In the Wilderness Read online

  From California, they moved back to Luther, a small town southwest of Tulsa, where her maternal grandmother kept a small herd of dairy cows. After a time, her parents drove away, leaving her to a more stable life, normal in ways that seemed to matter: regular schooling, solid meals, a bedroom she could wake to each morning and believe herself home.

  Certainly they made a wise decision. During the few periods my mother returned to live with them, she would sometimes stay at the bar they were running, eating when she felt like it, going to bed in the back room when she pleased, long before the last drinkers had stumbled out into the Oklahoma air, thick with the whir of cicadas. She watched the headlights trail across her walls, still hearing the clink of glasses, her father’s rough laughter pushing her into sleep.

  It’s easy to romanticize my grandparents’ ramblings, easy to see them as exquisitely lost in the economic and political wreckage that was our country during those years. Oklahoma has always symbolized hardship and grit, peopled by the disenfranchised and disillusioned. Anyone who could survive the hostile weather, could scratch out a living from the hard red clay, was made of something extraordinary, like the blackjack oak growing from the creek bottoms, twisted by wind and stunted by drought, strong as steel at the core.

  But for my mother, there was nothing novel about her parents’ absence, nothing humorous in the stories they told of their adventures on the road. She distanced herself from them, went to school, took care of her aunt Sarah, Granny’s youngest daughter, born nearly ten years after my mother, and did her farm chores. One day, she came home to find Princess missing. She searched the barn, the creek bed, crawled beneath the house, where the cat lay blinking, nursing her newest litter, and called until her voice cracked and the sky darkened.

  Several years ago, I overheard a relative say that my grandfather had needed money to pay a gambling debt and sold the dog. As tough as Granny could be, I imagine her telling my mother that Princess had been hit by a car, holding her while she cried, stroking her hair, shushing her. “We’ll get you another dog, now. Don’t you worry.” And then to herself, the words I myself have heard her say: Always knew he was a snake in the grass. Man never was no good.

  What my father and his family left to come to Idaho was economic hardship and the painful memory of a man who had once been a caring husband and father. My mother left even less—a family connected only by blood. That first camp my parents shared was made up of orphans—my father and his brothers; my mother, running from parents already dead to her; my grandmother, at once widowed and made fatherless; her sister; and my uncle Clyde, raised by his sister after losing his parents in a flu epidemic. That circle was more than a practical formation of community: it held all their pain and remaining strength, the combined belief that they could survive.

  My mother was drawn into the circle by my father’s love, and what remained of his life became hers. My grandmother, whom everyone called Nan, cast herself in the role of matriarch, and the relationship they had was both fiercely intimate and silently combative. From the beginning, Nan, whose strong nature had given her an indomitable will and a ruling tongue, took on the task of turning my mother into a fit and proficient wife and daughter-in-law. Since my father had no money of his own to pay for the wedding, having given it all to Nan, it was she who paid for—and picked out—my mother’s wedding dress: a blue wool suit, simple white blouse, and pillbox hat. My mother wanted a traditional gown, but Nan scoffed at the idea of spending so much money on something that could never again be worn. The suit, she reasoned, would do for church and funerals as well.

  As disappointed as my mother was, the only emotion that showed in her face as she prepared for the wedding was joy. The photographs catch her tucking in her blouse, elbows akimbo, nearly knocking the walls of the small shack. Her elegance belies her age—sixteen—and the suit gives her an air of sophistication. Tall, with a thin waist and shapely legs, she resembles the movie stars her own mother as a teenager had cut from the pages of magazines and pasted in a scrapbook, one of them, Claudette Colbert, her namesake.

  When the short ceremony ended, my uncles chased my parents through the streets of Pierce and down the hair-raising descent of Greer Grade (Roland passing on the right, making my flatlander mother nearly faint with fear that he would sail off the road and plunge into the canyon below) to a little tavern on the river. There, they drank and laughed till nearly dawn, then drove the grade back to the dirt roads rutted by logging trucks and into the woods, speeding alongside the creeks and onto even rougher roads before arriving back at camp, where they stepped out of the car and my father lifted my mother over the steps made of bucked-up cedar and into their own small trailer, still warm with the familiar heat of August.

