Sufficient Grace (18 page)

Outside their kitchen window, I can only see blackness. I can hear the rain hitting the snow and trees and leaving a thick skin of ice dragging everything down. Tomorrow morning, there'll be broken trees and snapped electricity wires. The county will have to call out their men to do plenty of fixing. That ice can do damage, alright, but the cold don't bother me much except for when I feel it freezing my bones. I guess it is the water. The water inside of us freezes up and makes a body hurt like it is too big for its own skin. Pulling a walleye out of a frozen lake must do the same thing. That fish — mouth, lips and pointy teeth all gasping for water — must feel the opposite of freezing. He thaws in the air, drowning being outside his cold, black water. His silvery scales break about in two, and he has to use every bit of his spirit to command his body to stay together tight. He has to be like Jesus, calling the storm to rest, rebuking the wind. He has to have faith strong enough to command the winds and the water.

Naomi is sorting her closet, piling up hand-me-downs on her pretty four-poster bed; after she is done with them, I inherit her dresses and sweaters. Fancy brands and fabrics, most of the clothes come from Aunt Gloria's fancy family out in California. The sweaters are always pink or purple, being colours Naomi, her momma and other swanky folk like. I like red, but I know ladies don't wear it. Naomi points out what sweaters can be thrown in the washing machine and what can't; it makes me think rich people must be dirty. She couldn't fit another sweater in that closet edgewise, crammed as it is with hooks and plastic hangers, but still, it is kindness that makes Naomi give me what she don't need — kindness and the thick-growing middle she thinks she's hiding.

Curled up on the bed like cats, we are warm and resting amongst the wool: Naomi leans against the foot and I stretch out along the head. Her room smells of lilacs and all other purple things, and there are even flowers in the curtain pattern. I wonder aloud whether Samuel is having fun at hockey camp. When I ask, she moves her pink foot away from where it was resting by my thigh. She crosses her legs and starts unbraiding her hair. Tracing a rabbit of soft white fur sewn into my new sweater, I thank her again for the clothes.

‘Do you think Samuel has any for Reuben?'

Naomi's loud breath out tells me no.

‘Why do you always want to talk about boys? I think you have a crush on Samuel. Just shut up about him.'

That ain't fair and she knows it. I sit looking at my hands for a while. When I look up, she's got her hair all unbraided and it almost touches her waist.

‘I wish I could sit on my hair,' she says. In front of the dressing mirror, Naomi shimmies her shoulders and hips. She's been watching television, pageants again, I can tell. She's peering at the mirror as she walks slow and ladylike, eyeing her reflection above the perfume bottles and hair ribbons lined along the shelf.

Staying quiet ain't getting me nowhere. ‘I don't even like boys.' I got my sock off and I'm picking at my toenails. ‘I sure wouldn't even want to be a boy.' My chest feels tight with me wearing this silly bra my mom brought home the other day. Mom said she could see me jiggle, and I was ashamed. I must be the only thirteen-year-old with saggy enough breasts to need to wear a bra. My nipples rub against the lace, and now I'm hunching my shoulders so that Naomi can't see. Everything needs to slow down, but it is getting all mixed up in my head.

‘Do you remember when I fell through the ice, Naomi?'

Naomi's re-braiding her hair. With her hands tangled through and looping back and forth, she shakes her head no.

I ask her again if she remembers, and she looks up with mean eyes all squinting. She pouts, then nods a little as she finishes tying her hair with a shiny pink bow. Glancing in the mirror, she turns to the side and holds another rosy ribbon to one ear and then the other, pretending earrings.

‘That was so long ago. I forget things all the time, Ruth.' She wraps the ribbon around her neck and makes a pretty sash. ‘I'm forgetting this already.'

Naomi thinks she'll be Miss Failing when she is eighteen. The high school gym full of family and friends will witness her singing in the pageant, purple spotlight on her lacy dress and gospel song. Her hair will be piled up shiny and thick, and she'll smile in surprise and cry all pretty when they place that diamond crown on her head. She sees herself riding in the parade, waving from the royal seat carved in the back of a giant plastic bird. She'll reign atop Failing's Turkey Princess float, holding fake roses and catching the eye of a boy who ain't from around here.

