The Fixer
The Fixer
Part One: Twelve (2005)
The combine is bigger than the house.
Late September, the shed doors open. His dad is up on the platform with a grease gun, working the zerks along the header drive. Jonah stands below and hands him the rag when he reaches down for it. They’ve done this every fall since Jonah was old enough to be useful, which in his dad’s estimation was about seven.
Saturday. They’ve been in the cab since five-thirty, his dad driving the way he always drives — one hand low on the wheel, reading the canola stubble and the sky at the same time, making small corrections Jonah can feel through the seat but can’t see in his father’s hands. CJOB comes through the AM radio in pieces, a man talking about the Jets and then static and then a woman selling furniture and then static again. It’s turned down so low Jonah can barely hear it. His dad has tuned it out completely — he turns it up for the hourly news and back down again without looking at the dial. The cab smells like the thermos of coffee his mom packed in the dark this morning, and diesel, and the particular sweetness of canola dust when it’s been baking in afternoon light for six hours.
Jonah is not bored. He’s been watching the reel speed and the return elevator since lunch, matching what he sees to what his dad told him last year about reading the crop. When the straw’s tough the reel bogs. When the return elevator rattles too much it means the concave is set too tight and kernels are cracking instead of threshing clean. He watches and he listens and his dad doesn’t test him on it but Jonah tests himself, silently, predicting what his dad will adjust before his dad adjusts it.
He gets it right more than half the time.
Then the sound changes. A grinding — metal on metal, low and ugly, vibrating up through the floor of the cab. His dad’s hand moves to the throttle and kills the engine before Jonah can take a breath, and the silence that follows is so sudden and so total that it feels like falling. The roar has been in Jonah’s bones for hours and now it’s gone and his ears ring and the field opens up around them — stubble to the treeline, stubble to the road, the shelter belt a dark stripe to the west, a hawk turning slow circles above it. Wind he couldn’t hear before. A meadowlark somewhere behind them, its song absurdly small against all that sky.
“Huh,” his dad says. He’s already halfway out of the cab.
They climb down. The stubble is sharp under Jonah’s sneakers — he’s supposed to wear boots but he forgot and his dad didn’t say anything because his dad saves his words for when they matter. His father walks around the header, one hand trailing along the frame the way you’d feel your way along a wall in a dark room. He drops to his back in the stubble and reaches up into the machine’s underside and Jonah crouches beside him, already reading the toolbox in his head. The nine-sixteenths. The channel locks. The flashlight.
His dad’s hand comes out. “Flashlight.”
Jonah has it ready.
His dad’s hand goes back in. A pause. His dad’s boots shift in the stubble — he’s levering himself deeper under the header, his shoulders disappearing. Jonah lies down on his stomach and aims the flashlight beam where his dad is reaching.
“There,” his dad says. “See it?”
A bolt, sheared clean at the shoulder. The bracket it held is bent where something — a rock, probably, hiding in the swath — hit it hard enough to twist the steel. The bracket is part of the knife drive, and without it the sickle bar won’t hold alignment. The nearest Case dealer is in Steinbach. Forty minutes each way if the highway’s clear, longer if the semis are hauling from the elevator.
His dad lies under the machine for another few seconds, looking at the break. Not frustrated. Looking at it the way he looks at everything that goes wrong — the water heater that quit in January, the sow that wouldn’t let her piglets nurse, the church furnace that died on the coldest Sunday of the year and his dad crawled under the building in minus thirty and came back with oil on his cheek and the heat rumbling to life behind him. The same quiet attention, as if the broken thing deserved a moment before you started fixing it.
“We’re not going to Steinbach,” his dad says.
“Weather coming?”
“Weather coming.”
His dad walks to the truck and drops the tailgate. The toolbox in the bed is old — green steel, dented, the latches worn smooth. Inside it is organized by a logic only his dad fully understands, though Jonah is learning. His dad pulls out a piece of flat steel stock, maybe eighteen inches long and two inches wide, and holds it up against the sky and sights along its edge the way a carpenter sights along a board.
He clamps one end in the bench vise bolted to the truck bed and leans into it, adjusting, checking, bending again. Matching the angle of the broken bracket by eye. When the curve is close he holds the new piece against the broken one, grunts, bends it a degree more. Drills two holes with the hand drill, his forearm muscles working under sun-darkened skin. The bit squeals through the steel.
