In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  My choices seemed few to me then. I could not risk anger, I believed, which would surely turn him away from me. And wasn’t anger itself a sin? I had been charged with getting him through his home schooling and was flush with the honor of such responsibility. If instead of knowledge I presented him with temptation, then it was my presentation that was at fault. I must purify my own thoughts. I was the woman and as such was charged with yet another responsibility: with my patience and purity to diffuse the man’s instinctive carnal urges into quiet domesticity.

  I could tell myself these truths as they had been taught me. But what of the desire I myself felt rising like smoke from the friction of skin on skin? No one had ever given me the prayers to diffuse my own carnal lust; no one had spoken of the hunger of women. Surely it must be particular to my own perversion that this want grew in me.

  I steadied myself with the rationale that we were nearly engaged. Another year, I promised myself, and we would be married, free to couple and lounge wholly naked, every inch of skin slick and revealed. Already, the names of our children were written in the margins of my Bible: David and Caleb, Jessie and Sarah.

  I let my fingers touch the roughened skin of his knuckles, then felt the wedge of his hand between my legs, gently widening the space until his palm rested hot against my thigh. His eyes never left my face. I could see his mouth open a little, his white teeth, the tip of his tongue. I jerked when his hand brushed the crotch of my panties.

  “Hey,” he whispered, “you don’t want to wake them up.” He nodded toward the ceiling as though it were a window. They were sleeping, I knew, but God never slept. I closed my eyes, ashamed, afraid, unable to move.

  Then the hand was gone. I opened my eyes to see him standing before me, once again grinning. “You’d best go to bed,” he said, then left the room, leaving me to the light.

  I shuffled the papers into order, then rose unsteadily. What had happened? Nothing. I ascended the stairs to my room—a doorless closet in the hall, really, just outside the real bedroom, where Terry and Sarah slept.

  The sheets cooled my skin. I opened my Bible to the passage underlined in red: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

  I must have faith, I told myself. I laid my glasses on top of my Bible and turned off the light. I could barely discern the stars out my window, but I knew they were there and kept looking into darkness until sleep took me and stars no longer mattered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I stood at the kitchen sink, running hot water over the plates and looking out the window. The temperature had been hitting one hundred the last several days and air rose in snaking ribbons off the streets of Spokane.

  The water scalded my hands, but I had learned not to mind the heat that turned my skin crimson. Sister Lang and Sarah could dip their hands quickly into the steaming rinse basin and pull out dishes sanitized and gleaming. In the bathtub each night I practiced, closing the cold water faucet down a turn at a time until only the hot ran over my palms.

  For the last several weeks I had been watching the women carefully. I had much to know about keeping house and cooking, and always before I had resisted participating in any of the kitchen chores my mother had asked me to do. If I were to be a good wife for Luke, I must work hard to learn his preferences: how much salt he liked on his eggs, how much sugar in his coffee. I folded the sheets into tight rectangles, following Sarah’s careful instructions. Each towel was doubled, then triple-folded and nested neatly in the closet. On my own initiative I had begun to clean the tub each evening after Luke’s bath, wiping away the greasy smudges. Gathering his dirty clothes in my arms, I felt proud—so different from that other self, who might have shunned such a simple and loving task. Now I was fulfilling my duty, and the Langs surely must see how grateful I was, how worthy I was to be their daughter-in-law.

  My every prayer had been answered. Even the problem with Luke seemed under control. Only once since that night at the table had he touched me in a bad way, and then just for a moment. We had finished his homework and stood to go to bed. As I’d turned toward the stairs, he’d slid his arms around me from behind and hugged me close against his chest. I could feel his heat at my back, his breath at my neck. I’d thought he might turn me toward him and kiss me. A kiss would be fine, as long as it went no further. I’d wanted him to kiss me, something he had never done. Instead, I’d felt his hands rise, cup my breasts, and then he was gone.

