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.
And I am happy to find somebody who can see me still as part of my family, who can remember my father and the place where my parents worked and lived for all of their married lives, first in hope and then in honorable persistence. A place that I seldom drive past and can hardly relate to the life I live now, though it is not much more than twenty miles away.
It has changed, of course, it has changed utterly, becoming a car-wrecking operation. The front yard and the side yard and the vegetable garden and the flower borders, the hayfield, the mock-orange bush, the lilac trees, the chestnut stump, the pasture and the ground once covered by the fox pens, are all swept under a tide of car parts, gutted car bodies, smashed headlights, grilles, and fenders, overturned car seats with rotten bloated stuffing-heaps of painted, rusted, blackened, glittering, whole or twisted, defiant and surviving metal.
But that is not the only thing that deprives it of meaning for me. No. It is the fact that it is only twenty miles away, that I could see it every day if I wanted to. The past needs to be approached from a distance.
Rachel’s mother asks us if we would like to look at the inside of the church, before we head off to Scone, and we say that we would. We walk down the hill and she takes us hospitably into the red-carpeted interior. It smells a little damp or musty as stone buildings often do, even when they are kept quite clean.