by Amy Espeseth
Troubles will be forgotten, remembered only like leaves on the current in the river, flowing by quick and tinkling. Even darkness will look bright enough to you. You stay safe standing or at rest; even laying down, you won’t be afraid because no one will want to hurt you. With the Lord on your side, the righteous won’t ever be lonely. But the eyes of the wicked will fail, and escape will elude them; their hope will become a dying gasp.
Without noticing, I sometimes stare at my face.
Mom’s peering at me in the bathroom mirror, everything backwards from our usual way of looking. I’m in my nightgown, and she traces me with her eyes: I’m filling out, too much so and too fast. My hips are spreading more than I’d like, with faint white lines squiggling across my skin. At night, my pushing breasts sag and hurt too much to sleep.
‘It’s a burden, Ruthie.’ Mom puts her hands on my shoulders and measures my reflection.
I feel my face flush and drop my eyes to my feet.
‘Beauty’s a hard gift to bear.’
10
NAOMI’S HAIR IS LONG AND BLACK AND WHEN SHE DREAMS, she dreams of trees. Even all the times I sleep over, Gloria comes to tuck her daughter in; they ain’t embarrassed. Before bed, her momma brushes Naomi’s hair with a hard bristle brush, and with each stroke it gleams until it crackles and sticks staticky away from her head like a coal halo. When she visits her sleep trees, Gloria has already braided Naomi’s hair into a long rope down her back, swishing past her middle. Depending on the season, her trees are different.
If I can wake her while she is still sleepy, Naomi will tell me about the long dreams of her trees. When she speaks, she says little, but I can see them in my mind’s eye: in the springtime, white, paperbark birch with crisscrossing black ridges like slowly knitting scars. And in the summer, sweeping willows, sun shining through the lacy leaves, making shadow patterns on her arms. But in the autumn, her tree is a sticky sugar maple dribbling sap out of a gash in its skin. The drips have gone hard down the side of her bark, and winged ants are stuck in the syrup; the seeping hole makes her ooze with insects.
Naomi just couldn’t sleep sound nor well this fall. She is more restful, now that we are deep in winter. When the cold wind whips through the tops of the trees and howls across the stubby cornfields, I also find myself sleepy and safe inside near the fire. But seems like all Naomi does now is sleep.
I’m here at the parsonage for the laying on of hands. Naomi’s here, sort of: her eyes are shut and she is sleeping sound, laying in the bed again. It’s been over a week that she’s been on the prayer chain, and I can’t say that she seems to be getting any better. Gloria thought Naomi was just going on with her sleeping all the time, and that her achy bones were just telling of the coming of freezing rain. We all can feel the weather creeping near or changing in our bones, and complaining don’t make any hurt go away. But now, Naomi’s holding water: her long yellow legs are thick and soft; her ankles are overstuffed bratwurst ready to burst. But faithfulness means that we continue to lift her up in prayer. We pray, in this family, without ceasing.
And yet there she lays: on Ingwald’s big bed, stretched out in the middle with her palms flat down hard on the outside of the patchwork quilt. It looks like Naomi’s holding on even when she’s sound asleep. The elders of the church have gathered round, brought by a tearful phone call from Gloria to Uncle Ingwald.
When told she was interrupting the Men’s Supper, Gloria wasn’t swayed. ‘Interrupt it. The girl still won’t wake.’
And so they did. But it seems like Ingwald came home for the Lord, not Naomi. She’s been sleeping now for three days, hasn’t stirred since after potluck on Sunday afternoon. Only now, with the elders on watch, has the man come home to pray.
The parsonage ain’t that far from church anyway. The house is like a cardboard cereal box, sitting tall, brown and tan within a row of squat yellow and white-shuttered neighbours. Of course, it is too big of a home for the current pastor’s family: just Ingwald, Gloria, Samuel and Naomi roam through the long hallways and empty rooms. But before Uncle Ingwald came home from Strength Bible College, the old pastor had plenty of family to fill it up. The evidence of his and his wife’s blessing is etched in the kitchen pantry, where they measured the heights of their six children at the start of every school year. The biggest boys grew past the top of the cupboard door before they left for their new church in Michigan.
