Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  I did not yet know who I was, sitting along the banks of the river, on ground that, in less than ten years, would be flooded beneath five hundred feet of water. I did not know that the dam would be built forty miles west at Ahsahka, where the Nez Perce fished the sacred salmon, that there would come a time when the native salmon no longer made their ancestral run for home. What I knew was that everything was as I wanted it to be, and that when I woke from my nap there would be cold pork chops wrapped in wax paper, macaroni salad, and the deviled eggs my Aunt Mary was famous for all across the county.

  And so I napped, and even in dreams my curiosity led me, for there was a way that things worked and the secrets were everywhere: inside the periwinkle’s lacquered cocoon was a grayish worm that I peeled from its shell and used for bait; if I dug deeply enough, I could find the ground squirrel’s burrow, its nest of soft moss and twigs; behind the washhouse was a dump, a treasury of broken crockery and blue bottles, some still holding the dregs of remedy. I could barely wait to begin again—turning the rocks, parting the fern, stirring the water to roust the crawdads flashing orange and red and mottled brown.

  In that place of possibility, I did not yet know that there was a battle being waged for my soul, that the man who lay near me, that the woman whose lap I rested in, were searching for safe haven from the evil they believed might swallow us. By the time I was thirteen, I would have forgotten the small pleasures of discovery, my world used up and ugly. By then I would have come to understand that it was Eve who desired the fruit and its store of hidden knowledge, Eve who had damned us all from the Garden. Years away from that child sleeping in her mother’s arms, I would enter into my young woman’s life knowing these two things: by my gender I was cursed, and my mind would destroy me.

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE FIRST CHURCH we attended, nor do I remember the first time I saw the men and women with their hands raised, praying loudly, stomping and clapping, swaying, dancing, some falling, some weeping, some singing a solitary chorus in a sweet, high note. Nor do I remember that moment when I laid my own soul on the altar. I must have been nine, maybe ten—coming into my age of awareness, coming into possession of my own destiny, my own free will.

  It was my mother’s example I followed: at the urging of the minister who had married her and my father, she had begun attending the Pentecostal Church of God. She missed the friends she had left in Oklahoma, missed even her fractious uncles, her grandmother, whom she had left crying on the porch of the farm. In the church she found women who called her Sister, a family willing to take her in.

  It was then that I watched my lovely mother put away her makeup and jewelry, summer shorts and swimsuit, as directed by the dictates of her new faith. As a woman, she must compensate for the flaw of her gender by extreme modesty. Her hair was her glory and could not be shorn. For a woman to don pants mocked the male’s superior station. Her arms must be covered, her shoulders, her knees—any part of her that might entice, intrigue, attract, cause another to sin. Silence was her virtue.

  It is here that the few stories I have of my mother end—those tales of her youthful courage, how she had sped down the rutted logging roads in her brother-in-law’s ’47 Chevy, kicking up dust for miles; how she clambered onto the running board of the timber-loaded truck her husband steered down the steep mountains, its brakes lost to roots and stumps, how, at the tightest of corners, she held to the door and side mirror and sailed like a tethered kite above the drop-offs and gullies; how she was not afraid of the bears or the absolute darkness or the height to which a stiff-boomed jammer might take her.

  This was before the minister held her beneath the cold water of Orofino Creek and raised her up reborn; before the women of the church had shown her the way with their own plain faces and long skirts, their Bibles whose pages held the teachings of Paul, his warnings concerning the capricious and treacherous female nature; before she bowed her head and covered her shoulders freckled with sun and said, “Teach me to do Thy will.”

  She had found the order she believed would negate the past she feared might one day manifest itself in her own life: the alcoholism she saw as her birthright, the violence and dislocation. Her silent and submissive role was an extension of the self-protection she had learned while growing up with a father made rageful by his weakness for drink and his frustrated desire for wealth, a man who ridiculed her for every mistake, until her very existence brought with it its own kind of humiliation. Here was a way to redeem her future, a place far away from the rejection and shame. She came home from her meetings glowing, collected, and still.

