by Amy Espeseth
The sins are on both sides. They are on both sides. For every buck deer that breaks a trail through the corn and eats half an ear off of each stalk, there is one of our neighbours crouching in a stand, high up in a tree, aiming at shooting it dead. For every weasel stealing silage or coon chewing crops, there is my brother setting up grip traps with steel teeth that will pinch that rodent through and through. Or worse, even worse than a beaver chewing and twisting its own foot around and around until it breaks free from a foothold trap, even worse are the drown traps. Damming up our river with sticks and mud, that beaver is just building himself a home. But when he takes the bait of a drown trap, he can’t just break off his foot. It holds him deep in the water, with the green plants swaying and the fish swimming by, down deep in the water. And he can’t take no breath and he can’t swim up to the top. He is held beneath the water with no breath until he don’t move no more. The poor muskrats, with their tiny feet and hands, they die the same.
Up and down this river, by these broken-down barns, peeling houses and crooked silos, up and down this river the sins are on both sides. Our Lord Himself is a neighbour to Himself, the Trinity holding Itself together in community: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The everlasting Trinity shows friendship and responsibility within Itself, amongst Its neighbours.
‘Ruthie, girl, are you a good neighbour not just to the beaver and the deer and your brother and your cousins, but are you a good neighbour to yourself? Are you a friend to yourself?’
It is hard. Grandma tells me these things so that I can be a good friend, a good neighbour. Many things can get in the way of being good neighbours. It might be that you weren’t there in someone’s time of need. Or, it might be that you were there, and now they can’t hold their head up to look you in the face. Either can get in the way: shame or need. One or the other or both, it can get in the way.
There is another scraping noise on the screen porch, and I turn my head. Daddy must be back for another round. Heavy boots are clomping inside from the wind and weather into the slightly protected cold just outside the kitchen door. I crane my neck to see who is out there. Grandma does not move her eyes; they stay on the patches she is matching, each swipe of her needle pulling together the pattern.
‘Expecting company, Grandma?’
Still, she does not lift her eyes.
‘Should I go to the door and see who’s there?’ I hope I’m not being impertinent. My daddy would have something to say to me if Grandma gave a bad report. He can say what he wants to her, I guess, but my place is to help, not to hinder.
Grandma sighs and puts down her needle. She takes her glasses off her face and rubs them with a tissue she keeps up her sleeve. She seems to know what’s waiting outside. ‘Ruth, we’ll just leave that man on the porch.’
And I hear the sound of heavy things being piled on the bench outside the kitchen door. The wind sweeps a little through the house each time a new load is brought near — but not inside.
‘There you go, Momma.’ And the door to the outside world swings open and stays open for a second. I hear my daddy’s younger brother, my Uncle Peter, call quiet from the threshold. ‘Some nice pork there, if you like.’
With a clatter and catch in the wind, the door shuts and Grandma puts her glasses back on her face. For some time, she doesn’t speak a word. She will not ask Uncle Peter inside.
Instead, we sing a little while. We sing: What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! Oh, what peace we often forfeit; oh, what needless pain we bear. All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!
Grandma rocks a bit, back and forth, and I can hear the wood beneath her chair squeak and shuffle. She touches the thread to her tongue before threading her needle, and she tucks stray hairs into her tight grey bun. ‘You know your Uncle Peter didn’t come to the Lord until he was a grown man, don’t you?’
I didn’t know nothing of the sort. Uncle Peter don’t talk much to me; Reuben has always been his favourite. Grandma tells me that Peter didn’t meet Jesus until after he came back from the navy. He had been to church with all the boys, but Peter didn’t know the Lord.
He’d never made that decision. Peter — always getting attention for being the tallest and the strongest around Failing — was too busy putting up hay in the summer, playing football in the fall, and courting pretty girls year round to draw close to the Lord.
‘That was a thorn in my side from the time he was in high school, especially after, when he was out in the world. Many’s the night I brought his name to the Lord in tears and in prayer.’
