In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  Each morning, the wives rose first to make their husbands’ breakfast, then stood at the door to see the men drive off into the pre-dawn light. They waved, hollering their day’s plans to each other across the yard before turning back to wake the older children for school. After the dishes had been done, the laundry hung to dry or sprinkled and rolled to be ironed later, my mother would take the cap off the tea kettle and whistle from the door, then wait for the long, high-pitched reply to echo across the meadow.

  What time they did not spend baking or sewing they filled with wishing: mail-order catalogs cluttered the table. I often came home from school to find one of the women perched primly in a child’s high chair while another cut her hair, Sears models for inspiration, or one of the aunts straight-backed as a Buddha, clothespins numbing her earlobes, waiting for another to sterilize the darning needle over a kitchen match. I couldn’t bear to watch the needle punched through to its backing of raw potato or cork, and hid in my room, covering my head with a blanket.

  During the high-altitude heat of summer, we loaded the car with iced tea and root beer, sandwiches and fried pies, and drove to the creek. While my cousins and I waded the shallow current, hunting periwinkles and crawdads, our mothers lounged on old sheets, their bathing suit straps undone, draping their shoulders.

  They seemed glamorous and distant then, leaned back on their elbows, one knee slightly raised, not at all like the same women we saw scooping up their husbands’ piled work clothes, mixing batter for breakfast, still wearing long johns and flannel to fend off the night’s lingering chill. On the banks and small pebbled beaches of the Musselshell they smoked and talked quietly, calling us in when we ventured too far, threatening early naps and spankings when we quarreled. I would look up from my pool of tadpoles and see them perfectly composed against the sheets’ white backdrop, smooth legs positioned to flatter, as though the world might be watching, judging their flat stomachs and ruby nails.

  Often I forget how young my mother and aunts were, barely into their twenties. Their men coming home must have meant everything, and to welcome them with golden shoulders and sun-tinted hair was an offering: Even here, in the deep forests of Idaho, in the wilderness, I can give you what you desire, what you love the most.

  The men returned each evening to find them tanned, glowing, arranging children and pork chops with equal ease. They must have wondered what kept them there—women any man might long for. Certainly, my father and uncles were jealous of their wives’ attention. I imagine that when the itinerant buckers and sawyers visited our camp, the women kept busy in the kitchen. All knew the few things that could fill a man’s gut when the isolation and deep-woods silence set his teeth to chattering for something he could almost taste, like the sweet whisper of last night’s whiskey: more whiskey came easy from the town taverns, but not the shoulder of a woman, bared for his mouth and no other.

  Eventually, the isolation and lack of even minimal luxuries such as indoor toilets and hot running water took their toll. By 1966 my aunts and cousins were gone, settled into city homes with yards and draped windows. My father must have felt the circle tighten, at its center my mother—the one who stayed, who never asked for more, who had been raised to believe each kindness shown her a gift, every grace mercurial as moonlight.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With the family gone, my parents were left to find for themselves what comfort and communion resided in the wilderness. The circle was broken. Even the land seemed to have lost its balance. I half-listened to men talk of helicopters and shutdowns, of a new machine with clipperlike jaws that could do the work of twenty good sawyers—snipping off trees at the base, mowing them down like ripe wheat. The adults shook their heads, perhaps foreseeing what I could not: the stores closing, the town deserted.

  The forest must have seemed to them, as it did to me, inexhaustible. I knew no one who had flown above the trees to see the clearcuts scabbing the land like mange. There would always be more timber on the next ridge, another stand of cedar over the rise. It was like picking huckleberries, like finding a good patch, fruit as big as your thumb and everywhere. You strip one bush, surrounded by others just as lush, and you find yourself panicking to get them all; though they stretch as far as you can see, you want them all.

  Some of the loggers packed up and took jobs at the pulp and paper mill in Lewiston, sorting green lumber, checking plywood for warp, initialing case after case of toilet paper. Others remained, hitting the bars before staggering home still sticky with pitch, forgetting to kiss their waiting wives. The wives forgot to fear for their husbands when the wind rose, and feigned sleep when rough hands touched their hips.

