by Amy Espeseth
‘Where’s Daddy?’ I don’t barely feel awake.
‘Peter came to take him to the fire.’
‘Where’s Reuben?’ He must’ve gone with the men.
‘That’s a good question.’ Mom clicks her seatbelt into place and starts backing out of the garage. ‘I don’t know where that boy is.’
I know only enough to keep my mouth shut. I pull the seatbelt across my body and stay quiet.
Up over the hill at the Turgeson place, I can barely make out the stars as the sky is so bright. The faded-red barn lights up the sky and snow, and smoke streams out the haymow. The freezing air is cloudy with smoke and ash and whispers. Ladies from neighbouring farms, coats wrapped over their nightgowns, huddle murmuring next to their pick-ups parked alongside Turgeson’s long driveway. Each time they speak, I can see the breath leave their mouths. The men are in the yard trying to salvage what they can of the machinery near the barn. I see my daddy run toward the tractor. I don’t see my brother anywhere.
She’s starting to come down now: the barn timbers are breaking away and burning in spiralling heaps toward the ground. I can hear the rafters creaking, men yelling, and animals bellowing too. A wave of heat rushes past my face, and a smell of fiery grease, manure, burnt hair and rot runs up my nose. The cattle are burning.
Mr Turgeson, stomping past bare-chested with only slippers on his feet, tries to run back into the barn. The men catch him on his way, and I can hear him sob. He is a proud man, but most he is a farmer, and he knows each cow by name. He swears not to go back in so the men release his arms, but he takes off for the barn again. Finally, they tie him to the clothesline post with baling twine. He slumps against the pole, his hands pressed to his ears, but I know we can all hear the stock screaming.
With its foundation of hand-laid river rock and fieldstone, this barn stood when Mr Turgeson’s daddy was a boy. The same post he’s bound to now used to mark a halfway point from the house to the barn; his folks would wrap a rope from house to post to barn to make sure they’d make it out to milk in winter. Even when a blizzard blew white beyond what he could see, no man could bear to hear the Holsteins moaning from the barn due to lack of milking. Following the rope through the hip-deep snow, they held on tight to make sure they’d make it out there and to make doubly sure they’d make it back home. The post let them know, both ways, that they were halfway there.
The night slowly turns to day as sunlight comes up over the pines. The barn is now just a pile of black wood as steam and smoke rise off it to mix with the falling morning snow. My eyelashes catch snowflakes and my teeth chatter. The birds have started to make their morning sounds; they call to each other. Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? There is something here about being chosen: Job to suffer, Samuel for service. Eventually, we will all hear our names called.
There is a yearling calf, furry black on white, bleating and scrambling in circles near the muck yard; she must be all that’s left. I know the best I can do is pray, so I do.
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters; He restores my soul. He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Late morning, and the Turgeson house remains. At least the fire didn’t get her too. That big yard must’ve spared that hard silent woman being turned out in the snow, turned out to stand alone next to her man staring up at the cloudless cold sky.
Mom and I have gone home and come back. We brought sandwiches — venison sausage and cheddar — up from our house to help feed the men. The Turgeson woman takes the plate with a soundless grimace. In the dusty four-season porch, apples and kindling stacked here and there, she has made a table of an old door laid across two sawhorses; with her bony hand, she slides our sandwiches onto the peeling-paint door next to the Rice Krispie bars and two-gallon jugs of milk brought by earlier women.
She hands back the empty plate with a mumbled, ‘So’s you won’t have to come back up the hill,’ and then rushes us outdoors. When the ash settles, she is going to feed all the volunteer firefighters and helping neighbours this one time, it seems, but she ain’t going to like it more than needs be.
As the screen door slaps shut, we stand in the yard’s grimy snow, smelling smoke and gasoline. I can see the woman staring out from the shadows, porch protecting her from the wet and cold; her tight lips press together and her eyes sit blank: loving-kindness is absent from her way.
