Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  At school, in the basement recreation room, with all the elementary grades, I’d sat cross-legged on the rust-orange rug while Jack Roach, the town’s fire chief, paced in front of us in full firefighting gear, calling out questions like, “Why shouldn’t you play with matches?” and “What should you do if you smell smoke?” He told us never touch a stove burner that’s bright orange, don’t ever put a can of gasoline beside a barbecue, and stop, drop, and roll if your clothes catch fire. Out of a paper grocery sack set on a table beside him, Chief Roach pulled a hot dog wiener and stabbed it on the end of a long metal rod with a cord that dangled from its end.

  “See this?” he said. “Looks harmless, doesn’t it?” He plugged the pronged end of the cord into a small silver box the size of a toaster, then flicked a switch on the top of the box. Sparks shot from the wiener with a pop, followed by a fizzle and puff of smoke. The room lit up with shrieks and gasps. As the smoke haze cleared, flecks of char floated onto the table. All that was left of the wiener was a flayed chunk of blackened, sizzled meat.

  Then, with the lights turned out and the projector whirring, we watched a film reel that told the story of one family’s house fire. Sirens and red flashing lights, a ladder truck with hoses spraying into a billow of black smoke, men with axes smashing windows—it all seemed like an episode of an evening TV show, until the scene shifted to a hospital room where a girl, smaller than me, sat in a white gown on a table. From the knees down, her legs were red and blistered, and she was crying, the kind of crying that comes in jagged gasps, her open mouth a dark oblong howl. A nurse held a silver basin into which she dipped the girl’s feet, slowly and one at a time, and then began to sponge water over the bright, burned legs. A close-up shot showed the girl’s skin falling away like bits of tissue paper, slipping into the basin cloudy with her blood.

  When the lights flicked back on, Chief Roach said, “And that’s why you never play with fire.”

  I’d sat quiet in my row with the rest of my schoolmates but wanted to raise my hand and ask about the girl, what happened to her legs, and had they sewn the skin back on, bandaged it up like Lazarus from the Bible, dead three days before Jesus called for him to come forth out of his tomb and he stumbled back to life again.

  Beside my grandparents’ hearth, as Uncle Glen flexed the stub of his half-finger for the amazement of my cousins and me, I traced my own scars, thin white striations on my forehead and above my left eye, proof of the pain that once was, and before the scars, the blood.

  “OKAY,” CALLED GRANDMA. “We’re ready to go.”

  She flicked the switch on the projector and it whirred into motion, throwing light onto the white screen set up at the far end of the living room.

  She held up the film canister and read aloud the handwritten title on its label: Barbecue, baptism.

  The first image stuttered into focus. The deep green of a summer lawn. A baby—Justin?—crying, and Aunt Lavonne scooping him up, kissing him on the cheek, turning away from us all in jittery Super-8 time, but in present tense on the chesterfield, laughing at her younger self, letting the room laugh with her.

  Spliced together, fleet footage of a wheelbarrow race, a three-legged race, a potato-sack race, kids falling face-first into the lawn, rising grass-stained and stunned. Me in a blue sundress running barefoot with my cousins. Then bowls of potato salad on a picnic table. Hunks of meat—drumsticks, steaks—sizzling on a grill, smoke rising from the charcoal briquettes, and a man’s hand with metal tongs entering the frame.

  In the room’s faltering dark, the story shifted to a tawny deer in the box of a white pickup, then blurred and zoomed in to its head hoisted by the antlers. On the tailgate, beside the buck, a baby sat clapping, smiling back at us.

  “That’s me!” Daniel hollered. “That’s me!”

  Then birch trees, and a river flowing. Four men in white shirts standing up to their waists in the current, lowering a young woman from the church’s College and Careers group into the water, her long brown hair fanning out behind her as she floated back to air, smiling, wiping her eyes at the weight of this ritual, this imitating of the death of Jesus—gone down into the grave and then rising into life, that blood-soaked story at the centre of all our stories.

  When the reel fluttered to its end and an empty screen, we kids rushed to be the stars, making ourselves shadows on white. With our hands outstretched, long fingers flexing, our silhouettes swayed in the brightness until Grandma flicked off the projector, leaving only the firelight. The darkened room settled back to quiet talk, the kind that lets the stories rise—first in quip and insult, one aunt taunting another, my mother saying, “No way, that’s not what happened.” Then Uncle John chiming in with his two cents and a fact recalled, a remember-when, like the time Uncle Glen chucked clods of dried horse manure through the outhouse window and hit Aunt Millie conk on the skull, and how Grandpa courted Grandma with after-church buggy rides, and that time he shot a moose at Shadow Lake—well, in Shadow Lake—and the beast dropped right there in the waist-high water, and Grandma had to wade out in her dress to help hoist that moose, drag it into the shallows where they could get a start on gutting it, this animal soaked through and pure dead weight.

