In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  • • •

  I loved the time I spent with Sister Lang and Sarah, perhaps believing that my kinship with women would be what would save me. I imitated their modest gestures, combed my hair and curled it just as they did, sat next to them at the table and filed my nails into blunt rectangles instead of the smooth ovals my mother preferred. Often, they took me to town with them—into Pierce with its sidewalks and American flag flapping above the new post office. They’d let me stop at the library, window-shop at Kimball’s Drug, buy me a cone at the Confectionery. The Confectionery seemed a rarity: soda fountain, booths and tables, a jukebox against the back wall, around which the high school kids congregated afternoons and weekends. Sometimes we lingered long enough over phosphates for me to catch a chorus of “Cherry Hill Park” or Elvis’s deep voice lamenting, If there’s one thing that she don’t need it’s another little child and a mouth to feed in the ghetto. I had never heard of a ghetto and could not imagine any mother mourning the birth of her baby, but I understood it was all very tragic. The songs left me feeling touched by something outside, real: there were places where people led lives of ongoing drama and magnificent despair while I raced the boys at recess for the one unbroken swing.

  During one outing, while Sarah shopped for material at Durant’s, Sister Lang called me to a display against the wall.

  “You don’t have any nylons, do you?”

  I shook my head, feeling both childish for having to say no and excited by her interest. She held up a pair of tights the color of sand, nearly opaque.

  “I bet your mother won’t care.”

  I looked doubtful. She might not care but my father would, and she would not risk his disapproval.

  Sister Lang placed them on the counter with her other purchases. I had never received such a gift, a gift made even more special by its provocative and conspiratorial nature; girls wore kneesocks because their legs had little value beyond simple locomotion, unlike the legs of women, whose shape and composure elicited considerable attention—why else were they so careful to wear their skirts covering their knees? It was permissible for a woman to show a certain portion of her body—the shins—as long as she did so with modesty. Too much revealed led men to imagine more.

  Sister Langs instigation meant she saw me as more than a child, and I clutched the small package to my chest as we drove home. I could not wait for Sunday, for Luke to see me in this new way. I hoped my father wouldn’t notice, although he seldom missed scrutinizing my dress and demeanor. Still, there was my mother, whom Sister Lang had made to seem different somehow, on my side. I felt how the circle could split like the cells we studied in school—a line through the middle like a stricture between the women and the men—and I felt newly joined to the lives of my mother, Sister Lang and Sarah. There was some power they had that I sensed more than understood.

  It confused me, seeing them without their husbands and still able to find their way in the world, making decisions as though the men did not exist. I thought of the night when Brother Lang had pulled his wife onto his lap and she whispered something in his ear that made him blush and squirm. Then, when she rose laughing, he watched her walk into the kitchen as though no one else in that room existed. What had she said to him? Whatever it was, it took him a moment to come back to his Bible, which had slipped between his knee and the chair cushion.

  • • •

  When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom, stripped off my kneesocks and pulled the silky tights over my pointed toes and up over my thighs. I bunched my dress at my waist and turned in front of the mirror, trying to make familiar the body in the glass. From the hips down, I looked like a woman, but above the gathered material I seemed still a child. My hair hung limp and stringy. My glasses slipped down my nose so that to look through them I cocked my head back, letting my mouth slack open. I dropped my dress and began brushing my hair furiously. One hundred strokes, day and night, Sarah said. Mayonnaise wash and vinegar rinse to make it shine. Someone knocked.

  “Kim, what are you doing in there? Come on out, now. Greg needs someone to play with.”

  I scowled at my mother through the door. I waited until I heard her step back into the kitchen, then gently pulled off the nylons, one leg at a time. The hair on my shins lifted with static. I had asked to be allowed to shave my legs, but my father said no. “Maybe when you’re thirteen,” my mother had said. She knew the boys at school teased me about the dark down. At least the nylons were heavy enough to hide the hair until my father gave his permission for it to be removed.

