by Kim Barnes
MANY EVENINGS I spent with John, the boy I’d been dating since graduation. I had known him for several years as a classmate, but I might never have seen past his wrestler’s walk, jock talk, and shyness if it hadn’t been for Thane’s encouragement.
Thane and John had picked me up one Saturday morning the spring of our senior year, and we’d headed for Winchester Lake for a day of fishing. This was one of the reasons I was attracted to Thane: he took me with him out of the city, back into the woods, where I could cast my line to the water, sit for hours breathing in the peppery smell of cattails and bull thistle, listening for the liquid trill of red-winged blackbirds. I would forego any number of trips to the mall for a few hours in the woods—the one place where I could feel my soul settle, where I could feel I might be home.
I’d heard stories of John’s expertise as an outdoorsman, and I was eager to be part of the day’s expedition. Wedged between the two boys, thigh against thigh, the new summer wind catching my hair, I’d been happy, always happy to be with Thane, though I’d come to know that, along with his girlfriend, I was only one of many who shared his affection. I’d learned this and more about Thane—how he’d lost his virginity in seventh grade, how the older girls had spoiled him silly with quickies behind the gym. I’d given up my visions of velvet evening gowns and pink corsages. Even a moment of his time seemed like a gift.
But something different came of this day. Thane had nudged me, nodded toward John. “I should share,” he whispered.
“What?” I could hardly hear him over Creedence Clearwater Revival blaring from the eight-track.
“He likes you.”
For the first time I really looked at John, and what I saw enticed me: brown eyes, straight dark hair that fell across his forehead in the back rush of wind through the car. Thane moved his knee from beneath my hand, once again nodded toward John. I hesitated, then, as Thane watched, I slid my fingers up the denim seam of John’s Levi’s. He looked at me quickly, then at Thane, who smiled. John didn’t move toward me or away, but sat there, letting me touch him, and I felt a wild exhilaration, riding between these two men, feeling their hotness and the quickness of their breathing, knowing I had this power, believing I did this not for Thane or for John but for myself: I was making my own rules, taking all that I could before the hours of my freedom ended.
And when, that May, my father had disallowed such freedom, it was John who waited for me. His mother, Viv, had taken me in like a hatchling, getting me my job at Idaho Fidelity, where she had worked for years. I’d tend my window from nine to five, counting, stacking, banding money, then come to her kitchen and watch as she tenderized roundsteak with the edge of a saucer or added a second can of mushrooms to the spaghetti sauce, smoking all the while.
Viv was a tall, dark-haired woman, once a professional model, who still credited Pond’s cold cream for the fineness of her skin. I marveled at her control of fire and ash, at how elegantly she held the cigarette, elbow bent, palm up, even as she went about her domestic duties. She took her time with things, wiping the smudges from each coil of the telephone cord, peeling a carrot in smooth, considered strokes as though she were carving a child’s whistle.
Walt, John’s father, most often sat at the table, pushing an ashtray across the Formica with the tip of his low-tar True. He was a large, loose-jowled man given to bouts of sulking and general gruffness, a beer drinker who lightened each night around ten and spun off story after story about his days as a World War II bomber and Alaskan bush pilot. He had been my eighth-grade science teacher, and I feared he might resent that girl I had once been—smoking, cursing, setting my desk on fire with the Bunsen burner while singing Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”—but in his memory my rebellion was less the sinister workings of a bad spirit than the simple boundary-testing of a teenager. I loved him for that.
Like his father, John was a man’s man—a high school football star, now a running back for the university. His thighs were thicker than my waist. He had an undercut jaw and a barrel chest. Tall and lumbering, he possessed an uncommon strength, which I felt held back each time he embraced me. I loved that he was a hunter, that he knew the ravines and streams of the surrounding mountains, their secret roads and hidden meadows. I loved that he took me there, back to where I believed I could not go alone. The first time we made love was in a farmer’s field, sheltered by hackberry and wild plums. I remember the warm earth beneath me, the way the magpies dipped and sculled around us, yellow pine riming the sun.
