by Amy Espeseth
We are singing peace like a river, joy like a mountain when we roll past the clump of trees all us kids call Babylon. A collection of twelve or thirteen pines in various stages of health, the ground beneath is littered with the long, auburn needles of the giant red pines and cedars and the sharp, short, green prickles of the ponderosas.
In the darkness there, under the canopy of sweeping branches, Samuel is hunched on the ground. He is wrestling with Zachariah Oleson, one of the boys my age. Samuel is on top of him like the bull in the yard. They’re both wearing pants — it’s too freezing for skin — but there’s no mistaking what would be happening without the cloth, without the cold. Zach’s pale face is pushed deep into the needles with only his wild eyes staring out of the dark like a startled sparrow. I see Samuel, and Uncle Ingwald sees Samuel too.
‘That damn boy.’
I have never heard him curse.
‘Not again. I’ll kill that damn boy.’
The kingdom of heaven is sowed with good seeds and weeds both; it’s not until the wheat sprouts, raising heads higher than the rest, that the weeds show themselves low down, close to the soil. With my own eyes, I see.
Uncle Ingwald parks the car crooked next to the trees we call Babylon. The lacy white-ridged scars that crisscross his cheeks are raised up and quivering. He tells me to go inside now and get Glory, and he runs toward the shadows of the trees.
Samuel spots him. Samuel stops.
I don’t see my uncle all during the special coat supper. Throughout the fellowship hall, people are laughing and enjoying each other’s company. All of us are thankful for food and friends and family. Aunt Gloria, with puffy eyes, comes inside after one of the elders says grace. Working in the kitchen, serving steaming spaghetti and garlic bread, she leans shaky against the high countertop and sighs with each scoop. Her arms must be so tired.
Mixed in with the overflow barn coats and snow-wet coats and new coats, Samuel has to stay in the nursery and wait for the spaghetti supper to end. When he sees me peering in through the door crack, he grabs my hand.
‘We were just playing, just wrestling.’ His face is sad and covered in pimples; where a beard could be are just infected bumps. I don’t want to look at him, his slumpy shoulders, skinny arms and that tight curly hair, but he is talking close to my ear now. He wants me to stay in here with him, smelling garlic and milk, crouching on shrunken chairs and playing with baby toys. He wants me in here with him so he ain’t alone.
I wish I’d stayed out front with Naomi and Reuben, clearing tables and scraping plates. I point at my hurt foot and make a show of my hobbling, so he grabs a little chair for me to sit on and then pushes puzzles off the table for me to rest my leg.
He is digging in his pants pocket for something to offer. ‘I’ve got a peach pit to suck.’
‘Where’d you find a peach in autumn?’ I ask him. It is a hard crumpled stone hung with bits of pink-orange flesh. Looking at the sticky lint, pine needles and dirt, I can see it’s been in his pocket awhile.
He barely pauses to think. ‘I got it in your daddy’s orchard.’ He is lying, but it don’t change his face. Samuel holds his mouth in a smile, tight over his yellow teeth the same when praising or cursing.
There is a green felt board on the wall waiting to hold a floppy Moses in the bulrushes or Jesus on the cross. Aunt Gloria has always taught the nursery class, and I remember learning Bible stories and the Fruit of the Spirit on that board: apples of love, something or the other for goodness, and the like. Aunt Glory’s red curly hair is now shot through with wiry grey, but she’s kept the same short crop my whole life. Rows and rows of braided blonde can judge her all they like; she knows her way. My aunt wears her hair like a man. The nursery is tight, barely four steps long and three across from the far blue wall to the stacked cribs with wooden bars to mind the babies. Thirty teething toddlers must’ve gnawed the plastic rainbow I hold in my hands.
Samuel tries to get my attention by hanging his tongue out the side of his mouth like a dead deer. He ignores me at school or on the bus, but now he wants my undivided.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be at hockey camp?’ I ask him. Samuel loves to skate hard, breathlessly skidding to a shredded-ice stop, wearing heavy padding and the blue-and-white Failing jersey.