Jonah hands him the bolts without being asked. His dad looks at him. A nod. Not praise, exactly — recognition. You saw what I needed before I said it. Jonah’s chest fills with something that has no name at twelve.
The whole fix takes maybe twenty minutes. His dad bolts the new bracket in, torques it down, reaches up and works the knife drive back and forth by hand to check the travel. Lies still for a moment underneath the machine, listening to the mechanism the way you’d listen to a sound in the wall of your house at night — patient, head tilted, sorting the thing you’re hearing from everything else.
“That’ll get us through,” he says, and wipes his hands on his jeans, leaving dark streaks of grease on the denim. His knuckles are cracked from the cold mornings. The grease is in the cracks and it won’t come out until February when the field work stops and his skin has time to heal, and even then there will be a shadow of it, like the rings inside a tree.
They climb back into the cab. His dad turns the key. The diesel catches and the roar swallows the meadowlark and the wind and the hawk and the silence, and the machine moves forward through the crop, and the bracket holds.
Sunday. Steinbach MB Church. The building is blond brick, low-ceilinged, plain on purpose. No stained glass. No statues, no icons, no paintings. A wooden cross on the front wall, unadorned — not even sanded smooth, which Jonah thinks about sometimes, whether somebody left the rough spots because Jesus’s actual cross would have had rough spots or because nobody got around to finishing it. The pews are oak. A furniture manufacturer in town donated them twelve years ago and got a plaque near the door for it that nobody reads.
Jonah sits between his parents. His shirt collar scratches his neck and the sleeves are too short again — his wrists stick out past the cuffs, bony and pale, and his mom keeps glancing at them like she’s calculating how many weeks until she has to buy him a new one. Elise is beside their mom, drawing on the back of the church bulletin. Horses. Always horses. She’s nine and she can draw a horse from memory that actually looks like a horse, which Jonah couldn’t do at nine or now.
He is bored in the way only a twelve-year-old can be bored in church — completely, cellularly, from the inside out. Pastor Wiens is talking about stewardship, which means money, and Jonah’s mom’s jaw has gone tight the way it goes tight when the bills come. The hog prices dropped again this spring. Jonah heard his parents through the floor register late one night — his dad’s voice low and flat and careful, his mom’s rising the way water rises before it spills. He lay in bed and listened to the sound of their worry coming up through the heat vent and there was nothing he could fix.
The worship band plays. Drums, keyboard, two guitars. Jonah’s Oma, who sits three rows back and to the left and who has opinions about everything, calls the worship band “too much world.” The song lyrics are projected on a screen above the pulpit — a concession that split the congregation five years ago. Three families left over the projector. They went to the EMC church on Highway 12, which doesn’t have a screen but does have a pipe organ that shakes the floor, and Jonah has never understood how a floor-shaking pipe organ is less worldly than a projector showing words, but nobody asked him and he wouldn’t have said anything if they had.
The band finishes. The congregation shifts and settles. Pastor Wiens steps back to the pulpit.
“Let us pray.”
Two hundred people go quiet at the same time.
Not gradually. Like a hand laid over a speaker. The rustling stops. The coughing stops. The baby two rows back who has been fussing all morning goes still in its mother’s arms. Elise’s pencil pauses on the bulletin, mid-mane. His mom’s jaw unclenches. His dad’s hands — those big, cracked, grease-stained hands that bent steel yesterday — settle on his knees, palms down, and stop.
Jonah has heard this silence a thousand Sundays. Every week since before he could sit upright in the pew by himself, this same collective hush, this sudden absence of sound. He’s never listened to it.
Today he does. For no reason. The way you might one day look at a tree you’ve passed every morning and actually see it — the bark, the shape of the roots where they surface, the way the branches reach — and wonder how you walked past it five hundred times without seeing.
The silence has weight. Not heavy. Dense, the way a field is dense after rain, the way the air before a thunderstorm holds something you can almost taste. Two hundred people breathing in a room the Klassens and the Reimers and the Friesens and the Dycks helped build — names that are also the names of roads and villages and municipal districts, names older than the province itself. And somewhere underneath the breathing, underneath the creak of the furnace and the hum of the fluorescent lights, something else. Something that doesn’t need the lights or the furnace or the two hundred people to exist. Something that was here before the brick was laid and will be here when the walls come down.
