Hungry for the World (5 page)

I was no longer that little girl he’d once led through the dark, my fingers wrapped around his thumb. I was an
early bloomer
, my grandmother said, and I cringed with the words’ connotations: images of flowers and creepers and verdant grasses sprouting from the sleeves of my blouse, the waistband of my skirt. I was too aware of my body’s sudden transformation, my need for bras and deodorant and feminine hygiene—all “private things,” my mother whispered, and I cringed yet again, unable to disassociate the word
private
from the parts of myself that most humiliated me. The chaos of my own body became unbearable, and I welcomed the long skirts and high necklines, the coverings that kept me concealed and contained. My full-immersion baptism in the frigid current of Reed’s Creek was a blessing—the water that set my teeth to chattering pure forgiveness, purging me of all sin, washing me clean.

T
HE WORDS MOST OFTEN USED
to describe the religion of my childhood—charismatic, evangelical, Pentecostal—indicate little other than its particular theological concerns. The fact is that we believed in the physical existence of Satan and angels, believed that the skies would break open and God would return to gather His chosen ones home, and that we were those chosen few. We listened to the missionaries tell of dark heathens who practiced the Devil’s art, casting spells and bedding witches. They ate the flesh of white babies. They could assume the shape of any man or animal and speak with honeyed voices. We practiced our own small exorcisms, commanding Satan to leave, and I watched those who were afflicted shudder beneath the preacher’s hand, watched them fall and writhe, and I never doubted that the agony I witnessed was anything less than the demon itself being seared by the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.

We believed that the laying on of hands would heal the sick and raise the dead. We believed that there was only one road to Heaven and that it began at the altar. We raised our faces and spoke in tongues—a language known only to God and the angels. People called out their prophecies; women danced in the aisles, their hair set loose and flowing; men
wept without shame. Those who were taken by the Spirit,
slain
, we said, collapsed to the floor, and we covered them with clean linens where they lay trembling and murmuring their delirious joy. Only in the church were we allowed so much release, such pure physical and emotional exhilaration. Perhaps this is why my parents, weaned on the dry teat of inexpression, found their greatest joy in those hours of praise.

We broke the bread that was the Body and drank the dark liquid that was the Blood of Christ. To consume the Eucharist with anything less than a pure mind and heart was unforgivable, and each communion, I searched my soul for some remaining sin. If I chose to let the plate go by, my secret trespass would be apparent to those around me. If I chose to partake, I might be doomed to eternity in Hell.

Yet I could not forego the ritual—the miniature glasses of grape juice clinking against the pewter tray (wine was forbidden), the way they nested so snugly, each in its individual slot; the coin-sized wafer, thin as a page from my Bible. When I held the unleavened bread in my hand, waiting for the minister to repeat the words of Christ at the Last Supper, I could not feel its weight. But it was there, softening with moisture, adhering to my palm like a second skin.

As young as I was, I could not escape the seeming impossibility of my mortal predicament: Christ could descend at any moment, come to carry his chosen ones home, yet only those whose garments were white as snow would be caught up. The smallest lie kept hidden, the mildest jealousy left unconfessed, would be enough to stain us forever, mark us for passage to Hell. Yet we could never be flawless, doomed as we were to imperfection. Our only hope was the second-by-second policing of our bodies and minds. “Go and sin no
more,” Christ had said. But how could we not? We were as God had made us—all sinners in His eyes.

As a woman, doubly cursed, my greatest hope was to find a husband who would continue to lead and protect me as steadfastly as my own father did. To earn such a blessing, I must remain pure of heart and body. The evil that might tempt me was everywhere, the preacher warned: in pool halls and movie theaters, bowling alleys and card rooms. Dancing was a sin, as were smoking, drinking, rock and roll, swimming with the opposite sex. I signed the Youth Pledge, swearing that I would not partake in any of these things. It seemed easy enough. I had never seen a pool table. The late-into-the-night pinochle marathons my parents had once staged with my aunts and uncles had ended when my relatives gave up the logging life and moved to Lewiston. The nearest movie theater was a hundred-mile round trip. It would not be until I had children of my own that I saw
Fantasia
, which, with its wizardry and enchanted brooms, embodied our belief in black magic.
Snow White, Cinderella, Old Yeller
—all off limits, all part of the American childhood that was not mine and would never be.

