by Carla Funk
AFTER THE UNCLES shook my father’s hand, and Grandma Reimer squeezed my cheeks goodbye, told my brother how big, how big he’d grown, patted my mother on the forearm, saying Merry Christmas, lilting her voice upward as she spoke the words, we climbed back into the pickup, yawning and slow. My dad, now clear-eyed and fully awake behind the steering wheel, said how good it was for us to have gone for a visit, that it was important, Grandma Reimer wasn’t getting any younger.
“Who knows how long she’s got,” he said.
Along the road’s snow-hush, we drove, the cab of the pickup stuffy and smoky with the heater blowing hot air and the radio carols cranked. The windshield wipers pushed away the snowflakes, clearing our view of what lay ahead. In our wake, a swirl of white and billow of exhaust, evidence of us moving through darkness, rounding the curve, leaving behind the old home on Loop Road and heading toward our new house, Christmas morning only one sleep away.
I held the hollow, bug-eyed doll and knew it wasn’t worth naming. It would end up in a bucket of plastic bath toys, and eventually lose all its limbs. On my lap, the cup and saucer clinked with every road bump.
“That’s practically antique,” my mother said. “You’ll want to keep it, put it somewhere safe, so it won’t break.”
If the cup were full of sweet tea or coffee thick with cream, I’d sit at the table and like a grown-up, hold it to my lips and sip until I hit the sugar at the bottom, then scrape out the syrup, lick every crystal from the spoon. But for now, that cup, empty and old, held nothing for me. Wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a cardboard box, it would be shoved into the basement crawlspace along with baby clothes and toys, old papers and photographs, and books we didn’t read anymore but couldn’t bear to throw away.
At the bridge, though the road was empty and not a car was in sight, we waited for the light to shift from red to green. That wooden bridge, blackened by years and creosote, would catch fire in a year and burn to a charred skeleton, the flaming trusses splashing and sizzling into the river. A new bridge would rise, wide enough for two lanes to freely pass, but for now, we waited to cross over to the other side. Below us, the ice lay silvery and smooth, hiding the waters darkly moving toward the sea. From deep down, the ground gave up its ancient swell like a cup filled to overflowing, pouring out what it could no longer hold.
By and By, Lord
IN THE MIDDLE of a dark and quiet afternoon, when all us students in our study carrels pencilled at our work, my head bent over a page of long addition—carry the one, carry the one—the silver bell on the desk behind me dinged.
“Children,” the teacher said, “look out the window.”
For weeks, the ground had been frozen, the dead grass white with frost, but the blank sky, overcast and pale grey, gave nothing—no blue, no thunder, no wind, no sleet. With my classmates, I rushed to the window to witness the shift.
Each year, by the time the season’s first snow appeared, I’d lost all memory of last winter’s treachery. Gone from my mind—the black-ice highway, the blizzards blowing sideways, the forty-below cold that freezes gasoline. Gone—the bitter wind that burns the skin, numb fingers, numb toes, feet like blocks of wood in boots that won’t keep out the chill. Gone, the trudge across the yard to haul more firewood from the shed, my loaded sled tugged up the hill. Gone, my shovel blade scraping across the yard, another fall of snow, another shoveling, and I, another northern kid, caught in winter’s loop.
What began as invisible came slowly into view. Pinpricks of silver. Flecks, nearly imperceptible, soloing lazily down. And then cinders drifting from a far-off fire. The sky tearing itself to pieces, letting us have it.
Set free into the courtyard, coatless and still wearing our indoor shoes, my classmates and I ran, scraping the shreds of snow from the dirt and pavement and throwing them into the air so that our hair was dusted white, and our cheeks burned wet and cold. To the sky that fell and failed us, to the God of a season that wounded and stoked our wonder, I tipped my face, I closed my eyes, I opened wide my mouth.
RECESS IN THE school field, we tramped a wide circle in the snow, boots shuffling in the drifts to stamp our track. Inward from the circle, we marked out spokes that ended at a centre hub—the safety zone. Together, we built our game, girls and boys in unity at work, but once the boundary lines were drawn, the hunt began.
