by Carla Funk
I meant it when I said the words—Please forgive my sins—and let them all be washed away, the way the stuck-on smears of dead insects disappeared as the windshield wipers waved back and forth over the glass and made clear the road ahead. And when I spoke the tract’s third and final step that assured an eternity with God—Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord—I felt the warmth spill over me, like when I lay back in the bathtub to let my mother wash my hair, the water scooped with a plastic cup and poured over my head, the heat trickling back from my forehead, down around my ears and neck so that my whole body shivered. Those words I spoke aloud—like a charm to change a creature into something new—charged the room, hung in the quiet around me, every syllable aglow.
Elsewhere in the house, my brother raked through Lego, building another fighter jet, battle-ready. Below me, in the basement laundry room, the ironing board creaked open to receive the clothesline’s load, and my mother smoothed out the wrinkles. Down the Kluskus logging road, my dad gripped the truck’s steering wheel, craning through a cloud of summer dust. But in the solitude of my pink-walled bedroom, even before I opened my eyes and unclasped my hands, I felt it—the beginning and the shift. I was like a birthday girl, floating to the centre of the story, clean and pressed and ready for the party, for the stack of wrapped and curly-ribboned gifts, for the cake blazing with candles and a cluster of guests leaning in, waiting for me to take a breath and blow.
When someone asks Jesus into their heart, Mr. Lonnie said, all of Heaven celebrates. From the beige shag rug in the middle of my room where I knelt, I tried to see past the stippled ceiling flecked with silver sparkles and picture the scene—high above the roofline, through the clouds, angels flexing their wings, swooping along the streets of gold, circling the sea of glass and a huge, smoke-wreathed throne, blasting brassy trumpets as they flew.
All that the verses and sermons proclaimed on long and boring Sundays—You are the salt of the earth, a city on a hill, a vessel of clay out of whose cracks spill treasure—had always sounded like words to a song meant for someone else to sing, promises made to the robed and bearded Bible men who followed Jesus around like a pack of hungry strays. But Jesus—the one Mr. Lonnie called “Light of the World”—he seemed to have climbed down an invisible ladder, away from Heaven’s revelry, to stand outside my heart and knock and knock and knock until I finally let him in. I stood in the centre of my bedroom, wearing the same clothes, but feeling like something had finally happened, like I’d changed. Do, Lord, oh, do Lord. I clicked off my bedside lamp and unlocked my door. Hide it under a bushel, no! In my gut, an ember, as if I’d swallowed all the candles off the birthday cake, and my face flush with the heat. I stepped over the threshold into the cool shadows of the hallway on whose walls hung photos of the girl I used to be.
The Horse Story
LIKE A PARABLE, my grandfather’s story of the horse burned with a wisdom beyond the earthly. Every detail seemed to catch the mind’s eye with a shimmer that said, Look, that said, Listen. The river, sluggish and low that summer, but still flowing. The sun’s high-vaulted heat simmering the elements, tipping the odds out of his favour. The buzz of insects at his sweaty head, and the smell—that off, sweet rot cooking around him. Though he didn’t remember the horse’s name—Cricket? Smoky? Or maybe Methuselah?—he could call up that day of his boyhood without effort, rebuilding that long-ago world for the listener, and taking me back to the farm on the outskirts of an Oregon town called Sweet Home.
It was the first time his father had left him in charge of the property. His parents needed to make a trip into town, a full day’s journey there and back, and his older sister, Mildred, would go along, but he, the only son, needed to stay behind. Though only twelve, he was old enough now to look after the livestock and to take on the daily rhythm of chores. He watched his family, dressed in their Sunday clothes, ride away in the buggy drawn by two bay horses, and felt a swell of pride at the burden of this day. His father, a man in whose shadow he gladly walked, whose footsteps in the dirt he followed, trusted him. A light fear threatened to creep in, but rather than mull the what-ifs that whirred on the fringes of his thinking—what if a stranger, what if a storm—he set to work.