Uncle Ingwald had been out at Bible college for a couple years, and they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him, or even met Gloria or baby Samuel. He couldn’t even afford to come home for his father’s funeral, but made it home by deer season the year the church called him to pastor.
‘There was so much to do that season: we had to come to know this pale girl with blackberry eyes and tiny hands. We needed to learn to call Samuel our own, this angel child crawling across the yellow linoleum.’
Grandma was shut up in the house with Gloria while the men hunted, and they had to find their own way. My mom was homebound with chicken pox, so Grandma had to watch baby Reuben, only a few weeks old. Grandma had Reuben so long that he wouldn’t even take his momma’s breast when he finally came home. Our women hold each other together. And before the men even saw their first deer, Grandma and Gloria were joyfully baking and minding the babies, and lifting each other up in prayer.
‘Since my sons were born, I had fretted over their salvation and the helpmeet the Lord had chosen for each. That week in the kitchen, aprons dusted with flour, Gloria became my daughter, Samuel bloomed in my heart, and Reuben made room.’
Ingwald and my daddy hunted and brought back nothing. The disappointment and worry for winter meat was felt by all, but seemed to dig deep at Peter. ‘He wouldn’t join the men hunting. Shame was what he was carrying, and it was past anything I had seen in him.’
I ask my grandma why Peter didn’t hunt with the men. Why he doesn’t hunt now.
‘You ask your daddy about that or — better still — you ask the man himself. Since Peter left our family, he’s never really come back.’
But back then, after evening chores, Peter would leave the house and walk the fields until dark. No one knew where he went. He didn’t speak in the house and refused to even touch the babies. Through this dark mood, the family held Peter up to the Lord, and slowly they began to think the cloud had passed. One night after supper, he kissed Gloria solemnly on the forehead and shook Ingwald’s hand with his giant fist. He didn’t say nothing to my daddy. Then, Peter walked over to Grandma where she was rocking the babies, cradled them both in those big arms, and walked straight out of the house.
Ingwald found his brother behind the milking shed, weeping so hard that his square shoulders were shaking, speaking of grave failure. Samuel was squirming, and Reuben lay screaming in the cold shade of the wall, both now wearing only cloth diapers. Peter knelt against the stone foundation, his skinning knife unsheathed and stuck into the snow. He’d sawed branches off of the spindly birch and, in the midst of the patchy snow, had a green wood fire smouldering in a scraped dirt circle.
‘We never spoke of it, so I don’t know what brought Peter to his despair, and I’ll leave that to Jesus. What I know is this: Peter didn’t believe when he took those baby boys behind the shed, but as Ingwald held his trembling hands and they cried out to the Lord, he believed.’
I know Grandma wants it to be true, that unwrapping a toddler and an infant and making a fire brought Peter to the Lord. She holds on to once saved, always saved; she believes he’ll leave behind his sin and come back to the Lord. But for most, that’s not enough; you got to walk the walk, and that just ain’t my Uncle Peter’s way. He just knew something we don’t;
maybe he still knows. He saw deep into those boys: something about where they were going or where they were from.
Uncle Peter is a black sheep; for all his coming-to-the-Lord story Grandma told me, he’s still got a ways to come. I guess I always thought my uncle was unsaved and that all he did and said was still waiting to be swept away by the blood of Jesus. Now that I know he’s been saved and is backslid, I worry more about his soul and I understand why Grandma don’t want him in her house. Peter’s been found once; I hope he finds his way again before the Lord returns. Reuben’s seen him with beer, and Mom says he can’t seem to settle down with one woman. Grandma says that he’ll come back to the Lord. When she was but a young girl, the Lord spoke to her: All your boys will return home before I call you home.
Grandma asks me to put another split log on the fire, so I go to the basement to get the wood.
When my grandma was a little girl, Wisconsin was a frontier. Her daddy traded pelts with the Indians and her momma minded the store. Grandma, blonde pigtails tied in ribbons, tidied paper sacks and swept the plank floor with a straw broom. ‘Be still.’ That’s all she remembers of when the Indians would come through the door. ‘Be still.’
