In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.” He was older than I was but not much taller. His sandy hair, unlike Luke’s, was cut short and uneven, and his eyes were an unremarkable green. He smiled at me, and I found myself moving toward him and the bike. It seemed natural, the way I ran my hand over the black leather seat and along the shiny gas tank. I felt a little thrill knowing he was watching.

  “Want to take a ride?” he asked. I looked past him to his house, where I knew his mother sat, knitting an endless supply of pillow covers and afghans, which she sold at the community bazaars. Mr. Buck had died years before, crushed when his bulldozer rolled.

  “Come on. Let’s just go to the tracks and back.”

  He was already on, gunning the engine. I straddled the seat behind him, hesitating only a moment before circling his waist with my arms. He smelled like the forest, like pine and woodsmoke.

  We started down the road, then turned onto a wide trail. I leaned out just a little, just enough to see where we were headed, just enough to catch the wind in my hair.

  When we reached the track, he turned the bike and headed back to his house.

  “Can you take me home?” I hollered, hoping he could hear me over the roar.

  He turned his head and nodded. A few minutes later, we emerged from the woods into my yard. I hoped someone would see me, seated on a rumbling bike behind a boy who seemed happy to have me huddled against him.

  My mother came to the door, curious at first, but when she saw Ned and his motorcycle and me on back, windblown and flush with freedom, her mouth settled into a tight line. I was pleased.

  We chatted for awhile, the three of us, my mother asking after his, Ned innocent and polite as pie. When my brother came to stare big-eyed at the cherry-red Honda, I felt a surge of pride. This was much better than gouging a lopsided heart into a dumb tree.

  No, Greg could not go for a ride. My mother seemed as concerned about my brothers lust for the machine as she did about the possibility of mine for Ned. When Ned said it was time he got back, we watched him speed up the road, popping the clutch just enough to raise the front tire. Greg was mesmerized. “Geez!” he said, and then looked sheepishly at my mother, who scowled. “Geez” was just another way of saying “Jesus,” and it was a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain.

  “Don’t you have chores?” my mother asked, directing her gaze at me. I nodded and headed for the house, nearly ecstatic. I wondered if my father would find out. Surely he had heard the noise. Still, he would be gone for days, maybe weeks. Already, it almost seemed as though he had never existed.

  When I woke the next morning and walked into the kitchen, I was stunned to see him there, eating breakfast at his usual place. My mother cushioned her steps and warned me with her eyes to stay quiet. Had God spoken already? If so, why was everyone so silent, so glum? I sat at the table and ate my cereal, taking in the subtle signs: my father’s studied attention to his food, my mother’s tentative movements. Something had happened. Maybe God had told him something horrible, that he was going to die or that someone else was. Maybe some evil had been revealed. I thought of Lola, but she was already gone. Who else could it be?

  I didn’t ask these questions out loud, and no one in my family ever again mentioned my father’s quest. Only recently did I learn why he abandoned his vigil and rejoined us at the table: his brother had threatened to have him committed.

  I imagine the struggle he faced: continue with what he believed a good and sacred task, or risk losing everything—his job, his home, perhaps even his family. I do not think he cared that people might label him crazy, but his responsibilities as a husband and father were also sacred. I’m sure he prayed before leaving the shelter, at first asking God why this obstacle had been placed in his path, and then understanding that he must not question, that his brother’s interference must in and of itself be part of the trial. God must have other plans, another way for my father to prove his spiritual commitment.

  Perhaps for him there could be another form of sacrifice. What was it my father loved the most? He could survive without food, could live for long periods divorced from those in the world he cherished. As much as he loved my mother, he knew that his love for God was greater and that if called upon to do so, he would not hesitate to leave her. My brother and I belonged not to him but to God, and if asked he would certainly do as Abraham had to his own child: place us upon the rock and raise a dagger above our breasts.

  What was left? What was he most jealous of? What I know is that the wilderness has always seemed my father’s greatest love. The woods had saved him, had provided a home for his family, had brought him to the church and to God. To separate the land from the Spirit might prove the ultimate sacrifice.

  He heard it in the voice that came to him one night, woke him into a light so bright he had to shield his eyes. This time, there was no demon, no chill air, only the light and the voice that might have been a dream except for the light and the way the words rang in his inner ear for hours afterward, saying, Go. Go now.

  My fathers decision was made: we would leave the woods. I don’t remember being told or how I took the news, but it was spring and everything seemed new and reasonable. Besides, Luke and his family were leaving too, first for the cherry orchards of Washington and Oregon to work the harvests, just as they did each year. They would not come back. They’d find another church in another town where they could start over and leave Cardiff Spur and its memories behind.

  Before then, there would be a baptism. By May, the month I turned twelve, the age when children were believed to be mentally and spiritually mature enough to determine the destinies of their own souls, the ice along Reeds Creek had thinned and collapsed. In a small eddy not far from our house, the congregation gathered to witness the total immersion of several members. After asking my parents’ permission, I added my name to the list of those to be baptized.

