Peace Like a River: A Novel

by Leif Enger

From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with—given

In these cases,” said Dr. Nokes, “we must trust in the Almighty to do what is best.”

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it’s been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week—a miracle, people say, as if they’ve been educated from greeting cards. I’m sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave—now there’s a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.

People fear miracles because they fear being...

No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here’s what I saw. Here’s how it went. Make of it what you will.

I believe I was preserved, through those twelve airless minutes, in order to be a witness, and as a witness, let me say that a miracle is no cute thing but more like the swing of a sword.

We and the world, my children, will always be at war. Retreat is impossible. Arm yourselves.

I now think of my survival as my father’s first miracle.

The second, I suppose, is that the doctor turned out wrong about the brain damage. I’m happy to say none surfaced until I entered tenth grade and signed up for Plane Geometry; but since I can still feed myself and grind out a sentence in English, you won’t hear me complain.

Swede and I rarely quarreled, for I never held opinions in those days, and hers were never wrong.

A veteran bystander to hard moments, I knew they went by quicker when you were unconscious.

“Thanks so much,” she said, and may we all be paid one day with looks such as she gave Dad.

When did it come to Davy Land that exile is a country of shifting borders, hard to quit yet hard to endure, no matter your wide shoulders, no matter your toughened heart?

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

Davy wanted life to be something you did on your own; the whole idea of a protective, fatherly God annoyed him.

The weak must bank on mercy—without which, after all, I wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes.

Humility came to me too late. I’m a living proverb; learn from me.

it’s difficult to do productive work and fume simultaneously—the labor dissipates your righteous steam—so

asked Dad why he kept laughing—what a sound that was, his laugh, low and confident again, like your best friend’s laugh in the darkness when you’ve believed he was gone forever.

“I have the substance of things hoped for. I have the anticipation of things unseen.”

Once traveling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else—ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it’s weak, but sometimes you’d rather just have a map.

Swede said no conversation in any room but the kitchen was worth overhearing anyway, something I’d guess is still true in much of North Dakota.

Hope is like yeast, you know, rising under warmth.

It sure is one thing to say you’re at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with its crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely.

we tiptoed through that town like a fat boy through a wolf pack.

that this house was so empty even God was not inside it. He was out there with the others, having fun.

It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in this world.

For heartening sights nothing beats a well-packed picnic basket. One so full it creaks. One carried by a lady you would walk on tacks for. Does all this make her sound beautiful to you? Because she was—oh, yes. Though she hadn’t seemed so to me a week before, when she turned and faced us I was confused at her beauty and could only scratch and look down at my shoetops, as the dumbfounded have done through the centuries.

I suppose that moment had been gaining on us, secretly, like a new piece of music played while you sleep. One day you hear it—a strange song, yet one you know by heart.