Sufficient Grace (6 page)

There was a cold rain last night and the temperature dipped back below freezing this morning. I take myself for a walk down the wire-lined path to check on some of my most special trees and see how they fared. I haven't walked that way for weeks; after snowfall, I usually stick to the road. But a sneaky wet like that with a sharp freeze can hurt the trees; they can lose a limb to ice or worse even. Near to the biggest plum tree — the one with the sharpest thorns in springtime but juiciest fruit in summer, plums that will just bleed down your arm from the first bite of flesh to the last suck of the pit — near to that tree I find a fawn.

But it isn't a white-spotted tan beauty curled up quiet in a nest of swirled grass. My fawn is a bleached white skeleton hooked in-between the fence wires; she is stuck tight, left behind. Rabbit fencing traces that part of the path, and when the momma jumped the fence, the baby must have tried to jump and instead ploughed straight through. Not exactly through, though; more like in, into the fence. I cry. All the way down over the hill, I cry. Seeing those white ribs tangled in the fence with only ribbons of hide and sinew still clinging to the bones, seeing that was too much for me.

I wonder on whose pain was greater, the momma who left or the baby who stayed behind. Was it hunger or wolves that ended it? And why? I most wonder why. I can barely walk for crying.

My face streaked with tears, I finally make it to Grandma's warm kitchen. I tell her I twisted my ankle in a snow-packed gopher hole, but she gets the story out of me soon enough. Out it comes with choking and heavy breathing, and at the end with hiccups. All mixed up in my mind is whether or not they were chased into the fence and how long the momma waited and if the baby kept making noises or shut its eyes or so many things that hurt to even think. Like stillness or quivering, like cold in the snow or wet in the rain? So many things I just can't know.

Grandma doesn't know neither. She pats my back and rubs my leg. I cry into her apron that smells of apples baking and vinegar too. Grandma pulls her soft hands through my hair and sings a soft hymn.

‘Take it to the Lord, my Ruthie. Take it to the Lord in prayer.'

And I do. I pray and sing a little with her when I can quiet my crying.

‘There are a many great losses in this world,' Grandma says. ‘Great losses all up and down that fence, all up and down that river. But we do our best. And when we can't do our best, we leave them to the Lord.'

Grandma's making a crazy quilt from worn-out clothes stacked in brown-paper grocery bags. She settles me down next to her in the wooden rockers near the cast-iron fire. A crocheted blanket warms my legs. As I thread needles and pile squares by colour, she sews together patches of summer dresses and unmendable coats. As we work, Grandma's hands are always moving, pulling fabric and touching my arm; like hummingbirds, they rarely settle against her soft belly.

There is a noise on the screen porch and we hear the door open and slam shut. My daddy walks straight in through the kitchen without taking off his boots or even knocking the snow clear.

His eyes are on fire. ‘What did you tell Reuben about hunting?' He stands there dripping in his work clothes, quilted flannel and worn pants.

‘Good morning, Eric.' Grandma slowly lowers her sewing and raises her gaze to meet her son's. ‘Can I give you something warm to drink?'

‘Momma, Reuben has his heart set on shooting a coyote. And trapping — the boy wanted to try for a bobcat this year, maybe a wolverine. He'll take care of the beavers so you'll get your river back.' His wheaty hair is all stuck up crossways on his head, and he is wiping grease or dirt from his thick hands.

‘I've made up my mind, son. I don't aim to harm you or Reuben. And I'm letting the boy trap this winter; Lord willing, he just might get his bobcat. But hunting on my land is over for this year. And next year, no hunting or trapping neither.'

I've never seen my daddy so angry. Looking at Grandma with almost a sneer, he is trying to find words to say.

Grandma talks before he can. ‘Not even tracking anymore. Not in my woods, no sir, not in my woods. And they are mine, until the Lord calls me home.' They are hers, the woods: the trees and the river and the animals that abide in them.

‘That's downright cruel,' Daddy says. ‘To let a wounded deer struggle through the woods and not let folks come and finish it off?' His voice is rising.

