by Kim Barnes
I wished for his vision that night as I lay staring into the dark, trying to discern the pair of hands reaching out to me—Jesus’ hands, delicate, mutilated, decoupaged and lacquered, beckoning to all those lost. I knew they were there, on the wall where I had hung them, but all I could see without my glasses was a small star of light reflected off the sleeve of Christ’s white robe.
What was I feeling? What had come to take the place of that afternoon’s consuming need to reject, at least for a moment, the life I had chosen? Not guilt, not even contrition. I was angry, resentful, like a child beaten for spilling her milk.
For the first time since the beginning of my summer at the Langs’ I wondered, What if it’s not true? Maybe there would be no Second Coming. Maybe, like Mrs. Steiner had said in mythology class, all people believe the same—that their god is the only god. Could the Greeks really have thought Zeus existed, that they could be punished by pestilence and disease if they disobeyed or were disrespectful? Would they have viewed my beliefs and fears in the same way that we perceived theirs—as nothing but primitive superstition and ignorance?
I worked at these questions the way I had once worked at my father’s riddles, testing each word for truth, weighing the logic, taking into consideration the perspective. Why would God leave me in terror if I were honestly trying to be good? Man could only strive toward Christ’s example of perfection; as humans, we were inherently flawed—and so the hourly battle to keep our robes spotless. But if we were doomed by our Maker to sin, it seemed to me that the rules of the game were woefully unfair: the chances were good Christ would come during the time when you were successfully walking the straight and narrow, but what if He dropped from the sky during the one second or hour when your guaranteed failure was manifesting itself?
A Sunday school teacher once told us that even cheating the telephone company out of a dime was enough to send us to Hell. If Christ were to return at that moment, before we had time to hang up, acknowledge our sin and repent, we would be doomed to burn in Satan’s eternal fire.
And the pain that would be endured! For years I had listened, petrified, as one preacher after another detailed his version of perpetual punishment: a lake of fire into which the unsaved and unforgiven were cast screaming and writhing; souls tearing their hair, gashing themselves with bloody nails, forever devouring each other’s flesh with the teeth of cannibals.
The preachers gloated on the details. They loved to see the congregation bent forward and shivering, some with fear for their own souls, others with a kind of eagerness, as though they yearned to imagine what punishment awaited those who had spent their earthly lives drinking and fornicating while the forgiven had denied themselves the body’s pleasures. Burn, burn!
I knew that even to question God’s purpose was a weakness, a sin. To question his existence, hiding in one’s heart a broken faith, some fundamental doubt, would most certainly be enough to bring on damnation.
I closed my eyes against my thoughts. I imagined the fingers curling over the gaping wounds, the hands turning into fists, the fists themselves curling against wrists and drawing away, like the feet of the Wicked Witch disappearing beneath Dorothy’s fallen house.
No! I threw back my covers and fell to the floor. Forgive me, forgive me my doubt I will never question, never again ask for reason. Let only my heart lead my steps and never my mind. But even as I prayed, I knew something had changed. The driving fear seemed dulled, my actions mechanical, too well learned. For many nights to come I would find myself beside my bed, kneeling on the floor and praying to a god I was no longer sure would listen. I had betrayed Him with my thoughts, unable to control the workings of my brain any more than I could the desires of my body.
Slowly, over the next several weeks, the tenor of my prayers changed, settling into a kind of contract, an acquiescence of both faith and reason: if God could not take me while I searched for some truth, if the quest itself were a sin, then so be it. Whatever faith I had left, compromised as it was, was mine. I possessed it, had forged it. It was all that I could offer any man or god.
The full realization of this washed over me in the early hours of one morning’s prayers, and I felt as I had when baptized—fully submerged and floating, touched by grace. I fell into sleep, sagged against my bed, where my mother found me later that morning. She woke me for school, tenderly and without question. What I carried with me to the table, where I ate in silence, must have seemed to her a necessary burden. What my father saw as he handed my mother his empty pail and sat to unlace his boots, I’m not sure, but there was something that passed between us, understood and determined, and I knew then that what came after that morning would be between the two of us—me and my father, who saw things so clearly.
The week before graduation, I stood in front of my father, waiting as he considered the request I had just made of him.
A friend’s parents owned a summer house on Coeur d’Alene Lake and had invited our class to come for a graduation party. Everyone was going, including my new boyfriend, John, a 230-pound running-back and leading scorer on the football team, who did not attend our church.
I explained carefully, trying to control the tremor in my voice: I would not drink, of course, I never did, the parents would be there, it wasn’t really a party, more of a supervised camping trip, boys on one floor, girls on the other. I’d gotten straight A’s on my report card and hadn’t missed curfew for months. Surely he could trust me.
He considered his plate for a moment, then said, “Let me think about it.”
Three days later, he said no.
“Why not?” All movement in the house ceased. Even the kitchen was silent, my mother as paralyzed by dread as I was.
My father hadn’t been home long, settled into his recliner with a plate of biscuits and gravy, two strips of bacon and a tumbler of milk. His socks hung off the ends of his feet like deflated balloons.
His mouth continued to work its bite of biscuit, but a twitch had gone through his shoulders. He settled them with a slight shift of his back and looked at me without raising his head.
“Because I said so.”
The arbitrariness of his answer made me furious, but I could not risk showing my anger. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Nothing I could say would change his mind now. He kept looking at me, sucking the bacon from his teeth, his fork poised above his plate and dripping white gravy.
Fighting back tears, I ran to my room, nearly knocking my mother over. She was standing in the hall, and it was her I wanted to scream at. How could she cower there, eavesdropping, folding the same towel again and again, more of a child than I was? Why wouldn’t she defend me, help me?
That day at school, while the other girls talked about what clothes they would bring, who would bunk with whom, I seethed. He was making me a freak again, someone strange, shackled like an animal. John listened while I cried, comforting me against his hard chest. I told him to go anyway, but all I could think of were my friends around the campfire, laughing and listening to the slow lap of water, John there with his strong arms around someone, but not me.
There’s no reason, it’s not fair, I thought again and again. More than anything, I wished my father would talk to me. Other parents discussed things with their kids, actually talked about decisions. Here, I could perceive no way in which my feelings mattered. Here, it was all yes or no. My sense of injustice gave me courage. I’d ask one more time. Surely he’d see how badly I wanted to go, how harmless a thing it was.
When I told my mother of my plans, she shook her head. “I wouldn’t, Kim. You know your father.” The consternation in her voice made me even more determined. To be a grown woman and live in a house with fear as the ruling principle, to be afraid of waking your husband’s wrath … I had never seen my father enraged, yet there was some danger that lurked beneath his calm exterior, and we were all subject to it. “As long as you live in my house,” he had told me, “you will abide by my authority.” That authority included the phy
sical punishment meted out during my childhood, and certainly I feared the power of his hand. He no longer whipped me, yet I still quivered whenever I caused his anger to rise. It wasn’t the discipline that frightened me: even as a girl I had learned to grit my teeth and not cry when a parent’s belt or switch or open palm blistered my backside. I could survive being grounded or having privileges taken away. What I could not bear was being made mute by tyranny, it was my own anger welling beneath the surface that threatened to consume me.
The morning of graduation, I once again stood before my father, half-regretting my decision, nearly deaf with the pounding in my ears. I focused on the bands of skin exposed between pant cuff and the top of his socks—pale and hairless where his boots rubbed, almost pretty.
“No,” he said, and with his eyes warned me I had already gone too far, a look on his face that usually scared me into sullen obedience.
“But Dad, please, I want to go so bad …”
“No.”
All the disappointments of the past years, all the resentments, the swallowed protests rose in my throat. I had one thing to barter, and even as I spoke it I knew how little it was worth.
“I’m eighteen. What if I go anyway?”
He looked up from his plate, every muscle in his body tensed, solid. “Then you take your things and you never come back.”
I let the words sink in. Maybe it was what I’d wanted all along—a reason to leave. Years before, I had run away out of hatred and defiance, but all I felt now was the sense of a sudden and clear path opening before me, free of boundaries and punishment, fear and tongueless subserviency. I was not surprised by the ultimatum. The position of the father must be recognized and honored; by challenging him, I challenged not only the authority of the family head but the authority of the church as well. Such usurpation would not be tolerated.
I felt a sudden and overwhelming desire to be rid of it all: the sin and guilt, the constant answering to mother, father, god. I let my eyes meet his and did not look down, letting the seconds pass, letting the look on his face—stony and impenetrable—settle into my memory. When I turned away, I passed the kitchen, where my mother stood stunned and silent. The pain on her face stopped me for a moment, but I knew that any hesitation would be seen by my father as weakness. I did not want him to think that I was any less resolved than he was, that I felt anything like regret.
From the phone in my bedroom I called my best friend, Bonnie, asked if I could stay with her and her family for a few days, then began to take inventory of my possessions. Only then did I realize how insubstantial my physical presence in that house had been: a poster that read MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, hung on the back of my door because someone might find it offensive; a purple alarm clock; a few bottles of perfume; a basket of stuffed animals; a box marked KEEPSAKES, full of letters and trinkets from boyfriends; Barbie dolls still clothed in the straight suits and pillbox hats Glenda and I had dressed them in that year we lived in Whispering Pines; a 7 Up bottle with its neck melted and stretched; the peace-sign patches, torn from the pockets of my old 501’s and hidden away, the POW bracelet I had worn that year I turned fourteen, when I thought myself as much a prisoner as the man whose name I bore on my wrist; a picture album, which I opened then quickly closed, stung to tears by the photographs of family, my Bible, my name on its cover glinting like a reminder of my remonstrance; the print of Christ’s bloodied hands, which I left hanging on its single nail.
I made a small pile, added to it my curling iron, toothbrush and a bottle of Prell (little pearl floating in its thick green sea), and in a few trips carried it all to my 1967 Chevy Impala, the one thing I truly owned, bought and paid for with the money I had earned at afterschool jobs.
As I backed out of the driveway, I searched the windows for my mother’s shadow. What had I left her to? A husband brooding and immovable; a younger son who would spend years of his life trying to make up for the pain I inflicted, trying desperately to be the good child; a house suddenly and without warning emptied of a body, a daughter, a soul.
And silence—this surest of all, for my father was a man taught well the stoic art of burying that which is most deeply felt, and my mother could recite the words of Paul the Apostle: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Any utterance against my father’s authority, public or private, he would see as treason.
Perhaps because of the chaos of their own young lives this was the only way my parents knew to save us: an ordered and structured hierarchy, a familial chain of existence and command that guaranteed our physical and spiritual survival. Only I refused to understand its worth and reason. Once again, it was I who had torn the carefully woven fabric of family.
May 29, 1976, one week past my eighteenth birthday, I wrapped myself in lavender satin, hung the gold cord indicating my induction into the National Honor Society around my neck and marched down the aisle to the bombastic blaring of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I knew that by then every invited family member and friend had heard what I had done. I didn’t care that they were out there, that my mother and brother were somewhere in the crowd, pale and withdrawn, that my father may or may not be watching me from the bleachers.
I accepted my diploma, listened to the pep band play its ragged rendition of “The Way We Were,” watched the ice sculpted into an enormous red-white-and-blue “76” melt into its metal pan. The night was beautiful—full of damp-earth smells and the high call of nighthawks. I looked around me. It was the same field where I had seen my first football game, the same lights that had dazzled me into a state of astonishment.
