Hungry for the World (11 page)

It was my father’s land I brought back to him, I believed, his ways I embodied. The wool and flannel and denim I wore, the firearms I carried, the trails I followed.
Look at me
, I wanted to say.
Can’t you see I am your daughter? Remember
what it was like before, when we existed together in our solitude, when all that mattered was a good shot, meat on the table, fire in the stove, a bed to share our warmth. Remember how happy you were then. Remember what you abandoned
.

But there was no going back, no compromise. My father had done what he believed God had asked of him, leaving behind the only land and work he ever loved, while I had failed in every way. It was impossible for me to be that daughter my father had raised and taught and shaped into being: a chaste and temperate young woman, virginal in her marriage bed, humble before her father, her husband, her god.

I believed it was John who might be my proxy, my way back into my father’s good grace. Over a period of several months, I brought John with me on my visits home. My father, though he seldom looked my way, would talk to John—conversations about calibers and quarterbacks and carburetors—and I would stand at the edge of the kitchen, where my mother cooked. I knew I should help her with the meal, but I couldn’t resist the pull I felt when the men began their tales of treks into the woods. I listened for what I might learn: look for the saplings stripped by antlers, the earth pawed clean for wallows; if you jump the deer and it runs, be patient—the prey will sometimes circle back, curious, drawn by its own fatal interest; always remember to mark your trail, gauge your direction by the progress of light.

When dinner was ready, my mother, John, Greg, and I would gather at the table while my father remained in his chair, plate balanced on his lap. He seemed unaware of our hushed tones, the loud emptiness that filled his place at the head of the table, where no one else dared sit. After the meal
was over, I left as I had come, aware of my place at the margins, wondering how long my shunning would last, wondering what I could offer in place of my liberty that might make my father see me again.

Finally, there came a time when I gathered my courage and suggested that we go hunting together, my father, my brother, John, and I. I thought my father might see that I had taken up where he left off, picked up the rags of our life and pieced them back together.

That hunt took us deep into Big Bear Canyon, where I partnered up with my father, working to match his stride, to convince him he didn’t have to slow down or rest for me—so little room between us for weakness, vulnerability. I wore myself out trying to keep up, denying my lesser legs and narrow shoulders, my thin wrists and ankles, believing that the race between us might never end. Without the need I felt to prove my worth, without his need to teach me worthiness, what would exist between us?

Winded, my thighs aching, I wondered at my father’s stamina, his long-legged march, the hint of a hitch in his walk—the vertebrae fused solid in his lower back. He had shown me once, when I was young—the long, clean gash along his hip, from which they’d taken the shaving of bone; the larger cut that grew from the base of his spine, the skin pink and shiny as pulled taffy. When I had touched him there, pushed at the scar with my small girl’s finger, I’d felt a strange and fragile resistance, the membrane of flesh so thin I feared I might hurt him, rupture the wound, cause him more pain.

Miles into our hike, we had stopped to watch a buck the color of ripe wheat cavort in a too distant field, made foolish
by the doe he had followed into the open. My father smiled like some benevolent god until the deer disappeared into a tangle of hawthorn and elderberry.

“Boy, that was pretty,” he’d said.

“Yes,” I said. “It was.” How long since I had seen that look on his face, that simple delight in the world, appreciation of something neither good nor evil, something that existed outside our realm of moral reasoning? How long since affection for anything had come unweighted by the baggage of obedience, sin, punishment, betrayal?

There would be not one hunt but several, and what I would remember is that nothing is as simple as memory. For each of our journeys into the forest, there would be a lesson I must learn: to mark my passage, to depend on no one but myself, not even my father, who walked me in, then let me lose myself and wander for hours before guiding me home.

There was no place of comfort with my father, no margin for weakness. If this was how I chose to “prove up,” then my rites of passage back into my father’s esteem would be on his terms, not my own. It seemed to me that nothing short of abject humility would win my father’s uncompromised love. At some point, the rigors of the trial were no longer worth the little that I gained with my stoic endurance—the nearly imperceptible nods indicating his approval, the meager dole of words.

With John, it was easier. He taught me the things my father never had: how to trail whitetail and flush grouse, how to cast for rainbow and cutthroat and steelhead.

