This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

There will be courage in this story and cowardice. There will be love and betrayal. And, of course, there will be hope. In the end, isn’t that what every good story is about?

Albert, who was four years older and a whole lot wiser, told me that 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’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.”

“I want to be rich someday,” Emmy said. “And live in a big house like that.” Albert said, “Do you know what a house like that costs?” Emmy shook her head. “Your soul,” he said. “Come on, let’s hit the river.”

At the Lincoln School, we’d had indoor plumbing, showers, and a roof over our heads that generally didn’t leak. We’d had grass, plenty of it, and trees. We’d been given three meals a day and a bed to sleep on. In truth, we’d known a great many comforts. But in this crowded, chaotic community, I could see in abundance two precious things that had been withheld from us at Lincoln School: happiness and freedom.

THERE IS A river that runs through time and the universe, vast and inexplicable, a flow of spirit that is at the heart of all existence, and every molecule of our being is a part of it. And what is God but the whole of that river?