Looking at me, Mom rebukes my thoughts. ‘Ruth, we can’t weigh what others carry, but her load seems heavy enough.’
And I think about the many women Mrs Turgeson has pulled panting through labour, and the many boys and even girls she’s pulled out screaming, and my heart is heavy. I lower my head as we walk toward the truck, weaving our path amongst piles of scrap board, metal cogs and the like. The drag in Mom’s leg leaves a strange pattern in the snow, separate from the trails of the other visitors to the house. I could follow her way without watching her walk; I could cipher it just by knowing her old wounds.
It is after sunrise but before noon, in the middling part of the morning where the sky is a fogless clear blue and the sun streams bright enough to blind. I rub the back of my sleeve across the inside of the truck’s windshield to wipe away the condensation settled on the glass. While we wait for the truck to warm, we watch the work spread out across the farm. Men are raking piles of smouldering remains, tamping out any glowing embers. My daddy drives the tractor, lifting wet and freezing hay bales from the wrecked barn toward a pile near the road. Uncle Peter is there too, herding horses away from the burnt rubble to a makeshift corral fenced with what looks to be white tape. Steam loops up from the trotting horseflesh, and the same vapour marks each guiding shout that leaves the men’s mouths. Over all the waste — cinders and debris and carcass — there rise whorls of smoke and mist. The farm is a hazy battlefield.
Mom and I both jump when Uncle Peter opens the passenger-side door.
‘Hate to disturb your sleep, ladies.’ In he climbs, sweating in his shirtsleeves and sooty, but smiling just the same. He pushes his hair from his face and leaves a black swipe across his forehead and nose. ‘Run me down to the homefarm, would ya, Marie?’
And so Mom clunks the truck in gear and we back out onto the road. Caked ice in his steel-toed boots melts next to my feet as we drive down to Grandma’s. Peter’s on a mission for a battery.
‘Those horses of Turgeson’s will stay behind the tape thinking that it’s wired, but only for a time. Be better if it was more than memory keeping them within bounds.’ He reckons a spare battery in our barn might give the right current until the electricity returns.
Mom hums a little and clicks her nails on the steering wheel. ‘Electrical fault then, was it?’
Failing loses a heavy share of barns and outbuildings. Bad wiring work or hay put up too early or critters eating through the wires usually split the blame.
‘Shame to see so many head go with the barn,’ Mom adds.
Turgeson’s luck was doubly bad that the fire took when all the cows were under cover. Out in the yard, at least more would have survived. In stanchions inside the burning barn, the heat and fear must’ve been awful. Kicking hooves and rolling eyes, it would’ve been a gruesome confusion beyond my mind. To just see a calm hundred-head herd of Holsteins confounds the eye: black and white, black and white, black and white. How they know one from another, I don’t know. But to each, its friends and relations
must be as dear as ours are to us. And the spots on a Holstein are the same as fingerprints, the same as snowflakes; no two cows are exactly alike. All beasts know our own.
‘Could’ve been electrical, maybe not.’ Peter don’t know what caused the fire. He turns his head from staring out the side window, watching the road whip snow and gravel beneath our tyres, and looks aside at Mom. ‘He’ll get back up again. Turgeson’s not one to stay down.’
They share a smile as we pull into Grandma’s farmyard. Chimney smoke spirals up and away from the roof, and I can almost smell the loaves in the oven.
Uncle Peter slides out of the cab; he’ll rummage in the barn while Mom and me visit with Grandma. ‘No need to track muck through her kitchen. Give me a quarter hour and I’ll be set.’ Peter ambles toward the barn and so we gather up jackets to make the short walk to the house.
Grandma’s in a flour-covered apron and waiting at the kitchen window. She waves to us as we crunch across the yard. Her head turns as her eyes follow Peter’s path to the barn. If she were a shepherd of a hundred sheep, she’d leave the ninety-nine on the hills to try and find the one that wandered. If her boy ever returns to the Lord, she’ll be happier about his salvation than about the rest of us never going astray. But, in truth, she isn’t willing to lose any of us to the Devil.