  Two years after moving her belt-lapped suitcase into my father’s one-room shack, two years after being married by the Pentecostal minister and his preacher wife, my mother packed her bag again, then sat on the trailer’s threshold and shaved her swollen legs. It was May, one week before her due date. She had rearranged her few articles of linen, bleached her hair, painted her nails a snappy pink, and said a prayer of thanks each night for the weight of her husband’s hand resting on the shelf of her stomach.

  Six days later, when her water broke, Aunt Daisy left a message for my father—“Tell him it’s time”—and drove my mother to Nan’s, who had remarried and moved to Lewiston. She soaked in the tub, hot running water a luxury, the tub even more so. When the pains started, she loaded her bag in the backseat and drove herself and Nan to the hospital.

  The labor was hard and fast. Nan remembered my mother, eighteen years old, her own family a thousand miles away, bravely preparing her mother-in-law for the worst: “Nan, I might have to scream.” And then, after enduring the labor, after pushing her baby from its watery chamber until its head bore down against the hard pelvis, just as the pain turned to an urge, a desire so strong she lunged toward her own spread knees, just as the baby was about to become real—flesh and bone, dark hair, blue eyes, a girl like she wanted, the first one a girl—the doctor breezed in, nuns tying strings, snapping gloves, and covered her face, filling her lungs with the stench of ether to stop the pain he could not imagine, thinking to save her from that wrenching moment when I slid into the hands of a stranger and began to wail.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In late fall kokanee the color of rosewood crowd the shallow tributaries of the North Fork of the Clearwater River. Landlocked salmon, they have made their way from deeper waters to spawn, and the beautiful mass of red they become is the result of their bodies’ decay.

  We lived for years along the banks of these creeks—Orofino, Weitas, Kelly—our destination determined by what timber sale my great-uncle had bid upon and, finally, by the lay of the land: we leveled our trailers atop the flatness of meadows, or maneuvered them between the stumps of a clear-cut.

  Perhaps because I was so young, what remains with me about those camps is not the trees and mountains, not the streams pulsing with red as the days shortened; what remains is a sense rather than a memory of place, a composite of smells, sounds and images: the closeness of my parents as they slept beside me when the temperature dropped below zero; my mother’s hair tightly curling around my fingers; cigarettes, coffee, sweat, diesel, the turpentine scent of pine.

  In winter, our shack darkened by early dusk, the single kerosene lantern illuminated my mothers face as she worked biscuit dough across the oilcloth table. The door would open and my father step in, shedding sawdust like snow. He’d lay down his black pail and steel thermos and grin at my mother as though he had something wonderful to tell, something to make us jump and clap, something so good she’d wrap her arms around his neck and he’d swing her in circles, knocking down chairs, tilting the nail-hung cupboard, causing the flour to fly.

  He’d lean over the table, careful with his diesel-stained clothes, never moving his calked boots from that one spot on the wooden floor, a place pocked and gouged, soft as tenderized meat. They wo
uld kiss, once, twice, and then he’d turn to where I played on our shared bed, nesting my doll in flannel shirts, covering her with tea towels, waiting for the grace of his smile.

  Even now, my parents speak of those first years in the woods as somehow magical. As poor as we were, we ate well. In summer, we picked huckleberries big as cherries, jerked trout from the shadowed bends of creeks, wrapping them in leaves of skunk cabbage. For Nan and Aunt Daisy, the cold-water char were a delicacy, so different from the muddy catfish they lived on as children. Fried in cornmeal and lard, the small brookies turned golden. Each year until 1988, when my grandmother died, I took her my first catch of the season. She added nothing, only the fish neatly arranged across her plate—no fork or knife, only her fingers pulling from the bones sliver after sliver of pure white meat.

  The men could step a few yards from camp and take their limit of deer and elk, enough to fill several town lockers with stew meat and roasts. I still associate the smell of blood, the mounds of entrails steaming in new snow, with fall. One season, it was a bear they hung from the loader’s boom. Gutted and skinned, it swung in the cooling wind, pink and muscled as the body of a man. It was the one thing my mother could not eat, sweet and tallowy, like the mutton she despised as a child.

