In the Wilderness Read online

  My mother must have taken my brother and me to the parsonage to wait with Sarah and Sister Lang. I remember night coming on, the light fading in degrees, like a drape being pulled against any vision we had of ever seeing Matthew again. I remember the stillness, the house so silent, words all we had to bid against the dark.

  How long before we heard the doors slam, the men tramping onto the porch? When Brother Lang stepped in, he was pale and sweaty. He looked to me and then Greg, as though in our eyes he might find what he was searching for.

  Sister Lang stood facing him, her eyes taking in the slump of his shoulders, the set of his mouth. Cold pushed in behind them, filling the room with the smell of woodsmoke.

  “What is it, Joseph?” she asked. Then louder, “What is it?”

  “We can’t find him.”

  “What do you mean, can’t find him?” Sister Lang stepped toward her husband, but when he reached to touch her arm, she brushed his hand away.

  “You’ve got to go back. He’ll die out there.”

  “No one’s going to die, Mona. Matthew’s smart. He knows what to do.” He let his voice drop and rested his hands on her shoulders. “We must have faith.”

  “How could you leave him? Go back! Go back!” She lunged, slapping his coat, his arms, his chest.

  I felt my brother crowding against my side. My mother had run outside to meet my father. The moon cast long, narrow shadows across the snow, and through the window I could see my parents facing each other beneath the burned-out floodlight. They looked young to me then, maybe sixteen or seventeen, as though they were on a date and taking as long as they could before being called in for the night.

  They set up search camp at the base of the mountain—townspeople and every available adult from our church. The women brought casseroles and coffee. The men napped in their pickups between sweeps. The nights’ cold blanketed the trees with a thin layer of crystalline ice. Ravens sat like little priests in the blown-out crowns of yellow pine.

  My brother and I were left with Sister Ward. We sat in the strange living room, watching TV and eating popcorn, focused on the blue square of flickering light, while she puttered in her kitchen, muffling every move as though the uninterrupted noise of the soundtrack were all that kept us tamed and content. I let myself exist in that room with studied attention. I did not think of my parents on the mountain, nor of Luke with his father and Terry calling Matthew’s name. I didn’t ask when anyone would be back. I sat beside Greg, cross-legged on the floor for hours, he as silent as I, watching Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in bathing suits dance by the light of a beach fire.

  They found him three days later, his neck wedged in the fork of a downed tree. Some believed he had been chasing an elk and slipped; he was unconscious immediately from the pressure against his jugular, the sheriff said, unable to free himself, the limbs holding his face to the sky as though he had simply fallen asleep tracing the movement of stars.

  Greg and I had been shuffled to the house of Sister Ward’s daughter, and when she told us they’d found Matthew and that he was dead, I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. I sat on the rim of the tub, trying to focus on the linoleum’s intricate geometry. I heard my brother crying, and then a gentle knock.

  “Kim, are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence and then the woman’s voice comforting Greg. I knew I should go to him. I should be crying too. I picked at my knees, the scrapes from a playground fall nearly healed. I said “dead dead dead” over and over again until I didn’t know the word anymore and it was just a sound in my mouth.

  • • •

  Days later, when Brother Lang opened Matthew’s Bible, left on the chair by the woodstove, he found passages underlined in red, all seemingly prophetic of Matthew’s death. He’d been so quiet the night before, playing his harmonica more plaintively than we’d ever heard. Had he known he was going to die?

  Even though we believed God’s will had been done and all things work together for the good, that last winter held little comfort for any of us. Brother Lang continued preaching, approaching the podium with the same halting gait as when he had fasted. Their ministry was broken; without Matthew, their dreams of a brother-and-sister singing success could never be realized. I wonder now why it seemed they never considered Luke as part of the mission. Maybe it was because he seemed to lack the seriousness of the calling that Matthew had possessed. I wondered if they wished it had been Luke they’d found dusted white with snow.

  In town, when women offered their opinions, clicking their tongues over the tragedy of such a wonderful young man so soon gone, my mother lowered her eyes and closed her ears, knowing that Matthew’s death was no accident but an act of God’s will. When men at the lunch counter wondered out loud why anyone would let a fifteen-year-old kid trail off alone, my brother and I glared at their wool-covered backs. “Found him stiff as a board, no matches, no nothin’.” “Aren’t from around here, are they?” I burned with anger at their smug ignorance. I wanted to believe that something had led Matthew into that wilderness, that he had known and accepted his fate with brave resignation, but I wasn’t sure that God should warn you like that, then make you go anyway.

