by Amy Espeseth
Grandma’s bird feeders brought us to Field-n-Farm: she is out of seed. Well, not completely out of all birdseed, but she didn’t have any more of the little oily black seeds that some of her winter birds like so much. The best time to feed birds is winter: snow covers tiny seeds and dangling, dry berries, while insects are even harder to find. It is then that they need the feeder the most. Heavy snowfalls and ice storms make it necessary to look beyond nature, to hold on to someone who can set out those trays and hang the seeds even when the sleet rains down. Once the birds rely on a feeder, especially during winter, they hold that commitment in their hearts at least until spring. Midwinter is no time to change your mind. If you stop feeding the birds in the middle of the cold, suffering and death are sure to follow. Hurting and dead little creatures aren’t an accident or a gentle mistake; those frozen bodies are your choice.
The weather outside ain’t the only enemy: at night the opossums and raccoons seek to steal and destroy. The dark prowlers will take the seed and break the feeder. Squirrels too will work against the birds, and not even suspending the seed on a wire between two trees will keep it safe. Metal guards and higher wires will convince some of the enemy to stay away, but sacrificing some seed is the only way to save the rest. Scatter some food at the base of the trees. Spread some seed on the ground. Some seed is lost, but the birds are saved. Morning and evening, they’ll come and feed. There are kinds of birds — even knowing the risk — who choose to eat the seed straight from the ground. Sparrows and juncos are that way; it is just the way of their kind.
Grandma hates to disappoint the birds — imagining their orange beaks curving down and fluffy black feathers tamping flat — so she called Mom to help her spare them. Grandma was out of birdseed and we were out of things to do at home, but we didn’t have a vehicle. Mom’s hair was still damp, freshly braided down her back, when she told me we were done waiting for the boys to finish fishing. She made a phone call. When Uncle Peter roared up the driveway in his shiny truck, she was in the bedroom putting on something decent. We weren’t going to sit around all night in an empty house. Uncle Peter was taking us to town.
And so here we are, freezing in front of the glass doors of Field-n-Farm, waiting for them to swing open automatically. I am hopping back and forth in my new moon boots, and Mom is stamping her tiny leather shoes; we’re trying to keep warm and awaken the doors both. We can see through the glass to the tables piled with Christmas decorations and the line of folks waiting to buy items, but the doors just can’t see us. Uncle Peter waves his thick arms and then he shouts. We are laughing when a red-vested man presses a button inside the doors and they swing open. Uncle Peter steers Mom and me beneath the warm, buzzing lights. He holds my mom light by her elbow, and he holds me firm by my hand.
Uncle Peter and Mom head toward the seed and I go to the salt. I watch them walk away, my uncle’s boots leaving light tracks of slush on that gleaming floor. The path seems to dry behind him beneath those bright lights. I don’t know how Field-n-Farm keeps these white floors shiny; I’ve never seen a red-vested gal mopping the aisles and I’ve sure seen folks tramping through in muck boots. Whether you change your boots for town or not shows whether or not you care.
Way back with the camouflage jackets and cracked-udder cream and duck decoys, I’m chipping away at the salt blocks in the rear of the supply store. After scratching the square, I use my tongue to scrape the salt from beneath my fingernails onto my tongue. I let it dissolve slowly in my mouth. I have to watch my raw hangnails: rubbing salt in a wound is more than just words. This salt section is meant for folks buying salt for their horses and maybe cows, and we always buy a block to set in Grandma’s field. All summer, deer mince up and lick; they don’t even mind us watching them. They stretch out their long necks and bend gentle toward the salt block. Their velvet ears swivel at the slightest sound. They are brown and beautiful in their mildness. They even run calm.
The sharp edge of the salt block crumbles: it is no longer a perfect square. I have been picking at this corner for a few minutes, wetting my fingers for the taste and using the wet to work against the solid salt. Used to be, I would just pick up the broken parts of the salt, crouching low beneath the piled blocks to scrounge the chips off the floor. But now that I’m older, I’m not content to eat off the floor, so I work the edges myself. It ain’t that the floors aren’t clean, they are. They are spotless.
