In the Wilderness Page 22

  When John wasn’t working as a carpenter’s apprentice, he took me into the mountains. He had promised that in the fall he would lead me to the breaks of the Salmon River, where pheasant and chukar made tunnels through thistle; we practiced our aim on the hundreds of ground squirrels whose burrows mounded the high meadows. But he had gone camping for the weekend, and I was stuck behind a plateglass window dusting Bag Balm.

  I imagined him wading the shallows of a mountain stream—the breeze still cold off the higher snow fields, the fish smell of fresh water, the pitched hum of insects waking to the sun. Nothing felt more right than being surrounded by pine and cedar, fir and spruce, the tamarack that bared its branches in winter like a common town tree.

  Even better was to be with John in the woods. I loved his love of the forest, his knowledge of animals, his accuracy with a rifle. I loved pleasing him with the accuracy of my own marksmanship. I loved the way he spread his flannel shirt on a bed of needles and covered me with his body. I loved looking past his head and seeing the sky, not just a piece of blue, but the whole of it from horizon to horizon. I loved the way the ravens called as they passed over, not a warning or hoarse caw of fear, but a cry of acknowledgment: there, there.

  Standing at the counter, longing for the presence of ravens, it came to me that I could go into the woods anyway, by myself. Tomorrow was my day off. I could go fishing, take my .22, find the squirrels and shoot them. I would cut off and bring home the wiry little tails, as John did, proof of my good eye and independence. But I wouldn’t go into the closest mountains. Instead, I would go to the Clearwater, back into that place from which I came.

  The next morning, I loaded my fishing rod, tackle box and .22 into the car and drove the river road east. It felt strange at first, doing something like this without a male companion, but as I left the city I felt the uneasiness lift. I was on a road I knew well. The river, slowed by dams and straightened by dikes at Lewiston, quickened upstream. Even though the North Fork no longer ran free, the Middle Fork still flowed in below the dam and lent to the Clearwater River a remnant of its remembered current.

  As I came into Orofino, the sight of Dworshak Dam stunned me. No matter how large I remembered it, its enormity didn’t seem real. I had felt the power of the river, had seen it tear away trees and float entire buildings during spring thaw: I tried to imagine the workers detouring the water in order to pour concrete and anchor steel. It seemed an impossible task.

  I crossed the bridge at Greer and wound my way up the mountain. The grade ended abruptly, spilling out onto a flat expanse of cultivated fields, already green with new wheat. In the distance the trees formed a protective circle and the hills rose even higher into dense forest and alpine meadows. Even if the river and its canyon had become something foreign, the Weippe Prairie had not.

  I rolled down my window and breathed in the rich smell of damp earth and early flowers—balsam root, dog fennel, lupine and camas—that floated on the heavier perfume of pine. The tears that stung my eyes surprised me, and I let out a loud “Hah!” It was a good noise, a sound of skepticism and control. It worked. I shook my head and tried to remember the road I would follow through Weippe and on into Pierce, the series of turns I would need to take in order to reach Reeds Creek.

  At first, Pierce didn’t seem much different. There was Kimball’s Drug, the Confectionery, the old Clearwater Hotel. But as I drove slowly down Main Street, I realized what I wasn’t seeing: people. No old-timers sat in the hotel window, pinging empty Folger’s cans with spit. No women stood in the doorway of Durant’s Dry Goods, testing the warm weather with bare arms and pinned-up hair.

  The school, I knew, had been closed and condemned, the children bussed to the new building, halfway between Pierce and Weippe, pledging allegiance with the Weippe Gorillas, the team we had once considered our arch rivals. But the post office—it should never be empty. Just then a dog barked and a woman bellowed for it to shut up. I relaxed my grip on the wheel.

  Everyone is at work, I thought. Later, on the way home, when I come back through, it will be different. I picked up speed, heading toward the hollow, fighting the sense of urgency rising in my chest.

