Armin's Shorts

By Armin Wiebe

Showcasing a selection of stories from Armin Wiebe's 30 year writing career, Armin's Shorts features tales from the familiarly fictitious Mennonite community of Gutenthal, re-imagined origin stories from the Tlįchǫ of the subarctic, and flights of pure fantasy set in modern day Winnipeg.

Funny enough to make your "grandmother sit up in her black trough coffin and laugh," and so gut wrenching you'll feel "that clunk in the heart, and that wrunsch in the stomach," master story teller, Armin Wiebe, presents a veritable smorgasbord of short stories that cover the gamut of human experience with a wry sense of humour, a stern sense of justice, and a warm and tender heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turnstone Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780888015471

Armin Wiebe

Armin Wiebe is the recipient of the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. He has five published novels, one play, and his short stories have appeared in numerous books and anthologies. A teacher for many years, Armin Wiebe is now retired and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Book preview

Armin’s Shorts

other books by Armin Wiebe

Murder in Gutenthal

The Salvation of Yasch Siemens

The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst

Tatsea

Armin’s Shorts

Little Fictions

by Armin Wiebe

Armin's Shorts

copyright © Armin Wiebe 2015

Turnstone Press

Artspace Building

206-100 Arthur Street

Winnipeg, MB

R3B 1H3 Canada

www.TurnstonePress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or ­transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or ­mechanical—without the prior ­written permission of the ­publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program.

Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens for Turnstone Press.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wiebe, Armin

[Short stories. Selections]

Armin's shorts / Armin Wiebe.

ISBN 978-0-88801-546-4 (paperback)

I. Title. II. Title: Shorts.

PS8595.I3573A6 2015 C813'.54 C2015-905278-5

For all who have provided ashes and dust,

water and wind, nightmares and dreams, and love to enrich the compost from which these stories were grown

Contents

From the Gutenthal Galaxy

Mouse Lake

The Well Woman

Thank you for that, Mr. Runnells

Kicking Against the Pricks

Barn Dance

Beginnings

The Courage to Cry

Flypaper

Cities of Refuge

February 3

Subarctic Stories

The Little Kollouch

A Woman Who Married Yamozha

Whaèhdǫ Godıì: Old Time Stories

The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

And Besides God Made Poison Ivy

Engel Bengel

Mary’s Creek

When the Piano Came

The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

Moonlight Rehearsal

Olfert

Olfert Feeds the Ducks

Silo W201

The Call of the Fedora

When a pleasant woman from the symphony phoned

Sheet Lightning on a Floor

Hearing it ring

Go Bed to Yellowknife

Return

Acknowledgements

Armin’s Shorts

From the Gutenthal Galaxy

Mouse Lake

Shups Leeven phoned today," Oata says as she reaches me a cold beer. I lean back against the combine ladder and take a long swallow before I ask what did she want. I don’t know for sure if I even want to hear about it. I think I have the tarp on the haystack and I want to keep it that way.

She invited us to go to Mouse Lake for the weekend. I said we would if the threshing was finished. Oata picks a straw from my wet shirt then rubs her fingers over my chin that is bristly like a boar, but who has time to shave for combining? Do you think we will be finished?

I know we will be finished because it’s only Tuesday and there are only forty acres left unless it rains or the combine breaks down again. Maybe we will finish if we hurry ourselves, I say. I drink some more beer and think that it is real nice that Oata brought it to the field on such a hot day. I mean, she even said I should buy it when I was in town the last time to buy some combine belts. Even if she doesn’t drink it she said it would be nice to have on such hot threshing days.

I will have to sew myself a bathing suit, she says and she leans herself against my greasy shirt. There wouldn’t be any big enough in the store I don’t think. Oata laughs a little bit and looks me in the eyes and it’s almost like she is asking me something that she is afraid to say and I would be afraid to make an answer. Like I said, I think I have the tarp on the haystack and I want to keep it that way.

You know, I have never been to a lake before … have you, Yasch?

Only one time, I say, happy to talk about something too old to bother anything. One time when we had just moved to Gutenthal from Yanzeed Futtachi took me and Muttachi on a trip one Sunday. We didn’t go to church and we drove to the east all morning and we went into the States to Lake Bronson and that was the first lake I ever saw. But I had my Sunday pants on and no bathing trunks so I couldn’t go in the water. But it was fun watching the other kids splashing. Then we drove east some more till we came to the Lake of the Woods. That was something to see. So much water that you couldn’t see all the way across. And Muttachi let me take my shoes off and roll up my Sunday pants as high as they would go and I went walking in the water and then Muttachi rolled her stockings off and Futtachi took his shoes off and we all three went walking along the beach there.