  “Thank you, Lord,” I’d whispered, for surely God had seen my weakness. I spent the rest of the night on my knees, imagining Luke at his own bed doing the same, our prayers rising to mingle like vapors above the sleeping town.

  Yet instead of drawing us spiritually closer, that night seemed only to have made it harder for us to be together. Luke seldom looked at me across the dinner table, and he’d taken to sitting in another pew at church. I believed I knew why: only by separating himself from me could he gain control of his physical self. I bowed my head in understanding, comforting myself with the knowledge that he and I waged the same battle.

  Perhaps what the Langs were discussing in private had to do with Luke and me. I lifted the plates gently, trying to cushion the clatter of glass so that I might hear the murmur of their voices coming from the bathroom. They were all in there—everyone except me crowded in the tiny space, leaning against porcelain, because it was the only room with a locking door.

  I had been told to remain where I was and finish the dishes. Why? Had he told his parents of his sin, and of mine? Were they in there deciding what must be done? I shook my head. No. They were a family and needed to speak of things that I was not yet privileged to hear, and I must be patient. Suspicion was the work of the Devil.

  This was not the first time they had closed themselves off. I had been asked to go outside just yesterday because, Sister Lang said, they needed to have a family meeting. I’d stepped out into the hot afternoon, squinting my eyes against the light. Family, family, I thought. I live here, eat, sleep and pray here. Isn’t this my family?

  “Lord,” I prayed, “just let me be here. Just let me stay.”

  Was that Terry’s or Brother Lang’s muted voice? I strained to make out words, to detect some pitch or intonation that might calm me. I need not know the ways of the Lord, I thought, but more than anything I wanted to tiptoe across the kitchen and put my ear to the door. I watched the water filling the sink and leaned forward to catch the steam on my face, breathing in the moisture. Something was working at my guts, something dark and foreboding—the tremor of recognition I had been fighting to suppress.

  Suddenly I knew what it was I was feeling, and I stepped back from the sink, grabbed the dishtowel and held it to my forehead and chin, wet with the steam and now sweat. It was all too familiar: the set of their mouths, the way they became silent when I entered the room. I remembered my mother leaned against the counter, the paper in her hands damp and curling, her quiet crying, her tears dropping into the scalding water as she read the letter from Lola.

  The wave of certainty broke over me, threatened to consume me with panic. These people had saved me, had believed me worthy of love. If they were to refuse me, where would I go? If my desire for Luke had brought this on, I would purge myself. I would fast, shut myself away in a room without food, take only water and that so sparingly my body would know its true thirst.

  The lock clicked. I could not bear for them to see my fear and kept my back to them as they filed by. There was nothing in the basin I could wash, nothing I could wrap my hands around and rinse clean. The screen door opened, sighed shut. Car doors slammed, an engine started. I spun around, suddenly afraid that I had been left. Sister Lang stood looking at me, and I was both embarrassed and relieved to find her there, hair tightly braided, familiar in her housedress cinched at the waist by a terry-cloth apron. Her ramrod
back reminded me that I was slouching, and I tucked my shoulder blades and raised my chin, forgetting for a moment my misgivings. She liked to see me standing straight, my own braid hanging toward the floor like a plumb bob.

  She moved into the dining room and motioned for me to follow. Already the heat had invaded the house, settling into the corners, sucking the breath from the morning. All the curtains were closed to shield against the sun, and the tempered light slowed our movement, as though sound and motion were somehow connected to the clarity of our vision. She pointed to a chair and I understood we would talk.

  She began simply. “You should know,” she said, “that Brother Lang has felt the presence of Satan in this house for some time now.” I nodded in giddy agreement, aware that demons populated the very air we moved through. Only constant vigilance held them at bay; only prayer and purity kept them from burrowing like maggots into our souls, where they would fester and burst forth in a frenzy of vile destruction. When Christ cast out Satan’s Legion from the possessed man, even the pigs in which the demons took refuge knew that it was better to hurl themselves from the cliff rather than be made monstrous by such evil.