As soon as he reached the barn, he knew something was wrong. The old plough horse was listless, leaning against the stall. When he scattered in a handful of oats, the creature didn’t eat. Not even a flicker of the ears. Within an hour of him being left in charge, the horse lay down in the stall’s far corner and refused to lift its head from the hay. He tried to rouse it, thinking colic, a twisted gut, and finally prodded the animal to its feet. He pulled it by the halter out into the paddock. The horse, breathing hard, stumbled, faltered. And then it was done. The horse stiffened where it stood, shuddered, and then crumpled over in the stink of its own manure.
To everything there is a season—a time to live, a time to die—and that late morning brought the horse’s death rattle to the farm. He’d seen animals killed by a quick snap of the neck, with an axe, a rifle. He’d knelt beside his father in the woods and pulled the innards from a buck, but never up close and in real time had he witnessed the natural end of a creature. The horse’s breath leaked out, like air from a slashed tire, and left the cheeks hollow, the rib cage gaunt.
The problem he faced now was what to do with the body. Not even noon, and the sun threw a heat warp over the field. He stalked across the yard to check the henhouse’s wire fence for holes, pumped fresh water for the troughs. He stacked what lumber needed stacking. He surveyed the acres—the barn, the house, the dirt road—found them all quiet, unnervingly so, but in good order. He thought of where his folks and sister might be now. His mother standing at a store counter, studying her list of goods. His sister at their mother’s side, a slim shadow in a white bonnet. His father talking with other men from the church about the price of wheat and wood, and who needed work, and whose crops this season suffered grasshoppers. He felt certain that this day was a test, and that his father, upon returning home, would judge how well he’d fared.
By early afternoon, the horse had begun to bloat. Under the high sun, its belly swelled like a broodmare due to birth twin foals. The stench, too, was rising: a sick and sweet perfume hung in the air. When a breeze tilted across the barnyard, it carried the odour toward him. Once he smelled it, he couldn’t shake it, the vapour trail haunting him, as if the horse were breathing at his back, pressing him to fix the wrong that festered.
He tried to drag the thing by its back legs, but even with all his weight anchored and leaning, the most he could do was shift its shape in the dirt. Each tug and yank only wafted the stench toward him. Sweat-drenched, gut muscles clenched, he pulled. Pulled hard. But no use. Flies congregated on the horse’s rusty coat, black spots rising, hovering, settling to feed.
He squatted in the shade of the barn’s lean-to and thought: what would his father do?
And here, Grandpa let his listener offer up ideas, thoughts of how best he should tackle the problem, guesses on what he should do with that horse. Stick a blade in the belly to let out the pent-up gases? Butcher it right there in the muck of the paddock? Leave the creature be until his father came home to help?
He knew the tractor key hung on a nail in the tool shed. His father didn’t like him driving it without permission, but he weighed the circumstances. Seeing as how he was the one in charge of the farm, taking his father’s place, he might be the one to give himself permission. He slipped the key from its nail, grabbed a shovel, coiled two chains over his shoulder, and headed for the tractor.
After swinging open the gate and backing the tractor into the paddock, as close to the horse as he could get without running over a hoof, he set to work with the chains. He wrestled them beneath the horse’s shoulder, then looped them around and behind the front legs, making sure they hooked around the girth where the joints met the belly. It took him a few tries and tugs to fit the chains so that the thousand pounds of horse would budge, and finally, when he let
out the clutch and eased the gas, the tractor lurched, and the dead weight moved. Out of the swung-open paddock gate he drove, the engine straining and a cloud of exhaust fumes blooming up, the cargo behind leaving a flattened, smooth swath of earth in its wake.
He hauled it to the field nearest the river. Slack in its chains, the horse lay stiff-legged, locked in position but still swelling. He’d been worried the beast might burst while being pulled, but miracle of miracles, the belly held.