His chest does a thing.
Not anxiety. He knows anxiety — before math tests, when his parents fight through the floor, when a sow gets sick and his dad’s face changes. This is different. Bigger and stranger and it has no edges. He feels it in his sternum and in the back of his throat and in his hands, which are curled in his lap the way his father’s hands are flat on his knees, and for a second — five seconds, six — the boredom and the itchy collar and the worry about hog prices and the desire to be anywhere else drain out of him like water through a sieve and there is only this. The room. The breath. The silence underneath.
He doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s twelve. He shifts on the pew. Picks at a hangnail. His shoulder blades itch inside the too-small shirt.
Someone coughs. The prayer begins. Pastor Wiens’s voice fills the room, and the moment folds closed like a book.
The Hinge
Three years. The beige tower arrives in the basement, bought used from the school division for eighty dollars. The CRT monitor hums when it warms up. The dial-up modem screams its handshake into the dark.
Part Two: Fifteen (2008)
The family computer lived in the basement, between the chest freezer full of farmer sausage and the wire shelves where his mom kept the canned beets and dill pickles from the garden. Beige tower, beige monitor, beige keyboard with crumbs in the keys that Jonah cleaned out every couple months with a butter knife and a can of compressed air he bought at Staples in Steinbach. Windows XP — Vista had come out the year before but everyone he knew who’d tried it wanted to throw their machine out a window, and on dial-up it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The CRT hummed when it warmed up and smelled faintly of hot dust, the same smell every time, a smell that years from now in a Winnipeg apartment would stop him in the middle of a sentence when a space heater kicked on and he wouldn’t know why.
He wasn’t supposed to be on it past ten. His parents went to bed early — farm hours, awake before the sun, asleep not long after. The basement was far enough from their bedroom that the keyboard clicks and the modem handshake and the faint electronic hum of the CRT were swallowed by two floors of old house. He sat in an office chair that squeaked when he leaned back, his feet tucked under him, the concrete floor cold through his socks.
Fifteen and teaching himself to code for two years now and getting good at it. Actually good. Not just copying tutorials but understanding why the code worked, seeing the logic underneath the syntax the way his dad saw the stress points in a piece of steel. Half the tower’s hard drive was games — Counter-Strike Source and the original 1.6, Warcraft III with Frozen Throne, StarCraft Brood War that he uninstalled and reinstalled depending on how guilty he felt about the hours. None of it downloaded on the farm connection. The dial-up couldn’t handle it. Derek, whose family lived in Steinbach, had broadband, and Derek’s older brother had a CD burner and pulled ISOs off IRC channels that ran all night. The discs arrived at school in CD-R sleeves with handwritten labels — Math Notes, Youth Group Photos — and Jonah kept his stash inside the jewel cases of the Christian rock albums he knew his mom would never open. Pillar. Relient K. Thousand Foot Krutch. The CDs served their purpose even if the music never did.
Last Friday his dad had driven him to Derek’s for what Jonah called “a study group” and what it actually was: four boys, four towers, a tangle of ethernet cables daisy-chained through a cheap switch from the computer shop on Main Street, monitors wedged between laundry baskets and a broken treadmill in Derek’s unfinished basement. Counter-Strike until two in the morning. Mountain Dew cans. Doritos ground into the carpet. A volume of profanity that would have gotten Jonah’s mouth washed out with hand soap if his mother had heard a syllable of it.
The LAN party had its own rituals. You carried your tower in both arms like a cinder block, careful of the cables trailing behind you. You argued about who got the spot near the router because the signal was stronger. Derek’s brother, who was nineteen and worked at the Co-op gas bar and had a goatee that looked like it had been drawn on with a felt marker, sat in the corner with a separate screen running something Jonah wasn’t allowed to see yet and probably didn’t want to. They ate pizza pockets out of the box, cold from the center, scalding at the edges. At one in the morning, Derek’s mom came down in her bathrobe and told them to keep it down and Derek said “Yeah, Mom” and she went back upstairs and the volume didn’t change at all.
