by Amy Espeseth
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.
Putting aside the wood, I hold up the empty nest with both my hands. ‘Daddy, guess we missed the adoption.’
‘Don’t be silly. Grow up, girl.’ His mouth is drooping, hanging open a bit, and he looks at me like I’m crazy.
But I was just pretending, being the baby girl he used to set on his knee or take by hand up the path. Daddy goes back to stacking, but I stand there stupid and staring; I’m wounded. He don’t hurt Reuben like he does me, not looking me in the eyes when he says mean things — ‘good luck keeping a husband, Ruth’ or ‘that face won’t make a man forget a burnt supper’ — always pretending after it’s a joke when it’s not. He must think I’m proud, too big for my boots. He needs to squash me, but Reuben don’t need squashing. I put down the mouse nest and go back to stacking wood, but the tears come and I keep wiping my snot on the arm of my sweater.
‘Go help your mother, Ruth.’
Daddy hears my sniffing. He can’t bear watching a woman cry.
‘Mom ain’t doing nothing, though.’
‘Well, go and help her with that. Do nothing, just don’t do it here.’
I throw down my wood and stomp toward the stairs. Even though he don’t hold me no more, I know my daddy still loves me. Daddy didn’t have any sisters, so he didn’t learn nothing about girls. His insides are hard like the inside of a stone. Maybe my daddy’s meanness is like when I loved those baby mice so much that I held them tight, tighter, until I crushed them soft and pink in my hands. Next t
ime I find a mouse nest, I’ll step on it; that’ll show him what a girl I am then.
So I hunker down in my room for a couple hours, squished between pillows stacked high on the carpet like walls. I’m reading my devotions when Reuben knocks soft on the door. I act like I don’t hear him, like I’m more interested in the Philistines — reading the scripture and checking my Bible guide — than my brother standing at the door. I wait until he calls my name to look up, with my eyes startled open, feigning surprise.
‘You want it?’ Still covered in sawdust and grimy from sweating while splitting wood outside in the snow, Reuben holds out one of our last oranges.
Fruit in winter is a luxury we usually do without, our parents neither willing nor able to pay for food that’s travelled up from Florida or California or some other sunshiny place. Outside of Grandma’s dried apples and frozen strawberries, what few shrivelled oranges we have left now will have to do until summer. Store-bought canned peaches will sometimes make their way to our home; Daddy’s got a sweet tooth and both Mom and Grandma try to keep him happy. But for Reuben to break into our dwindling rations means he must feel there’s something he owes.
I love eating the white membrane of an orange, stripping back the peel to chew the soft fuzzy casing covering the flesh and dividing the centre like a wick. Reuben likes eating the orange’s heart, especially any strange middle slices, stunted misshapen pieces holding the inside together. Your taste is special, what you like or what you don’t. Like Naomi with crusts, I don’t like to eat corn kernels but I will eat apples without any forcing. Eating corn — even fresh sweet corn and not mealy field corn meant for cows and folks up from Chicago — feels like I’m eating seed. Corn kernels are too inside out for me. Apples have cores and seeds, but I don’t mind them. Oranges have seeds that folks spit out or chew. Fruit without seeds is something I don’t aim to try.
Leaning on the door, Reuben holds out the orange, waving his arm up and down like a flag, like I don’t see. I turn my head so he knows I’m looking, but that fruit ain’t going to fix my hurt. My brother can’t help his feelings, but neither can I. I look Reuben straight in the eye. He’s angry himself now, having gone to the effort but getting skunked. But he’s still going to try.
‘Ruth, if I never split the logs I’d never learn.’
It doesn’t mean much coming from him, but I see his heart. I soften my eyes and walk to the doorway. When I take the orange, our fingers barely touch.
‘I can’t always change it, but I believe I’ll always try.’ And he leaves my room, his boots clomping on the stairs.
I’m not able to see it, but I’m sure there are crushed lines of ice and sawdust marking his path out the door: melting piles of water and wood, boot prints tracing his way outside.
I’ll save this orange for later, maybe give Reuben half after supper. It isn’t that Daddy loves my brother more, maybe just better. I know that is what Reuben meant. But it isn’t anybody’s fault. Sometimes you have to split your own wood. I know that is what Reuben said. The orange’s skin is dry and puckered; it was picked a long time ago.
‘Anything on your heart, Ruthie?’ Getting ready for bed, Mom’s babying me tonight, worried I’m still mad at Daddy.
She is combing out my wet hair, ready to braid it tight. Overnight it will almost dry, and in the morning I’ll unwind it and wear it down and wavy like a mare’s tail. She used to wash my hair in the bathroom sink: I’d lay along the counter and let my head fall back while she put shampoo and creme rinse through the tangles. I’m too long and old for that now, but those framed needlepoint black bears on the wall still tell me every day to: Remember to brush your teeth. Remember to comb your hair. Remember to say your prayers.
This upstairs bathroom has locks on both doors. Other than opening them from the inside, only a nail will get you in from the outside. If Reuben gives chase when mad, I’ll lock the doors and secret myself away amongst the towels in the closet. I don’t need to hide when the doors are locked, but I do anyway, just to be safe. I rest for hours in the tub, soaking. Sometimes I sing and pray. A couple years ago I realised that I was meant to get clean in the water, not merely lay and ponder. Mostly it relieves my achy knees and my head full of worries. It soothes me, body and soul, to let the water wash over me.
