In the Wilderness Read online

  My uncle had seen it before, when they lived in Oklahoma. The youngest brother, Barry, had been diagnosed too late and lay for weeks on his hospital deathbed, brought back to life, they believed, by nothing more than their mother’s prayers and constant presence even after the doctors had told her to go home, they couldn’t save the boy.

  This night they made it in time. Sandra was immediately admitted to surgery, and after making sure the operation had gone well and she was resting comfortably, my mother and uncle found their way back to their families, who were done up like Eskimos and eating whatever food could be found not frozen.

  I was happy in that place, bundled against the cold, surrounded by people I knew and loved. My cousins and I made a game of it, serving Kool-Aid milkshakes and congealing cereal. Even after the electricity came back on and we returned to our own house, we bumped and huddled against one another for the remembered pleasure of closeness.

  The warm spring days passed quickly. My brother and I played with the other children from morning until night, stopping only to heed our mothers beckoning us to lunch or dinner. Weekends, we built forts in the woods behind our yards and pretended the muddy gouges left by bulldozers were pits of quicksand. We walked the two miles to town grouped tight as a clutch of chicks, the dimes and quarters we’d earned selling lemonade sweaty in our palms. Back home we’d come with bags of penny candy, racing one another up the hills, balancing on the logs that bridged the gullies, made brave by our independence and wealth of treats.

  But our time left in that place was short. Even as my brother and I filled our days with childhood adventures, something was at work in my father. It was nothing that Dr. Kimball or a hard days labor in the woods could heal or fix, and I’m not sure that even now I understand it. For most of his life, as a sinner and a Christian, my father had felt the workings of otherworldly things through dreams and intimations. His conversion to fundamentalism made him even more aware of the division between the forces of good and evil, and he had come to understand that dreams could be visions, that a sudden and overwhelming sense of darkness and despair could be the presence of Satan himself. In that tract house on the hill, in a place that represented the realization of modest ambition for a man striving to feed and shelter his family—to provide for them a safe and simple life—my father saw a demon.

  It is a story I’ve heard told only twice but remember with a child’s sense of horror, how he woke chilled by the sudden false movement of air, damp as wind across rotting snow. He turned his face slowly toward the bedroom door, the stench of decay filling his nostrils, and saw the dark body and hollow face. It offered no word or sound, peering from its place at the threshold as though gauging my fathers wariness, sucking from his night breath the secrets of his soul.

  He had never felt such fear, such abject, mute helplessness. He could not scream or move his hand to touch his wife’s shoulder so that she might bear witness to the specter. Even the simple rote of exorcism—In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I command you to leave—was more than he could utter. For a long moment the demon held its place, then vanished. My mother woke to the bed rattling, my father violently trembling. In the next room, I felt the house shudder, the mountain possessed by wind. I heard my fathers whispering. I thought, prayer. I snuggled deeper beneath my covers, nothing in this world to fear.

  One afternoon in early fall, my mother picked Greg and me up at school before we could board the bus. Her eyes were red and she pinched her nose with a handkerchief. I peered intently out my window, fearing what she was going to say. She patted my hand.

  “I’ve got some bad news, sweetie.”

  I waited, my breath coming out shallow and quick. Greg was already crying in the backseat.

  “Uncle Ed was killed today.”

  I nodded without looking at her, not sure how I was supposed to respond now that I knew it was not my father, only a great-uncle I hardly knew—Aunt Edith’s husband, the red-haired Swede whose hands had built the bomb shelter in one day. He was known as an expert sawyer, a shy and gentle man comfortable only in the presence of timber. He had been struck by a felled tree, his shinbones driven through the soles of his boots and into the ground like marking stakes.

  I felt around for grief or sadness to match my mothers, but all that came to me was a sense of something gone from the world. My mother took us to the Headquarters Cafe for ice cream, and I swirled the cone with my tongue, considering how easily death came: my friend Anita Kachelmier’s dad had died at this very counter, strangled on a piece of steak, still wearing his boots and red suspenders.