In five years, the only thing that had changed about the setting was me. The world went on its way whether we thought it wicked or not, impervious to our sense of its contagion. And all these people around me—teachers, friends, parents, toddlers screaming for their siblings, babies oblivious to the delirium of the day, sucking their syrup-sweetened pacifiers—did they know they were doomed? How many had sat in their places before them? Generations of Lewiston seniors had found their way to the stage without ever once fearing that the paper might disintegrate in their hands, the earth might shudder beneath them, the sky crack open, the cemetery only blocks away give up its ghosts. I wanted to believe my life might continue. I wanted to be part of a community, a family, that believed the next day or year, the next son or daughter, held the promise of something other than inherent imperfection and destruction.
My father left Lewiston that evening and drove the 120 miles to Coeur d’Alene Lake, but this was northern Idaho, on a body of water larger than some counties, and even after hours of searching, the only speeding ticket of his life flung on the seat, he never discovered the one cabin where I slept.
I knew of this only later, and I was stunned, not by fear of what might have happened but by the action itself, that I was able to elicit such a reaction from him. What would he have said to me? I could not imagine anything other than bitter confrontation, could not imagine that he would ever suggest compromise. If he had found me, would it have been as it was years before, when his eyes were enough to command me to follow?
But he did not find me, there on the shore where I sat next to John around a campfire, gagging down half a beer from the six-pack one of the boys had brought. I hated the bitter, grassy taste, but it seemed the thing to do my first night of freedom. I waited for some panic to set in, some sense of loss and sadness. But all I felt was air and space, room to move and breathe. I wasn’t even sure I missed them.
I felt a pang remembering my mothers face, and if I let myself, a twinge of guilt every time I thought of Greg coming home to find our father settled deeper into his chair, our mother brittle as rime. I wondered when I would ever see my little brother again.
My boss at the pharmacy where I worked after school needed someone forty hours a week, and I would begin looking for an apartment the minute we got back from Coeur d’Alene. I had lost all
sense of the future I’d planned: to attend college and become an English teacher. I looked around at the other seniors, still bound to their parents, chained by someone else’s rules. For once in my life, their lives seemed more pathetic than my own.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I leaned against the counter, bored and restless, the feather duster loose in my hand. Children rode by on their bicycles, wild with the warmth of June. Sundays never seemed right anymore. I hadn’t been inside a church since I’d left home. The final, outward break from doctrine had been simultaneous with my break from family.
Still, all that time once filled with singing and prayer now seemed without purpose and threatened to expand into a feeling of loneliness. I did not want to be lonely. Lonely filled me with panic. Even at work I felt cut off, closed up in a box of glass and metal, surrounded by aspirin and splints, lotions, greeting cards and Russell Stover chocolates—everything anyone could ever need to feel better or encourage someone else to. Anymore, the only thing that made me feel better was being with John.
At first, just having my own apartment seemed like heaven. I painted the walls shell white, decorated them with pastel landscapes from K mart instead of the juvenile posters I might once have chosen, and carefully arranged in the cupboard the few pots and pans my boss and his wife had given me. On the wall across from my bed, I nailed the walnut gun rack my great-uncle Clyde had made as a gift for my graduation. In it rested my .22 rifle, my Ithaca shotgun and my father’s Winchester 30.06.
I had found the Winchester leaned in the corner of my grandmother’s closet, where it had been for years, ever since my father, still recovering from his back injury, had pawned it to his brother for a fifty-dollar loan. I loved the swirled grain of its stock, the smooth comfort of it against my cheek. Its smell of Hoppes gun-cleaning fluid brought back a run of emotions, which I let my mind sift through, discarding those images too specifically linked to my family or the Langs. I savored only the sensations of those times, warm as a tightly banked fire. If I let my mind’s eye wander, allowed myself to remember and miss what existed beyond the smells and warmth, I’d feel it in the pit of my stomach: loss, regret, an overwhelming sense of sadness and longing that would devour me from the inside out. I kept the rifle as I would a funeral token—a flag folded and tucked into a tight triangle; a clutch of crushed flowers, dry and dusted. It symbolized for me the metaphorical death of my father: I could imbue it with whatever nostalgia I chose.
