In the Wilderness (6 page)

My mother rose early enough to pack my lunch and send me off to catch the bus, but my father often slept past noon. On weekends, I watched them linger over their coffee before beginning their daily chores. While my father split and stacked another days firewood, my mother prepared her share of the communal meal—mixing flour and shortening into pie dough, filling the shells with syrupy fruit, or sorting the beans as bacon browned in the bottom of the soup pot.

Those winter afternoons, the aunts and cousins arrived first, bringing with them the smells of woodsmoke and freshly baked bread. By the time the men had gathered in, slapping their hats against their knees, the snow on their backs already melting, the plates were laid out and the bread cut. The other children and I ate where we wanted—on the couch or cross-legged on the floor—and no one cared that we coaxed out thick wedges of pie with our fingers. Miraculously set free of baths and bedtime, we whispered secrets, shielded from our parents’ view by a makeshift tepee of wool blankets. As long as we kept our quarrels to ourselves and minded the general rules of the household, we were blissfully ignored.

While the women cleared and washed the dishes, the men leaned back in their chairs, sucking on toothpicks. After the dishes were done and another pot of coffee put on to perk, the adults scooted their chairs closer around the table and began their game of poker or pinochle that would last long into the night. The snow and below-zero temperatures meant little more to them than inches and degrees: no matter how bad the blizzard, no matter how low the thermometer dropped, we were safe in the circle, with enough food and fuel to keep us for weeks, the gift of land to sustain us—wood to burn, package
after package of frozen venison, spring water cold and plentiful running pure beneath a crystalline crust of ice.

Uncle Clyde had known what Idaho offered to people made poor by Oklahoma dust, and we were blessed to be there. What went on in the rest of the world—whatever wars raged in the jungles of foreign countries, whatever prices rose and fell—could not affect us. Our days were made of ourselves. There was little to pull us outside that circle.

I realize now that my mother and aunts were some of the first women to reside in the camps. Before, without the machinery needed to punch through roads, the men left their families at home. Only men manned the cookstoves and loaders, made the coffee and skidded the poles. The closest women were town whores, who hung from upstairs windows and called sweet things to the loggers in their cleated boots, wages heavy in their pockets.

During the mid-fifties and early sixties, logging equipment became more advanced and efficient, capable of reaching into the deepest pockets of virgin timber. New roads crosshatched the mountainsides, and existing roads were improved to allow easier passage of the machinery. With the improvement in access, most of the camps were abandoned altogether, and those that remained served only as temporary shelter for the loggers, who arrived in town late Friday evening, spent weekends with family, and left hours before dawn Monday morning to begin the week’s work. Pole Camp was a compromise, close enough for the men to make their daily commutes, but isolated enough to make us believe the wilderness still touched us.

Like my mother, my aunts were beautiful women. Dorothy, Ronnie’s wife, had deep auburn hair, which she combed
into an elegant chignon before breakfast. She was from Tennessee, and she carried herself with all the elegance of a horsewoman born to Southern aristocracy. I shivered at the pure beauty of her town clothes—matching high heels and purses, emerald greens, black patent leathers—and the way words dripped off her tongue, slow as winter syrup.

Aunt Bev was only slightly less displaced in the winter snow and spring mud than Aunt Dorothy. Born in Texas, she mixed her own Southern drawl with that of her new Oklahoma relatives, who teased her, as border-sharers often do, about her home state allegiances. She was barely five feet tall and even when pregnant never moved the scale above a hundred pounds. (Her husband, Roland, stood over six feet, as do all the Barnes brothers.) She reminded me of my Barbie dolls—a tiny waist and blond hair looped and pinned in a fashionable twist. She was the only woman I knew who wore false eyelashes, and she taught her sisters-in-law how to mend a torn nail with cigarette papers and clear polish. My strongest memory of her is shooing me and my cousins out the door and locking it behind us, ensuring that her newly mopped floors would remain spotless until her husband got home. I see her standing on the threshold in a summer top and tight knit pants, broom clutched in one hand, the other hand cocked on her hip, enchanting in her blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick.

