Sufficient Grace (10 page)

John scratches his nose with red, gloveless hands; he wants to make the most of the weak light and make a final push through the woods his family and mine share. Daddy and Peter agree: they might as well try and not come home empty-handed. Toward the trees they walk, across the field that joins Grandma's land with Magnusson's. Up over their left shoulders they can see Magnusson's barn. The silo is painted with an American flag. There is no smoke coming from the house's chimney. Toward the woods, they are walking without talking. John walks fast with those long legs and leads the way, while Peter and my daddy bring up the rear.

John hits the fence first and scrambles through easy, even with his gun strapped across him. He pauses to lift up the top wire for Daddy as Peter reaches out to take his brother's gun. Daddy is already crouched to go through but — reminded — he straightens and turns to hand Peter his gun. Daddy bends and starts to clamber through again, and his jacket back snags on a barb. He is caught, but only by fabric, and with a rip he keeps moving. But Peter has already moved forward to hand John Daddy's gun; John holds out those cold hands, touches the wooden stock and the gun drops onto the frozen ground. Knocked off safety, the gun discharges and the bullet sings past Daddy's ear and into John's stomach.

And there is blood on the snow. John screams once only and there is blood melting the frost on the dirt. John is struggling to get up and Daddy is holding him down, flat on his back. They hear their friend holler and watch the entrails bulge. There is so much blood.

Folks say that Peter don't hunt because he killed that Magnusson boy. People talk and reckon he is a felon and the law won't let him hunt. Now he killed him, but he didn't do wrong and he wasn't charged. All the boys were guilty of being in a hurry for the hunt. Uncle Peter quit the day John Magnusson died. No more football, so no more waiting on maybe-someday college. No more killing, so no more waiting on hunting seasons. He didn't even graduate high school; instead, Peter joined the navy so he wouldn't have to handle a gun daily. When he came back from the navy — even with farm prices falling through the floor — he bought the farm off old Magnusson. The man didn't have no heir. Peter still plants corn in that field. Around and around, he rides that rusty tractor: tilling the soil, planting the seed, and cutting down the crop. He don't leave no corn for nobody.

My daddy still hunts. Maybe he can because the boy wasn't his friend or maybe because the bullet took a chance but didn't cut him. Daddy says a guy's got to learn to carry his burden and let others carry their own. Uncle Peter carries a too-heavy load. But Jesus himself will take up our infirmities; He'll carry our sorrows. That ain't something God makes His boy do, strikes Him or smites Him with our afflictions. Instead, that is Christ's own nature:
He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.

Peter can't sleep for the echoes that keep him awake at night: the sound of the shot and the sound of the fallen. And, mostly, the stillness after. Being tired is an awful thing. In autumn, we all just want to get some rest, lay down and drift off, not scared as children are. We will sleep only a little while, won't be leaves afraid to let go, won't be pumpkins fighting decay. Harvest ain't death, just means little sleep. And harvest is over; now we rest.

Hot and wet is what I feel, not pain. My palms are slippery. I am shook from Uncle Peter's story and look down at blood smeared across my hands. I was smoothing my fingers across the biting edge of the axe and almost sliced the tips. No cuts, but when I drew back my hands fast I dropped the axe and somehow sliced something. My hand is bleeding like a headless chicken, but I sure ain't running around none. I just sit on the bucket, stunned by the hard pain beating in time with my heart and the blood running down my hand. I'm still not making a sound. But he knows.

‘Damn it, girl.' Uncle Peter is wrapping a greasy rag tight around my hand quick. His voice is still low but sharper than usual. ‘Can't even keep body and soul together.' But it ain't a rebuke on me; he tries to smile while he's talking and wrapping. I know we both hear Grandma's voice echoing in our heads.

Pulled to my feet and over to the workbench, and my hand is stretched beneath the light Uncle Peter uses to tie trout lures. He unwraps the towel to see what I have done to myself. He spits on my hand and wipes gentle: the skin is sliced clean off beneath my knuckle and a big flap of meat and fat is hanging off the side of my finger. The hurt starts pounding real hard.

