In the Wilderness (14 page)

The station wagon left a cloud of gray smoke that settled around the house and shelter. I tasted the sweet pop, savoring its syrup, then thought of my father and his sacrifice. I stepped to where the bridge crossed the spring and emptied the bottle into the pure rush of water.

My mother wrapped her hands in the dishtowel she carried and pressed the cool cloth to her lips, then looked at me. “Go find your brother. He didn’t come down.”

She took my empty bottle and went into the kitchen. I hesitated for a moment, studying the shelter, then walked up the path to the outhouse. My brother was inside, reading a Superman comic.

“Mom wants you,” I said, and watched him rise, still reading, and disappear down the trail.

I stepped behind the outhouse to the tree where weeks before I had carved a heart around the initials “KB” and “LL,” a secret promise to Luke that as the tree grew, so would our love. But the letters and heart were gone, the bark stripped and weeping.
No, no! Why would anyone do this?
I shook my head, trying to hold back the tears and rush of heat I felt rising in my chest. Greg did it! Greg and my stupid cousins.

I ran across the bridge to the house, slamming through the door. My brother sat at the table, the comic in one hand, a peanut butter sandwich in the other. I looked from him to my
mother, then burst into sobs, unable to think of any word that would convey to them the depth of my pain.

My mother followed me to my room, where I threw myself on my bed and buried my face in the pillow.

“It’s okay, Sister. You don’t have to feel bad. Uncle Barry just doesn’t understand.”

“It’s not that.” I turned my face toward her, let her pull the strands of hair from the corners of my mouth.

“Well, what is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just not that.”

She patted me on the back, then walked quietly from the room. I lay for a long time, feeling sick with betrayal and confusion. Why couldn’t things just be normal? Why was everything all wrong?

After a while, I rose and tiptoed out the door. I gave the shelter a wide berth, circling behind it, into the deeper woods. I didn’t feel like carving another heart. Instead, I took one of the trails that connected the old skidroads and walked aimlessly, not caring where it took me, until I stumbled into the clearing where Gerty Buck’s house sat, older than ours, never painted, the cedar shingle siding weathered to black. I stopped, surprised. Gerty’s son, Ned, knelt only a few feet from me, polishing his motorcycle.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” He was older than I was but not much taller. His sandy hair, unlike Luke’s, was cut short and uneven, and his eyes were an unremarkable green. He smiled at me, and I found myself moving toward him and the bike. It seemed natural, the way I ran my hand over the black leather seat and along the shiny gas tank. I felt a little thrill knowing he was watching.

“Want to take a ride?” he asked. I looked past him to his
house, where I knew his mother sat, knitting an endless supply of pillow covers and afghans, which she sold at the community bazaars. Mr. Buck had died years before, crushed when his bulldozer rolled.

“Come on. Let’s just go to the tracks and back.”

He was already on, gunning the engine. I straddled the seat behind him, hesitating only a moment before circling his waist with my arms. He smelled like the forest, like pine and woodsmoke.

We started down the road, then turned onto a wide trail. I leaned out just a little, just enough to see where we were headed, just enough to catch the wind in my hair.

When we reached the track, he turned the bike and headed back to his house.

“Can you take me home?” I hollered, hoping he could hear me over the roar.

He turned his head and nodded. A few minutes later, we emerged from the woods into my yard. I hoped someone would see me, seated on a rumbling bike behind a boy who seemed happy to have me huddled against him.

My mother came to the door, curious at first, but when she saw Ned and his motorcycle and me on back, windblown and flush with freedom, her mouth settled into a tight line. I was pleased.

We chatted for awhile, the three of us, my mother asking after his, Ned innocent and polite as pie. When my brother came to stare big-eyed at the cherry-red Honda, I felt a surge of pride. This was much better than gouging a lopsided heart into a dumb tree.

No, Greg could not go for a ride. My mother seemed as concerned about my brothers lust for the machine as she did about the possibility of mine for Ned. When Ned said it was time he got back, we watched him speed up the road, popping
the clutch just enough to raise the front tire. Greg was mesmerized. “Geez!” he said, and then looked sheepishly at my mother, who scowled. “Geez” was just another way of saying “Jesus,” and it was a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain.

