‘There are no words’

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This article was published 26/02/2015 (4022 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RM OF MORRIS — Bad things aren’t supposed to happen here.

That’s the thought that runs through one’s mind driving through the quiet southern Manitoba town of Morris to the community of Kane.

But something bad did happen here. This idyllic Prairie community was the site of a tragedy on Wednesday. Four boys — Bobby, Timmy, Danny and Henry Froese — lost their young lives in a devastating fire that tore through their family’s two-storey farmhouse near Kane, leaving behind their mother, Doralee Eberhardt, their father, Jake Froese, and four siblings.

The unthinkable has left this tight-knit community reeling.

“There are no words,” said James Waldner, who lives down the road. The hurt has a familiar sting; nearly two years ago, the Waldners’ daughter, Kezia, drowned in the pond on their neighbours’ property two weeks before her fourth birthday. “We can understand what they are going through.”

The Waldner family is now planning to sell their gleaming, well-kept home. It holds too many painful memories. “I used to love gardening, and now I can’t go back there,” says Evelyn Waldner, Kezia’s mother. She has seven other children. “I always have to count again.”

Evelyn feels her neighbours’ pain deeply. “When something like this happens, you carry it with you all day. My heart is just feeling for them.” Evelyn says she has sweet memories of the Froese boys coming over to play with her children. One of them coveted her dumpling recipe.

The loss of Kezia, lovingly remembered by her mother as a bubbly, curly-haired girl who instantly charmed everyone she met, is still raw. The Waldners have found solace in their faith — and the hope that they will see her smiling face again one day, reunited as a family. “A lot of people have said ‘I don’t know how you cope.’ God’s grace is sufficient. I believe God will give them the grace to get through.”

The loss is something one learns to carry with them. “We still miss her. She left a huge void. We think about her every day.”

Kezia’s death was solemnly recalled in the late afternoon at the Lowe Farm Country Café, where four middle-aged men were gathered for an afternoon coffee. This community has seen tragedy before.

Wednesday afternoon, all four men looked stricken. “It was my neighbour’s house,” said Brian Brown of the Froese-Eberhardt residence. Brown’s wife is a teacher at the K-8 school in Lowe Farm. Some of the Froese boys were her students. He says she is pretty shaken up. He mostly kept his gaze fixed the table as he spoke.

One wonders how many tears were blinked back by stoic Prairie men that afternoon.

One of the other men at the table, who declined to give his name, sold the Froese family his donkey after one of the younger boys became attached to it. (The donkey would often get out of its pen and go snack on the Waldners’ hay.)

The man’s son and grandson are part of the fire department. “They don’t usually have to deal with this kind of thing,” he said quietly.

Robert Stevens knew the Froese house well, even before it was the Froese house. He has lived next door for 42 years. He figures the family moved there about five to seven years ago and describes Jake as hard-working and proud.

“He must be out of his mind with grief. He was proud of those boys,” he said, puffing out his chest as though to emphasize his point.

Stevens saw the blaze in progress, waking up as he usually does in the middle of the night. He struggled to describe it, settling on the word powerful.

“There was nothing you could put on it that would prevent that house from burning to the ground.”

Stevens was saddened to learn later in the morning the fire took four young lives. “It’s always heartbreaking when it’s children.” He worked as a teacher up north for many years. He’s lost some. “You get attached to them. I lost a little boy — he wasn’t mine, but I was his teacher. And another boy stabbed him to death. You get attached to them.

“It hurts.”

The news hadn’t reached everyone in the town of Morris in the early afternoon. A different group of men in baseball caps was gathered around a table in a different small-town coffee shop. Some hadn’t heard the news of the blaze yet. Johnny Friesen, the elder statesman at the table, blinked in disbelief when I told him four children had died. “Four children,” he repeated slowly. He looked out the window in silence, his eyes far away.

Four children.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca