In the Wilderness (2 page)

I begin in Oklahoma, in the late 1920s. In a one-room farmhouse near Stigler, my father’s mother sleeps on a makeshift bed of muslin-covered cornhusks with her seven brothers and sisters. They are used to sleeping this way, and the warmth their bodies generate is a great comfort. Outside, the wind sweeps the leaves and straw from the dirt yard. In the morning when they wake, the soiled blanket covering them will be frosted with their moist breath.

Only one child stirs, my grandmother’s eldest sister, Daisy. Since the death of their mother, and then their stepmother a few years later, it has been Daisy who has kept them clothed and fed, who has shielded them from their father’s drunken rages. She’s a beautiful girl, her light blue eyes brilliant against the smooth brown skin inherited from her Cherokee grandmother.
She sits up slowly and sees her father slumped in his chair, sour with whiskey and sweat. Raising her arms above her head, she winds her long hair into a bun, then slides carefully from between the other children. Quietly she begins to work her way around the single room, knowing he’ll whip her raw if he wakes to find her gathering her shoes, pulling on her two pairs of rough stockings, pulling first one and then the other of her cotton dresses over her flour-sack slip (even in the cold she is wet with sweat), then her winter coat.

She reaches to take the hard biscuits wrapped in a clean tea towel from the cupboard, but decides it will be a last offering, something the youngest can chew on while her father calls her name across the fields. The door squeaks on its leather hinges, and she thinks to run but takes a breath and steps out onto the packed red clay. Cold air cuts her lungs as she walks toward the corn rows, stopping to squat one last time, feeling the weight of her clothes, all she owns, but never once looking back.

How did she survive her journey that night? She had seldom left the isolated farm, had seen the city only a few times, had never left the county she was born in. A girl, maybe sixteen, bundled in beggar’s clothing, no luggage or purse, walking, perhaps hitchhiking, her way across the state line into Texas, kept warm by fear and shame, kept going by the exhilaration she felt whenever she remembered she was free. In Texas, she believed, she could find a way to live on her own. In Texas, there was oil, money and, if she were lucky, a man who would find her comely enough to make her his wife.

She found a job working early shift in a small cafe in the panhandle. She knew the first time he came in—square-jawed, lips set—she’d marry him. He was going somewhere,
maybe not in oil, maybe not in Texas, but somewhere. She could see it in his shoulders, the way he focused on his food, how his hands weren’t still—not nervous, but always moving, stirring sugar into the black coffee, rubbing water rings off his fork, smoothing the napkin’s edge between his fingers. He didn’t smoke, and she liked that about him. There were things he wanted to do, and he wasn’t one to waste his time. Within a month they were married, and it would be his ambition that would lead my great-uncle Clyde Knight into the Idaho wilderness, and it would be his lead that my family would follow.

But first I must go back to that shack where the children are waking to find their sister gone. My grandmother, because she is the second-eldest girl, moves around her sleeping father and stirs the ashes of last night’s fire, looking for an ember to breathe on and bring to life. She thinks Daisy may be out gathering more wood, but there is a stillness in the house that doesn’t feel right. Why isn’t the water heating? Their father will expect it when he wakes, and she trembles to think of his anger should he not be met with warmed biscuits and the pale liquid drawn from the grounds of yesterday’s coffee.

She opens the door. Even though the wind whips her bare legs and makes her teeth chatter, she wishes for the three-mile walk to school. She misses the books, the room and its little stove, the smell of drying wool and chalk dust. But her father has said she must stay home: sixth grade is enough learning for any girl, and the other children must be looked after.

She looks across the flat fields and pasture for Daisy. She knows firewood is getting harder to find, but she cannot imagine why Daisy would wander so far from the house in this weather, knowing that in his state their father would want her to keep the baby quiet.

She picks up the few remaining sticks of oak left by the door. Her younger brother Lee is awake now, stretching his bad leg, rubbing it at the knee. Like her, he limps across the room: both have been crippled by TB. She doesn’t even think of it anymore, compensating for the difference in the length of her legs by walking on the toe of one foot. Already, her hip is enlarged and her back curved from the stress.