One potato, two potato, three potato, four—
We counted fists to choose our predator, the fox to chase the wild geese. Donny—the fast one, the hyperactive one, the boy whose eyes hardened into slits when he smirked—lifted his nose to the cold sky and yip-yip-yipped a bark to scatter us, his prey.
With the rest of my classmates, I shot out into the circle and down one of the spokes, taking the ten-second lead to break as far away from danger as I could.
I knew I wasn’t fast enough to last, that I needed to steer near the safety zone, but even then, the rule was clear: the geese can pass through, but cannot stay. With every lope, my footsteps dragged a little more, snow-pack on my boot soles and the burden of a heavy coat and ski pants weighing me down, until at my back, the fox was yipping, gaining on me.
In chapel, we learned all about the devil’s schemes, his wily tricks and lies, and how he preys on weak and faithless ones. I didn’t want it to be me. I didn’t want to be the first one taken out, picked off, an easy target. In the open field of white, in the eye-ache glare of sun on snow, I maneuvered my body inside the drawn lines, keeping with the rhythm of the game, slowing when the fox slowed, caught up in the chase and bound by winter.
THE PREACHER’S VOICE, a metronome in monotone, kept time. Long and dragging time. I stretched out on the pew, or tried to, but my mother pushed back to prop me up.
“You’re old enough to sit,” she whispered in my ear.
I swung my feet. Kicked out my legs and pointed my toes. I picked the pills of lint that dotted my tights.
Sit still, she mouthed, her mother-eyes lit up.
Above me, incandescent light bulbs gridded the ceiling tiles. I tried to count, but lost my place somewhere along row three. Across the aisle, the lady with the facial tic kept trying out a smile, her lips in constant twitch, her glasses rising, falling on her cheeks with every spasm.
“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?” the preacher said, the sermon’s scripture passage open in his Bible hand.
I saw it in my mind—the long toboggan hill slicked down by sleds and crazy carpets. Out back behind the school, it crested with laughter, shrieks, and whoops, the promise of the rush.
“Or who shall stand,” the preacher intoned, “in His most holy place?”
Before I flew, I had to climb. Every step was a chore, a trudge, a reckoning of sweat and burning lungs. Each time a body rocketed past, a wake of snow spray stung my face and sleeted my eyes. At the top, the ones who waited in line wore smiles. At the bottom, they hollered and high-fived, and punched a fist of victory in the air.
My mother nudged me to pay attention to the preacher’s words, but I was lost, gone off wandering in my mind, somewhere in between the psalm and hardback wooden pew, the long ascent through elements that kept the body down.
I WOKE TO Johnny’s voice calling his wife’s name, calling the whole Cash and Carter family to join him on stage. My mother’s winter coat, my makeshift blanket, covered me on the three chairs she’d pulled together for a bed. “Lie down,” she’d said, “it’s late,” and even through the steel-guitar solo and the shuffle of the drums, I slid into sleep, hearing and not hearing as Johnny sang, I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.
In the darkened hockey arena, the rink ice covered over with plywood to make a floor, the floods lit Johnny, his right arm crooked high on the body of the guitar. When the song swelled into a musical interlude, he stepped away from the microphone, and as he strummed, pulled back the guitar like a shotgun. My dad, standing to the side with his trucker buddies and card-game pals, tipped his chin up, laughed. “Pretty good,” he said, “that man
in black.”
When June walked back out with her sisters and her daughter, and they stood with Johnny along the front of the stage, the whole audience jumped to their feet, clapping, clapping. Even my mother, who stood guard over me, clapped, rising on her tiptoes to witness the finale.
“Do you want to see?” she said, and pulled me up to stand on the chair beside her. Johnny and June and Rosanne and the rest of the singers and band members were far away, but I could see that June wore a white floor-length dress, and her long hair shone beneath the lights, and she was waving at us. I waved back, believing June Carter Cash could see my blonde head out among the crowd.
