In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [7]
The boy staggered from the car. He was crying.
“What is it? Tell me. Are they dead?”
“Daddy’s hurt bad. Real bad.”
“Go fetch Uncle Everett. Do it now! Run!”
She turned and saw her youngest boy looking at her, his mouth drawn tight. “Get in the house. You go sit and be still, you hear?”
He was staring. Across the front of her, handprints bloomed like bloody roses.
My father wasn’t there. He was a high school junior, gone to Lawton on a class trip. But when he stepped off the bus, he knew what the girl who waited for him, the one who worked as the local telephone operator, would say. He had dreamed it already: his father was dead.
The accident that killed my grandfather also killed my grandmother’s father. Her brother-in-law, who had been driving and missed the bridge, sending the car nose-first into the dry creek bed, was injured but survived. What did my grandmother have left to sustain her? When the letter came from Idaho, they all agreed it would be a new start, a way for the boys to learn a trade. Clyde guaranteed them food and shelter, and that was more than she had ever been promised. Roland would stay behind until everything was sold—furniture, pickup, farm equipment, my grandfather’s beloved hounds—and Ronnie would follow the next summer when his stint in the service ended. My father and his youngest brother boarded the train with their mother and headed for the Northwest.
Many times I heard my Uncle Clyde say, “I looked to those hills and thought, No man should ever go hungry here.” Deer, elk, partridge, fish thick as a baby’s leg from the smallest stream. And the trees, stretching from the Snake to the Clearwater, Lochsa and Selway, from Oregon and Washington to Montana. With hard work, guts and ingenuity, a man could feed his family and make money besides.
He had begun working for his brother at Waha, sending logs out by train north to Lewiston. He saved his money, took extra odd jobs, asked the markets for their old produce and bread, scavenged from garbage bins. Every fall, he shot one elk, one deer. Every summer, he and Daisy fished, filling milk cartons with rainbow trout, freezing them in solid blocks of ice. They harvested blackcaps, huckleberries, plums, cherries, apples, apricots, anything and everything they could gather or glean. With some of the fruit, she made pies and sold them to the cafes.
For one winter and one winter only, Clyde worked for Potlatch Forests Incorporated, mushing into the isolated logging camps along the North Fork of the Clearwater River with Daisy and their daughter, Peggy, bundled tight in the dogsled. The only women in the camps were prostitutes, whom Daisy, in her role as head cook, immediately put to work as flunkies serving three meals a day to long tables of hungry men, washing stacks of dishes, wringing from the plaid wool shirts and denim pants gallon after gallon of ambered water.
Clyde bought used and broken equipment, military surplus he rigged with booms and hitches. He was a genius with tools, gears and ratchets. What parts he couldn’t buy, he made. He knew that his small wages were nothing compared with the profit gained by the company, and when after that first year he came out owing them money, he was determined to strike out on his own, to become what the loggers called a gyppo, independent of corporate ties. With a good crew he could do it.
By the time my father and his family came to live in the Clearwater National Forest, Clyde had cleared a site along Orofino Creek, within fifteen miles of Pierce, a town (population five hundred to one thousand, depending on the season) located ninety miles east and slightly north of Lewiston. He gave my grandmother her own shack, put the boys in another. For eight bits an hour, they cut and skidded, dodged wind-snapped crowns and barber-chaired fir, kicked-back saws and heart-rotted cedar. They spent the evenings gathered in the narrow room, laughing at how bad the injury might have been, how narrow the escape, how close Death got before they poked