I am looking across the field and I don’t know for sure why I have said this to Oata but she sure is listening and I know that if the threshing is finished by the weekend I will for sure have to take Oata to Mouse Lake because if she has never been to a lake she has to go even if the tarp might rip off my haystack.

I reach the empty beer bottle back to Oata and give her a little scratch with my stubble cheek and I say, Better get back on the combine if we’re going to go baptizing ouselves by Mouse Lake, and she says, You sure are getting scratchy, and I say, I won’t shave till the threshing is finished! Then I climb up to the platform and push the button to start the old John Deere 27 up again and I look at Oata putting the faspa back into the half-ton and for a minute I wonder myself if it bothers her that she is so fat and if she wonders if it bothers me that she is two hundred pounds and I am wondering what kind of bathing suit she will make herself and I wonder if it will bother me to have Oata and Shups Leeven with their bathing suits on by Mouse Lake. And I wonder if I can keep the tarp on for a whole weekend with Laups Leeven, Shups’s husband.

Because I have been to Mouse Lake before. When I was fifteen. I was weeding beets by Yut Yut Leeven’s place and when the weeding was finished, I went to Carman fair with some neighbours and I was very excited because Shups Stoesz was going to be there because she was in the calf club. Me and Hova Jake had taken Shups and her sister Shtramel for a few rides through the knackzoat and Shups had been pretty good to me so I was real excited about going to the Carman fair which was so much bigger than any other fair around and so I had all these plans in my head and I saw Shups with the other calf club people and me and Hova Jake were sort of trying to decide how we could get Shups and Shtramel to go on the Ferris wheel with us when all of a sudden we see those girls on the Ferris wheel with Laups Leeven and his brother Lowtz.

I think I could have been a murderer then, but I smoked a pack of Export ‘A’ instead and didn’t kill anybody.

Then about a week later the Leevens invited me to Mouse Lake to stay by their cabin there for a few days and how can you say no to something like that? And it wasn’t so bad there by the lake driving with the boat and even catching one small fish and I tried even to water ski but I was always falling down.

But I think I killed something there by Mouse Lake then, while I was watching Laups and Lowtz diving in and out of the water never scared of it and just like they were fish and having so much fun and I could hardly swim at all and in my head I was thinking that for sure it would be much more fun for Shups to be with Laups than with me and I never tried anything more with Shups even though she went out with lots of guys, some even lots worse than me, and I just pushed her out of my head and learned myself to pitch baseball and played for the team and stopped going to school and started drinking beer with the team beside the big ditch that cuts us off from the States.

And when Laups and Shups got married last summer I didn’t go to the wedding even though Muttachi got an invitation, because the ball team was playing some place. And it just didn’t seem important.

And it shouldn’t seem weighty now, neither. I mean, I’m with Oata engaged and it’s not like we are having some secret love affair or anything and probably everybody in Gutenthal knows that I don’t always come home for night after working on her farm, but I don’t think nobody will say nothing against me so that I can hear. And for sure Oata hasn’t told nobody that we’re getting married right after the harvest instead of waiting for next summer because the Lord sometimes works in wonderful ways while you are thinking about something else. But it’s just that some old things that I thought were forgotten are coming back in my head and I sometimes wonder if everything there is in the world is in my head and if there is room for everything, and that even if you change your mind about something, or if you make right a mistake, is it wiped out like words from a blackboard, or is the thought that you now think is wrong, is it still there inside all that butter between the ears?

I don’t know but I want to keep the tarp on the haystack. Because I think I have it straight in my head and my heart about Oata, that I love Oata and that her half-section land isn’t why I am engaged with her. But I did have some black thoughts about Oata maybe going dead from fat and then I could marry skinny Sadie Nickel, but Sadie is having a hurry up all of a sudden wedding with Pug Peters so those black thoughts don’t make sense any more and I mean Shups is married with Laups so what should that bother anybody? Besides, I don’t think that it would be so comfortable with anybody like it is with Oata because we both come from the wrong side of the double dike and for sure we never had cabins by Mouse Lake like so many Flat Germans have now. But I am still scared about something.

Oata doesn’t seem scared at all. When I stop threshing for the day she is sewing herself a bathing suit. She has picked a picture from a woman’s magazine she bought by the drugstore and she has figured out how she will make it and she has cut herself out a pattern from the Free Press Weekly comics and she seems really happy so that I have to get my own supper off the stove.