Then Johnny started to strum, a steady chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck, and June’s voice came in sad and lonesome as the night train whistling through our valley. I was uh standin’ by my window on one cold and cloudy day.
Above us, the rafters hung with flags and pennants won by local hockey teams. Higher still, beyond the ceiling and the roof, the sky was pricked full of holes and falling in shreds, like hints about the home waiting on the other side. On the highway as we’d travelled toward the music, the windshield was a blizzard of flakes. Looked at too long, the snow turned to flying stars, light speed. Watch out, my mother said, and gripped the dash, be careful, Dave, as my dad hunched over the steering wheel, blinking into the night.
Undertaker, undertaker, please drive slow, sang June Carter Cash as her mother’s body rolled away. When the fiddle pulled hard into the song, the whole family crowded around the microphones and in four-part harmony sang, Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by. I pulled my mother’s heavy coat around me, slipped my arms into the puffy, too-long sleeves, and felt the collar’s cool fabric on my neck. I leaned against her back, close enough to smell her hair—the wind and earth and snow-damp warmth of it, and to see the double cowlick of her crown, two whorls of soft brown joined but curling away from each other. By and by, Lord, we all sang together, by and by.
AS WE WALKED the line that moved around the edges of the sanctuary, I held my mother’s hand. The whole room murmured with hushed voices, the shush of shoes and winter boots shuffling over carpet. At the front, the organ and the piano played quiet hymns, and a small table waited with a vase of white flowers beside a long wooden box. The top half of the box lay open, the lid cocked back on its hinges, like a magician’s trick with the lady sawed in two.
“Don’t look,” my mother said, and pulled me close against the scratchy wool of her coat, but I only hid one eye and left the other open so I could look out toward the casket as we inched by. In the folds of the white shiny fabric lay a black suit, a man with his arms tucked straight at his sides, his white shirt collar buttoned at the throat. His face lay slack, eyelids smooth and bluish, cheeks gaunt, and skin dull grey, the ash of last year’s fire pit scattered on the ice for tread.
My mother’s voice, panicked and soprano the night we skidded down the highway past the Pine Country Inn, came back to me. The road too slick to steer, and our green Oldsmobile sliding past the turn-off as she gripped the wheel, pumped the brakes, said, I can’t stop, I can’t stop. She breathed a high and drawn-out vowel that made me think we’d end up in another town or in the ditch. Past the truck weigh scales, the veterinary clinic, and the lumber mill’s incinerator glowing smoke in the night sky, we barrelled into the snowflake-streaked darkness. I was sure that we were headed to our death, that soon, the flashing sirens would be called to us in our crumpled heap of metal.
All through the service, I watched the open coffin, Great-Grandpa’s pointed nose and cheekbone visible in profile from where we sat. I wondered if what my mother said was true—that once, a woman had sat up in the middle of her own funeral and asked for a drink of water. But nowadays, said my mother, the lips of the dead are sewn shut.
While the preacher spoke in German in the quiet sanctuary, I listened for the rustle of the casket’s satin lining, for the sound of an old man’s voice straining through stitches. As we bowed our heads in prayer, I peeked through squinted eyes to see if that body might arch up like Lazarus from his tomb when Jesus said, “Come forth.” When the preacher shut the lid, and my dad and his brothers stood on either side of the coffin and carried it down the aisle toward the long black car that waited outside the front doors of the church, I hoped Great-Grandpa was dead, fully and completely dead, never to wake in his frozen plot beneath the drifts of snow, never to knock his knuckles on the ceiling of his wooden box and holler to be let out. I wanted him to lie forever in the dirt, mouldering until that final day when the trumpet call of Heaven cracked the earth wide open and all our bodies rose up from our graves clean and new, our bones dressed and ready for the angels to usher us into the cloud.
I THOUGHT I’D killed him.
