Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  Lucky, brave, gifted with special knowledge. Why, then, did it happen that just as the crop ripened toward harvest, something came to knock it down? Wind, hail, hordes of locust, and only on the farm that he leased and tilled. Everything he put in for the landowner thrived, while a few miles away his own crop died. Not just bad luck, my father insists, but the manifestation of the struggle between my grandfather and God.

  My great-grandfather Barnes had been a Baptist minister and believed that this calling had been passed on to his son, a calling that my strong-willed grandfather would not heed. Instead, he began drinking—days when he lived on nothing but alcohol and cigarettes, nights when his own sons would find him at the bar, unable to stand but still fighting, mornings when they carried him from the hidden stills and back-road juke houses, bleeding from falls, beaten and cut by men he fought for moonshine. He was no longer the man gifted with uncommon insight and knowledge but a man who let the whiskey possess him, who allowed himself to forget that he once held dominion over the serpents.

  The day my grandfather died—his car slammed into the baked clay of a dry creek bed—my father was miles away on a high school field trip, but he knew: he had dreamed it the night before. Already, he had willed the grief from his mind and taken it from his eyes and buried it deep in his chest. All that was left for him to do was nod when they told him, take his sobbing mother by the hand, and lead her home.

  His senior year, he drove the school bus mornings and afternoons and gave his mother the earnings, keeping for himself only enough to buy cigarettes—my father’s single and enduring vice. He never forgot the chaos created by his father’s failure, how it left my crippled grandmother without comfort or support, engendered his siblings with grief and resentment. That summer he answered his uncle’s call for workers in the timberland of Idaho, and it was there that he found the isolation he craved, there where he could labor from sunup to sundown, felling cedar, skidding poles, alone with the noise of the saw and the loader, alone with his thoughts of the way things happened, in his mind a growing sense that he could make an ordered and enduring life for himself, there in that place where the trees grew thick as hair on a dog’s back, where a man with a rifle and rod should know no hunger.

  It would be not his father’s life but a life of his own, and he thought of his sweetheart left behind in Oklahoma and knew that he would call her and she would come and he would have all he might need in the world.

  MY MOTHER—FULL LIPS, blue-gray eyes, hair cut short and wisping at her neck and temples—was two years younger than my father, only sixteen the first time he picked her up in his brother’s ’42 Ford and, with no money for a movie, drove for hours around the Oklahoma backroads for no other reason than to be in her company. They cruised Highway 66, through Arcadia, Wellston, Stroud, Depew, past the oil rigs and hog barns, marginal farms and corner bars. Sometimes they went with friends to the drive-in movie in Oklahoma City, hiding in the car’s trunk so they wouldn’t have to pay the quarter each, holding hands in the backseat while William Holden and Jennifer Jones pined their way through Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.

  Her own family waylaid by wanderlust and alcohol, my mother lived with her grandmother on a dairy ranch. Her father had been a professional gambler in Oklahoma, a con artist, a grifter, never content to stay in one location long enough to let his game catch up with him. Her first years were spent in a constant state of financial and emotional flux: depending on her father’s winnings or losses, they were filthy rich or dirt poor. They left town in the dead of night, arrived at the new motel with the sun just breaking the horizon. My mother’s self-awareness came to her stained and secreted. Even now she fights her desire to hide.

  They went well together, my mother and father, high school sweethearts, both tall and good-looking, both possessed of the same need to escape, to remake themselves. It was 1956 when my paternal grandfather died, and that year, too, when my mother, at the age of sixteen, joined my father, leaving the red clay fields of broom corn and cotton for a high-elevation camp in the wilderness.