‘But I know now — I didn't always know, but I know now — that those bleeding deer are mine and my woods are mine, and it is my decision. So, no.' Grandma is set in her mind; she won't let them track no deer, wounded or otherwise, in her woods. ‘If the Lord decides to take a life, animal or otherwise, the Lord decides. And the wolves and coyotes and the other will take care of the struggling.'

Daddy laughs a mean laugh, looking in her eyes. ‘They'll take care of it alright. There ain't no blood on my hands.' And he turns on his heel to go, throwing up his arms in exasperation. ‘You know, this don't hurt the others — Ingwald and Samuel, especially not Peter — like it's going to pain me. Hell, it's going to almost kill Reuben.'

Her son has cursed to her face. Grandma lowers her eyes back to her quilt. She will say no more. Daddy stomps out of the house. The wind takes the door and slams it twice.

And so they'll talk, the neighbours and my daddy and my uncles. I say as much to Grandma without trying to stoke her anger. She isn't angry. She's too old for that.

‘They can talk all they like.'

But she came to the conclusion that she had to provide a sanctuary for the hurt and the wounded when she found that pile as Ingwald drove her home from church last Sunday. Right next to the old swimming hole where the bridge crosses the river, right where Grampa and Grandma used to swim when their boys were little, she found the pile. Heads and hooves, and some ribs with meat still sticking to them were spilling out of torn plastic bags. One head had a horn — a young spike buck, must have been — still attached with the other side torn straight off. The rest of them were does, fawns, or were missing horns: bloody holes sat burrowed in the meat and soft fur between their eyes and ears. Curled-up hooves spilt out on the riverbank and some picked-over bones lay right where she was fixing to relax and remember and look at the water. This bag of bones and skin and fur had been thrown from a passing pick-up; I can see it in my mind's eye. And now they were dumped and spilt out and picked through by scavengers, rat and vulture and coyote.

‘I made up my mind — swaying there amongst the blood and the fur and the dirt — I made up my mind.' Grandma knows what she knows.

The sins are on both sides. They are on both sides. For every buck deer that breaks a trail through the corn and eats half an ear off of each stalk, there is one of our neighbours crouching in a stand, high up in a tree, aiming at shooting it dead. For every weasel stealing silage or coon chewing crops, there is my brother setting up grip traps with steel teeth that will pinch that rodent through and through. Or worse, even worse than a beaver chewing and twisting its own foot around and around until it breaks free from a foothold trap, even worse are the drown traps. Damming up our river with sticks and mud, that beaver is just building himself a home. But when he takes the bait of a drown trap, he can't just break off his foot. It holds him deep in the water, with the green plants swaying and the fish swimming by, down deep in the water. And he can't take no breath and he can't swim up to the top. He is held beneath the water with no breath until he don't move no more. The poor muskrats, with their tiny feet and hands, they die the same.

Up and down this river, by these broken-down barns, peeling houses and crooked silos, up and down this river the sins are on both sides. Our Lord Himself is a neighbour to Himself, the Trinity holding Itself together in community: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The everlasting Trinity shows friendship and responsibility within Itself, amongst Its neighbours.

‘Ruthie, girl, are you a good neighbour not just to the beaver and the deer and your brother and your cousins, but are you a good neighbour to yourself? Are you a friend to yourself?'

It is hard. Grandma tells me these things so that I can be a good friend, a good neighbour. Many things can get in the way of being good neighbours. It might be that you weren't there in someone's time of need. Or, it might be that you were there, and now they can't hold their head up to look you in the face. Either can get in the way: shame or need. One or the other or both, it can get in the way.

There is another scraping noise on the screen porch, and I turn my head. Daddy must be back for another round. Heavy boots are clomping inside from the wind and weather into the slightly protected cold just outside the kitchen door. I crane my neck to see who is out there. Grandma does not move her eyes; they stay on the patches she is matching, each swipe of her needle pulling together the pattern.

