Acceptance and Forgiveness Theme Analysis

“You’re saying she’s got some hillbilly in her?”

“Just like us.”

We’d been raised in a little town deep in a hollow of the Missouri Ozarks. When we first came to Lincoln School, we still spoke with a strong Ozark accent. That twang, along with a lot of who we were, had been lost over our years at the school.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“I’m just saying, Odie, that nobody’s born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.”

Maybe so, but I still hated her little black heart.

They walked away, Mose carrying little Emmy, but Brickman lingered a moment and surveyed the destruction. Under his breath he said, “Jesus.”

“You were wrong,” I told him.

He looked at me and squinted. “Wrong?”

“You said God was a shepherd and would take care of us. God’s no shepherd.”

He didn’t respond.

“You know what God is, Mr. Brickman? A goddamn tornado, that’s what he is.”

God be with you. That was the last thing Miss Stratton had said to me. But the God I knew now was not a God I wanted with me. In my experience, he was a God who didn’t give but only took, a God of unpredictable whim and terrible consequence. My anger at him surpassed even my hatred of the Brickmans, because the way they treated me was exactly what I expected. But God? I’d had my hopes once; now I had no idea what to expect.

Albert stopped and turned to me, his face sad and serious. “Listen, Odie, things have happened to you, bad things, and I know I should have done a better job of protecting you. But I don’t want you to turn out like…like…”

“Like Clyde Brickman? Like DiMarco? You think that’s who I am? The hell with you.”

I walked away from his as fast as I could. Not only because I was angry but because I didn’t want him to see how much he’d hurt me.

“Everything’s hard work, Buck. You don’t wrap your thinking around that, life’ll kill you for sure. Me, I love this land, the work. Never was a churchgoer. God all penned up under a roof? I don’t think so. Ask me, God’s right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods. In you and me, too. It’s all connected and it’s all God. Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”

“This land spawned a tornado that killed Emmy’s mother. You call that tender?”

“Tragic, that’s what I call it. But don’t blame the land. […] The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”

I’d killed Vincent DiMarco, which had done something to me that could not be undone. But if you asked me, even to this day, I would tell you that I’ve never been sorry he was dead. Jack was different. I knew it wasn’t his fault, the rage inside him. I’d seen a different Jack, a Jack I liked and, who knows, given time and other circumstances, a Jack I might have been happy to call my friend. Shooting him was like shooting an animal with rabies. It had to be done. But when I pulled that trigger, I lost something of myself, something even more significant than when I’d killed DiMarco, something I think of now as a sliver of my soul.

As the piano player laid down the first few bars, I moved out into the dark of the meadow, sat down, pulled out my mouth organ, and played right along with them. Oh, it was sweet, like being fed after a long hunger, but it filled me in a different way than the free soup and bread earlier that night had. Into every note, I blew out that longing deep inside me. The song was about love, but for me it was about wanting something else. Maybe home. Maybe safety. Maybe certainty. It felt good, in the way I’d sometimes imagined what prayer might feel like if you really believed and poured your heart into it.

She laughed and put her arm around my shoulder. “Only God is perfect, Odie. To the rest of us, he gave all kinds of wrinkles and cracks.” She lifted her hair from her cheek, showing me the long scar there. “If we were perfect, the light he shines on us would just bounce right off. But the wrinkles, they catch the light. And the cracks, that’s how the light gets inside us. When I pray, Odie, I never pray for perfection. I pray for forgiveness, because it’s the one prayer I know will always be answered.”

“Sometimes, Odie,” Sister Eve went on, “in order for people to reach up and embrace their most profound belief in God, they need to stand on the shoulders of others. That’s what Jed and Mickey and Lois and Gooch do. Their experiences are the shoulders for others to climb on. And, Odie, it works. People come forward and I take their hands and I can feel how powerful their faith is, and that’s what heals them. Not me. Their faith in a great, divine power.”

“Drink’s a tough devil to face down. I seen it lay lots of good men low. But, Buck, here’s the thing. If you never make that kind of bet, you’ll never see the good that might come from it.”

“You think it wasn’t a bad idea?”

“Like your brother said, could turn out you’re throwing good money after bad. But me, I admire your leap of faith.”

We risked a fire that night and sat together, talking quietly around the flames, as we had on many nights since we’d taken to the rivers. It began to feel to me as if what had been broken was coming together again, but I knew it would never be exactly the same. With every turn of the river, we were changing, becoming different people, and for the first time I understood that the journey we were on wasn’t just about getting to Saint Louis.

This was all my doing, all my fault. This was my curse. I saw now that long before the Tornado God descended and killed Cora Frost and decimated Emmy’s world, that vengeful spirit had attached itself to me and had followed me everywhere. My mother had died. My father had been murdered. I was to blame for all the misery in my life and the lives of everyone I’d ever cared about. Only me. I saw with painful clarity that if I stayed with my brother and Mose and Emmy, I would end up destroying them, too. The realization devastated me, and I stood breathless and alone and terribly afraid.

I fell to my knees and tried to pray to the merciful God Sister Eve had urged me to embrace, prayed desperately for release from this curse, prayed for guidance. But all I felt was my own isolation and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

“What I’m going to say may sound impossible. But I’ve seen impossible things before, so here goes. Those fits she suffers? I think they may be her attempt at wrestling with what she sees when she looks into the future. I think she might be trying to alter what she sees there.”

That knocked me over. “She changes the future?”

“Maybe just tweaks it a little. Like a good storyteller rewriting the last sentence.”

We are creatures of spirit, I have come to believe, and this spirit runs through us like electricity and can be passed one to another. That’s what I felt coming from my mother’s hand, the spirit of her deep longing. I was her son, her only son, and the photographs in her lap, the money she’d sent, her naïve willingness to believe the lies of the Black Witch, all told me that she’d never stopped loving me.