In Counter-Strike, Jonah was good. Not the best — Derek was better, Derek had the reflexes, the twitch aim that made him terrifying at close range. But Jonah was the one who figured out the angles, who knew where to hold, who could read the other team’s economy based on what guns they bought in the first three rounds. Strategy. Systems. He played the same way he watched the combine — looking for the pattern underneath the noise.
His dad had carried the beige tower to the truck and wedged it between them on the bench seat and not asked a single question, because he didn’t know what questions to ask, and Jonah felt a specific guilt about that. Not about the lying. About the distance. The gap between what he did in Derek’s basement and what his dad could picture him doing.
Derek’s broadband was a different world. Pages loaded in seconds. YouTube videos played without the rebuffering stutter that made every clip on dial-up feel like trying to drink through a coffee stirrer. At Derek’s the internet was fast and vast and generous, pouring through a pipe wide enough to carry everything at once. At home the same internet dripped through a line so thin that a single webpage could take ninety seconds to render, and if someone picked up the phone upstairs the connection died and he had to start the handshake again, the modem screaming its sequence into the empty house.
But tonight he wasn’t gaming. He was building a website for the church youth group because Pastor Wiens had asked if anyone knew how and Jonah had said yes before he’d thought about it, the way he always said yes to things he could fix, and now he was deep in JavaScript, trying to make a dropdown menu work. Teaching himself from tutorials that loaded one agonizing page at a time. He’d turned the modem’s speaker volume to zero so the handshake wouldn’t carry upstairs. The only sounds in the basement were the CRT hum and his own breathing and the occasional creak of the house settling above him like a large animal turning in its sleep.
The dropdown wouldn’t work. He’d been at it for an hour, checking his syntax against the tutorial, reloading the page, watching the same broken result render in Internet Explorer. The menu appeared but it wouldn’t close when you clicked away from it. An event listener, probably. Something not binding right. He went back through the code line by line, the way his dad went over a weld — checking for the flaw you couldn’t see from outside.
He found it at eleven-forty. A missing parenthesis. One curved bracket in eighty lines of code. He fixed it, saved the file, pressed F5, and the dropdown opened and closed with a clean little animation he’d written himself, a fade-in that made the menu appear like it was breathing to life.
The grin came before the thought. Alone in the basement in the blue-white CRT glow, grinning at nobody. He’d built a small machine out of logic, and the machine worked, and the feeling was physical — heat in his face, a tightness under his ribs, his hands wanting to do it again, build the next thing, fix the next bug.
Tomorrow he might show Derek. Derek would get it. Nobody upstairs would. His dad would nod and say “that’s good, Jo” and mean it genuinely, the way he meant it when Jonah helped in the field — but the nod would cover a gap, and the gap was growing.
The screen was not just code. The browser history he cleared every night before bed — not anything terrible, nothing he’d need to confess to Pastor Wiens, just the ordinary pull of a fifteen-year-old boy with an unmonitored internet connection and parents who didn’t know what a browser history was. Limewire downloads. YouTube rabbit holes that started with skateboarding videos and ended three hours later in places he couldn’t explain. Late-night IRC channels where people talked in a language his faspa table couldn’t parse. The whole world poured through that dial-up line into the basement, slow and unfiltered, and Jonah sat at the mouth of it like a kid at the edge of a lake whose depth he couldn’t guess.
He turned off the monitor. The blue-white light collapsed to a single bright dot in the center of the screen and held there for a second, an afterimage, and then went dark. The basement was just a basement again. Cold concrete. The smell of the chest freezer. The faint vinegar tang of his mom’s canned beets on the wire shelves.
He sat for a moment in the dark. Upstairs, the furnace kicked on. He could feel it through the floor.
At school the next day he sat beside Sarah Klassen in English class. She’d arrived two years ago with her family from an Old Colony community in northern Mexico — Cuauhtémoc, or maybe Casas Grandes, Jonah could never remember which. She wore a head covering and long skirts and she didn’t have a computer at home. No TV either.
During lunch she watched him sketch a website layout in his notebook. Boxes and arrows, the navigation structure for the youth group site.
“What’s it for?” she asked.
