by Amy Espeseth
‘Hockey practice. Took one in the face.’ Samuel is mouthful and proud about the puck; it means he had some time as goalie, his great plan to become popular at school.
It won’t work. He’s too bad for the Mennonites and too good for the normals. And the Fundamentalist and Baptist kids know him too well already; his spark is wearing out. Samuel is wedged halfway between heaven and hell: he is stuck in high school.
I am eating my warm bread, and Grandma is spreading honey on the piece cut for Naomi. The girl won’t eat crusts, so they have been trimmed and piled on the wooden breadboard. Samuel’s half-tooth reminds me of a girl from Iowa who visited our Sunday school last summer. Someone’s cousin, she had a black smear in the blue of her eye. I kept risking glances at her, trying to figure what was strange, what was broken. And she saw me. She fixed me with a stare straight from both eyes, smeared and plain: I can see you looking. But she didn’t take it hard or none. She told me about being little and the cat claw and the prayers of the righteous. She lived it all as testimony, and that’s how I took it. Samuel’s tooth is just the same. I sneak looks at Samuel, trying to look deep enough to see the brokenness in him. Trying to tell if he is too far gone to ever come right again.
Naomi has finished her bread and has plopped down next to Grandma. Side by side on the living-room couch, they are reading an old seed magazine and making grand plans for the garden. Grandma is anxious to get to the dirt this spring; she rubs her hands together, crepey skin smoothing like mud wet from early rains. Naomi’s honeyed hands stick to each page as they pick tomato and radish and squash. I pile the plates in the hot soapy water in the sink. Samuel strokes his tooth lightly with his thumb. Grandma sees rows of geraniums and pansies. Naomi don’t want to go home.
What I don’t understand is how you can grow mushrooms and raspberries out of the same dirt, water and air. No one planted them there, but they still spring up alongside the old horse path. Even with seeds: who tells the seed what to become? Take a handful of pumpkin seeds and a handful of cucumber seeds and plant them in the garden. It takes faith. A body must have faith in the seed and faith in the rain and faith in the sun. Once the spindly sprouts shoot through the soil, it is hard at first to tell what you sowed. The green vines are hairy and curly both; it ain’t until the flowers lose their bloom and the fruit begins to form that I can tell what’s what. A more experienced gardener must know right away, but I haven’t seen too many seasons of planting or harvest. I guess I’ll learn more along the way.
Wrapped in a pink crocheted blanket, Naomi and Grandma are purring together like cats. I watch them from the kitchen, the way they hold their heads near and smile, always sharing some secret. I wipe my hands on a dishtowel and lean in the doorway.
Naomi is blooming like there is no stopping her. Honestly, she has been sick to her stomach and pretty tired, but the Lord has granted her an easy way. Other than peeing all the time and being a bit teary and crabby, she is still my Naomi. Her face is pink and shiny; Grandma just said that Naomi ‘glows with the love of the Lord’. I felt like growling and saying that her breasts must be full of the love of the Lord too, because they sure are getting swelled up fast. Naomi lifted her shirt and showed me before, so I know. For all her spiritual gifts, Grandma sure is missing something right now. Can’t she tell that there are two souls dwelling in the little brown girl settled on her lap? Can’t she see the work of the Lord? It is right before her eyes, but she has not eyes to see.
Jesus taught this about the kingdom of God: all man can do is scatter seeds on the ground; the work is done — seeds sprouting and growing — while he sleeps or toils, just the same. Alone, the soil generates the grain; we don’t know how, how it grows from seed to stalk to head then kernel. When the grain ripens, he reaps it with the sickle. Man doesn’t grow the grain, but he cuts it when the harvest has come.
23
MY EYES SEEM LIKE THEY’VE LOST THEIR COLOUR. IT’S NOT like the blue has drained from them, but that I now live in a black-and-white world. We got about six inches of snow last night, and she’s still blowing out there this morning. The dark pines are weighed down with thick, heavy snow, and I think that some of the boughs might even break. Naomi and I are looking out Grandma’s front window watching the white come down; although Samuel went home when Gloria came by in the van, we stayed the night. The fire was too warm to leave. Winter is already too long, and we’ve all got months to go yet.