My life with John was defined by our time spent together in the outdoors. For Christmas he gave me the Ithaca 20-gauge semiautomatic I’d seen in the window of Lolo Sporting Goods. For his birthday I bought him a Weatherby .22-250. Bolt-action, lever-action, single-shot, pump, Leupold Gold Ring 3×9 power: here was the language of my father, the numbers and names I’d heard all my life. It was all familiar to me—the rifles in the pickup’s rear window, the smell of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning fluid, the dank odor of downed deer, their guts pulled out in a pile, glistening and steaming, the rasp of a saw through pelvic bone as an elk was quartered and sacked to be carried. When I brought the shotgun to my cheek, the movement came to me fluid and easy—all those seasons of watching and yearning, dreaming that someday I, too, might walk the mountain and come home rich with provision.
Sometimes, after a hunt, I would stop by my parents’ house, mottled with blood and feathers, still shouldering my gun, smug with success. I took a perverse pleasure in my mother’s dismay. She could not understand such masculine endeavor. But it wasn’t my mother I hoped to impress; it was the man who sat in his easy chair, facing the television, hardly looking my way.
My father seemed only to tolerate my presence, the few bits of speech he offered brittle and empty, hulls, husks, and chaff. From the kitchen, where I sat while my mother fried chicken in Crisco, I would ramble loudly about the shot I’d taken to bring the pheasant down, the deer I intended to hunt come October.
It was my father’s land I brought back to him, I believed, his ways I embodied. The wool and flannel and denim I wore, the firearms I carried, the trails I followed. Look at me, I wanted to say. Can’t you see I am your daughter? Remember what it was like before, when we existed together in our solitude, when all that mattered was a good shot, meat on the table, fire in the stove, a bed to share our warmth. Remember how happy you were then. Remember what you abandoned.
But there was no going back, no compromise. My father had done what he believed God had asked of him, leaving behind the only land and work he ever loved, while I had failed in every way. It was impossible for me to be that daughter my father had raised and taught and shaped into being: a chaste and temperate young woman, virginal in her marriage bed, humble before her father, her husband, her god.
I believed it was John who might be my proxy, my way back into my father’s good grace. Over a period of several months, I brought John with me on my visits home. My father, though he seldom looked my way, would talk to John—conversations about calibers and quarterbacks and carburetors—and I would stand at the edge of the kitchen, where my mother cooked. I knew I should help her with the meal, but I couldn’t resist the pull I felt when the men began their tales of treks into the woods. I listened for what I might learn: look for the saplings stripped by antlers, the earth pawed clean for wallows; if you jump the deer and it runs, be patient—the prey will sometimes circle back, curious, drawn by its own fatal interest; always remember to mark your trail, gauge your direction by the progress of light.
When dinner was ready, my mother, John, Greg, and I would gather at the table while my father remained in his chair, plate balanced on his lap. He seemed unaware of our hushed tones, the loud emptiness that filled his place at the head of the table, where no one else dared sit. After the meal was over, I left as I had come, aware of my place at the margins, wondering how long my shunning would last, wondering what I could offer in place of my liberty that might make my father see me
again.
Finally, there came a time when I gathered my courage and suggested that we go hunting together, my father, my brother, John, and I. I thought my father might see that I had taken up where he left off, picked up the rags of our life and pieced them back together.
That hunt took us deep into Big Bear Canyon, where I partnered up with my father, working to match his stride, to convince him he didn’t have to slow down or rest for me—so little room between us for weakness, vulnerability. I wore myself out trying to keep up, denying my lesser legs and narrow shoulders, my thin wrists and ankles, believing that the race between us might never end. Without the need I felt to prove my worth, without his need to teach me worthiness, what would exist between us?
