In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [6]
Perhaps then he heard his name, his mother’s voice screaming at him from the door. He turned to her slowly, the smoke filling the room so that his eyes watered, and he saw how she held his brother at her breast and how the child still suckled, greedy and pawing. Only when his mother started to limp toward him did he move. He grabbed her hand and together they stumbled from the porch, falling to their knees on the hard-packed dirt, coughing for breath as the baby began to cry.
When the fire grew too hot to endure they moved, heading for the field. Only then did the boy think of his father, how in times before he might have seen the tall man jump from his tractor and come running to save them. He imagined the ground his father could cover, arms pumping, fists doubling with each stride. But the man was not in the field. He was in town, not to buy food or sell the heavy skimmed cream, but to drink.
From the muddy bank they watched bits of paper and blackened cloth rise on dark columns, knowing the neighbors would see the smoke and come running with their buckets and shovels. But it would be too late. It always was. The women would comfort the wife. The men would stand silent, spitting in the dirt, already planning their own run for whiskey.
My grandfather’s drunks got longer and more frequent. The fire was not the reason: they had endured so much by then that fire seemed only a purer form of loss. The man remembered by his sons for his quickness and agility seemed to buckle as he walked. He had been known to jump from a moving tractor, come up holding a copperhead by its tail and be back in his seat before the snapped-off head hit the ground. The only singing he did was at the bar with the other men who could not face sober another season of stunted crops and government handouts. He often drank with his wife’s father and her brother-in-law, and the four of them would disappear for days, finally staggering home filthy and hungover. My grandmother made him sleep on the porch and would not feed him until his chores were done. He was sheepish then, shamed and sorry, and worked like a man possessed, breaking the clay into rock-hard clods, filling the empty larder with fat squirrels and partridge.
The daughter married and moved away. The older boys became vigilant, protective of their mother, who sent them into town to search for their father in the beer joints. When they found him, they carried him to the old pickup and rolled him into the bed, where he slept the rough road home, bouncing about like a dead man.
In the spring of 1955, my grandmother stood on the porch, blocking the fierce Oklahoma sun with her raised hand. She peered across the field where the old creek bed ran. She had been waiting for her husband’s drunken arrival when the noise had reached her—the muffled whump of earth and metal colliding.
Had the fools run off the road? She refused to allow herself fear, believing they were probably hanging from the doors even now, laughing and deciding it was as good a time as any to take a pee.
She waited for several minutes, then called Roland from the house. With Ronnie, the oldest, in the service, it was Roland she relied on to handle her husband. Roland was not afraid of his father, and if need be, he could outrun the staggering man and hide until his rage died.
She watched Roland climb into the car and take off down the road, disappearing over the hill’s crest, then saw him again as he crossed the bridge and dropped out of sight behind the trees. She stood there, feeling the cooling wind catch the thin skirt of her housedress, feeling the sweat run from beneath her arms and pool at her belted waist. When she saw her son again, his face was white behind the wheel. Even from