Sufficient Grace (30 page)

These are things I hear, though not things I've seen, and I'm beginning to appreciate the difference. I'm starting to wonder about some of the things I hear and have heard, and I might not believe anything anymore unless I've held it in my own hands. Even then, I might decide not to believe that it is true.

At the parsonage stop, Naomi and Samuel climb on the bus. She is pale and shivering, but she slides in next to me, by the window, like always. I meet her smile with a smile, just like always; she is a true friend to me.

Samuel slinks all slow into a seat across the way. His curls are squashed under a camouflage hunting cap. He is sucking on an orange, hurrying its thaw after it froze during the wait for the bus.

We drive on and pick up more regular kids at all the regular stops. Under a highway bridge, I feel the temperature drop in the shadow. No sun can sneak through and warm what is beneath a bridge; under a bridge, a river might never melt. A cold shudder snakes through my body, and I watch as Naomi melts the window frost with the side of her hand. She melts bear paws, dog tracks and baby feet.

Deep in the woods, in the bramble near the rivers without bridges, the beautiful wild turkeys are strutting and gobbling. Come spring, the hunters will be out, camouflaged head to toe, settled dead still in their blinds waiting. They lure the brown-black jakes and toms, clucking and purring, trying to call them in close enough to fire. Only their eyes show, the men lingering in the branches. They cover their clammy, white faces so the wild turkeys won't spook; they cover their frozen, red hands so the wild turkey hunters won't shoot. Turkeys can see colour, and folks fire quick at blue, red or white. More than one empty-handed hunter has come home, or didn't ever come home, because of a shotgun blast straight into his face or chest.

We are what we are, and always will be.
No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.
Look and see and know: figs don't come from thornbushes and grapes don't come from briars.
The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.
Good or evil, it is there in the tree; good or evil, it pushes out the same.

I want to be like the happy girls — the Indian girls with long black braids and the normal girls with stubby ponytails — holding hands and skipping toward the school. I want to sing, laugh and sometimes pray. Naomi, Reuben, Samuel and I could look the same as everyone else on the bus. We walk, talk and sleep like everyone else.

My boot catches on the edge of the bus's stairs, and I fall onto the concrete and bite my lip. I am okay, but my lip is cracked. ‘Shit! Shit!' I say as I spit blood into the snow.

Naomi looks at me with wild eyes, afraid of my cursing. Hear me now: I am just like everyone else. Samuel grins at me, and then walks away onto the playground with one of the little kids off the bus; he is always hunting.

We are always hunting when spring comes to Failing: we shoot songbirds, chukar partridge, Canada geese, wild turkey and whatever else is within reach of our shotguns. I hope we all go pheasant hunting this year and turkey hunting too. I pray we see one of the strange, white turkeys that are rumoured to be hiding in the wild. Folks say that they are escapees from the sheds, albinos or half-breed wild turkeys. But I know that the ghost turkeys are spirit birds with beady pink eyes and sharp claws who hunt the hunters. The pure-white wild turkeys wait for a boy with blood-red hands to stalk them through their woods. Then, the spirits will tell the other hunters to fire. We should be out in the woods; we need to be out amongst the good trees. Our hands might redden with cold, but we will be safe; we will be safe under the shadow of the Lord's outstretched wings.

At recess, Naomi walks slow to our spot. Away from the regular kids, we hide near the elementary school playground. We've sat on these swings a thousand times, pushing back and forth, pumping our legs toward the sky. We've swung and sat and sung, day after day, racing our hymns into the sky. But today, she is dragging her boots along the ground, leaving a long trail behind her that looks like a limp. It is one of those bright sunshine days that make a body think it's spring. The ice is shining and sparkling but dripping, trying to reflect light while it still can, while it can still keep itself together. But there is a darkness on her. Naomi finally makes it, slumps down on the leather seat farthest from me and holds tight to the chains. She keeps her feet on the mud and doesn't swing.