Wednesday the threshing already gets finished and Thursday at dinnertime Shups phones Oata to say that they want to go on Friday at noon, and Oata says we’ll be ready and she phones Hauns Jaunses’ Fraunz on the farmer phone to see if he will do the chores for us while we are away, and he says yes. So I go home and tell Muttachi to find my bathing trunks because I never even used them this summer yet, because I mean when a person is twenty-three already you don’t go swimming in the water hole much any more. And Oata finishes her bathing suit on Thursday but I don’t have time to see her wear it because even if the threshing is finished it still doesn’t mean there is nothing to do because on a farm there is always something to do.

Sure enough, Friday at dinnertime Laups Leeven and Shups come pick us up with their LTD and the boat on a trailer behind. Shups is wearing white shorts and a shirt with no sleeves and it seems like she doesn’t look any older than when she was sixteen, and she seems real friendly and Laups is real friendly too. He puts our stuff in the trunk and then Oata and Shups sit in the back seat and I sit in the front with Laups and it is just like we were all old married people even if me and Oata are only engaged. And we drive along quite fast and Laups and me talk about the crop and such and a little bit about the ball team though I don’t have much to say about it because I quit playing after Oata’s father’s funeral. And Laups says that the ball team still wants me to pitch for them again, that a person doesn’t have to stop living just because he’s getting married and it seems to make sense because if a guy just is with his woman all the time he could easy get to be like a woman too. And I start to feel pretty good about everything.

Soon we are driving east from Emerson and I can hear Shups and Oata are finding lots to talk about, which seems a little bit funny because I can’t remember that Oata and Shups ever did anything together in school or in church but they sure are flapping their tongues like flags on a windy day and then all of a sudden Shups says a little bit louder, I never thought Yasch had it in him to get married, and I feel my ears getting red and Laups laughs a little bit and says, Don’t listen to such women. As soon as they get married they can’t stand to see any man that isn’t married. If Shups had had her way there would have been fifty weddings in Gutenthal this year!

But I always thought that Yasch didn’t like women. I thought he just liked baseball. All of a sudden she is ruffling her fingers through my hair from the back. But I thought he was cute.

Before I can even think Oata laughs and says, Oh that Yasch, he likes women all right. When we went to Winnipeg to get Ha Ha Nickel’s Honey Wagon I thought his eyes would fall out he was looking at the women so much!

And I am sitting there getting red and everybody is laughing good, and I laugh too but under the laughing I feel like the tarp is coming off the haystack. I mean what Shups said shouldn’t mean nothing but what is it supposed to mean when she says she thought I was cute and that she didn’t think I liked women when I was heista kopp in love with her then and maybe if I hadn’t been so scared of everything I could have had some luck with her.

Then Laups has to slow down the car real quick because there is a tractor in front of us pulling a load of straw bales and so I shove all that old stuff out of my head and try to count the bales on the load.

Mouse Lake isn’t such a terribly big lake, only maybe a mile across and four or five miles long, but it sure is bigger than Hauns Jaunses’ Fraunz’s water hole or even Morden Dam. It smells like a lake, too, kind of a smell that gets a person between the legs or someplace like that, kind of a scary smell. Lots of Flat Germans have cabins here now and there is even a Flat German church. There is no hydro at Mouse Lake so the church should be good for those that don’t think there should be hydro in church but I don’t think any of them have cabins here.

Oata right away gets out of the car and runs down to the water. There is a strip of gravel at the water’s edge where Yut Yut Leeven has dumped a few loads. Otherwise there is mud under the water as Oata soon finds out when she takes her shoes off and steps in a few steps. Oh, it’s cold! she says as she sinks into the mud.

Come, Oata, we’ll go swimming as soon as we put the food away, Shups says and we all help to load off the car. Then Laups turns the car and trailer around and backs the trailer as far into the water as he can without getting stuck. I help him to slide the boat off the trailer into the water and tie it on by the dock. I take the tarp off the boat while Laups drives the car back up the bank and parks the trailer on the other side of the cabin. It is still the same wooden boat I remembered from that other time only they must have painted it because it is red now and it used to be brown. And it’s a different motor, too, twenty-horse Johnson. The old one was only eighteen. Otherwise it seems the same, almost like a car, I thought the first time I saw it, only with the steer on the right side. The steer was still the same only it looked more worn and the levers for the gear shift and the throttle didn’t have any paint left on them. The little windshield had a lot of scratches and a big crack on the left side that was taped over.

Let’s take it for a spin to see if everything is working okay, Laups says when he comes back to the dock. Last time we had some trouble with the motor.