  My father dug in, determined to stay. He had seen how the dispossessed could turn to liquor and how liquor could in turn possess the soul, as had my mother. Perhaps because it was she who felt the impending isolation most keenly, she was the first to turn to fundamentalism. I’m sure that the presence of the Pentecostal preacher and his wife who had married my parents was a comfort in the absence of family. She began attending services, relating to her husband the words of joy and faith—the promised sustenance the Bible offered.

  The Bible and its teachings were not unfamiliar to my father. His mother’s roots were Baptist. The songs she had sung for them spoke of life’s hard road and Heaven’s sure peace, and I’m certain that Hell was made real by her readings from the Scripture. Still, I can only guess at what drew my normally shy father to the small group of Pentecostal worshipers who gathered several times a week to praise God in loud voices and denounce the ways of the world. Was he intrigued by the unequivocal dictates of the religion? Given his life—the seemingly haphazard set of circumstances and catastrophes that had beset his family—the sterile reasoning of an all-knowing God negated the need to question. What comfort it must have seemed for a man and his family come to the wilderness, escaping whatever demons that had threatened to destroy them. What he believes is that it was the Spirit that spoke to him, that it was my mother’s faith and prayers that led him to pick up the Bible she had left on the table and begin reading the words that would change and direct his life.

  And so my life is divided by this line: before the church, and after. In the photographs taken those first years when she played with her husband and his brothers like a child set loose from school, my mother is startlingly beautiful. More often than not, she wears a pair of my father’s jeans, a man’s shirt and cast-off logging boots. She poses on a stump, tall and slender, or rides the boom of a loader, looking playful and brave, game for anything. Her lips are colored red or deep pink to match her nails, and her hair is short, wisping at her neck and temples. She reminds me of Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, like her, my mother’s bobbed hair gives her a boyish prettiness, making her seem even more feminine and vulnerable.

  I don’t remember the moment my mother pulled the golden hoops from her ears, collected her carefully chosen tubes of lipstick, gathered her swimsuit and open-necked blouses and pushed them all into the drawers’ dark corners. Nor do I remember the moment my father began to believe that angels and devils walked among us, in the groves of cedar and stands of tamarack, that their voices could be heard above the saw’s loud litany. What I know is that our lives shifted. Where before we had thrown our suitcases and boxes into the car and left one home for another on a day’s notice, we could now make no move, no matter how small, without careful consideration and prayer. Three times a day we prayed over meals. When my father left for work, we prayed for his safety, when he arrived home that evening, we prayed in thanks. If the car developed a rattle, we prayed as my father leaned into the tangle of wires and hoses, asking God to give him the knowledge to fix it, or for God to fix it Himself, knowing, as He must, how little money we had to spend.

  My father’s authoritative presence became absolute, my mothers desire to please him even greater. In the teachings of the church, a man’s duty is to be the physical and spiritual protector of his wife and children. The w
oman is to be chaste and modest, subservient to her husband’s guidance, lest the mar of her sex tempt her to stray into the ways of the world.

  My mother grew her hair long until it hung in satin ringlets, which she backcombed and pinned into a shapeless mass. Her cheeks and lips remained clear, no trace of the paint a ruined woman might wear. Plain, wide-cut skirts brushed her legs mid-calf. Only the tiniest holes scarred the lobes of her ears.

  It is this mother I remember most, cloaked and colorless, her virtues defined by what she covered and erased rather than by what she presented to the world. She could not be aware of her own beauty, lest others become aware of it too. Because her husband was the hammer and she the nail, she built a house of acquiescence, allowing herself only the reward of steadfastness, holding the walls together with silent compliance. Because a quiet woman was a treasure, she seldom spoke except to offer and agree. It was as though my mother had disappeared, as though the doctor had once again come with his ether.