  My father watched her, listened as she spoke of her newfound peace, her absolute salvation. He read the Bible she had left near his chair. Soon after my mother’s conversion, he laid his own soul upon the altar.

  The Scripture was familiar to my father, but as he began to study more carefully the teachings of Christ and His followers, he came to understand how his own father’s life had been ruined by willfulness. How different would it have been had his father heeded his call to the ministry, taken up the cross instead of the bottle, if it had been tent meetings where he met his brethren and not the riotous bars where he badgered the man with the moonshine into floating him another jug?

  My father vowed that he would do God’s bidding without question, and in this way he would gain salvation not only for himself but for his family as well. He would embrace the faith his own father had abandoned, commit himself to a life of spiritual submission, gain absolution for all past sins.

  Here, too, was argument for the simplicity he longed for. He possessed a holy man’s antimaterialism; his contentment often seemed linked to our lack of anything beyond the barest of necessities. Even after we had moved from the camps to the small logging towns, when we lived in houses with running water, my father preferred to stop at the spring and dip his hand and drink. Given a choice between an outhouse and an indoor toilet, my father chose the rough-hewn privy. He was a loner, a hermit, a would-be anchorite, if not for his family, whom he loved, and his need to support them. But now his eccentricities, his seeming lack of ambition, were no longer odd or ignoble but necessary to his quest toward spiritual enlightenment.

  It seems, too, that my father’s inherent mysticism had to find this home. In the time and place of his childhood—in the Oklahoma Bible Belt—his uncanny sense of the future, his dreams that seemed less dream than prophecy, must needs come from somewhere, and as far as his people knew, there were only two possibilities: such powers came from Heaven, or they came from Hell.

  After his redemption, my father’s dreams were no longer dreams but visions: sometimes they foretold the future, which he could not change. Sometimes they were apparitions—demons that fouled the air with their breath. There were times when he fasted and prayed for days so that God’s will might be made clear.

  This new father was the same and not the same. He still played the guitar and sang in his fine tenor’s voice, but now the songs were not the country ballads he’d learned on the leaning porch in Oklahoma; now they were songs of redemption and revival. Instead of Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, he spent his spare moments immersed in the King James Bible. When he read, we knew not to interrupt him, not because he might be angry but because it would do us no good: once fixed on his chosen text, nothing short of a shout could gain my father’s attention, and no one in our house was allowed to raise his or her voice except in prayer.

  The church reinforced our family’s already existing patriarchal structure—God to rule over man, man to rule over woman. The man was the physical and spiritual leader, the lawgiver, the interpreter, the one on whom the task of discipline fell most heavily. No decision could be made without his approval. My father’s authority had always been absolute, his command of every aspect of my life unquestioned. He believed, as his own father had believed, that a child’s love for her parent came only through respect and fear. Stoic and not given to negotiation, my father ruled with the intensity of his eyes and the strength of h
is hand. Any breach of proscribed conduct was met with immediate punishment, and that punishment was most often a spanking made more agonizing by my being sent to my room to await and think about what I had done. I would lie on my bed wide-eyed, listening for the sound of my father’s footsteps coming down the hallway, the slap of the leather belt in his hands.

  After his conversion, the discipline my father meted out came just as surely and suddenly as it always had, but now my misbehavior displeased both him and the Heavenly Father, whose punishment, I was promised, would be even greater.

  What both my father and my faith demanded of me was complete obedience, the total submission of my will. And it was my will, even at a young age, that I seemed unable to surrender. I learned early on how not to cry when whipped, to let the sting of the hand turn from burn to icy numbness, to let the arm wear itself out trying to draw from me tears. I never learned to give in, make it easier on myself, pretend the chastisement I did not feel. Stubborn, strong-natured, my elders said, and shook their heads in foreboding.

  But it was not so simple. Along with unflagging obedience, there was this other, seemingly contradictory thing that my father required: he wanted me to use my mind. It was my father who taught me to question, who teased me with riddles and word games, asked me to tell him which way the wind was blowing, how many miles we’d traveled at certain speeds, why it was that Christ insisted upon washing the feet of Simon Peter even though it was the disciple’s heart that bore the greater stain.

