In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [5]
Even after she and her husband found their own piece of land to sharecrop, her life seemed little changed from the one she had left. Except for this: she loved the man who worked the packed sod and came home to her each evening, a wide smile on his dusty face. She would give birth to four more children, the next to the last my father.
On their little acreage of leased land, they grew cotton and broomcorn. They raised a few hogs and a milk cow, enough to keep food on the table and land under their feet. My grandfather never really gave up fighting the heat, the hailstorms and tornados. A man bred to the life, his fair skin fissured and toughened, his eyes permanently squinted against the dry silt wind and sun, he might have made it if the country had given just a little, offered up something he could depend on from one season to the next. But this was the time of dust, and what sustenance he could not draw from the seed and furrows he drew from the still: the one thing he could count on in that land of baked soil was alcohol, and he gave himself to it more and more.
His is an old and familiar story in the too-often romanticized myth of the twentieth-century pioneers—the story of men broken by the land’s promise and the government’s lie that said borrowed money, hard work and patriotism would see the country through. And alongside this story is the quieter story of the women, who sometimes endured but more often did not, twice betrayed, first by the land and then by the men who worked it.
There was one year they all remember as good, the year things took a turn for the better. Prices were up, and harvest had gone well. Their house had a wooden floor and two rooms big enough so that Coleen, the oldest and only girl, could have her own bed instead of being piled together with her four brothers.
That year they bought a new couch. My grandmother hung curtains on the windows, pleased with the colors that brightened the fading wallpaper. My grandfather bought himself a new fiddle, a true extravagance. They were all musical, and it is the music my father speaks of now as holding the best of his Oklahoma memories: summer evenings when the heat eased and they could sit on the sagging porch and play their fiddles and guitars and sing.
It was my father who hunkered inside the house one day, beneath the open window, four years old and flush with his secret—a box of wooden matches left beside the stove. His brothers and sister were at school, except for the youngest boy, the creak of the porch slats let him know that his mother was rocking the baby to sleep.
I imagine him as he slid open the cardboard box, breathing in the sharp smell of sulfur. Several of the matches fell into his lap, and he gathered them up quickly. He wanted only one, just to feel the magic of friction and fire, to hold in his hand the instant bloom of light. He struck it slowly at first, then faster and harder, and the match’s tiny explosion took his breath away. He held it gingerly, letting the rest drop from his lap as he raised to his knees, holding the match before him like a gift.
Above him, his mothers new curtains drifted in the spring breeze. A corner brushed the boy’s hand, and suddenly the flame was no longer his but something alive and growing, climbing the curtain and spreading fast until the window was framed by fire. He grabbed the box, spilling matches over the floor. They rolled across the linoleum, beneath the table and chairs. He crawled after them, thinking that if he could just get them back in the box, put the box back on the counter, and walk out the door onto the porch where his mother sat nursing the baby, no one would know it was he who had been bad. He reached beneath the couch, where one had rolled, and touched instead the smooth