In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [69]
My father called me into the kitchen. I glared my disgust at him. I set my lips against my teeth and stared out the window behind his head, waiting to be ordered to my room and await my whipping. But they had another plan, one they believed might hurt me even more: Les and I would no longer be allowed to see each other.
I was stunned. How could they deny me my cousin? Did they really think they could keep us apart? I fretted over Les’s situation: her family lived on the outskirts of town, on a small ranch. How would I know what her punishment had been? We could stand anything as long as we could make a story of it, as long as we could shape it for the ears of the other and control its end. I imagined her going about her chores, bringing in the firewood, doing the dishes, graining the big stallion named Smokey her father had bought for her when she asked for a horse. God, I thought, let her be okay.
Several weeks later, I was handed an envelope. It was a letter from Les. She had the oversized handwriting of a child, and the few words she sent filled the entire page of ruled notebook paper: She was fine. Her horse had cut his fetlock on barbed wire. That was all. I tried to read between the lines, to gain some sense of her daily life. Was she under the same restrictions I was, barred from using the phone, unable to leave the house except under supervision?
Perhaps my parents knew that given the opportunity I would bolt like a branded calf from the chute. What punishment was left to them? They had whipped me, placed me under virtual house arrest. I no longer feared their anger or their limited power to inflict pain.
Together, Les and I had formed an inner circle of companionship based on kin and something else—our desire to escape our fathers. We longed to be orphans, free to make our own decisions, free to die if we chose, or survive by whatever means available. And isn’t that what we were doing—making the only choice remaining to us? We could obey and survive. We could utter the simple word no and be whipped, locked in, denied our meals. Or we could run. I bided my time, comforted by the music I believed might save me, the loud and constant beat drowning out the self-loathing I felt no matter which part of my soul I listened to.
By the time I was fourteen, my mother and father hardly recognized me. My grades dropped from A’s to F’s and I was labeled a truant. The child with whom they had shared their bed and its warmth, the girl they had dedicated to God, who had spoken in tongues and healed the sick, who had emerged from the waters reborn, now slouched past them, hissing out answers to their questions. When my father caught me in a lie, he whipped me, but I was stronger now and did not cry. I met his eyes, in my own the glint I hoped he knew meant you cannot hurt me, you cannot touch any part of me.
At school I met Patti, a gum-snapping girl with long brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, who even at the age of fourteen seemed absolutely sure of her place in the world. She was everything I wanted to be: smart and tough, afraid of no one. She made her own rules, somehow free of parental constraint. She dreamed of going to San Francisco, and because I knew nothing of her life, I believed she longed not for escape but adventure. When, because of my parents’ growing restraints I could no longer make my own small escapes, we made our plans to meet at the high school track, stay in her apartment, then hitchhike the next morning for California.
I lay in my bed for what I believed would be the last time, remembering all I had heard of Haight-Ashbury and flower children and free love. We could steal to eat if we had to. I’d been told that some girls let men have sex with them for money, and even though I had never made love to a boy in my life, I resigned myself to doing whatever I had to do in order to stay alive. I believed that no matter how foreign the town and its people, I would feel no less lost than I did at that moment, in my house with its