  • • •

  It had been dusk when they pulled off the road and began their hunt, crossing into a forest they knew little of. It is this my father cannot understand—why men intimate with the ways of the woods would go against a code they understood held the balance between life and death. Matthew’s death has remained a mystery—a freak accident, we call it now. Still, my father shakes his head when we speak of it. “There comes a time in the evening,” he says, “when you should never go into unknown country.”

  Our life with the Langs was never the same after that. The laughter quieted to an occasional weak chuckle. Sister Lang barely acknowledged my presence, and Sarah’s face seemed permanently altered, drawn into rigid lines. It seemed to me that both women blamed their husbands for Matthew’s death, and when Sarah looked at Terry I saw in her face not love but something closer to hate.

  I missed the parsonage, the warm room and dark stairway. I missed the late evenings of music and laughter. Now there was this thing that separated us each from the other, as though the pain we all felt would only be intensified by our sharing it. My parents were silent. My brother and I kept to our books. The winter passed into my memory as bitterly cold, more night than day. We drifted through the stillest air, tethered to our tables by threads of hunger, to our beds by their small promise of warmth.

  I watched Sister Lang’s face, motionless as the moon, Luke forever beside her, his hand at her elbow. I watched Sarah turn from the husband she believed should have known better than to let Matthew go off alone, who should have called him in before it was too late. Wasn’t he, after all, the one the hunters from California called to lead them to the dens of sleeping bears? How could he track a sow gone weeks to her bed and be unable to find a boy lost only hours in new snow?

  My father I saw brace himself to take on whatever pain another could not bear. He never questioned out loud, never asked how or why, but eased the grief of others onto his own shoulders. He spoke slowly, smiled just enough to make us all believe God’s will was still sweet, his ways mysterious.

  What was it, then, that brewed in my father that winter if not the battle he waged with his own will? He wanted every cell of his existence to submit to God’s order. He wanted to be tested and consumed by the Spirit, to hear the voice of Christ Himself call from him some sacrifice. Perhaps he saw in the movement of seasons something unfolding, threatening his guarded circle, his family, his life. The demon he had seen at the bedroom door the year before still cast its shadow across his soul, and as winter deepened and the cold shut down logging, he studied his Bible late into the night. I fell asleep to the murmur of his prayers.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Grass sprouted from the cratered snow. The creek flooded its narrow banks and spread into the meadow. Sp
ring came late to our hollow, the trees grown close as ribs around us. During high summer, we would welcome the dense shading, but the blossoming of April and May was lost to late frosts. Mornings, my brother and I ran to catch the sun long before the bus made its way to our stop, happy to sit at the side of the road, where the asphalt radiated warmth and robins trilled.

  Most loggers found the layoff of spring thaw a time to mend the shingles loosened by winter winds or putter beneath the mud-crusted engine of a favored pickup. My father did neither. My mother, Greg and I stood in the yard, a small gathering of silent well-wishers watching him walk toward the bomb shelter, lift the latch and step in. The door seemed to shut of its own accord, darkening his face an inch at a time until all that remained of my fathers presence was the lingering smoke of his final cigarette.

  He was embarking upon a quest, like Jesus in the wilderness, or like Sir Galahad, I thought. He intended to remain in the bunker for forty days and forty nights, fasting and praying. He wanted to be wholly taken, to be tested and purified, perhaps to understand the meaning of the demon’s visit. He would hold his own body hostage until it became both sacrifice and ransom, until God offered in return for his suffering a vision.

  My mother stood wiping her hands again and again in the damp folds of her apron. “Now,” she said, an affirmation of something about to begin or end. She turned and walked back into the kitchen, leaving my brother and me to wonder at the two closed doors: our father behind one, a man driven to acts of abstinence and conquest; our mother behind the other, working over the counter her incantations that made dough rise and egg whites stiffen into perfect peaks.

  For a moment I felt orphaned, shut off from either world. My mother was not the same, could not be the same, with my father gone. His absence both diminished and enhanced her presence, and I wasn’t sure how things would be between us. Her usual threats of discipline—I’ll tell your father if you don’t … You better not let your dad see you doing … We’ll talk about it when your father gets home—were suddenly worthless: she would not dare break his solitude. With this realization came a sense of my mother’s vulnerability and my own responsibility to shelter her, to take on my role as eldest child. The romance of it all thrilled me; already I had transformed my parents into gallant lovers, my father a knight striding off to do business with dragons (how fitting that even though he went by Neil, his given name was Arthur!), my mother, the fair and faithful wife left to keep the homefires burning.

