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Authors: Kim Barnes

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BOOK: Hungry for the World
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So I had been taught, and so I believed until that summer, when, amid the country’s bicentennial celebrations, amid the fireworks and politicians’ chatter and our preacher’s dousing
reminders of the fall of Rome, I turned my back on it all: my church, my family, my home, my future made bright by good grades and a nation at peace. I did this for reasons I understood then, reasons that today remain clear: my father’s authoritarian discipline; the repressive doctrine of our church; my own stubbornly independent nature. This separation seems as necessary and predictable to me now as did my earlier rebellion, when, at the age of thirteen, I had thrown myself into the world for a trial run. Then, I had been a
juvenile delinquent
, a
runaway
, a minor still watched, protected, and punished by close kin and proper authorities. Not so this time, when I left my father’s house as an adult, a young woman still clutching her high school yearbook, on whose pages her classmates had inscribed their names and good wishes.

What path did I believe I might follow outside that door, that gateway into a world from which I’d been protected, isolated, kept hidden? Perhaps even then I knew that the road ahead of me would be a hard one, just as my elders had predicted. Maybe I realized how little desire I had to be sheltered from any of it, for what I desired more than anything were the simple experiences of a life led outside the confinement of dogma and discipline. I wanted all that I had been denied: to go to movies, listen to rock and roll, dance with others my own age and feel the sweet exhaustion of gaiety and abandon. I wanted to be free of the guilt my every need and movement seemed to bring, the threat of my father’s censure, the pall of eternal damnation.

I thought I could slide the yoke from my shoulders, like a woman laying down her pails of water. I thought I might
brighten and grow stronger with the feel of freedom in my bones, remember again the child I had once been, raised not in the city but in the woods—that sacred place where my father once had lived the life of the lumberjack, where my family had been happy and whole. I did not understand what he had been running from when he left that life, nor did I see how it was that my father was still questing, and that I, his daughter, would continue that quest, unaware of the inheritance I carried with me—the innate need I felt to control my own fate, the very trait that would both scar and save me.

In the heart of a town ticking with fever, I made a decision that would change my life in ways I could not then imagine. Over the next three years I would become a woman I hope never to be again. Yet how can I separate myself from that
other
, that soft girl who hardened in the fire, who came to know of her world far more than any preacher or father had dreamed to warn? She is still with me, and I with her. She is my sybil, my familiar, my reminder of all that I have escaped and come to, who I am when my need is darkest and most true.

Is that child also still with me—that girl who stands beside her mother, leaning against the pew rubbed smooth by chintz dresses and gabardine slacks, raising her hands as her parents raise theirs, praising God in a voice full of first conviction, waiting for the gift of the spirit, the gift of speaking in tongues, the gift that will give to her the language of angels? Is she there in the woods sifting through pine needles for a robin’s blue egg, or balancing atop her father’s feet as he Texas two-steps her across the floor? I would cling to him in giddy desperation as he waltzed me through the rooms, my
head hung back, his arms holding me tight against gravity’s dizzying pull.

I want to regain that place I have lost—so much of it now gone, burned by accident or intent. There in the ashes, I might discover some remnant of who I was, some reflection of who I have become, who it is I might yet be.

 

“NO ONE NEEDS TO KNOW,” MY MOTHER
once said to me, “what has happened in the past.” But without that map, I cannot find my beginnings, trace the progress of my own journey. I must circle back, pick up the threads that bind me to the lives of my parents, in order to understand what brought us to that place in the woods, where our windows had no curtains, our doors no locks, where I did not understand that beneath the nightly narratives of strength and survival that grew and thrived with the telling, there were stories not being told—stories of failure and despair, of chaos and rejection, stories that had been cast off and abandoned like ragged, ill-fitting coats.

At the age of eighteen, my father had left Oklahoma with his widowed mother and his three brothers to come to Idaho. Until the death of his father in a drunken car wreck only months before, their lives had been defined by increasing poverty and the chaos of my grandfather’s worsening alcoholism. My father was the second-youngest, the responsible one, strange in his way. In a photo taken in second grade, his hand-me-down overalls hang by one gallus; his hair has not yet darkened to brown. He stares solemnly at the camera
with an intensity that is startling, as though it were not the lens he was looking into but the future and the faces he would meet there. Already, he is gauging the world’s worth, taking its measure.

As he grew older, my father remained shy but sure of himself. Tall, strong, and handsome, he made his friends and helped his mother, he worked and he hunted, and he read. His brothers and older sister gave him a little more room. He seemed to need it somehow, always going off by himself, preferring his own company, quiet and sometimes brooding. As a teenager, he had his fun. He drank bootleg whiskey, smoked Pall Malls, ran the backroads in whatever coupe his brothers would loan. But from the time he was a young boy, there had been something different about him, as though he hoarded some secret knowledge, some sad awareness, some burden meant only for him to carry.

For my father, his mother, and his siblings, some part of that burden was the tall, redheaded man they each loved with a fierce loyalty. They say my Grandfather Barnes was once a man everyone respected—a good man, quick with his hands and steady on his feet. In the early years no one could grow things the way he could—corn, cotton, hay. When the bordering fields were dry, his were coming up green. Neighbors came from miles around to ask his advice on when to plant, when to plow, what piece of equipment to buy. When injured or ill, they called for him before fetching the doctor.

He could take a beating, they say, then come up swinging. He could work longer, drive himself past endurance. He could drink hard for days on end, then raise himself from his stupor, walk into the field, labor beneath the Oklahoma sun
until sweat soaked his clothes and he had rid himself of poison, on into the dusk, the cooling air stiffening the cotton across his back.