Men’s voices raised in anger travel swiftly over the snow. Mom and I turn to see Uncle Peter pushing Samuel against the side of the barn and Reuben trying to get between. As they scuffle, a huge icicle falls from the eaves. What the boys are doing out here, I’d hate to guess. I think back to the early time when Peter prayed aside a weak fire with two puny babies; he sat there and called out, feeble and fearful, to an unknown God. Whether watching or hiding, those boys were behind the barn then and now.
Peter is waving his arms as Reuben stands between him and Samuel. The boys jump on the snowmobile and roar away, spitting dirt and slush beneath the sled’s skis. Too far away to hear, I don’t know what Peter said to the boys, what his accusation was. I only know I saw anger and fear; I saw it just as plain as I know men sweat and heat rises.
26
SHE WAS STILL IN HER ROBE WHEN HE FOUND HER. THREE days ago, Uncle Ingwald went to pick up Grandma Esther for Sunday morning service, and she was lying dead in her bed with rollers in her hair. She’s sinned; I’m real sure of that. When she was a young girl, just about my age, her mean daddy told her to take a sack of kittens and throw it in the river. She couldn’t do it, just heartless drown the mewing grey fluff-balls, so she let those kittens out before throwing the empty sack in the river.
When her daddy asked if she had obeyed, she answered true. ‘Yes, Daddy, I threw that sack in the river.’
And it wasn’t until the kittens came home that she got a whipping. Then he made her drown the kitties in the family’s cast-iron bathing tub. Grandma said that she held those babies down in the water and wept. So she has sinned in her life, but she’s been saved too. I know that to be true just the same.
I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses. And the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
She is in a box now. At the front of the sanctuary, she is in a box with so much make-up on her face it would drive her to anger and to sin anew. When my mom passed by the casket to get to the organ, she was horrified to see the colour caked on Grandma’s cheeks and settled in her wrinkles. Mom took the handkerchief straight out of Daddy’s pants pocket, spit on it and wiped most of the make-up away. Mom also put Grandma’s glasses on her face.
When I said that it just didn’t look like Grandma in that box, Mom got real stern.
‘That’s because it isn’t. That there is just a painted-up shell. Don’t let me hear you talk like one that ain’t got no hope, Ruth.’
So it ain’t Grandma up there in that box. But it is important that she don’t have too much make-up on nonetheless. It’s why I make my mom swerve around cardboard boxes in the road: I’m afraid there might be a litter of kittens in the box. So she swerves for me; she swerves for empty boxes.
He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing. And the melody that He gave to me within my heart is ringing.
Uncle Ingwald leads the service with prayers, psalms and hymns. He hasn’t broke down once, even when his brothers did. My daddy has been red-eyed and quiet-crying since Grandma died. Uncle Peter don’t even try to muffle his cries; as he pays his respects in his worn blue suit, he leans and practically throws himself on the casket. Whatever woman’s with him now has to hold him by the elbow and steer him to his pew. We grandkids are in the second-to-front pew behind the grown-ups. Reuben, Naomi, Samuel and I are squished up toward the middle aisle, and our current cousins of many colours sit dazed and staring along the rest of the row.
Against Ingwald’s strong advice and wishes, Uncle Peter dries his eyes and pulls himself together enough to speak. Steadying himself, tall and straight, he grips the edges of the wooden podium and closes the Bible resting atop it. He speaks of the totems of the Ojibway: crane, catfish, bear, marten, wolf and loon. Just sniffing slightly, he explains reindeer, rattlesnake, black duck, goose, white fish, pike, lynx, eagle, moose, sucker, sturgeon and beaver. He tells us that the rivers underground are the veins of our mother; water is her blood. She is life and fertility. She is Mother Earth, and we who are here — especially we who are native — are home. Just like Grandma Esther prophesied, Peter has come home. He has just gone further and deeper than she ever could have believed.