Uncle Peter holds his face an inch from my hand. ‘Should get some stitches, Ruthie. We got to take you to town.' He looks straight in my face. ‘You know them stitches hurt worse than the cut. I got to take you in, but you'll wish we hadn't.' He ain't been scared until just now.

I shake my head. ‘No hospital.' I don't know what stitches feel like, but I know I don't want no more metal in me. And I don't want Grandma to find out I went to town.

He nods. ‘You sure?' He angles his head at me like he's trying to gauge my pain. ‘This is your choice, girl. I'm not about to make it for you.'

And I look at my hand and I think of the blood. ‘No hospital.'

Uncle Peter reaches beneath the bench and gets a shoebox holding aspirin, little scissors, needles, fishing line and duct tape. I hold my breath and look at the ceiling, the spiderwebs and nests and dark. He doesn't use the needles though, just wraps it tight with gauze, putting it all back in place.

Grandma was a stickler about not needing no doctors interfering with her boys' salvation. Growing up on a dirt farm, the boys had their share of knocks and bumps, but none was ever brought to — or born in, for that matter — a hospital. Grandma says Uncle Ingwald survived to be a man of God only by the grace of God. He had been scalded with boiling potato water as a baby, torn away half his ear lobe, and caught an exploding canning jar with his face all before the age of sixteen. Even being the youngest, Daddy barely made it, being sickly since birth and coming down hard with scarlet fever as a baby. When he was six, my daddy's belly button swelled up and seemed like it wanted to pop right out of him, but Grandma and Grampa just wrapped cheesecloth around Daddy's middle and prayed and fasted every day for a week until the infection passed. Uncle Peter had more of a safe passage through life. He came off the farm to enlist in the navy without a single scar and the Lord continues to watch his way for him whether Peter likes it or not. Grandma remembers everyone's trials.

The scarless man works almost silently, just making a soothing sound now and again. Near my hand, Peter's face is soft and almost clean; a few wood shavings cling to the sweat in the crinkles by his eyes. I can hear him breathe, slow and deep.

When he finishes the final wrap with duct tape, he breaks the quiet. ‘There. And it will heal flat.' He winks and smiles his own crooked smile.

And I know that scar won't bother me none neither. It will lie flat beneath my wedding ring. On the day of my marriage, I'll be doubly glad to be a bride.

9

A WORN MAP
OF ALASKA
,
EDGES TATTERED AND CREASES WORN
, hangs on the cement wall behind the canning jars in our basement. Amongst the dusty put-up tomatoes and the pickled beans and cucumbers, I can trace the path my daddy took when he went to the frontier. Daddy says he was hunting moose and tracking caribou. Grandma says he was shirking duty, making his family care for his abandoned wife while he was off avoiding God and his child. Mom won't say nothing except that Daddy was the first to hold Reuben in his arms. He didn't go right away: he lost a month of hunting to make sure Mom could manage on her own; some men wouldn't have had that patience. Even though Daddy was gone in Alaska for over three months, at least he waited for the boy to be born. With my finger, I can almost reach to trace the path he walked so long ago with a heavy pack and heart. Mountains of tall trees and snow, giant grizzlies and salmon, Daddy's Alaska was a free place, undiscovered and lawless.

Swinging the maul hard and fast, that grown baby is splitting wood outside. Through the high basement window, Reuben's steel-capped boots are level with Daddy's head. I can hear the rhythm of his work: wrestle the log onto the stump, raise the maul and hit and split, kick aside the pieces that fall right and left to the ground. The snow is covered with bark and wood. After Reuben gets so far ahead he runs out of space to split, he knocks on the window and Daddy pulls the glass away. I back out of the wood room fashioned from the plywood sectioning the basement, and in comes the wood. Reuben pitches it down the window chute in front of the neat woodpile, and Daddy starts to stack.