  My mother found herself surrounded by mountains. The friends she had left in Oklahoma had by now finished their schooling. Most were having babies of their own, keeping house in Tulsa or moving into Oklahoma City to clerk at Woolworth’s. The few letters she received she kept tied in a ribbon, tucked away in some secret place.

  She rose before dawn each morning to fix my father’s breakfast—venison steak and eggs, home-baked bread toasted on the cast-iron stove top, coffee boiled black in its aluminum pot. While he ate, she packed his lunch, filling the dented bucket with sandwiches and fried pies—golden half-moon pastries made with dried apricots. His work clothes hung from the beams, the thick flannel shirt and black pants washed the day before and ironed to a shine.

  After his kiss at the door, she watched him climb into his truck, its blue exhaust disappearing into the dark sky like a heaven-bound spirit. When I awoke, she lay sleeping beside me. The kerosene lantern still burned, its reflection lost in the sunlit window.

  We hauled laundry to the wash shed, where the gas-powered wringer washer sat like a giant toad, all belly and noise. Uncle Clyde had connected a large reservoir to the woodstove there, and by building a popping fire, we had enough hot water to wash our clothes and bathe. While I splashed in a small galvanized tub, my mother hummed in the makeshift shower stall fed by pipes running from the water tank.

  When Nan first arrived in Idaho, Aunt Daisy had immediately set about matching her younger sister to one of the numerous eligible loggers. She settled on Elmer Edmonson, a widower, known locally as the Little Giant. His small stature belied his strength, and his reputation was that of a hardworking and fearless lumberjack. He and my grandmother moved out of the woods to Lewiston, into the house he had shared with his first wife, who had died of cancer. Nan set up housekeeping with the dishes and linens of another woman, grateful to have what was given her.

  Soon after their marriage in 1956, while working a site near Craig Mountain, my step-grandfather was severely injured ducking beneath a log to secure a choker cable. The log rolled, crushing his skull. By the time they got him to the hospital in Lewiston, his head had swollen to the size of a watermelon, the flesh split from the pressure, yet he never lost consciousness. My parents shudder when they speak of it. No one less strong and determined could have survived, they say.

  My grandmother nursed him constantly, and it was only as an adult that I was told how the kindly, shaking old man could turn suddenly manic, returning home from the grocery store with gallons and gallons of ice cream or giving away every dime in his pocket to strangers on the street. He had violent seizures and hallucinations, and the family would have no choice but to commit him to the state mental hospital at Orofino until his episodes subsided.

  I don’t remember his bizarre behavior or sudden, unexplained absences. Instead, I remember the evenings spent visiting Nan, waiting for Grandpa to come home from his rounds as a salesman hawking Rawleigh spices and liniment door-to-door. He would draw from his pocket a rolled purse of soft leather, jingling with coins that I dumped onto the floor, stacking the dimes and quarters into towering columns, breathing in the blood-sharp smell of copper.

  In the camps, my mother was left with Aunt Daisy, who gave her little attention, believing that a woman’s duty was to provide her husband with every bit and moment of herself, so that even in his absence her hands were busy making his meals, scrubbing the pitch from his clothes, snapping and smoothing fresh sheets for his bed. She counseled my mother to do the same, reminding her that the needs and love of a child must come second to the ties between husband and wife. She offered another piece of wisdom: the only power women have in this world is sex. A smart wife knew when to offer herself and when to hold back. There was little a husband wouldn’t do if teased and denied enough.

  By the time my father arrived home, my mother had cleaned the shack’s every corner. Brown beans bubbled on the stove, and the room seemed honeyed with the smell of corn-bread cooked in a cast-iron skillet. Her hair was neatly curled and combed, her fingernails painted. My own long hair she drew up in a bow so that my father might be pleased.

  The trailer’s size made it impossible to gather more than a few people in at once, but on weekends my uncles squeezed around the table for a game of cards. The bed was mine, an oasis of softness and warmth where I played with my dolls and listened to the men’s stories. Their days were full of giant things—machinery and trees, the noise of saws and snapping cables. They wore their wounds, deep cuts and bloody gouges, with the nonchalance of immortals, doctoring themselves with turpentine and alcohol. I fell asleep, protected from the outside world by my father’s strength, by his laughter, louder than the screech of tree against tree as the wind whipped the darkness.