Sin lives in me, so I went to the salt-lick section to crumble the corners and suck it. Sin lives in me, and I chew my hangnails until they are ragged. Now I am standing next to the pile of salt blocks; they are balanced one atop the other like bricks with spaces for spying. I lean into the salt wall with my hips while my hand picks the edges. The store buzzes: the bright lights pulse with heat and electricity. I feel the buzz in my bones, seeping through me like stray voltage. It’s no wonder the cows dry up.
I am walking past the ice-fishing gear because I’m dizzy and my mouth is salty and I’m hot and I need a drink of water; orange tip-ups and rainbow bobbers and shiny ice skimmers are waiting to go outside. As I lean over the drinking fountain, I read the sign written in blue ballpoint: Please don’t spit tobacco into the fountain. There is a rusty stain around the metal drain. If I were small, little like a not-born baby, I could slip down that spigot drain. I could slip down, sliding into the pipes. And the buzzing and the bright don’t stop, and I think of the raping wasps, and the giant bees that will come after the rapture. Those left behind will be punished beyond my mind: men with black hoods and long knives will hurt women and babies. They will hurt us all.
I will be left behind. Sin lives in me, in what Samuel did to me and that I let him. I know I am ruined; I will be used up by him before the Lord’s return. Maybe I will never marry. Worse, maybe Samuel will marry someone else, even Naomi; they ain’t blood related. And I know that Reuben knows. Reuben knows that Samuel has ruined me and he doesn’t care. All anyone cares about is Naomi; seems like she’s all I care about too. She will be kept pure, safe from the demons.
The floor is too shiny and white; it smells like cat pee even though I can see my own reflection. It is too clean for me, so I feel dizzy and need to rest on a ride-on mower. A red-vested demon leans over me and makes noises in its words. I shake my head and say enough to make it move away from me. I can’t understand its words because of the light and the buzzing and the smell being so strong. I sit on the seat of the mower; it is meant to be outside. But it has to wait until the snow melts and the grass wakes and grows and needs cutting. It has to wait until the thaw. I lay my head down on the cool metal greenness of the mower, and the store slows and then stops its spinning in my head. It must be time to go, so I walk on the clean floor beneath the blazing lights; I fight through the buzz like quicksand to leave the salt behind.
We are waiting at the cash register at Field-n-Farm. Uncle Peter hoists the sacks of birdseed onto the counter and the checkout girl looks at him. She has pink-stained lips and black spider eyelashes. He has a handsome face and a handsome crooked mouth. My mom looks at the checkout girl looking at Uncle Peter, then Mom concentrates on the seed. Uncle Peter stares at the seed.
Right now I can look and see: Uncle Peter took the photo in the basement. He was there when Daddy wasn’t; he was there waiting when his brother finally came back. Candy bars are three for a dollar. Uncle Peter has the same mouth; he has no beard and no tobacco stains. The cloud had hidden him from my sight; it’s like seeing love right before your eyes. Uncle Peter keeps his eyes low. When they rest on Mom’s face, they really rest; his chest moves in and out slow, and it looks like he’s remembering how to breathe — or how to see — again. Uncle Peter kept our garden the summer my daddy was away; Peter cared for Mom and taught her to walk again. Uncle Peter took the photo, and the harvest in the picture is his. Daddy ain’t the only one with that mouth.
And it comes to me as if from the Lord: Peter could have been my father — or he coul
d be still. But he couldn’t and can’t because my mom isn’t that way, like the world is. It could have all gotten broken and ruined, but I’m sure Mom’s heart was strong. Uncle Peter’s got the same mouth as Daddy, the same mouth as me; Peter’s mouth ain’t straight. Somebody’s mouth is lying.
I can see Daddy in me, even though he hides his crooked mouth. My heart is hurt the same way as his, so it hurts the same way for him. We are both soft. We are all too soft for this, too easy hurt. But when he looks at me, it ain’t kindness. He looks at me with pity. And that’s what he’s got to carry. Jesus on the cross carried the same load; He had the same look and the same mouth.
But I can see Uncle Peter in me even stronger. We are eyes not needing lids and fingers without nails. We are trees without bark. He looks at me and knows I’m strong. He knows I’m his. Waiting for a daddy, for the boys, is like waiting on the Saviour. I don’t know how long I will have to wait.
