In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [20]
And so my life is divided by this line: before the church, and after. In the photographs taken those first years when she played with her husband and his brothers like a child set loose from school, my mother is startlingly beautiful. More often than not, she wears a pair of my father’s jeans, a man’s shirt and cast-off logging boots. She poses on a stump, tall and slender, or rides the boom of a loader, looking playful and brave, game for anything. Her lips are colored red or deep pink to match her nails, and her hair is short, wisping at her neck and temples. She reminds me of Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, like her, my mother’s bobbed hair gives her a boyish prettiness, making her seem even more feminine and vulnerable.
I don’t remember the moment my mother pulled the golden hoops from her ears, collected her carefully chosen tubes of lipstick, gathered her swimsuit and open-necked blouses and pushed them all into the drawers’ dark corners. Nor do I remember the moment my father began to believe that angels and devils walked among us, in the groves of cedar and stands of tamarack, that their voices could be heard above the saw’s loud litany. What I know is that our lives shifted. Where before we had thrown our suitcases and boxes into the car and left one home for another on a day’s notice, we could now make no move, no matter how small, without careful consideration and prayer. Three times a day we prayed over meals. When my father left for work, we prayed for his safety, when he arrived home that evening, we prayed in thanks. If the car developed a rattle, we prayed as my father leaned into the tangle of wires and hoses, asking God to give him the knowledge to fix it, or for God to fix it Himself, knowing, as He must, how little money we had to spend.
My father’s authoritative presence became absolute, my mothers desire to please him even greater. In the teachings of the church, a man’s duty is to be the physical and spiritual protector of his wife and children. The woman is to be chaste and modest, subservient to her husband’s guidance, lest the mar of her sex tempt her to stray into the ways of the world.
My mother grew her hair long until it hung in satin ringlets, which she backcombed and pinned into a shapeless mass. Her cheeks and lips remained clear, no trace of the paint a ruined woman might wear. Plain, wide-cut skirts brushed her legs mid-calf. Only the tiniest holes scarred the lobes of her ears.
It is this mother I remember most, cloaked and colorless, her virtues defined by what she covered and erased rather than by what she presented to the world. She could not be aware of her own beauty, lest others become aware of it too. Because her husband was the hammer and she the nail, she built a house of acquiescence, allowing herself only the reward of steadfastness, holding the walls together with silent compliance. Because a quiet woman was a treasure, she seldom spoke except to offer and agree. It was as though my mother had disappeared, as though the doctor had once again come with his ether.
We lived for a while in one or the other of the identical houses built by Potlatch Forests Incorporated on the outskirts