Who Has Seen the Wind

  Illustrated by William Kurelek

  WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND

  W.O. MITCHELL

  Who has seen the wind?

  Neither you nor I:

  But when the trees bow down their heads,

  The wind is passing by.

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

   To O.S. Mitchell  My father and my son

  CONTENTS

   Foreword  FRANCES ITANI

  * * *

  Preface

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  * * *

   Afterword  ORM MITCHELL

   “A Literary Lazarus”  BARBARA MITCHELL

  About the Author and Illustrator

  FOREWORD

  FRANCES ITANI

  Iwas a passenger on a bus between Calgary and Edmonton during the early 1970s when I first read Who Has Seen the Wind. Packed bus, window seat, landscape on my right. I read the first paragraph, which begins with one of the most memorable opening sentences in Canadian fiction: “Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky. . . .”

  I looked up from the page but stayed within the scene. The words have the effect of film, the camera panning out, carrying the reader across living, breathing prairie to the edge of a small town and then zooming in to focus on a particular street where a particular house is situated — the house of Brian O’Connal, the boy at the centre of the story.

  I have read this novel several times and I own four different editions. With each reading I have been impressed by the beauty of the language and by the breathtaking descriptions of prairie. A true classic, the book stays in print and is still read and enjoyed seventy-five years after its initial publication because it speaks to the human condition. The search for meaning goes on in our best art.

  Like most people who grew up and were educated in 20th century Canada, I was introduced to stories, poems, plays and novels created by writers from other countries; almost all of those writers were dead. From a small Quebec village, I read Anne of Green Gables in my home, and listened to Jake and the Kid episodes on our kitchen radio, but Canadian literature was not part of my schooling. Canadian books were not discussed and never assigned. It was not until I was a university student in Alberta and Ontario during the ’70s that I began to discover the literature of my own country. Edmonton is where I read the works of western writers such as W.O. Mitchell, Rudy Wiebe, Sinclair Ross, Frederick Philip Grove, Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Adele Wiseman, Martha Ostenso, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Henry Kreisel, Maria Campbell and Nellie McClung. Now, another generation of writing — in widely representative ways — has been added to the earlier body of work. The number of practising writers across the entire country has multiplied many times over since the 1960s and 1970s. As for W.O. Mitchell, he wrote many more novels, stories and plays of high quality, as well as approximately two hundred and fifty Jake and the Kid episodes for CBC radio. W.O.’s honesty, his warmth and humour as both artist and performer made him immensely popular with the general public.

  * * *

  During the time that I was enrolled in courses at the University of Alberta, I was truly fortunate as a beginning writer to have W.O. as my first writing teacher. He tried to impart what he knew about creating fiction, and he knew a great deal. In class, I was also watching artistic process; W.O. was always working on a new novel or play of his own.

  We — the students in his small writing class — heard about the illusion of bridging between two creative partners, writer and reader, and the intimacy of that relationship. We listened to W.O. talk about our “findings,” our private sea-caves, about the extra spectator quality of the artist and the unfettered imagination doing its work. W.O. talked about the use of impertinent detail and how each of us has a unique, stored past. What he believed and what is readily apparent in Wind was that the human condition is rooted in our daily lives. That is something he repeated often in class. He helped writers — not only beginners — to know and understand that it was all right, that it was perfectly okay to tell the stories of our own culture and to write the details of our everyday lives. Our “findings” became starting points for ideas that would later come together around a theme and develop into the beginnings of art.

  W.O. was a gifted teacher and he instilled in his writing students the sense of possibility. He felt that the telling of Canadian stories is not only important, but essential. His distinctive, caring voice through his work and in his teaching amounted to a huge contribution over his lifetime, a contribution that has become part of the backbone of what is now an impressive body of Canadian literature. His rootedness in and familiarity with prairie community explain in part why Wind has been and continues to be read by generations of readers. As a child, W.O. grew up in a small town on Saskatchewan prairie. As a skilled novelist, he mined his own unique, stored past. He exercised his unfettered imagination. He examined the human condition through his central character, Brian, who is always searching for meaning, always trying to understand his feelings, his place in family and community and, ultimately, in the larger world that surrounds. W.O. wrote that he was “trying to present sympathetically the struggle of a boy to understand what still defeats mature and learned men — the ultimate meaning of the cycle of life.” This novel has been lauded not only by readers and critics, but by writers, as well. Every one of us can identify with story that is about community we know instinctively. We connect through art and literature and share the concerns of the characters. We read and understand and feel a sense of belonging. The themes are universal. The story is ultimately about “us.”

  * * *

  The quest for meaning is found in the literature of every nation. W.O.’s literary use of wind as force, as background, almost as subliminal text, is important to the shading and to the telling of this story. Indeed, the wind — sometimes steadying, sometimes shifting and changing — is woven delicately through major and minor scenes, and sets mood and tone for celebration, vulnerability, love and tenderness, discovery, anger, shame, chaos, sorrow and grief. The lives of the people of the town are presented without sentimentality — with their truths and conundrums and moments of joy, and sometimes with their bitter endings.