She still knows those words in German because that’s how her momma talked. Little Grandma was let loose on the candy under the counter and could cut brown bags into paper dolls as much she liked as long as she kept quiet. I can hear those snip, snips while she slices long lines of girls holding hands all in a row. She liked to eat striped candy while the tall shadows leaned over the counter and her momma guarded her beneath her skirts. Grandma still claims a fear of Indians, but I believe she just wants candy.
It makes her laugh, my reckoning about her sweet tooth. She smiles wide and shows me her rows of perfect teeth. They aren’t stained with coffee and wine like those in the world, but she does misuse them to bite off stray threads. I’ve seen her do it. She claims she tries not to be afraid of good Indians, Christian Indians, just the ones that still do the worshipping of the trees and such. But I’ve seen her fearful in the grocery store, too scared to walk an aisle with an Indian in it. I guess she can’t forget her momma’s legs trembling beneath her skirt when the men, smelling of campfire and horses, stood in the store. Grandma’s blonde hair would have been a prize scalp, so her momma said.
‘Once I peeked out, low by Momma’s foot, and I saw a buckskin moccasin.’ That’s all she knows. Naomi’s an Indian, and that ain’t nothing she’s got to be ashamed of, not her or us. Grandma says it and it is true. Naomi is part of us now. ‘She’s no more Indian than we are.’ Snip, snip, she cuts the stray threads of a patch with her teeth; snip, snip, she cuts the stray threads with scissors. ‘Liquor’s another story. Only the blood of Jesus can cover that.’ And she believes that for any man.
Naomi ain’t no Indian to Grandma; Grandma can’t get enough of that girl. But, for once, Naomi ain’t here; it’s just Grandma and me rocking and working, staying warm by the fire. I thread needles and pile the patches by colour: blue with blues, stripe with stripes. The wooden chair creaks across the floor while Grandma’s hands stay busy with the quilt.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m one of the righteous or the wicked. Would the Lord spare this place and this people for my sake? Or will He sweep it all away, all of us together, sinners and saints alike? He will not do it; I believe it in my soul. The Judge of heaven and earth will do right. But it is not my place to know the mind of God, or the timing of His return.
6
YESTERDAY AFTER SCHOOL, DADDY WANTED TO WORK ON THE old tractor that he’s reassembling. Someday he’ll have his own shed — maybe we’ll even own our own woods — but until then, his projects are piled up in the dust and grease of Grandma’s barn. I stayed inside with Grandma for an hour, but once she started talking about making lefse, I made my escape. Peeling potatoes makes my hands go red and itchy.
When I left Grandma in the kitchen, she was pressing a white kitchen towel against her forehead. Sometimes I look at Grandma and see the Haralson apple tree we have in the orchard in the yard. This August, it had so many little green apples pulling it down, its branches were fit to break. Straining to hold its arms up to allow its fruit to ripen in the sun, the tree was slowly losing its fight as it drooped closer and closer to the ground. Deer eating off it at night were like dark, silent ghosts surrounding a weeping willow. Grandma holds all of us up to the Lord in prayer, trusting God for our safety and salvation. As she leaned against the kitchen sink, Grandma looked bone weary, and it don’t seem fair that she didn’t have anyone anymore to help hold up her arms.
It ain’t really fair, neither, to call the abandoned little patch of fruit trees we got an orchard. The pines surrounding it have grown too close and are shadowing what apple and cherry trees have survived ice storms and lawnmower crashes. Daddy planted most of them for an agriculture project his senior year of high school, so I guess we are all still hoping they’ll become a success. I thought on all of these things while walking out to the barn, dragging my feet in my hand-me-down pink, puffy moon boots.