  At the end of one story and before the next began, a few moments of silence made space for a hush of meditation, like the pause of an amen after the prayer. But then another voice began, tentative, sounding its way into another story, telling of how the boys got hold of Aunt Lavonne’s favourite doll—the one that cried when you tipped it backward—and sawed into its chest with a hunting knife to steal the voice box, and the one about catching crawdads and bullfrogs in the pond, and the frog legs they fried over a small flame on shore and ate straight off the whittled willow spear.

  All our best stories had blood, and in that blood were more stories.

  “Tell us another one, Uncle Glen,” said a cousin—yes, tell us, said the others, and I jumped in with them, my voice eager in the chorus—another story, yes, the one about the grizzly and her cubs, the one where you had to shimmy up the tree and she almost clawed you down and sank her teeth into your neck, the time you almost died but lived to tell—tell us that one.

  This Little Light

  SUMMER. IN OUR northern interior, it flicked on like a heat lamp. June’s sudden shot of sun jolted everything green, from chickweed to poplars to the garden’s seedling rows. At the tilt into July, bees hummed at every flower, and in the acres at the back of the property, among fireweed and thistle, wild strawberries reddened on their stems. With my brother and the neighbourhood kids, I ran barefoot through the rise and fall of the sprinkler’s prismed arc. Some days, we carved out roads and tunnels for our Hot Wheels cars, each of us commanding a corner of the communal sandbox. Other days, we ripped around on our mini motorbikes, throttling down trails, pretending we were the Dukes of Hazzard County on the run from Boss Hogg and his sidekick, Rosco P. Coltrane.

  By the middle of July, the novelty of time without structure had begun to wear off. With no early-morning wake-up, no running to catch the bus, no homework, no after-school piano lessons, each day blurred into the next until it seemed that all I did was sit inside the long, hot hours, sunburned and sweating, plucking the dry, prickly grass and shrieking away the wasps, waiting for something to break through the sameness.

  Then, right at the threshold of August’s monotony, it did.

  “WHO’S EXCITED TO be here at VBS?” said Mrs. Penner from the church podium, smiling and cupping her hand to her ear. “I can’t hear you, children!”

  Me, me, me, we hollered back. I scooted to the edge of the pew full of girls my age and raised my hand high, a keener in the house of God.

  VBS was Vacation Bible School, a free week-long program of games, arts and crafts, puppet shows, snacks, and Bible lessons run by our Evangelical Mennonite Church. Monday through Friday, morning until noon, I joined the horde of summer-bored kids eager to run through the sanctuary with a liberty never allowed during church services. So
me of us were Sunday school kids, accustomed to the liturgy of songs and stories and the quiet, no-fidgeting-please-and-hands-to-yourselves prayer time that inevitably came at the close of every activity. Others were kids from the neighbourhood who had wandered over to the church to see what all the ruckus was about, then stuck around to drink the Kool-Aid and eat the free cookies.

  “It’s time to sing and praise the Lord,” Mrs. Penner said, and clapped her hands to make us look her way. No matter the hellion back-row boys who chicken-farted and doled out Charley horses, Mrs. Penner smiled on, permed and twinkle-eyed and powdery with kindness.

  Cousin Betty on accordion started up the opening notes, along with Aunt Mary on the vibraphone. Their tinny squeeze-box wheeze and smooth, velvety bells cast our song with an eerie cheer, like a sort of rising circus music.

  Most of the words we sang, I didn’t understand, but still they took me elsewhere. When we bellowed Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me, way beyond the blue, I eyed the bright velour fabric draped like a skirt around the vibraphone, sure that its royal-blue colour held a clue about the song’s meaning. Aunt Mary with her mallets hit the keys to make a quivering doooo sound, a cool tremble that made me wonder if, way beyond the velvet blue, the Lord might recognize me, even know my name.