I want to wait until Reuben is done throwing the wood; I don't need a log to the head. Lingering over by the canning jars, I swing open the door to the meat freezer. Heaped inside the freezer are square and other angled packages wrapped in butcher's paper. Some are labelled with my daddy's crimped writing:
Polish sausage, venison steak, ground venison.
But most packages bear Uncle Peter's hand; they say
ground beef, blade steak, prime rib
and the like. Uncle Peter gave us almost half a cow this year. Daddy's mouth turned down and he wiped his head with his hand like he didn't want charity, so Uncle Peter said it was to pay Reuben for keeping
the varmints down with his trap line. Frozen strawberries and freezer-jam berries are piled in flat plastic bags along the top shelf of the freezer. I like them even before they thaw.

‘Ruth, you down here to stack or watch?' Daddy's voice is a bit of a growl, and he is holding his back right where his jeans hitch up at his belt.

He knows I don't like to stack wood: it is dusty and dirty and the bark tears at my hands. Most of all, I don't want to be not looking — bending over concentrating on piling wood neat and tight in the corners — and take a flying lump of birch in the face. He ain't joking, so I push out my breath in a bit of a huff and start my way toward the wood. I climb across boxes of broken toys and worn clothes, Christmas decorations and tinsel, and photographs sketching our family from black-and-white to Polaroid. Next to a smushed cardboard box of deer antlers, a broken bike that should be in the shed is tangled across a collection of
National Geographic
and some westerns that Daddy bought at a garage sale. He knows the story behind each of the antlers, but I doubt he's gotten through the stories in the magazines and books. Neither science nor adventure would be the type of reading material he'd want the family to know about, so he must read them down here on the sly.

Daddy hides down here. But he don't waste time: there is an oil stain on the floor where he reconditioned a carburettor, and he used to butcher deer on the table before Mom made him move the whole operation to Grandma's barn. The basement is his, from the stacked ten-gallon buckets to the orange or camouflage hunting clothes hanging on the rack. There are new and old feed hats dangling off nails, machinery calendars featuring tractors and combines on the walls, and canning lids screwed to boards with the glass jars beneath hanging full of spare nuts and bolts.

In summer he hides more behind the barn, over by the rhubarb pile where his coon dogs lived before I was born. He chews tobacco out there — resting on an upturned bucket unsnarling fishing line and the like — and he thinks we don't see. But in winter, the house needs the heat and he needs to keep that wood boiler fed, so he hides most in the basement.

‘Ruth? You got something better to do?'

Now I'm at the end of his patience. That's how it is with my daddy. Something can sit there for a month — maybe a book on a chair in the kitchen — and not make him mad. Then he'll tell you to move it, and if you don't jump before the words have left his mouth, no youth group for you. Reuben is splitting again, so I'm alright to stack and I start bending and grabbing. Gathering up the wood into my arms makes my sweater dirty. The basement is musty and I reckon there is mould down here in the dark corners, probably growing under the stairway that's missing all the backs of the stairs. There must be mould in that dark and dank place, mould in amongst the eyes that glow when I imagine the basement at night.

Thinking about those eyes, I find the nest: a tangle of dog hair, mattress stuffing and must-have-been newspaper. There is a round mess made in the wood we stacked in the late summer. My favourite part of laying in wood has always been finding the mice: snuggled together in a mess of grass and fur, the tiny pink babies have needle claws and bulgy eyes. Since I was little, my daddy would let me pick through the nest to see the pink, hairless babies and stroke them light with my finger. After I was done petting them, he'd walk me up along the path to Grandma's house to where the gopher lives. Since their momma abandoned them — and because we tore up their home — we'd drop the baby mice into the gopher hole so that he could adopt them. A couple years ago, it hurt my heart when I realised that those babies were chewed rather than loved. But remembering that walk with Daddy — him stopping to pick the wild strawberries that grow along the path, holding out the best for me, still warm from the sun — touches my heart too.