Other than my father, Uncle Barry, the youngest brother, remained the longest. He brought to the woods a woman from Colorado named Mary, and with her came Lezlie, a little girl with startling white hair and green eyes. I was a year older than she was, and the relationship we established in our shared yard became less that of cousins than sisters, with all its inherent jealous rages and intimacies.

Mary had the high cheekbones of her Indian mother. She came without pretense, equally at home in the trees as on the
sage and cinnamon plains of Colorado. Her beauty was enhanced only a little by makeup and polish: large brown eyes and dark lashes gave her an exotic appearance even when she fluttered at the door in her soot-streaked bathrobe, and no matter how long the winter, her face and arms seemed bronzed.

She, too, left a life less than fortunate. The women in her family had run their men off, sometimes with the help of a gun, and her first marriage had lasted less than a year. She entered into our family with the bravado of a woman used to making her own way, and her spontaneity and the childlike pleasure she took in games and holidays often lent a carnivallike atmosphere to our get-togethers.

Each morning, the wives rose first to make their husbands’ breakfast, then stood at the door to see the men drive off into the pre-dawn light. They waved, hollering their day’s plans to each other across the yard before turning back to wake the older children for school. After the dishes had been done, the laundry hung to dry or sprinkled and rolled to be ironed later, my mother would take the cap off the tea kettle and whistle from the door, then wait for the long, high-pitched reply to echo across the meadow.

What time they did not spend baking or sewing they filled with wishing: mail-order catalogs cluttered the table. I often came home from school to find one of the women perched primly in a child’s high chair while another cut her hair, Sears models for inspiration, or one of the aunts straight-backed as a Buddha, clothespins numbing her earlobes, waiting for another to sterilize the darning needle over a kitchen match. I couldn’t bear to watch the needle punched through to its backing of raw potato or cork, and hid in my room, covering my head with a blanket.

During the high-altitude heat of summer, we loaded the
car with iced tea and root beer, sandwiches and fried pies, and drove to the creek. While my cousins and I waded the shallow current, hunting periwinkles and crawdads, our mothers lounged on old sheets, their bathing suit straps undone, draping their shoulders.

They seemed glamorous and distant then, leaned back on their elbows, one knee slightly raised, not at all like the same women we saw scooping up their husbands’ piled work clothes, mixing batter for breakfast, still wearing long johns and flannel to fend off the night’s lingering chill. On the banks and small pebbled beaches of the Musselshell they smoked and talked quietly, calling us in when we ventured too far, threatening early naps and spankings when we quarreled. I would look up from my pool of tadpoles and see them perfectly composed against the sheets’ white backdrop, smooth legs positioned to flatter, as though the world might be watching, judging their flat stomachs and ruby nails.

Often I forget how young my mother and aunts were, barely into their twenties. Their men coming home must have meant everything, and to welcome them with golden shoulders and sun-tinted hair was an offering:
Even here, in the deep forests of Idaho, in the wilderness, I can give you what you desire, what you love the most
.

The men returned each evening to find them tanned, glowing, arranging children and pork chops with equal ease. They must have wondered what kept them there—women any man might long for. Certainly, my father and uncles were jealous of their wives’ attention. I imagine that when the itinerant buckers and sawyers visited our camp, the women kept busy in the kitchen. All knew the few things that could fill a man’s gut when the isolation and deep-woods silence set his teeth to chattering for something he could almost taste, like the sweet whisper of last night’s whiskey: more whiskey came
easy from the town taverns, but not the shoulder of a woman, bared for his mouth and no other.

Eventually, the isolation and lack of even minimal luxuries such as indoor toilets and hot running water took their toll. By 1966 my aunts and cousins were gone, settled into city homes with yards and draped windows. My father must have felt the circle tighten, at its center my mother—the one who stayed, who never asked for more, who had been raised to believe each kindness shown her a gift, every grace mercurial as moonlight.

