Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  What the river takes, the river gives, and so it is with my life here. Each hour I spend with my feet near water, I feel more deeply rooted; the farther away I get, the less sure I am of my place in the world. I have known this river from its feeding waters to its mouth where it meets the Snake. I have known it before the dam and after. I have known it as a child knows water, as a lover knows water, and now as a mother who watches her own children bend at the waist, leaning forward to bring up the pods of periwinkles, the sandy shells and broken bits of blue glass worn smooth by the current’s rush and tumble.

  Many afternoons I pull on my vest, gather my rod, walk into the river one step at a time. My feet slide from the shoulders of rock; my toes wedge between boulders. I am timid about this, moving out toward center, where the water is deepest, where the big fish might lie.

  The Clearwater is not easy. Too wide to cast from shore, too swift, too pocked with hidden currents and sudden holes. I go at it anyway, determined to find my place of stability, the water at my belly, my thighs numbing with cold.

  My husband fishes below me. On shore, our daughter and son dig pools in the sand. I watch as they flash in the sun, and it is as though I am reliving my own young life, as though I exist in two dimensions and know the pleasure of each—the child’s pure delight in the moment; the woman’s recognition of continuance, of the water around her, the sun on her face.

  I choose a fly I think the fish might favor, its color that of the day’s light and leaves and wings. I praise its tufts and feathers, its hackle and tail. I load the line, thinking not of the S I must make through air but of the place above sand where the water eddies, the V above whitecaps, the purl below stone.

  I do not think of the line or the fly or the fish as much as I think about the water moving against and around me, how the sky fills my eyes and the noise that isn’t noise fills my ears—the hum of just-waking or sleep, blood rush, dream rush, the darkness coming on, the air.

  I forget to watch for the fish to strike, forget to note the catch, the spin, the sinking. I pull the line in, let it loop at my waist, sing it out again, and again. The trout will rise, or they won’t. The nubbin of fur and thread will turn to caddis, black ant, stone fly, bee, or it will simply settle on the water and remain a human’s fancy. Either way, it’s magic to me, and so I stay until my feet are no longer my own but part of the river’s bed. How can I move them? How can I feel my way back to shore, where my family is calling that it’s time to go home? They are hungry, and the shadows have taken the canyon. They are cold.

  From my place in the water, they seem distant to me. I must seem like a fool, numb to my rib cage, no fish to show. But I am here in the river, half in, half out, a wader of two worlds. I smile. I wave. I am where nothing can reach me.

  IT HAS TAKEN ME TIME to understand the need I feel to be consumed by the river. I want its sound in my ears, its smell, its taste. I want to be immersed—my hands, my feet, my hips—just as I was as a child, when the preacher leaned me back into the icy waters of Reeds Creek and I felt my legs let go, floating for that moment without resistance, without air or sky or land, baptized, reborn, swept free of all sin.

  Perhaps what I see in the river is some mirror of the contradictions that make up my own life—the calm surface, the turbulent pull beneath, the creation, the infinite capacity for destruction. Several times a week I drive the river road to Lewiston, where I teach at Lewis-Clark State College, where I mark the chalkboards I once took notes from, where I lead my students through the same books that jolted me into awareness. The drive takes me past Cherry Lane Bridge and its fragrant fields of alfalfa, past Myrtle, where there once was a bar famous for its fights and fast women, where my uncles, pressed into child care, had often felt the need to stop for a cold beer before logging the final miles of our trip. I remember how they came back to the Chevy, smelling of whiskey and Kools and pepperoni, suddenly happy in the company of children entrusted to them for the day.

  As I drive, I see how the dark silhouette of my travel wavers across the river’s shallows, grows fat, then thin, disappears altogether at the deepest curves. I think how that twin has always been with me—through my memories of childhood journeys, from the woods to town and back, always the long blue ribbon of water, the blacker thread of road, our outline weaving between sun and shade, an apparition through yellow pine and red fir, through the tight growth of paradise trees, through snake grass and the shiny, oiled leaves of ivy.

  Nights, as I follow the winding highway back home, I look toward the water, casting the moon from its belly in a current of silver. Driving by water is a seduction, I think, a temptation to come and join and know. So easy, the lift off asphalt, the wind, the slow sinking. The final fear to face no fear at all but a rare, consuming sleep. There have been times in my life when such oblivion seemed more enticing than the impossible path before me. I remember those hours of limbo as though I were already drowned—everything a swirl of gray noise and no light.

  I am grateful that farther up the road is my family: my daughter who still lolls into dreams with her thumb in her mouth—that small mouth falling open as I trace her lips and wonder at their delicate resistance; my son, weaned at two, whose fingers still caress my breasts when he thinks I’m not looking; my husband who waits for me, porch light on. “You’re home now,” he says. He takes my coat, sits me down at our table. He feeds me good bread, roasted chicken, squash from our garden baked soft and sweet. He locks the doors against the outside, pulls back the sheets and covers me. He tells me to sleep, that he is there, that he means to stay. The house murmurs its familiar sounds, my lover slides in beside me, and I smell the warm-earth smell that is his.