I’d stay in the garden with Him, though the night around me be falling. But He bids me go; through the voice of woe, His voice to me is calling.
Now it’s Uncle Ingwald’s turn to look dazed. He is trembling with anger; the little vein in his temple bulges and his nostrils flare like a heavy-breathing horse after a gallop. He steels his eyes against the room and leads us all in the Lord’s Prayer. Grandma walks in the garden now with her Lord. Her gentleness is matched by the Saviour’s touch, and she will know no pain forevermore. As for me, I think I would just run the bathtub warm. I don’t need no bag or box. Stroking them nice and holding them down, the little kitties would just drift on off to a breathless sleep, a gentle deep sleep in the warm water.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
We sit at Grandma’s house, the entire family, eating the buttered flour-dusted rolls filled with ham and turkey that the faithful brought by the dozens. Daddy’s hand rests on Reuben’s shoulder; they slouch together, almost snoozing, in the living room on the lumpy couch. My brother has pained eyes but has not cried. Mom and Aunt Gloria are busying themselves in the kitchen. From the clinks and scraping of glass, I’d hazard that they’re cleaning out the refrigerator. Ingwald and Naomi are flipping through the pages of Grandma’s calendar, reading her daily notations. There are records of the progress of her annual read through the Bible; interesting variations in the temperature and precipitation; daily sightings of bird species including number; and records of phone calls especially highlighting prayer requests and answers. Samuel sits with me near the bird window. We stay a ways apart, both from them and from each other. We watch the dirty grey snowbirds scratch beneath the feeders.
Of course Uncle Peter didn’t come in the house. He drove his woman home, along with what appears to be her children. Where he finds these creatures, no one knows. And what we do know is limited to inheritance: the woman is white and the children ain’t, so that makes none of them his, by nature anyway. Peter don’t pay no nevermind to inheritance one way or the other; those about him, he’ll care for, regardless of blood or skin. Except, it seems, his own; he’s off with them now when he should be sitting here with us. She was his momma, whether he likes it or not. His blood and skin are a match to hers and he should be here looking after his, and his inheritance, inste
ad of looking after those that got no claim.
‘There’s enough put by here to last us all five years.’ Mom is calling from the pantry off the kitchen.
Aunt Gloria is bent deep in the chest freezer, restacking, as I slide by to help take inventory. Mom is right: the pantry shelves are laden with sliced and dried apples sealed in plastic quart bags; glass jars of peaches, tomatoes and sauerkraut; and row after row of homemade pickles — some cucumber, some pepper, some beans. Paper labels tell content and date, with a couple jars collecting dust since I was born. The handwriting gets scratchier each year and the canning done from this fall is only identifiable because the names can barely be read. Grandma’s hand shook so, but she still laid by for our provision.
‘With the meat, we’ll all just take what’s ours.’ Gloria’s got the cold job: separating into plastic bags whose is whose. Store-bought from them, venison from us, and the rest — pounds and pounds of beef, practically a side of pork, and that giant shrink-wrapped turkey — from Peter. ‘You know he won’t take his. He won’t take it back. But I’ll leave it just the same.’
Grandma’s last year’s Christmas coat hangs empty on a hook near the door. My aunt is wearing the matching blue gloves she stole from the pockets. She sorts and piles carefully, making sure each bag is full of wrapped meat before reaching for an empty sack.
Naomi wanders in the kitchen, bringing Grandma’s wall calendar with her. ‘Who’s gonna feed the birds?’ Not looking up from the page, she asks of no one in particular.
Grandma sliced oranges for the orioles and smeared grape jelly on plates for the hummingbirds. She hauled seed for the little hopping birds, and shot at coon — and once, even a skinny black bear — when they tried to raid her feeders. She kept up the seed all winter; she kept an eye on it like she watched the river ice and the deer and the muskrat and the weather. She watched the beavers build, and the ice tear away. She watched that river close. Naomi don’t ask for certain from anybody; she asks this of us all.