  “Now,” I said to my brother and turned him toward the house, where we were needed.

  I stole glimpses of the shelter those first few hours, imagining my father kneeling by the single cot, or stretched out on the floor, face down, suppliant before the Spirit. I never saw his shadow pass the small window. Not even his prayers escaped the earth-bermed walls. It was as though he had been swallowed into the hillside, gone to die or win the battle with hellish things. I offered my own prayers for his journey as I dusted and swept, mimicking the quiet diligence of my mother, who seemed to have shut herself away in her own body, her weapons of defense a mop and sponge. Instead of watching the shelter like a wife might watch the sea for sign of her sailor, my mother filled her hours with intense cleaning and organizing. The pained longing I had imagined she might feel—the sighs, the lingering contemplation of her husband’s chair—instead took the form of determined orderliness. Guinevere was a drudge.

  My mothers emotions were no doubt closer to fear and concern than any kind of chivalric nonsense, and like many women, she quelled her tremors of anxiety by controlling what she could: the state of her household. The intended length of my father’s isolation must have seemed infinite. Since her marriage at age sixteen, the longest she had been separated from her husband was for a week when she took my brother and me by train to visit relatives in Oklahoma. Certainly, if a bear were to ramble into the yard or a fire break out, my father would be only feet away, able to rescue us if needed. But it was the nights she feared, not because of wild animals or even demons, but because it was then she had to lay down her weapons and be still. It was then that she felt the doubts and the guilt that accompanied them, wondering at the makeup of this man who had brought her into the wilderness.

  She remembered Brother Lang’s fast, how weak and brittle he’d become, and she could not imagine her husband’s body wasted, his broad chest and strong legs gone to bone. She believed in his need to do this thing. She believed in divine inspiration. Yet the voice of the world still reached her, in that gray sea of near sleep: He’s abandoned you in the middle of nowhere. He thinks he sees demons. He’s obsessed, dangerous, mad. The voice was sometimes one she recognized, come from the past to haunt her. What would her grandmother think, her mother? She could see their eyes narrow, their mouths tighten, their judgment settle heavy and unspoken. Even some of the church people were sure to view such conspicuous self-denial as suspect, and she steeled herself to ignore their looks of pity, the wagging of heads when they thought her back was turned. Perhaps, too, she feared for the sake of me and my brother. Our school friends might find out, taunt us, deny us a place on the merry-go-round, throw rocks at our backs as we walked from the bus. Already we were set apart by our dress and our daily prayer over sack lunches.

  These fears raised yet another fear: that Satan was weakening her in order to reach my father. If she were not strong enough to resist such trivial concerns as gossip and peer exile, she would fail in her role as helpmate. She remembered the words of Christ—“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” She prayed that the vision would come soon.

  • • •

  On the third day of my fathers seclusion, a Saturday, a white Ford station wagon bumped down the narrow road to our house, Uncle Barry grinning behind the wheel. My cousins sat in back, holding strawberry sodas and Planters peanuts. Aunt Mary grasped the dashboard with one hand and the door handle with the other. “Surprise,” they yelled as they crawled from the mud-spattered car. “Surprise!”

  My mother stood still in the doorway as my cousins handed me and Greg a soda. Their mouths were circled in red.

  “You didn’t call that you were coming.” My mother looked from them to the shelter and back.

  “Where’s Neil? Tell him his little brother’s here. He ain’t working, is he?”

  I sipped the warm pop. Greg had already run across the bridge with our cousins, who thought the outhouse was a castle.

  “Barry, Neil’s not here. He’s searching for the Spirit.”

  Mary stood fanning herself by the car. She got carsick a lot. Barry, who had no religion at all, stared at my mother as though it were she who had lost her mind.

  “What do you mean? Where is he?”

  My mother wiped her hands on her apron and nodded toward the shelter. I kept my eyes on the car and wondered if my father could hear us.

  “He’s set himself off, Barry, so God will speak to him. He’ll stay in there forty days and forty nights if he has to.” My mother’s voice was steady, and I took my cue from her, straightening my shoulders and bringing my gaze up to meet my uncle’s. He looked from one of us to the other, then ran his fingers hard through his hair.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake!” He turned several small circles, as though trying to get his bearings, then stopped and glared at the bunker. X-ray vision, I thought. He wants to be like Superman.

  “Lezlie! Chad! Get in the car.” His bellow echoed through the hollow, and my cousins came running, something in his voice that made them think trouble. Aunt Mary was already in. I don’t remember that she had said a word. She was watching my mother.

  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.