Every Little Scrap and Wonder: A Small-Town Childhood by Carla Funk

Author:Carla Funk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ask Now the Beasts

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee ...

—JOB 12:7

NO OTHER BIRD sings chick-a-dee-dee-dee, my mother said, the way the chickadee can.

Except for the piano keys I plunked, I had no signature song. In the choir, I was one kid among a row of boys and girls, and we all sang someone else’s tune, a score composed for children’s voices, simple and unadorned. When I looked out the window at the chickadees flitting on the feeder, I studied them for some trait of a maker blinking through. As they jittered and scratched at the suet and sunflower seeds, the shells flew to the dirt, their black-capped heads moving like figures in a stop-motion animation. I wanted to read those birds and know what God was thinking when he invented their buffy feathers, black bibs, round heads, when he hollowed their bones for flight. God had a master plan, but what and why, I still hadn’t figured out. I wanted to know the truth behind the mystery, to be able to decipher the code etched into the universe. I wanted to listen like a prophet, to hear what only the wise ones hear, so that I, too, could have my own chapter in a thick, leather-bound book, like Joseph and Gideon and Esther, all those famous lives of faith. I wanted my life to be worthy of a Bible story, illuminated in full colour.

“All of nature speaks of its maker,” said our school principal, Mr. Schroeder, which is why, he explained, we study both books written by the Creator—the Holy Bible, and the book of the natural world, with all the chapters in its glorious design.

Like I’d learned in our school’s weekly devotional time, I leaned on the pigpen fence and studied our quintet of pigs to see what God might be saying. As they wallowed in late-spring mud, their snouts, rooting in the sludge of their own poop, came up brown and glistening. Their small eyes wheedled, and when I dumped a bucket of slop into the trough, they squealed and snapped at each other like wild boars, the kind that would gore an old yeller dog. Only weeks ago, I’d fed them by hand, and before that, when they’d first arrived, swaddled each of them in turn in a flannel doll blanket. On the fresh straw in the corner of the shed, I’d cradled a piglet, scratched its wiry pink chin until it fell asleep in my arms. But now, in their filth and gluttony, they’d gone primal, forgetting my kindness.

Even my closest animal companion, Leslie, the patched tabby I’d found as a kitten in a hollow log, seemed to have forsaken me. The one who used to follow me like a stealthy shadow had grown aloof ever since Packsack, the trapper who lived part of the year in a trailer in our yard, had stuffed the cat headfirst into a length of stovepipe. After the jackknife-quick castration, Leslie shot into the bushes, leaving droplets of blood in a trail on the dirt.

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