In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  I felt no fear. I felt the roughness of his hands and the eyes of the church upon me, but I believed in this man of the Lord. I had seen him heal the Paxson boy, seen the short leg lengthen in the preacher’s cupped hand. What wound or fault he might find in me I could not discern, but I waited calmly to be free of it, to be made newly whole.

  “What is your name, child?”

  “Kim,” I whispered.

  “Sister Kim, God has brought us here together tonight for a very special reason. Do you know what that is?” He let his gaze sweep the room. “Sister Kim walks among you with a gift. Sister Kim, do you know what that gift is?”

  I heard the voices behind me: “Yes, Lord!” “Thank you, Jesus!” I thought I heard my mother crying. I shook my head, filled with a growing curiosity as though a stranger were about to read my palm, uncover a family secret. I steadied myself against the weight of his hands.

  “You, my daughter, have the gift of healing. You are a healer!” Behind me the praise grew louder. The room felt suddenly hot and I wished for an open door, a window letting in the cool night air. His hands were heavier than my legs could stand and I fell, sweat trickling down my sides.

  Sister Lang pounded out chords on the upright. I don’t remember the hymn or what other hands came to bless me. I only remember my knees on the cold wood floor and wondering what my father thought then, what would be expected of me in the days to come. I wondered if Luke had witnessed my anointing. I wondered what part of him I might touch.

  The next Sunday I sat at the table of Brother and Sister Baxter. They ran cattle outside of Weippe, an even smaller town than Pierce, twenty miles southwest. There were others there my age, children still wobbly in their manners at the table’s far end, eating silently while the adults pondered the day’s sermon and praised the wife’s fried chicken. If there was a lull in the conversation, if the discussion had turned to the past week’s revival, I don’t recall. I only know I felt a sudden pain, as though a nail were being driven into my ear. I whimpered and my fork clattered to my plate.

  I had never had an ear infection, had never felt the kind of pain I now felt, both throbbing and sharp. I remembered the missionary’s words, and with absolute certainty stood up and announced, “Someone here has an earache.”

  Looking from one unperceiving face to another, I pressed my hand to the right side of my head.

  “Someone’s ear hurts.”

  I stood with my neck bent to ease the pressure. At the other end of the table a woman let out a single sob. It was Sister Baxter.

  I moved from my child’s place and walked to her chair. She bowed her head, softly crying, and I placed my hand on her right ear. I could feel the heat there, the drumming pain. Others joined me, clasping my shoulders, touching my back.

  “Dear Lord, our sister has a need. She needs you, Jesus.” My words were met with a chorus of amens and hallelujahs. I drew a breath. My eleven-year-old awkwardness was gone. The words flowed.

  “We ask that you take this pain from her. Heal her, Lord! In God’s name we pray.”

  The chorus grew loud and encompassing, until the body I touched and the hands touching me melded. I floated in a swell of sound, a humming of breath and blood.

  “You will be healed!” I demanded it, surprised by the volume of my voice. The woman shuddered and groaned. The heat from her ear spread from my fingers into my arm and shoulder—my neck and face flushed with it. I opened my eyes and found myself in that room, the chicken half-eaten, gravy scumming the plates. The woman shivered in my hands.

  Later, I played with the other children in the barn. The woman’s one daughter and I hid from the boys in the stubble, giggling with pleasure at their blindness. We rooted tadpoles from the shallows and stabbed them onto rusty hooks. The creek held catfish and we bobbed for them in the manuresilted water. Each one we pulled from the muddy stream seemed a miracle, so different from the blazing trout I caught in the clear runoff of Reeds Creek. I held their sleek black bodies in my hands, smoothing the spiny backs, careful of their poison.

  We trapped the big green frogs that huddled beneath the overhanging grass, and while the girls swaddled them in the hems of their skirts the boys got a hammer from the barn and made little crosses of split barnwood. Holding the struggling frogs by their tiny wrists and ankles, we drove small nails through each webbed foot, then studied them for a while. Their white bellies spasmed, their mouths opened and closed. They looked like rotund little men with their legs stretched straight. Someone suggested making miniature crowns of nettles but no one wanted to be stung.

