In the Wilderness

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  Other Books by this Author

  Copyright

  In consideration of their privacy, the names of some of the people appearing in this text have been changed.

  An earlier version of Chapter Four was originally published in The Georgia Review.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people without whose support I would never have found my way back: Mary Clearman Blew, who shared with me her vision; Claire Davis and Dennis Held, who offered friendship no matter the season; and Robert Johnson, upon whose quiet belief and confidence I could always depend. Thanks to Robert Wrigley for seeing me through; it is my hope that our children—Philip, Jordan and Jace—will add to this story their own. I would also like to thank Keith and Shirley Browning, Margaret Bremer, Ripley Schemm, Annick Smith, Bill Kittredge, Judy Blunt, Julia Watson, Dee McNamer, Renée Wayne Golden, Bruce Tracy, and all the others who offered their encouragement and direction. Thanks, too, to the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the PEN/Jerard Fund.

  I am also grateful to those who have dedicated their time to uncovering and retelling much of the local history, which might otherwise have been lost. Among many upon whose knowledge and research I depended were Lalia Boone, Cort Conley, Ladd Hamilton, Louise Shadduck, Ralph Space, Sandra Taylor, and Johnny Johnson.

  In attempting to acknowledge the inevitable disparities between my recollection and that of those who might tell this story otherwise, I recall a line attributed to Barbara Kingsolver: “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

  For my husband, Robert Wrigley,

  my saving grace

  In memory of Nan,

  whose wisdom and courage

  continue to sustain me

  And for my parents

  Willows never forget how it feels

  to be young.

  Do you remember where you came from?

  Gravel remembers.

  Even the upper end of the river

  believes in the ocean.

  Exactly at midnight

  yesterday sighs away.

  What I believe is,

  all animals have one soul.

  Over the land they love

  they crisscross forever.

  —WILLIAM STAFFORD

  “CLIMBING ALONG THE RIVER”

  Until the spirit be poured

  upon us from on high, and the wilderness

  be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field

  be counted for a forest. Then

  judgment shall dwell in the wilderness….

  —ISAIAH 32:15,16

  CHAPTER ONE

  Past the Clearwater Timber Protection Association and the “Fire Danger” board, across the creek and before the dump, the small house squatted in a pocket of red fir and pine, not visible from the road. The locals called the hollow Dogpatch. The Joneses lived nearby, and Gerty Buck and her son, who owned a motorcycle, and someone else across the way who had two German shepherds chained to a clothesline. The dogs were the first things my younger brother, Greg, and I saw when we stepped off the bus after school. They barked ferociously, racing back and forth between the two T-shaped poles, until we disappeared down the steep path leading past the woodshed and root cellar to a small piece of flat ground surrounded by trees.

  Beside our house, painted the same umber red as other shacks built by local loggers on company land, flowed the spring, and from its constant source we took our water. Each day the train, pulling its load of logs, ran the route from Headquarters to the mill at Lewiston and back, and my brother and I, feeling the tremor of its coming before we heard the engine’s rumble, ran to the rear of the house and through the trees to wave at the brakeman and engineer. When not in school, we filled our days exploring the near woods, digging after ground squirrels, amassing piles of found treasure: feathers blue as river water, bones of deer, old buckets and chains, nests stitched through with colorful bits of moss.

  A narrow footbridge crossed the spring to the path leading to the outhouse. Several years before his death, one of my great-uncles, Ed Swanson, had added a small bathroom off the kitchen, but the pipes froze in winter and clogged in summer. The outdoor privy seemed familiar, made comfortable by a tightly closing door and a genuine toilet seat. Behind the outhouse the trees grew dense, and the little building seemed the last safe place before the forest closed in. It was a corner boundary for my brother and me—home base for hide-and-seek, our secret meeting place where we could be hidden from our mothers eyes.

  On the other side of the spring, the root cellar squatted deep in the bank beneath its cowl of sod. It had begun its service as a bomb shelter, dug out in one day by Uncle Ed during the Cuban missile crisis. I cannot imagine why the shy Swede believed Castro might target him and his family deep in the wilds of Idaho, but his panic and furious excavating became the stuff of family legend. He leveled the dirt floor, built the walls and roof of rough-cut cedar and hung a door so heavy the hinges shrieked when it opened. He filled the shelter with tins of food and brown Purex bottles of water. Finally, he cut a hole in one wall and added a large crank air vent. It reminded me of the meat grinder my mother used to make sausage, and when my brother and I together turned the handle the wind sang in fresh and cold.