  I stepped into the kitchen, where my brother waited. “Wanna go outside, Sis?”

  I looked from him to my mother. No, I didn’t want to go outside. I wanted to stay in and wash my hair in eggs and honey, rub lemons on my knees to erase the rough skin, just like it said in Ladies’ Home Journal. My mother dipped her head toward the door. “Go out for a little while, just until dinner. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  Outside, the late afternoon air made me wish I’d pulled on pants beneath my dress. Ice on the eaves glistened, catching the last sparks of sun. I refused to talk to Greg and began trudging in circles, kicking aside moss and pine needles, scuffing lines into the damp ground. I took my time, working my feet close, until the letters looked perfect, joined by a cursive flourish—“LL+KB.” Greg watched from a distance. There was something different about me he wasn’t sure of, something secret. Instead of a playmate I’d become an adversary. When he edged toward me, I shuffled and kicked through the lines before he could see what I’d written.

  He looked at me curiously. Had he done something wrong? Was I angry? All those years in the camps and moving from one house to another, he and I had shared everything—baths, beds, toys, the child’s heartache that followed being scolded and spanked. Now, I wanted to share nothing with him. Even his eagerness for my company disgusted me.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone? Why are you always bugging me?” I gave the letters a final sideways kick and started for the house. Greg hesitated, then followed, wiping his eyes. I felt a twinge of guilt but could not bring myself to offer him anything other than indifference.

  More and more, I wanted to be with the women, doing the things that gained them praise and proud glances from their husbands. My mother was an experienced seamstress, and I watched in fascination as she cut and pinned the onionskin paper to the fabric she had chosen for a new dress. The illustrations on the front of the Simplicity patterns showed several young models, hips cocked and hair flowing. I knew my mother always bought extra material to lengthen the hem, but as I studied the girls I longed to be like them, in whatever place it was they existed. They shaved their legs and floated little capsules of scented oil in their bathwater. They had more than one pair of shoes. They looked happy and not too sinful.

  The cold coming on brought my family and the Langs together even more. The parsonage was always warm, seasoned by years of woodsmoke and the heavy smells of simple cooking: meats roasted and fried, potatoes and onions and bacon grease.

  The gut smell of green hides that Sarah’s husband brought home seemed as much a part of the parsonage as the brewing aroma of coffee. Off the kitchen, the enclosed porch housed Terry’s cache, the tools of his trade: skunk scent (to mask his own human odor), Borax to cure the hides, waterproof boots and cold-weather garb, and the traps hung according to size—the small rodent and weasel traps with their lightly hinged jaws; the larger ones for cats and coyotes, possibly bear. Rods and reels, creels, his bow and sharp arrows, targets he would tack to a tree and aim at, as though he needed practice: at the center of each one, a fist-sized pattern of holes.

  As much as I anticipated my times with the women, I thrilled to be with Terry on the porch or out past the creek. The attention he paid me was that of an older brother, and even though I knew that what he did with guns and hides was men’s business, I found the intricacies of stretching hides and target practice much more compelling than baking the perfect pie.


  Terry knew the secrets of the woods. Once he caught a young red-tailed hawk from its nest and brought it to the parsonage, believing he could train it like a falcon. It glared at us from its perch above the curing pelts. Sunday morning service found it screeching its hunger while Brother Lang raised his voice, competing for the congregation’s attention, until Terry sneaked out and shot a squirrel to satisfy the bird, demanding as any god.

  His expert sense of the woods and the ways of animals drew Terry the respect and recognition of his peers—other men who, like him, loved their lives in the woods. He could exist for weeks in the wilderness with nothing other than his knife to live by, mimicking the magpie’s chortle, bellying down to the water to drink like a cat. When strange men came into town, wearing their stiff new hats and pressed pants, flipping their wallets open at the cafe long enough for Gladys or Holly to take note of the sheaf of bills, it was Terry’s name that got passed to them: he was the one who could find them the elk they wanted, who could lead them to the bear raking grubs from the spongy wood, taking on her winter’s fat.