With my missing colour, I also miss birds: feathers swooping, beaks chittering, tiny feet hopping about. It’s not like they’ve all gone south. The downy and red-bellied woodpeckers are still hammering the trees, and there are quite a few black-capped chickadees scratching at the sunflower seeds on the ground underneath Grandma’s feeders. But we haven’t seen a mourning dove nor heard their low coo coo since their hunting season in September. Reuben and Samuel took a few beside the barn, but when they brought them in to Grandma, she wouldn’t help the boys cook them up. It was sad to see their floppy necks hanging down the side of their fluffy, smoky feathers; limp and dead, they looked so small and not even worth eating.
Not all the winter birds are shades of grey and black. Last year, Grandma’s tree was blessed with a pair of cardinals; the lady was a brownish-red smudge, but the male could take your breath. He was a beauty against the snow with his deep-red chest puffed against the cold. He would lift his pointed cap high as his black-lined eyes held a steady gaze. They haven’t come back this year, though, and the feeders are too close to the house to pull in the pheasants, so this winter we’re stuck with only blue and black on white on snow: blue jay.
We come by our love of birds honestly; Grandma gave it to us in her blood. Sitting on hardback chairs, side by side, Naomi and me keep watching those birds pecking at the snow. They make tiny tracks with their cold feet.
I wouldn’t shoot one, but I sure wouldn’t feed one neither. I just can’t bring myself to like blue jays. With their bright blue feathers lined with black and white, any beauty they bring to winter is rubbed out by my memories of the pain they bring to spring. I’ve seen one steal a mourning dove’s nest, peck out the eggs, and then lay her own eggs in the spaces left by the dead. Blue jay mommas will munch on newly hatched robins; blue jay daddies will rip up mice and frogs to take back to his naked, blind babies. He is a thief, and he is a liar: his voice can pretend to be a hawk or a killdeer. Around the blue jay, you can’t trust even your own ears.
There must be a special kind of cruelness that pushes a body to kill a baby; to crush a helpless egg is beneath even an animal. What kind of mother can crunch through a damp, downy chick and then fly back to her brood?
‘What kind of mother will I be?’ Naomi is smearing the window with her hand, trying to clear the fog.
I place my hand on her swollen belly, hidden below her thick sweater. Her stomach is stretched tight, bloated like a new bruise forming underneath the skin. My finger traces the shadowy line falling from her belly button into her skirt. I’ve got to convince her.
‘Don’t worry, girl; you will not be a mother. I believe God’s Word, Naomi, and God’s Word says that He loves us. What kind of Father would He be, if you were made to become a mother?’
I don’t tell her that I wonder too: what kind of mother can she be?
When I am a mother, I will be a killdeer. My nest will be a slight dip in the gravel; my mottled eggs will be still and silent as stones. My babies will be born on their feet, eyes wide open, prepared to fight. My chicks will hatch covered with black-and-white feathers; our wings are ready to fly. No soul can come near my nest. I will scream my name and lure danger away, dragging a wounded wing: kildeeah, kildeeah! Maybe I don’t so much miss colour in winter; maybe I miss sound.
It would be better to drown like a worm in a mud puddle than to put a child to sinning. I’d rather have stumps instead of hands or feet than burn forever in hell. Blindness to the streets of gold in heaven wo
uld be better than seeing the lake of fire. Worms will live forever in hell; they won’t fear drowning there. We all — the saved and unsaved alike — will be salted with fire. Once we lose our saltiness, can we be made salty again? We must stay salty but remain at peace.
Naomi is crying again. She never used to cry. She has chewed her nails down to ragged nubs; she has scratched at her face, scraping down any bump, pimple or otherwise, flat as a scab. She needs me so. Gently, I wrap my arms around my girl and hold her close. I have to be so careful with Naomi. She is like a robin’s egg I found on the ground last spring: pale, fragile and broken.