  The newly warm air, the birds chittering in the greening trees, the smell of the meadow opening into tiny flowers, all added to the dreamlike feel of the day. I stood with my parents, savoring the sun on my shoulders, shivering in my crisp white dress and bare feet.

  I felt it was expected of me, given my age, but I also remember thinking that everything was changing, that this ritual would be a fitting symbolic end to my life in the woods and my relationship with the people of the church, whom we would be leaving behind. And it would also mark the end of my childhood, both spiritually and, I thought with a shiver of expectation, physically. It was a rite of passage, and I was painfully aware of my nipples already rigid from the cold air. My prayers were forgotten as I considered how I would survive the embarrassment of having my wet dress cling to my chest, the shape of my breasts exposed for all to see in that moment before I could cover myself.

  When Brother Lang called my name, I passed my glasses to my mother, then took the hand of my father, who gave me like a bride to the preacher. He stood waist deep in the frigid pool, solid as a stump against the slow current. I shuddered in the runoff of mountain snow, my eyes already closed.

  “Sister Kim, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” I felt his arm low at my back, and then his hand against my forehead. We dipped like dancers. The current caught my feet just as the water closed over my face, then I was lifted up and helped to the bank. My mother wrapped me in a blanket and cradled me against her warm shoulder. It all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to worry about modesty. I blinked in the light. It was beautiful, the way the trees and sky looked without my glasses, like a watercolor painting. The dome of blue blended seamlessly to green, then back to the lighter blue of water. Figures moved before me, dark against the sun.

  This is the way it’s supposed to be, I thought. Like spring, everything reborn, everything whole. I closed my eyes and listened. Hallelujahs rose and I knew someone else was going under.

  There is something about that moment when I stepped from the water into my mother’s arms that I want to hold o
n to. The sun’s warmth, my father’s steadying hand, the familiar voices praising God from whom all blessings flowed, and in every new leaf and birdsong a promise of everlasting life. Yet there are times when I remember myself silent, an observer, reflecting the ecstasy of others just as the water mirrored the sun. I could mimic their prayers, sway with them in my pew. Was I doing only what was expected of me, acting the role I knew would gain approval and praise?

  Sometimes I think I never felt anything, only imagined the pure joy of absolute faith. There are times when I remember the peace that filled me at the end of hours at the altar, hoarse from calling on the Lord, exhausted and nearly incoherent. I felt emptied, purified by my physical weakness. Often, these were the times when I could feel the new language rise in my throat, feel the rhythm of the words suddenly come to me as I began to speak in the tongues of angels—a gift that each of us quested for, a gift that never came to some.

  My glossolalia was guttural, the hard sounds low and deep in my throat. I felt I could speak it for days, my eyes closed, sustained and mesmerized by this thing that controlled my body and my soul.

  That day at the creek, when the water closed over me and then parted, I felt the magic of the ritual. I could never deny the rapturous exhilaration of being renewed, knowing I had pleased both my people and my god. Stepping from the water into the warmth of my mothers arms, feeling my father lay his hand on my head as he had done when I was young—I felt in that moment wholly loved.

  I knew Luke stood nearby, but without my glasses he was only a blur. The pleasure I dreamed of with him could never be this pure. Yet when I thought of the way he might wrap the blanket around me and hold me against his chest, I felt both lightheaded and weighted in my heart. Why did every moment have to be compromised this way? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t deny my flesh, that I so easily slipped into the carnal even as the hallowed water dripped from my body?

  The ride home was short, around the meadow and down the rutted driveway. My father lit the stove just for me while I changed. My mother melted Crisco and salted the chicken. Greg, not yet old enough to truly commit himself, fell asleep on the couch. In a few days we would leave our house for good and drive the winding road to Lewiston. I began clearing my shelves and dresser, filling boxes marked in big black letters, “KIM’S ROOM” and “BOOKS.”

  It didn’t seem real that I might never see my room again. After years of seasonal moving, nothing seemed ever to be left wholly behind: we always came back to the fragrant smell of pine, to the creeks, to the town where every building, fence and driveway was familiar and expected.

  Still flush from the cold water and the attention of my elders, intent on doing a good job of packing to show how responsible I had become, I never thought I’d miss the trees or the narrow spring. I wish I had looked one last time to the mountains that had folded us in and kept us for so long, for when I think of them now my mind’s eye cannot see past the clearing: everything beyond comes up dark, impenetrable, as though the world itself fell away beyond the perimeter of my vision.

  There is a photograph of me taken on my twelfth birthday, in which I stand posed against the snow berming the bomb shelter, squinting into the newly warm sun. My hair is long and straight, nearly to my waist. My kneesocks reach to the hem of my homemade dress, the only concession to style a pattern of muted orange and yellow rings against the brown background, a print that I remember thinking was almost psychedelic (a word I hissed in a whisper between my lips when no one was listening), something the hippies in San Francisco might wear.

