In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [14]
We were less isolated—neighbors often stopped by for coffee, and ready-made bread and fresh beef were as close as Rape’s store—but some part of the magic was gone. Unlike my mother and my aunts, “Pierce women” (as I heard them referred to in the coded kitchen conversation) did not live in the camps with their husbands, but took up permanent residence in town. Most were born and raised in the area and had married into other logging families. They learned to dress and order their households in deference to the mud and deep snow. They often wore their husband’s clothing, as did my mother, but I remember them differently: their shirt cuffs hung unbuttoned; their pants sagged in the seat. They cut their hair into no-nonsense bobs permed tight to their heads, and their only makeup was an occasional slash of red applied haphazardly in the pickup’s rearview. They sucked at their cigarettes like old men, eyes crinkling against the smoke.
My mother must have missed those first few years in camp, when she and her new husband slept snugged together on their single cot, never minding the thin mattress and close edges, forgetting there ever was another world. My father’s injury made her realize how easily she could be left alone, and she awaited his return each evening with growing uneasiness. She listened to the stories other women told—how the wife had opened the door, already knowing with the first knock, already disbelieving the words she had always feared to hear: the dozer rolled; the chain snapped; that one tree, the widow-maker, gave in to the wind it had withstood for decades and came down like a javelin. Always, they told the grieving wife, death was quick, the one belief she could hold on to as she passed into her life like the newly blinded—feeling for thresholds, leaning heavily on the counter’s edge.
When one day our town neighbor came running across the muddy yard, fear on her face that could mean only one thing, my mother fell against the window, clutching the curtain to her breast. In those few moments before the woman burst in, half her head still in curlers, the other half sprung loose in ribbons of hair—my mother donned the shroud of a widow.
But it was not my mother the woman mourned for but Jackie Kennedy, and as we all sat before the neighborhood’s only television, my mother cried for the country, for the slain president, for the widow in her brain-spattered dress, for the long hours she herself had yet to endure, waiting for my father to come home.
There is a trileveled hierarchy in woodswork. True logging—falling, limbing, skidding and hauling timber to be made into lumber—is at the top; making shakes and shingles is at the bottom, and only those who for whatever reason cannot find work as lumberjacks split cedar. Between these two is pole-making: the cutting, skinning and hauling of cedar trees straight and uniform enough to be made into telephone and electrical poles. Uncle Clyde found that, with the help of his nephews, he could cut and skin record numbers of poles, taking advantage of an opportunity left open by the prejudice of others. Buyers were amazed by the loads hauled off the steeply pitched mountains—the long, thin trunks still whole, not cracked or snapped by carelessness—and paid my great-uncle well.
One summer, he bet my father and uncles a town dinner that they couldn’t clear the pole sale on Mockingbird Hill in a single week. They began cutting at dawn, urging each other on, giving everything they had to beat the old man’s bet, even though they knew the smallness of his wager. They worked steadily until the light drained from the trees and their backs ached with the weight of peaveys and saws, then drove back to camp to eat and sleep,