  We planted them in the muddy creek bottom, three frogs hanging above the water, arranged to mimic the painting we had seen of the crosses on Golgotha: Christ, the largest frog, in the middle, the two thieves on either side. Something about the symmetry of the martyred frogs seemed targetlike and the boys ran to the house and came back with their BB guns. Bulls-eye was the belly, and we all took turns until the frogs sagged on their crosses and we lost interest in the game.

  That night, after evening service, Sister Baxter slipped into bed beside her already sleeping husband. When she woke the next morning her pillow was sticky with pus. The fever was gone. Whether it would have been so had I not touched her, I don’t know. I can explain the progress of illness and infection but not that moment when her pain took hold of me as though it were my own affliction.

  She testified at church that a miracle had been wrought, and only then did I feel the weight of expectation fall upon me, heavy as the missionary’s hands. My parents allowed me to walk in front of them. The other children began to resent the way the adults nodded whenever I spoke. The attention made me aware of how seriously everyone looked upon my gift, yet I wasn’t sure I could do it again. If I failed to discern an illness, or if I prayed for someone to be healed and nothing happened, would it mean I had sinned, that I was unworthy?

  And then there was Luke. How did he fit into the maze my life was becoming? Somewhere between a child’s innocent cruelty and her coming initiation into the world. When I thought of Luke’s hands, how they touched me accidentally or on purpose but always in a way I remembered for days, I was filled with more emotion than I had ever experienced crucifying frogs or healing the sick.

  Many Sunday afternoons my family spent at the parsonage. While the women made stew or fried venison dusted with flour, Matthew, Luke and I hunched together on the narrow stairway leading upstairs, sharing the dirty jokes we had heard at school, guessing what went on in the bed of their sister.

  It was always dark there, and we spoke in whispers. The closeness of our bodies took my breath away. When Luke’s leg rested against mine I could no longer hear what was being said. When he put his hand on my knee, the sweet shock traveled to the bone and began a fire that spread its warmth to my crotch, a feeling so pleasurable I shuddered with the sure sin of it.

  When we returned to the company of our parents, I could still feel the heat of his hand. Even if I could not articulate what I was feeling, I understood that what we were doing fell into the category of sin called “petting”—touching between young men and women that brought on our elders’ direst warnings. I burned with shame to have given myself so easily to his caress. I prayed for forgiveness, for strength, for whatever temptation this was to leave me. But even in sleep I remembered his palm pressed against bare skin beneath the hem of my skirt.

  The more I tried to forget the pleasure of being close to Luke, the more I longed for it. This was a symptom of Satan’s influence I recognized: the greatest sin was desire for anything other than God. Desire for money, whiskey, the touch of another without the marriage blessing—any possession or wordly place—was lust and must be controlled, purged and destroyed.

  I saw that something had begun its slow possession. How could I be both healer and sinner? How could I close my eyes in prayer when all I could see was the face of the preacher’s son? I was lost, no language to describe how I savored this sin, no one to prophesy my salvation or d
amnation. I huddled beneath the covers of my bed, hearing the wind rise, the pinecones tacking the ground. Surely God would cause a tree to fall, send it crashing through the roof. I imagined Luke’s kiss, then the slide of his hand between my legs. The night held still. I could dream of no more.

  Enlightenment came via my teacher, Mrs. Nichols, a young and beautiful woman who sang opera and demanded that we sing with her, her high soprano voice rattling the windows in their panes. She seemed especially fond of Handel’s Messiah, and we belted out hallelujahs no matter the season. Blond beehived hair, red nails that clicked like beetles against our chairs—we could hardly believe she lived in our town. As eccentric as she was, there were still some things she would not tolerate in her charges: a clumsily held pencil (she would sneak up behind us, jerk the pencil from our hand, rap us sharply on the head, then slide it back into our quickly corrected grasp), a messy desk and, oddly enough, given her own propensity for adornment, pierced ears. She held to her own kind of fundamentalism, a code that dictated her expectations of our demeanor.

