Kaidenberg's Best Sons Read online

  Book and Copyright Information

  © Jason Heit, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  In this book, names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Edited by J. Jill Robinson

  Book designed by Grace Cheong

  Typeset by Susan Buck

  Cover image: Peter Henry Emerson (British, born Cuba, 1856 - 1936) A Stiff Pull. [Suffolk.], 1888, Photogravure 20.8 Ч 28.6 cm (8 3/16 x 11 1/4 in.), 84.XB.696.2.4, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Kaidenberg’s best sons : a novel in stories / Jason Heit.

  Names: Heit, Jason, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190123915 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190124334 | ISBN 9781550502312

  (softcover) | ISBN 9781550502329 (PDF) | ISBN 9781550502336 (HTML) | ISBN 9781550502343 (Kindel)

  Classification: LCC PS8615.E375 K35 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Available in Canada from:

  2517 Victoria AvenuePublishers Group Canada

  Regina, Saskatchewan2440 Viking Way

  Canada S4P 0T2Richmond, British Columbia

  www.coteaubooks.com Canada V6V 1N2

  Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Saskatchewan through

  Creative Saskatchewan, the City of Regina. We further acknowledge the [financial] support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l’appui [financier] du gouvernement du Canada.

  Dedication

  For Jacqueline, Odelia, and Oleander

  Foreword

  The stories in this book are inspired by the experiences of a small group of ethnic Germans, known as the Schwarzmeerdeutsche (Black Sea Germans), who settled the St. Joseph’s Colony in western Saskatchewan in the early 1900s. My ancestors were among these settlers and I’ve woven what I know about some of their personal experiences into these stories.

  I’d like to acknowledge that my ancestors and other immigrants were able to settle on the Canadian prairies because of Canada’s treaties with First Nations. The St. Joseph’s Colony was established on Treaty 6 land.

  Contents

  The Feud1

  The Horse Accident28

  A Turn West54

  Fireworks Over Kaidenberg80

  Whiskey and Flu139

  A Death in the Family153

  Telling Stories182

  The Card Game196

  The Feud

  1907

  In the late 1800s, large numbers of German-speaking farmers emigrated from the Russian steppe to find new fortunes on the American prairie. Many of these first settlers made their way to the Dakotas, but the prospect of better land took some of them further into the northwest frontier, up into Canada and the newly formed, as of 1905, province of Saskatchewan.

  Iremember it like yesterday. The smell of desperate, tired men lined up outside the small one-storey brick building grumbling in the summer heat waiting for the agent to arrive. The land titles building stood atop a hill overlooking the town of Battleford, Saskatchewan, and the junction of the North Saskatchewan and the Battle rivers. Young caragana trees made a rough perimeter around the building, stifling the already heavy air. The year was 1907. I, Jakob Feist, was only 19 years old, and while I was as excited as any of those men to get my very own quarter of land, there was another feeling that overtook me that day. Something much bigger and much darker than my excitement. It was an ugly feeling – like the way you get before a fist fight, with your guts tied in knots and everything is nerves. My father, Kaspar, had that feeling too. I can still remember the look in his eyes. If eyes could growl, his would have growled, Ich will das Land.

  And they would have growled at Bernhard Holtz too. Bernhard and my father had been at each other since we left North Dakota, but my father hadn’t really figured it for much until he suspected Bernhard had his eye on a quarter section of land we planned to farm. It was good land, and one of only two quarters next to my uncle’s that was still open for homesteading. You see, each man 18 years or over could get one quarter of land for ten dollars, which was a very good price considering it was nearly $500 to buy an extra quarter. Father planned to file a claim for one quarter and I’d take the other.

  The thing about feuds is sometimes you can be in one without really knowing it. For Father and me, it started outside that land titles office in Battleford. For Bernhard, it started some years before in North Dakota. He blamed us for ruining his fingers, which I’d admit we had a part in, but so did Bernhard, seeing how he had a bad habit of putting them where they didn’t belong.

  We had a hard time making a go of farming in North Dakota. Father was at it eight years. Eight years too long, he’d say. We’d left good farmland in South Russia – not far from the Black Sea, with tall grass and plenty of rain – for America. I was only a young boy when we left. I liked the place – well, it was all I knew – but Father said the time to leave had come. We weren’t welcome any longer. It’d been nearly a hundred years that our people were there – keeping to ourselves, in our own villages, and speaking our German language. Until one day someone in Saint Petersburg snapped their fingers and said we needed to speak their language, go to their schools, and fight in their armies. No, that’s not our way. So we went from Russia back to Germany and onward to America, from Philadelphia to Towner, North Dakota. And what we got was the late comings – land too sandy for grain farming. If there wasn’t a flood of rain, the soil baked and the crops turned to dust. It was heartbreaking. Year after year we prayed for a good crop, and year after year we got more frustration and disappointment. We tried grazing animals on the wild grasses but we couldn’t do more than a few head of cattle. The land just didn’t produce – except for gophers. They were all over the place. Without crops, though, it was hard to put food on the table. It seemed our bellies were always aching with hunger. I remember before bed each night, the littlest ones bawling for a spoonful of molasses to fill the hollowness inside them. Living like that, you do everything you can to make ends meet.

