Read Online Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth - Free Book Online

one of the righteous or the wicked. Would the Lord spare this place and this people for my sake? Or will He sweep it all away, all of us together, sinners and saints alike? He will not do it; I believe it in my soul. The Judge of heaven and earth will do right. But it is not my place to know the mind of God, or the timing of His return.

6
    YESTERDAY AFTER SCHOOL , DADDY WANTED TO WORK ON THE old tractor that he’s reassembling. Someday he’ll have his own shed — maybe we’ll even own our own woods — but until then, his projects are piled up in the dust and grease of Grandma’s barn. I stayed inside with Grandma for an hour, but once she started talking about making lefse, I made my escape. Peeling potatoes makes my hands go red and itchy.
    When I left Grandma in the kitchen, she was pressing a white kitchen towel against her forehead. Sometimes I look at Grandma and see the Haralson apple tree we have in the orchard in the yard. This August, it had so many little green apples pulling it down, its branches were fit to break. Straining to hold its arms up to allow its fruit to ripen in the sun, the tree was slowly losing its fight as it drooped closer and closer to the ground. Deer eating off it at night were like dark, silent ghosts surrounding a weeping willow. Grandma holds all of us up to the Lord in prayer, trusting God for our safety and salvation. As she leaned against the kitchen sink, Grandma looked bone weary, and it don’t seem fair that she didn’t have anyone anymore to help hold up her arms.
    It ain’t really fair, neither, to call the abandoned little patch of fruit trees we got an orchard. The pines surrounding it have grown too close and are shadowing what apple and cherry trees have survived ice storms and lawnmower crashes. Daddy planted most of them for an agriculture project his senior year of high school, so I guess we are all still hoping they’ll become a success. I thought on all of these things while walking out to the barn, dragging my feet in my hand-me-down pink, puffy moon boots.
    Sliding the barn door across to squeeze into the shelter, I thought I heard a coon or a skunk or something scratching around the back of the lawnmower. Already covered in grime, the mower was sitting idle as it had since the end of September, so leaning against it to peer over into the corner was my first mistake. Nothing living was in the corner anyways, and my second mistake happened right quick. An old Gustafson’s ice-cream-pail handle, twisted up and tangled by the mower, had been kicked out the side of the blower and was there waiting for me to plonk my foot down hard. The wire ripped right through the bottom of my boot and screwed up into my foot. At first, I only felt wet soak into my boot, like I was barefoot on the cold, concrete floor of the barn. The metal must have clanked my bone inside my foot, though, because I felt that hit right up to my teeth.
    Daddy was there quicker than I thought he could move. He’d been wiping his hands on an oily rag, cleaning up, getting ready to come back inside when he heard me cry out. Kneeling over me, down on the floor with the swallow droppings and the dust sticking to my boots and jacket, he shook my shoulder to get me to stop crying, look up at him and tell him what was causing the racket. When I pointed to the wire tangled around and through my boot and he saw the thin trickle of blood staining the sole, he caught the hair hanging in my face and tucked it behind my ear.
    â€˜What you over here crouching around for?’
    I explained about the possibility of coon or even skunk.
    He just grabbed me up in his arms and carried me out of the barn. ‘You let them skunks look after themselves.’ His arms were shaking, but he was smiling the comfort smile he gave the ewes when they were lambing: knowing they was hurting, but loving them the same. He carried me to the house like I was still little and