In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [43]
In town, when women offered their opinions, clicking their tongues over the tragedy of such a wonderful young man so soon gone, my mother lowered her eyes and closed her ears, knowing that Matthew’s death was no accident but an act of God’s will. When men at the lunch counter wondered out loud why anyone would let a fifteen-year-old kid trail off alone, my brother and I glared at their wool-covered backs. “Found him stiff as a board, no matches, no nothin’.” “Aren’t from around here, are they?” I burned with anger at their smug ignorance. I wanted to believe that something had led Matthew into that wilderness, that he had known and accepted his fate with brave resignation, but I wasn’t sure that God should warn you like that, then make you go anyway.
• • •
It had been dusk when they pulled off the road and began their hunt, crossing into a forest they knew little of. It is this my father cannot understand—why men intimate with the ways of the woods would go against a code they understood held the balance between life and death. Matthew’s death has remained a mystery—a freak accident, we call it now. Still, my father shakes his head when we speak of it. “There comes a time in the evening,” he says, “when you should never go into unknown country.”
Our life with the Langs was never the same after that. The laughter quieted to an occasional weak chuckle. Sister Lang barely acknowledged my presence, and Sarah’s face seemed permanently altered, drawn into rigid lines. It seemed to me that both women blamed their husbands for Matthew’s death, and when Sarah looked at Terry I saw in her face not love but something closer to hate.
I missed the parsonage, the warm room and dark stairway. I missed the late evenings of music and laughter. Now there was this thing that separated us each from the other, as though the pain we all felt would only be intensified by our sharing it. My parents were silent. My brother and I kept to our books. The winter passed into my memory as bitterly cold, more night than day. We drifted through the stillest air, tethered to our tables by threads of hunger, to our beds by their small promise of warmth.
I watched Sister Lang’s face, motionless as the moon, Luke forever beside her, his hand at her elbow. I watched Sarah turn from the husband she believed should have known better than to let Matthew go off alone, who should have called him in before it was too late. Wasn’t he, after all, the one the hunters from California called to lead them to the dens of sleeping bears? How could he track a sow gone weeks to her bed and be unable to find a boy lost only hours in new snow?
My father I saw brace himself to take on whatever pain another could not bear. He never questioned out loud, never asked how or why, but eased the grief of others onto his own shoulders. He spoke slowly, smiled just enough to make us all believe God’s will was still sweet, his ways mysterious.
What was it, then, that brewed in my father that winter if not the battle he waged with his own will? He wanted every cell of his existence to submit to God’s order. He wanted to be tested and consumed by the Spirit, to hear the voice of Christ Himself call from him some sacrifice. Perhaps he saw in the movement of seasons something unfolding, threatening his guarded circle, his family, his life. The demon he had seen at the bedroom door the year before still cast its shadow across his soul, and as winter deepened and the cold shut down logging, he studied his Bible late into the night. I fell asleep to the murmur of his prayers.
CHAPTER SIX
Grass sprouted from the cratered snow. The creek flooded its narrow banks and spread into the meadow. Spring came late to our hollow, the trees grown close as ribs around us. During high