Sliding the barn door across to squeeze into the shelter, I thought I heard a coon or a skunk or something scratching around the back of the lawnmower. Already covered in grime, the mower was sitting idle as it had since the end of September, so leaning against it to peer over into the corner was my first mistake. Nothing living was in the corner anyways, and my second mistake happened right quick. An old Gustafson’s ice-cream-pail handle, twisted up and tangled by the mower, had been kicked out the side of the blower and was there waiting for me to plonk my foot down hard. The wire ripped right through the bottom of my boot and screwed up into my foot. At first, I only felt wet soak into my boot, like I was barefoot on the cold, concrete floor of the barn. The metal must have clanked my bone inside my foot, though, because I felt that hit right up to my teeth.
Daddy was there quicker than I thought he could move. He’d been wiping his hands on an oily rag, cleaning up, getting ready to come back inside when he heard me cry out. Kneeling over me, down on the floor with the swallow droppings and the dust sticking to my boots and jacket, he shook my shoulder to get me to stop crying, look up at him and tell him what was causing the racket. When I pointed to the wire tangled around and through my boot and he saw the thin trickle of blood staining the sole, he caught the hair hanging in my face and tucked it behind my ear.
‘What you over here crouching around for?’
I explained about the possibility of coon or even skunk.
He just grabbed me up in his arms and carried me out of the barn. ‘You let them skunks look after themselves.’ His arms were shaking, but he was smiling the comfort smile he gave the ewes when they were lambing: knowing they was hurting, but loving them the same. He carried me to the house like I was still little and light.
Daddy showed my wired boot to Grandma. She put down her potatoes and told him to set me on the couch.
I was wailing — I balled my hands and bit my lip, but I couldn’t keep the sound down — and he said, ‘I got to take her in.’ Even his hands were trembling.
Grandma shook her head no; her mouth was set firm and she pointed him to the kitchen. They went in and there were some words, but I couldn’t hear them rightly over my own noise. But I didn’t need to hear; I knew. Grandma’s momma seemed to fall into whatever faith was passing through Failing on any given day. We’re blessed that that woman came to know the truth of Jesus Christ when she did, but still, our family hangs on to some of Great-Grandma’s beliefs picked up from travelling Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-day Saints, and even questionable revivalist preachers. Grandma wants always to pray for healing and to believe for the touch of the Lord. I guess we still have to suffer now even though we have insurance through Daddy’s construction job.
When they came out of the kitchen, the time for words was over.
And then they took it out. Grandma ran a bath and Daddy
sat me, clothes and all, in the warm tub. He cut my boot off, real careful around where the wire went through, with his skinning blade. Grandma held my leg up and Daddy looked to the problem; in one quick pull, he untwisted the twisted metal from me.
‘They would have cut it out,’ he told me when I asked why he didn’t let me pick doctor or home. I used to always get to pick doctor or home.
They would have cut it out. So I was glad he made my choice for me.
Today, I am waiting just inside the door of the county courthouse. The bus dropped me off after school because I had to get a tetanus shot at public health. Mom said Grandma didn’t have to know about the needle. So Mom didn’t have to drive into town so early, Uncle Ingwald is going to collect me from county health; he’s willing to keep our secret. Afterwards, he’ll drive me to church for the annual spaghetti supper before youth group. Winter coats amongst some of the larger families in the congregation have been kind of scarce this year, so we are raising some money with spaghetti.
Picking me up, Uncle Ingwald leans across the church van to open the door and make my way easy.
‘This year, the spaghetti supper will keep some warm inside and out.’ He chuckles, and he is so corny I laugh at him.
It is only a couple streets’ drive to the church, but with my injury it would have taken me all night to walk. As we drive, Uncle Ingwald sings with the gospel radio. I’ve got peace like a river; I’ve got peace like a river; I’ve got peace like a river in my soul. He taps out the beat with his hands on the wheel and gives me a grin. An older and balder version of my dad’s, his face carries scars from childhood. His calm voice and smile always make me feel happy and safe. It’s a bit early for the supper, so bunches of kids are running around in the vacant field next to the church playing touch football. They run and scream and crash into the piles of leaves and snow, laughing.
