by Amy Espeseth
Her hands hit the piano, but soft like a sigh. ‘How can you ask me that?’ She cuts her eyes at me, and I’m ashamed I spoke. Mom pulls the lid down on the piano keys, swings her legs over the bench and hurries away. She’s in their bedroom now. I know she’s standing just behind that door.
Every day we choose heaven or hell, and one day we will stand before the judgement seat of God. Life or death will be spoken from His mouth, and only then will we know for sure. All we know for certain is life on this earth. Until we see the Lord face to face in heaven, we haven’t even felt real love. Mothers’ love is the closest we’ll get, though, and I can’t imagine not having a momma.
My daddy told me that when he was in Alaska he saw a young moose trying to suck milk from its mother’s gut pile. Nobody could drive it off for over a week, so the landowner had to come and shoot it before it starved.
We may not know true love yet, but I got to think that we’re close.
20
UNCLE INGWALD IS DRIVING ALL OF US TO THE CABIN. The old church van is a white Chevy with rust so deep that I can feel the wind sneaking past the rags stuffed in the holes in the walls. There ain’t any carpet left on the floor, but we got some of Grandma’s braided rag rugs spread out. Red, blue and green, they decorate the inside of the van and keep the wind off our feet too. The van is packed, with Ingwald and Daddy in the front seats, and Naomi and me in the back with the supplies. Samuel is home from hockey camp; he and Reuben sit in the middle. Even if we get skunked and don’t catch any fish, we got enough venison jerky, and cans of cream corn and pork and beans to keep us fed a week.
I love going to Uncle Ingwald’s cabin up at Cranberry Lake. It’s not really just their cabin, being that all the boys built it with Grampa Ole back when they were just teenagers. No one back home in Failing understood why someone would want to leave their perfectly good house on the farm and drive three hours every Saturday to slap together a shack on the edge of a mosquito-bit lake, but Grampa sold one of the horses and bought the land anyway. Now, most of the neighbours on the lake are all lawyers, doctors and such from Minneapolis or Chicago. Maybe because Grampa wasn’t such a silly dirt farmer, there is a Rundhaug cabin stuck right in amongst them all.
Grampa’s cabin is made of spare barn wood and some of the blood-stained floorboards from the butcher’s shop in Failing. After the sheriff’s wife got sick off of some venison sausages, the county health department came in to check on Seversen’s shop. They made the butcher rip up the good oak floorboards just because there was some blood bringing out the grain. From what my daddy tells me, I don’t know what else they were expecting to be on the floor except blood in a butcher’s shop that’s been there since the Indians, but we got a large part of our lake cabin courtesy of county health.
It takes less time to get to the cabin in winter. Summertime, we take the Rabbit Trail and wind through the old logging roads all around Cranberry Lake; wintertime, we go through. Not through, exactly, but on: on the lake. Once we get to the boat ramp, Uncle Ingwald steps out of the van and lifts up the rusty ice auger being used as a gate over the driveway. Then, we drive down onto the ice and cut straight across; County Road CL exists only in winter. Uncle Ingwald always drives in between the orange cones that the fish and game or highway department or some other such county boys put up as a guide. Not that they’re guaranteeing your safety, the cones, but it helps to have a bit of a track to follow. When he’s driving, my daddy goes wherever he pleases on the ice. He says he’s got to listen to the ice and just hear where to go. He jokes with Ingwald that only the true believer will ‘follow where the Spirit leads’. But whenever my daddy is driving on the ice, he still unbuckles his seatbelt and opens the windows; I believe his back-up plan is to follow the Spirit out the window.
Crunching across the snow, the going is slow. But when we make a turn, bending around a slushy spot in the ice, sometimes the tyres slip and provide a bit of excitement. Seems like Naomi’s forgotten whatever made her hate me before. She’s been all smiles today. With our legs in the air and our heads near the ground, Naomi and me hang upside down on the far back couch. Each time the van jostles, our heads almost touch the musty rugs, and we scream and laugh. I’ve got to sit up quick now or I’m going to throw up.
We are slowing down anyways. Daddy wants to get the fish-frying pan that’s inside the rickety Cranberry ice shack. Close to the open water, the shack always sits where the fishing is the best. The van stops, and Daddy jumps out to trek quick across the frozen lake; he jumps out into the black.