We all have something to be forgiven for. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. I am recalling all I can of verses of sin I know; I am remembering all I can of the sins of the world, my church, my family and my soul. I take them before Jesus and lay my sins down. I pile them up at the foot of the cross. It is cold, so I climb into the rusty truck and buckle my seatbelt. We drive home with my mom sitting in the middle of the seat. The clouds have covered the moon, and it is dark and the cold makes my hands tremble. Winter seems to last forever; the roads are slick with ice. But soon, in the spring, the deer will lick me until I am gone.
16
‘SILENT NIGHT, HOLY NIGHT’ IS PLAYING ON THE BROWN Bakelite radio that rests on the corner of Grandma’s kitchen counter. All the local radio stations play carols during most of December, but Grandma always chooses the Christian station all the way from the Twin Cities as it plays hymns, choruses and sermons to help us bake and cook. Even though the reservation radio station is closer by, their music crackles as it don’t seem to travel good through the woods. I’ve played with the dial without Grandma’s knowing, and now she’s busy boiling krube on the stove and humming along to carols in some Indian language. I guess Christmas is Christmas and we all know the words, so it’s alright just to hum along without knowing.
We celebrate Christmas in the ways our people have always celebrated Christmas: lefse, lutefisk, pickled pork, salted herring, krumkake and krube. The lefse is a year-round treat, thin crepes made of potato, served with butter sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. We even have a sugar shaker pre-mixed with cinnamon just for the job. Lutefisk is slimy and shiny both: dried cod soaked soft in lye, boiled in hot water, then served with melted butter. All the smelly things — lutefisk, pickled pork and salted herring — I leave to Daddy and Reuben. But I love krumkake: holiday sugar cookies crimped in a special-shaped metal pan. And krube is something different altogether; it is my favourite.
Krube takes the whole family. We peel potatoes, mounds of them, and then stuff them through a meat grinder. The grinder is hand-operated, not no fancy electric model, and it does take some pushing and pulling. Reuben and Samuel take turns winding the handle, trying to keep the metal pan set underneath in just the right spot to catch the dripping starchy water. The big bowl of worm-like potatoes then passes to us assemblers at the table. Naomi and I cover our hands with flour and grab mounds of the potatoes to mould them around a thumb-sized glob of suet or fat. Grandma says her people used to use bacon, but Grampa and her boys like suet. So we use suet. Grandma boils the flour-covered mounds until they float; they bob up to let us know they are ready. Later, we’ll smother them in butter and eat them near whole or break them up and fry them again in milk with plenty of salt and pepper. Either way, krube sticks in the belly. I think it must be what manna from heaven was; there is no hunger after a few balls of krube.
That’s how you tell what people are: their people do it a certain way and your people do it another. Grandma’s momma was German, so she used bacon. My daddy’s Norwegian so he uses suet. My daddy’s people did not come to America; they came to Wisconsin. When they left the frozen fjords, the goal was to find the place farthest from home which was closest to home. From what they’d overheard in snatches of conversation on the long ocean crossing, Wisconsin was the place for a poor farmer to start again. When my great-grandpa finally came across the ice-crusted lakes, snow-sunken fields, and endless pine forests of the northwest Indian Head country, he knew that he was home again.
We are known by our food. Words, too, show a people. Daddy can remember his daddy speaking Norwegian around the holidays. ‘Glade Jul! Hellige Jul!’ He wouldn’t use it the rest of the year, though, as he didn’t want the boys to pick it up. In the broken-down country schoolhouse that’s slumping next to Mikkelsen’s place, Grampa Ole got the strap from the schoolmarm when he used old-country language. Because of that, the boys didn’t learn nothing but English at home. Only when their daddy would get real happy or sad did they hear the other. Sometimes he would sing to the cattle, just so he wouldn’t forget the words. But we do try to keep some of the old ways: advent calendars to count down the season, gingerbread houses to decorate with frosting snow, prickly green pine trees with popcorn and cranberry strings, and red-and-white Christmas stockings hung by the fireplace.