Standing in a circle around the bed with arms raised, the elders are tall, old pines swaying with the wind. Outside the circle, Gloria is teary; her pale hand rests like snow on Ingwald’s shoulder. Voices in prayer and praise convert from low murmurs to high music; I feel this change too like weather in my bones. From below, Naomi’s little voice joins the noise. At first I strain to hear it through the tangle of men’s voices, but as it starts to trickle into their ears, the elders hush and listen too. Her voice is like the taste of snowmelt in the water.
Naomi is speaking in tongues. It is a scramble of Grandma’s voice and Naomi’s sighs.
‘Hebesheba nonna. Hebesheba nonna. Op it littlemoftastompka, hebesheba nonna.’
She starts off low, but swells loud; her voice begins to crash against the room, straining at the walls and ceiling.
‘Hebesheba nonna! Hebesheba nonna!’
With words swirling around her, Aunt Gloria is labouring to make sense of the rushing noise; her tiny hands are fluttering about her collarbones, and her eyes are shut tight. No matter how hard she struggles — how too long the sound continues — her mother can’t make sense of the words. With all the words piling up on my head, I feel like I am swimming underwater, straining for the surface.
‘Hebesheba nonna!’
My ears and eyes might burst, but I will not open my mouth.
‘Hebesheba nonna. Hebesheba nonna. Op it littlemoftastompka, hebesheba nonna!’
Naomi suddenly stops, and I am beyond out of breath. The room is silent; no one brings forth the message.
It is over now, and Naomi’s eyes remain shut and her breathing has returned to the deep, slow rhythm of a breastfed baby. The elders are nodding in prayer, taking Naomi’s sounds as words straight from the mind of God; the men are looking at her still, sleeping lips as if they are holy. Ingwald is looking at Gloria, who is looking at Naomi as if she is trying to decide whether a demon or an angel lies upon the bed.
I stay in the shadowed corner of the room, just looking. I don’t know if what I heard was blasphemy or prophecy; all I know is that Naomi remains asleep. Maybe my belief would help her wake. Jesus rebuked evil spirits and commanded them to leave the afflicted. Their bodies would shake and shriek violent and then lay still like the dead. Even the disciples were amazed, for they could not exorcise every demon. But Jesus could and did and does still today. This kind can come out only by prayer. So here we are, again, still praying.
After the elders left, each touching her head with a sweaty palm, Uncle Ingwald cradled Naomi like a baby and carried her into her own room. I sit with her there on her fluffy bed, tucked up close with a cup of hot water and lemon that Aunt Gloria brought me. Naomi’s hair is sweaty and tangled, and it is all I can do to keep from pulling it away from her face. For all the sleeping, her face is tired with dark circles and pulled-down lips. I don’t want to wake her by stirring her hair. Her eyelashes flicker as she breathes, her chest moving up and down, and the sound of her breath beating regular.
Why didn’t her real momma want her? I don’t know why she wouldn’t. Naomi is most precious, and we can all see that. Maybe that was the problem: the momma didn’t want to fade back next to Naomi; maybe no one could see her anymore. Most likely it was like those berries that the birds eat: good for their bodies but poison to me. They taste sweet to all creatures but can’t benefit us all. Beyond Naomi’s purple curtains, snow blows white and hard against the window. It is drifting over the streets in peaks with barely any dips; the
ditches along the roadsides are full of deep snow. I do not know what God said, or if it was even God speaking. But Naomi spoke clear to me, most clear to me in my heart: There is a seed.
11
HE IS JUST BONES AND COAT, LIKE THE JESUS PICTURE HANGING at the front of the sanctuary: Christ’s eyes are lonely, slinking out of a bony face framed by lanky hair and a mangy beard. This dead coyote resembles a sad Jesus. It’s a real nice one with thick yellow-grey fur like an overcast sky and a drooping-down heavy tail, tip dipped in ink. Nearly as high as a wolf, he sure is skinny, though; he might have himself a tapeworm or maybe he’s been away from his family a good while. If he’s been on his lonesome, he couldn’t knock down a deer on his own so would have stayed fed on rabbits, rats, corn and whatever he could scavenge in the way of carcass. A guy wouldn’t want to ever leave the pack if it meant the only venison he sunk his teeth into was going to be flyblown and rotten. Folks have their reasons, I guess.