  IN THE WOODS, in the logging camps and exhausted boomtowns of northern Idaho, my life was defined by simple existence, or so it seems now. My first home was a wooden trailer, eight feet by twenty, with no water, wood heat, a table, two chairs, and a bed. All around me, the forest rose so high I could not see the surrounding mountains. Except for my extended family and a few itinerant sawyers, we were alone, but I did not know this. What I knew was the early warmth of a tamarack-fueled fire, the whistling of elk calves outside my door. There were venison and huckleberries in the fall, beans and bacon in the winter, brook trout all summer long. There were the creeks full of mussels and minnows, the air buzzing with crickets and locusts, the grass spiced with sage, wild onion, and fennel. Always, there was my mother, never far, warming herself in the sun of late June, preparing our meals, sprinkling the laundry while I read about the engine that could and the saggy baggy elephant and Little Black Sambo who melted the tiger into butter.

  My father left for work and came back, his movement sure as the beginning and ending of our day. In the fall he would leave before dawn to find deer and elk, and I would sit at the window and wait for him to come home, back from that place that was full of things dark and wild, full of danger and adventure—where I would have gone, too, if they’d have let me. But I was a girl and too young to go so deep into the forest.

  He came out of the woods into the circle of our logging camp, his teeth flashing white, his brown hair thick beneath his cap. He held his rifle in one hand, a yearling buck slung across his shoulders. Blood flowed down his arms—the trail of it led back into the shadowing trees. When I ran to him, he slid the gutted deer to the ground and gathered me up against his chest so that I, too, might feel the strength there. When he sat me down, the print of his hands remained, a brush-stroked swirl of palms, fingers and thumbs.

  I followed him to the shed, where he severed the deer’s head with a hatchet, hung it by its hind legs, began the skinning—the joint slits, the quick cuts through membrane and tendon. He took the hide in his fists and peeled it down, grunting with the effort. It made a ripping sound, like tape torn from cardboard. He sent me for hot water and vinegar, and I held the heavy bowl as he dipped the rag and wiped the meat clean.

  And then to the washhouse, with its wood-fired cookstove for heating water, its wringer washer, its communal shower, where my father rolled his sleeves and scrubbed his arms with soap. The water, tinctured red, ran from his hands into the drain, the pipe, out into the meadow where, in early summer, moose came to graze.

  “Come here,” my father said. He lifted me to the sink, and I felt the cold sting of water pumped from the spring. He took the towel from its nail and dried my hands between his own. Outside, the air had lost its color. I breathed in the sharp and familiar smell of wood smoke. Across the clearing, I could see that Swede the sawyer had gone to town; his eight-foot wooden trailer looked abandoned without lamp or smoke, and I wondered if he’d be sour when I fetched him for breakfast.

  The house of my great-aunt and -uncle sat higher on the hill, supported by a foundation of concrete, more permanent than our base of tongue, hitch, and wheels. They surely had turned in for the night—my aunt with her hair washed and wrapped in tight curlers, my uncle with his whiskers and rough voice—because the next day was their Sabbath and they must drive to town for church.

  We stopped, my father and I, so that he might strike a match: for a moment, all the light in the world blazed in the cup of his hands. When the fire went out, I closed my eyes, then opened them to a bank of stars. My father traced the Little Dipper’s handle with the red ember of his cigarette, and the outline became something solid, a trail leading toward Polaris—the brightest, my father told me, the one I might always find myself by.

  Our trailer made of pine boards was warm, the windows dewy with the steam of my mother’s cooking. We stomped our feet, left our boots at the door. I didn’t like the brown beans she h
ad prepared, and so I crumbled my cornbread into a bowl and covered it with milk. In the morning, hours before the horizon lightened toward dawn, my father would do the same—it would keep him full while he cut and limbed and skidded the timber from which we took our living.

  My brother, Greg, slept in my parents’ room, in the crib I’d known as a bed the first four years of my life. But I was five, and I must share. Whenever he gurgled, we stopped our chewing and waited. I thought it was my silence that lulled him back to sleep. I wanted this time with my mother and father to last without interruption. I wanted the snow to come soon, sugaring the windows shut. I wanted one path to the outhouse, one to the woodpile, one to the shed where the deer hung, so that we might stay warm and eat but not have to leave for work or town.