  When we sang “If I Were a Butterfly,” I saw myself in pinks and purples, a winged thing fluttering above a field of cartoon flowers. And when we sang about all the critters in creation having a place in God’s choir, I became a bird on a taut telephone wire buzzing with voices, a chickadee in full song. I sang until I was another of the garden’s wild creatures lifting off into the voltage of the sky, and no longer me down here, pale and stocky in my elastic-waisted rugby pants and smock blouse with the scratchy lace around the collar reddening my neck.

  Around me, other children clapped along to the raucous song and fairly shouted, This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. Though none of us had any idea what a bushel was, and why we wouldn’t dare hide a little light under it, we all sang together as if we meant every word. I held my pointer finger up like a flaming candlewick. Hide it under a bushel—no! I belted out, assuming the words had something to do with the story of Moses and the desert bush on fire, and God’s voice burning through to send him back to Egypt.

  Later, after prayer and an amen dismissal, we stampeded down the stairs to the church basement, where a lineup of leaders stood waiting with clipboards in hand. Above the chatter of girls and the noise of boys locked in impromptu wrestling matches on the carpet, they called out names: Wendy? Geneva? Steven K.? Steven D.? Shushed into order and split into smaller groups, we shuffled off for the part of VBS that felt less like Vacation and more like School.

  In a curtained-off corner, I sat with my fellow Juniors around a low U-shaped table, listening to Mr. Lonnie. He was younger than most of the leaders, a volunteer from the College and Careers group. His black, wavy hair was combed neatly to one side and slicked down to a shine, like a man in a shampoo commercial. As he talked, he flipped the pages of his fat lesson book and held it up for us to see the colour illustrations. Always, in every picture, Jesus stood at the centre of the story. Stretching out his hand toward a sick girl. Healing the lepers. Feeding the multitudes with a boy’s loaves and fishes. Casting out a wild man’s demons and sending them into a herd of pigs.

  I’d heard it all before, in bedtime stories read aloud by my mother, in Sunday-school classrooms since I was old enough to talk. Jesus born in a manger. Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus the carpenter’s son. Jesus in the temple, on the shore, in the boat, walking on the water. Jesus in the desert, in the garden, in the tomb, in the clouds, always kind-eyed, always wearing the same blue-and-white robe.

  Every time I closed a prayer in Jesus’s name, I felt the same quiet pride as when I plinked my quarter in the offering cup. In the mouths of soft-voiced women—my mother, my grandmothers, the women in the church—Jesus carried a lullaby’s calm. From the tongues of men, it flashed like a double-edged sword. But I heard it spat, too, around the woodstove card games in my dad’s shop, Jesus as a bitter hiss, a fed-up cuss to punctuate defeat. His name wasn’t like other names. When I said it aloud—Jesus—I tasted a little of its hush and honey, and the sword and spark of it, too. Yet Jesus was, to me, like someone else’s teddy bear—comforting in theory, but not close enough to be mine.

  “Jesus loves you sooooo much,” said Mr. Lonnie. “So much that he died on a cross for you.” He stretched his hairy arms wide to show how much love, and to make a cross beam, like the one where Jesus hung. Nails pounded in his hands, he told us, and held his own thick-fingered hands up, palms toward us, and nails in his feet, too. I flashed back to my mother, weeks earlier, sprawled in the garden dirt with one shoe off, her mouth a tight circle of pain as she pulled a rusty nail from her heel.

  I’d stepped barefoot on thistles, pricked my finger on a wild rose bush, snagged my skin on the barbed-wire fence, but the crown of thorns set down on Jesus’s head—thorns like thumbtacks, like the sharpened points of screws—that cruelty made my throat cinch tight. I knew the story well, had seen it pantomimed in Sunday-school Easter plays with a flimsy lumber cross dragged up the aisle and a papier-mâché stone rolled away from a cardboard tomb. But that morning in the church basement, as I listened to Mr. Lonnie tell us again about the bag of silver and Judas’s kiss, the purple robe and crown of thorns, the Roman soldier hammering in the nails, the old story sounded different. It made my stomach feel weird, partly because as Mr. Lonnie told it, his words wheezed out of him, as if he’d swallowed the squeaker from a waterlogged dog toy, or was trying hard not to sob.

  “Can you believe it?” he said. “Can you believe that Jesus died for me? For you?” He held open the lesson book to a picture of Jesus hanging, chin to his chest, slumped and bleeding on the cross and naked, except for what looked like a bunched-up cloth diaper about to slip off his limp body. Even the noisy boys stayed quiet, leaning in toward the violence as we studied the illustration.

