I say.

“That’s right. That’s her.”

I ask him if he knew any Laidlaws from around that area, and he says no.

I say that if he worked at Wallaces’ (another rule in our part of the country is that you never say
the
so-and-so’s, just the name), then he must have known Bob Laidlaw.

“He raised turkeys too,” I tell him. “And he knew Wallaces from when they’d gone to school together. Sometimes he worked with them.”

“Bob Laidlaw?” he says, on a rising note. “Oh, sure, I knew him. But I thought you meant around Blyth. He had a place up by Wingham. West of Wingham. Bob Laidlaw.”

I say that Bob Laidlaw grew up near Blyth, on the Eighth Line of Morris Township, and that was how he knew the Wallace brothers, Alvin’s father and uncle. They had all gone to school at S.S. No. 1, Morris, right beside the Wallace farm.

He takes a closer look at me, and laughs.

“You’re not telling me he was your dad, are you? You’re not Sheila?”

“Sheila’s my sister. I’m the older one.”

“I didn’t know there was an older one,” he says. “I didn’t know that. But Bill and Sheila. I knew them. They used to be down working at the turkeys with us, before Christmas. You never were there?”

“I was away from home by then.”

“Bob Laidlaw. Bob Laidlaw was your dad. Well. I should have thought of that right away. But when you said from around Blyth I didn’t catch on. I was thinking, Bob Laidlaw was from up at Wingham. I never knew he was from Blyth in the first place.”

He laughs and reaches across the table to shake my hand.

“Well now. I can see it in you. Bob Laidlaw’s girl. ’Round the eyes. That’s a long time ago. A long time ago.”

I am not sure whether he means it’s a long time ago that my father and the Wallace boys went to school in Morris Township, or a long time since he himself was a young man fresh from Holland, and worked with my father and my brother and sister preparing the Christmas turkeys. But I agree with him, and then we both say that it is a small world. We say this, as people usually do, with a sense of wonder and refreshment. (People who are not going to be comforted by this discovery usually avoid making it.) We explore the connection as far as it will go, and soon find that there is not much more to be got out of it. But we are both happy. He is happy to be reminded of himself as a young man, fresh in the country and able to turn himself to any work that was offered, with confidence in what lay ahead of him. And by the looks of this well-built house with its wide view, and his lively wife, his pretty Rachel, his own still alert and useful body, it does look as if things have turned out pretty well for him.