As he dug the blade into the earth, he guessed how many shovelfuls remained. Three hundred. Two hundred. No, five hundred more. The hole, he knew, needed to be bigger than the horse, but still, he hadn’t known the long hours this digging would take. Without a tree to shade him, he felt as though the sun were cooking him alive. His hands fattened with heat, and his feet tightened in his boots. His pulse throbbed in his head, sun-hammered, dizzy. He stopped only to wipe sweat from his eyes or take a swig of water from the jug.
By the time the hole was deep enough to hold the body, the sun had begun to cast an amber dazzle over the river. The horse, dragged the final distance, slid rigid into the earth. Then he noticed the problem. Though the back legs were bent tight and close to the body, one of the forelegs—the left—locked at the knee, stuck straight up. With the horse lying on its back in the hole, the stiffened limb jutted above ground level. When he stood a few paces back, the hoof and fetlock were still visible. He tried to work the leg down, but no use. With rigor mortis having settled, it was like trying to bend a block of wood.
Because he wanted to finish the job and have his father, upon returning, see the paddock horseless, ask to hear the story, then say to him, Well done, son, he shovelled the mound of loamy dirt back into the hole. Dust to dust, he thought, like any old gravedigger. Each shovelful erased the horse a little more until the neck and withers disappeared, then the eerie half-shut eye, the black mane, and finally the rusty, bloated belly. What remained, though, was that foot, stuck like a blunt question mark above the plot.
Here, again, Grandpa’s eyes crinkled, his face still solemn with the telling, but he let the listener lean in, surprised, maybe let out a little laughter to accompany the curiosity and comedy. A horse’s hoof! He paused long enough to let on that this was still a wisdom story, the kind that brought a lesson along with it, and if we pressed in further, the truth would come clear. For the big illumination, I hadn’t the language yet, but even without being able to say metaphor and symbol, I knew a story’s power to carry my mind elsewhere and to other thoughts. That hoof poking out of the ground and my grandpa’s boyhood shoveling made me think of other deaths I knew, other plots of dirt. Aunt Linda in her pale-blue dress descending. My cousin beneath the closed lid of that sinking coffin. The uncle buried beneath a tombstone in an Oregon churchyard—Uncle Howard, the ghost baby no one spoke of anymore. He would have been the eldest, my grandmother once said, but he came too early. A blue-skinned stillborn too small to live.
He drove the tractor up the slope and into the lean-to, hung the key in the tool shed, and grabbed a hacksaw, then headed back down to the field. With the shovel, he dug down around the foot, clearing enough room to finish the work. Then, in the same way he’d fit the blade to a notch in a tree trunk, he pulled that saw into place at the knee joint. He let the teeth catch, then snag into the flesh and tendon. He pulled the hacksaw back and forth, slowly, until it found the bone, then kept the blade moving. A little blood oozed. Flies droned around his face. And that bone, with his final passes of the saw, splintered. He cracked it off and nicked away the skin left clinging until the hoof came free in his hand.
Had he stood there with his eyes closed a moment, the heft of that horse’s foot in his grip could have been a mossy length of punky alder, solid, but hollow, too, the hoof unshod, striated with cracks from two decades of trod miles, frost and snow, mud and dust, man’s work and beast’s work. I held that foot, too, in my mind’s eye, and saw my grandfather—that serious boy in the black-and-white photograph resting on the mantle—standing still in the field, wondering what came next.
He carried it down toward the shore. On the weedy bluff, with the water twisting and whorling below, he cocked his arm back, then pitched the foot, that bloodless stump floating a moment at the peak of its arc—a flying thing held above the sun, as if free and with a will to choose height or depth, rise or fall, light or dark—then pitching down into the river. A splash, white froth, and the rusty stump bobbing to the surface as the current took it south toward the sea.
In the silence that followed Grandpa’s story, a smile threatened to break over his face, but he always held back, letting the listener sit with the question of what it all meant. What happened when his folks came home, what his father said about the dead horse, all that shoveling, the sawed-off foot—he never told. He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, tilted his head a little to the side, and clicked his tongue against his teeth like punctuation, an ellipsis that left the story open and inscribed in me a question mark.
