In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [3]
She reaches to take the hard biscuits wrapped in a clean tea towel from the cupboard, but decides it will be a last offering, something the youngest can chew on while her father calls her name across the fields. The door squeaks on its leather hinges, and she thinks to run but takes a breath and steps out onto the packed red clay. Cold air cuts her lungs as she walks toward the corn rows, stopping to squat one last time, feeling the weight of her clothes, all she owns, but never once looking back.
How did she survive her journey that night? She had seldom left the isolated farm, had seen the city only a few times, had never left the county she was born in. A girl, maybe sixteen, bundled in beggar’s clothing, no luggage or purse, walking, perhaps hitchhiking, her way across the state line into Texas, kept warm by fear and shame, kept going by the exhilaration she felt whenever she remembered she was free. In Texas, she believed, she could find a way to live on her own. In Texas, there was oil, money and, if she were lucky, a man who would find her comely enough to make her his wife.
She found a job working early shift in a small cafe in the panhandle. She knew the first time he came in—square-jawed, lips set—she’d marry him. He was going somewhere, maybe not in oil, maybe not in Texas, but somewhere. She could see it in his shoulders, the way he focused on his food, how his hands weren’t still—not nervous, but always moving, stirring sugar into the black coffee, rubbing water rings off his fork, smoothing the napkin’s edge between his fingers. He didn’t smoke, and she liked that about him. There were things he wanted to do, and he wasn’t one to waste his time. Within a month they were married, and it would be his ambition that would lead my great-uncle Clyde Knight into the Idaho wilderness, and it would be his lead that my family would follow.
But first I must go back to that shack where the children are waking to find their sister gone. My grandmother, because she is the second-eldest girl, moves around her sleeping father and stirs the ashes of last night’s fire, looking for an ember to breathe on and bring to life. She thinks Daisy may be out gathering more wood, but there is a stillness in the house that doesn’t feel right. Why isn’t the water heating? Their father will expect it when he wakes, and she trembles to think of his anger should he not be met with warmed biscuits and the pale liquid drawn from the grounds of yesterday’s coffee.
She opens the door. Even though the wind whips her bare legs and makes her teeth chatter, she wishes for the three-mile walk to school. She misses the books, the room and its little stove, the smell of drying wool and chalk dust. But her father has said she must stay home: sixth grade is enough learning for any girl, and the other children must be looked after.
She looks across the flat fields and pasture for Daisy. She knows firewood is getting harder to find, but she cannot imagine why Daisy would wander so far from the house in this weather, knowing that in his state their father would want her to keep the baby quiet.
She picks up the few remaining sticks of oak left by the door. Her younger brother Lee is awake now, stretching his bad leg, rubbing it at the knee. Like her, he limps across the room: both have been crippled by TB. She doesn’t even think of it anymore, compensating for the difference in the length of her legs by walking on the toe of one foot. Already, her hip is enlarged and her back curved from the stress.
They go about their chores as though in a church, cushioning each step, hushing the four-year-old when he calls for milk. But as the others wake and begin clattering from the bed, they see their father stir. He notes the fire first, then turns