24
JANUARY, EVEN AT THE WAILING MONTH’S END, AIN’T EVEN close to spring. In Wisconsin, the winter has scarcely taken hold. Sometimes, especially in the dark low times of the night, I warm myself by thinking on things of spring. Tonight I lay in my bed, nothing but dark through the window, while the wind moves and moans outside.
Last year during calving, I helped with a cow. Straining with pain, on her knees, the black-coal-spotted Holstein was all torn up. She just couldn’t hold. Daddy was helping Turgeson with the stuck calf. The chains rattled. I held the spotlight from the corner of their old barn and listened.
‘Least it’s out.’
And it was: fresh, filthy with blood. I couldn’t hear if there were breaths beyond the men. Maybe it lived; maybe it died. The calf lay silent when we left the barn.
Springtime makes nothing willing to wait. Before it’s hardly warm enough, yellow-stain dandelion heads push through mud to struggle for sun. The petals scrape new through the dampness. Dandelions are just a weed, but they get anxious too. Like fresh-born garter snakes, green-striped and only just strong enough to move, the fierce babies break out of their mothers. She has carried them all winter, deep inside and near her pumping heart, to keep them warm and safe in their eggs. They break their shells inside her and wriggle away. She is left with the abandoned ragged membranes. When I put my heart inside her emptiness, I know she don’t regret carrying them — the extra struggle for warmth and food and safety even in the season of least — but she fears for them on their own. Always, there are hawks and owls and ravens.
I put my heart inside the animals and even inside the ground. When the world presses too hard, I don’t press back; I fly apart. By the Holy Spirit, I move beneath their outsides and push within them.
In earliest thaw, the river can’t decide if it is winter or spring. Some days, the white-cloudy river ice’ll be only just thick enough to hold a skinny deer drinking, away from the shoreline; other days the ice will be thawing, cracking up, slow floating toward the edges. But then the same rains that melt the ice will refreeze it thicker. It is a confusion that I cannot sort even from within the current. The water has outgrown its home; it is fighting the ice. The changing seasons will bring blessed release. But the river will not wait; it always pushes, especially in spring.
These are secret things, and they are sacred. We are to go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. In the name of Jesus, signs and wonders will accompany us: we will drive out demons, speak in new tongues, take up venomous snakes and swallow poison. Our fingers will not be blackened by the fangs, nor our tongues by the deadly drink. Instead, we will lay hands on the sick and they will be healed; we will call out praise to the Saviour with our mouths.
My people don’t know about my travelling, my minutes and hours inside the dirt and clouds. It is my sign and wonder alone. Even Grandma and Mom and Naomi don’t know. If they knew, it may not be called holy. But it might.
Come May, when spring finally arrives in the northwoods, I will be waiting.
After the thaw, the spring flows will fill the streams and rivers and lakes until the lost water is brought home. The water will be cold, clear and icy. In the lakes, the walleye will swim shallow in the weeds and the peepers will be peeping in the mud. Swimming the shallows to spawn, the crappie can be found in the weedy bays and in the bulrushes. Deeper water hides the largemouth and smallmouth bass. Muskie, too, will be spawning in the deep lakes, the clear lakes full of cold water. But the panfish will swim in the warmer water and the bluegill will be nesting. Trout will be swimming the rivers, gorging themselves on the hatching insects. Some larvae survive only seconds.
When the spring is late in coming, when it is cold even into the last days of May, the birds and the flowers and the trees are late as well. The songbirds and warblers do not fly north soon enough, and we wait up here while they wait down south in the warmer trees. The birds linger for the better winds. The late spring slows the blooming of the flowers but it also slows their death. The flowers and trees delay for rain and sun; they hold tight their buds. But once it happens — the rain and heat and wind combining to crack open all those waiting — the music that happens is spring. Mosquitoes buzz, frogs chorus, and toads trill their happiness. Spring peepers peep.