Reuben, stocking hat pulled low over his ears, is all excited and rushing his words. My brother do love coyotes. ‘He come running straight at me like you wouldn’t believe. I’d been calling for a while, hunkered still for just over an hour. Sun come up, here the ’yote come running straight at me. I’m yipping a bit and trying to do a woodpecker call, because them rabbit calls weren’t doing me no good. And, sure enough, here he comes loping ’cross the field straight at me.’
Coyotes move to the sound of other coyotes or the rustling and wailing of a wounded animal. Reuben takes himself up from our house in the dark; because of Grandma’s new ban on hunting, he now has to trek all the way over the hill to Uncle Peter’s place. Following the fence line, walking quiet as can be through the brush and bramble, he moves silent like a bobcat until he sets himself down and waits. Wearing camouflage of white, tan and black, he crouches ahead of a tangle of brush with the wind blowing in his face. He sits real quiet; he sits real quiet a long while. Then he starts to call. He don’t make no howling, though that’s what folks hear when they think coyote. Reuben calls more like a bark, even sometimes like a dying fawn.
Folks still do a lot of coyote trapping with a dirthole set; you just find an old den with tracks scratched in the dust at the front of the hole. They’ll dunk those sharp metal teeth in anti-freeze and store-bought coyote urine or skunk scent, use god-awful smelling bait, and do all sorts of other tricks to out-trick the coyotes. Coyotes are always about. They stay downwind of whatever herd you got, don’t matter if you are running cattle or sheep or deer. Coyotes are born hungry, and they stay that way until they die. It could be a winter feedlot, froze cows squashed in amongst the snow and grain — or a spring calving barn, birthing cows moaning and babies sucking. Either way, a farmer’s got coyotes. I’ve heard of ’yotes sleeping cosy in field haystacks or inside with the livestock on hay bales, steam rising off their sleeping bodies when the barn door is opened for morning. To watch one in a stubble field, circling around before bedding down, stretching skinny legs before folding ears and shutting yellow eyes to sleep, it’s like spying on the neighbour’s dog. But keep in mind that forever-empty belly crouching alongside the new lambs in the pasture; he’s no lapdog.
So Reuben sets up his hunting blind just the same as the dry trappers set their traps: along the worn dirt path that leads right to the beaver dam on the river, between the tall stands of jack pine, just up over the hill. Behind where Uncle Peter dumped his old tractor, atop generations of rusty Magnusson scrap, he’s got a bone yard to drag dead cows and the like. Each and every coyote in the county can smell that bone yard all year round — and sometimes in a stinking-hot summer, all the neighbours can smell it too. Death-bloat Holsteins will be covered with black crows so you can’t see any white of their hide. Coyotes know good eating, and Reuben sure knows his coyotes. Reuben is a soldier who stalks antler rub on trees, bear tracks in the mud, and coon scat on the path. Reuben will catch you. He knows all your hiding places and all your secret names: prairie wolf, kyute, mush-quo-de-ma-in-gon. Be sure, he will find you out.
Reuben is almost panting. ‘I thought something was up when the jays started to chatter in the pines. Then a black squirrel ran up a trunk real close by. He come running. He come running straight at me, and then he sat down and just stared me plain in the face. Stupid, like. I tried not to blink. I didn’t nearly breathe. Then he picks up and keeps running straight at me.’
Meat in the belly of a coyote don’t always stay there. Folks say he’s got a double stomach. The very same ’yote that’ll push a new calf away from the herd takes the care to vomit a stomach-full of meat out to feed its pups. Reuben’s even seen a coyote struggling along, dragging the backbone and hindquarters of a fawn with its teeth. I can’t decide whether that’s just plain evil or just plain nature. Baby cow, baby coyote, baby deer; everybody just wants to eat. In times of plenty, there’s no excuse to cause so much pain. But hunger excuses plenty, it seems. I haven’t seen yet what makes a body just plain mean.
