Free Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth Page B

aren’t out of Grandma’s mind, though.
    â€˜Boys.’
    I think it’s fun when she speaks to my daddy and Uncle Ingwald like children.
    â€˜Boys. You know it wasn’t long between when the Svensens’ roof went patchy to when the whole heap fell down altogether.’
    The men grunt in agreement, look up and nod slowly. They are both stuffed full and stretched out in the living room: Uncle Ingwald’s on the worn green couch and my daddy’s on the orange davenport with his stocking feet hanging over the armrests. The boys are outside somewhere. Usually Daddy and Reuben would be out hunting on Thanksgiving, but with Grandma’s new killing ban, we’re all homebound. We got enough venison to fill our freezer this year anyway, but what we’ll do next year, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to hunt up at the cabin.
    â€˜Am I just talking to the wind?’ Grandma slaps the towel on her skirt.
    â€˜Repairs take money, Momma.’ Daddy knows the dollars and cents of every farm building in Failing. There’s plenty he would do around our house and the homeplace if he had the means; he spends most of each Sunday pencilling plans on the bulletin. Nobody’s proud of the state of Grandma’s barn. ‘You got some put by we need to know about?’
    And I know right away he don’t try to be mean — just seems he gets tired. He works and works and got nothing to show for it but rough hands. A man can hardly feed his family. And he’s still sore at Grandma.
    â€˜Maybe you should talk to Peter about it.’ Daddy’s picking at her scab. ‘He’s got no end of time and money, and he sure don’t have no sense.’
    Grandma makes a sound like a hurt pup. She shakes her head and moves slow back into the kitchen.
    Ingwald opens his eyes and gives my daddy a harsh look. He don’t even say a word, but the matter is closed for now. It will rest.
    She really shouldn’t be hassling them right after they’ve eaten like that. We’ve fed so much today, we’re all feeling a bit sluggish and weighted down. We ate cheese soup and wild rice soup; cranberries straight out of the can; fresh rolls hot from the oven with butter sliding down their sides; boiled potatoes, carrots and rutabagas; and turkey, ham and venison. I ate a lot of both dill and bread-and-butter pickles and green and black olives too, because I do love pickles and olives.
    Daddy ate a lot of pickled pork hocks, salted herring and slimy lutefisk, because Daddy loves things that look and smell foul. Reuben and I teased him after the big dinner, and he pretended to be all offended. He said we were lucky that he was full and sleepy like a wintering bear, too slow and dumb to catch us kids and give us a good swipe. He might now need to consider some hibernating, as he looks like he’s having some trouble breathing easy even when he’s laid out flat on his back.
    Grandma is right about Svensen’s barn. Down across the rows of corn stubble in the fields that separate our homeplace from theirs, you used to could see Svensen’s red barn barely standing like a worn-out, swayback cow. Her main ridge was all slumped and broken, and her side timbers let through the sunlight until it seemed you could see right through her ribs to the other side. Late last winter, we woke to a different view of scraggly jack pines behind a pile of red scrap dusted with white; she’d collapsed under the gentle weight of a new snow. Come summer, even her remnants had caught fire and burnt. But our barn can’t be that bad, even though it is as old as Svensen’s. Even if the roof looks a little mangy, our family wouldn’t ever let it all just fall apart. And anyway, most of the barns around here burn before they fall.
    Wafting across the kitchen, the smell of hot coffee and cinnamon-spiced apple cider wakes the slumbering gluttons.
    Grandma looks itchy and seems