In the Wilderness Read online

  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.

  From the muddy bank they watched bits of paper and blackened cloth rise on dark columns, knowing the neighbors would see the smoke and come running with their buckets and shovels. But it would be too late. It always was. The women would comfort the wife. The men would stand silent, spitting in the dirt, already planning their own run for whiskey.

  My grandfather’s drunks got longer and more frequent. The fire was not the reason: they had endured so much by then that fire seemed only a purer form of loss. The man remembered by his sons for his quickness and agility seemed to buckle as he walked. He had been known to jump from a moving tractor, come up holding a copperhead by its tail and be back in his seat before the snapped-off head hit the ground. The only singing he did was at the bar with the other men who could not face sober another season of stunted crops and government handouts. He often drank with his wife’s father and her brother-in-law, and the four of them would disappear for days, finally staggering home filthy and hungover. My grandmother made him sleep on the porch and would not feed him until his chores were done. He was sheepish then, shamed and sorry, and worked like
a man possessed, breaking the clay into rock-hard clods, filling the empty larder with fat squirrels and partridge.

  The daughter married and moved away. The older boys became vigilant, protective of their mother, who sent them into town to search for their father in the beer joints. When they found him, they carried him to the old pickup and rolled him into the bed, where he slept the rough road home, bouncing about like a dead man.

  In the spring of 1955, my grandmother stood on the porch, blocking the fierce Oklahoma sun with her raised hand. She peered across the field where the old creek bed ran. She had been waiting for her husband’s drunken arrival when the noise had reached her—the muffled whump of earth and metal colliding.

  Had the fools run off the road? She refused to allow herself fear, believing they were probably hanging from the doors even now, laughing and deciding it was as good a time as any to take a pee.

  She waited for several minutes, then called Roland from the house. With Ronnie, the oldest, in the service, it was Roland she relied on to handle her husband. Roland was not afraid of his father, and if need be, he could outrun the staggering man and hide until his rage died.

  She watched Roland climb into the car and take off down the road, disappearing over the hill’s crest, then saw him again as he crossed the bridge and dropped out of sight behind the trees. She stood there, feeling the cooling wind catch the thin skirt of her housedress, feeling the sweat run from beneath her arms and pool at her belted waist. When she saw her son again, his face was white behind the wheel. Even from a distance, she could see the red blotches covering his arms.

  The boy staggered from the car. He was crying.

  “What is it? Tell me. Are they dead?”

  “Daddy’s hurt bad. Real bad.”

  “Go fetch Uncle Everett. Do it now! Run!”

  She turned and saw her youngest boy looking at her, his mouth drawn tight. “Get in the house. You go sit and be still, you hear?”

  He was staring. Across the front of her, handprints bloomed like bloody roses.

  My father wasn’t there. He was a high school junior, gone to Lawton on a class trip. But when he stepped off the bus, he knew what the girl who waited for him, the one who worked as the local telephone operator, would say. He had dreamed it already: his father was dead.

  The accident that killed my grandfather also killed my grandmother’s father. Her brother-in-law, who had been driving and missed the bridge, sending the car nose-first into the dry creek bed, was injured but survived. What did my grandmother have left to sustain her? When the letter came from Idaho, they all agreed it would be a new start, a way for the boys to learn a trade. Clyde guaranteed them food and shelter, and that was more than she had ever been promised. Roland would stay behind until everything was sold—furniture, pickup, farm equipment, my grandfather’s beloved hounds—and Ronnie would follow the next summer when his stint in the service ended. My father and his youngest brother boarded the train with their mother and headed for the Northwest.

  Many times I heard my Uncle Clyde say, “I looked to those hills and thought, No man should ever go hungry here.” Deer, elk, partridge, fish thick as a baby’s leg from the smallest stream. And the trees, stretching from the Snake to the Clearwater, Lochsa and Selway, from Oregon and Washington to Montana. With hard work, guts and ingenuity, a man could feed his family and make money besides.

  He had begun working for his brother at Waha, sending logs out by train north to Lewiston. He saved his money, took extra odd jobs, asked the markets for their old produce and bread, scavenged from garbage bins. Every fall, he shot one elk, one deer. Every summer, he and Daisy fished, filling milk cartons with rainbow trout, freezing them in solid blocks of ice. They harvested blackcaps, huckleberries, plums, cherries, apples, apricots, anything and everything they could gather or glean. With some of the fruit, she made pies and sold them to the cafes.

  For one winter and one winter only, Clyde worked for Potlatch Forests Incorporated, mushing into the isolated logging camps along the North Fork of the Clearwater River with Daisy and their daughter, Peggy, bundled tight in the dogsled. The only women in the camps were prostitutes, whom Daisy, in her role as head cook, immediately put to work as flunkies serving three meals a day to long tables of hungry men, washing stacks of dishes, wringing from the plaid wool shirts and denim pants gallon after gallon of ambered water.