The hot sun, the boy alone and in his father’s place, the horse’s body bloating in the heat—I heard them like the elements of a Sunday sermon or a story from an ancient text. I knew they meant more than the sum of their parts. A boy working his father’s farm sounded like scripture, like a missive from a far-off kingdom. Death beneath the sun conjured Christ sweating in the desert, the body breaking down, aching toward the final Resurrection. My grandfather, the boy, staring into that hole in the earth, mulling his own end.
I imagined that horse’s foot travelling down the river, and the dead-uncle ghost baby floating, too, joining with the horse’s hoof, hooked together in a chain, like a starter strand of DNA, cast out but swimming toward the rivers of eternity, where one day we all will meet. And there, Grandpa will tell the story all over again, patting that horse on the shoulder as it shakes off the flies and sweat, and the stillborn will be no longer blue at the lips but spark-eyed and standing near in the field—a boy, a horse, a man, all held inside the bigger story, the one we all were made for, and are forever carried toward.
Every Hidden Thing
BE SURE YOUR sins will find you out. The iambic pulse of my mother’s words sounded like a warning spoken in a fairy tale, a glowing bony finger pointed at my heart, the final sentence of a Sunday-school lesson in which the story ends in fire or flood or famine. When she recited this proverb, she tilted her head a little to the side and raised one eyebrow, and spoke in the same dark tone she used when a pickup had run over our cocker spaniel: She should have listened when I called.
We lived in a surveillance state. Though Jesus had long gone back to Heaven, rocketing up post-Resurrection, light shooting from the holes in his hands, he’d left behind the Holy Ghost, who could be anywhere, and was, and all the time kept watching like my mother. When alone in my parents’ bedroom I picked up my dad’s coin bank, a ceramic monk with a fluffy tonsure and a painted-on sad face, and fiddled with the rubber plug that stopped the dimes and quarters from spilling into my palm, I sensed the eyes behind me: the Holy Ghost or Mom—I couldn’t tell. When I cracked open the refrigerator in my dad’s shop to the brown bottles on the shelves and thought of the cold, bitter Pilsner on my tongue, the whisper in my ear intoned with a haunting quaver: Be sure ... be sure ... be sure your sins will find you out.
That summer morning when the telephone rang and Grandpa Shenk told my mother to hurry up, get in the pickup and meet him back at their house, but come right away, she thought something was seriously wrong. Grandpa wouldn’t tell her over the phone why she needed to come, only that he needed her right away, right now, just come. So we climbed into our mint-green Chrysler and gunned it up the hill and through the asphalt’s heat-shimmer toward Grandma and Grandpa’s house. When we pulled into their driveway, other cars and trucks were waiting. Uncle Wayne stood sweating at the back of his pickup’s open box, pulling a stack of pallets to the edge of the tailgate, motioning for us to come and take our pick.
Grandpa lived a secret l
ife that only the family knew about. On his visits to the town dump, under the guise of dropping off his own garbage, tossing a black plastic bag onto the smoking heap, he waited until he was sure no one was watching him, and then he’d sneak, cap pulled down to shield his face, and begin scouring for free junk, anything worth plucking from the pile. A lamp without its shade. A broom without its bristles. A stack of Hardy Boys with the pages only slightly waterlogged, only faintly smelling of cat pee. At family gatherings, he quietly displayed his latest finds, pulling us aside to show how he’d cleaned up the thing, repaired it, made it almost good as new.
“Can you believe someone actually threw this away?” he’d say, holding up an axe with a splintered handle or a bent can opener or a telephone missing its coiled cord.
Their toy box overflowed with scavenged things. Rusty Tonka trucks and die-cast metal cars, teddy bears restitched, restuffed, wooden blocks that needed sanding and repainting, a smudge-faced doll with an eye that never fully closed or a head of hair left too close to the heater and now melted to a matted plastic clump.