In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [19]
Often I forget how young my mother and aunts were, barely into their twenties. Their men coming home must have meant everything, and to welcome them with golden shoulders and sun-tinted hair was an offering: Even here, in the deep forests of Idaho, in the wilderness, I can give you what you desire, what you love the most.
The men returned each evening to find them tanned, glowing, arranging children and pork chops with equal ease. They must have wondered what kept them there—women any man might long for. Certainly, my father and uncles were jealous of their wives’ attention. I imagine that when the itinerant buckers and sawyers visited our camp, the women kept busy in the kitchen. All knew the few things that could fill a man’s gut when the isolation and deep-woods silence set his teeth to chattering for something he could almost taste, like the sweet whisper of last night’s whiskey: more whiskey came easy from the town taverns, but not the shoulder of a woman, bared for his mouth and no other.
Eventually, the isolation and lack of even minimal luxuries such as indoor toilets and hot running water took their toll. By 1966 my aunts and cousins were gone, settled into city homes with yards and draped windows. My father must have felt the circle tighten, at its center my mother—the one who stayed, who never asked for more, who had been raised to believe each kindness shown her a gift, every grace mercurial as moonlight.
CHAPTER FOUR
With the family gone, my parents were left to find for themselves what comfort and communion resided in the wilderness. The circle was broken. Even the land seemed to have lost its balance. I half-listened to men talk of helicopters and shutdowns, of a new machine with clipperlike jaws that could do the work of twenty good sawyers—snipping off trees at the base, mowing them down like ripe wheat. The adults shook their heads, perhaps foreseeing what I could not: the stores closing, the town deserted.
The forest must have seemed to them, as it did to me, inexhaustible. I knew no one who had flown above the trees to see the clearcuts scabbing the land like mange. There would always be more timber on the next ridge, another stand of cedar over the rise. It was like picking huckleberries, like finding a good patch, fruit as big as your thumb and everywhere. You strip one bush, surrounded by others just as lush, and you find yourself panicking to get them all; though they stretch as far as you can see, you want them all.
Some of the loggers packed up and took jobs at the pulp and paper mill in Lewiston, sorting green lumber, checking plywood for warp, initialing case after case of toilet paper. Others remained, hitting the bars before staggering home still sticky with pitch, forgetting to kiss their waiting wives. The wives forgot to fear for their husbands when the wind rose, and feigned sleep when rough hands touched their hips.
My father dug in, determined to stay. He had seen how the dispossessed could turn to liquor and how liquor could in turn possess the soul, as had my mother. Perhaps because it was she who felt the impending isolation most keenly, she was the first to turn to fundamentalism. I’m sure that the presence of the Pentecostal preacher and his wife who had married my parents was a comfort in the absence of family. She began attending services, relating to her husband the words of joy and faith—the promised sustenance the Bible offered.
The Bible and its teachings were not unfamiliar to my father. His mother’s roots were Baptist. The songs she had sung for them spoke of life’s hard road and Heaven’s sure peace,