  Clyde bought used and broken equipment, military surplus he rigged with booms and hitches. He was a genius with tools, gears and ratchets. What parts he couldn’t buy, he made. He knew that his small wages were nothing compared with the profit gained by the company, and when after that first year he came out owing them money, he was determined to strike out on his own, to become what the loggers called a gyppo, independent of corporate ties. With a good crew he could do it.

  By the time my father and his family came to live in the Clearwater National Forest, Clyde had cleared a site along Orofino Creek, within fifteen miles of Pierce, a town (population five hundred to one thousand, depending on the season) located ninety miles east and slightly north of Lewiston. He gave my grandmother her own shack, put the boys in another. For eight bits an hour, they cut and skidded, dodged wind-snapped crowns and barber-chaired fir, kicked-back saws and heart-rotted cedar. They spent the evenings gathered in the narrow room, laughing at how bad the injury might have been, how narrow the escape, how close Death got before they poked Him in the eye with a peavey, stomped His toe with spiked boots, buried Him beneath tons of piss pine. They laughed at their own foolishness, eight bits an hour while the old man got rich.

  My father laughed loudest. When his brothers fought a frozen saw, cursed and kicked a jammed winch, my father laughed. He laughed as they tumbled over stumps, madder at him than the machinery. When he stripped a gear, knotted cable, caught an ankle while decking logs, he reacted calmly, taking one last drag off his Camel before bending to survey the damage, to undo what needed to be undone. There was nothing he couldn’t make sense of, no breakdown or injury that couldn’t be learned from.

  “People kill the things they most love,” said A. B. Guthrie, who knew as much as anybody about love of land. Day after day my father sawed, fell, limbed, skidded and burned what he lived for. The money, what little he earned, meant nothing. The woods, he said, had gotten in his blood.

  In 1956, when my father called his high school sweetheart and asked her to marry him, the logging camps lay surrounded by hundreds of miles of uncut forest. The sites themselves consisted of five or six eight-by-twenty-foot clapboard trailers circled like a wagon train amid the new stumps and slash piles. Each trailer held a bed, woodstove, table, and two straight-back chairs. A few were equipped with primitive plumbing—a single sink that drained onto the dirt below.

  When my mother came to Idaho, she was a young and lovely woman making her own escape into the wilderness. She told her grandmother with whom she lived that she would be back the next fall to finish school. She climbed into the car with Roland, her future brother-in-law, who had bartered and sold what was left of the family’s possessions and was headed for the woods. It would be years before she returned, holding me by one hand, my brother straddling her hip.

  She has told me the first months were hard, even though she loved my father and wanted to be with him. The weeks before the wedding, she stayed in my grandmother’s small shack, sharing the double bed with her future mother-in-law. Unlike my father, she had no siblings, and the unaccustomed closeness of another left her unable to settle into sleep, fearing the movement of her own dreaming body.

  As cramped and self-conscious as she was, she still believed herself lucky. She had spent much of her childhood in Oklahoma City. Her father was a professional gambler, a grifter, and their conditions were determined by his winnings. One day they would be rich; the next they would spend in a cheap motel where she and her mother waited the long hours for my grandfather’s return. She remembers a period of several months, when she was four or five, spent in California
, in a hotel whose lobby was draped in red velvet. There, while her parents slept late, she would wander the halls, accepting candy and coins from the bellboys and an old black porter, who placed in her palm each morning a new and shiny dime. She explored the surrounding avenues and stores, taking Princess Diamond Jill with her, the champion-sired English bulldog won by her father in a card game.

  Princess moved with them to the house my mother remembers as a mansion, and in my own imagination the home and its contents have taken on fairy tale proportions: in the closets the relinquished clothes of a wealthy lawyer and his wife; brocade furniture; china plates and silverware and a pantry full of food; my mother carrying each dish from kitchen to table with painful care, feeling the fragility of crystal, trembling with the weighty roasts and brown gravy, while Red, as my grandfather was known, settled comfortably into the captain’s chair, pulling from his pocket the heavy gold watch won from the man between whose elegant and ironed sheets he would soon sleep.

  Then one night her mother woke her, wrapped her in a blanket and led her to the car—a shining Mercury with plush upholstery. No matter what else her father might win or lose, he always had a fine new car.

  They left the house as they had found it—clothes neatly pressed and hung, the dishes nested in their windowed cabinets—as though their presence there had been weightless. Her father hunched behind the wheel. She could smell on him the hot bar smells—the sawdust mixed with spit and spilled beer, the rank whiskey, the perfume of someone she did not know. They headed west out of town. She watched the lights of Oklahoma City fade, and when she could see them no more, she laid her head against the window and gazed into the starred night sky, gently stroking the strong, broad back of the dog.