  I felt my jaws tighten, the saliva pool behind my teeth. Not until she reached out and pulled the dishtowel from my hands did I realize I had been stripping it between my fists, spotting the table with water. I rubbed at the spots with my palm, then looked at my hand, the creases damp and shiny.

  “We’ve heard strange noises, the stairs creaking in the middle of the night. Evil stalks this house.” Then she pointed her finger, the towel hanging down like a skin. “You,” she said. “You have brought these demons into our home.”

  I watched the movement of her mouth. I could see her talking, but her words floated from her lips and into the air, mixing with the sounds of flies and Saturday traffic. I sat with my palm still open, feeling my body let loose its hold, feeling that part of me that wanted to rise screaming and begging instead drift slowly downward, inward, settling somewhere deep, unreachable. I could just as easily not be there. I could be anywhere I wanted—outside feeling the hot sidewalk through the soles of my shoes, or sitting at the piano, safe in the dark church. I began to hum a little to myself, rocking in my chair.

  There was more. She told me she knew of my love for Terry, the husband of her true daughter. Hadn’t I called him one day to the shadowed sanctuary? Hadn’t I pressed myself against him and whispered in his ear the name of some dark familiar? In the church, she said, I had seduced him.

  I was stunned with disbelief. Nothing had prepared me for this story of my life, a story that made of me a plotting adulteress, a betrayer of gross, unimaginable proportions. I shook my head, wanting to say no, no, I’d never do that, I’d never … but I had no breath to form the sounds, no chance of changing the vision Sister Lang had created of my lascivious nature.

  There had been several times when Sarah had brought up veiled references to my sexual experience, her implication being that I had led a life of promiscuity. I never felt I had the right to protest, to set their thinking straight: I was a virgin, that magical designation that meant everything to a girl’s future on earth as well as in Heaven. Once, over a meal at the K mart cafeteria, I had shyly asked Brother Lang if he would perform the ceremony at my wedding. I didn’t understand the smirks and shared glances between the family members until Sarah said, “Daddy only marries virgins.” I’d nodded, too naive to believe she meant her comment to be cruel. I could no more register that kind of intent than I could begin to understand how Sister Lang believed me capable of seducing Terry. I was fourteen years old and had been cast in the role of Jezebel, whose story I knew well: for her sins against the believers she was thrown down into the street and made to be eaten by dogs; only her skull, hands and feet were left to be cast onto the field like dung.

  I don’t remember how I found my way from that room. It’s as though a shade were drawn, leaving only the silhouettes of bodies and their coarse movement visible in my memory: no detail, no emotion, no faces or fingers, just the dense and undefinable figures of people going on with their lives, and I somewhere among them.

  I do know that I was shunned. Even though I continued to attend church, I sat alone in the long pew. I ate in silence, my throat constricting so that the food swelled in my mouth and I spat it into my napkin, afraid that if they saw my plate still full they might find more proof of my evil: demons feed not on flesh but on the spirit. Sleep became my only comfort. By some mercy I did not dream and welcomed the impenetrable darkness, feeling the water close over my head as though I were tied to a stone. And it is this I remember most: the sense of being anchored yet drifting languorously, like one drowned and made to love her own death.

  The remaining days of the summer between my eighth-and ninth-grade years come to me in memory like smoke from a distant fire. Someone must have told me what day my parents would arrive to pick me up, and I awoke that morning, made my bed, packed my few belongings in a bag, then sat before my window and waited until Sister Lang called me downstairs.

  I moved with my eyes down. I didn’t think, didn’t remember. What was in front of me commanded my full attention: dicing onions, grating cheese. Only when the car pulled into the driveway did I look up.