“Don’t you have chores?” my mother asked, directing her gaze at me. I nodded and headed for the house, nearly ecstatic. I wondered if my father would find out. Surely he had heard the noise. Still, he would be gone for days, maybe weeks. Already, it almost seemed as though he had never existed.

When I woke the next morning and walked into the kitchen, I was stunned to see him there, eating breakfast at his usual place. My mother cushioned her steps and warned me with her eyes to stay quiet. Had God spoken already? If so, why was everyone so silent, so glum? I sat at the table and ate my cereal, taking in the subtle signs: my father’s studied attention to his food, my mother’s tentative movements. Something had happened. Maybe God had told him something horrible, that he was going to die or that someone else was. Maybe some evil had been revealed. I thought of Lola, but she was already gone. Who else could it be?

I didn’t ask these questions out loud, and no one in my family ever again mentioned my father’s quest. Only recently did I learn why he abandoned his vigil and rejoined us at the table: his brother had threatened to have him committed.

I imagine the struggle he faced: continue with what he believed a good and sacred task, or risk losing everything—his job, his home, perhaps even his family. I do not think he cared that people might label him crazy, but his responsibilities as a husband and father were also sacred. I’m sure he prayed before leaving the shelter, at first asking God why this obstacle had been placed in his path, and then understanding that he must not question, that his brother’s interference must in and of
itself be part of the trial. God must have other plans, another way for my father to prove his spiritual commitment.

Perhaps for him there could be another form of sacrifice. What was it my father loved the most? He could survive without food, could live for long periods divorced from those in the world he cherished. As much as he loved my mother, he knew that his love for God was greater and that if called upon to do so, he would not hesitate to leave her. My brother and I belonged not to him but to God, and if asked he would certainly do as Abraham had to his own child: place us upon the rock and raise a dagger above our breasts.

What was left? What was he most jealous of? What I know is that the wilderness has always seemed my father’s greatest love. The woods had saved him, had provided a home for his family, had brought him to the church and to God. To separate the land from the Spirit might prove the ultimate sacrifice.

He heard it in the voice that came to him one night, woke him into a light so bright he had to shield his eyes. This time, there was no demon, no chill air, only the light and the voice that might have been a dream except for the light and the way the words rang in his inner ear for hours afterward, saying,
Go. Go now
.

My fathers decision was made: we would leave the woods. I don’t remember being told or how I took the news, but it was spring and everything seemed new and reasonable. Besides, Luke and his family were leaving too, first for the cherry orchards of Washington and Oregon to work the harvests, just as they did each year. They would not come back. They’d find another church in another town where they could start over and leave Cardiff Spur and its memories behind.

Before then, there would be a baptism. By May, the month I turned twelve, the age when children were believed
to be mentally and spiritually mature enough to determine the destinies of their own souls, the ice along Reeds Creek had thinned and collapsed. In a small eddy not far from our house, the congregation gathered to witness the total immersion of several members. After asking my parents’ permission, I added my name to the list of those to be baptized.

The newly warm air, the birds chittering in the greening trees, the smell of the meadow opening into tiny flowers, all added to the dreamlike feel of the day. I stood with my parents, savoring the sun on my shoulders, shivering in my crisp white dress and bare feet.

I felt it was expected of me, given my age, but I also remember thinking that everything was changing, that this ritual would be a fitting symbolic end to my life in the woods and my relationship with the people of the church, whom we would be leaving behind. And it would also mark the end of my childhood, both spiritually and, I thought with a shiver of expectation, physically. It was a rite of passage, and I was painfully aware of my nipples already rigid from the cold air. My prayers were forgotten as I considered how I would survive the embarrassment of having my wet dress cling to my chest, the shape of my breasts exposed for all to see in that moment before I could cover myself.

