In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [41]
The snow promised easy hunting. My father and Luke picked up their own guitars and joined Matthew. Brother Lang followed with his banjo, and soon the room filled with louder music. The women came in from the kitchen, wiping their hands on their aprons, and we sang late into the night, some gospel, some country, the words all about love and God and husbands leaving and women who wouldn’t do right.
I watched Luke’s fingers grip and strum, fascinated by their rhythm and his concentration. The last song, he and Matthew played together. Matthew unwrapped his harmonica from its buckskin pouch, something he seldom did, and began to breathe out the slow notes of a melody I did not recognize. Everyone sat still to hear Matthew finish the last chorus, eyes closed, still leaned back in his chair as though he existed alone in that room with his music. We all knew he was in love, and even the adults, perhaps remembering their own first stirrings, allowed him the sweetness of his misery.
My father did not join the hunt the next day. Perhaps he was working. Perhaps he had no desire to share even with Brother Lang and Terry the solitude of the forest. I’m not sure when they left the parsonage, but I imagined them bundled in the truck, leaving narrow black lines in the snow. I thought we might find them that way, if we had to, follow the twin trails down the road to Bertha Hill, where their footprints would lead into the woods.
I longed to go with them, to walk the ridges and smell the musk of rutting elk. But women did not often carry rifles into the mountains. There was one year my mother disappeared into the forest behind our shack, the fall after my father hurt his back. She pulled on his jeans, wool shirt and red cap, then set off into the grove of cedar as though she were intimate with the habits of deer, the rifle slung across her shoulder. She returned within an hour, dragging by one hind hoof a fawn the color of caramel. The tender meat lasted only a few weeks, long enough to keep us fed until my father’s compensation check came, but the memory of the deer’s smallness in her hand never left her, and she never again raised a rifle to her cheek.
This had been many years before, and still the need to hunt outweighed any number of things. Each year, I felt the pride of seeing the men off: the ritual of early mornings and frost; thermoses of sweet hot tea; the orange hats, wool and gleaming rifles. My father and uncles never took more than they needed, never hunted for size and racks, preferring a fat young cow elk to a swollen-necked bull. The Langs needed lockers full of venison and elk to last the long winter; the men needed to feel the balance of steel and polished wood in their hands, the mastery of lead and powder. The boys needed to learn from their elders the ways of the woods and how to take their place as providers.
Early that evening, Brother Lang called my father from the cafe at Headquarters. Could he meet them there? Matthew had gotten separated and they were having trouble finding him. He was probably already waiting on the road at the base of the butte, but they might need to split up, do some circling.
They called my father because they believed if anyone could find Matthew, it would be him. I imagine my father with the heavy black telephone in his hand, moving slowly to light a cigarette, his motions already weighted with the knowing, that sense he had when things had already fallen into their fated place.
My mother must have taken my brother and me to the parsonage to wait with Sarah and Sister Lang. I remember night coming on, the light fading in degrees, like a drape being pulled against any vision we had of