by Amy Espeseth
4
IT TOOK HALF OF SATURDAY TO CONVINCE NAOMI TO COME UP into the haymow with us. Reuben and Samuel go up all the time and are always building big forts from the hay bales stacked up there. It’s a warm day for November, and we are out in the yard without even hats, so I wanted to go up and build me a fort too. Seems like Naomi ain’t any fun anymore and always wants to be acting like she’s sixteen or something. But she’s more baby thirteen than I am, so I’m not buying her lady act. Soon she’ll be pretending to ride her horse sidesaddle like the black-and-white pictures of a little girl Grandma on her way to church.
It’s only the top of Grandma’s barn, anyway, and usually there’s swallows swooping in and out all the time, and it’s fun. Through the old milking parlour door, we have to squeeze around a broken-down tractor, step by rusty pipes and cracked buckets, and pass through clingy spiderwebs to get to the ladder that leads to the haymow. We have to jump up a little from the floor to catch the first iron rung, pull up to the next rung, and then keep going until our heads pop through the floor of the barn’s attic. The hole in the floor looks like it won’t fit even me through, and I’m the runt of the litter. Even being two years younger than Samuel, Reuben’s bigger by almost half. I can’t believe either of them will fit. But, lo and behold, Reuben squeezes his way and Samuel shimmies through just fine. Part of the wood must be rotten, because slivers slough off the boards when Samuel’s knees scrape against them.
I want to go up next, but Naomi is being a girl again, kinda whimpering over and over like it’s a memory verse.
‘I don’t want to go up there. It’s dark and dirty and scary. I don’t want to go up there.’
This is annoying me to no end, so I decide that she’s the next one up. I reach over and pull the hem on her thin, pink pants and use my stern momma voice. ‘You shouldn’t wore cotton pants, Naomi. You’re going to get all scratched up. It’ll look like you’ve wrestled a bobcat.’
She gets herself a good grip on the bottom rung and I give her a boost from behind. Grabbing her legs and bottom like this, I touch all over Naomi and think that I better have a talk with her once we build ourselves our own hay fort.
Samuel’s yelling now. ‘Get up here, you chickens! Reuben’s killing himself a snake!’
I’m not missing that for nothing — the snake, anyway — so I give Naomi’s hind end another sharp push and, with a whimper, she scrambles up through into the haymow.
Dust and chaff and old, old dirt has been falling into my eyes while I was shoving Naomi up. I run the bottom of my t-shirt across my face to kinda clear things up a bit. Outside, the clouds must have shifted: when I look up through the floor hole again, shafts of sunlight stream down at me. Dust mites and fine-sieved bird poop older than I am float in the air. As the particles turn and swirl, they are beautiful and glint in the light like tiny pieces of gold. Grandma says that swallows do nothing but make a mess with their mud nests hanging under the eaves of anything that don’t keep moving, but I know now that they help make a beauty of this world too. I get a good grip on the iron rungs and pull myself up into the haymow.
Well, Naomi was right. It is dark and dirty, but it is a nice dark and dirty. The light is like when a thunderstorm pushes in on a sunny, summer day and shadows run together to form buckets of dark. Sunlight creeps in between the cracks of the boards of the wall and also through the window up at the peak of the barn. As my eyes adjust, I can see the bales of hay stacked up in three or four piles around the floor. Some of the piles are over thirty feet high and are mountains of preparation that Grampa left for the cows before he fell over and died. With only the couple of riding horses and few sheep we all got now, the bales have been waiting up here must be years. The hay smells warm and kinda tricks you into thinking that it might be a soft place to snuggle into; but as I lay back on one of the lower piles, I find out right quick that Grampa’s old hay is as scratchy as any hay we got nowadays.
Samuel is pulling apart one of the bales, hoping for more snakes. This barn is a welcome place for any creature searching for some warm and dry to raise babies. I imagine that there are generations of field mouse and garter snake families living here, and with them are generations of swallow and barn owl families living on them. Bats swoop low round the barn at night too, and there might be creatures up here with names that I don’t even know. Samuel’s whooping loud and starting to throw the loose hay into the air; it scatters around Naomi’s head and gets stuck in her tightly braided pigtails. She looks real pretty with her dark hair and tan skin and the pale, yellow stalks sticking to the sweat on her forehead and arms. I feel a twinge of jealousy and think that somebody looking in on this scene, God even, might not even see me or Reuben or Samuel because we just blend into the hay: blonde on blonde on blonde on blonde.
Naomi and I are in need of more sameness, so I run over and grab her arm and pull her toward what’s going to be our hay fort. We just got to pile up the walls a bit and balance a good roof; then, we’ll have a safe place to come and talk girl talk or whatever without the boys listening in and making fun. Reuben’s yelling like Tarzan and swinging on a rope that is looped over the rafters. Hanging on for dear life, he swoops over the tops of our heads and his foot nearly scrapes my hair.
Not really, because it wasn’t that close, but boy it makes me mad. ‘Reuben! You bring your bottom down from there! I’m going to tell Daddy you kicked me in the head!’