‘Not until December, after deer season.’ Samuel thinks he’s got friends on the hockey team, but he don’t. He can sharpen his skates all he likes, but they call him Smell-ule both behind his back and to his face. Samuel is held down in the world as firm as he is held up here. And it is hard being us at school. Most of the worldly kids won’t waste their time on us except for teasing, so we are friends amongst ourselves and with the Bible-believing Baptist kids and other Fundies. They sit out the dances and sex talks with us Pentecostals, so we all know each other from the school library. But we aren’t many.
Samuel is spread out on the carpet, arching his back and stretching his bowed legs. He smiles and shines his eyes soft.
‘Are you in season, Ruth?’ This is how this boy is, trying to joke like a man. ‘You sure are real pretty.’
And I can see how he will be then, taller but still not much thicker round; he’ll be the pastor of this church and the father of children. He will lead. They’ll all think they’ve drowned him, but he’ll still have a secret fire buried. Amongst all the pale ghosts that sit in this church — baby-weary mommas and work-broken men — hardly anyone holds that spark inside. Samuel does, but I don’t know how he keeps it safe. Maybe he could guard mine too.
I shouldn’t think such things and he sure shouldn’t say them: cousins are too close. But it ain’t the first time. Whenever Samuel is near — especially if we are alone — he holds his eyes too low on me and leans closer than he should. Even in church, he’ll press my hand hard during prayer. But all the boys do it: sitting thigh-to-thigh in the pews with the girls, they breathe in our smell. Reuben always makes sure he’s next to somebody who’s not blood, but it seems like Samuel aims to claim me. And sometimes, even I like feeling a bit special, maybe chosen.
Samuel’s eyes shine blue in the light from the Noah’s Ark lamp. Holding each other’s tails, the elephants and all the handpicked animals march two-by-two, male and female, around the shade. Animals’ histories can be traced in their bones, whether they had a leg break or a too-heavy load. Diseases, too, can show themselves on the inside of a carcass, old wounds or whatever brought the thing to finally give up and lay down. Whether you’re slaughtering goats or killing weasels, the inside will show the creatures’ lives. Samuel has spaghetti sauce caked in the corner of his mouth. His heart knows that he can take without paying, at least for a little while.
I stare at the chewed Noah’s rainbow in my hands; he don’t need to tell me what I already know.
After church, Mom and I are squashed together in the truck, our sweaters and jackets making us wider than we should be, as we wait for the windshield to thaw and fog to clear from the glass. Outside, Daddy is struggling with the ice and I feel the sound of his scraping down deep in my teeth. My tongue prods a hollow place inside my molar while the noise rasps our ears. Reuben is kicking frozen slush away from the tyres; it is finally time to head home. I tilt my head to rest on Mom’s shoulder and I hold my mittens over my nose to keep it warm. The day is done.
‘Why on earth would that woman be walking?’ Mom rubs on her side window to melt a way through the frost to double-check. ‘In this weather?’ Freezing cold air whips into the truck as she opens the door to call out. ‘Glory? Something wrong with the van?’
Gloria’s head doesn’t so much turn as twist hard on its stalk. I didn’t see her and my cousins bundled up and crunching across the parking lot, but now with my aunt’s eyes raging all afire, I wonder how she hasn’t melted a way through; her hat is pulled low across her forehead, but it can’t tamp down her heat. They walk over to the truck.
‘
Van’s fine, Marie.’ As she stands at the gaping vehicle door, Gloria’s breath puffs like smoke, and her hollow eyes are still red-rimmed and burning like coals. ‘Pastor’s staying in prayer, so we’ll walk.’ Her lips are straight and tight; she don’t let her thoughts betray her none, even if she’s got some betrayal in her.
When my mom suggests a ride, taking it in turns since we all won’t fit at once, Gloria shakes her head and keeps that rigid mouth.
And Naomi starts in, whining and complaining about her good shoes and the snow and wind whipping up her dress. ‘The ride is here, Momma. Can’t we take it?’ Naomi stamps her feet, trying to thaw through her legs, and wraps her purple scarf higher around her face. ‘It’s not my fault.’ Naomi’s eyes are always so brown and wide and warm, but tonight they are blinking and squinting against the cold. She is moaning and carrying on, but Samuel stands still, hands holding on to his elbows. He doesn’t open his mouth to speak. He is without a hat, and his hair catches in the wind; he isn’t wearing a jacket, just his Sunday button-down shirt and a sweater. His sister keeps on going. She makes the whimpering of a turned-aside calf.