  I had seen hippies only on Nan’s TV, and their wondrous hair, bright colors and dangling beads amazed me. Even so, I could hardly connect them to the monsters the townspeople spoke of over coffee at the cafe. If we weren’t careful to run them off the minute they set their sandaled feet inside the village, they said, the hippies would poison our water tower with LSD. The results would be disastrous: normally decent men, women and children running naked through the streets of Pierce, murdering their neighbors, throwing themselves from the hotel’s balcony, addicted until death to the mind-altering drug. The entire population of our community would be destroyed, the wiser ones said, shaking their heads in grim contemplation.

  I could hardly imagine the carnage. I pictured the burly Mr. Butler with his ax, running bare-chested after his neighbor Mrs. Ball, her enormous breasts flopping loose in front of her. I wasn’t sure what the “orgy” was that I heard spoken of as a result of this behavior, but it must be something close to “ogre,” and certainly Mr. Buder and Mrs. Ball barreling down Main Street naked fit that bill.

  My last gift from the Langs would help guard against such evil. It was the blue Bible I had seen at the Christian Gift Center in Lewiston, my name embossed in silver on the cover. Inside they had written, “To a very lovely girl by the Rev. & Mrs. Joseph Lang May 1970.” It was the most important thing I could carry with me into my new life, they said. I hugged it to my chest, loving the smell that rose from its cover of morocco leather.

  I can’t look at that photograph with its promise of hot July days without remembering the summer before, the last summer we spent in the woods, when we had gathered at the parsonage, piled into several cars and gone deep into the forest to where the North Fork ran the color of jade. Matthew was alive then, and while he, Terry and Luke dove from the jutting boulders and swam the strong current from one side of the wide river to the other, the women arranged potato salad and lunch meat on paper plates, shaded by cedar and pine. It was a celebration of summer, of friendship, and the prayers we offered over our dinner echoed through the trees.

  It would be the last time any of us would ever see the river free, and that, finally, is why we had come—to see it once more before the giant slab of concrete already rising miles downstream blocked the flow and sent the river back on itself, flooding the land.

  I could not know what the dam would mean to my life any more than I could have foreseen Matthew’s death, my father’s demon or the physical and spiritual upheaval of the next two years. The cycle of the river would be broken. Salmon would die by the thousands, snouts abraded to bone from their attempts to break through the barrier. As I folded my clothes into the cardboard boxes, I knew things would change, that our move to Lewiston would mean a new house, new people. But I had moved many times as a child and had come to believe that even in strange homes and new schools, some things would always remain constant: the love of my parents, the circle of our family and my belief in God.

  When we drove that last time from the house in the hollow, I didn’t look back. We crossed the river at Greer, down to Orofino, where my father pulled onto the shoulder of the road. At first I could not see it, so large it seemed another mountain—but then the sheerness of it, the steep, smooth expanse. Dworshak Dam braced itself between the canyon walls. I had never seen anything man-made so immense, and I stood still, letting my eyes adjust to the vision of something foreign in a familiar landscape.

  Even now, when I drive the few miles east to Orofino, the dam catches me by surprise, looming up from the river, towering over the small town below. It flooded my place of memory, my place of birth. As the dam rose, so did the walls that severed my ties to my family, my god, the land. Sometimes, trying to find my way back, I want to go at the concrete and steel with my fists, beat it until the real water flows and I, like the salmon, am raw to the bone. That last summer, the syringa just beginning to spray its heavy sweetness into the air, I hung my head out the window to watch the dam disappear, then turned to the road ahead, the wind in my face.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I trace the road from the dam west to Lewiston, where the mill spews its poison, where, in winter, the Nez Perce once gathered their families close along the joining banks of the Clearwater and Snake rivers. The town itself is not large—thirty thousand, another ten thousand in the sister city of Clarkston, Washington, connected by two short bridges spanning the Snake. But for me, coming out of the woods, the place seemed n
ever to stop, to sleep. Even at night the traffic continued, the stores stayed open and people went on about their business as though they had no home to go to.

  We stayed with Nan for the first few weeks, and my memories of that time are heavy with nostalgia, sweet as the lilacs that grew in a hedge outside her door. Early summer in Lewiston couldn’t be more idyllic: crocus and daffodils begin their bloom in March, and by May the valley is rich in color. Morning winds clear the air. People rise at dawn to vie with their neighbor for earliest garden, bragging in June of two-pound tomatoes and knee-high corn.

  I luxuriated in the warm weather, burrowing my bare feet into the ground we turned to plant potatoes. I loved my grandmothers house, the worn chair where we cuddled together to watch her soap operas; the kitchen, where something was always baking or boiling; her bedroom, where I slept curled against her back, wearing my Grandfather Edmonson’s T-shirts.

  My step-grandfather had been killed the summer before, the summer I turned eleven. Nan had been waiting for him to come home from his sales rounds when she saw on the evening news that he had been hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street. She sat stunned, watching the police mark the distance between one scuffed Romeo slipper and the pool of blood.

  When I was told, I felt numb and far away, not just out of grief for my grandfather, whom I would miss, but also out of grief for Nan. Why was she given so much to bear? It didn’t seem fair that she should lose her mother, then her first husband and father, and now this other husband who had once embodied the promise of a new life.