  Outside, the wind rose, the darkness rolled in, night bellied up against our windows. Full and sleepy, I lay on the couch and watched my mother wash and rinse the dishes; my father watched too, sitting and smoking, his legs crossed, his socks damp with the sweat of his boots. The coyotes yipped and howled, but I wasn’t afraid of what was outside. We were safe, with our light and heat. When I woke, I was in my father’s arms, being carried toward bed, the lights going out behind us as my mother followed. My father laid me down and covered me. I curled away from the cold sheets, curled into myself like a leaf touched by fire.

  They whispered to each other across the small room—my mother’s light voice, the deeper resonance of my father’s. I heard the crib rattle, felt the weight of my parents settle on either side of the bed, the warmth of bodies, the cotton long johns they both wore to fend off the chill. They kissed once, twice, in the air above my head, then my mother lay with her back to me so that she might nurse my brother, who murmured and suckled, hiccupped and coughed. I felt my father shift, the solidness of his shoulders, the long length of his spine.

  I was warm, the bed gently rocking with the movement of an arm, a leg. I could not fall or be snatched away. Nothing could find me there in the nest they had made for me, and when my mother rolled my brother onto her chest and then over between us, I smelled his sweet-milk face and the musk of her breast. All around I felt the bodies, the close boundaries. My fingers traveled the seam of a thermal sleeve and I slept, and I dreamed of nothing beyond the clearing, beyond the meadow where the elk would whistle their calves in. I did not dream of the deer where it hung from the rafters, turning slowly in the current of wind sifting through barnboard. It was safe there from the bear, who came for garbage, and from the coyotes, who came for bones. When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but a rivet of star through glass.

  I HAD ALL THAT A CHILD COULD NEED and more: loving and devoted parents, a doting grandmother, a tight-knit clan of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Raccoons trailed their kits across the meadow we called our yard. The creeks were full of tadpoles and bullfrogs, brook trout lured to strike by nothing more than a bit of red cloth. We gathered pinecones in burlap sacks and sold them to the Forest Service for pennies a pound, hands sticky with pitch that my mother scrubbed off with turpentine. In August we spent entire afternoons squatting among the huckleberry bushes, wary of bears, buckets hung from our belts, our mouths and fingers stained blue. My mother and aunts made afternoon picnics and sat with us around a large stump of red fir, tablecloth and napkins, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches cut into neat triangles, red Kool-Aid coloring their lips. My uncles, still young and given to play, chased us with towels that snapped and stung; I remember the feeling of ecstatic fear—hysterical exhilaration heightened by the sound of a large man galloping behind me, howling his own soul’s delight.

  Perhaps we were all children then, my elders barely into their twenties, most of them orphaned and carrying the weight of their own parents’ bitterness—a bitterness brought on by weather and grief and a country’s depression. Perhaps I am not the only one who remembers those days in the wilderness as full of teasing and laughter, days when the work was hard and the good times easy, when supper came not from the butcher or corner market but from the stream only steps from our door, the ravine behind our circled trailers.

  There was no fear, no need to padlock our doors. What out there could hurt us? What worries my parents harbored about foreign missiles and communism and the rising conflict in Vietnam were kept from me. Without newspapers, radio, or TV, we were protected from the turbulence of war and social unrest. My father had found his sanctuary, my mother believed that her happiness lay in his, and I rested between them, secure within the walls they had built for me.

  I REMEMBER DAYS OF RAIN when my father took the puzzle from atop the refrigerator and spread it across the oilcloth-covered table. I helped him turn each piece face up, and together we began to create the frame—corners first, then each side connected, blocked in, until the outline was whole. Still, the clouds had no shape; the horizon was a line without direction. It was impossible that all the bits would come together. “But they will,” my father assured me. I would see.

  Often my father worked on the puzzle for hours, long after I had given up and slid from his lap, weary of so much concentration. Sometimes I stayed and watched him at the table, a single piece in his hand, which he turned and turned on the hub of his finger and thumb. He would remain there beneath the light long after his family had gone to bed, and we would hear the soft click of cardboard, like the tick-tick of birds on the tin roof.