There is no moving her, Gloria; she chooses the hard way for its own sake. She silences Naomi with a fierce look and points her chin at Samuel, slumping silent and head down. ‘Thank you, family, but we’ll live.’ And she pushes Samuel in the back, forcing him to walk ahead of her while she holds Naomi to her side.
Mom shuts the truck door and then reopens it and yanks it fast again; it never catches the first time closed. The rubber inside the door has cracked and come away, but it will seal eventually given enough firm direction. As they walk away, Samuel dragging his feet one step ahead of Naomi and Gloria huddled together against the wind, the night seems to get darker with stars burning millions of miles away moving even farther from us. Maybe the moon has gone behind a cloud.
Mom’s fingers kneading her sore leg lets me know she is troubled, that none of it sits right with her neither. ‘He’s on his knees,’ is all she says, and she starts her humming, her heart reaching out to the Lord.
Whether she means Ingwald or Samuel, I’m unaware, but she does not speak against the anointed. We don’t always know another way. Daddy and Reuben clamber into the truck, snow clumping off their arms and melting onto our warmer bodies.
As he clunks the truck into reverse, Daddy takes one look at Mom and holds up his other hand. ‘Don’t start, Marie. I can’t tell my brother what to do. They’ll survive the walk.’
And Mom keeps on humming, looking straight out the window. Then she pauses her song. ‘Who will Ingwald pray for when there’s no one left?’
The engine churns under the hood.
It is a dark, cold night, and we are all tired and in need of rest. The truck has warmed long enough; we begin our journey home.
7
GRANDMA’S BARN NEEDS RE-SHINGLING. MOSTLY IN TATTERS, the shingles left hanging on the roof through this past summer’s storms are starting to slip under the weight of wind and wet. Every now and then, you can see them dropping to the dirt, caught on a blowing gust like crumpled maple leaves leftover from fall. Where the shingles land, they smudge the snow, and Grandma says that from her kitchen the roof looks like a patchy cur dog with mange. That can’t be good. Seems like most the barns in our area burn down before they fall down; we’ve had three go just this last year. But Grandma don’t want to lose that barn no matter what.
We women are clearing the table after Thanksgiving dinner. Even though my foot hurts, I have to help. We scrape and stack the plates near the sink where Grandma is running the faucet. The hot water steams up the window that looks across the farmyard; each of the four panes of glass is clouding over, and the barn is now out of sight. The shingles aren’t out of Grandma’s mind, though.
‘Boys.’
I think it’s fun when she speaks to my daddy and Uncle Ingwald like children.
‘Boys. You know it wasn’t long between when the Svensens’ roof went patchy to when the whole heap fell down altogether.’
The men grunt in agreement, look up and nod slowly. They are both stuffed full and stretched out in the living room: Uncle Ingwald’s on the worn green couch and my daddy’s on the orange davenport with his stocking feet hanging over the armrests. The boys are outside somewhere. Usually Daddy and Reuben would be out hunting on Thanksgiving, but with Grandma’s new killing ban, we’re all homebound. We got enough venison to fill our freezer this year anyway, but what we’ll do next year, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to hunt up at the cabin.
‘Am I just talking to the wind?’ Grandma slaps the towel on her skirt.
‘Repairs take money, Momma.’ Daddy knows the dollars and cents of every farm building in Failing. There’s plenty he would do around our house and the homeplace if he had the means; he spends most of each Sunday pencilling plans on the bulletin. Nobody’s proud of the state of Grandma’s barn. ‘You got some put by we need to know about?’
And I know right away he don’t try to be mean — just seems he gets tired. He works and works and got nothing to show for it but rough hands. A man can hardly feed his family. And he’s still sore at Grandma.
‘Maybe you should talk to Peter about it.’ Daddy’s picking at her scab. ‘He’s got no end of time and money, and he sure don’t have no sense.’
Grandma makes a sound like a hurt pup. She shakes her head and moves slow back into the kitchen.