  It was God’s will for Uncle Ed to die, just as it was God’s will for us to move from our house in town to Dogpatch and begin making payments to his widow. I knew I would miss my neighborhood friends, and I cried when we pulled away and I saw Glenda waving from her bedroom window. But my parents had said we would own our new home, and something in the word sounded permanent to me, settled.

  When we drove down the driveway and into the hollow, Aunt Edith was waiting. She showed us through the narrow house and led me to my bedroom, with its curtain for a door. The room had once belonged to her son Larry, but he had left home years before. Now it was empty except for a doll, rigid in high heels, her feet glued to a platform. She wore an odd little hat, round and pointed, and her eyes were the shape of almonds. When Aunt Edith handed her to me, I could hardly believe my luck. “Is she Chinese?” I asked, smoothing the silk tunic over her white leggings. “No,” she said. “Larry brought her back from Vietnam, but I can’t imagine what I’d do with her now.” She looked around the room sadly, then lifted the curtain and disappeared.

  I sat down on the bare floor and contemplated my new possession. Her hair was thick and black, parted and gathered into two braids. Painted red lips, breasts high and pointy, waist narrower than her hips by half—she was beautiful. I brought her to my nose. Even her smell was exotic—spice mixed with the smoke of Aunt Edith’s cigarettes.

  I took her to show my mother, who was quietly crying as my aunt’s car bumped up the driveway for the last time. I did not think then to consider how my mother saw in the older woman the shape her own future might take. What would be left to the widow of a logger whose house squatted on borrowed land and existed only by the favor of the company? The choices were few: find another man to marry, or leave. But I was too young to see these things and took off with my brother to explore the outhouse and meadow, leaving my doll to my mother, who cradled it gently, as though it held all the hope and fragility of her life.

  We arranged our few pieces of furniture, unpacked our boxes of books and clothes, and I began to believe that we’d be there always: nestled in the draw, protected from wind, a few distant neighbors, a school-bus stop at the top of our road.

  My father worked so close we could hear the thrum of machinery, the saws catch and whine, the trees crack, the dull echo of their falling. When the other men began their talk of new equipment and less land, my father leaned harder into his cut, feeling in his arms the strength of pine and muscle, the familiar ache in his back. He was blessed by wood, blessed by God to be there with his wife and children safe in the draw with the woods all around where, unless you had been there, you would guess no house existed, no people lived.

  Between Dogpatch and Pierce lies Cardiff Spur, a cluster of faded trailers and creosote-stained shacks named after a sawmill operator. One of those shacks was the parsonage, which shared a large open space between the road and Trail Creek with the Cardiff Spur Mission, the Pentecostal church my parents had chosen for us to attend. Our first meetings were around a potbelly stove, scooted so close the preacher was made to circle behind us, calling on us to confess our latest sin.

  The men who attended were loggers and mill hands, men who blended easily with the small population of the area. On Sundays, they wore freshly pressed shirts, suitcoats and trousers; other days, they were distinguished only by their profession: black boots and stagged pants cut to mid-cal
f, out of the way of saws and snags. The women who attended our church, however, with their long skirts, plain faces and coiled hair were easily identified as holy-rollers. I became aware of the fact that I, as a girl approaching adolescence, was being dressed accordingly—no shorts, short-sleeved blouses, blush or pierced ears—only when we made our visits to Lewiston, where Nan would shorten my dresses and trim my hair, clucking all the while about never having seen such nonsense. She believed I could be a beauty queen: how was that to happen if people’s only notice of me was the simple curiousness of a girl dressed like a dowager?

