In the library I met a friend who had dropped in to see us last summer shortly after our discovery. We had told him about the crypt and given him some rough directions as to how to find it, because he is interested in old cemeteries. He said now that he had written down the directions as soon as he got home. I had forgotten ever giving them. He went straight home and found the piece of paper-found it miraculously, he said, in a welter of other papers. He came back to the library where I was still looking through the atlases.
Peabody, Scone, McCullougb Lake. That was what he had written down.
Farther north than we had thought-just beyond the boundary of the territory we had been doggedly covering.
So we found the right cemetery, and the grass-grown crypt looked just as surprising, as primitive, as we remembered. Now we had enough time to look around. We saw that most of the old slabs had been collected together and placed in the form of a cross. Nearly all of these were the tombstones of children. In any of these old cemeteries the earliest dates were apt to be those of children, or young mothers lost in childbirth, or young men who had died accidentally-drowned, or hit by a falling tree, killed by a wild horse, or involved in an accident during the raising of a barn. There were hardly any old people around to die, in those days.
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, golden-rod, 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.