Ingwald opens his eyes and gives my daddy a harsh look. He don’t even say a word, but the matter is closed for now. It will rest.
She really shouldn’t be hassling them right after they’ve eaten like that. We’ve fed so much today, we’re all feeling a bit sluggish and weighted down. We ate cheese soup and wild rice soup; cranberries straight out of the can; fresh rolls hot from the oven with butter sliding down their sides; boiled potatoes, carrots and rutabagas; and turkey, ham and venison. I ate a lot of both dill and bread-and-butter pickles and green and black olives too, because I do love pickles and olives.
Daddy ate a lot of pickled pork hocks, salted herring and slimy lutefisk, because Daddy loves things that look and smell foul. Reuben and I teased him after the big dinner, and he pretended to be all offended. He said we were lucky that he was full and sleepy like a wintering bear, too slow and dumb to catch us kids and give us a good swipe. He might now need to consider some hibernating, as he looks like he’s having some trouble breathing easy even when he’s laid out flat on his back.
Grandma is right about Svensen’s barn. Down across the rows of corn stubble in the fields that separate our homeplace from theirs, you used to could see Svensen’s red barn barely standing like a worn-out, swayback cow. Her main ridge was all slumped and broken, and her side timbers let through the sunlight until it seemed you could see right through her ribs to the other side. Late last winter, we woke to a different view of scraggly jack pines behind a pile of red scrap dusted with white; she’d collapsed under the gentle weight of a new snow. Come summer, even her remnants had caught fire and burnt. But our barn can’t be that bad, even though it is as old as Svensen’s. Even if the roof looks a little mangy, our family wouldn’t ever let it all just fall apart. And anyway, most of the barns around here burn before they fall.
Wafting across the kitchen, the smell of hot coffee and cinnamon-spiced apple cider wakes the slumbering gluttons.
Grandma looks itchy and seems ready to get the roof settled. ‘Keeping up the homestead is the same as keeping up the family. Just think of Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie or lefse. Letting that barn die would be like letting go of our name or letting go of our faith. Boys, what would your daddy be thinking right about now?’
My own daddy’s busy eating lefse right now, so I believe that he couldn’t imagine Thanksgiving without it even if he tried. Uncle Ingwald is slowly stirring cream into his coffee. Grandma’s not getting the reaction she wants.
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‘Peter may have forgotten who he is and where he’s from and where he’s going, but I thought both you boys knew better than that.’ She lets loose the same little cry-sounding sigh from before. Seems she’s got to almost bleed to get their attention.
Of course, Uncle Peter couldn’t — or wouldn’t — make over for Thanksgiving again, even though we can almost see his house from Grandma’s porch. Mom told me that Grandma misses Uncle Peter for he is still her middle baby. So when she is mad or ornery, it is really because she is sad over her son.
Uncle Ingwald puts down his coffee spoon. ‘Momma, there isn’t anybody here forgetting who they are or what they owe. We’ll get that barn fixed up come summer.’ He takes another sip of coffee and then breathes out real slow. ‘And Peter’s bound to come back soon enough.’ It is hard to tell whether he means back to the homeplace or back to the Lord. ‘Peter’s sins will be far from the mind of God, just as far as the east is from the west. The Lord does not forget the ones He loves.’
Ingwald makes plans without keeping promises: lumber and nails he won’t buy, hauling and hammering that my daddy and Reuben will have to do. My uncle will be minding souls with his soft hands, and we’ll owe more to the farmers’ co-op. Ingwald keeps talking. Daddy just nods his head.
The boys are back inside, and Grandma wants to settle with us kids and look at the few pictures from when our daddies were little. Reuben, Samuel and Naomi scrunch in real close around her big chair by the fire. I need another piece of lefse, so first I scoot back into the kitchen. Mom, her hands still soaking in suds, and Aunt Gloria, swishing a drying towel across the heavy pots, together have their backs to me. They don’t pause their talking while I creep toward the lefse, so I disappear under the table real quick. I almost let out a yelp when my arm touches fur, but it’s just the barn cat hiding under the table too.
‘She shouldn’t be one to talk of forgetting names,’ Aunt Gloria says under her breath.
