Shaping of a Servant

Since the trip to Calgary took longer than expected, Dad was not even present when the day of the sale came. All our possessions were taken out of the house and arranged on the lawn. Mom's wedding gifts, her jars of preserved fruit, our toys, furniture, farm machinery, livestock, everything was to be sold to the highest bidder.
Then the auctioneer and the people came. In a few hours, the happy people carried all our things out the gate, and our house and yard were empty. This was no longer our home, so we might as well go.
We, now a family of seven, stayed with Grandpa and Grandma Friesen’s until the business was all cleared. Then, on the night of November 29th, our grandparents, aunts, and uncles escorted us to the railroad station at Brooks. They came along to say goodbye and to send us off.
I remember the awful feeling. It was about eight o'clock on this dark, cold, wintry night. The huge CPR steam locomotive came clanging and puffing and hissing into the station from the west, and behind it followed a long line of rumbling passenger cars. The regular clackity clack of their wheels slowed as they passed, slower and slower until finally, there was a mighty screeching of brakes and a bumping of all the cars down the line, then a final hiss, and the train was dead still.
Grandmother and the others hugged and kissed us goodbye. My new aunt Wilma, Jake’s wife, kissed me goodbye. It made me feel I was special. I liked her.
Then we all hurried and climbed up the steps into this dark, unfamiliar monster. Strange black people hurried us to our seats. Mom carried the six-week-old baby Charles and saw that we got in place, and Dad saw to it that the suitcases and boxes were all on board. Our aunt, Anita, helped him. She was coming with us to help us get settled into our new home. There were whistles and shouts in the darkness outside, and soon the monster was slowly chuffing forward, at first very slowly, then faster and faster, and we were on our way.
There were dim electric lights in the train, so we could see to settle ourselves into our seats. Soon the conductor came by to punch our tickets, and his assistant came to see that we were comfortable.
They were both black people. This was my first time to see a real live black person. Mom had read Uncle Tom's Cabin to us and had told us all about the times when people were captured in Africa and stolen away to America where they were sold as slaves, and how they were abused and cruelly mistreated, and how some of them escaped to Canada and freedom.
I just stared and stared at these men, thinking they or their fathers may have been slaves once. Africa must be a vastly different place if all the people looked like these two!
Soon the steward came by and announced he was ready to make up our beds. We were amazed as he took the cushions off the seats, pushed, and lifted and shoved, and suddenly, the seats turned into beds, and a compartment was pulled down from the ceiling making another bed. Soon we were all in beds, Dad and Peter and I in the upper bunk, Mom and Paul and Charles in a lower bunk, and Anita and George in a third bed.
The steam whistle screamed outside at every railroad crossing as we sped eastward through the dark, empty prairies in that lonely, wintry night. Its mournful wail found its echo in the depths of my empty, lonely heart. It was, somehow, incredibly sad to be riding on this train, away from all that was home and familiar, into the darkness of an unknown world ahead in this strange chuffing monster. But my dad was beside me, and my mother was below me, so there was nothing to fear. I was soon fast asleep.
The morning sunshine took away the sad feeling, and we began to look forward with excitement. What would our new home in Ontario be like? The first night and the first day we crossed the Great Plains, the next two days we snaked our way through the rocks and mountains and lakes of the Great Canadian Shield. We had never imagined there could be so many rocks and trees and lakes in the entire world.
That train took three nights and three days to reach our destination in southern Ontario. Finally, we came to Union Station in Toronto where we had to get off the train and find another train to take us to Drayton.
Union Station was a huge, strange place for us little “prairie chickens.” We wondered in awe as we crossed through a vast underground basement with huge pillars and were told that the trains were overhead. We went up the stairs and sure enough, there were the trains, many of them. We found our train and reached Drayton later that day. The date was December 2nd, 1948.
Lavoy Roth met us at the Drayton train station. We moved in with his family for about a week until my folks could find a place for us to live. Lavoy and Lula Roth were farming near Drayton. They had four children: June, a year older than Peter, James, about my age, Faith, about George's age, and Ruth, a baby girl, about Charles's age. Dave and Emma Roth were the grandparents and lived in their own small house on the farm.
When our Hansen family moved in with our five children, the Roth house was really full. If we could still be friends after a week of living together in such conditions, then it was true friendship indeed! The oldest children went to school during the day, so it was not too bad.
But one evening the Amos Brubaker family dropped in for a visit. They brought two big girls and an older boy. That was too many for one house. We soon were taking sides and getting into a fight. Our friendship was strained that night.