But I know the turkey farmers pour that turkey crap in the river. I know it is drowning the fish and making folks ill. And I know — more than I know anything — no one's ever going to let Naomi forget who she is.

‘Girls, come and see.'

Uncle Ingwald is calling up to Naomi's room from the breezeway that connects their kitchen to the plywood mud room. He's never home, always in church, visiting shut-ins, or working in the shed. Something must be bad.

‘Now just you wait.' Uncle Ingwald's face is round and his cheeks are red; the scarred lines of his cheeks crinkle like frosting. His balding head is covered up with a winter-weight cowboy hat, and his eyes are shining.

It's done raining, but it sure is real cold. All of us, Aunt Gloria and prettified Naomi and plain old me, bundle up tight with jackets, scarves, hats and woollen gloves to head out to see just what has made this man come in the house. I'm worried, but seems like Ingwald aims to smile.

We follow him out to the shed, walking single file like hunters trying to limit their footprints on a path. The flashlight in his hand carves a road of light that we step into as we crunch and slip across the yard on the strange icy snow. Once we make it to the shed, Aunt Gloria reaches across the doorway to cut on the lights, but my uncle stays her hand.

‘Wait, Glory. Now I'll show you.'

And then he does. Taking the big spotlight they use for shining deer, Uncle Ingwald lights up that yard like sun. He sweeps the bright light across the yard and shows us the twinkling ice that coats the world.

‘Sugar snow.' He speaks real low.

Sugar snow it is with everything that is still standing frosted heavy with clumps of diamonds and crackled like icing. All we do is sigh and look at the beauty. When Naomi reaches over and puts her glove in my mitten, I catch her brown eyes and feel as if I might cry. And if I cried that would be all sweetness and beauty too.

‘We used to blow bubbles, didn't we, Daddy? When I was little, we used to freeze bubbles in the sky on an icy night.' Naomi's eyes shine.

Her daddy nods and reaches across to her and pulls her tight to him; since I am holding on to Naomi, I am pulled into his flannel jacket too. He smells like a man. Aunt Gloria puts her arms around us all, and we pause there together for a while.

As we turn to head in to start fixing supper, Uncle Ingwald's spotlight swings inside the shed and the light catches on ten or twenty eyes staring from the corners. In the cold air, my scared, quick breath in makes me cough. Uncle Ingwald's eyes are now wet from laughing at me and my fright.

‘Daddy.' Naomi sounds like a little girl whining. ‘Don't laugh at her when she's scared.'

And I am scared. Staring back at me from the shadowy eaves of that creaking shed are opossums clinging to branches and a fox with a pheasant dragging out of its mouth. There is a grimy muskrat and a mean-looking weasel stacked on a shelf and three old fish, maybe muskies, hanging on the wall. I got such a fright, I'm shivering in spite of myself.

Aunt Gloria tells Uncle Ingwald he better clean up his mess, and by mess she means me. I'm trying to laugh at being afraid of dusty animals covered in cobwebs. You got to expect taxidermy in a taxidermy shed, but those glass eyes just about shocked the life right out of me.

To make up for the fright, Uncle Ingwald is going to let Naomi and me help him with a pelt. Besides mounting most of the deer and other hunted animals around our neighbourhood, he also puts up fur from trapping. My daddy says that though Ingwald is home-taught and slow, he's about the best taxidermist and tanner he's ever seen. Working one or two jobs off the farm while trying to run a trap line — checking sets morning and night — a guy don't always have the time to flesh and skin out his own catch. So Uncle Ingwald takes care of it. He takes care of it right, as long as you don't mind waiting until after the Lord and the church, waiting until he gets around to it.

Lights on now, I can see animals in varying states of life all over the shed. Some new ones still got bodies, but most are pelts and parts. I know that my body is just a house for my soul, but seeing these inside-out animals with pink-grey skin stretched tight makes me wonder. Stroking my hand across a finished silky mink, I believe I'm knowing mink for the first time. Mink is soft almost to wetness, still and sleek; mink is not beady eyes and sharp teeth. There are other scalps — muskrat, weasel and skunk — stretched out on wood around the shed. Uncle Ingwald points out which animal is which as we can't always tell from the inside out. He explains while lifting up various just-come-in bodies or skins or pelts on boards.