  When he was finished, he would call me so that I could view the miracle of his work: the table a bloom of red and yellow tulips, behind them the windmill, and behind that, the high, rising mountains capped with snow. “You see,” he said. “It just takes patience.” But what lay before me had not come from patience, nor even from that far-off land of Holland—it was my father who had made the fields to blossom in wondrous colors; the mountains had grown large beneath his hands.

  I wanted to be like him. I wanted to rise each morning before dawn, eat my breakfast of pancakes and bacon, pull on my calked boots at the door, and go into the world that was waiting for me. Out there was the life of the lumberjack. Out there exciting things happened: the machinery racketed and grumbled, the saws pitched and whined, the trees hit the earth in whumps that rattled our windows. Out there was where the coyote began its song and the bear snuffled for wild hyacinth, where my father found fawns hidden in Johnsongrass, where nests of baby birds floated down from limbs like wind-sailed bonnets. Out there was where the men, called from their skidders and peaveys, fought the summer fires that raged and threatened to consume us whole, where they dug the ditches and set the backfires that saved us. It was then that my father came home mottled with ash, flushed with heat and the war he waged.

  But I was here, in the small house with my mother and my brother, and though it was a good place with its warmth and closeness, smells of fresh bread and fried venison, it was not out there, where the stories came from. The stories were of danger and survival, split-second decisions, moments of courage—the stories my father and uncles told while picking their teeth with broom straw, while the women cleared the plates and sliced the pie and made another pot of coffee. They told of riding the boom to the top of the loader, jumping clear when they heard the snap of a snag knocked loose by sudden wind. They told of the chainsaw kicked back, the deck broken loose, logs rumbling down the hillside and no time to run. They shook their heads and laughed, for this was good fun, having lived and survived so much.

  They came home smelling of balsam and diesel, smells I loved. At dinner they smelled of Old Spice and Lucky Strikes and Vitalis, and this, too, I breathed in and savored. There was comfort with my mother and my aunts and grandmother, comfort in their incense of Ivory and Emeraude, yeast and cinnamon. But it was the men I listened to, their strength and freedom that I envied.

  I will be like them, I thought. I will go and not stay behind but take up my axe and shoulder my rifle and step out into that world beyond the clearing, beyond the wooden trailers with their narrow windows and heavy doors. They would tell me, all the days of my girl’s l
ife, that I wanted too much, that it was not my place, that such thinking would undo me—where did I get such ideas? My imagination, they said, ran wild.

  And so I waited, with the other children and women, and I dreamed, and I watched my father leave and come home, and I saw that he was happy. My mother was happiest when he was with us, and I watched her, too. This was her life: she rose to make breakfast; she cleaned, she sewed, she ironed; she baked my father fried pies golden as the moon, oozing apricot filling. Sometimes she called across the clearing to my aunts, and they gathered in the kitchen to drink coffee and smoke and paint their nails. She combed her hair and put on her makeup before my father came home, knowing that a man would not want a woman who let her looks go. She pulled my hair back in a ribbon—she wanted me to look pretty for my father when he returned home. I understood that this was what I must learn: to honor the man’s place with the offering of my hands and body. Here is this face; kiss it. Here is this food; eat.

  THIS IS THAT PLACE that embodies all my child’s lost innocence, that piece of myself I left behind, there in the bitterbrush shot through with deer trails, somewhere along the creek banks lined with lupine. It has dropped from my pockets like the lead sinkers that weighted my hooks; it has slipped from my hands like the fish themselves, escaped back into the deepest of waters. It is who I was yet becoming, my feet growing long beneath me, my bones lengthening their stride. It is my mother at the door in her nightgown, my father leaning in to kiss her before disappearing into the early-morning dark, in which he would work until the summer heat shut them down, the danger of fire too great. It is in the river’s lost current, the North Fork of the Clearwater before the dam, when the water ran an icy jade, when my brother and I lay on blankets and played in the shallows, ate watermelon and drank iced tea from the canvas-covered water bags dipped in the river to cool. It is in my mother’s warmth as she bundled me, wet and shivering, in a towel, my father dozing close by, beneath the drapery of cedar.