I can’t look over at Naomi; she’s sitting up straight now. I can’t look over at Reuben or Naomi’s brother either. The boys are slumped against the van windows, and Samuel is melting ice on the glass with his breath. It’s been about a month since I fell into Little Failing, so we can’t look at each other — or worse, speak of it — and make what happened true. We all spent Christmas together, but then we weren’t so alone and so close. I can hear him breathe.
It is quiet and darkest night.
‘You guys still with me?’ Uncle Ingwald turns around and checks on us. ‘Your daddy will be back soon. It’s just dark.’
My face must be pale and my eyes wide.
‘He can see with the flashlight and the moon. It’s a real bright night.’
I look down into my hands; in the moonlight I can see that with my nails I’ve punched little half-moons of red into my palms. I unclench my fists and try to breathe. I just feel a little sick from the drive.
‘I told you girls not to hang upside down like that. I’ve been saying it since Mishtogie.’
I start to gag and heave, so I scramble in between the seats, slide open the door of the van and puke. I’ve been eating squeaky cheese curds and saltine crackers and red licorice. I vomit all down the front of my shirt, and I tremble and gag. Naomi stays in the back.
It is my daddy who comes to rescue me. He steps out of the dark with the fry pan in one hand and the flashlight in the other. When he sees me hanging out the van door crying and carrying on, he tries to hustle on the ice and ends up falling flat on his behind. Because his hands are full, he can’t break his fall and he groans a big ‘Uff da!’ Uncle Ingwald smiles and Daddy thrashes in the snow like a trapped weasel, so we all see the funny in it too.
‘I tried to get to you, Ruthie.’ Daddy’s eyes are wet and shiny from laughing. His hair is sticking up all over; that hat never can stay on his head. ‘I did try.’
I’m too busy giggling now to be sick or scared or whatever I was anymore. It is good to make the most of things, to take the good with the bad, so that is what we do. That is what I do.
We’ll have to make the best of it, all of us, together this week at the cabin. The outhouse is one thing and the weather is another. The damp and cold will creep into your bones during night or day, no matter which. ‘Keep dry,’ my daddy always says, and ‘Stay warm.’ So when we open the door to the cabin, the summer screen door catching wind and banging backwards against the outside wall, we get set to making our nest cosy.
While the boys start a wood fire smouldering in the potbelly stove, Naomi and I see to the blankets. Someone’s beat us to it, though, making a nest. Sprawled across the old cast-iron bed, stuffing — from the quilts, pillows and mattress alike — has been picked out and scattered. Must be coon, skunk or just plain rats got in and made a whole mess of the bed. Every time I reach around a pillow, tangled feathers and fibres fall out in clumps. I can’t begin to tell about the crap. We shake out the blankets and pillows as best we can; it won’t be perfect, but it will be as close to warm as we can get.
Old as it is, the cabin struggles. My grampa built it good enough, but Wisconsin weather takes a toll on both the living and the dead. We’ve got baling plastic tacked over the windows inside and out, but still the wind sneaks in around the edges. To prime the pump, we’ve got to wrench on the handle over the sink a couple dozen times
before the well will consider working. Daddy’s got the water boiling on the woodstove: a pot holds our hot-dog supper, and the kettle will provide washing-up water both for the dishes and for ourselves.
Uncle Ingwald is moving a pile of old red-checked hunting clothes off of the green formica table. All around the edges of the table, there are chips gouged out: either from rambunctious eating or playing Zonk until bedtime, I don’t know. Zonk is the dice game we play at the cabin; Grandma won’t allow any semblance of gambling at the farm, but we play it loud and regular up here. Circling the table are many chairs: matching metal ones with green vinyl seats and some rusty blue ones from outside. I have the special wooden chair. It has my uncle’s name carved in the arm, but he would swear — if he swore — that he didn’t do it. My daddy winks at me when I trace my finger over each of the letters. I’m sure I-N-G-W-A-L-D still remembers that undeserved whipping; I’m most sure the leather strap hanging amongst a mess of feed caps on that antler rack by the stove won’t let him forget.
