Sufficient Grace

Scribe Publications
SUFFICIENT GRACE

Born in rural Wisconsin, Amy Espeseth immigrated to Australia in the late 1990s and lives in Melbourne. A writer, publisher and academic, she is the recipient of the 2007 Felix Meyer Scholarship in Literature, the 2010 QUT Postgraduate Creative Writing Prize, and the 2012 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize.
Sufficient Grace
won the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056
Email: [email protected]

First published by Scribe 2012

Copyright © Amy Espeseth 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV®
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™
Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Lyrics in chapter 1 from ‘As the Deer'
Words and music by Martin J Nystrom
© Universal Music – Brentwood Benson Publishing
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Espeseth, Amy.

Sufficient Grace.

9781921942891 (e-book.)

Wisconsin–Fiction.

A823.4

www.scribepublications.com.au

For my family.
We did the best we could
.

AND THEN THEY STRING THEM UP. BRAIDED ROPES FLY UP
through the high crotches of the old birch by the shed and slide back down the trunk like nightcrawler ghosts. Daddy starts pulling on one end of the rope, each pull pushing a moist cloud of breath out his mouth into the cold blue air. Higher and higher the deer rises until his hooves are hanging level with Daddy's head. That's my brother Reuben's buck — only a yearling — but his horns'll push three inches, and it will make him legal.

Another deer rises, cutting through the sharp air along with the sun that is sending heat toward our November morning. Reuben is pulling on the end of this rope. The deer is thicker around with well-muscled thighs and rump and will make good eating. Daddy took her because she kept standing there in the snow, stupid, just staring at him in his tree.

Mine's next, and I can feel my legs quaking even inside my thick layers and crusty mud boots. I'm a little embarrassed that, even with him high up in the tree, you can still see the white spots on his hindquarters and that he ain't even half the size of Daddy's deer. But when I heard the low swift whistle from Daddy's stand, I just pulled up quick and aimed and fired, my arms quaking hard even after I shot him. I know now that Daddy meant for me to take the big doe, but I still don't know why I chose the fawn. Reuben says that I got the tag so I shouldn't be worrying; it was a blessing to draw an antlerless permit, so he was mine to take, baby or not. I was glad when Daddy took his momma too; she almost looked relieved.

Sun's not full up and three carcasses are hanging in our tree. Daddy is so proud right now, he is grinning that crooked smile. His whiskers are hanging bits of ice and frozen blood that must've splashed up during the field dress of the deer, and his teeth are tobacco stained. We look the same except I am thirteen and I am a girl. I have blonde hair past my shoulders, even features and clean skin, and that is part of the problem. When I hunt, I braid my hair back and hide it under my cap so that nobody mistakes me for a whitetail. When my daddy smiles, I can't help but smile my version of his crooked smile too.

This old birch, with her peeling white and black strips waving against the blue sky, has shot out three brown and red furry buds this fall morning. Three slabs of venison cooling in the stillness, legs spread wide and swaying in the tree. I think it's probably sacrilegious to wonder which two are the thieves, so I keep that question private to myself.
At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light and the burden of my heart rolled away. It was there by faith I received my sight, and now I am happy all the day.

Daddy says you can tell a lot about a man's heart from the way he kills a deer. First off, a body don't shoot if he ain't willing to take it all the way. A guy takes a bad shot and wounds something good, he best get himself ready for some long trails tracking. In the fading light, squinting at every broken twig and blood-smeared leaf on the path, he trudges along every step wishing he had shot her clean. Some folks around here won't track farther than the tips of their boots, but that's selfish and lazy, and in their hearts I know they know it. I'd rather crawl crackling through the leaves on the floor of the woods for eight miles, scrambling for slobber on berries and squeezing through the brambled patches where she fell, than leave one out there bleeding overnight.

