In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [49]
I knew Luke stood nearby, but without my glasses he was only a blur. The pleasure I dreamed of with him could never be this pure. Yet when I thought of the way he might wrap the blanket around me and hold me against his chest, I felt both lightheaded and weighted in my heart. Why did every moment have to be compromised this way? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t deny my flesh, that I so easily slipped into the carnal even as the hallowed water dripped from my body?
The ride home was short, around the meadow and down the rutted driveway. My father lit the stove just for me while I changed. My mother melted Crisco and salted the chicken. Greg, not yet old enough to truly commit himself, fell asleep on the couch. In a few days we would leave our house for good and drive the winding road to Lewiston. I began clearing my shelves and dresser, filling boxes marked in big black letters, “KIM’S ROOM” and “BOOKS.”
It didn’t seem real that I might never see my room again. After years of seasonal moving, nothing seemed ever to be left wholly behind: we always came back to the fragrant smell of pine, to the creeks, to the town where every building, fence and driveway was familiar and expected.
Still flush from the cold water and the attention of my elders, intent on doing a good job of packing to show how responsible I had become, I never thought I’d miss the trees or the narrow spring. I wish I had looked one last time to the mountains that had folded us in and kept us for so long, for when I think of them now my mind’s eye cannot see past the clearing: everything beyond comes up dark, impenetrable, as though the world itself fell away beyond the perimeter of my vision.
There is a photograph of me taken on my twelfth birthday, in which I stand posed against the snow berming the bomb shelter, squinting into the newly warm sun. My hair is long and straight, nearly to my waist. My kneesocks reach to the hem of my homemade dress, the only concession to style a pattern of muted orange and yellow rings against the brown background, a print that I remember thinking was almost psychedelic (a word I hissed in a whisper between my lips when no one was listening), something the hippies in San Francisco might wear.
I had seen hippies only on Nan’s TV, and their wondrous hair, bright colors and dangling beads amazed me. Even so, I could hardly connect them to the monsters the townspeople spoke of over coffee at the cafe. If we weren’t careful to run them off the minute they set their sandaled feet inside the village, they said, the hippies would poison our water tower with LSD. The results would be disastrous: normally decent men, women and children running naked through the streets of Pierce, murdering their neighbors, throwing themselves from the hotel’s balcony, addicted until death to the mind-altering drug. The entire population of our community would be destroyed, the wiser ones said, shaking their heads in grim contemplation.
I could hardly imagine the carnage. I pictured the burly Mr. Butler with his ax, running bare-chested after his neighbor Mrs. Ball, her enormous breasts flopping loose in front of her. I wasn’t sure what the “orgy” was that I heard spoken of as a result of this behavior, but it must be something close to “ogre,” and certainly Mr. Buder and Mrs. Ball barreling down Main Street naked fit that bill.
My last gift from the Langs would help guard against such evil. It was the blue Bible I had seen at the Christian Gift Center in Lewiston, my name embossed in silver on the cover. Inside they had written, “To a very lovely girl by the Rev. & Mrs. Joseph Lang May 1970.” It was the most important thing I could carry with me into my new life, they said. I hugged it to my chest, loving the smell that rose from its cover of morocco leather.
I can’t look at that photograph with its promise of hot July days without remembering the summer before, the last summer we spent in the woods, when we had gathered at the parsonage, piled into several cars and gone deep into the forest to where