  Pole Camp was gone. Only the shop remained, a dustier shade of red, but still standing. I pulled off the road and stared at the clearing where our circle had been. I looked closer and saw the house that Clyde and Daisy had built, the one with a genuine foundation. The forest had closed it in, but the windows were curtained, the burn barrel still upright. I searched the clearing for the stumps our trailers had rested on, the outhouse, anything that might verify that my life there had been real.

  There—behind the lightning-struck yellow pine, we had had our secret place. There my cousins and I had eaten thick butter-and-sugar sandwiches, quarreled and made up, come for solace and pity after a whipping. I wondered if at twilight the elk still came into the meadow—beyond where the wash shed had stood—to eat the marsh grass and whistle their calves in.

  A few miles farther, I passed the Jaype mill, whose name I had always heard as initials—J.P.—still huffing out its smoke. A solitary loader swung its jaws over a deck of logs, lifting six or seven at a time and placing them precisely between the hard metal ribs of a rail car. The familiar activity was a comfort, and I drove on toward Cardiff, where the church and parsonage stood skirted by a bog of mud. I did not slow to look. I wanted the woods. The creek would be there, the meadow where I had seen the fawn, the hollow with its sheltering trees. No matter what I did, no matter how many times I left, I could always come back to the woods.

  I hardly noticed the clearcuts behind the stingy buffer of trees left standing along the road. The logging didn’t surprise me. I expected to see raw stumpage and slash piles, the knee-deep gouges left by skidders. This was part of the life there, the sound of saws as familiar as the wind through the trees. But this wasn’t the forest. The trees could fall but the forest would somehow remain, always out there, always removed and separate from what we called timber.

  I turned onto the dirt road that paralleled Reeds Creek, my old Chevy chattering across ruts, working my way back to where I knew the branches shaded the deeper holes and fat trout wallowed in silt. The hollow lay just across the meadow, hidden behind the thick grove of pine. Already the sun had crested and begun its slide behind the mountain, and I knew the house would be dark and cool.

  The creek seemed changed, shallower and muddier (had it ever been the strong clear flow I remembered?), and as I wound my way back, the water thickened. Within a mile the current was dead, dammed by a mass of slash.

  I stared at the mound of roots and limbs, at the bulldozed wad of dirt and stumps. Fingers of water had found their way through, following the curve of branches, seeping between rock and wood. Behind the mound the ground was scraped and pitted. A sheen of oil slicked the stagnant pools.

  “No, not here,” I whispered. “Please, not here.” I stepped slowly from the car. Insects skimmed the surface of the water, yet the water remained still—there were no fish to rise.

  It was as though I had been hit, as though I could taste the blood in my mouth. I reached into the backseat, loaded my rifle and shot. A small explosion of dust erupted from the slash. I shot again, then emptied the .22 as fast as I could pump. I pulled all the ammunition I had from my pockets, reloaded and shot again, pulled the maps and Kleenex from the glove compartment until I found the last box and aimed and shot until my ears rang.

  I hated it. I hated the dozer that made it, the man who pushed it there, the company the man worked for. No one was innocent. I slumped against the car and cried. Something had broken—whatever thread it was that tied me to my life there. The water that had fed me, cooled me, cleansed me had been choked off, turned to sludge.

  Alone in the woods, the air and sun still unchanged, the throaty trill of a meadowlark reached me, and I felt an overwhelming sadness—not just because of the creek, but because of the flood of memories and feelings that swept over me. It was as though see
ing the creek this way had released all the emotions I had tamped down and buried since we left the house in the hollow.

  What I mourned was the loss of myself: that girl who had fished long into the warm summer afternoons, who had believed in a world held solid by family and the encircling presence of trees. I wanted it all back: the red shack; my brother still a comrade who would accompany me into the darkest glens; my mother in her apron, bent over pies, listening for the dieseling idle of my father’s pickup; my father bringing in the cedar-scented air, a man for whom the world had made itself simple.

  I knelt and gathered the dirt in my hands. It sifted through my fingers like powder. The land had been scavenged, scraped, then burned to sterile ash. I knew nothing could ever grow there—not in my lifetime, not until the wind and rain had covered the scar with sediment deep enough to nurture the seeds that might fall from the few remaining pines.

