My Name Is Not Easy - By Debby Dahl Edwardson Page 0,29

fi nd Isaac, but I don’t know how.

“It’s okay, Luke, it’s okay,” Sister Mary Kate said. “You have the faith of Abraham, remember that.” But it’s not okay and I don’t want Abraham’s faith. I want my brother. Abraham’s the one who tied up his own son and got ready to give him to God as a burnt off ering, but then God gave him an old sheep to burn instead. Abraham’s son was named Isaac, too, just like our brother. Only God never stopped them from taking our Isaac away the way he stopped Abraham from burning his Isaac. Which is why I got no use for God. I fi gure if he’s gonna do stuff like that for one Isaac and not for another, then he isn’t fair. And if he’s going to do it to a little kid like our Isaac, then God is just plain mean, like Father Mullen, because Isaac been waiting his whole life to get big enough to learn how to hunt, and now he’s gone, so he’ll never learn anything. Not even how to skin a dumb old moose. Which me and Bunna are supposed to know how to do.

Bunna’s thinking about it, too. Standing there with his teeth chattering, he says, “How we gonna skin a moose? We never even seen one before.”

“Never mind,” I say.

“Never mind” is what Mom always says when she doesn’t want to think too hard about something.

Bunna looks at me. “But how we gonna fi gure it out?” he says. He says it like he knows I have the answer.

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B U R N T O F F E R I N G S / L u k e I don’t, but I don’t say this to Bunna. Bunna expects me to just take care of it somehow, like I’m supposed to take care of everything, which makes me think about Isaac, again, his face pressed against the back window of the car, disappearing into the trees that time, and about me and Bunna running away through those same trees and getting caught, and Father saying it’s our job to go out there and hunt for them. Somehow I’m always supposed to take care of it, but how?

And all of a sudden, I’m mad. Mad enough to hit somebody. Hit Father Mullen, maybe. Hard.

Instead, I box at Bunna—Bunna, wrapped in his towel, his hair standing up every which way. Bunna ducks and laughs and tries to box back.

You can’t get mad when you box. Th

at’s what Father Mul-

len says. When you box, you have to put all your feelings away, because if you let your feelings get in the way, you might make mistakes.

Father Mullen never makes mistakes.

Father is perfect when he boxes, like a dancer moving just right to the beat of the drum. Like the dancers I can see when Junior plays his tapes, dancers moving to the sound of the drums until the beat of the drum and the movement of their bodies turns into one thing, one perfect thing. I never fi gured out a word for that thing, but I see it in the way Father Mullen moves when he shows us how to box, boxing all by himself against a boxer nobody else can see. After a while that boxer gets so real, you could almost see the outline of his shadow, right there next to Father, throwing feints. Trying to fool him.

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

Father Mullen is never fooled.

Th

e trick is to always be two moves ahead of your opponent.

Th

at’s what Father Mullen says, punching at his shadow.

Th

at’s why when Sister Mary Kate said I had to show them how to cut a moose, I never said I don’t know how. Guess they think us boys up North are born with knives in our hands.

Guess it’s okay to let them think that.

Th

e trick is to always keep them guessing about what you know and what you don’t know.

“But Luke,” Bunna says again, “we don’t know nothing about cleaning a moose.”

Th

e bathroom is still steamy from the showers, and the mirrors are all fogged up, so when you try to see yourself, it’s like looking through smoke.

“Sure we do,” I say, running my fi nger across the steamy mirror, watching Bunna’s eyes pop out. “We watched Uncle Joe before, lotta