  From my father I learned to challenge the explication and interpretation of Scripture. He spent hours referencing and cross-referencing various texts. He argued loudly and obstinately with ministers, evangelists, and deacons, taking, I think, his greatest pleasure in the argument itself. Like him, I read from my Bible each day, so that by the time I was in fifth grade, I had memorized any number of begetting lineages, and I knew that dross was the imperfection that must be separated from the pure, just as Christ would return to claim His church and leave the sinners behind. It would be years into my adult life before I realized the relative, physical limitations of our holy text: the story of creation and original sin, only a few chapters long, goes on for pages and pages in my mind, so carefully had I been taught to embellish the Garden, the conflict, the Fall.

  Reading was my solitude, my escape from boredom, from my younger brother’s demands to play, from my cousins and their constant bickering. Even after we moved closer to town, into a frame house with interior walls, we were still miles from the nearest television, isolated by the impenetrable barrier of mountains and trees so that the only radio we pulled in were the midnight skips from a station in Texas. I would read not only the Bible but whatever script came into my hands. The club my mother had joined in my name gave me the miracle of books by mail, and I raced my brother home from the bus on days we thought the thick cardboard envelopes might come. Cereal boxes at breakfast, the instructions on cases of motor oil, the trials of Bazooka Joe—I was ravenous for words, for some connection to the outside world. I read the set of World Book Encyclopedia and Children’s Classics my parents had purchased when I was in third grade, cover to distant cover. Robin Hood, Science World, Le Morte d’Arthur, Big Red: I learned about the universe in which I lived from the pictures and tales, and from the words whose sounds I did not recognize but hoarded like a raven nesting silver. I learned puma and ermine; friar, Excalibur, longbow, Fey Morgan. I learned that the Eskimos wear boots called mucklucks, that Nez Perce ate pemmican made from venison and the boiled berries of kinnikinnick.

  I was teased by peers and berated by uncles for burying my nose between pages. My poor eyesight was blamed on too much reading, as were my allergies and pale skin—all that lingering over the impossible, all those daydreams and big words that put even bigger ideas into my head. But it was my father who encouraged and challenged me. “Look it up,” he would say. “Find out for yourself.” From him I learned the nuance of language, how each phrase could be read and reread, each time different. Words were jewels to be turned and examined for every facet, every refraction of light. The only absolutes were the legalities of my faith—the rules for behavior and salvation—and my father’s authority, his word that could not be questioned.

  I wonder now if my father may have foreseen that the analytical skills with which he engendered me might someday lead me away from the beliefs he himself embraced. For even as he insisted that I think for myself, he cautioned me against thinking too much. To think was to know, but the desire to know more than had been granted was blasphemy. There were doors that must not be opened, passages that must be foregone. Satan lurked there, waiting to snag the wayward traveler, to lure him away with the promise of wisdom, knowledge—the fruit of the tree that Eve could not leave be.

  BY THE TIME I was eleven, the easy companionship my father and I once shared was gone. My sudden maturation had caught us both by surprise. I remember one evening near the end of my fifth-grade year, lying back in the tub so that my mother could rinse my hair. The Prell shampoo, stringent as paint remover, got into my eyes, and I let out a howl of pain that reached my father where he sat in the living room, reading his Bible. He thundered down the hall and swung open the door, thinking only of injury. The sight of my unclothed body froze him where he stood, and I saw the look on his face turn from alarm to embarrassment and then to anger. This intimacy was not to exist between us, and I, through my babyish caterwauling, had forced him to see what should remain hidden. For days afterward, I believed it pained him to be near me, so shamed was he by my nakedness.