  We sat one drowsy afternoon, warmed by the popping steam heaters working to keep at bay the below-freezing temperatures. (Even in winter the girls were forbidden to wear anything but dresses, except during the periods of bitterest cold, when, with a special dispensation announced by the principal, we were allowed to don pants under our skirts. My church’s rules governing modesty seemed little displaced.) We nodded over our Idaho history books, which were hopelessly outdated, with no sympathy for what stood in the way of Manifest Destiny. Lewis and Clark were nothing short of rustic gods adorned in their buckskin and high leather boots. I tried to focus on the illustration of Sacajawea pointing toward the west with a sweeping, grand gesture, as though she could see every bend and bog that lay ahead. She was beautiful—slim and burnished atop her rocky pinnacle—and the aura radiating out from behind them left no doubt that the three were ushering in a golden era.

  We did our best to stay awake, knowing that at any given moment our teacher’s displeasure could take new and startling forms. When she stopped at the desk next to mine, I closed my eyes and flinched, the dates of gold discoveries and town settlements swirling through my head: history was a whirlpool, and I was hopeless in the face of chronological sequence. My mind worked in other ways. I could recite the story of Polly Bemis, the Chinese girl bought and lost in a game of poker. I could tell you the shade of her red dress, the way her hem swept across the rough-cut floor, how the room smelled of bacon grease and the sweat of men just come in from the mines, the light sifting through the warped logs like gold dust, falling across her arms as she went silently about her chores.

  I had already worked my way to the part in the story where the man who owns Polly loses the bet and she sees her life pass into the hands of another, when I heard Mrs. Nichols’s voice rise. She was standing over Julie, whose eyes had widened in fear.

  “Stand up!” Julie stood. The teachers movements were swift and I thought for a moment she had cuffed Julie along the sides of her head. Julie gasped and covered her ears, and it was then I saw the small gold hoops Mrs. Nichols held in her palm.

  Perhaps, like the crimson hue of Polly’s skirt, I have only imagined the blood that pearled and dropped from Julie’s torn lobes. Mrs. Nichols took her by the shoulders and marched her out of the room, and none of us dared even look up. We never doubted the teacher would win, that her rule—“No pierced ears in my classroom”—as well as her actions would be supported. We knew the laws that governed us, and few were prepared to face the kinds of punishments meted out for disobedience.

  I also knew that there was some exciting stigma attached to having holes punched in one’s ears, and that it had something to do with men and women and what I was coming to recognize as sex. Nan once told me only ruined women pierced their ears, and from that I gleaned some vague sense of what “ruined” might mean: a woman no man would want to marry. Why, then, had my father wed my mother when she had pierced ears? Even the fact that her ears were pierced intrigued me: what had she been like before she was the woman whose back I knew so well, having studied its shift and set as she worked over pie dough or biscuit mix?

  Another classmate had pulled me aside one recess and guided me behind the huge shed that covered the playground equipment and protected us from the wind and snow. There, she whispered that her older brother often crawled into her bed at night and rubbed himself against her, and that once he had stuck it in. I listened mesmerized but could not imagine the mechanics of such an act, much less the motive.

  “Why does he do that?” I asked.

  “Because,” she said, “he loves me.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Sometimes. But he gives me a quarter when it does.” She pulled a fistful of penny candy from her pocket and giggled. I contemplated the sticky remains of suckers and malted milk balls but took nothing. Something wasn’t right about it, and after that I avoided her on the swings and slide, watching as she took other classmates behind the shed. Some came in wiping chocolate from their mouths, but all of them ran when back in the familiar domain of children, leaving her alone with her pocket of sweets.