In the middle of the driveway, on our Honda Big Red three-wheeler, I cranked the handlebars as far left as they’d go and revved the throttle to turn a tight circle on the hard-packed snow. With every revolution, we gathered momentum, me on the machine and my brother on the inflated inner tube tied behind with a thirty-foot length of rope. Belly-down, he bounced each time the tube caught a ridge or dip, but held on tightly. With every donut spun, we edged toward the bank of snow my dad had ploughed along the yard. At the end of the taut rope, my brother slid in wide orbit until at last, he hit the bank, his body jetted airborne with limbs outstretched—stunt man, fall guy, six-million-dollar boy—bionic as he flew in momentary hover.
The empty tube slid toward me on its slackened rope. When I turned Big Red around and cut the engine, the open field of snow along the driveway lay blank and brotherless.
I thought I’d killed my brother, disappeared him, erased him into air. All the kid-sister terrors I doled out—my lippy quipping, my victim cheek, the way I’d lure his temper with a well-aimed sneer, then tattle when he raged—flew back to me. Dear God, dear God, dear God, I prayed, not knowing how to ask for resurrection.
When, up through the crust, his gloved fist punched, and his bright-red helmet crashed through the white, I felt the cold air sting my eyes to tears. My brother, spitting out and shaking off the snow, stamping through the waist-high drift, had come back to me whole.
“Let’s go.” he said. “Again.”
TO MAKE THE perfect angel, you have to leap into a clean, untrampled patch of snow. You have to plant yourself, then fall straight back. As the ground receives you, let your body go, and trust that it won’t break. Your spine won’t snap. The breath that leaves your lungs will soon return. After the soft whump, lie still a moment. This is what it feels like to sleep inside the cold. Cocooned. Snug in the snow-hush.
Above you, stars like stitches in a quilt adorn the dusk. Find the Little Bear’s North Star, the compass mark to point you home, if ever you get lost. Find Big Dipper tipping out a scoop of bruised and blue-black sky. You haven’t learned the names of all the other constellations, only know that God created them, spoke darkness into light, and from that light made stars, and called them each by name. Dolores. Corinne. Bryan. Frederick. You wonder if the stars know who they are, have any clue who hung them with the moon.
Swooped up and down in flutter form, your arms make wings. Your legs, kicked out and in, swish the shape of an angel’s robe. Like every night, the signal comes. The porch light by the front door flickers on, casting glitter on the whiteness of the yard. No halo marks your head, but when you climb up from the ground, the snow around you glows.
AT THE FIRST signs of freedom, when the icicles that hung along the eaves began to drip and the crust of snow over the yard trickled to slush, my brother and I pulled our bicycles from the shed. We pedalled up and down the driveway, skidding in the mud and ice slicks, riding out the new release. Like Aslan the lion soaring over Narnia and turning the white kingdom back to green and flowers and leaves on trees, thaw began to wake the scrubby birches and poplars into bud, velveting the willows, sugaring the wind against my cheeks. With the rush of water unlocked, with the trill from the high branches and te
lephone wires, with the wet world’s canticle in praise of spring, I joined, my whole self singing as I flew behind my brother, wheeling away from winter, however temporal my flight.
SPRING
The Higher Kingdom
EVERYTHING HELD THE possibility of God. Sun through the kitchen window stretched like the first waterlogged rainbow above the ark. Last summer’s bloodstains on the chopping block echoed the Passover’s painted doorframe. Even my sparkle-spackled bedroom ceiling glinted a melody in my head as I lay awake, humming a song about Jesus coming back in the twinkling of an eye. The world and all its elements reverberated like Sunday-school lessons pointing toward a higher kingdom. Nothing was exempt from meaning, from meaning more than itself, from speaking beyond the sky in symbol and sign. Nowhere was off-limits for a voice to hint through clouds: Look, I’m here, I’m everywhere, which was why, on a springtime Saturday morning, at the centre of town, I stood beside my brother in a crowd of people, watching the sky, buoyant with hope.
A week prior, the headline of our local newspaper had advertised the “First Annual Ping-Pong Ball Drop,” an event sponsored by the village municipality to promote local businesses and community spirit. The article promised coupons, cash savings, and prizes galore—and the excitement of watching a helicopter dump thousands of ping-pong balls into the Co-op parking lot. “All ages welcome!” it said. “Everyone a winner!”