In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [12]
Soon after their marriage in 1956, while working a site near Craig Mountain, my step-grandfather was severely injured ducking beneath a log to secure a choker cable. The log rolled, crushing his skull. By the time they got him to the hospital in Lewiston, his head had swollen to the size of a watermelon, the flesh split from the pressure, yet he never lost consciousness. My parents shudder when they speak of it. No one less strong and determined could have survived, they say.
My grandmother nursed him constantly, and it was only as an adult that I was told how the kindly, shaking old man could turn suddenly manic, returning home from the grocery store with gallons and gallons of ice cream or giving away every dime in his pocket to strangers on the street. He had violent seizures and hallucinations, and the family would have no choice but to commit him to the state mental hospital at Orofino until his episodes subsided.
I don’t remember his bizarre behavior or sudden, unexplained absences. Instead, I remember the evenings spent visiting Nan, waiting for Grandpa to come home from his rounds as a salesman hawking Rawleigh spices and liniment door-to-door. He would draw from his pocket a rolled purse of soft leather, jingling with coins that I dumped onto the floor, stacking the dimes and quarters into towering columns, breathing in the blood-sharp smell of copper.
In the camps, my mother was left with Aunt Daisy, who gave her little attention, believing that a woman’s duty was to provide her husband with every bit and moment of herself, so that even in his absence her hands were busy making his meals, scrubbing the pitch from his clothes, snapping and smoothing fresh sheets for his bed. She counseled my mother to do the same, reminding her that the needs and love of a child must come second to the ties between husband and wife. She offered another piece of wisdom: the only power women have in this world is sex. A smart wife knew when to offer herself and when to hold back. There was little a husband wouldn’t do if teased and denied enough.
By the time my father arrived home, my mother had cleaned the shack’s every corner. Brown beans bubbled on the stove, and the room seemed honeyed with the smell of corn-bread cooked in a cast-iron skillet. Her hair was neatly curled and combed, her fingernails painted. My own long hair she drew up in a bow so that my father might be pleased.
The trailer’s size made it impossible to gather more than a few people in at once, but on weekends my uncles squeezed around the table for a game of cards. The bed was mine, an oasis of softness and warmth where I played with my dolls and listened to the men’s stories. Their days were full of giant things—machinery and trees, the noise of saws and snapping cables. They wore their wounds, deep cuts and bloody gouges, with the nonchalance of immortals, doctoring themselves with turpentine and alcohol. I fell asleep, protected from the outside world by my father’s strength, by his laughter, louder than the screech of tree against tree as the wind whipped the darkness.
Injuries in the woods are common and expected: deep punctures from snagged limbs, twisted ankles, bruises from falling off decked logs—traumas so small they rarely warrant mention. The real danger lies in the dance of machinery and wood. In the hands of a seasoned logger the saw seems tamed, teeth directed easily toward a precise and efficient cut. But green wood cannot be predicted, nor can the saw’s instantaneous reaction to what lies hidden in the heart of fir, tamarack and pine. Kickback—the saw ricocheting off a knot or warp deep in the tree’s interior—seldom leaves the logger unscathed. If he’s lucky, he has no time to turn his head, and the razored chain cuts only his face. If instinctively he does jerk away, the teeth find a truer mark—the neck.