What most people feared, my grandfather mastered. In Oklahoma copperheads coil beneath hay rakes, sun themselves between rows of broom corn. The distance a sharp hoe could reach or a shotgun slug could cover was close enough for most. But for my grandfather, the snakes were something he took personally, as though their presence on his small acreage of leased land were a territorial encroachment, some festering of the earth’s vindictive nature. He wanted them to feel whatever fear they were capable of, to know that he did not fear them. When he found one in the barn or on the step of the root cellar, or spied one from the seat of his tractor, he would step close, make of his left hand a target, charm the snake into following the flatness of his open palm. With his right hand he would snatch it up by its tail and snap the body like a whip, the head popping loose to roll in the dust, grotesque and skinned down to its small, arrow-shaped skull.

Lucky, brave, gifted with special knowledge. Why, then, did it happen that just as the crop ripened toward harvest, something came to knock it down? Wind, hail, hordes of locust, and only on the farm that he leased and tilled. Everything he put in for the landowner thrived, while a few miles away his own crop died. Not just bad luck, my father insists, but the manifestation of the struggle between my grandfather and God.

My great-grandfather Barnes had been a Baptist minister and believed that this calling had been passed on to his son, a calling that my strong-willed grandfather would not heed. Instead, he began drinking—days when he lived on nothing
but alcohol and cigarettes, nights when his own sons would find him at the bar, unable to stand but still fighting, mornings when they carried him from the hidden stills and back-road juke houses, bleeding from falls, beaten and cut by men he fought for moonshine. He was no longer the man gifted with uncommon insight and knowledge but a man who let the whiskey possess him, who allowed himself to forget that he once held dominion over the serpents.

The day my grandfather died—his car slammed into the baked clay of a dry creek bed—my father was miles away on a high school field trip, but he knew: he had dreamed it the night before. Already, he had willed the grief from his mind and taken it from his eyes and buried it deep in his chest. All that was left for him to do was nod when they told him, take his sobbing mother by the hand, and lead her home.

His senior year, he drove the school bus mornings and afternoons and gave his mother the earnings, keeping for himself only enough to buy cigarettes—my father’s single and enduring vice. He never forgot the chaos created by his father’s failure, how it left my crippled grandmother without comfort or support, engendered his siblings with grief and resentment. That summer he answered his uncle’s call for workers in the timberland of Idaho, and it was there that he found the isolation he craved, there where he could labor from sunup to sundown, felling cedar, skidding poles, alone with the noise of the saw and the loader, alone with his thoughts of the way things happened, in his mind a growing sense that he could make an ordered and enduring life for himself, there in that place where the trees grew thick as hair on a dog’s back, where a man with a rifle and rod should know no hunger.

It would be not his father’s life but a life of his own, and he thought of his sweetheart left behind in Oklahoma and knew that he would call her and she would come and he would have all he might need in the world.

M
Y MOTHER—FULL LIPS
, blue-gray eyes, hair cut short and wisping at her neck and temples—was two years younger than my father, only sixteen the first time he picked her up in his brother’s ’42 Ford and, with no money for a movie, drove for hours around the Oklahoma backroads for no other reason than to be in her company. They cruised Highway 66, through Arcadia, Wellston, Stroud, Depew, past the oil rigs and hog barns, marginal farms and corner bars. Sometimes they went with friends to the drive-in movie in Oklahoma City, hiding in the car’s trunk so they wouldn’t have to pay the quarter each, holding hands in the backseat while William Holden and Jennifer Jones pined their way through
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
.

Her own family waylaid by wanderlust and alcohol, my mother lived with her grandmother on a dairy ranch. Her father had been a professional gambler in Oklahoma, a con artist, a grifter, never content to stay in one location long enough to let his game catch up with him. Her first years were spent in a constant state of financial and emotional flux: depending on her father’s winnings or losses, they were filthy rich or dirt poor. They left town in the dead of night, arrived at the new motel with the sun just breaking the horizon. My mother’s self-awareness came to her stained and secreted. Even now she fights her desire to hide.

They went well together, my mother and father, high
school sweethearts, both tall and good-looking, both possessed of the same need to escape, to remake themselves. It was 1956 when my paternal grandfather died, and that year, too, when my mother, at the age of sixteen, joined my father, leaving the red clay fields of broom corn and cotton for a high-elevation camp in the wilderness.

I
N THE WOODS
, in the logging camps and exhausted boomtowns of northern Idaho, my life was defined by simple existence, or so it seems now. My first home was a wooden trailer, eight feet by twenty, with no water, wood heat, a table, two chairs, and a bed. All around me, the forest rose so high I could not see the surrounding mountains. Except for my extended family and a few itinerant sawyers, we were alone, but I did not know this. What I knew was the early warmth of a tamarack-fueled fire, the whistling of elk calves outside my door. There were venison and huckleberries in the fall, beans and bacon in the winter, brook trout all summer long. There were the creeks full of mussels and minnows, the air buzzing with crickets and locusts, the grass spiced with sage, wild onion, and fennel. Always, there was my mother, never far, warming herself in the sun of late June, preparing our meals, sprinkling the laundry while I read about the engine that could and the saggy baggy elephant and Little Black Sambo who melted the tiger into butter.

My father left for work and came back, his movement sure as the beginning and ending of our day. In the fall he would leave before dawn to find deer and elk, and I would sit at the window and wait for him to come home, back from that
place that was full of things dark and wild, full of danger and adventure—where I would have gone, too, if they’d have let me. But I was a girl and too young to go so deep into the forest.

BOOK: Hungry for the World
11.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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