When she waits like this, it makes me mad. She wants me to ask, but I won't. Naomi can pink-lip pout and shoulder huff all she wants, but if she needs something she'll have to say. I start swinging, moving my legs hard and making the chains clank. She is chewing her nails, down to the nub again; as the swing set sways, she gnaws the corner of her thumb.

‘Ruth.'

I slow my swinging but say nothing.

‘Ruth.'

That thumb of hers — all her nails, in fact — won't look good in her Miss Failing princess wave.

‘Do you think I have a call?' She moves her legs a little now, swaying in the muck.

I slow my pumping legs and just ride the swing natural, until it stops gentle on its own accord. I put my feet on icy snow. ‘It ain't Grandma's.' And I look over at her to know that she gets my meaning.

If she's got a calling from the Lord, it's her own because she didn't inherit it from Grandma. It isn't lack of bloodline or the anointing: Naomi's our blood because we chose her and the Holy Ghost power can fall on whomever He chooses. But Grandma's mantle — what Ingwald calls down and claims for Samuel — her gifting is mine and mine alone.

This is what I used to pray against, ask the Lord to take from me. But now I know that I am an instrument in His plan, a tool for His way. I have tasted of the tree of good and evil, and still I remain. I will walk the path, but my way may not be their way. The scales have fallen from my eyes.

But she isn't claiming through Grandma.

‘I've healed myself.' She looks over at me and nods toward her skirt. ‘It's done.'

And I nod back. If she was closer, I'd take her hands in mine.

Across the swing set we stare in a hard look and agree together in prayer. The ice atop the swings is dripping water down the chains and onto my hands. It is new water, unfrozen just at this moment. It is ice that is moving for the first time. My hands are wet and shake with the cold.

Recess is over, so we head back inside.

Unless you are most near, any shadow brings cold. No comfort comes unless you push in close enough to touch. And the turkeys in the sheds can't. In the sheds it is all unblinking eyes, low murmur of cackle, feed scramble, peck peck. There is always the gouge and the peck. With the wing dragging and the torn claw — injuries that never heal — the night-day-night is endless. The trucks move in the dark, when the turkeys are alone with their blue-bulb moon.

The birds will be herded toward the truck, and onto it, and we will move forward. All of this will happen without ever being touched. Endless until the end.

35

AFTER A WEEK
OF COLD DURING A WEEK OF SCHOOL, LAST
night
the moon shone white and blue on the icy snow. But today like yesterday, the yellow sun is shining hot like spring; snow is melting into mud, ice is breaking up and the rivers have started to run. Even with the snow, March began like a lamb and is staying gentle. The sleeping animals have started their waking.

We who remain are still sitting around Grandma's table like old times past: Ingwald and Gloria, Naomi and Samuel, Dad and Mom and me. But we aren't playing cribbage or telling tales. We wait in silence. And Uncle Peter stands solid in the room.

Honeycomb ice, like that straddling the current, is not good ice. Neither is black ice: when the colour turns, that's the sign to go. Ice is as living as I am. And it speaks. The ice moves on the river and lakes, making sound as it breaks up and floats away. Taste of snowmelt in the water is a sure signal of spring. But at this moment, right at this moment, spring could stop. As small as she is, just starting, this melting season could end. Winter still touches the trees and the shadowed river with cold hands. Beneath the bridges is the last place to thaw, or it should be.

But we are a people who are ever hearing but never understanding, ever seeing but never perceiving. Our hearts are callused and hard; our eyes and ears are closed. Otherwise — if our hearts were soft — we might open our eyes and ears. Otherwise, we might see and hear and understand with our hearts, and Jesus would heal us. But the ice is unmoved: it will stay or thaw according to the season. The ice will hold or shift according to time. Weather does not care to know our hearts.

This is what Reuben was looking for at daybreak in the mud along the river: stone arrowheads, bone fishhooks, lost tackle, early wildflowers. This is what he found snagged on a tree root: an impossibly tiny baby girl, wet and bloated, but held in near-perfection by weeks in the frozen, icy river.