Television in and of itself was not a sin, but we did not have one and could not have received the distant signals anyway. When I visited my grandmother Nan, who had moved with my new step-grandfather to Lewiston, my parents were vigilant:
Gilligan’s Island
was acceptable;
Bewitched
, with its nose-twitching sorceress, was not. Only after my parents were gone would my grandmother allow me to watch
Dark Shadows
, a Gothic soap opera complete with werewolves and vampires. I fell madly in love with the resident Transylvanian, Barnabas Collins, whose tragic and
noble desire to resist his thirst for blood seemed to embody the human condition: in order to regain his soul, he must deny his body its pleasure.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL THE ARRIVAL
of the new preacher and his family that I came to understand such visceral desire. By 1968, the year the Langs took over pastorship of our church, the last of my uncles had taken his wife and children and moved to the city. We claimed Brother and Sister Lang, their two sons and one daughter, as kin.

There were long sessions of Bible study and sermons, midday suppers of fried deer meat and mashed potatoes, the grown-ups laughing and happy, the children wading the creek or hunting squirrels in the meadow. In the hours after evening service, I would sit in the parsonage stairway with Luke—at thirteen the preacher’s youngest son. Tall and lean, with blue eyes and full lips, he was handsome enough to turn any girl’s head, and in the feel of his hand stroking my knee, I came to an awareness of a truer temptation, too sweet not to be sin. Yet even as I prayed for forgiveness, I longed to be next to him, longed for the pleasure his closeness might bring.

What little I knew of sex had come to me via school-yard rumors and from a single book my mother handed to me a few months before I turned twelve, although what it had to say about my rapidly maturing body I’d already learned, and what it had to say about intercourse was,
Don’t
. Mostly I heard about sex in the dire warnings against it. Kissing would lead to petting, and petting was going-too-far and
might lead to going-all-the-way. This I knew from the endless lectures on the subject given by our Sunday-school teachers and the preachers themselves. They seemed, in fact, obsessed with man and woman’s desire for each other, and I came to understand that all other wide and crooked roads led to this one intersection: the illicit coming together of the sexes outside the marriage bed. Drinking led to fornication and adultery, as did going to pool halls, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. Rock and roll was nothing more than an excuse to bump and grind: the beat—the hard-driving insistence of the drums and guitars, urging us back to our animal desires, our savage roots—told it all. Anything that throbbed or pulsed, shimmied in the darkness, was there for one reason and one reason only: to lure our souls away from Heaven, to fill the coffers of Hell.

During those long Sundays of church and covered-dish socials and hours spent in the stairway with Luke, I never thought to question this truth. I believed that, should Christ return while I sat with the preacher’s son, his fingers brushing my thigh, I would be doomed. No matter how much my father had encouraged me to think for myself, I knew that to question moral law was to doubt, to doubt was a weakness in faith, and faith was everything. The answers were all there, in the King James Bible: “There hath no temptation taken you but that which is common to man.” I prayed that God give me strength to resist the new feelings flaring within me, feelings that I believed arose not from the physical maturation of my body or from my elemental need for Luke’s attention but from my ancestral transgression: it was Satan who whispered in my ear so that I in my weakness would take
with me this other soul, whose only excuse was the man’s natural and predictable passion for a woman made easy by sin.