  Here is the young Brian, observing and wondering. This passage from chapter 23 allows us to glimpse his inner state against the vastness of the universe he is trying to understand. The delicacy of W.O.’s writing matches the delicate state of Brian’s awareness and feelings.

  A wind was twanging the telephone wires, gently so; it lifted the dust from the road, and farther down from Brian came whirling to meet him in a dancing funnel that left the road just in front of him. Through the prairie silence the rasping of grasshoppers came again and again; now and then a gopher squeaked — questioningly — senselessly.

  A meadow lark sang, and the prairie was a suddenly vaster place. . . . He was alone, as utterly alone as it is possible to be only upon prairie.

  Or this, a passage from chapter 24 that takes place after a death in the family — a sombre depiction of mood and internal longing.

  After everyone had left, he stood before the house, the inexplicable longing within him deepened by the clarity of the fall day, a longing made more intense as the breeze stirred and he felt the half-hearted warmth of the sun dying from his cheek.

  This was W.O.’s territory and he knew it well. When he spoke about Who Has Seen the Wind it was with tenderness. Several times, I heard the story of how he felt when he held a copy in his hands for the first time. I always suspected that this was the book closest to W.O.’s heart.

  * * *

  W.O. and I became personal friends and remained so for tw
enty-six years, until his death in 1998. Our families stayed in touch and often spent time together, travelling as colleagues, or to book signings, or on vacation — sometimes in Ontario, New Brunswick, Alberta, British Columbia, or Germany (where my own family lived for three years during the ’80s, and W.O. and Merna Mitchell visited), as well as several summers on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. W.O. was a writer both on and off duty, and when we were together, we always spoke about writing and literature. The main activity, however, was storytelling, non-stop. Stories told and retold. Stories underway. Fragments of stories passed back and forth. And always laughter: doubling-over kinds of laughter. W.O.’s curiosity, his sense of discovery, was as if he were meeting everything for the first time. But laughter could quickly turn to the serious, for there was always perspective, a distillation of essence, no experience gone to waste.

  We laughed until we cried; we shared sadness and shed tears; we had some of the most raucous and rowdy, entertaining, loving and satisfying times any two families could ever hope to share.

  W.O. had integrity and he was fiercely loyal. His family and close friendships meant everything. As a writer and friend, I witnessed and learned how generous he was in trying to pass on what he himself had learned through a lifetime. His first novel holds a place of honour in the literature of western Canada, and a seminal position in the development of our country’s literature as a whole. W.O. did not set out to become a literary icon. But from his earliest beginnings and after the 1947 publication of Who Has Seen the Wind that is, indeed, what he became.

  PREFACE

  Many interpreters of the Bible believe the wind to be symbolic of Godhood. In this story I have tried to present sympathetically the struggle of a boy to understand what still defeats mature and learned men — the ultimate meaning of the cycle of life. To him are revealed in moments of fleeting vision the realities of birth, hunger, satiety, eternity, death. They are moments when an inquiring heart seeks finality, and the chain of darkness is broken.

  This is the story of a boy and the wind.

  As for man, his days are as grass;

  As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

  For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;

  And the place thereof shall know it no more.

  PSALMS 103: 15–16

   PART  ONE

  ONE

  * * *

  Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky — Saskatchewan prairie. It lay wide around the town, stretching tan to the far line of the sky, clumped with low buck brush and wild rose bushes, shimmering under the late June sun and waiting for the unfailing visitation of the wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life; later, a long, hot gusting that would lift the black top soil and pile it in barrow pits along the roads or in deep banks against the fences.

  But for now, it was as though a magnificent breath were being held; still puffs of cloud were high in the sky, retaining their shapes for hours on end, one of them near the horizon, presenting a profile view of blown cheeks and extended lips like the wind personification upon an old map.

  Over the prairie cattle stood still as the clouds, listless beside the dried-up slough beds which held no water for them. Where the snow white of alkali edged the course of the river, a thin trickle of water made its way toward the town low upon the horizon. Silver willow, heavy with dust, grew along the river banks, perfuming the air around with its honey smell.

  Just before the town the river took a wide loop as though in search of some variation in the prairie’s flat surface, found it in a deep-cut coulée ragged with underbrush, and entered the town at its eastern edge. A clotting of frame houses inhabited by some eighteen hundred souls, the town had grown up on either side of the river from the seed of one homesteader’s sod hut built in the spring of eighteen-seventy-five.

  Now it was made up largely of frame buildings with high, peaked roofs, each with an expanse of lawn in front and a garden in the back; they lined avenues with prairie names: Bison, Riel, Qu’Appelle, Blackfoot, Fort. Cement walks extended from First or Main Street to Bison Avenue which crossed Sixth Street at MacTaggart’s corner; from that point to the prairie a board walk ran.