So we load the coyote up in the back of Daddy’s rusty hunting truck and drive together all the way over to the parsonage. We are riding in the back, pulling a woodheap tarp over the top of us to keep the cold wind and blowing snow off. Starting out, I didn’t want the thing even touching my leg. But by the time we get to town, Reuben and I both are snuggling into the coyote’s scratchy pelt for warmth. Traced around his mouth and all along his throat, his fur is creamy white, just like the inside of his floppy ears and all of his underside. I even lay my head down on the coyote’s back, but just for a minute. It is real cold. He has a sore or something, full of pus and blood, eating into the black, rubbery gum of his mouth. There is a scab, white and mushy, forming like ice on the river. The wound is trying to close. My hand knocks against the muzzle as we corner a sharp curve. I think I got blood on my hands, so I wipe them deep in the fur.
Because we called ahead, as we pull into the driveway Uncle Ingwald is waiting, stamping his boots outside the door of the garage attached to the house. As Daddy drives up to him, Ingwald hinges open the green metal door with a creak. After he parks the truck inside the garage, Daddy climbs out of the cab and steam rises off his barn coat. The door from the house is stirring; Aunt Gloria is half carrying Naomi down the stairs. Squinting in the garage light with matted sleep in the corners of her black lashes, Naomi is wearing her pyjamas, Ingwald’s flannel robe, and a patchwork quilt wrapped around her body. We are here to show our family Reuben’s coyote. Samuel will miss it because he’s at hockey practice. Reuben don’t play hockey seeing he can’t afford the gear, and it cuts into his hunting time. Seems like for once, Reuben’s the big man today.
But the talk turns to the fever dreams again. Next to the freezers, Aunt Gloria is telling my daddy all about it. Gloria’s been sleeping next to Naomi while she’s been nursing her back to health. Before Naomi opened her eyes this morning, she told her momma — in a high, sorrowful voice — that she had wandered inside a great cave which was the gaping mouth of a giant. Inside his stomach, Naomi fed starving people and animals with meat and fat cut from the giant’s belly. His heart was a volcano and his blood was lava. She used her hunting knife to stab the giant in his volcano heart. The people and animals inside his stomach flowed out his mouth and were freed. As the big mouth clamped shut in death, Naomi pulled a wood tick out between the giant’s clenched teeth. The tick was pulled out alive, but it was flat as a tack. We don’t know at all what to make of these feverish dreams.
I don’t think Naomi should touch the coyote, as sick as she’s been and all. I can’t keep her from him, though. Bending over in her coat of many colours, Naomi looks into the mouth of the cold, still animal. Her brown thumb pushes up, hard, onto the sharp, pointy tooth jutting out the side of his mouth. The tooth is the same colour as a hen’s egg, white-like with shadowy bruises. The muzzle is starting to freeze solid; no steaming cloud escapes from his mouth. When she takes her hand away, a purple-red imprint remains on her thumb. She moves so sl
ow but gives me a shy smile, and I can almost see her secret dog teeth.
Rubbing the dent on the inside of her bottom lip, she looks up. ‘I do believe I’m better now.’
Reuben puts his arm low around Naomi’s waist and she lays her head on his wide shoulder. Loose and wild, her hair spills across her chest. I feel the beating of their hearts. He is so proud.
‘Boy? Watch your hands.’ Uncle Ingwald’s breath puffs white even inside the garage.
Reuben and Naomi break apart, but the girl’s daddy ain’t having it. Ingwald grabs his daughter and pulls her to his side.
‘I was only showing her the coyote.’ Ain’t much use in protesting, but Reuben can’t just stand there dumb.
Naomi shivers and looks down at her feet; she is barefoot on the cold concrete. No one thought to make her wear shoes. She should say something — maybe Reuben was helping her stand — but she doesn’t say nothing at all. Uncle Ingwald wraps the quilt tighter around her and glares at Reuben.
Daddy and Aunt Gloria walk over from the freezers. They both look at all of us waiting there silent. We hear breath and the wind blowing outside. There is nothing to say.
On the way home, I’m scratching at a bump in my hair. It sure ain’t a scab. I got a wood tick stuck deep in my head: something more to remember this coyote by. And it comes to me unbidden: the tick is a messenger of the Most High. What Naomi’s dream says, I don’t rightly know. But I know that God has come upon me. He is speaking through Grandma’s blood.