  After he set down the book, Mr. Lonnie pulled from his bag of lesson supplies a rubber-banded stack of glossy red pamphlets and began to hand them out. They looked like brochures, the kind displayed at the medical clinic, advertising help for infections and diseases. Three Steps to Knowing Jesus, proclaimed the cover.

  It was a tract, Mr. Lonnie told us, and we could follow the steps inside the tract, on our own, alone in a quiet spot, and Jesus would hear us if we talked to Him, as if we were the only ones praying. “Whenever someone invites Jesus to come in,” said Mr. Lonnie, “the angels in heaven celebrate.”

  I thought about it as I stood in line to receive my oatmeal cookie and cup of purple juice. I thought about it as I stood at the craft station gluing popsicle sticks into a frame that held a Polaroid of my face and below it, in sparkle-glitter letters, my name. I thought about it as we held hands and trudged in a circle in the parking lot behind the church, singing the farmer picks a wife, and the wife picks a child, and the child a nurse, the nurse a cow, all the way down the line of “The Farmer in the Dell” until Clarence Harder, the cheese, stood alone, sweating in the sun. My mind was elsewhere, still on the cross. If Jesus loved me enough to wear those thorns and let the blood run down into his long brown hair, the least I could do was ask him to come into my heart. A tiny house painted red with a brick chimney puffing smoke—that’s how I imagined it, and Jesus standing outside the little door, patient as an old dog, waiting for me to open the door and let him come inside.

  I MADE SURE my bedroom door was locked, that I would be alone. I pulled the curtains shut and clicked on my bedside lamp. Its glow threw a lace-edged circle of light over my feet. I liked the feeling of standing in it, and how the room grew serious around me, my skin prickling in the quiet. I unfolded the glossy tract and spread it open on my bed. Three cartoon numbers stared up at me with goggle eyes. In a white speech bubble, a smiling number one decreed: Admit that you’re a sinner, and that you’ve made mistakes.

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sp; I knelt on the carpet, clasped my hands, bowed my head, and closed my eyes.

  “Dear Jesus,” I whispered, following the words prescribed to me for everlasting life.

  Like the spool of music on Grandpa and Grandma Funk’s player piano cranked by some hidden ghost hand, sins rolled up through my mind. My fat mitten slapped across Dustin’s red cheek. The snapped antenna from the radio-pack of my brother’s Six Million Dollar Man. My crayon scribbles and ripped pages in the colouring book, above which I’d forged my younger cousin’s name. Look, Mom, I’d said, she’s wrecking everything. Once begun, the reel of trespasses played on. The orange-haired baby’s neck fat pinched so I could hear him cry. The lemon drop stolen from the belly of the blue glass hen when my mother wasn’t looking. And the daddy longlegs spider I trapped inside an empty pickle jar, watching as it tried to scrabble up the glass. I tipped it onto the carport floor and, one by one, plucked off its legs until a single threadlike leg remained, then watched it drag in circles on the concrete.

  “I am a sinner,” I whispered. “I have made mistakes.”

  The tract’s cartoon 2 with its wide-open mouth speech-bubbled the second step: Believe that Jesus died for you and rose again, and ask him to forgive your sins.

  I knew Jesus had died, like Mr. Lonnie told us, but for me, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t figure out how back in Bible-times Jerusalem he knew what I’d do wrong here, in Vanderhoof, all these years and miles away from where he walked the earth. But if alive and spying down from Heaven’s lofty vantage, then of course he saw it all, even me. And if he could see every sin and secret, of course he had to have risen from the grave. How else to explain his all-knowingness, his everywhere-ness. The riddle of that logic rolled back and forth in my mind, a stone unsealing and sealing up the tomb.

  In Sunday-morning worship, the female voices, silver and flutey, together sang the question, What can wash away my sins? And the men sang back in a deep, mahogany drone, Nothing but the blood of Jesus. I thought of the bloodstains on the knees of my baby-blue corduroy pants when I wiped out on my bike. The blood crusted in my hair, oozing from my split lip, road rash on my chin and cheeks when I fell down, down, down. How blood could cancel any stain, erase sin’s black X and leave a clean white space, only made sense by miracle, the kind Jesus performed when he waved his hand over jars of water and changed them into wine. What holy magic he wielded, how one word from his mouth made the storm go still and the waves go slack, remained mysterious. But not every mystery needed to be solved for the story to be true. All I had to do was look at stars pinpricked into darkness. Even without me knowing why and how, they shone.