They go about their chores as though in a church, cushioning each step, hushing the four-year-old when he calls for milk. But as the others wake and begin clattering from the bed, they see their father stir. He notes the fire first, then turns his reddened eyes toward the cookstove.

“Where’s Daisy?” His voice is coarse with phlegm. He coughs and spits into the fire.

“Don’t know, Daddy.” Even as she says it, she cringes away from his chair. Daisy is the one he depends on to rub his feet and fix his meals. Even as young as Daisy is, she’s had suitors, and he has run each of them off with threats, a gun in his hand.

Immediately he is suspicious. Hadn’t she tried to run away once already? Raising himself from the chair, he stumbles toward the door, groaning, made angrier by the pain in his head. He shouts her name once, then, still standing on the threshold, opens his stained trousers and pisses a long stream onto the red dirt.

“Daisy! I’ll whip you good, girl!”

My grandmother gathers up the baby and sways to keep her quiet. She watches the man walk toward the barn, still calling, his stride becoming more purposeful. He disappears into the barn and she turns to the stove, knowing he’s leaving and may be gone for weeks. It is not the first time. His trips into town to drink and gamble are common enough, but before he has left them with enough cut wood, meat, flour and
sugar to get by. The children crowd to the door, watching the wind bend the dry corn stalks to the ground, their bellies already aching with hunger.

My grandmother and Lee fed the children the hard biscuits, soaking the baby’s in the last of the milk from town. They had no food, and no wood to keep the fire burning. At thirteen, my grandmother was older than Lee by a few years; as their eyes met above the heads of their brothers and sisters, they knew that survival depended on them.

Together they scouted the ground for wood, but what could be broken or easily carried had already been scavenged and burned. They ventured out farther, wrapped in flour sacks and their fathers shirts. A quarter mile from the house they found a small fallen blackjack. Calling for some of the others to help, they dragged it home, feeding it a foot at a time into the fireplace.

There was food: the crippled calf, grazing in the corn rows. The younger children watched as their older brother and sister chased the bawling calf, all three—the boy, the girl, the bony animal—limping across the frozen ground. But they were children, and even the life-and-death chase brought them to cheers and laughter as the calf slipped between them, one or the other skidding along behind, hanging on to its tail.

Finally, Lee found a rope and lassoed the calf, then straddled its belly while my grandmother slit its throat. They’d lived the farm life long enough to gut and skin with the grace of old hands, and throwing their combined weight to the rough rope, they winched the small steaming carcass to the low rafters of the smokehouse. Sawed off a hunk at a time and roasted over the coals of the saving tree, it was enough meat to last them until their father came home.

•   •   •

My grandmother took Daisy’s place in that ramshackle house, enlisting the help of her younger sisters to make the meager meals, to cut and sew the flour sacks into baggy dresses and shirts that raked their skin. The bitterness she harbored against her sister kept her jaw tight and her direction set: she would not leave the others as Daisy had, nor would she ever admit that she longed to do the same and be gone from the house that reeked of kerosene and urine.

Years later, when a drinking partner of her father’s, Pat Barnes, a tall, lean red-haired man, began courting her, she allowed herself to imagine another life. The children were older now. Certainly her younger sisters were grown enough to cook and clean. Her father didn’t like it, and although he teased the man about flirting with his daughter, he forbade her to see him, and threatened to beat them both if she disobeyed.

When she turned eighteen, they asked for permission to marry, and when her father said no they eloped. They lived first with my grandfather’s sister, a shrewish woman whose only use for my grandmother was as a milker and maid. When my grandmother became pregnant with her first child, she craved one delicacy: a full, sweet plum from her sister-in-law’s tree. This the woman denied her, taking special pleasure in the smallness of her cruelty. Because of this, my grandmother believed, her daughter was born with a birthmark on her hip, the exact size and purple shade of the plum she had longed for.