  By the time we came to live in the hollow, the shelter had become a catchall for old clothes and empty boxes. We hauled case after case of pop bottles over the hill to Headquarters, pulling our wagon along the one-mile stretch of road, stopping each time a logging truck geared for the rise. When we gave a high, imaginary tug, the driver let loose a brawling blast from his air horn and we’d howl with pleasure. In Headquarters, the store saved its outdated comic books, covers torn away, in a pile behind the fishing gear. With the dimes from our turned-in bottles we could each head home with two comics and a chocolate cone, our wagon rattling empty behind us.

  Across the track was the dump with its brown corked bottles, the bits of metal and porcelain we carried home like booty. The deer bed was there, fragrant grass crushed beneath an overhanging branch of yellow pine. We would lie down and smell the musk, pick tufts of hair from the needles, imagine the warmth of a fawn nestled tight in the curve of its mother’s flank. We hunted the grouse that roosted near the house. Sometimes my brother and I would find them huddled in the woodshed. “Fool hens!” we’d shout, pumping our pellet guns, shooting them near the shed, where their wings beat against the metal siding.

  We fished no matter the season, first testing our luck in the shallow spring, then in Reeds Creek, cutting through the meadow a half mile south. We knew each shadowed pool and the fish that stilled themselves there: many times we jerked them free of the water, only to see them sail from our hooks like silvery kites. Always, we knew, they would return to their favorite bend, where grasses hung down and fat grasshoppers fell.

  The meadow spread out from the creek on either side, a marsh, really, spongy and thick with cattails. Deer fed at its edges and once, just as the big rainbow I had caught and lost five times before gave in to my patience and took the worm I let drift one last time by its hole, from the corner of my eye I saw the ground shift and settle. In a nesting of dry fern lay a fawn, curled against itself and nearly invisible. The ro
d jumped in my hands but I could not look from that spot. I was afraid the shape might disappear, my sight might deceive me, though the fawn huddled so close I might cast my line across its dappled back. As still as it was I could see the body tremble, the nostrils flare with the scent of me.

  I knew I’d lost the fish. The tension in the line was gone, and the rod no longer quivered as though it held life of its own. I backed away, looking up the trail toward home only after I had lost the white spots and dark eyes to the tall grasses. There was a secret there, more mysterious than the fish sleeping without air in beds of gravel. I wanted it to stay.

  I remember the late autumn evening my brother did not come home, the snow beginning to fall, my mother standing in the yard, hands cupped to her mouth, his name echoing back, all the love and fear in her voice repeated again and again. We knew better than to try and find him in the dark and could only wait, shivering in the cold, for my father to come home.

  I think of us there, a woman of twenty-nine, a girl of eleven, both imagining a life without this other—son, brother—both believing that the one who could save him would arrive at any moment, bringing with him his strength and sense of the woods. My father, we believed, might see through the blackness, his eyes so blue they seemed clairvoyant. We believed he might feel in the air my brother’s lost breath, trace with his fingers the heat left by his body. If only he’d come, now, now.

  But by the time he came home Greg was stumbling from the trees, clutching the scruff of our dog’s neck, nearly deaf from the cold. He screamed as my mother rubbed his fingers into life, her prayers and scoldings a constant chorus. I stood ready with warmed blankets, feeling outside something dark slip away, taking with it its hunger.

  I recall my father’s absence in that place more than his presence, the sound of logging—his saw, the clanking choker—more than the tenor of his voice. So much had changed since the first years of my life spent living in the woods, years when we moved from one logging site to another, my father and uncles hitching our wooden trailers to the backs of self-loaders and surplus jeeps, filling the cars with cardboard boxes, stashing our treasure like gypsies. Those were the years when my parents seemed happy to live hand-to-mouth as long as the hand that held the food, as long as the mouth that received it, was that of the other. I think of their traditional wedding pose—my father eighteen, my mother sixteen—each holding to the other’s lips the sweetly frosted cake.

  The year we spent living in the hollow, the year I turned twelve, was the last year we would live in the woods, the last year I would sleep beneath the soft brush of pine against the tin roof, the last year I would remember our family as somehow whole. From that house we would take nothing that did not fit into the trunk of our car and make our final trip down the river road to town.

  My life would change in ways I could no more dream than a far-off soldier might imagine an enemy hidden in a shelter beneath the mounded forest floor, or a young girl, fishing the shallow stream, might for a moment believe a heart other than her own beat in the meadow’s thick grass. Who is that girl, the rod still quivering in her hands, rapturously balanced between two worlds? I sometimes think that if I could go back, follow the driveway down, past the woodshed and out into the meadow, I might find her—I might find what I have lost. Like my brother wandering in the wilderness, I might find home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 th
e 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.