He tried to explain. A website. For the church. So people can find information about—
She listened with a polite blankness that wasn’t rudeness. Just distance. The distance between her family’s Mennonite and his family’s Mennonite was wider than the distance between his family and anyone walking down Portage Avenue in Winnipeg. They shared a word for their faith and almost nothing else. Her great-grandparents left Manitoba for Mexico in the 1920s to keep the world out. His great-grandparents stayed and let it in, degree by degree, projector by projector, and now here he was with a hard drive full of pirated games explaining the internet to a girl whose family had crossed a continent to avoid exactly this.
He stopped explaining. She went back to her sandwich. Neither of them thought it was strange.
Sunday. Faspa at the Klassens’. The whole extended clan — twenty-something people in a house built for twelve, kids running through the living room, the back door slamming every forty seconds, Opa yelling at nobody in particular to close it behind them though he’d stopped expecting results years ago.
Tante Helen had been frying rollkuchen since before church ended, standing over the deep fryer on the back porch with a long fork and a look that meant nobody was to bother her until she was done. The strips came out golden and blistered and she laid them on paper towels in rows, the oil soaking through in dark circles, and they were still warm when Jonah grabbed two on his way past. The taste — oil and salt and the slight chew of the dough, the crunch giving way to softness in the center — was a taste he’d been tasting every Sunday for as long as he had memory. He bit into the first one and the crunch was perfect and he ate the second one standing up because sitting down to eat a rollkuchen was like sitting down to drink water from a garden hose.
The long table in the dining room. Watermelon cut in wedges, seeds and all, dripping onto the plastic tablecloth that had a pattern of sunflowers on it and had been on this table for every faspa Jonah could remember. Cold farmer sausage sliced thick on a wooden board, the garlic sharp if you got an end piece. Cheese curds in a bowl. Dill pickles, homemade, from Tante Helen’s garden — crunchy, too salty, better than anything from a store. Raisin buns that Uncle Henry’s wife made, dense and sweet, the raisins plump from soaking. And the big ceramic bowl of plumi moos, cold plum soup, sweet and heavy and purple-dark, the taste that belonged equally to funerals and Sunday afternoons and the Tuesday after a barn raising when the leftover plumi moos was the best part. Jonah spooned some over a raisin bun because that’s how his dad ate it and therefore how he ate it.
His dad was at the end of the table talking to Uncle Henry about a bearing on the grain auger. A bearing that was going, the sound it made, the wobble you could feel if you put your hand on the housing while it ran. Uncle Henry nodded. Same problem last year, different machine, same fix. They traded solutions the way other men traded fishing stories — practical, specific, each one a small act of help dressed as conversation so nobody had to feel like they were asking for anything or offering anything, just two men talking about bearings, just a solution moving across the table with the sausage.
His mom was in the kitchen. Her laughter carried through the doorway — hers and Tante Lena’s and three other women’s, a layered sound, low and familiar, the background frequency of every Sunday Jonah could remember. He could pick his mom’s laugh out of it the way he could pick CJOB out of the static. She laughed from her throat, not her chest, and it had a catch in it at the top, a little hitch that meant she was laughing hard.
Oma sat at the corner of the table. Small, sharp-eyed, a woman who had been small and sharp-eyed for as long as Jonah had been alive and who, according to family legend, had been the same way at twenty. She was speaking Plautdietsch to Opa — rapid, guttural, the words crashing into each other like gravel under tires. When Jonah sat beside her she switched to English without a pause, without a seam, the way you shift gears going up a hill.
“Eat, Jonah. You’re too skinny.” She pushed the rollkuchen toward him. Then back to Plautdietsch, the language closing around her like a room he couldn’t enter. He caught pieces. Weat — weather. Schwien — hogs. Oabeit — work. Always those three. The eternal subjects, the trinity of the East Reserve.
He loved this.
He loved the noise and the food and the way the house was too full and too hot and how the back door kept slamming and nobody told the kids to stop because that’s what back doors were for. He loved that everyone was here. Nobody was invited. It was Sunday and this is what you did. You came. You brought your bowl of something and your family and your noise and you filled up the house until the windows fogged from the heat of all those bodies in one room.
