This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

Gilead is a lovely river, lined with cottonwoods already ancient when I was a boy.

They wouldn’t have understood any more than I did that if you kill a man, you are changed forever. If that man comes back to life, you are transformed.

Open yourself to every possibility, for there is nothing your heart can imagine that is not so.

people are most afraid of things they don’t understand, and if something frightened you, you should get closer to it. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be an awful thing, but the awful you knew was easier to handle than the awful you imagined.

Everything that’s been done to us we carry forever. Most of us do our damnedest to hold on to the good and forget the rest. But somewhere in the vault of our hearts, in a place our brains can’t or won’t touch, the worst is stored, and the only sure key to it is in our dreams.

I’d believed in a just God, a compassionate God, I might have prayed. But I believed in a different God now, the Tornado God, and I knew he was deaf to the cries of the suffering.

This was a man who’d shown us nothing but harshness, had not smiled in all the time we’d been with him, but the music had found a way to slip beneath all that hard, bitter armor and touch something softer and more human inside him.

LOSS COMES IN every moment. Second by second our lives are stolen from us. What is past will never come again.

There is a deeper hurt than anything sustained by the body, and it’s the wounding of the soul. It’s the feeling that you’ve been abandoned by everyone, even God. It’s the most alone you’ll ever be. A wounded body heals itself, but there is a scar.

“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,

How many times did my heart have to be broken before I wised up? I sat in the shade of a cottonwood and watched the brown water sweep past, and before I knew it, I was crying. They were hot, angry tears,

“Remember this. It’s an old saying but a true one. Home is where your heart is.”