The boat rocks a little as I step onto the narrow boards at the bottom. Laups unties the boat and pushes it away from the dock as he jumps in. He connects the gasoline hose to the motor and squeezes the bulb in the hose before he pulls out the choke and pulls on the starter rope. For a minute I feel like the first time, how Laups seems to know so much about things, then I push that out of my head. I mean, anybody can connect up the hose from a gas tank. The motor starts on the second pull and then Laups moves to the driver seat and I sit down beside him. I look up at the cabin and I see Shups coming from the beckhouse behind the cabin and as Laups backs the boat away from the dock I see Oata waving at me from the steps. Laups shoves the gear lever forward, then the throttle and the boat lifts up in front and we go driving over the water. Laups heads for the middle of the lake and makes a few power turns. He speeds up and slows down a few times, listening to the motor, then opens it up again and makes a big turn and heads back to the cabin. Time to water ski! he says, just as excited as he was that other time, and my stomach feels just a little bit crooked when I think that I’m going to have to water ski, too. For sure, Oata will want to see me do it.

Of course, I don’t say nothing about how I feel a little bit scared about water skiing and for sure I won’t have to try first anyways and then there are other things to think about when we get back to the dock because Oata and Shups have their bathing suits on and are sitting on the strip of sand by the water. Oata’s suit is made from some light blue material that stretches itself over all of Oata’s big curves like it was the sky or the lake and her white arms and legs could be clouds. Beside her Shups sits in a yellow two-piece suit and her legs and arms are brown from the farm but her stomach is white; otherwise she could be a picture from the Eaton’s catalog. I try not to let my eyeballs fall out and I can’t figure out how come Laups doesn’t even seem to look them on as he hurries to the cabin.

I left your suit on the bed, Oata calls after me.

In the cabin Laups is already in one of the bedrooms with the door closed so I go into the other one where I see the trunks on the bed. Oata’s clothes are folded nicely on one end of the bed and it looks like for sure we will be sleeping in the same bedroom because there are only two in the cabin. It will be like we are married already and I wonder what Shups and Laups are thinking about that but then Laups opens his door and says, Coming, Yasch?

Right away, I say and he goes to the corner of the front room of the cabin where the water skis are and I close the door and undress. My trunks aren’t new and they feel terribly tight and I think everything is sticking out too much, but then I figure the cold water will shrink everything soon enough and so I go outside. Shups is standing in the boat with an orange life jacket on that she hasn’t closed at the front. Oata is on the dock trying to fit into another orange life jacket but she is having trouble. Yasch, come and help me, she calls and I hurry over to her and I see a strap that can be loosened. Then she can get both arms through the holes even though it is very tight. The straps almost close in front but not quite, so Oata laughs and says, I don’t think it will fall off anyways. So I lean closer and give her a kiss on the cheek and she says in my ear, Besides I got lots of life jacket in my bathing suit already, don’t you think? and I try to tickle her stomach and Shups laughs behind me and I feel myself getting red.

C’mon already, let’s go! Laups says from where he is sitting on the end of the dock. He has a white ski belt on and his feet are in the water with skis on. He is holding the handle of the tow rope in one hand and a coil of the rope in the other.

Get in, Oata, Shups says. I help Oata step into the boat and it tips quite far and she says Huy yuy yuy! and Laups says to me Maybe you better stay on the dock or the motor won’t have enough speed to tow me. I don’t say nothing but I stay on the dock while Shups gets Oata to sit in the middle of the back seat looking backwards. You have to watch the skier, she says to Oata. Shups pulls the starting rope and climbs to the driver seat while I untie the boat. She carefully backs up the boat while Laups holds up the rope so it won’t get tangled up in the propeller. Then she shifts into forward and turns out toward the centre of the lake slowly as Laups lets out more rope till it is tight. Oata is holding tightly onto the seat with both hands but she still almost jerks off the seat when Shups shoves the throttle all the way forward and Laups is jerked off the dock and for a moment he is knee-deep in the water struggling to get his skis up but then he is away flying over the water in the wake of the boat.

Well, Laups doesn’t stay behind in the wake very long. Soon he is going outside the wake to one side of the boat and then back across the wake to the other side and Shups makes some big power turns that really let Laups fly over the water. Then he holds on only with one hand and next he has the handle hooked behind his head and he is waving both arms. Then I see him pointing to the dock and I think he is ready to stop already but Shups keeps the motor wide open as she drives past and Laups lets go one ski and is standing just on one. He almost falls down when he does this but then he is going good again and he starts swerving from one side to the other. The dropped ski comes bouncing on the waves to the shore and I go into the water to get it. The water feels cold at first but I dive under and swim to the ski and bring it back to the dock. Then I see Laups pointing to the dock again. Shups drives real close to the dock and Laups doesn’t let go of the rope till he is so close that he doesn’t even get his trunks wet when he sinks down in the shallow water.

Your turn, Yasch, he says when he puts the other ski on