‘Expecting company, Grandma?'

Still, she does not lift her eyes.

‘Should I go to the door and see who's there?' I hope I'm not being impertinent. My daddy would have something to say to me if Grandma gave a bad report. He can say what he wants to her, I guess, but my place is to help, not to hinder.

Grandma sighs and puts down her needle. She takes her glasses off her face and rubs them with a tissue she keeps up her sleeve. She seems to know what's waiting outside. ‘Ruth, we'll just leave that man on the porch.'

And I hear the sound of heavy things being piled on the bench outside the kitchen door. The wind sweeps a little through the house each time a new load is brought near — but not inside.

‘There you go, Momma.' And the door to the outside world swings open and stays open for a second. I hear my daddy's younger brother, my Uncle Peter, call quiet from the threshold. ‘Some nice pork there, if you like.'

With a clatter and catch in the wind, the door shuts and Grandma puts her glasses back on her face. For some time, she doesn't speak a word. She will not ask Uncle Peter inside.

Instead, we sing a little while. We sing:
What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! Oh, what peace we often forfeit; oh, what needless pain we bear. All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!

Grandma rocks a bit, back and forth, and I can hear the wood beneath her chair squeak and shuffle. She touches the thread to her tongue before threading her needle, and she tucks stray hairs into her tight grey bun. ‘You know your Uncle Peter didn't come to the Lord until he was a grown man, don't you?'

I didn't know nothing of the sort. Uncle Peter don't talk much to me; Reuben has always been his favourite. Grandma tells me that Peter didn't meet Jesus until after he came back from the navy. He had been to church with all the boys, but Peter didn't know the Lord.

He'd never made that decision. Peter — always getting attention for being the tallest and the strongest around Failing — was too busy putting up hay in the summer, playing football in the fall, and courting pretty girls year round to draw close to the Lord.

‘That was a thorn in my side from the time he was in high school, especially after, when he was out in the world. Many's the night I brought his name to the Lord in tears and in prayer.'

Uncle Ingwald had been out at Bible college for a couple years, and they hadn't seen hide nor hair of him, or even met Gloria or baby Samuel. He couldn't even afford to come home for his father's funeral, but made it home by deer season the year the church called him to pastor.

‘There was so much to do that season: we had to come to know this pale girl with blackberry eyes and tiny hands. We needed to learn to call Samuel our own, this angel child crawling across the yellow linoleum.'

Grandma was shut up in the house with Gloria while the men hunted, and they had to find their own way. My mom was homebound with chicken pox, so Grandma had to watch baby Reuben, only a few weeks old. Grandma had Reuben so long that he wouldn't even take his momma's breast when he finally came home. Our women hold each other together. And before the men even saw their first deer, Grandma and Gloria were joyfully baking and minding the babies, and lifting each other up in prayer.

‘Since my sons were born, I had fretted over their salvation and the helpmeet the Lord had chosen for each. That week in the kitchen, aprons dusted with flour, Gloria became my daughter, Samuel bloomed in my heart, and Reuben made room.'

Ingwald and my daddy hunted and brought back nothing. The disappointment and worry for winter meat was felt by all, but seemed to dig deep at Peter. ‘He wouldn't join the men hunting. Shame was what he was carrying, and it was past anything I had seen in him.'

I ask my grandma why Peter didn't hunt with the men. Why he doesn't hunt now.

‘You ask your daddy about that or — better still — you ask the man himself. Since Peter left our family, he's never really come back.'

But back then, after evening chores, Peter would leave the house and walk the fields until dark. No one knew where he went. He didn't speak in the house and refused to even touch the babies. Through this dark mood, the family held Peter up to the Lord, and slowly they began to think the cloud had passed. One night after supper, he kissed Gloria solemnly on the forehead and shook Ingwald's hand with his giant fist. He didn't say nothing to my daddy. Then, Peter walked over to Grandma where she was rocking the babies, cradled them both in those big arms, and walked straight out of the house.