In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [10]
As disappointed as my mother was, the only emotion that showed in her face as she prepared for the wedding was joy. The photographs catch her tucking in her blouse, elbows akimbo, nearly knocking the walls of the small shack. Her elegance belies her age—sixteen—and the suit gives her an air of sophistication. Tall, with a thin waist and shapely legs, she resembles the movie stars her own mother as a teenager had cut from the pages of magazines and pasted in a scrapbook, one of them, Claudette Colbert, her namesake.
When the short ceremony ended, my uncles chased my parents through the streets of Pierce and down the hair-raising descent of Greer Grade (Roland passing on the right, making my flatlander mother nearly faint with fear that he would sail off the road and plunge into the canyon below) to a little tavern on the river. There, they drank and laughed till nearly dawn, then drove the grade back to the dirt roads rutted by logging trucks and into the woods, speeding alongside the creeks and onto even rougher roads before arriving back at camp, where they stepped out of the car and my father lifted my mother over the steps made of bucked-up cedar and into their own small trailer, still warm with the familiar heat of August.
Two years after moving her belt-lapped suitcase into my father’s one-room shack, two years after being married by the Pentecostal minister and his preacher wife, my mother packed her bag again, then sat on the trailer’s threshold and shaved her swollen legs. It was May, one week before her due date. She had rearranged her few articles of linen, bleached her hair, painted her nails a snappy pink, and said a prayer of thanks each night for the weight of her husband’s hand resting on the shelf of her stomach.
Six days later, when her water broke, Aunt Daisy left a message for my father—“Tell him it’s time”—and drove my mother to Nan’s, who had remarried and moved to Lewiston. She soaked in the tub, hot running water a luxury, the tub even more so. When the pains started, she loaded her bag in the backseat and drove herself and Nan to the hospital.
The labor was hard and fast. Nan remembered my mother, eighteen years old, her own family a thousand miles away, bravely preparing her mother-in-law for the worst: “Nan, I might have to scream.” And then, after enduring the labor, after pushing her baby from its watery chamber until its head bore down against the hard pelvis, just as the pain turned to an urge, a desire so strong she lunged toward her own spread knees, just as the baby was about to become real—flesh and bone, dark hair, blue eyes, a girl like she wanted, the first one a girl—the doctor breezed in, nuns tying strings, snapping gloves, and covered her face, filling her lungs with the stench of ether to stop the pain he could not imagine, thinking to save her from that wrenching moment when I slid into the hands of a stranger and began to wail.
CHAPTER THREE
In late fall kokanee the color of rosewood crowd the shallow tributaries of the North Fork of the Clearwater River. Landlocked salmon, they have made their way from deeper waters to spawn, and the beautiful mass of red they become is the result of their bodies’ decay.
We lived for years along the banks of these creeks—Orofino, Weitas, Kelly—our destination determined by what timber sale my great-uncle had bid upon and, finally, by the lay of the land: we leveled our trailers atop the flatness of meadows, or maneuvered them between the stumps of a clear-cut.
Perhaps because I was so young, what remains with me about those camps is not the trees and mountains, not the streams pulsing with red as the days shortened; what remains is a sense rather than a memory of place, a composite of smells, sounds