After all the krube is moulded — all the balls stacked on the counter, waiting for their turn in the boiling salty water — Reuben, Samuel, Naomi and I start unpacking the nativity set. To prevent knocks and breaks, each piece is wrapped in paper towels from the kitchen and then wrapped again in last year’s gift-wrap. Most every year, though, somebody comes out worse for wear. Unwrapped from his cinnamon-and-pine-smelling shroud, one of the wise men, the black-faced one with a purple and gold hat, is missing a part. He went in the box last year whole, but while he was buried, his hand must have offended him. I dig down deep in the box to find his missing part; in the far corner, mixed amongst a little pile of mouse droppings, his broken hand clutches his tiny, shiny gift. Reuben’s got the crazy glue, so we start to mend him best we can.
Between gold, frankincense and myrrh, I know most about myrrh because of my library project at school. Last week before Christmas vacation, we all got to pick a topic to read about and then write a report. Since I like to sing ‘We Three Kings’, I picked myrrh, and I now decide that that’s what this black-faced king’s hand is holding. It’s most like the syrup we get from boiling sugar maple sap; myrrh comes from the blood of trees. Sap flows from cracks in the bark, from the wounds of the tree. It is scent and it is holy; it is never just given away. Myrrh is more than perfume: it can heal cracks in the mouth and in the skin. I don’t know why this king brought myrrh to a baby — I suppose Jesus’ momma might have had need of it.
But the library book didn’t stop there; it went back even beyond Bible times. There was a story of a sad girl, Myrrha, who ran away from her daddy. She didn’t want to live and she didn’t want to die. She turned into a tree. Nine months later, the girl-tree split open and a baby was inside; from the wound of the tree, the momma’s myrrh tears dripped down and bathed her baby. It was a most confusing story, but I understood the end: like any wild creature — bird, wolf or other — the momma scented her baby so she could find him later. It seems that in all these old-time stories — Greek, Ojibway or whatever — something is always changing shape. I read other stories in the book: hands being chopped off because of apple trees; beautiful dresses made of the sun, moon and stars; young girls swallowed by the earth and being pulled by the hair. These things were a mystery and some were unspeakable: ice storms, bloody water and ashy smoke. These stories must be why Samuel and Naomi aren’t allowed to read just any book at the school library. I read them, though, and at night I see them again in my dreams.
We have mended the king best we can and set him with the others around the nativity; you’d have to look mighty close to see he’s been broken. Taking turns, one by one, we alway
s put everything in the exact same place: Mary and Joseph, shepherds and sheep, cow and donkey, star and angel, and, finally, baby Jesus in the manger. We scatter hay and cottony snow over the scene. I can smell the roasted turkey and ham, and Grandma is calling from the kitchen; dinner is all perfect and set. The fireplace is roaring with heat, the gifts are under the tree, and the table is packed with food. We are together, all warm and safe. Now, we are ready to start.
Dinner is over and yellow ladybugs plop off the ceiling fan into the leftover mashed potatoes. The bugs are everywhere this winter, in the cupboards and beds and bathtub, and they stink when you squish them on the linoleum. Aunt Gloria says they have to watch the nursery babies close: when the little girls aren’t eating the bugs, the little boys are pushing their spotted backs to try and make them spin or play music. Mom and Aunt Gloria are scraping and stacking dishes, finishing Christmas lunch, while the men and kids are relaxing with Grandma near the tree. Daddy brought in a beautiful pine for Grandma’s tree: taller than I am with short, sharp, grey-green needles. It smells like a forest. Later, after we open a present each — mostly socks and sweaters — we’ll head to church for carols and communion.
We hear it before we see it, Uncle Peter’s fancy truck crunching slow down the driveway. As he parks outside the kitchen window, the overgrown branches of the evergreens planted near the turnaround stretch and catch the canopy of his pick-up. Green needles break onto the snow and ice crusted across the windshield; he’s only cleared enough window to be able to drive over the hill. The passenger side is dark and bare. Grandma is sitting with Uncle Ingwald by the wood fire, watching the empty bird feeders out the window. She moves her chin down and then looks out through the glass again, pretending the truck in the drive didn’t disturb the birds. The snowbirds flew up into the trees, but eventually they’ll come back down again.