  I left the creek, following the dirt road back to pavement. I would not go to the hollow that day; I could not bear what I might see. Instead, I drove the road slowly back toward Pierce, past the bunk buildings of the Clearwater Timber Protection Association, past the wide curve in the creek where I had been baptized. Then Cardiff, where the parsonage with its creosote-stained siding squatted silent and cold, even though the sun shone brilliantly off its tin roof.

  This time I stopped. I rolled down my window and studied the parsonage and the church. How small they seemed: the plain building, now looking dispatched, settled into disrepair, seemed an unlikely place to have ever contained the warmth I remembered, the loud singing and boisterous praise, the preachers twirling like dervishes down the aisles. I knew that inside the doors of the church was a wall of obsidian, built by one of the elders as a gift to the congregation. Many times I had studied its makeup. The black shards reflected my face in broken whorls, and when I reached to touch the fractured image I felt the cutting edge of glass.

  The double-seated outhouse still stood tilted between the house and church. Did the rope swing still hang from the cottonwood limb above the creek, the one only the boys were allowed to sail from? Beyond the creek lay the railroad and the trails of coyote and bobcat.

  Where were those skulls now, perfectly matched, incisors gleaming? Did the Langs carry them in their gypsy caravan, stashed with the hymnals, cushioned by tea towels and aprons? They would be picking cherries somewhere in Oregon, camped in a canvas-walled tent, singing their songs of faith.

  I let myself miss the Langs as I had known them then, and felt with a nauseating intensity the shame and betrayal they had left me with. Times before, on a day such as this, the sun greening the leaves, warming the stone flies to hatch and swarm the creeks, Luke and I might have found ourselves alone in the church. In another place, another time, it might have been called first love. Whatever it was I felt then was lost to me now.

  I thought of the life we had all lived there for those few years. So little of it seemed real, so little of it made sense outside the world we had created for ourselves. I pulled onto the road and drove the miles back to Pierce, its windows and sidewalks still faceless, then on to Lewiston, to my apartment empty of anything that felt like family.

  Sitting on the kitchen counter that night, smoking, flicking ash into the sink, I let the cool air from the open window draw the cloud of my breath away. Outside, the locust trees hung heavy with their sweet blossoms, drawing the bees in clusters that wove and bobbed through the branches like dark drowsy spirits. I had nothing to attach the trees’ fragrance to, no memory I might later recall and feel the rhythms of life continue.

  That night was one of many I would spend alone, balanced at the window, smoking and looking into the night for some sense of what my life might be made of. For the next fifteen years, there would be no place I could find that gave me comfort, no place I believed I might be sheltered from the world—no sanctuary, not in the arms of a lover or the house of a friend, not even in my own bed, there least of all, for it was there that the fear set in and the dreams found me, and always I was running, trying to hide, trying to find the place of safety I had left, the way back a dim and impossible memory.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  My father’s arms encircle me as he snugs the rifle into my shoulder, pressing me against his legs. He steadies my left elbow, extended and trembling with the barrel’s weight. I lay my cheek on the cool wood, breathing in the camphor of gun oil.

  “Steady,” my father says. “Don’t hold your breath. Aim like you’re pointing your finger.”

  The target—a red circle crayoned on butcher paper and tacked to a stump—seems more distant with one eye closed. I know in a moment my arms will collapse, that the rifle will fall from my hands. Imagining the lovely brown stock caked with mud makes me shudder. I focus on the wavering bead and touch the trigger. The still afternoon explodes into pain, sharp and burning, spreading from my shoulder to the tingling tips of my fingers. My ears ring as the shock reverberates across the meadow.

  He moves from behind me, loosens my hands, cradles the rifle against his chest. He pulls a Camel from his pocket and smiles, a full, eye-wrinkling grin, holding the cigarette between his teeth. He is proud of me.

  He nods toward the target. “Let’s go see,” he says, and I move after him, my shoulder numbing, still feeling at my back the cool air of his absence. It is 1964. I am six.