  First, we collected buffalo bones. They were everywhere and we got more than a few wagonloads. We sold them to traders; they’d turn around and sell them to some big shot fella in fancy clothes who’d haul them east on the train and turn them into fertilizer for the farmers back there. When the bones ran out, we took to trapping. Like I said, there were plenty of gophers. Father was always lamenting, “They’re the only thing that grows in this godforsaken land.” I think it had something to do with the buffalo being gone, because no land should be infested like that. If Moses had been around surely he would’ve called it a plague, but since there was no Moses in North Dakota, the county put a bounty on the tails. It was enough so we could buy a sack of flour, some coffee and sugar. That was in the summer.

  In the winter, we turned to trapping weasels and jackrabbits. Rabbit was good eating. Mother would cook it long and slow so the meat would fall right off the bones. We sure did eat a lot of rabbit back then, not so much nowadays.

  Wea
sels, though, could make you a little money, especially in their winter coat. We had a few miles of traps running along the creekside between our two quarters and Uncle Sebastian’s land. Those weasels would come off the creek looking for whatever food they might find and that’s where we’d get them.

  Father appointed me to the job of trapping the critters. I liked it. I was the right age for it, 12 years old. It was my responsibility to walk the line each day; sometimes my brother Anton would come along. He was a few years younger than me, so I was expected to show him how to set the traps and what to do with the weasel or the gopher depending on the season. He didn’t like to touch them though. He was scared they might come back to life and bite him or run up his arm and under his clothes. It helped if we put them in a burlap sack so Anton didn’t have to hold them by the tail or look at them, but the sack never got very full. On a good day, we’d get a weasel. It seemed to me that happened about once every five days. Maybe a week. It’d been better at the start but the more we trapped the fewer there were; then, for a while, there was nothing. It didn’t mean much at first, but after a few weeks it seemed a little suspicious. Father got that angry look he gets when things aren’t going right – his dark eyes narrowed and all the lines in his forehead turned to ridges.

  “What kind of tracks did you see?” he asked. My father was always worried that we weren’t checking the traps often enough and that a coyote or fox, maybe even an owl or something, would get there before we did.

  “No tracks,” I replied. “There was nothing there.”

  Father snapped his index finger against my forehead. “You Dummkopf. What do you mean there was nothing there?”

  I rubbed the palm of my glove where he’d hit me on my forehead and stared off toward the soddie where mother and the other children were keeping warm. “The traps were bare. They hadn’t even been set off.”

  “That can’t be.” He looked to Anton. “Is your brother lying to me? Have you boys been playing on the creek when you’re supposed to be checking traps?”

  “It’s the truth, Father,” Anton said. His voice was always so gentle, more like Mother’s than Father’s or my own. Father was quiet. Anton could settle the fight in him better than anyone else. It was his eyes; they never wavered.

  “Show me,” Father said.

  The traps were just as I had described to him, but Father noticed something I hadn’t – someone was walking our trail. You could see it every now and again: a boot mark that was too big to be from my foot and with a heel that was much more square shaped than mine.

  “Someone’s stealing from us,” Father said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Teach them a lesson.”

  So, he sent me home to fetch a fox trap and the fur from the last weasel I’d skinned. He fixed the fur in the trap to look like its old self and set the fox trap right next to it, covered in a little snow and with the fur teasing its trigger.

  “What happens when someone reaches for the trap?” I asked.

  “If they’re smart they’ll see what’s waiting for them; then, maybe, they’ll think twice about stealing from others.”

  “And if they don’t see it and the trap goes off?”

  He shrugged. “That poor sucker’s hand is going to hurt awful bad.”

  I wasn’t happy with the idea of hurting someone, but I also knew that those weasels were more than a few dollars in my father’s pocket: they put food on the table. When I started to think about Anton, Magda, Johanna, and Adam aching with hunger and Mother crying because of all the pain and sorrow she felt for our dear family, I couldn’t help but think that maybe our thief was owed some pain of his own.

  The next day, Father and I checked the traps. When we got to where the traps were, we found nothing – no bait trap, no fur, and no surprise trap either.

  Father studied the ground. “He’s been here.”

  “I reckon someone has. They took the traps,” I said.

  Father grunted and lowered down onto one knee. “Look here.” He pointed to a blotch of red snow. “See how it moves from here to there and back.”

  “It cut him.”

  Father nodded. He stood up and surveyed the marks in the snow.

  “Do you think he’s hurt bad?”