  After the incident with Julie’s ears, we watched Mrs. Nichols even more closely, hoping to give ourselves enough time to bolt should she move on us, although we doubted we’d have the courage to make even the smallest gesture of escape. She seemed more withdrawn, given to staring thoughtfully out the window with her lovely hands crossed behind her, her fingers entwined, her nails clicking.

  It was during one of these pensive moments when she turned suddenly toward us. “You think you know things,” she said. “You don’t.” We were startled into rapt attention. “You are animals, and like all animals your bodies know only these two things: pleasure and pain.”

  The best we could do was to let her go and maybe she would forget we were there, waiting for our lessons. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brian’s hand shoot up. He was the class nosepicker, and I groaned inwardly at his foolishness.

  “Mrs. Nichols, what about itches?”

  She studied him intently for a moment, then walked slowly to the side of his desk. “Itches,” she echoed flatly. “Itches are slow pain. Each and every feeling you have is the man-i-fe-sta-tion of pleasure or pain.” She turned her back on us and once again focused her attention on the air outside the window.

  Wasn’t what I felt when I thought of Luke a kind of pain? I ached to be with him, yet suffered no less in his presence than I did in his absence. Sometimes I thought pleasure inseparable from pain and wondered if I’d ever know when one became the other. It all seemed a riddle to me, a world in which things were not as they appeared, as though our emotions were reflected back on us, reversed, warped. What gave me worldly pleasure was the very thing that caused me spiritual pain.

  But what did I know of suffering, of the makeup of souls? I must not think that the teachers of the mind such as Mrs. Nichols might have insight into the ways of the Lord. I opened my Bible to Corinthians, to the words of Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through the glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

  It had been three years since my mother stood at the kitchen window, pointing up and out into the haze of August sky.

  “How many, Kim? How many birds on the wire?”

  I looked from her to the square of light and back. The clues lay in the words—bird, wire—just as they did in my father’s riddles: If a plane crashes on the border between the U.S. and Canada, where do they bury the survivors? If a rooster lays an egg on the peak of a roof, which way will the egg roll? Kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St. Ives?

  I could no more find the true meaning in my mothers question than I could see the birds and wire. The distance from the window to the table where I sat, nose rubbing the pages of my reading book, was no more th
an ten feet, but even that distance would have been enough to fade her features to an airbrushed silhouette.

  Some weeks afterward, I sat in the optometrist’s office, surrounded by cases of heavy frames, trying on pair after pair. I could not see myself in the mirror the assistant held out for me: the dark plastic lines faded into the peachy canvas of my face, which I obediently studied for a weighty minute before reaching for the next pair. Days later, when the doctor slid them over my ears, the glasses settled onto my nose with surprising heaviness. Even more startling was my mothers face peering into my own, so close I could see gray flecks in her pale blue eyes. Behind her, the doctor and assistant leaned toward me as though I had just been given the power of speech and were about to utter my first word.

  What had I seen before? The birds on the wire I had imagined as leaves on a branch; now, when I saw them from the window, I could count their feathers, watch the small beaks preen for dust, see them tense for flight before rising into the air and disappearing. I described for my mother the colors of grass, the movement of shadows, the ever-changing shade of my aunt’s hair.

  The language of vision had always been with me—pale, clear, bright, deep—but my sense of the words had been tactile, palpable, something I felt rather than saw. I remember the smell of smoke, the auroral glow of my father’s cigarette as we drove the dark road to town or back to camp. The trees and river flew by, miles I knew by heart but could not describe any differently in daylight than at night, although I never doubted their existence any more than I doubted the presence of angels, whose wings I imagined the cloudiest white, softly downed without quills or striation, large enough to carry me aloft in huge breathy beats.

  In the parsonage stairway I came to believe the absence of light a blessing. I prayed for the counterfeit night and the sound of Luke’s voice husky with desire. I prayed we not be found out, knowing God’s grace covered a multitude of transgressions, knowing my wickedness lay in the very prayer I offered—the prayer of a sinner jealous of her sin.