  I am twenty, my father’s age when I was born. He, my brother and I sit in the pickup, parked somewhere in the Clearwater National Forest, drinking sweet tea from a thermos, waiting for dawn. Nearly a decade after moving to Lewiston, we have come back to hunt my fathers country.

  It has been two years since I left home on graduation night, and we have barely spoken since. Two years on my own have given me the courage to believe that I’m independent enough to forge a new relationship with my father based on love and respect rather than on authority and obedience. I want to be welcomed into his home again. I want him to stay in the room when I enter to visit my mother. I want him to stop getting up from the table when I sit down. More than anything, I want a family that will not shun me.

  I know that our truce will not come via apology—we both hold firm to the decision we made that day—and so I’ve found another alliance: I’ve asked him to hunt with me, to show me the land he knows. He logged it, punching through skidroads now grown over with chokecherry and alder. The thicketed draws, the stands of cedar, the meadows lush with tall grass and lupine are landmarks he lived by, familiar beyond simple memory. He has moved through this landscape, taken it inside of him, worked in the bone-deep cold of its winters, hauled from its heart millions of board feet. He has found the water sprung from rock and filled his hands with it, so cold it seemed molten.

  I crave his intimate knowledge of the woods and want to show him what I have learned. I’ll point out the deep-cut track of a running deer (twin divots at the back—it’s a buck, then), name for him the birds that cross the sky (flicker, evening grosbeak, pine siskin, and that one you call “camp robber”—it’s really only a gray jay). Given the chance, I’ll prove my marksmanship, but not with the rifle I’ve carried for the last year. I’ve given the Winchester 30.06 back to him, cleaned, oiled and polished—a token of peace. Maybe here, I think, in the woods, we can come to some understanding of the ways we share.

  Sitting next to him in the pickup’s cab, I feel light-headed and girlish, once again a visitor in my father’s territory, beset by the need to act properly, to show myself worthy of his command. I try to keep my arms and legs close, conscious of every brush of cloth between us. I try not to breathe too fast and give away my nervousness. Greg sits on my right, six-foot-three and solid, touched by the light coloring of our Grandfather Barnes—dark blond hair that will prove itself red as he matures, his beard and mustache the color of fox. Between the two men I feel both protected and diminished, the daughter, the sister, always in need of safeguarding. When the silhouettes of trees notch the horizon, we pull on our hats, savoring the last of the heater’s
warmth before stepping out into the frosted morning air. My father checks for matches, drops a few shells into his shirt pocket. He turns a slow half-circle, squints at where the sun colors the clouds, smiles at us and heads for the cover of timber.

  For a time, we keep to an old dirt road, then turn onto a game trail that leads us along the flank of a high ridge. My breath wisps out and evaporates, and I keep my eyes on the path, intent on keeping up. Already, my shoulder is numb with the weight of the Marlin—a lever-action 30.30, heavy and homely compared with my father’s Winchester. I swing it around, cradle it in the crook of my left arm.

  My father is a tall man, long-legged and lean, unhurried and efficient in his movements. He keeps our pace steady, as though he has no intent of simply hunting but will lead us directly to where the deer stand exposed, stunned by our arrival into stillness. We should slow down, I think, listen. There might be bucks stripping alder only a few feet away. The farther we get from the rig, the farther we have to carry what we kill. The thought of half a carcass on my shoulders makes me groan. The muscles in my thighs ache with the climb. Sweat wicks into my long johns, and I am thankful for the overcast sky, gray and cool as gun metal.

  I’ve been told my father can outwalk any man, can walk for days without tiring. Beneath a towering larch, he stops just long enough to strike a match. Golden needles drop around him, catching in his hair. His hands seem sometimes possessed of their own grace, like the wings of a raptor, finely boned and beautiful. He is strong, his chest and arms surprisingly large, so that when he rolls up his sleeves I find myself staring, seeing the muscle there tense and release, and I feel all that he has held back and is capable of.