Literary Tuesday

After finishing The Hunger Games last week I started reading Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger.  It's the story of "eleven-year-old Reuben Land, and asthmatic boy in the Midwest who has reason to believe in miracles. Along with this sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother, who has been controversially charged with murder (from the back of the book)." 

Sound intriguing?? 

  

I'm 3/4 in and, as per usual, I'm delaying finishing it.  I both love and hate it when good stories come to an end.  I obsessively watched all four seasons of Prison Break in just over a month, yet put off watching the final two episodes because then it would really and truly be over.

Can you relate?!

I'll miss this family, particularly Reuben's sister, Swede.

Here is an excerpt, from the chapter entitled By the Grace of Lurvy:

In retrospect it’s hard to believe I didn’t see instantly what to do with that money.  But when it’s the first you’ve earned by sweat you see it as special and by golly not to be spent on less than the desire of your grasping heart.  The more I thought about old Alfred and his cedar canoe, the more I saw myself paddling one just like it.  Convinced similar exquisite vessels lay concealed in dairy barns all over the country, I told Swede of my decision.

          “We’re out of food, Reuben,” she answered.

          Having used great gestures describing the canoe I planned to purchase and the adventures we would enjoy thereafter, it irritated me that she would change the subject.

          “Well, let’s go get some then.”

          “We can’t.”

          I really did need it spelled out for me; the truth is, I’d been wondering when Swede would take the initiative and suggest we go up to the Red Owl for groceries.  We often did the shopping, the two of us, pulling our painted wagon, Dad’s money in my pocket; in the winter we used a toboggan.

          “If we spend any more money right now,” she said, “we shall be broke.”

          Her emphasis on shall put me in mind, as it was certainly meant to, of Pastor Reach, whose inflections left you in no doubt of his good sense.  I was smitten into silence while Swede stacked dishes in the sink and ran water on them and waited for me to make myself gallant.

          But I was more interested in canoes than gallantry.  I was annoyed that we were out of money and Christmas almost here; also that Swede knew we were out of money before I did, and her younger than me.  I was annoyed that I’d worked hard to earn twenty-five dollars and now would have to give my twenty-five dollars to Otto Schock, the Red Owl man.  There was a lot to be annoyed about, and I could afford to grouse because Dad had eaten his small breakfast and thanked us and gone back straightaway to his bed of exhaustion.  I stood festering in the kitchen. “You don’t want a canoe, then?”

          I like to believe we have all said things that approach this in stupidity.

          Swede didn’t answer but swabbed the dishes and rinsed them and laid them up to dry.  Normally I’d have taken a towel and wiped them myself, but it’s difficult to do productive work and fume simultaneously – the labor dissipates your righteous steam – so I stood glaring at the back of her little blond head, which was tilted in thoughtful mien.  Sensing she was going to say something sagacious, I started to leave the kitchen but was too late.

          “In Little Women,” she said – see? – “when Jo cut off her hair and sold it to pay for Marmee’s train fare – you remember?”

          Well, of course I remembered.  After the shearing Jo had gone home and stunned them all with her sacrificial present, the profit from her bounteous hair, her one beauty, as her sisters so backhandedly put it.

          “If Marmee had begged Jot to go cut off her hair and sell it,” Swede hypothesized, “I wonder how heroic a thing it would have been.”

          I didn’t say anything.  But I thought: Aw, crumb.