  I was no longer that little girl he’d once led through the dark, my fingers wrapped around his thumb. I was an early bloomer, my grandmother said, and I cringed with the words’ connotations: images of flowers and creepers and verdant grasses sprouting from the sleeves of my blouse, the waistband of my skirt. I was too aware of my body’s sudden transformation, my need for bras and deodorant and feminine hygiene—all “private things,” my mother whispered, and I cringed yet again, unable to disassociate the word private from the parts of myself that most humiliated me. The chaos of my own body became unbearable, and I welcomed the long skirts and high necklines, the coverings that kept me concealed and contained. My full-immersion baptism in the frigid current of Reed’s Creek was a blessing—the water that set my teeth to chattering pure forgiveness, purging me of all sin, washing me clean.

  THE WORDS MOST OFTEN USED to describe the religion of my childhood—charismatic, evangelical, Pentecostal—indicate little other than its particular theological concerns. The fact is that we believed in the physical existence of Satan and angels, believed that the skies would break open and God would return to gather His chosen ones home, and that we were those chosen few. We listened to the missionaries tell of dark heathens who practiced the Devil’s art, casting spells and bedding witches. They ate the flesh of white babies. They could assume the shape of any man or animal and speak with honeyed voices. We practiced our own small exorcisms, commanding Satan to leave, and I watched those who were afflicted shudder beneath the preacher’s hand, watched them fall and writhe, and I never doubted that the agony I witnessed was anything less than the demon itself being seared by the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.

  We believed that the laying on of hands would heal the sick and raise the dead. We believed that there was only one road to Heaven and that it began at the altar. We raised our faces and spoke in tongues—a language known only to God and the angels. People called out their prophecies; women danced in the aisles, their hair set loose and flowing; men wept without shame. Those who were taken by the Spirit, slain, we said, collapsed to the floor, and we covered them with clean linens where they lay trembling and murmuring their delirious joy. Only in the church were we allowed so much release, such pure physical and emotional exhilaration. Perhaps this is why my parents, weaned on the dry teat of inexpression, found their greatest joy in those hours of praise.

  We broke the bread that was the Body and dra
nk the dark liquid that was the Blood of Christ. To consume the Eucharist with anything less than a pure mind and heart was unforgivable, and each communion, I searched my soul for some remaining sin. If I chose to let the plate go by, my secret trespass would be apparent to those around me. If I chose to partake, I might be doomed to eternity in Hell.

  Yet I could not forego the ritual—the miniature glasses of grape juice clinking against the pewter tray (wine was forbidden), the way they nested so snugly, each in its individual slot; the coin-sized wafer, thin as a page from my Bible. When I held the unleavened bread in my hand, waiting for the minister to repeat the words of Christ at the Last Supper, I could not feel its weight. But it was there, softening with moisture, adhering to my palm like a second skin.

  As young as I was, I could not escape the seeming impossibility of my mortal predicament: Christ could descend at any moment, come to carry his chosen ones home, yet only those whose garments were white as snow would be caught up. The smallest lie kept hidden, the mildest jealousy left unconfessed, would be enough to stain us forever, mark us for passage to Hell. Yet we could never be flawless, doomed as we were to imperfection. Our only hope was the second-by-second policing of our bodies and minds. “Go and sin no more,” Christ had said. But how could we not? We were as God had made us—all sinners in His eyes.

  As a woman, doubly cursed, my greatest hope was to find a husband who would continue to lead and protect me as steadfastly as my own father did. To earn such a blessing, I must remain pure of heart and body. The evil that might tempt me was everywhere, the preacher warned: in pool halls and movie theaters, bowling alleys and card rooms. Dancing was a sin, as were smoking, drinking, rock and roll, swimming with the opposite sex. I signed the Youth Pledge, swearing that I would not partake in any of these things. It seemed easy enough. I had never seen a pool table. The late-into-the-night pinochle marathons my parents had once staged with my aunts and uncles had ended when my relatives gave up the logging life and moved to Lewiston. The nearest movie theater was a hundred-mile round trip. It would not be until I had children of my own that I saw Fantasia, which, with its wizardry and enchanted brooms, embodied our belief in black magic. Snow White, Cinderella, Old Yeller—all off limits, all part of the American childhood that was not mine and would never be.