In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [44]
Most loggers found the layoff of spring thaw a time to mend the shingles loosened by winter winds or putter beneath the mud-crusted engine of a favored pickup. My father did neither. My mother, Greg and I stood in the yard, a small gathering of silent well-wishers watching him walk toward the bomb shelter, lift the latch and step in. The door seemed to shut of its own accord, darkening his face an inch at a time until all that remained of my fathers presence was the lingering smoke of his final cigarette.
He was embarking upon a quest, like Jesus in the wilderness, or like Sir Galahad, I thought. He intended to remain in the bunker for forty days and forty nights, fasting and praying. He wanted to be wholly taken, to be tested and purified, perhaps to understand the meaning of the demon’s visit. He would hold his own body hostage until it became both sacrifice and ransom, until God offered in return for his suffering a vision.
My mother stood wiping her hands again and again in the damp folds of her apron. “Now,” she said, an affirmation of something about to begin or end. She turned and walked back into the kitchen, leaving my brother and me to wonder at the two closed doors: our father behind one, a man driven to acts of abstinence and conquest; our mother behind the other, working over the counter her incantations that made dough rise and egg whites stiffen into perfect peaks.
For a moment I felt orphaned, shut off from either world. My mother was not the same, could not be the same, with my father gone. His absence both diminished and enhanced her presence, and I wasn’t sure how things would be between us. Her usual threats of discipline—I’ll tell your father if you don’t … You better not let your dad see you doing … We’ll talk about it when your father gets home—were suddenly worthless: she would not dare break his solitude. With this realization came a sense of my mother’s vulnerability and my own responsibility to shelter her, to take on my role as eldest child. The romance of it all thrilled me; already I had transformed my parents into gallant lovers, my father a knight striding off to do business with dragons (how fitting that even though he went by Neil, his given name was Arthur!), my mother, the fair and faithful wife left to keep the homefires burning.
“Now,” I said to my brother and turned him toward the house, where we were needed.
I stole glimpses of the shelter those first few hours, imagining my father kneeling by the single cot, or stretched out on the floor, face down, suppliant before the Spirit. I never saw his shadow pass the small window. Not even his prayers escaped the earth-bermed walls. It was as though he had been swallowed into the hillside, gone to die or win the battle with hellish things. I offered my own prayers for his journey as I dusted and swept, mimicking the quiet diligence of my mother, who seemed to have shut herself away in her own body, her weapons of defense a mop and sponge. Instead of watching the shelter like a wife might watch the sea for sign of her sailor, my mother filled her hours with intense cleaning and organizing. The pained longing I had imagined she might feel—the sighs, the lingering contemplation of her husband’s chair—instead took the form of determined orderliness. Guinevere was a drudge.
My mothers emotions were no doubt closer to fear and concern than any kind of chivalric nonsense, and like many women, she quelled her tremors of anxiety by controlling what she could: the state of her household. The intended length of my father’s isolation must have seemed infinite. Since her marriage at age sixteen, the longest she had been separated from her husband was for a week when she took my brother and me by train to visit relatives in Oklahoma. Certainly, if a bear were