Daddy gives us each a hot dog in a bun, and we pile on raw onions, ketchup, mustard and pickled relish. There is a dish of Grandma’s bread-and-butter pickles on the table and a jar of pork hocks too. Over the taste of my supper, I can smell damp mittens drying on the stove; their steam rises into the air and gives a wet-dog smell without us even having a dog. Next to the wood box just inside the front door, there are six pairs of boots drying upside down.
I gather up the fancy cut-glass tumblers and black-eyed-susan water pitcher filled with Kool-Aid. Grandma told me once that she saved coupons from the grocery for ever so long to earn up enough points to get this drink set. Daddy pours the hot water into the sink as the kettle is too hot and heavy for me to lift. I got to watch out that I don’t accidentally bump the stovepipe in my clumsiness, or I’ll have me both a scar and a memory from the cabin to match Reuben’s from last year. Naomi and I wipe the dishes; my dishtowel looks made from a flour sack but Naomi’s is a souvenir from a state fair.
After we wipe and stack, Naomi and I head up the creaky steps to play with Grandma’s spoon collection. Through years of dedication to spoons — finding, buying and guarding — she’s been able to gain a variety from across this land. She’s got spoons from the Winter Carnival Ice Palace in Minnesota, the fantastic Corn Palace in South Dakota, and even one showing the carved heads at Mount Rushmore. On the stairway wall, in between an implement dealer’s calendar from 1977 and a stretched beaver-pelt wheel from even before then, the spoons hang neatly in rows on an oak rack my daddy fashioned for Grandma one birthday. When we play spoons, Naomi and I do our best to push off the cobwebs from the rack and rub the tarnish from the metal. Each spoon is different: an enamel apple, gopher or owl squats at the top, or a bell or other such trinket dangles at the handle. We travel with Grandma to faraway places — Michigan, Illinois and even Georgia — just by holding and sorting her spoons.
From the sleeping loft, we can follow the light coming from the cracks in the floorboards and see the tops of our daddies’ heads. Ingwald’s near-bald one is hunched over the table; he is rolling dice with Samuel and Reuben. As usual, my daddy’s straw hair is sticking up all over as he pokes around the back of the icebox, trying again to sort out why it growls and burps all night like a dying pig. The floor is covered in carpet patches nailed down with penny nails and linoleum leftovers from my Uncle Peter’s renovations. Last year, Ingwald said that it was too bad that Peter had ‘more money than sense or morals’ but that it would do for wiping boots. Now I don’t get near as many splinters in my feet from walking barefoot in the cabin kitchen, so I’m thankful nonetheless for the money, be it senseless or not. The morals are between Peter and his Maker, as far as I’m concerned.
We are settling into bed now. Downstairs, the boys are sleeping with their fathers: Reuben and Daddy on the pull-out couch, and Ingwald and Samuel on the bed. We girls are camping upstairs on our own. It is still except for the wind swaying the trees and the lake making ice. In the eaves above our heads, little mice or bats or some such rodents are scratching. But the sound is nothing like it is in summer when the cabin hums at night with pawing and scraping. As my body rests, my mind scrapes at me.
Tomorrow, after bacon and eggs for breakfast, Daddy will walk us through the woods along the same hunting trails he has always walked with his family. He will stop at each spot where he or his father or his brothers killed a deer. Again, he will tell us stories of Ingwald stripping off and swimming across the freezing river to retrieve a downed doe. Or of Grampa Ole driving deer through the woods, only to look down and discover he was straddling a black bear hibernating in a shallow cave made by the roots of a tree. Or of neighbours claiming the champion buck that Peter shot, because Peter was too lazy to track. And of all the boys living at the cabin for weeks on end — eating fresh fish and cans of pork and beans — being too little to help with harvesting chores and too big to stay out of the way. His stories are of fishing and shooting and trapping, stories of swearing and biting and fighting. Daddy’s stories are stories of the good old days.
Sheltered by the wooden planks my grampa nailed and the patchwork blankets my grandma quilted, I lay here in the dark amongst the smells of the cabin. The air is both damp and dusty, but mostly full of the scent of men: socks, mud and blood.
It is most quiet, and whispery sounds of breathing creep up into the sleeping loft.