‘You got to case the fur, pull it inside out like a sweater over your head.' He says to take the skin, slit it from one hind foot to the other and peel it back up over the head. ‘Now you got yourself a hose of skin, a cased fur. You don't case a coyote, fisher, grey or red fox, not a bobcat either. You leave them with the fur on the outside and prepare the pelt thataway.' Beavers are special too: skin them open by cutting down the underside, slit them from nose to tail.

Uncle Ingwald is happy out here in the tanning shed; he moves his arms — covered in wiry, red-blonde hair — like he does when he's really preaching. He points to chemicals in bottles on the tables, pats furry animals hanging from gambrels, and rubs a few slick skins pulled taut over fleshing beams. The fleshing beams are pointed boards that look like short skis, but skis with a strange glove of skin and fur. There is little blood, mostly skin, grey and pink skin and stripy fur. Uncle Ingwald is pulling up a soaking raccoon, and he looks mighty excited. He is known for his brain tan and is rightly proud.

‘Now what I'm rubbing into the coon, this is just a little brain tan.'

Naomi's momma don't like him cooking the cow brain in her kitchen, so he simmers it out here in a pot of water on the camp stove and then mashes it up good with an ice-fishing strainer. He likes the brain tan; it must remind him of his grandpa, Naomi's and my great-grandpa, putting up fur for neighbours.

‘Not using chemicals for this one — just like the early folk around these woods and the Indians too — just using regular oil straight from the brain. Got to rub it into the skin of this coon, then I'll wait for her to dry and start scraping and working her. I'll work her until she's snow-white and soft as a girl's cheek. Take me a while, but she'll get there.'

Naomi can do it too. She can stretch and flesh an animal, scraping off every little bit of fat and muscle without even tearing the hide. She's nowhere as quick as Uncle Ingwald, but she is practising. I watch as her black-haired arms work a tube of skin and fur and her daddy leans over and guides her with his heavy hands. His pants press hard against her back while he talks low and slow of oil glands, stripping tails, rabies and such. I watch with my glassy eyes, sometimes pretending I'm Naomi; sometimes pretending I'm Uncle Ingwald. I stay still and catch dust on my hair.

‘Don't work that section so much it gets weak.' Uncle Ingwald helps Naomi as she scrapes and cleans the skin toward the tail. ‘One little bit of fat will spoil the whole pelt.'

You got to scrape out the insides to preserve the fur. That animal is more than dead: it is empty, and this is the only way to pretend it is still alive. We all pretend together. Whether the skunk is stuffed and mounted with glass eyes and one foot raised up ready to step, or whether the pelt is soft and silky and ready to make a fur collar, we all pretend together that it is real. It will stay that way forever.

Naomi's arms are slowing; she is done for the night.

As we walk together toward the house, I worry about church in the morning. Just last Sunday, my uncle preached scary.

‘There may be corpses amongst us this morning, corpses that haven't been buried yet.'

He told us to take out what is inside. He told us to reject the pretender who seeks to destroy.

‘My eyes have seen Thy salvation. The Enemy seeks to eliminate and ignore. Woe to the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites. Do not cleanse the outside of a bowl or cup and leave the insides full of rot. Pretending is hiding behind a mask. This is not a dead, empty pulpit!'

I ain't heard of nobody from the congregation dying, but I worry about bodies waiting to be raised from the dead. Week-long funerals with no burials have caused other Full Quarter churches to split; they splintered with cousins and brothers no longer speaking, let alone praying together on Sunday. We believe in Lazarus too; we believe, but I've never heard of us leaving a body in the sanctuary until it started to stink. Seems like flies are the end of our faith.

I wonder if our pulpit is dead and silent, and if our church smells of brain tan and blood. I wonder if I will feel black, furry raccoon arms holding and protecting me in my sleep. Maybe their masked eyes will look at me brown and gentle, or blue and mean and they'll haunt me, hunting me through the night. Precious Jesus, please keep me warm and protect me from spoiling. Scrape me clean inside and make me holy. Wash me in Your blood, raise me from the dead and take me to live with You in heaven forever. Dear Jesus, all of these things are written on my heart, in Your Holy Name, amen.