  I signed the church’s youth pledge and carried a white waxy card listing the regulations governing my behavior. I promised never to dance, drink, smoke or swear. I would not go to movie theaters, frequent bowling alleys, swim with the opposite sex or dance except under the Spirit. The hem of my dresses would measure two inches below my knees, and I would refrain from wearing pants. I would wear no jewelry, makeup or other adornment that might draw attention to my physical self and cause another to lust after me in an unholy way. I would pray daily, fast frequently and believe always in the Lord as my Savior. I embraced these commandments, thrilled to have in my new purse a card bearing the large script of my signed name. When I made my commitment public, my parents and the other adults beamed with approval and prayed with hands on my shoulders that I forever follow the path of righteousness and turn not from the hard road onto the wider path of wickedness leading only to Hell.

  I don’t remember the name of our first preacher at Cardiff, thumping his Bible behind my head, taking great leaps around the room, agile beyond his years. He is a presence, a bellowing exhortation. Nor do I remember the day he left, the Sunday our new pastor, Brother Lang, took his place at the podium.

  Joseph Lang was short and stocky, ruddy complected, with thick black hair that glistened like patent leather. His wife, Mona, was shorter still, burdened with enormous breasts that she shrugged and shifted into balance. She sat ramrod straight at the piano, hair the color of granite brushing the bench behind her. Their children were all ahead of me in school—Sarah, the eldest, then the two boys, Matthew and Luke.

  They seemed always happy, singing separately or as a family, teasing with affection, catching us up in their enthusiasm for God. We often gathered at the parsonage for long hours of music: Brother Lang on his banjo, my father strumming along on the guitar my mother had bought him for Christmas—a Gibson arch-top f-hole—playing the simple chords he had learned as a boy. Brother Lang was originally from Texas and knew many of the bluegrass songs my parents loved, and when not playing gospel they filled the small room with the loud and vibrant twang of country.

  Perhaps my father saw in Brother Lang the man he might become—a preacher, a husband whose family followed the path he laid out without question. My mother found in Sister Lang something her own life had never offered: a role model of Christian womanhood. And I found the same in Sarah, nearly a woman herself but willing to treat me with kindness, teaching me the art of modest behavior: keep your legs together, your skirt pulled over the caps of your knees; don’t chew gum; run the water when you use the bathroom to mask the noise. Her long blond hair and virtuous demeanor brought her the attention of an eighteen-year-old boy from downriver, a trapper and wilderness guide, red-headed and easily embarrassed. At sixteen her parents believed her more than ready to marry, and before the year was out she and her new husband, Terry, had taken up matrimonial residence in her upstairs bedroom.

  But there was one stipulation to their union: Terry could marry their daughter, but he must agree to never take her away from the family. Brother and Sister Lang believed that Sarah and Matthew had a singing ministry to fulfill, a calling that might bring them recognition and success in the process of spreading the Gospel. At some point during each service, Matthew and Sarah would take the stage. Matthew strummed his twelve-string and sang with his eyes closed while Sarah crossed her hands in front of her and focused on something just above the heads of the congregation. If Terry were to separate the family, their dreams would die.

  At fifteen Matthew was impish and quiet. He loved hunting nearly as much as Bible study, and his mature approach to both impressed everyone. He delivered the Sunday sermon when his father was away, unmoving behind the podium, attempting only occasional and solemn glances at his attentive audience. His brother, Luke, a year younger, had high cheekbones touched by his fathers coloring, full lips, startling blue eyes, a James Dean swagger. Cocky and intelligent, less serious than Matthew, he sometimes gave me the gift of his gaze, and I found myself shuffling the awkward corners of my elbows into a more presentable picture.

  Along with my desire for his attention came an awareness of the failings of my eleven-year-old body—the skinny legs and ridiculously large feet, the heavy glasses that constantly slid down my nose. In his presence I jumbled my words and tripped for no reason. His smug grin humiliated me, and I came to realize that my best self lay in stillness. When around him, I moved only when I had to and spoke only when addressed, answering in clipped phrases, but no matter how I held myself in, wrapping my arms about my waist, double-crossing my legs, something escaped to betray me: I stuttered out the wrong chapter and verse when asked to recite Scripture; my stomach growled in the quiet between prayers; sweat pooled in my palms and beneath my arms. Surely he and everyone else could see how imperfect I was.

