Provenance iii

Yesterday, I included the first paragraph of a narrative I wrote fifty years ago, when I returned home after a long weekend in Emo, Ontario--my first out-of-town speaking job. I've been calling this whole story "Provenance," a word I've known only since working at a museum. What I'm writing is the provenance of a story I wrote 40+ ago. What I'm telling you is the story of the story.

Today, a large chunk of the published story.

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Brown sugar melts quickly into the ladleful of por­ridge Nick Veldhuisen slaps down in the bowl of anyone who happens in for breakfast. The coffee is hot and strong-Canadian strong; it can barely be swal­lowed black. The eggs are fried in a broad iron skillet, and the children eat their eggs on toast like their father, cutting it up into a hot sandwich, lightly pep­pered. The raw milk is cold and thick, just brought in from the cooler in the barn. The toast is store-bought, but the light gold honey is from the hives, the same hives that attract the bears. The bears catch the scent of the fresh honey and wander in from the "bush." The bush is the wilderness, and the wilderness sits like a stubborn landlord all around the Veldhuisen dairy.

The Veldhuisens are not an ordinary Christian Re­formed family. There are, for instance, seventeen of them in all, including Mom and Dad. Margaret Ger­trude came first, in August of '54, and Wilma Jeanette was last, in November of '71. Fifteen children, all healthy, all strong. "Three times," Nick will say, "three times we had to rebuild the kitchen table." To­day the rectangular giant stretches the entire width of the kitchen, but there's wasted space at the end. Al­ready seven children are gone-five are married, three of those taking the step in one year. Nick remembers the sudden change and laughs. "Just over j20 percent," he says; "hardly even noticeable." His dark hair is combed back over his head. After morning milking a few long strands drop toward his ears. He prays beautifully and, when he concludes, the younger children repeat the amen.

Like so many other Canadian Christian Reformed, Nick and his wife, Johanna, "came over" penniless fol­lowing the Second World War. They came first to Win­nipeg; then, following an ethnic railroad of sorts, they arrived in Emo, Ontario, a tiny river town whose "Front Street" faces the Rainy River, borderline between Canada and the States. Today their pennilessness has evolved into a 450-acre farm on the edge of the wilder­ness-the "bush" as they call it in Emo. Yet only half their land is workableable to yield the necessary hay for the dairy.

Backpacks and orange nylon tents have made the word wilderness quite fashionable these days, but there's little romantic about the bush of northern Ontario. The land is beautiful but not especially hospitable. Moose wander through the cedar swamps. Occasionally, a timber wolf, three feet high at the shoulders, appears from the thin white birch during the long winters, and black bears make startling appearances when the plums ripen in the orchards. Beavers are constantly damming the waterways; the deer and elk make their home in the muskeg, the strange, cushiony soil that feels like an immense waterbed beneath your feet. Red ants build sharp hills that rise from the meadows like Indian mounds. Gerald, the fifth of the boys, says the ants are mean. He steers the tractor between the ant hills on his way to the bush, the loader filled with the innards of a young bull Nick had butchered the night before. "The ants will clean the meat off a carcass in just a few days," he says. Veldhuisen's bush is not a Walt Disney wilderness. Gerald says the bears will rip up what's left of the bull by tomorrow. He dumps the remains no more than a half mile from the house. The Veldhuisens are a wilderness family of seventeen.

And yet they are no different from the rest of the CRC. As strong are as it is, the Veldhuisens have to stretch to cover its generation gaps. They milk thirty cows, keep dozens of chickens, and maintain what most romantically can be referred to as a “family farm.” There are three hoses, three geese, a turkey or two, dogs, cats, and one bull. But a new Massey Ferguson stands in the shed, a new baler and a new disc seem somehow out of place. Johanna Veldhuisen smiles defensively when  she sees them, remembering many a summer when such luxuries were too extravagant even to covet.

''My son says that someday she there will a new barn here in the pasture," she says. There’s an obvious skepticism in her voice, a skepticism fostered by the rigors of the Canadian immigration experience. She remembers summers when there was no hay to put up. She remembers pennilessness as if it were yesterday, and when her own young men see visions and dream dreams, she shows her instinctive protectiveness. “We never believed in buying on credit,” she tells me and remembers only too well those few times when borrowing was the only way to hold on to a fragile dream. That new blue Harvestore her son talks about remains only a dream in his mind. The dairy changes slowly; the new red baler still looks out of place.

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Tomorrow, the original story continues.