With the family gone, my parents were left to find for themselves what comfort and communion resided in the wilderness. The circle was broken. Even the land seemed to have lost its balance. I half-listened to men talk of helicopters and shutdowns, of a new machine with clipperlike jaws that could do the work of twenty good sawyers—snipping off trees at the base, mowing them down like ripe wheat. The adults shook their heads, perhaps foreseeing what I could not: the stores closing, the town deserted.

The forest must have seemed to them, as it did to me, inexhaustible. I knew no one who had flown above the trees to see the clearcuts scabbing the land like mange. There would always be more timber on the next ridge, another stand of cedar over the rise. It was like picking huckleberries, like finding
a good patch, fruit as big as your thumb and everywhere. You strip one bush, surrounded by others just as lush, and you find yourself panicking to get them all; though they stretch as far as you can see, you want them all.

Some of the loggers packed up and took jobs at the pulp and paper mill in Lewiston, sorting green lumber, checking plywood for warp, initialing case after case of toilet paper. Others remained, hitting the bars before staggering home still sticky with pitch, forgetting to kiss their waiting wives. The wives forgot to fear for their husbands when the wind rose, and feigned sleep when rough hands touched their hips.

My father dug in, determined to stay. He had seen how the dispossessed could turn to liquor and how liquor could in turn possess the soul, as had my mother. Perhaps because it was she who felt the impending isolation most keenly, she was the first to turn to fundamentalism. I’m sure that the presence of the Pentecostal preacher and his wife who had married my parents was a comfort in the absence of family. She began attending services, relating to her husband the words of joy and faith—the promised sustenance the Bible offered.

The Bible and its teachings were not unfamiliar to my father. His mother’s roots were Baptist. The songs she had sung for them spoke of life’s hard road and Heaven’s sure peace, and I’m certain that Hell was made real by her readings from the Scripture. Still, I can only guess at what drew my normally shy father to the small group of Pentecostal worshipers who gathered several times a week to praise God in loud voices and denounce the ways of the world. Was he intrigued by the unequivocal dictates of the religion? Given his life—the seemingly haphazard set of circumstances and catastrophes that had beset his family—the sterile reasoning of an all-knowing God negated the need to question. What comfort it must have seemed for a man and his family come to the wilderness,
escaping whatever demons that had threatened to destroy them. What he believes is that it was the Spirit that spoke to him, that it was my mother’s faith and prayers that led him to pick up the Bible she had left on the table and begin reading the words that would change and direct his life.

And so my life is divided by this line: before the church, and after. In the photographs taken those first years when she played with her husband and his brothers like a child set loose from school, my mother is startlingly beautiful. More often than not, she wears a pair of my father’s jeans, a man’s shirt and cast-off logging boots. She poses on a stump, tall and slender, or rides the boom of a loader, looking playful and brave, game for anything. Her lips are colored red or deep pink to match her nails, and her hair is short, wisping at her neck and temples. She reminds me of Ingrid Bergman in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and, like her, my mother’s bobbed hair gives her a boyish prettiness, making her seem even more feminine and vulnerable.

I don’t remember the moment my mother pulled the golden hoops from her ears, collected her carefully chosen tubes of lipstick, gathered her swimsuit and open-necked blouses and pushed them all into the drawers’ dark corners. Nor do I remember the moment my father began to believe that angels and devils walked among us, in the groves of cedar and stands of tamarack, that their voices could be heard above the saw’s loud litany. What I know is that our lives shifted. Where before we had thrown our suitcases and boxes into the car and left one home for another on a day’s notice, we could now make no move, no matter how small, without careful consideration and prayer. Three times a day we prayed over meals. When my father left for work, we prayed for his safety, when he arrived home that evening, we prayed in thanks. If the car developed a rattle, we prayed as my father leaned into
the tangle of wires and hoses, asking God to give him the knowledge to fix it, or for God to fix it Himself, knowing, as He must, how little money we had to spend.

My father’s authoritative presence became absolute, my mothers desire to please him even greater. In the teachings of the church, a man’s duty is to be the physical and spiritual protector of his wife and children. The woman is to be chaste and modest, subservient to her husband’s guidance, lest the mar of her sex tempt her to stray into the ways of the world.