In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [8]
My father laughed loudest. When his brothers fought a frozen saw, cursed and kicked a jammed winch, my father laughed. He laughed as they tumbled over stumps, madder at him than the machinery. When he stripped a gear, knotted cable, caught an ankle while decking logs, he reacted calmly, taking one last drag off his Camel before bending to survey the damage, to undo what needed to be undone. There was nothing he couldn’t make sense of, no breakdown or injury that couldn’t be learned from.
“People kill the things they most love,” said A. B. Guthrie, who knew as much as anybody about love of land. Day after day my father sawed, fell, limbed, skidded and burned what he lived for. The money, what little he earned, meant nothing. The woods, he said, had gotten in his blood.
In 1956, when my father called his high school sweetheart and asked her to marry him, the logging camps lay surrounded by hundreds of miles of uncut forest. The sites themselves consisted of five or six eight-by-twenty-foot clapboard trailers circled like a wagon train amid the new stumps and slash piles. Each trailer held a bed, woodstove, table, and two straight-back chairs. A few were equipped with primitive plumbing—a single sink that drained onto the dirt below.
When my mother came to Idaho, she was a young and lovely woman making her own escape into the wilderness. She told her grandmother with whom she lived that she would be back the next fall to finish school. She climbed into the car with Roland, her future brother-in-law, who had bartered and sold what was left of the family’s possessions and was headed for the woods. It would be years before she returned, holding me by one hand, my brother straddling her hip.
She has told me the first months were hard, even though she loved my father and wanted to be with him. The weeks before the wedding, she stayed in my grandmother’s small shack, sharing the double bed with her future mother-in-law. Unlike my father, she had no siblings, and the unaccustomed closeness of another left her unable to settle into sleep, fearing the movement of her own dreaming body.
As cramped and self-conscious as she was, she still believed herself lucky. She had spent much of her childhood in Oklahoma City. Her father was a professional gambler, a grifter, and their conditions were determined by his winnings. One day they would be rich; the next they would spend in a cheap motel where she and her mother waited the long hours for my grandfather’s return. She remembers a period of several months, when she was four or five, spent in California, in a hotel whose lobby was draped in red velvet. There, while her parents slept late, she would wander the halls, accepting candy and coins from the bellboys and an old black porter, who placed in her palm each morning a new and shiny dime. She explored the surrounding avenues and stores, taking Princess Diamond Jill with her, the champion-sired English bulldog won by her father in a card game.
Princess moved with them to the house my mother remembers as a mansion, and in my own imagination the home and its contents have taken on fairy tale proportions: in the closets the relinquished clothes of a wealthy lawyer and his wife; brocade furniture; china plates and silverware and a pantry full of food; my mother carrying each dish from kitchen to table with painful care, feeling the fragility of crystal, trembling with the weighty roasts and brown gravy, while Red, as my grandfather was known, settled comfortably into the captain’s chair, pulling from his pocket the heavy gold watch won from the man between whose elegant and ironed sheets he would soon sleep.
Then one night her mother woke her, wrapped her in a blanket and led her to the car—a shining Mercury with plush upholstery. No matter what else her father might win or lose, he always had a fine new car.
They left the house as they had found