  Injuries in the woods are common and expected: deep punctures from snagged limbs, twisted ankles, bruises from falling off decked logs—traumas so small they rarely warrant mention. The real danger lies in the dance of machinery and wood. In the hands of a seasoned logger the saw seems tamed, teeth directed easily toward a precise and efficient cut. But green wood cannot be predicted, nor can the saw’s instantaneous reaction to what lies hidden in the heart of fir, tamarack and pine. Kickback—the saw ricocheting off a knot or warp deep in the tree’s interior—seldom leaves the logger unscathed. If he’s lucky, he has no time to turn his head, and the razored chain cuts only his face. If instinctively he does jerk away, the teeth find a truer mark—the neck. Even with good roads and helicopters, help cannot reach a man fast enough to staunch the flow of blood from a severed jugular.

  One local logger decapitated himself, slipping from a log, his chainsaw still running. Another died when a cable snapped and the loader’s boom plummeted. Some are killed, simply and predictably, when the tree, set loose from its base, twists in an unexpected way. A tree will sometimes “barber-chair”—splinter vertically from a perfect half-cut, catching the faller squarely in the chest with enough force to crush or impale him against the next nearest trunk. Bulldozers roll. An unstable slope gives way and sends the logs, loader and man tumbling down the mountain.

  The year I turned four my father lay housebound, a cast from armpit to hip. He had ruptured a vertebra that winter while trying to turn a pole with a peavey. After his surgery, we moved to Lewiston, in with Nan and Grandpa Edmonson for the six months it would take for his back to heal.

  Workman’s Compensation paid only forty-one dollars a week, so while my father recuperated, my mother worked morning shift at Kube’s Korner Kafe. I had never seen so much of my father. The smoke from his cigarettes filled the small house. He read every western he could get his hands on, played solitaire and watched without comment the dramas of other people’s lives unfold on daytime television. What I recal
l most is the card table set up in the kitchen for his puzzles—thousands of intricately cut pieces sorted by edge and color, which he patiently worked into perfect pictures of mountains and wildflowers—near replicas of the landscape they had hauled him from.

  He showed me how the pieces fit, taking my wrist in his fingers, swiveling my hand, redirecting a corner. He smelled different—still smoky, but less like earth than pot roast and my grandmother’s sacheted linen. I forgot to miss that other father, the logger who came home in twilight, bringing my mother wild iris, bending easily to kiss me.

  Even though he walked with a noticeable hitch and lifting a saw made spasms ripple my father’s rib cage, when the cast was off we headed back to the woods. This time we settled into a small green house in Pierce proper. Pierce was named for Captain Elias D. Pierce, a California prospector who discovered gold there in 1860; within a year of his discovery, the townsite had been cut and cleared, making room for the miners, gamblers and prostitutes who lived, at least for a short time, in the booming heyday of the town. Along with them came a large influx of Chinese workers, and for many of them the West and its riches also held horror: three miles southwest of Pierce is Hangmans Gulch, now a designated historical site. There, in 1885, five Chinese unjustly accused of brutally murdering a local businessman were dragged from their cells by vigilantes and hung on a makeshift gallows.

  Placer mining came first, and soon the hills were pocked with lode claims and ore mining, sites with names such as the Democrat and the Mascot, the American, the Dewey, the Pioneer, the Ozark, the Crescent and the Wild Rose; the Oxford, the Klondike on French Creek, the Rosebud. Then came the dredges with their greater capacity to scoop the gold from its bed, working the waters of Canal Gulch, Rhodes Creek, the Orogrande.

  My father remembers the early days in Pierce, when the road was mud in spring and dust in summer and boardwalks fronted the bars and the single hotel. Now we had the luxury of a sidewalk down both sides, which the merchants kept shoveled and salted in winter to encourage business. Rape’s Grocery Store and Meat Locker, Durant’s Dry Goods, a beauty shop, bar and the post office lined the street’s north side. Across was the Clearwater Hotel and Cafe, where old-timers sat for hours behind the large front window, still uniformed in black denim and red suspenders, spitting into Folger’s cans. Some wore hard hats. When they waved, light shone through where fingers once had been.