In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [2]
I remember the late autumn evening my brother did not come home, the snow beginning to fall, my mother standing in the yard, hands cupped to her mouth, his name echoing back, all the love and fear in her voice repeated again and again. We knew better than to try and find him in the dark and could only wait, shivering in the cold, for my father to come home.
I think of us there, a woman of twenty-nine, a girl of eleven, both imagining a life without this other—son, brother—both believing that the one who could save him would arrive at any moment, bringing with him his strength and sense of the woods. My father, we believed, might see through the blackness, his eyes so blue they seemed clairvoyant. We believed he might feel in the air my brother’s lost breath, trace with his fingers the heat left by his body. If only he’d come, now, now.
But by the time he came home Greg was stumbling from the trees, clutching the scruff of our dog’s neck, nearly deaf from the cold. He screamed as my mother rubbed his fingers into life, her prayers and scoldings a constant chorus. I stood ready with warmed blankets, feeling outside something dark slip away, taking with it its hunger.
I recall my father’s absence in that place more than his presence, the sound of logging—his saw, the clanking choker—more than the tenor of his voice. So much had changed since the first years of my life spent living in the woods, years when we moved from one logging site to another, my father and uncles hitching our wooden trailers to the backs of self-loaders and surplus jeeps, filling the cars with cardboard boxes, stashing our treasure like gypsies. Those were the years when my parents seemed happy to live hand-to-mouth as long as the hand that held the food, as long as the mouth that received it, was that of the other. I think of their traditional wedding pose—my father eighteen, my mother sixteen—each holding to the other’s lips the sweetly frosted cake.
The year we spent living in the hollow, the year I turned twelve, was the last year we would live in the woods, the last year I would sleep beneath the soft brush of pine against the tin roof, the last year I would remember our family as somehow whole. From that house we would take nothing that did not fit into the trunk of our car and make our final trip down the river road to town.
My life would change in ways I could no more dream than a far-off soldier might imagine an enemy hidden in a shelter beneath the mounded forest floor, or a young girl, fishing the shallow stream, might for a moment believe a heart other than her own beat in the meadow’s thick grass. Who is that girl, the rod still quivering in her hands, rapturously balanced between two worlds? I sometimes think that if I could go back, follow the driveway down, past the woodshed and out into the meadow, I might find her—I might find what I have lost. Like my brother wandering in the wilderness, I might find home.
CHAPTER TWO
I begin in Oklahoma, in the late 1920s. In a one-room farmhouse near Stigler, my father’s mother sleeps on a makeshift bed of muslin-covered cornhusks with her seven brothers and sisters. They are used to sleeping this way, and the warmth their bodies generate is a great comfort. Outside, the wind sweeps the leaves and straw from the dirt yard. In the morning when they wake, the soiled blanket covering them will be frosted with their moist breath.
Only one child stirs, my grandmother’s eldest sister, Daisy. Since the death of their mother, and then their stepmother a few years later, it has been Daisy who has kept them clothed and fed, who has shielded them from their father’s drunken rages. She’s a beautiful girl, her light blue eyes brilliant against the smooth brown skin inherited from her Cherokee grandmother. She sits up slowly and sees her father slumped in his chair, sour with whiskey and sweat. Raising her arms above her head, she winds her long hair into a bun, then slides carefully from between the other children. Quietly