Winded, my thighs aching, I wondered at my father’s stamina, his long-legged march, the hint of a hitch in his walk—the vertebrae fused solid in his lower back. He had shown me once, when I was young—the long, clean gash along his hip, from which they’d taken the shaving of bone; the larger cut that grew from the base of his spine, the skin pink and shiny as pulled taffy. When I had touched him there, pushed at the scar with my small girl’s finger, I’d felt a strange and fragile resistance, the membrane of flesh so thin I feared I might hurt him, rupture the wound, cause him more pain.
Miles into our hike, we had stopped to watch a buck the color of ripe wheat cavort in a too distant field, made foolish by the doe he had followed into the open. My father smiled like some benevolent god until the deer disappeared into a tangle of hawthorn and elderberry.
“Boy, that was pretty,” he’d said.
“Yes,” I said. “It was.” How long since I had seen that look on his face, that simple delight in the world, appreciation of something neither good nor evil, something that existed outside our realm of moral reasoning? How long since affection for anything had come unweighted by the baggage of obedience, sin, punishment, betrayal?
There would be not one hunt but several, and what I would remember is that nothing is as simple as memory. For each of our journeys into the forest, there would be a lesson I must learn: to mark my passage, to depend on no one but myself, not even my father, who walked me in, then let me lose myself and wander for hours before guiding me home.
There was no place of comfort with my father, no margin for weakness. If this was how I chose to “prove up,” then my rites of passage back into my father’s esteem would be on his terms, not my own. It seemed to me that nothing short of abject humility would win my father’s uncompromised love. At some point, the rigors of the trial were no longer worth the little that I gained with my stoic endurance—the nearly imperceptible nods indicating his approval, the meager dole of words.
With John, it was easier. He taught me the things my father never had: how to trail whitetail and flush grouse, how to cast for rainbow and cutthroat and steelhead.
I could hardly wait for Saturdays, when John and I would sail down the highway toward the woods, through Tammany, past the 49’ers arena, the speedometer topped out and no reason to slow down. I would watch the sun slip behind the Blue Mountains, and I would remember the books I had read, the words so ripe I could taste them, and I would think, the mountains look blue because the gloaming has touched them; the sky is spreading its wings, feathering to fuchsia, magenta, that purple called Tyrian—like the colors of exotic birds, descending to a canopy of trees.
I did not speak such words aloud; no one wanted to hear them. They were fussy, temperamental. They were another of my secrets, my clandestine passions. I held them on my tongue, where they were safe. I would lay my head on John’s shoulder, close my eyes, feel the muscle in his thigh tense and relax. There was another language I was perfecting, one that would seem, for a time, to take the place of all that I could not say. I spoke it to John with my mouth, my hands, my hips. At the end of the evening, he would take me home, walk me in and shut the door. We made love every night because he was a man of eighteen and I was a woman who knew little about her own desire but understood that it was the one thing she could offer that would keep him long into the night.
OUTSIDE OF JOHN, there were few friends that I spent any time with. I was uneasy in the company of women, unsure how to traverse the complex pathways of female companionship. My family’s transient lifestyle had cost me the social confidence bred by lifelong friendships, and I’d consciously gone about an adherence to my father’s behavior, interests, and codes—one of which, though unstated, was clear: the truest and deepest adventures can be found only in the company of men.
My cousin Les, competitive and not easily intimidated, seemed one of the few women who offered the kind of camaraderie I craved: she did not tolerate boredom. There had been years when Les and I had shared little outside of family. Even though she had often accompanied me to summer church camp, she had never fallen under the spell of fundamentalism, and during those years when I went “straight,” she continued in her precocious ways, smoking, drinking, taking the punishment her parents meted out. Now, out from under our fathers’ roofs, we had once again found common ground.
Les had the exotic looks of her mother—high cheekbones, bronzed skin, large, almond eyes—gifts of an Indian heritage. She worked at a clothing boutique, taking her wages in strappy dresses, gossamer negligés, four-inch heels. We spent many evenings together, downing shots of schnapps, sharing cheap wine straight from the bottle, just as we had as teenagers bent on rebellion. We smoked, we cursed the air blue, we drove to Spokane for nights of dancing, then weaved the hundred miles home, never thinking about the ways in which we endangered ourselves and others. What mattered was staying alive, and that had little to do with physical survival. Our greatest fear was inertia, of finding ourselves gone still while the world revolved on around us.