  One winter, a group of these men paid Terry well to track a bear to her den, where they aimed and shot the sow to death with their precisely honed arrows. When they pulled her from her cave, Terry discovered the cub.

  He would never have done it had he known, he said. He brought the young boar to the parsonage and made it a bed behind the stove, holding it when it cried in its little human voice, rocking it like it belonged. I loved to cradle the cub and feed it its bottle. It grunted and mewled, docile until something set it off—the bottle gone empty, its plaything snagged beneath a chair leg. Within a few weeks we were jumping atop the furniture to evade its rampages and sharp teeth: Sister Lang’s calves were mottled with punctures and bruises, and I can still see the small white scars where the cub sunk his sharp incisors into my shoulder.

  Eventually, Terry sold the cub to a man who ran a tourist trap farther east on Highway 12. We heard later that the bear had bitten someone and been shipped off to a zoo in California. I wondered if it remembered us as it snuffled in its bedding for warmth, looking with its small eyes into the sea of faces.

  Terry showed me how to slide the knife between hide and muscle, how to make the short, delicate cuts that separated the sticky tissue. I’d watch him work the body of a coyote from its skin in one easy piece, leaving the pink carcass glistening in its shimmering caul.

  Once, while walking his trapline, Terry discovered the tracks of two bobcats, a mated pair thickly furred from the autumn’s early cold, its promise of hard winter. He set a single trap near the water, baited it with rabbit or squirrel and waited.

  I remember him describing the female’s high-pitched yowling as he let her struggle against the teeth embedded to bone, knowing her howls would bring the male, and then he would have them both. Terry made plans for the money two good pelts would bring: the truck needed tires, or he might buy Sarah a new coat. He’d buy more traps to make more money, to keep doing what he loved—walking the woods, conversing with the owl and hawk, pounding the stakes down through the metal rings.

  I knew this was his trade, his job: he was a trapper, a careful tracker, a good shot, one of the best around. Things like this happened, and we all knew it was best to stay tough, to not let the agonized screams of an animal get in the way of practical sense. He shot the male first—an easy target as it turned to him, ears flattened, teeth bared, protecting its mate—and then he killed the female. After the bodies were skinned, the pelts scraped and Boraxed, Luke built a fire in the back yard, hung a large black kettle above it and dropped the still-meaty heads of the cats into the boiling water. We stood close to the cauldron for warmth, watching the eyes bubble up, gelatinous as poached eggs at first and then hollow. We stomped our feet and drank hot chocolate as the night lengthened and the moon rose. I watched the skulls roil, clicking against each other, a sound I still remember when fall nights come and the acrid smoke of field-burning fills the air.

  What ancient ritual were we observing? What drew us together around that fire and kept us there, fueling the coals with more wood long after the skulls had sloughed off their flesh and shone white as shell beneath the moon? Was it some racial memory that drove us to celebrate the hunt? The hides, cured and sold, would serve to sustain our tribe. The skulls themselves would become icons: bleached and polished, each anchored a corner of the preachers desk, where he studied his Scripture for the next week’s sermon.

  I leaned one evening into the arm of the Langs’ sofa, lulled by music and fire. Luke sat on the floor across from me, forcing square after square of wadding through the barrel of his rifle until the cotton emerged clean, gleaming with oil.

  The parsonage was so warm I felt bundled, protected from the wind whipping the pines and swirling the year’s first snow into sugared drifts, rattling the windows in their crumbling panes. In the kitchen, my mother, Sister Lang and Sarah diced carrots and potatoes while last year’s venison browned in a big cast-iron frying pan.

  I could hear my father and Terry laughing on the porch. The one vice my father had never been able to give up was his cigarettes, and when he stepped outside to smoke, one or the other of the men often went with him, taking, I think, a kind of vicarious pleasure in this small weakness. Brother Lang sat in his chair with his Bible, underlining passages for next Sunday’s sermon. Closest to the stove sat Matthew, chair leaned back against the wall, softly singing and strumming his guitar. I knew the words to the song he sang, but there was something comforting in his single voice. I drifted in and out of near-sleep, thinking of Matthew and Mary, his girlfriend from downriver. It must be for her he sang, I thought, even though the words were for God.