  He took a step to the side and picked something out of the snow – a bloodied piece of flesh, maybe part of a fingertip or a knuckle or something. The flesh was an ugly blue-white fused with crystals of blood. It made me sick to look at it, knowing some man or boy was missing a part of himself.

  My father stood there shaking his head looking at it. “He must be some kind of idiot not to see that coming.”

  As it happened, we didn’t find out who took the bait for quite some time. Father was a little sore that we’d lost two good traps, but for a while at least there was no more trouble from our thief.

  I remember it was in the fall of 1904 when the land agents came around and started to spread word of a new settlement for German-speaking Catholics up in Canada. Folks were wary. We’d already been offered plenty of cheap land and it showed. Still, it was hope and it got folks excited thinking of what could be. Father was one of those, but it was bad timing for our family – it was only a few months after Anton died. Pneumonia took him. There wasn’t much talk about leaving North Dakota when Father mentioned the idea to Mother. She was set against it.

  “You’d have us leave a child behind?” Her blue eyes teared.

  “I don’t want to, but we need to think of the future. Each year we stay here we have less money in our pocket. I wouldn’t have Jakob farm this land. I’d tell him to go find better land somewhere else. We should take our own advice and put an end to this suffering.”

  “No,” Mother said as she wiped her cheeks. “We need to have faith; next year might be better. God’ll reward our faith and sacrifice.”

  “I could say the same thing for moving.”

  “Well, I won’t go. There’ll be no one to watch over him,” Mother declared. I can still see her standing in the kitchen and trembling like an autumn leaf. She’d said her piece and Father put the idea away. For a while, life went back to normal.

  Of course, that didn’t stop other people from talking about picking up and starting over on cheap land. At that time, places like Canada and Saskatchewan were nothing more than strange words to us. It could mean anything – fortune, disaster, hope, disappointment – depending on the day and who it was doing the talking. It didn’t take long though and our friends and neighbours were selling their land and whatever else they could and leaving for the unknown. Fourteen families left in 1905, including the Werans and the Eberles. Uncle Sebastian was ready to go too. I heard him and Father talking in the little clapboard shed where Father did his blacksmith work.

  “We came here to build something for ourselves, something we could leave for our children, but this isn’t it,” Uncle Sebastian said. “This land is a curse.”

  “Please, don’t go,” Father said. His voice was low and desperate.

  “I don’t understand, Kaspar. This place has handed you and Margaret more than your share of suffering. Why stay?”

  “The Lord brought us here to build a new life for our children; we must stay constant in our belief.”

  “Is it Margaret?”

  Father was quiet for a long time. “We’ve buried a child here.”

  After that I never heard Uncle Sebastian say another word about leaving to my father. But, a year later, he left with Aunt Helen and their daughter, Mary, who was only a toddler and their boy, Ignaz, who’d only just been born.

  Things seemed to shift then. Father’s grief took hold of him and he retreated to the forge and the anvil. He was a fine blacksmith. Had he a different mind he might have used it to put a little more food on the table, but he was more given to trade his work for whatever a neighbour might have on him, which, in
those days, wasn’t much. A tin of coffee, a quart of wild berries or a piece of leather to mend a saddle was often the measure of his work.

  Father found his hope again that spring day when he returned from town with a letter from Uncle Sebastian. He was so excited he ran straight into the house without unhitching his horse, Juniper, from the wagon, so he could gather us around the table and read us the letter.

  February 24, 1907

  Greetings to you, dear brother, Kaspar, sister-in-law, Margaret, and children, from all of us, Sebastian, Helen, and children. We are all healthy and praying for an end to this long, cold winter. Helen tells me to write that Ignaz is walking and Mary sings to us each night.

  Brother, did you get my letter from last September? Please, you must not wait any longer. There is good farm land here. I broke ten acres of land last summer and the soil is a good, thick clay, not as rich or deep as the steppe, but it is an improvement from North Dakota.

  There are two quarters next to mine that have not yet been settled. As I wrote before, we are on the northeast quarter of the 24th section. NE24-36-21-W3. The other quarters are the southeast and northwest quarters of the section. These are both good pieces of land with no hills and a few sloughs for water.

  With this I will close my letter. Give my greetings to all, God keep you healthy and strong, and please do not wait to join us.

  Sebastian Feist

  Father smiled. “Two quarters.” He held the letter in his hand for a time. All of us children smiled to see him so happy, but on Mother’s face I saw a worried look.

  “Father, was there another letter from Uncle Sebastian?” Magda asked.

  “Not one that I got,” Father said. His eyes barely moved from the page.

  “It might’ve been lost,” Mother said, wringing her hands in her apron. “It’s good to hear the children are growing fast.”

  “And the land is good,” Father added. “Sebastian’s right. We can have a new start – a quarter for us, and another for Jakob –”