In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [42]
How long before we heard the doors slam, the men tramping onto the porch? When Brother Lang stepped in, he was pale and sweaty. He looked to me and then Greg, as though in our eyes he might find what he was searching for.
Sister Lang stood facing him, her eyes taking in the slump of his shoulders, the set of his mouth. Cold pushed in behind them, filling the room with the smell of woodsmoke.
“What is it, Joseph?” she asked. Then louder, “What is it?”
“We can’t find him.”
“What do you mean, can’t find him?” Sister Lang stepped toward her husband, but when he reached to touch her arm, she brushed his hand away.
“You’ve got to go back. He’ll die out there.”
“No one’s going to die, Mona. Matthew’s smart. He knows what to do.” He let his voice drop and rested his hands on her shoulders. “We must have faith.”
“How could you leave him? Go back! Go back!” She lunged, slapping his coat, his arms, his chest.
I felt my brother crowding against my side. My mother had run outside to meet my father. The moon cast long, narrow shadows across the snow, and through the window I could see my parents facing each other beneath the burned-out floodlight. They looked young to me then, maybe sixteen or seventeen, as though they were on a date and taking as long as they could before being called in for the night.
They set up search camp at the base of the mountain—townspeople and every available adult from our church. The women brought casseroles and coffee. The men napped in their pickups between sweeps. The nights’ cold blanketed the trees with a thin layer of crystalline ice. Ravens sat like little priests in the blown-out crowns of yellow pine.
My brother and I were left with Sister Ward. We sat in the strange living room, watching TV and eating popcorn, focused on the blue square of flickering light, while she puttered in her kitchen, muffling every move as though the uninterrupted noise of the soundtrack were all that kept us tamed and content. I let myself exist in that room with studied attention. I did not think of my parents on the mountain, nor of Luke with his father and Terry calling Matthew’s name. I didn’t ask when anyone would be back. I sat beside Greg, cross-legged on the floor for hours, he as silent as I, watching Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in bathing suits dance by the light of a beach fire.
They found him three days later, his neck wedged in the fork of a downed tree. Some believed he had been chasing an elk and slipped; he was unconscious immediately from the pressure against his jugular, the sheriff said, unable to free himself, the limbs holding his face to the sky as though he had simply fallen asleep tracing the movement of stars.
Greg and I had been shuffled to the house of Sister Ward’s daughter, and when she told us they’d found Matthew and that he was dead, I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. I sat on the rim of the tub, trying to focus on the linoleum’s intricate geometry. I heard my brother crying, and then a gentle knock.
“Kim, are you all right?”
“Yes.”
There was silence and then the woman’s voice comforting Greg. I knew I should go to him. I should be crying too. I picked at my knees, the scrapes from a playground fall nearly healed. I said “dead dead dead” over and over again until I didn’t know the word anymore and it was just a sound in my mouth.
• • •
Days later, when Brother Lang opened Matthew’s Bible, left on the chair by the woodstove, he found passages underlined in red, all seemingly prophetic of Matthew’s death. He’d been so quiet the night before, playing his harmonica more plaintively than we’d ever heard. Had he known he was going to die?
Even though we believed God’s will had been done and all things work together for the good, that last winter held little comfort for any of us. Brother Lang continued preaching, approaching the podium with the same halting gait as when he had fasted. Their ministry was broken; without Matthew, their dreams of a