  Lawn sprinklers sparkled in the sun; Russian poplars stood along either side of Sixth Street. Five houses down from MacTaggart’s corner stood the O’Connal home, a three-storeyed house lifting high above the white cottage to the left of it. Virginia creepers had almost smothered the verandah; honeysuckle and spirea grew on either side of the steps. A blue baby carriage and a tricycle with its front wheel sharply turned stood in the middle of the walk.

  The tricycle belonged to Brian Sean MacMurray O’Connal, Scotch-Irish son of Gerald O’Connal, druggist, and Maggie O’Connal, formerly Maggie MacMurray of Trossachs, Ontario. The baby carriage had once been Brian’s but now was used for his brother, Robert Gerald O’Connal.

  Brian at the moment was in the breakfast-room. He sat under the table at the window, imagining himself an ant deep in a dark cave. Ants, he had decided, saw things tiny and grass-coloured, and his father and mother would never know about it. He hated his mother and his father and his grandmother for spending so much time with the baby, for making it a blanket tent and none for him. Not that he cared; he needed no one to play with him now that he was an ant. He was a smart ant.

  He hadn’t asked Dr. Svarich, with his bitter smell, to play with him. He would never again ask anyone to play with him. He would make them wish they had never been mean to him — making the baby a tent and filling it with steam — not making one for him.

  He would get into the seat between his two brother horses; he would get Jake Harris, the town policeman, after them. His horses would go fast; they’d start from the clothes closet and go fast because he would give them pop to make them go fast. They would hold the bottle between their teeth and let the pop go fizzing down a long, dark hallway to their stomachs, which were very well lighted.

  “Brian!”

  His grandmother stood high above him. Looking up to her he could see her face turned down, could see the dark velvet band circling around her throat, hooping in the twin folds of skin that hung from under her chin. Light stabbed out from her silver-rimmed glasses. She wouldn’t get any pop.

  “I told ye to go outside!”

  He crawled from under the table and stood by her hand with its large liver spots spattering its back and blue veins writhing under the thin skin. Her hand had great knotted knuckles. When her stomach sang after dinner, Brian promised himself, he would not listen.

  “I will not speak to ye again!” The loose folds of her cheeks, at either side of her sickle mouth, shook slightly as she spoke. The winy bouquet of tonic was about her, reminding him of over-ripe apples. Behind the spectacles, the dark depths of her eyes looked forbidding to him. “If ye stay inside ye’ll disturb the baby. Ye must go out!”

  “May I have a tent like the baby has?”

  “Ye cannot. Get outside, now!”

  “Just a little one?”

  “Tis bad enough having the baby ill without —”

  “Is he ill bad?”

  “Aye,” said his grandmother. “Now, be a good boy and do as ye’re told.”

  He hoped that Jake Harris brought his policeman knife and chopped her into little pieces and cut her head off for making him go outside to play.

  He stood on the step of the back porch a moment, feeling the warmth of the sun living against his cheek, the wind which was beginning to rise now that it was late afternoon, delicately active about his ears and at his nostrils. In the eaves above him he could hear the throating sadness of pigeons; at the corner of the cement bird bath a robin, very fat, tried to cool himself.

  Slowly he walked to the sand pile by the high caragana that separated the O’Connal back yard from that of Sherry’s next door. He hated his grandmother. She made him go out to a sand pile where there was nobody but an old shovel t
o play with. Reflectively he stared down at the sand hump in one corner of the box. It was like an ant pile, he thought; perhaps if he waited an ant might come out. He watched impatiently, and then as no ant emerged, he took up the shovel that lay at his feet. He hit the bump and wished that it were his grandmother. He hit the bump again, being careful that it was with the sharp edge and not the flat bottom of it. His grandmother had no colour in her hair, he thought, as he gripped the shovel more tightly and with both hands so that he could hit the sand with greater force. As the shovel rose and fell, he made thunder in the back of his throat; hot fire, he decided, was coming from his nose, and eyes, and ears, and mouth. He was hitting his grandmother so awful she was bawling her head off. He stopped.

  Directly opposite him and low in the hedge, was a round and freckled face — a new face to Brian. He began again to punish the sand pile.

  “You’re mad.”

  The shovel rose and fell. She was squealing now.

  “You hate sand piles.”

  “No, I do not,” contradicted Brian between blows.

  “You hate this one.” The boy had come to the edge of the sand pile. Hedge leaves hung to his sweater and to his hat, a blue sailor hat bearing the legend, HMS Thunderbolt. It had got twisted so that the ribbon hung down his snub nose. He pointed to one corner of the sand pile. “Hit this.”

  “I’m banging this,” said Brian. “In my grandmother’s stomach, I’m banging it.”