  We lived for a while in one or the other of the identical houses built by Potlatch Forests Incorporated on the outskirts of Pierce—a development called Whispering Pines. The rent was often more than our budget allowed, but my mother had learned early the worth of hard work. She took the most abused houses, the ones left filthy and broken by previous residents, because no one else wanted them and the owners would lower the rent. Then she would barter a month’s payment for fixing up the place, scrubbing and painting, trimming shrubs gone wild, planting colorful, even rows of marigolds. One house was littered with straw, the floor covered with the leavings of dogs and goats that had been allowed the run of the home. She shoveled and bleached until her back ached and her hands were blistered. No one would have guessed the tidy rooms trimmed in calico curtains were once a stable.

  It was my first real neighborhood, a place where children gathered at the end of the block to play hopscotch, a place where my brother and I could set up a lemonade stand and depend on a customer an hour. It was also the first place where I saw clearly how different the world was outside our extended family. The couple next door filled the evenings with screams and curses; even the voice of Jim Reeves singing his heart out on our old stereo couldn’t compete with the noise. I never asked why the man and woman were screaming, nor why the woman often appeared at our door, bruised and bleeding. My mother would lay her on our couch, call to me to bring her a cold rag, then shush me from the room. I’d lean against my bedroom door, straining to hear their muffled conversation: the woman’s voice high and hysterical, my mother’s sometimes soothing, sometimes stern. Before she left, I knew the woman would bow with my mother in prayer.

  I never knew what reasoning passed between the two women, but I cannot imagine my mother counseled her to leave her husband. Even my grandmother once told me that sometimes when a woman got to thinking too much of herself, got a “smart mouth,” she needed to be “shaped up,” “put in her place.” And while the church never condoned abuse, I always understood that it was the woman who was responsible for her husband’s actions toward her. I wondered what it was our neighbor had done to deserve her beating.

  The last year we lived in Whispering Pines seems a golden time in memory. I had a best friend, Glenda, who believed that her dolls came alive at night to keep her company and that her mother’s washing machine groaned when it worked: I don’t WANT to wash, I don’t WANT to wash. I saw nothing strange in this and chose to think that whatever spirits possessed toys and appliances must be friendly. Glenda and I listened to her older brother’s music, jiggling our larynxes to mimic the quivering voices of Tommy James and The Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover.” I watched with fascination as her mother melted wax in an aluminum pan and then applied it to her upper lip, waiting a specified number of minutes before ripping the mustache from her face.

  That year, I had one of the few conversations about sex I would have with my mother, when she asked me if I knew about menstruation. I said yes, my best friend Glenda had told me, which was true, and my mother seemed satisfied. Glenda prayed for the day she would “get her little friend,” as her mother put it, and kept a pink-belted pad in her top drawer just in case. Every time I went to her house, we’d get out the Kotex and consider its mysteries. When finally it was I and not Glenda first beset by the ritual bleeding, she was mute with envy. I would have gladly given her my status. I didn’t tell her that when the rusty stain appeared on my panties, I thought I was dying and locked myself in the bathroom to await my fate. Finally, after much cajoling, I let my mother in and explained my condition. Her shoulders slumped and a look of pity and regret showed on her face. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’ve started your period.”

  She brought in her purple box of Kotex and handed me an elastic belt like the one Glenda kept in her drawer, then left me to work out the mechanics of attaching the pad to the two hooks, which I finally managed to do in a haphazard fashion. I hated it already, hated the attention and concern and the look on my mothers face that said I was now doomed to my life as a woman. I hated to think that I would be strapped and uncomfortable for a week each month, and that someone might notice the bulging pad or discover me in the bathroom at recess, struggling to bandage and bind myself and staunch the betraying flow of blood.

  Then the cramping started, and for one day each month I lay doubled up in the school’s sickroom, pleading constipation or food poisoning but determined to never admit that the ache I felt somehow stemmed from the weakness of my gender. I had never felt anything that hurt so badly. It began in my thighs and rose in spasms to my pelvis, where it settled into a constant dizzying pain. My mother had explained that this would happen—it was part of what we must expect to endure as women.