My mind is like the church van: my cabin memories squeeze out through the rust even though I have stuffed socks in the holes. Since I can remember, we’ve played games here: sleeping games; death games; even carcass games, where entrails are scooped out with hands and mouths. My mind won’t let me sleep. What if what we think now is not what we will think in the future? Red hunting clothes used to keep you safe; now we wear orange. Can you change your mind just like that? We didn’t use to have fishing seasons or bag limits or hunting licences. We do now. Can you fear heaven and hell at the same time? Can you love someone and hate him too? Can Jesus forgive you if you can’t forgive others? Can you pray to Jesus without being forgiven? Can your soul have the stuffing scooped out of it?
I need to shake these questions off of me like leaves from a picnic blanket. I must shake myself as if shaking cobwebs from a quilt, spiders from the pillows. I will make the best of things. I will take the good with the bad. Even when red changes to orange, some things do remain. There is a place, deep in my heart, that remains unchanged. The hurt cannot seep all the way through; that is why I cry, so the water can’t reach my heart, can’t change my mind. I will not be made wet — damp and musty inside myself. My body will not betray me. But even my eyes won’t let me rest either: I need it to be dark to sleep, but the light keeps leaking through the cracks in the floor.
When Samson went to Timhah with his mom and dad, he was attacked by a lion. The Spirit of the Lord came upon him in power so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat. But he didn’t tell them that. When he went back to the vineyard, back to where he was attacked, he found the carcass of the lion he had torn limb from limb. Inside the carcass, instead of mangled meat and maggots, were a swarm of bees and their honey. He held his hands like a cup and filled them with honeycomb; he ate it and his parents did too. But he never told them about the lion or where he got the honey. He just ate and gave the strange sweetness away.
The quilts are wrapped around my head, so I can barely breathe. I sit up and push Samuel away from me. I need to get air.
He touches my face gentle. I don’t lay back down.
He pushes my shoulder, hard. ‘If you don’t let me, I’ll go back to Naomi.’
Naomi? If Samuel could go back to Naomi, if he would go to his sister, that means that he has been to Naomi before. I know that what he does on me is not love or even making love, but I thought I was the only one. It hurts me to know that Naomi knows what he does on me. It hurts me most that I let him do it again, when I wasn’t even
protecting Naomi’s perfect baby-girl life.
Even with the shame, I thought I at least was different now — maybe might smell different — but I’m not different; I am just the same as she is. Now, I am more like her than ever before; I am still just the same as them all.
I stare at Samuel. He is breathing heavy and sitting up on the bed. I tell him with my dark eyes to leave. And he does, creaking the stairs all the way down.
Naomi slept through it, or at least her shut eyes look like she did. But I’ve heard her sleeping enough to tell the difference. Her breathing tells me she’s awake; she’s just playing possum.
At my church dedication soon after I was born, Uncle Ingwald raised me up in the sanctuary and spoke a word of knowledge. He prophesied, ‘This child will always follow the Spirit and reject hell.’
And I will. I will follow the Spirit out the window. I will reject hell. Hell is a place where you can’t make the best of it. I reject hell, whether it is dry or wet, hot or cold. I reject hell now.
21
TOMORROW IS SUNDAY, SO TODAY IS OUR LAST DAY AT the cabin. We will start driving home after lunch. Uncle Ingwald is at the table, working on his sermon. His black leather Bible is spread out in front of him, and he is writing notes while he prays and reads the scripture. He is reading of the widow in the second book of Samuel: her sons fought in a field and one struck the other down, struck him down to death. Her clan rose up to kill the remaining boy; they aimed to strike their names from the face of the earth. She called out to save her last burning coal.
Our Samuel and Reuben are outside cleaning fish, scraping scales and cutting, with Daddy. Naomi and I are settled on the bed, trying to decide what to do with a bird we found outside this morning.
Aunt Gloria has a bird feeder hanging in the maple tree, and one of the tiny winter birds must have misjudged his take-off or landing and hit the window by mistake. When we were washing the breakfast dishes, scraping off greasy bacon and eggs, I looked through the steamed-up window glass and couldn’t see for a smear of feathers and blood and sweat. Naomi’s got him wrapped up in a towel, and we are hoping that he didn’t freeze to death laying there — assuming the impact didn’t get him first. His soft sooty feathers were all splayed out on the snow and his orange beak was open just a touch.