It was with John and the other young men who shared his love of the outdoors that I found my truest fraternity. They took me in, allowed me to exist in that strange place between one of the guys and a girl to be protected. My favorite was Brock Hoskins, a shy Catholic boy with fine brown hair and chestnut eyes. He had a gentleness about him, quiet ways, and I often found him watching me. He leaned across the pickup seat one time, whispered in my ear, “John is a damn lucky guy to have you.” The sentiment—so sweet and old-fashioned—made me girlish, and I blushed.
Whenever we dropped Brock off at his parents’ house, his passel of younger brothers and sisters came to the door, and he was embarrassed but happy. I’d wave to his mother, a tall, round woman, good in her Catholic ways, who came to the window and smiled, wiping her hands on a dish towel. I wondered at her life—so many children, so little outside of house and family. I could not imagine forever being left behind, incarcerated with Comet and Pine-Sol, waiting for the men to return from their work, their fields and pastures, their games, their fishing trips and hunting camps. Always, the women waiting, waiting like my mother had for my father to come home unscarred and upright from the woods. Instead, he came home cut and bruised and finally broken, flat on his back in a body cast for a year while she worked at the café to support us.
Left behind: nothing scared me more. Perhaps a remnant of my fundamentalist faith, believing that God would return at any moment to take his chosen ones home. Or maybe it was the loneliness and boredom I feared, the sense of panic that swelled in my chest when the rooms grew quiet and I was left without distraction.
And so I followed John everywhere: to the tip of Hoover Point, to the bottom of the Salmon River canyon. When John and Brock took up motocross, I bought my own dirt bike and rode behind them on rutted raceways and logging roads. We roared across pastureland, meadows, and creek beds, along trails too narrow for one, dodging wind-felled snags and sawn-off stumps. I came to believe that my fear was what fuelled me, and that as a woman I had never been allowed to call it by any other name—a rush, a dangerous thrill, a jolt of excitement and daring. The landscape was a blur of spruce and tamarack, sumac and dog fennel. I loved the way it all flew by, the way I could speed through hours and eat noth
ing but air. When we rested, we eyed each other with a kind of pleasure, flushed with adrenaline, sensuous in our damp skins and panting. Then John would move closer to me, Brock would take his eyes to the breaks of the canyon, the horizon clouded by harvest, and we would sit that way, content in our place, catching our breath, once again on familiar ground.
I REMEMBER the summer afternoon I stood with Viv in the kitchen, spreading deviled ham across slices of Wonder bread. John and I planned to pick up Brock and drive several hours south, across the prairie, down Eagle Creek to the Salmon, the River of No Return. John had loaded the motorcycles, rifles, and fishing rods. We’d make a day of it, maybe even spend the night, throw our bags on the sand where the canyon walls echoed the rise and roll of sturgeon.
As I filled the cooler, I heard the wail of an ambulance, distant, then close, then trailing off. The shrillness of the siren faded. The phone rang. Walt grunted into the receiver, listened, looked from beneath his eyebrows at the rest of us, circled around him and frozen by the sudden slackness of his face.
“Ah, sweet Jesus,” he said, then handed the phone to John.
By the time we got to the hospital, the doctors and nurses had cut Brock out of his Levi’s and T-shirt, started IV’s, inserted a catheter, shaved his head and wrapped it in layers of gauze. Several of Brock’s brothers and sisters sat outside his room, the younger ones concentrating hard on the pictures they drew, the older ones tearful, arms crossed, holding themselves. The father, a carpenter and rancher, hadn’t yet been reached. Brock’s mother turned toward us and gripped John’s arm.
“He was just going for a ride until you got there. Just a short ride down the road.” She looked into my face, searching for some reason why such an easy story had broken down.