Reuben didn't bring it in the house. She needed to stay in the barn. And she is wrapped in my brother's hunting coat: he came back freezing with the wind screaming through his bones and the snow slicking his skin. He found her and brought her home, and then he got someone to help.

Uncle Peter called us all to Grandma's house, just told the grown-ups that it was ‘life or death'. Once we came, he took the adults one by one into the barn and showed them what the children didn't need to see, what we already knew: black hair and lashes, tiny pink hands. Peter didn't take Naomi or me, just stared at us with those hangdog eyes and then looked away. The women came back crying, and the men came back grim.

Peter hauled Samuel out there last, and they were out there a long time. When they came back, the boy's lip was bleeding.

Peter put us in the kitchen and stood beside the door, halfway between the inside of the house and the porch. He didn't take off his boots, but stood there with his big arms crossed and still wearing his cap. There is a tiny smear of blood on his forehead; he must have wiped his hand. All I was thinking was that the small things of this world are smaller — and mean more — than I would have ever thought possible.

Hummingbird eggs are like peas, and when the chicks hatch they buzz about like bumblebees. But their momma isn't much bigger: she weighs only a penny, and her wings are black and shine metal green. She sucks her nectar and sap through her straight pointy bill and she'll gobble bugs whether they're flying through the air or climbing on leaves. We sit at the table waiting for God to tell us what to do. That momma will even grab insects from a spiderweb, and then go and steal the web itself to stick together her nest. Her eggs rest in a cup made from lichen, feather and dandelion thistle. She takes fur from dogs and hair from horses; she patches it together with spiderweb.

‘Ruth!' Uncle Peter yells my name and stamps his hand against the doorframe.

And I look up from the table and see his eyes angry at me.

‘Tell them.'

And what would I tell? Who she is? They know she don't belong to my skinny arms. Do they want to know how she flew away?

‘Ruth, you can't just sit there forever.'

But there is nothing for me to say.

I think about the hummingbird and spiderweb glue holding moss and fur together. She sleeps deep and barely alive, almost frozen in the night. When she wakes, she bathes in leaves, fluttering her wings against whatever is wet and glossy and green. And she'll die fighting — struggling against a frog or a giant spider — not sliding gentle along their killing throats. There is no proof of anything but spring, and that is beyond what I could say or understand.

Gloria's hands are folded and resting on the table, and her eyes are shut. Ingwald stares at the door. Samuel is blank and still; his lip bleeds. Naomi's head rests on the table; her braids lie limp atop the tablecloth.

My parents sit squashed together; Daddy's arm wraps around Mom's shoulders.

I look Peter straight in the face and do not speak a word.

Peter shakes his head at me and at all of them, and he turns his back on us. ‘This is what you want?'

We remain silent.

Peter will not stop. ‘You know, I saw it on that boy — a darkness — the day I met him.'

Uncle Ingwald looks up. ‘Which boy are you talking about?'

‘Your boy.' Peter turns to face his brother. ‘There ain't nothing wrong with Reuben.'

‘You sure about that?' Ingwald's voice is proud and mean.

Peter's hands are fists, and his eyes are on fire. ‘Don't speak against him again. You know what I meant.'

Ingwald pushes his chair back. ‘Last I remember, there were two baby boys you set naked in the snow.'

Aunt Gloria starts to speak. Out of the corner of my narrowed eye, I see Ingwald rising up. I think he might slap his wife — or maybe Naomi or maybe me — but my daddy stills his arm. All I hear is weeping: Gloria, Mom and Naomi. All I see is Samuel: mouth shut tight, icy-blue eyes staring straight ahead.

Ingwald shakes off my daddy's hold. ‘You sure you didn't see something in the other boy beside that fire?' He points at Peter. ‘If a curse is being carried, it's Reuben carrying your blood.'