In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [4]
“Where’s Daisy?” His voice is coarse with phlegm. He coughs and spits into the fire.
“Don’t know, Daddy.” Even as she says it, she cringes away from his chair. Daisy is the one he depends on to rub his feet and fix his meals. Even as young as Daisy is, she’s had suitors, and he has run each of them off with threats, a gun in his hand.
Immediately he is suspicious. Hadn’t she tried to run away once already? Raising himself from the chair, he stumbles toward the door, groaning, made angrier by the pain in his head. He shouts her name once, then, still standing on the threshold, opens his stained trousers and pisses a long stream onto the red dirt.
“Daisy! I’ll whip you good, girl!”
My grandmother gathers up the baby and sways to keep her quiet. She watches the man walk toward the barn, still calling, his stride becoming more purposeful. He disappears into the barn and she turns to the stove, knowing he’s leaving and may be gone for weeks. It is not the first time. His trips into town to drink and gamble are common enough, but before he has left them with enough cut wood, meat, flour and sugar to get by. The children crowd to the door, watching the wind bend the dry corn stalks to the ground, their bellies already aching with hunger.
My grandmother and Lee fed the children the hard biscuits, soaking the baby’s in the last of the milk from town. They had no food, and no wood to keep the fire burning. At thirteen, my grandmother was older than Lee by a few years; as their eyes met above the heads of their brothers and sisters, they knew that survival depended on them.
Together they scouted the ground for wood, but what could be broken or easily carried had already been scavenged and burned. They ventured out farther, wrapped in flour sacks and their fathers shirts. A quarter mile from the house they found a small fallen blackjack. Calling for some of the others to help, they dragged it home, feeding it a foot at a time into the fireplace.
There was food: the crippled calf, grazing in the corn rows. The younger children watched as their older brother and sister chased the bawling calf, all three—the boy, the girl, the bony animal—limping across the frozen ground. But they were children, and even the life-and-death chase brought them to cheers and laughter as the calf slipped between them, one or the other skidding along behind, hanging on to its tail.
Finally, Lee found a rope and lassoed the calf, then straddled its belly while my grandmother slit its throat. They’d lived the farm life long enough to gut and skin with the grace of old hands, and throwing their combined weight to the rough rope, they winched the small steaming carcass to the low rafters of the smokehouse. Sawed off a hunk at a time and roasted over the coals of the saving tree, it was enough meat to last them until their father came home.
• • •
My grandmother took Daisy’s place in that ramshackle house, enlisting the help of her younger sisters to make the meager meals, to cut and sew the flour sacks into baggy dresses and shirts that raked their skin. The bitterness she harbored against her sister kept her jaw tight and her direction set: she would not leave the others as Daisy had, nor would she ever admit that she longed to do the same and be gone from the house that reeked of kerosene and urine.
Years later, when a drinking partner of her father’s, Pat Barnes, a tall, lean red-haired man, began courting her, she allowed herself to imagine another life. The children were older now. Certainly her younger sisters were grown enough to cook and clean. Her father didn’t like it, and although he teased the man about flirting with his daughter, he forbade her to see him, and threatened to beat them both if she disobeyed.
When she turned eighteen, they asked for permission to marry, and when her father said no they eloped. They lived first with my grandfather’s sister, a shrewish woman whose only use for my grandmother was as a milker and maid. When my grandmother became pregnant with her first child, she craved