  Sometimes, after church, after the foyer had emptied and the adults had gone to the parsonage to drink coffee, he’d teach me the chords of a forbidden song—“Hey Jude” or “House of the Rising Sun”—and I’d plunk along on the old upright, filling the sanctuary with wanton rhythms. When he lowered his eyes and sang, I felt dizzy with a feeling I could no more identify than the taste of sugarcane. It was a tingling in my belly, a lightness in my bones. It felt like sin and I knew it.

  What I did not know, could not foresee, none of us could, was how the church would cleave, how the congregation would be divided by the new preacher, this man of God come to the wilderness to save us. Then our numbers would grow, drawing converts from the camps and near towns until the pews filled with believers. The building itself would be torn down, a new one built. The old woodstove would be hauled across the creek and dumped; a new oil furnace would blow its warmth into the church. Our circle would once again tighten, drawn together by the Langs until our lives—theirs and the lives of my family—became meshed, inseparable. We rocked in the comfort of their ministry until those last few months when one died, another dreamed of demons so horrible he purged his body of food and trembled in his wife’s arms to stand and sing God’s praises and another locked himself in an earthen cell with only a few jugs of water and a Bible, praying for a sign, deliverance for us all.

  Tuesday night, Pathlighters. Wednesday night, prayer meeting. Thursday, men’s Bible study, women’s Aglow. Sunday school, church, choir practice, evening service. In between we gathered informally, sharing dreams and Scripture, passing out tracts in town, witnessing to our few and patient neighbors. And every few months, revival.

  The revivalist would arrive, bringing with him an air of excitement, the anticipation of a circus or carnival. We held meetings in our church, in the grange halls of other small towns or, most memorably, in huge tents set up in mown fields and vacant lots. If a creek were close by, we had full-immersion baptisms, sometimes so spontaneous the women had no time to don double slips beneath their dresses. When they surfaced, hands raised to heaven and speaking in tongues, translucent pink showed through the wet cloth. Their skirts floated up like lilies.

  Meetings lasted for hours, every night, beginning with the opening prayer, a few answering amens, then singing. As our voices rose, people began to clap, then sway, palms raised to the ceiling. When the missionary took the podium, we were primed for his outpouring of God-given wisdom and spiritual insight. By the time the sermon ended, the pitch of our praise had built to the point of drowning out his closing words, and he called on us to confess and be
reborn in loud outbursts that sounded more like commands than entreaties. Finally, the entire congregation shouted and stomped, those gifted in tongues adding their heavenly language to the booming chorus.

  Each preacher was different. One might holler and wave his arms; another pounded the pulpit with his Bible until the spine broke and pages flew. The missionary from down south danced in the aisles, twirling with his arms outstretched, head thrown back, heels clicking the wooden floor in the measured beat of flamenco. The first man to prophesy my future was a grandfatherly missionary with hair the color of new dimes, who sold us beautiful wooden boxes carved by the natives of Haiti. In our second week of revival, two people had been healed: one of an ulcer, the other of a slow-knitting rib, cracked when his saw kicked off a limb and knocked him flat. It was this preacher who called me out one night after the sermon, after Sister Baxter had prophesied in tongues and Sister Johnson had interpreted God’s message, a message of warning lest Satan rally his army, jealous of our praise. Several women had fallen under the Spirit and lay on the floor weeping—others less stunned draped the women’s legs with lap cloths to ensure modesty.

  He found me, head bowed, a little sleepy, muttering my prayers and unprepared for his attention. The voices quieted as he called me to the altar. I stepped away from my seat and made my way toward the front, weaving through the prostrated bodies. His eyes were serious and piercing, as though there were something I was hiding, as though he could read in my face what had roused in him the need to clasp my head between his sweaty palms and drive me to my knees.