In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [106]
I think of how long we search to find that place we might call ours, where we might feel we have found a home: the perfect house in the perfect town; the secret hollow; that place in the heart we call love; that state of grace we call salvation. Yet it is easy for me to intellectualize my parents’ quest for a new life, to cast my father as the villainous male, an extension of the patriarchy that doomed my mother to victimization. I know that they will tell me it was nothing but the call of God, nothing but the Truth, that drew them to the church. And I remember that call. I have felt the purging and radiating calm of being born again. I have spoken in tongues, have healed and been healed. I have seen demons cast out and watched a man live forty days without food. I saw the paleness of my father’s face that morning after the demon had found him. I remember these things without doubt, beyond reason, just as I remember my mother’s hair, her movie-star beauty and the way my father looked at her when he came from his work of cutting and falling, taking only the best trees, the ones he could sell and keep his soul alive.
Even now, more than two decades later, I can see the Langs as though they sat beside me. That summer when I chose their house as my cell, I came to believe myself saved, that they had pulled me from the brink of hell. Did some part of me also believe as they did that I had brought the demons that lurked beneath the stairwell?
What was it that sometimes swept over me, knocked me to the floor and caused me to sing out in another voice? Even now, if I close my eyes and listen hard enough, the rhythms come back to me, the surge and lilt of vowels and consonants: glossolalia—“an ecstatic utterance.” In the woods above our canyon, Nez Perce once went alone to fast and pray, to have their visions. There are times I long to search out their weyakins, their sacred places, to hear the dry rattle of snakes and feel the bloodletting vines of berries, to be purged, to dream in the tongues of animals.
I watch my children at Halloween as they carve their jack-o’-lanterns and crayon the green skin of witches. I haven’t yet told them of their grandfather’s demon, nor of my own night fears—how sometimes I wake and believe I see in the doorway red eyes winking. Voices whisper damnation, promise salvation, voices of angels or devils or perhaps only the past. My husband comforts me, saying, “It is only the light of a candle, only the wind in the mouths of pumpkins that you hear.”
I sometimes believe I can excise the past from my soul, consider it as my father once considered a stand of timber—test each memory for soundness, recognize the true ring of unbroken, concentric circles. I could say my father only imagined the demon roaming our house; I could say that the words I spoke in tongues were the unintelligible mutterings of exhaustion. I could say that no memory is more or less sound, no story more true than the one before: my father loved the land and his wife, his family and his god; my father feared the chaos of his own nature and delivered us from the wilderness into a life I am still aswirl in.
I carry it all with me, in the quiet pools and strong currents of my being. I fill my hands with the black dirt left by the river’s birth. I believe that what I hold in my hands is memory: like the river, it takes what it touches, carrying it along until all that remains is the bed over which the water flows.
So it is that I have chosen to remain here, above the Idaho river whose feeding brooks once ran beneath my window, whose waters I drank from my hands. All that I am and have ever been the river has known. It is the map I follow back to understand what has shaped me: my family, the camps, the church; the preacher’s son whose initials I carved into the spongy bark; his family I believed loved me—back past the dam and into what remains of the forest, to where my father’s voice once