When the Klassens’ barn roof blew off in that windstorm last spring, fourteen men were on the property by noon. No phone calls. They just came. His dad was one of them, still in his church clothes, pulling on work gloves in the yard. They had the trusses up by sundown. Jonah carried lumber with his cousins until his shoulders ached and his hands had splinters in them and nobody thanked anybody because thanks would have implied the help was optional.
When Mrs. Bergen three farms over had her stroke, meals appeared on her family’s porch for six weeks. Casseroles, buns, jars of canned peaches with the lids still warm. His mom organized it — she was on the phone that first night, a lined notepad in front of her, her handwriting small and angular, matching families to days so the Bergens didn’t get four tuna casseroles on Tuesday and nothing on Thursday. She wrote in the margins of the church directory. Names and phone numbers and little checkmarks. The care didn’t just happen. Somebody — his mom, Tante Lena, the women in the kitchen whose laughter he could hear right now — did the work of making it happen, every time, and they called it nothing.
He didn’t know the word for what this was. Jemeenschoft — community — was what the old people said, but that word was too big and too small at the same time. It was just how things worked. You showed up. You brought food. You fixed what was broken. You didn’t wait to be asked.
But he was also thinking about the website. He’d figured out a JavaScript trick last night that made the dropdown animate, and he wanted to show someone, and there was nobody at this table who would understand why it mattered. Why a parenthesis in the right place could make a dead page come alive. Derek would get it, but Derek’s family went to the Alliance church and they were having their own faspa somewhere else.
His cousin Jake leaned over. Twenty years old, already farming full-time with his dad, already broader across the shoulders than Jonah would ever be, his forearms brown to the elbow from the sun, pale above. “So what are you gonna do, Jo? After grad?”
The question was genuine. Maybe a little concerned. Jake could see what the faspa table was beginning to see — that Jonah’s shape didn’t match the shape the community had ready for him. The shape was clear: farm, church, family. The same shape it had held since the first Klassens came to the East Reserve in 1874. A good shape. A shape that worked.
“I don’t know yet,” Jonah said.
The lie came out smooth. He’d been turning it over for months, the way you turn a stone in your pocket until the edges wear down. He already knew. He’d looked up U of M computer science admission requirements on Derek’s broadband — the courses, the grades he’d need, the application deadlines. He knew the tuition. He knew the residence fees. He’d found the bus route from campus to the apartment his older cousin rented near Osborne Village, had traced the blue line on the transit map from the university to a street address in a neighborhood he’d never visited, and the blue line on the screen felt more real than the gravel road outside this house.
He was going to Winnipeg. He’d checked the bus routes. He knew the tuition. He knew which residence hall had the cheapest meal plan. And the life at this table — the rollkuchen and the plumi moos and the Plautdietsch he never learned properly and the back door slamming and the fourteen men on the roof and his mom’s handwriting in the margins — he couldn’t see yet how it would thin. How distance works on a place like this. How the drive back gets shorter each time not because the road changes but because you stop taking the long way through town.
He didn’t know all of that yet. But he knew enough to lie about it.
He took another rollkuchen. Oma said something in Plautdietsch he didn’t catch and Opa laughed, a low rumble that shook the table, and his dad’s hands rested on the tablecloth, still and open, the grease still in the cracks of his knuckles.
After faspa. The light had turned.
Jonah walked out to the field behind the house. Nobody asked where he was going.
The stubble crunched under his boots. Turned earth, canola sweetness from the Rempel place, the sour tang of the hog barns on the south wind. He’d stopped smelling it years ago.
The sky was turning. September did this — took forty-five minutes to go dark because the land was so flat there was nothing to cut the light short. No hills. No buildings taller than a grain elevator. The grid roads ran north-south and east-west the way they’d run since 1874, and the last light caught in the clouds above them, pink and tall.
He walked to the fence line. Power lines along the section road, the wires sagging in shallow curves against the sky. He could hear the hum — sixty cycles, low and constant, the same sound that was there every morning when he walked to the bus stop in January dark. He’d never paid attention to it.
He stood there for a while. Not thinking about anything in particular.
The first stars came out over the eastern fields. Behind him, the kitchen light was on. His mom at the sink. His dad somewhere in the house. The dog lifted its head on the porch at sounds Jonah couldn’t hear.
He walked back.