  IS THIS WHEREIN FAITH LIES—the unlearning of old lessons, the impossible projection of love? Is it found here, in the everyday rituals of sustenance, the food on the table, the nightly kisses, the mornings all new and intimate, when we rise and greet one another, blinking in the light?

  “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, into the fire they had to go,” our Sunday school once sang. “But did they burn up? Oh, no!” we exclaimed. It was faith that delivered them and faith that I clung to, desperately, because it seemed something elusive, easily lost. And if faith were lost, so was I. We might all be tested by fire, we were told, before the Lord’s coming. Without adequate faith, I would be bound over like the three men and cast into Nebuchadnezzar’s fire but without the protection of God’s asbestos angel. I would burn forever for my sins.

  What I feel now is not the faith of my childhood, but perhaps it is one that has taught me the other, the Bible and its sermons that have allowed me to recognize faith when I feel it: a letting go of control; a giving over to the forces you believe are shaping your life, whether it be God or the land or the love of a child or the look on your lover’s face when he turns to you in his sleep and whispers your name.

  Summer nights, when I lie with my family on the deck, the moon at our fingers, the river at our feet, I trace the meteors’ fall, name the constellations. Cassiopeia, the Archer, Cygnus the Swan: for me, it was one simple star, but I want for my children a larger heaven. Still, each time, I name it first, that star they might always find themselves by—Polaris forever to the north.

  From the tallest tree, an owl calls its honest question. It waits in the branches above us, somewhere between earth and sky, patient for its dinner, shedding light from its wings. I hear the sound of the river, the soft breathing of my son and daughter as they drift toward sleep. My husband reaches his hand across them, touches my face. I wonder if, at that moment, he knows how much I fear such a perfect world. For this is not a fairy tale. It is the story of a woman still struggling to understand what she is made of, all that she has been and might yet be.

  ———

  “I KNEW IT WOULD BE HARD for you,” my father says to me. “I just didn’t know how hard. What I never doubted was that you would be okay. I never doubted that at all.”

  I wonder, sometimes, at my father’s vis
ion. I watch him as he sits in his easy chair, smoking, reading the Bible, watching TV, and I see the inner absorption, the way he is always thinking, thinking in that way that makes him deaf to the kitchen noise and the traffic and the voices of his family, calling him for dinner. He is a traveler, journeying inward, through the maze of his heart and mind and soul. Often, my father and I sit together in silence until I rise to begin the reclamation of socks and shoes and toys, preparing to take my leave; it is then that his head comes up and he begins our conversation, as though it has taken him all evening to decide what questions deserve asking, words to him like desert water, spare and necessary.

  My grandmother is dead now. My mother and father have moved into her house, and I feel immersed in her memory each time I visit. It isn’t perfect yet, this truce my parents and I hold between us, but I can come to their home, eat at their table, and sometimes say what matters. Often, my brother brings his wife and children. He is an engineer, a good husband and father. He is an elder in the church; he keeps the faith. His memories are not always the same as mine, and so we work toward common ground, toward those places and stories we share. As with my father, I find my strongest connection with my brother when we go back into the wilderness, when we hunt the draws and wade the river together.

  My mother and I have come to our own place of repose. Her elbow rubs against mine as we wash and dry the plates and silverware, and I think how satisfied I am to work next to her. Her body is familiar, her light scent of perfume a sure comfort. Her only need, it has often seemed, is for harmony, something my father and I have, in the past, been incapable of offering. I have come to realize that the will of my beautiful mother, who demanded of herself invisibility, who struggled to suppress her desire for anything beyond the happiness of her family and the good of her faith, may have been the strongest will of all. There are times when I look at her and am struck again by the blue of her eyes: so light, almost white, she would say with regret in her voice, as though the wash of color, like a high-clouded sky, were something to be ashamed of.

  All those years of warning came of love—the best she could do without a voice, without the words to articulate the fear she felt for me. I know so few of her stories, have so little sense of her life’s narrative. And because she has not spoken her stories, I have, in the past, allowed myself to believe that there weren’t any, that her life was an uninterrupted line leading from her childhood to marriage and the birth of her children.

  Over the years it has taken me to write this, I have, in small, interlocking pieces, told my mother and father the story of David Jenkins. And because my father believes that everything works together for the good, he tells me that there is a reason why I have chosen the paths I have walked.

  “It’s not that I want to hear these things,” he says. “But I’m glad you’ve told me. It helps me understand.”

  I think of the puzzles he worked those long winter nights in the woods, each piece so carefully considered. “Farther along,” he would sing, “we’ll know all about it. Farther along, we’ll understand why”: more a wish than a prayer.

  Yet here I am, having survived my lessons, having learned more than anyone might have foreseen. Because my father gave me both reason to rebel and the means to do it. Because he believed, even in the darkest hour, that I would find my way out.

  On the curving highway below my house, my father drives each day, hauling his load of wood chips. It is a dangerous road, one he cannot take his eyes from. He raises his hand anyway, in case I am watching, and in that small, transitory gesture is an acknowledgment of connection, of faith in the air that binds us.