  One such day the principal, concerned by my pallor and the fact that I was lying on the cot with my knees drawn tight to my chest, called my mother to come and take me home. But my mother had gone to Orofino to buy groceries, so he called a neighbor, who swooped me into her car and led me into Kimball’s Drug to be inspected by the white-frocked pharmacist. Dr. Kimball was no physician but we respected his college education. The nearest medical attention was a hard hour’s drive in good weather, and anything that required less than surgery could be attended to by our one local nurse or the pharmacist. Most of the men’s wounds they treated themselves, and the women’s maladies, usually “female problems,” Dr. Kimball might remedy with laxatives and vitamins.

  He asked me a few questions, pushed at my abdomen, then pressed my nails to check the color. I didn’t say a word, but he must have known. Undoubtedly, I wasn’t the first tight-lipped Pierce girl to be ushered into his presence, suffering from the same condition. (I would read one day in the paper that the pharmacist’s wife had reported him missing. The search that was launched covered three counties—everyone suspected foul play—and when they did discover him, not dead or even lost but simply hiding out, safe and supplied with enough food and clothing to last a while, the townspeople were stunned, the sheriff furious. How could the man on whom everyone depended suddenly disappear into the woods, leaving his family and community in torment? The county sent him a bill for thousands of dollars, and though he resumed his place behind the apothecary’s counter, he never again held the trust of the people. I wondered what affliction he suffered from—what had driven him into the wilderness—but knew without question what words would be spoken of him from the pulpit the next Sunday, his a lesson we all might learn from: Physician, heal thyself).

  Dr. Kimball suggested rest and that I be kept warm, and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the neighbor’s house beneath a pile of blankets, nearly happy to be there since she had a TV and I could watch a real doctor at work—the dreamy Dr. Kildare, not at all like our bespectacled, sterile-smelling practitioner with hands white and dry as cornstarch. I didn’t think I’d mind Richard Chamberlain prodding my insides, knowledgeable as to the intimacies of my sex.

  That winter the snow fell for days on end and only by constant shoveling could we g
uarantee our escape from the house. My brother and I charged ten dollars to scoop the heavy snow from the nearby roofs. Soon the berms and piles covered the windows, and we could step from the peak of our own house and sink neck-deep into star-shot whiteness.

  Uncles, aunts and cousins came back to visit for Thanksgiving, piling into our small house with sleeping bags and pillows. But no one was prepared for the sudden drop in temperature to 40 degrees below zero. We were even less prepared for the electricity to go out. We woke Thanksgiving morning to rooms frosted in ice and our breath falling into crystals. Potlatch, in a fit of misplaced modernizing, had equipped each residence with baseboard heaters, and only my fathers boss down the road, Max, had a fireplace. To his house we went, our large extended family snuggling close with his around the inadequate fire.

  Whatever prayers were offered for heat failed to bring the desired results, and we must have finally decided that our being brought so intimately together had divine purpose. That purpose became clear when the woman of the house, Sandra, doubled over in pain.

  While her husband and my father remained with the children, my mother and Uncle Roland, not so far gone to California that he couldn’t maneuver through an Idaho snowstorm, drove Sandra to the drugstore, where Dr. Kimball promptly and accurately diagnosed appendicitis. The forty-mile trip to the hospital in Orofino seemed impossible given the weather, but there was little choice.

  They made their way across the white expanse of the Weippe Prairie, along roads closed by blowing drifts. Max had a short-wave radio in his basement, allowing those left behind to communicate with the four-wheel drive, at least until it reached the icy switchback curves of Greer Grade. Whenever Sandra raised up from the backseat to say with hope in her voice that the pain had stopped, my mother and uncle glanced at each other and then away. They knew that while the pain continued she’d be okay, but once the appendix ruptured, the relief from pain was temporary: peritonitis would set in.