‘If you’re coming down with something, I’d rather know so we can head it off.’
She’s done braiding, so I lean back into my mom’s soft legs and chest and look up at her face. She gave me my straight nose and heart-shaped face. Her eyelids are drooping now, like mine will soon enough, and she’s got little creases in the corners of her eyes. But she is still lovely, even with the worry that’s worn her beauty away. When I was just born, Mom decided to get both me and Reuben vaccinated. Her bout with whooping cough didn’t bring her or anybody closer to Jesus, so she reckoned the needles couldn’t take us farther away. Daddy agreed in faith but I don’t believe Grandma knows. Mom still frets, though; she lost a couple brothers in childhood.
‘Are you under the weather?’
There ain’t nothing wrong with me. ‘I guess I’m just quiet.’
I look at the mirror. If you devote your heart to Jesus and stretch out your hands to the Lord, if you reject sin and strike it from your land and give no quarter to evil, then you can lift up your face. Hold your eyes high and straight, for shame is not on your shoulders, weighing you down. Stand tall and solid and strong.
When she left her family to make my family, Mom’s picture was turned to the wall — not taken down and forgotten, but left hanging to be remembered. Above the fireplace in my grandparents’ house, where I have never been, are the portraits of their family: my grandparents, my uncles and my aunts, and my many cousins. My mother’s photo hangs backwards, the brown-paper backing and stapled twine showing instead of her small, square teeth. Reuben and I do not exist on that wall. Beneath that backwards photo, I don’t know if there are even spaces waiting for children.
My mom is back-slid Holiness. Her Grandma Wyse was back-slid Amish. Generation by generation, we are a family of women who are slowly slipping away from heaven and toward the world. We don’t ever see those Yoder grandparents. My grandma on that side says that we’ll meet in heaven, or she’ll watch us being sent to hell. But she won’t cry, for there will be no weeping in heaven. She says that in the letter she sends every year on Mom’s birthday to try and bring us back into the fold.
I don’t know how the woman can judge; if it weren’t for her own momma running away from the Cherokee River Amish down in the south of the state, she herself wouldn’t know electricity or even motor vehicles. She can’t see the sameness in her daughter and her momma. All she sees is that her daughter don’t wear no prairie dress, and that she cut her hair to her shoulders and even wears fingernail polish now and again. You won’t ever catch Mom in make-up or even persuade her an inch on ear-piercing, her own lobes or anyone else’s, but Grandma Yoder can’t touch my mom for fear of … for fear of something I don’t know how to fear.
Of course my mom’s parents didn’t approve of the union. Even though my daddy came from clean farming stock, he wasn’t Holiness and he wasn’t ever going be. Grandma Yoder tried to scare her daughter off of the boy by telling her gossip about dancing and shrieking at the Pentecostal church. Grandma Wyse told Mom that we didn’t know the way of salvation and that we were lost along with the world. But ever since my mom saw my daddy showing cattle at the county fair, she was smitten. She was all long blonde braids and strawberry cheeks, and he was dirty overalls and bucktooth shy. To hear Daddy tell, it was my Uncle Peter who spoke bold first and fell for her a bit as well. But it was my daddy and his shiny black bull that won her heart and the reserve champion ribbon too.
At first, their courting was done normal: Uncle Peter would drive and Daddy would buy Mom a malted milkshake at the Dairy Queen. But after Peter left for the navy, and Mom’s parents forbid contact,
my parents had to sneak. After her chores, Mom would take long walks through the field corn and Daddy would do just the same. Daddy says that’s why Reuben’s hair feels like cornsilk. Mom says she was afraid they’d be mistaken for deer and be shot dead in the field. Accident or not, gunshot from a .30-30 ain’t a pretty way to travel. It’s been said that deer hunting sorts out a lot of family problems in Failing. It’s hard to believe how many fathers of bruised and black-eyed daughters accidentally wing their sons-in-law during the hunt. So gunshot wasn’t far from my parents’ mind all through their courtship. Mom said Daddy seemed to be all she needed then and forevermore; he was the one to both keep her safe and cure her lonely. Ingwald was in California, but Peter made it home special to be best man at the wedding. Mom’s family wouldn’t witness the union, so the wedding was small. Mom wore a plain church dress.
No matter what, even when she is lonesome for her family, my mom won’t lay any fault in the whole thing, the shunning. She only says we all struggle against our sinful nature and that she knows Grandma Yoder is praying daily for our salvation, which can’t be a bad thing. After Mom’s car accident, she thought for a while that maybe she was being punished by God for walking away from the Holiness and her own grandma’s walking away from the Amish. She was even angry at Daddy for him being gone in Alaska, and her needing to drive herself. She was thankful, though, that baby Reuben wasn’t hurt — not a cornsilk hair on his head was harmed. He was proof that the Lord had protected them. Even though a car accident scares a body away from cars, it don’t have to scare a soul away from God.
When they let her loose from the hospital, she didn’t want to ride in a vehicle again. But she couldn’t yet walk, and it was the only way home, so ride she did. Uncle Peter handed her a swaddled, sleeping Reuben, and she held him and prayed in the truck all the way home. And while Daddy hitchhiked from Alaska, desperately trying to make it home, Uncle Peter helped her learn to walk again. Mom says that you have to keep walking, just keep on walking. And when you can’t walk no more, there ain’t no shame in riding. Maybe she was outside the will of her momma, but I know she wasn’t never outside the will of the Lord.