  Mary was darkly beautiful, with long, straight hair parted down the middle and pushed behind her ears. When she visited our church, she and Matthew sat in the back pew and held hands in a quiet and modest way. They planned to marry the following year, with their parents’ blessings. They would be sixteen.

  I wanted to be to Luke what Mary was to Matthew. Their love seemed rooted in something pure. I knew they never groped in the dark stairway. Mary would not have allowed it, would not have invited such a possibility. She had a wonderful full smile, but she kept her head bowed a great deal of the time. Her legs were always firmly together. I wanted to carry Luke’s Bible the way Mary carried Matthew’s, wear his jacket over my shoulders when the weather suddenly turned. I wished Luke would carve for me, as Matthew had for Mary, a wooden heart engraved with the numbers “1-4-3,” which meant “I love you.” If I could come and live in the parsonage forever, nestled beneath the slanting roof with Luke as my husband, I would be happy.

  The snow promised easy hunting. My father and Luke picked up their own guitars and joined Matthew. Brother Lang followed with his banjo, and soon the room filled with louder music. The women came in from the kitchen, wiping their hands on their aprons, and we sang late into the night, some gospel, some country, the words all about love and God and husbands leaving and women who wouldn’t do right.

  I watched Luke’s fingers grip and strum, fascinated by their rhythm and his concentration. The last song, he and Matthew played together. Matthew unwrapped his harmonica from its buckskin pouch, something he seldom did, and began to breathe out the slow notes of a melody I did not recognize. Everyone sat still to hear Matthew finish the last chorus, eyes closed, still leaned back in his chair as though he existed alone in that room with his music. We all knew he was in love, and even the adults, perhaps remembering their own first stirrings, allowed him the sweetness of his misery.

  My father did not join the hunt the next day. Perhaps he was working. Perhaps he had no desire to share even with Brother Lang and Terry the solitude of the forest. I’m not sure when they left the parsonage, but I imagined them bundled in the truck, leaving narrow black lines in the snow. I thought we might find them that way, if we had to, follow the twin trails down the road to Bertha Hill, where their footprints would lead into the woods.
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br />   I longed to go with them, to walk the ridges and smell the musk of rutting elk. But women did not often carry rifles into the mountains. There was one year my mother disappeared into the forest behind our shack, the fall after my father hurt his back. She pulled on his jeans, wool shirt and red cap, then set off into the grove of cedar as though she were intimate with the habits of deer, the rifle slung across her shoulder. She returned within an hour, dragging by one hind hoof a fawn the color of caramel. The tender meat lasted only a few weeks, long enough to keep us fed until my father’s compensation check came, but the memory of the deer’s smallness in her hand never left her, and she never again raised a rifle to her cheek.

  This had been many years before, and still the need to hunt outweighed any number of things. Each year, I felt the pride of seeing the men off: the ritual of early mornings and frost; thermoses of sweet hot tea; the orange hats, wool and gleaming rifles. My father and uncles never took more than they needed, never hunted for size and racks, preferring a fat young cow elk to a swollen-necked bull. The Langs needed lockers full of venison and elk to last the long winter; the men needed to feel the balance of steel and polished wood in their hands, the mastery of lead and powder. The boys needed to learn from their elders the ways of the woods and how to take their place as providers.

  Early that evening, Brother Lang called my father from the cafe at Headquarters. Could he meet them there? Matthew had gotten separated and they were having trouble finding him. He was probably already waiting on the road at the base of the butte, but they might need to split up, do some circling.

  They called my father because they believed if anyone could find Matthew, it would be him. I imagine my father with the heavy black telephone in his hand, moving slowly to light a cigarette, his motions already weighted with the knowing, that sense he had when things had already fallen into their fated place.