I could hardly wait for Saturdays, when John and I would sail down the highway toward the woods, through Tammany, past the 49’ers arena, the speedometer topped out and no reason
to slow down. I would watch the sun slip behind the Blue Mountains, and I would remember the books I had read, the words so ripe I could taste them, and I would think, the mountains look blue because the
gloaming
has touched them; the sky is spreading its wings, feathering to
fuchsia, magenta
, that purple called
Tyrian
—like the colors of exotic birds, descending to a canopy of trees.

I did not speak such words aloud; no one wanted to hear them. They were fussy, temperamental. They were another of my secrets, my clandestine passions. I held them on my tongue, where they were safe. I would lay my head on John’s shoulder, close my eyes, feel the muscle in his thigh tense and relax. There was another language I was perfecting, one that would seem, for a time, to take the place of all that I could not say. I spoke it to John with my mouth, my hands, my hips. At the end of the evening, he would take me home, walk me in and shut the door. We made love every night because he was a man of eighteen and I was a woman who knew little about her own desire but understood that it was the one thing she could offer that would keep him long into the night.

O
UTSIDE OF
J
OHN
, there were few friends that I spent any time with. I was uneasy in the company of women, unsure how to traverse the complex pathways of female companionship. My family’s transient lifestyle had cost me the social confidence bred by lifelong friendships, and I’d consciously gone about an adherence to my father’s behavior, interests, and codes—one of which, though unstated, was clear: the truest and deepest adventures can be found only in the company of men.

My cousin Les, competitive and not easily intimidated, seemed one of the few women who offered the kind of camaraderie I craved: she did not tolerate boredom. There had been years when Les and I had shared little outside of family. Even though she had often accompanied me to summer church camp, she had never fallen under the spell of fundamentalism, and during those years when I went “straight,” she continued in her precocious ways, smoking, drinking, taking the punishment her parents meted out. Now, out from under our fathers’ roofs, we had once again found common ground.

Les had the exotic looks of her mother—high cheekbones, bronzed skin, large, almond eyes—gifts of an Indian heritage. She worked at a clothing boutique, taking her wages in strappy dresses, gossamer negligés, four-inch heels. We spent many evenings together, downing shots of schnapps, sharing cheap wine straight from the bottle, just as we had as teenagers bent on rebellion. We smoked, we cursed the air blue, we drove to Spokane for nights of dancing, then weaved the hundred miles home, never thinking about the ways in which we endangered ourselves and others. What mattered was
staying alive
, and that had little to do with physical survival. Our greatest fear was inertia, of finding ourselves gone still while the world revolved on around us.

It was with John and the other young men who shared his love of the outdoors that I found my truest fraternity. They took me in, allowed me to exist in that strange place between one of the guys and a girl to be protected. My favorite was Brock Hoskins, a shy Catholic boy with fine brown hair and chestnut eyes. He had a gentleness about him, quiet ways, and I often found him watching me. He leaned across the
pickup seat one time, whispered in my ear, “John is a damn lucky guy to have you.” The sentiment—so sweet and old-fashioned—made me girlish, and I blushed.

Whenever we dropped Brock off at his parents’ house, his passel of younger brothers and sisters came to the door, and he was embarrassed but happy. I’d wave to his mother, a tall, round woman, good in her Catholic ways, who came to the window and smiled, wiping her hands on a dish towel. I wondered at her life—so many children, so little outside of house and family. I could not imagine forever being left behind, incarcerated with Comet and Pine-Sol, waiting for the men to return from their work, their fields and pastures, their games, their fishing trips and hunting camps. Always, the women waiting, waiting like my mother had for my father to come home unscarred and upright from the woods. Instead, he came home cut and bruised and finally broken, flat on his back in a body cast for a year while she worked at the café to support us.

Left behind: nothing scared me more. Perhaps a remnant of my fundamentalist faith, believing that God would return at any moment to take his chosen ones home. Or maybe it was the loneliness and boredom I feared, the sense of panic that swelled in my chest when the rooms grew quiet and I was left without distraction.