So make sure you know what you are aiming to kill, shoot straight, and always finish what you started. A good shot will bring her down a few yards from your stand, and now that she's down she'll be wailing and kicking and making a ruckus like you won't believe. Most folks don't know that the thing sometimes screams a while once it's hit. They see a pretty doe nosing through their gardens and leaping like a gazelle over the ditches, but can't see that something with grace straight from heaven will fight for her life with all that she's got. And something she's got is a wailing like a sick nursing calf.

Now you got some choices. I've seen some fellas that they leave the thing kicking itself silly in a circle of leaves, bleeding to death and flailing like a child making a snow angel, while they slowly climb down out of their tree and then stand and look at it screaming. That sound pierces my heart and shocks the fear of God into me. I make doubly sure that I will be a good steward of this gift that has been given unto my body. I am thankful for both the meat and my life.

And my first deer is hanging silent in the tree now. Even early this morning, when I shot the fawn, I was not shocked at the sound coming from his mouth. I have heard that crying many times before, me waiting quiet beside my daddy shooting. When I finally got my own chance to shoot last year, I didn't see nothing, didn't even take a shot. But until I was holding the firing gun, I had never heard that death crying coming straight at me, and it scared me. I couldn't think of anything but to make the sound stop. I had heard my uncle preach about the wailing and gnashing of teeth in hell, but I had thought that that was the result of sinners' pain and was their punishment alone. I never knew that the hearing of some other's wailing and gnashing would be another punishment, yet another coal heaped upon our tongues. So, I kept shooting. I shot whatever moved: blew off the deer's front right leg at the knee, hit him again in the hips, and yet again in his baby back. I think that broke his spine, so he stopped hurting right then, and that made me happy.

Still, though, I had to wait for Daddy to come down out of his tree over the way and finish the fawn for me. Shame on me that I didn't do it myself. But I was shaking too hard to climb down the ladder of old boards nailed on the trunk of the tree that led to the ground beneath my stand. Daddy's a big believer in slitting throats; it don't waste a bullet and it's over right quick. As he walked across from his stand, though, he glanced up at me in the tree as I stood quaking. He saw that my face was wet, so he put the muzzle of his rifle to the fawn's tiny head and ended it with a bullet.

I came down from the tree and I lay the deer out on his back; the fawn's quiet face peered upwards through the tangle of tree branches that laced the sky. Even though he was barely past a year and I'm almost grown, he was about as heavy as me, so it was a bit of a struggle to manoeuvre him into a comfortable position. So little blood spilt out in the gutting. It might've looked to be more than it was as it stained the surrounding snow and soaked out through the white until, from above, me and him tangled together must've looked like the stamen of a heart-red flower. Daddy helped me with the parts I wasn't strong enough for, but he still let me guide my way through the carcass. He was mainly off to the side of me, anyway, beneath his stand carving up the fawn's momma.

Then Daddy looped ropes around the neck of the fawn so he could drag both deer together. I should've drug him myself, but I was still puffing from the excitement of shooting and the effort of cleaning him out, so I just gathered up and started carrying the rifles. That was when we heard the shots from Reuben's deer stand across the woods. We heard him fire then fire again. My brother yelled out that he'd filled his tag. Today was a good day for Rundhaugs, but maybe not so good a day for deer.

Before we headed off to find Reuben and start dragging the kill home, while Daddy was bent over his deer, I set down the guns and reached way in the pile of entrails and got my fawn's heart and liver. They were cooling down already; I could feel it. Still, they were hotter than my skin; they seemed to beat in rhythm with my pulse. I didn't have to hold them long, though; I had two square bags made of cheesecloth in my pocket, and I put each organ safely in its own little pouch. Tied with twine, they both would make it home safe and clean. I made the bags in the hope that I would get a deer, that I could give Daddy his favourite treat for supper. He'll be touched I went to the effort. Too bad that there's a hole in the heart where one of my bullets went through. There was enough left to eat, though, and I smiled a bit secretly to myself as we started to make our way home. I held and carried the organs close to my heart and pondered what small things please my father.