A
T SCHOOL
, in the aging brick building that smelled of sour wool and paste, I felt protected by the innocence of my peers, few of whom seemed yet aware of their own sure damnation. I prayed over my sack lunch while the other children nibbled their cheese sandwiches in teacher-imposed silence, yet I never felt marginalized by my habits and appearance. There were so few of us, each with his or her eccentricities: Terry wet the bed and bit her nails to bloody stubs; Linda was a Jehovah’s Witness, worse than any religion I could imagine, since they didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas; Gordon’s father was a drunk; Janet’s mother cried at the PTA meetings, but no one knew why. Whatever group designations and boundaries might later form were not yet present my last year in the woods, when I met my sixth-grade friends at the monkey bars, tied my sweater around the steel pipe, and twirled myself into a dizzy freedom I have not known since.

I, like my friends, was the child of a logger, that was all. We did not have neighborhoods. We did not have blocks. We had
in-town
and
out-of-town
. We had camps and settlements and a new development built by Potlatch Forest Industries to house its workers. Some of our parents stayed home at night; some went to the bars, where they drank and danced and, more than once, shot one another to death in fits of jealous rage. Some were Protestant, some Catholic, some knew no religion at all. My schoolmates did not care that I had been
gifted with the power of healing, that the visiting evangelist had announced it to the congregation, that I felt the heat come rushing to my hands whenever I touched the sick.

Everyone was struggling to get by, keep up, stay ahead. Simple survival bound us together, and when the sheriff or supervisor knocked on the front door with his hat in his hands, each wife felt her heart leave her. Injury and death came too often, brothers and sons and husbands caught by a barber-chaired hemlock, crushed by a loader, cut by a saw. My great-uncle was killed by a felled tree; the sawyer did not know he was near. When my grandmother remarried, it was to a man known as the Little Giant, a Norwegian logger who, only months after the wedding, was crushed by a load of logs. Although he survived, the damage to his brain left him doddering and disabled. My father ruptured a vertebra after tripping backward over a half-hidden stump, then endured several operations and months in a body cast before returning to the woods. Yet he loved his life there, and my mother loved him, and so we stayed, ferrying our meager belongings from one camp to the next, sometimes renting a house in Pierce, until 1969, when we took up residence in Dogpatch, in the line shack of my dead uncle.

It was there, in the spring of 1970, in that hollow where I turned twelve, that a brilliant light roused my father from sleep—the presence and voice of God, he believed, telling him we must go and never come back, away from that land in which we had made for ourselves a good life. It was the answer my father had been questing for: what could he offer his god? He had no desire for money or material things. He didn’t drink or dance or lust after other women. He was poor in the eyes of men but rich with happiness in the life he had
chosen: he had a lovely wife who shared his bed and beliefs; his children were strong and healthy; he rose each morning pleased with the light, savoring his work in the woods. What then? What could he give up as a token of his commitment to God?

He locked himself in the root cellar, intending to fast and pray for forty days and forty nights. It was his quest, his spiritual journey inward toward greater understanding. I often wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t been interrupted by the surprise arrival of my youngest uncle and his family, who could only interpret my father’s actions as verging on insane. He’d gone too far, some people thought, alarmed by my father’s self-dependency and direction.

What I’ve come to understand is that it was his life in the woods that my father loved more than anything—more, even, than his wife and children; he has told me so. He had found his haven there, his safety and his comfort—the very things my father believed he must sacrifice.

Within days, we had left it all behind: the elk, the coyotes who wove their song through the forest. The raccoons had one last go at our garbage; the pack rats took what baubles they could from the cupboards and closets. I carried from that house in the wilderness a box of books, a suitcase of dolls I’d outgrown, the Bible given to me by our pastor and his family for my twelfth birthday.

I believed that the Bible would be my map through the world, a journal of warning and direction. As we drove the narrow road, past the logging camps and small settlements, across the Weippe Prairie, down the Greer Grade to the Clearwater River, I held it in my lap, feeling a loss I could not make sense of. I thought it was the boy that I missed, the
preacher’s son. I believed he would someday be my husband, that I would save myself for him, keep myself pure. With my mother’s ballpoint pen, I wrote his name again and again in the palm of my hand as we followed the Clearwater toward the city of Lewiston one hundred miles west, down the same highway my mother had driven to reach the hospital in which I was born.