  MY HOME IN THE WOODS is gone now. Company land, after all, worth more as commodity than domicile. The narrow house we called a shotgun shack, the shallow lawn with its river-rock barbecue, the root cellar with its bottles and old blankets—all of it scavenged, then burned to the ground.

  The first time I saw it this way, having remembered it whole for so many years, I walked like a wanderer through what once had been the living room, or maybe my bedroom—so little left to orient myself by. Even the trees that had anchored the corners of the land had been cut and hauled off; smaller trees had sprung up, tipping the sky twenty feet above my head: grand fir in the laundry room; blue spruce in the kitchen.

  Bits of porcelain shone through the grass like shards of bone. Every window, every pane, shattered into sharp angles, half buried in duff, a field of glass and metal and scorched cloth, a dark yawn in the hillside where my father once prayed—all that was left of my life there, that short period of time when the spring gave us water and the trees gave us shade, when my parents were poor but seemed happy, before I learned what my body might know.

  I felt an overwhelming sense of loss—not just for the hollow, but for that memory of myself in its palm. Because it is no longer there, because even its ruins have been buried, it feels as though it never existed—some dream I had come to believe and now must forget.

  It is in this place above the river that I set down the words I hope to live by. That woman I was before, she has no place here. Yet even as I say this, I realize I cannot separate myself from that other. She is both me and not me, just as I am both of the past and the present. If I reject what I am made of, I leave nothing to guide my own daughter except the silence that is my inheritance, nothing for my son, whose birthright is half the truth of what passes between man and woman.

  I think of the Inuit way: a wolf bone whittled to a point at both ends, coiled and frozen in blubber, left along the path of bears. The bear eats it and weakens slowly, over miles, over days, the bone twisting and slashing, killing from the inside out. Shame feels this way, swallowed and sharp, working its way deeper with each move to dislodge the pain, so that finally, we lie still, dying with blood in our mouths. We eat our stories and starve.

  MINE IS A STORY OF FIRE, the ravening and purging, the exhaustion of air, the cinders and flames of renewal. Mine, too, is the story of intimate waters: the womb, the runoff of spring thaw, the cold dash of baptism, the tidal flow of my seasons, the birth-glide of my children in their paraffined skins. It is the story of the wilderness I was born to and left and reentered, the prayers of my faith and its betrayal, the touch of hands both holy and damned. Deer lick and trout flash, the voices rising in hallelujahs of praise, belt lash, the salving caress, the cry of shame: I am all of it, and will always be.

  From that place in the woods where the fires burned, where my father returned to us weary and watchful, his clothes smelling like coals from the furnace, I come to this bend in the river, where the water runs deep, where, in spring and fall, the last steelhead and salmon nose into stone and anchor themselves to rest. It is here that I take up my journey, chart my course by that true north star, and begin once again to believe.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY HUSBAND AND CHILDREN—Bob, Philip, Jordan, and Jace—have given endless comfort and encouragement; they have kept me anchored in the present; they have fed me when I could not feed myself.

  I could not have made this journey without the love of my parents, whose willingness to travel the old roads with me has given me strength and taught me yet another lesson in the ways of the heart. The support of my brother and his family is a gift.

  Thanks to others who have offered their wisdom and have shared their own stories so that I might know what good company I keep: Mary Clearman Blew, Claire Davis, Dennis Held, Robert Johnson, Lisa Norris, and Christy Thompson. Keith and Shirley Browning, Vana Vernon, Ann Jones, and Renée Wayne Golden have aided and guided me. Special thanks to Bruce Tracy, who hears the story when I cannot.

  ALSO BY KIM BARNES

  A COUNTRY CALLED HOME

  When Thomas Deracotte, a young doctor, meets his wife, Helen, she is a vibrant, willful free spirit. The daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family, Helen happily abandons her future in Southport for an adventure with Thomas. Together the newly weds buy a rundown farm in rural Idaho. They live in a tent, making coffee on
a campfire and eating dandelion greens. A young farmhand named Manny is hired to rebuild the barn and house, providing labor and friendship. But the sudden, difficult birth of Helen’s daughter tests the marriage, and it falls on Manny to try to mend this fractured family. In this extraordinary novel, Kim Barnes reminds us of what it means to be young and in love, to what lengths people will go to escape loneliness, and the redemption found in family.

  Fiction/978-0-307-38911-4

  HUNGRY FOR THE WORLD

  On the day of her 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, Barnes decided she could no longer abide the patriarchal domination of family and church. After a disagreement with her father—a logger and fervent adherent to the Pentecostal Christian faith—she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. She had no skills and no funds, but she had the courage and the will to make her way, and eventually to survive the influence of a man whose dominance was of an altogether different and more menacing sort. Hungry for the World is a classic story of the search for knowledge and the consequences, both dire and beautiful, of that search.

  Memoir/978-0-385-72044-1

  IN THE WILDERNESS

  Winner of the 1995 PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the Wilderness is this poet’s account of a journey toward adulthood against an interior landscape as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we all must enter to face our own demons. It is the clear-eyed and deeply moving story of a young woman’s coming to terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.

  Memoir/978-0-385-47821-2

  ANCHOR BOOKS

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