More than the trout and walleye and more than the crappie and bluegill swim in our waters. The thaw ain’t just the shiny fish, gleaming bronze or brass or silver in the sun. The thaw ain’t just the muskellunge and sauger, all sharp fins and teeth. In these waters are creatures that can’t be believed until they’re seen. Although I’ve moved my heart inside many of the fish — seeing the larvae hatch in the moaning weeds and hearing the flies’ buzzy dance on the filmy water — I now choose different where I can.
Today I can, because I feel her down deep in the mud beneath the water, underneath the January ice. The lamprey is moving softly, just rocking with the slow currents that tunnel in the muck. She is eel-like in her jawless body and gliding movement, but someway remains a fish with only dorsal fins slid low along her back. And she too is dreaming of spring.
Once we attach, all our anxious thoughts peel off like scales. Until this host is empty, we — the lamprey and I — have all we want. Complete, without need of smell or sight or sound, we are whole. Touch and taste brought us to this host: a plump, mature walleye, she must be near two foot long. With our bony tongue, we rasp a hole into the side of the host; she feels it, we can’t pretend she don’t. Then our teeth bore into and past the scales and sharply sink into her flesh. We — the lamprey and what is me but is not Ruth — are a funnel of sucking and biting teeth. Our teeth circle without end.
But it is not only need that brings the lamprey to the walleye, and it is not only greed that shifts life from one to the other; it is more like admiration or even love. And it is more than a little jealousy. It ain’t her pointed teeth, funny cones protruding from a gaping, low-slung jaw. It ain’t her splotchy olive-yellow top, blotched with black, or her white belly. Not even her rough scales with biting ridges or the cutting bones that guard her gills are what the lamprey envies. We envy the eyes of the walleye.
Rolling in the sockets, the eyes can only just be held. The marbles flash silver, guiding the walleye to the dim and deep water during the bright day and to the shallow shoals and weedy bays during the night. Given muddy water or cloudy skies, the fish will risk the light, but glare usually keeps her deep in the dark water. And in spring, when the flowages break up the ice, the walleye bite will last as long as the cool weather does, as long as summer is willing to wait. The walleye feeds and thrashes and feeds again. She prepares for the spawn.
And the lamprey and I are with her, the walleye, as she swims where she needs to go. We trail alongside her like a streaming coil, but straight in our body. We drain her. She swims to a sloping gravel bottom along the river’s rocky shoreline. There they wait for her: fish with dorsal fins glinting metal in the sun. She blinks; the shine, at first, hurts her eyes. She is weary, already, with her burden: us and the eggs. The males approach, pushing us backwards by her nose. There are many of them, seven, and the male walleyes rush around her and tangle themselves with us; we struggle to hold our place. The water is a snarl of fish and
fin and lamprey. Pushed and prodded on all sides, the female walleye is finally satisfied with the labour and turns on her side. She lays her eggs and the males discharge their milt; it is over and we all, God-like, swim away. It is days until the female dies and the lamprey and I release. It is weeks until the eggs hatch; it is a cold spring. I come back to winter where the lamprey lies in mud.
Knowing what I know now — since the lamprey and our spring dreaming — I will not swim inside walleye. I can, if I want to, but I don’t and I won’t. Sometimes, even I know when to leave well enough alone.
25
ROLLING OVER, MY SLEEVE CATCHES AGAINST THE FROST ON the window aside my bunk bed, but the glass glows silver. The frost glazes the panes both inside and out, and the snowflake pattern is now traced in sharp gold. It must still be darkest night, but I feel someone call my name. If we are deep in night, why is the icy window turning gold?
‘Ruth. Ruth?’
I hear the call again but am more awake now. I reckon I’m not being chosen, so I don’t answer with here I am; you called me nor speak, Lord, for your servant is listening, but I answer just the same. ‘Yes, Mom?’
‘Ruth, get out of bed and come downstairs. Turgeson’s barn is burning.’
I struggle out of bed and try to wake up, but I can’t seem to put my clothes on right. I can hear Mom rushing through the house, pulling on her jacket and boots. The door between the kitchen and the garage opens and shuts: she’s starting the truck. The woman won’t wait forever.
When I open the door and climb inside the vehicle, Mom is wiping the fog from the inside of the windshield.
