There was one more story about Gemma’s family. In the fifties, her great-uncle was excommunicated. This happened because he stood up in the congregation one Sunday and had the temerity to say he knew he would receive salvation, that he was a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he had no doubt that upon death he’d receive admittance into heaven. The church didn’t agree. Gemma knew this story thanks to her Opa, telling her this at the Dairy Queen one day when she was in high school. See, Gemma’s Opa, he didn’t like that his brother had been so caustic in referring to this experience. “They booted me out,” the brother had said. Gemma’s grandfather took exception to that term. “Booted.” It was a harsh term, he said. Though he soon was joking again, with an easy smile. “See, Mennonites are like good wood,” he counselled. “Easily split.” Her Opa was rarely so chatty. Her Opa was a private man. Gemma never did find out why he and her Oma had separated. All her dad, or her Opa himself, would ever say was that they decided they no longer wanted to live together. She’d pushed her Opa on this exactly once, and he’d snapped, “There is simply nothing more to it.” Was that true? She’d never know. Perhaps she might not want to. Be careful not to practice your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. Mennonite secrets often covered for cruelty and evils banal. But sometimes, every now and then, they could contain an intentional kindness.

She’d never thought to ask her Oma about the whole thing. Gemma had always been too scared of irritating her, that steely-eyed woman who always moved with an immense tiredness. There was an ocean of something visible in that woman as she walked across a room. And then, one day, she got a blood clot and she was gone.

When Gemma was a child, she barely even knew what the term “Mennonite” meant. She thought it was just a random word she didn’t understand, like “Lutheran” or “Anglican” or whatever. Different churches had different names—who cares? All she knew was Jesus Christ and peace and faith and crowded Sunday couches and an old man and an old woman who spent nights alone in silent bedrooms. Facts that she now understood were freighted but at the same time unremarkable and immediate and total as thirty-below air. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. One of those evenings staying with her grandpa, they’d been in Winkler having dinner, and a bad storm was coming in. Gemma was worried about the drive back to Roland, and she begged for them to stay at a friend’s place. But her grandfather wouldn’t hear of it. “No,” he said, with a wavering shake of his head. It took them two hours to make it twenty klicks. He drove with a flashlight out the truck’s window to see the lines on the road, Gemma huddled and freezing on the other side of the cab. There’s nothing but farmhouses and granaries on that drive between Winkler and Roland. It’s a beautiful drive even in winter, so long as the weather’s good. When the sun sets, and bursts of colour fan out in rays over miles of fields, a panorama of oranges and reds and purples over wizened patterns of white-blue, the snowdrifts shining like fossilized waves. But on that trip it was storming, and the sun was already down. Gemma could see nothing; nor could she hear anything over the wind. Gemma was unspeakably scared. But her Opa always knew himself. Her Opa had always known what he could do, and what he couldn’t.