And so I followed John everywhere: to the tip of Hoover Point, to the bottom of the Salmon River canyon. When John and Brock took up motocross, I bought my own dirt bike and rode behind them on rutted raceways and logging roads. We roared across pastureland, meadows, and creek beds, along trails too narrow for one, dodging wind-felled snags and sawn-off stumps. I came to believe that my fear was what fuelled
me, and that as a woman I had never been allowed to call it by any other name—a rush, a dangerous thrill, a jolt of excitement and daring. The landscape was a blur of spruce and tamarack, sumac and dog fennel. I loved the way it all flew by, the way I could speed through hours and eat nothing but air. When we rested, we eyed each other with a kind of pleasure, flushed with adrenaline, sensuous in our damp skins and panting. Then John would move closer to me, Brock would take his eyes to the breaks of the canyon, the horizon clouded by harvest, and we would sit that way, content in our place, catching our breath, once again on familiar ground.

I
REMEMBER
the summer afternoon I stood with Viv in the kitchen, spreading deviled ham across slices of Wonder bread. John and I planned to pick up Brock and drive several hours south, across the prairie, down Eagle Creek to the Salmon, the River of No Return. John had loaded the motorcycles, rifles, and fishing rods. We’d make a day of it, maybe even spend the night, throw our bags on the sand where the canyon walls echoed the rise and roll of sturgeon.

As I filled the cooler, I heard the wail of an ambulance, distant, then close, then trailing off. The shrillness of the siren faded. The phone rang. Walt grunted into the receiver, listened, looked from beneath his eyebrows at the rest of us, circled around him and frozen by the sudden slackness of his face.

“Ah, sweet Jesus,” he said, then handed the phone to John.

By the time we got to the hospital, the doctors and nurses had cut Brock out of his Levi’s and T-shirt, started IV’s, inserted
a catheter, shaved his head and wrapped it in layers of gauze. Several of Brock’s brothers and sisters sat outside his room, the younger ones concentrating hard on the pictures they drew, the older ones tearful, arms crossed, holding themselves. The father, a carpenter and rancher, hadn’t yet been reached. Brock’s mother turned toward us and gripped John’s arm.

“He was just going for a ride until you got there. Just a short ride down the road.” She looked into my face, searching for some reason why such an easy story had broken down.

I looked past her, through the windows of Intensive Care, where the medical personnel, who never assume a story’s ending, clustered at the railings of Brock’s bed. One came toward us, nodded.

“Are these the friends?”

There was an ominous tone to his voice, accusatory and defining, as though we were somehow responsible. I looked at the man’s hands and arms—cuticles scrubbed into nonexistence, the dark hair on his knuckles and wrists at odds with the sterility of his skin.

“Do you understand he probably can’t hear you? Don’t try to shake or startle him. There’s no response at this time, but he might—” He stopped, considered the mother’s face, how she had caught the word
might
and how he mustn’t be responsible for instilling hope. “Sometimes, not very often but it’s not unheard of, it’s not impossible that he could conceivably respond to your voice. We’ve seen it in these cases. The comatose patient is unpredictable. You’ll have five minutes.”

Comatose
. I mulled the word as John and I followed the man into the dark room. Iridescent lines and numbers radiated
from the monitor screens. A nurse leaned into the light of the observation window, checking her clipboard notes.

Brock was on his back, sleeping, it seemed, except for the tubes and bandages and dried smears of blood across his jaw and throat. He wore no gown, just the hospital sheet stamped
ST. JOSEPH
. Down the hall a woman howled, in pain or rage, I couldn’t tell which.

I smoothed the sheet, realized as I took in this man, whom I had known before he was a man, that even in the heat of hard rides and late summer hunts I had never seen his bare chest. He was modest, like my father, who would never think to strip below his undershirt in front of a woman not his wife.

I leaned over Brock, smelled the sharp blood odor of his breath. If I had been alone, I might have touched him there, where the twin wings of his rib cage met, touched with one finger the softness that rose and fell with the delicate pulse of a newborn’s skull. I slid my fingers beneath Brock’s hand, felt the cold, talcum smoothness of his palm. What was it about hospitals that forced everyone’s temperature to the level of just-cooled wax? I looked at the monitors. Nothing quickened. Nothing slowed.