Even after she and her husband found their own piece of land to sharecrop, her life seemed little changed from the one she had left. Except for this: she loved the man who worked the packed sod and came home to her each evening, a wide
smile on his dusty face. She would give birth to four more children, the next to the last my father.

On their little acreage of leased land, they grew cotton and broomcorn. They raised a few hogs and a milk cow, enough to keep food on the table and land under their feet. My grandfather never really gave up fighting the heat, the hailstorms and tornados. A man bred to the life, his fair skin fissured and toughened, his eyes permanently squinted against the dry silt wind and sun, he might have made it if the country had given just a little, offered up something he could depend on from one season to the next. But this was the time of dust, and what sustenance he could not draw from the seed and furrows he drew from the still: the one thing he could count on in that land of baked soil was alcohol, and he gave himself to it more and more.

His is an old and familiar story in the too-often romanticized myth of the twentieth-century pioneers—the story of men broken by the land’s promise and the government’s lie that said borrowed money, hard work and patriotism would see the country through. And alongside this story is the quieter story of the women, who sometimes endured but more often did not, twice betrayed, first by the land and then by the men who worked it.

There was one year they all remember as good, the year things took a turn for the better. Prices were up, and harvest had gone well. Their house had a wooden floor and two rooms big enough so that Coleen, the oldest and only girl, could have her own bed instead of being piled together with her four brothers.

That year they bought a new couch. My grandmother hung curtains on the windows, pleased with the colors that
brightened the fading wallpaper. My grandfather bought himself a new fiddle, a true extravagance. They were all musical, and it is the music my father speaks of now as holding the best of his Oklahoma memories: summer evenings when the heat eased and they could sit on the sagging porch and play their fiddles and guitars and sing.

It was my father who hunkered inside the house one day, beneath the open window, four years old and flush with his secret—a box of wooden matches left beside the stove. His brothers and sister were at school, except for the youngest boy, the creak of the porch slats let him know that his mother was rocking the baby to sleep.

I imagine him as he slid open the cardboard box, breathing in the sharp smell of sulfur. Several of the matches fell into his lap, and he gathered them up quickly. He wanted only one, just to feel the magic of friction and fire, to hold in his hand the instant bloom of light. He struck it slowly at first, then faster and harder, and the match’s tiny explosion took his breath away. He held it gingerly, letting the rest drop from his lap as he raised to his knees, holding the match before him like a gift.

Above him, his mothers new curtains drifted in the spring breeze. A corner brushed the boy’s hand, and suddenly the flame was no longer his but something alive and growing, climbing the curtain and spreading fast until the window was framed by fire. He grabbed the box, spilling matches over the floor. They rolled across the linoleum, beneath the table and chairs. He crawled after them, thinking that if he could just get them back in the box, put the box back on the counter, and walk out the door onto the porch where his mother sat nursing the baby, no one would know it was he who had been bad. He reached beneath the couch, where one had rolled, and touched instead the smooth black case of his fathers new
violin. The peeling wallpaper caught, its pale pattern disappearing as the fire ate deeper, through the newsprint insulation and into the walls. He stood up but did not scream, did not run outside to his mother, who might yet believe him the best boy—the quietest, most thoughtful, the wise and responsible one.

Perhaps then he heard his name, his mother’s voice screaming at him from the door. He turned to her slowly, the smoke filling the room so that his eyes watered, and he saw how she held his brother at her breast and how the child still suckled, greedy and pawing. Only when his mother started to limp toward him did he move. He grabbed her hand and together they stumbled from the porch, falling to their knees on the hard-packed dirt, coughing for breath as the baby began to cry.

When the fire grew too hot to endure they moved, heading for the field. Only then did the boy think of his father, how in times before he might have seen the tall man jump from his tractor and come running to save them. He imagined the ground his father could cover, arms pumping, fists doubling with each stride. But the man was not in the field. He was in town, not to buy food or sell the heavy skimmed cream, but to drink.