When Brother Lang called my name, I passed my glasses to my mother, then took the hand of my father, who gave me like a bride to the preacher. He stood waist deep in the frigid pool, solid as a stump against the slow current. I shuddered in the runoff of mountain snow, my eyes already closed.

“Sister Kim, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” I felt his arm low at my back, and then his hand against my forehead. We dipped like dancers. The current caught my feet just as the water closed over my face, then I was lifted up and helped to the bank. My mother
wrapped me in a blanket and cradled me against her warm shoulder. It all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to worry about modesty. I blinked in the light. It was beautiful, the way the trees and sky looked without my glasses, like a watercolor painting. The dome of blue blended seamlessly to green, then back to the lighter blue of water. Figures moved before me, dark against the sun.

This is the way it’s supposed to be, I thought. Like spring, everything reborn, everything whole. I closed my eyes and listened.
Hallelujahs
rose and I knew someone else was going under.

There is something about that moment when I stepped from the water into my mother’s arms that I want to hold on to. The sun’s warmth, my father’s steadying hand, the familiar voices praising God from whom all blessings flowed, and in every new leaf and birdsong a promise of everlasting life. Yet there are times when I remember myself silent, an observer, reflecting the ecstasy of others just as the water mirrored the sun. I could mimic their prayers, sway with them in my pew. Was I doing only what was expected of me, acting the role I knew would gain approval and praise?

Sometimes I think I never felt anything, only imagined the pure joy of absolute faith. There are times when I remember the peace that filled me at the end of hours at the altar, hoarse from calling on the Lord, exhausted and nearly incoherent. I felt emptied, purified by my physical weakness. Often, these were the times when I could feel the new language rise in my throat, feel the rhythm of the words suddenly come to me as I began to speak in the tongues of angels—a gift that each of us quested for, a gift that never came to some.

My glossolalia was guttural, the hard sounds low and deep
in my throat. I felt I could speak it for days, my eyes closed, sustained and mesmerized by this thing that controlled my body and my soul.

That day at the creek, when the water closed over me and then parted, I felt the magic of the ritual. I could never deny the rapturous exhilaration of being renewed, knowing I had pleased both my people and my god. Stepping from the water into the warmth of my mothers arms, feeling my father lay his hand on my head as he had done when I was young—I felt in that moment wholly loved.

I knew Luke stood nearby, but without my glasses he was only a blur. The pleasure I dreamed of with him could never be this pure. Yet when I thought of the way he might wrap the blanket around me and hold me against his chest, I felt both lightheaded and weighted in my heart. Why did every moment have to be compromised this way? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t deny my flesh, that I so easily slipped into the carnal even as the hallowed water dripped from my body?

The ride home was short, around the meadow and down the rutted driveway. My father lit the stove just for me while I changed. My mother melted Crisco and salted the chicken. Greg, not yet old enough to truly commit himself, fell asleep on the couch. In a few days we would leave our house for good and drive the winding road to Lewiston. I began clearing my shelves and dresser, filling boxes marked in big black letters, “
KIM’S ROOM
” and “
BOOKS.”

It didn’t seem real that I might never see my room again. After years of seasonal moving, nothing seemed ever to be left wholly behind: we always came back to the fragrant smell of pine, to the creeks, to the town where every building, fence and driveway was familiar and expected.

Still flush from the cold water and the attention of my
elders, intent on doing a good job of packing to show how responsible I had become, I never thought I’d miss the trees or the narrow spring. I wish I had looked one last time to the mountains that had folded us in and kept us for so long, for when I think of them now my mind’s eye cannot see past the clearing: everything beyond comes up dark, impenetrable, as though the world itself fell away beyond the perimeter of my vision.

There is a photograph of me taken on my twelfth birthday, in which I stand posed against the snow berming the bomb shelter, squinting into the newly warm sun. My hair is long and straight, nearly to my waist. My kneesocks reach to the hem of my homemade dress, the only concession to style a pattern of muted orange and yellow rings against the brown background, a print that I remember thinking was almost psychedelic (a word I hissed in a whisper between my lips when no one was listening), something the hippies in San Francisco might wear.