This scares him a bit, so it settles him down some. Naomi and I are left to work on our fort while the boys try to build a second storey onto theirs.
I’ve been wondering since that boost at the ladder, so I decide that I’m just going to come straight out and ask her. While Naomi helps me move one of the hay bales that’s soon to be part of the wall, I talk low. ‘You’ve started, haven’t you? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t your momma tell Grandma?’ I’m sure that if something that important happened, Grandma would know; the whole family would know.
Naomi looks at me with her big eyes all wide like a deer caught in the headlights and flat out lies to me. ‘No, Ruth, I haven’t started. No, honest.’
Well, her lie smacks me like if she’d slapped me, and I get mad enough where I could hit her myself. ‘Yes, you have! And now you’re lying about it, which is even worse than not telling. I felt something in your underpants when I was shoving you up into the haymow, you little baby.’
Now I feel bad, because Naomi starts to cry and I know that I’ve hurt her feelings again. She keeps crying until her shoulders heave, and I can see snot slip down across her mouth and slide off her chin. She slinks over into a corner of the fort and slumps onto the floor. She’s crying so hard that I lose some of my anger, righteous though it may be, and come over and settle beside her with my arm around her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry, Naomi. I was just mad that you didn’t tell me, and that you’re a woman and I’m not. I was just jealous. It’s not so bad, is it?’
Naomi snuffles and heaves and tries to talk, but she needs to just catch her breath a bit before she can. I wait patiently, and I don’t think that she’ll gloat, but I did make her cry.
Finally, she can talk. ‘I’m not a woman, Ruth, I’m just a big stupid baby. I’ve started to pee my bed again. Mom says it’s alright and she helps me change the sheets every morning, but I’m scared now that I’ll wet myself during the day too. I’ve got paper towels from the kitchen in my panties because I couldn’t bear for you and Reuben to know. Samuel knows, but he’s promised not to tell. He’s promised.’
I feel really bad now and rock Naomi until she stops crying so hard. ‘Well, girl, we got to get on and build this fort.’ I talk soft to her. ‘I can’t do it without your help. Get on up and help me move these bales.’
She gets up and gets to work, only small hiccups break into the sound of us dragging bales. Naomi’s got streaks of dirt down her face where her tears caught on some dust
, and she looks like a baby raccoon. I don’t tease her, though; seems like she’s got enough on her heart right now.
Reuben’s running around with another garter snake stuck on the end of a rusty pitchfork. He’s pierced it on three of the four tines, and the snake is writhing with its eyes all bugged out in pain. My brother meets its gaze with a mean and hungry glint in his eye, and he grins like a barn cat ripping the wings off a bat.
‘You ain’t no Moses, Reuben,’ I tell him quick. There is no need for the bronze snake; we haven’t been bitten. We seek no cure.
He sees the seriousness in my eyes and moves as if to fling the limp creature up over a low barn rafter. I call out and he stops. He’s leaning on the pitchfork, relaxing with half-lidded eyes.
Naomi is still sitting on the bales, braiding twine into her hair and humming a chorus.
‘You’re hurting that snake just to hurt it.’ I hate to see a creature suffer.
And Reuben sticks the fork hard into the floor. The sharp tines are through the snake and stab the wood, but it doesn’t take. The pitchfork bounces and hits the ground. I’m looking where it landed — feeling the slice of the tines through my body — when Samuel comes up behind me and tickles my back where my hair touches my waist. I jump and turn around and he smiles. I was scared, but there wasn’t no harm done; I smile back at him.
Samuel reaches down and pulls the snake off the end of the pitchfork. He passes it over and I hold it limp in my hands.
‘What a girl.’ Reuben smirks at me and goes into his fort. My brother’s peeing in there now. I can hear it and smell it strong and sharp in the still air.
5
SO MANY THINGS CAN COME BETWEEN NEIGHBOURS, EVEN good neighbours. Friendships formed through generations of raising barns, crops and babies together seem to weather like uncut grass when some unexpected sun shines too hot and too many days in a row. Some grasses will cure standing; heat just makes them all the better for cattle. But then, some grasses will steam in humid sun or plain wither in dry heat; after that, they ain’t good for nothing. That’s the way it is with friendships in Failing.
Grandma is my family’s main neighbour: our house squats on an acre carved off the side of her nearest cornfield. We don’t even need a fence. Grandma owns all the woods around here and more land here and there. Uncle Peter owns the adjoining Magnusson place, and most of the folks around here have farms with many acres. Grandma can keep track of all of us from her porch. Uncle Ingwald lives in town in the parsonage, but the Lord watches over him, so Grandma can have a break.
But we count them all neighbours, up and down the river that winds through the tangle of branches in the woods we all share. We are connected by these woods and the river. We are connected by land and history.
Near the river, along the path that leads from our house to Grandma’s house, there stretches a battered old fence. Years ago, we had a horse that needed penning in the spring. He ain’t there anymore, but the straggly wires still string along one side of the path, with the other side hemmed in spring and summer by chokecherry bushes, plum trees and wild strawberries scattered on the ground.
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 laugh
s 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.