  I greeted my parents kindly, as though they were old friends instead of blood kin. The dinner was served outside—a casserole and salad, a plain hamburger patty for my father—laid out on a cheerful, red-checked tablecloth. I ate and nodded in quiet agreement: Yes, the weather was good, the church was growing. No comment was directed toward me, no questions were asked. I had only to remain upright and silent not to shatter.

  What my parents saw before them was a girl, modest and willing to acquiesce, a girl who bowed her head and said grace when asked. Were they stunned into the same state of unreality in which I found myself? Could this girl really be their daughter, the angry and spiteful child they hadn’t seen for months? Changes so dramatic and seemingly sudden can hardly be reconciled except in retrospect, and all that is left to ground us are the expected and familiar motions of the present: the salt must be passed, the ice cream served, the coffee perked.

  After the dishes were washed, I gathered my things and climbed into the backseat. We pulled away from the church, my family and I. The Langs were waving, and in the sharp light of August, I could see Luke’s face, in his eyes nothing I recognized as regret or desire.

  My brother was asleep almost immediately. His head rolled and nodded against the window until I pulled him gently down and pillowed his head in my lap. I had not seen the fields since late spring, and their golden color infused with the pink glow of twilight soothed me.

  Nothing was spoken as the car glided silently across the prairie, its shadow growing and shrinking, absurdly deformed, finally swallowed by the earth’s umbra. It was then that I felt it well up, the panic and overwhelming pain, and I began without reason to tell it, from the end back to its beginning, as though in the unraveling I might find the cause, the one offending stitch.

  The road passed evenly beneath us. Nothing broke the rhythm of my story, no one questioned or interrupted. When it was done, I leaned back exhausted, not caring what they understood or what they doubted. I had spoken it, had brought it into the world, had made it real. In the rearview mirror I saw the small ruby glow of my father’s cigarette, brighter as he inhaled, then fading. Nearly dreaming, I heard the only words he would ever speak of that summer. He said, “I was afraid something like this might happen.” In his words I found comfort and I slept.

  I do not know what meaning lay in my father’s words that night any more than I know what drove the Langs to accuse me of harboring demons. I do know that most often the possibilities are too dark to contemplate even now. I bundle myself in the safety of ambiguity and allow the vagaries of language to protect me.

  I see how my life is often defined by the events of that summer, how my emotions are fenced by fear and distrust. And what a fourteen-year-old suffering her bod
y’s own betrayal could not know about seduction I now understand: I seduced no one. I also know that I have no explanation for Sister Lang’s accusation. Remembering how carefully I shut myself down that day, how I’ve allowed myself so little memory of time and circumstance, I wonder if there is some other horror I might not remember. Can I believe any of these people capable of sins greater than my own? Who would I blame? Luke, barely sixteen? Terry, who may never fully have known of his role in the condemnation? A jealous mother or wife? The father, the family, the church, the Devil Himself, God?

  For years there remained only one answer, and that answer was that the blame lay with me. I came to distrust no one more than myself, and the loathing I felt for any passion that threatened to rise in me—lust or love, joy or decided sadness, anger, hate, hope—eventually honed itself into a dulled and protective sheath.

  It was a covering I wore well: this new consciousness suited the life of a Christian. Kindness to others was no risk—I expected nothing in return. I found it easy to turn the other cheek when the slap itself produced no sting.

  That night when I arrived home and took up my life like an old and familiar garment, I felt only an overwhelming relief. In this place I knew the boundaries, knew what I must do to be accepted and survive. I had learned my lesson: I could not run; I could never again believe I knew the world that well.

  I woke the next morning to the sounds of my mother in the kitchen. Jumping up, I washed my face quickly, combed and tied my hair. When she turned from the stove I saw my own benumbed smile mirrored in her face. I felt a pinch of repulsion. “Let me,” I said, and took the spatula from her hand.

  My father and brother came to a table set with matching plates and flatware, coffee and milk poured, syrup heated. We bowed our heads and I offered up thanks for food and family. My mother began to cry softly. “I’m just so happy that we’re all here together,” she said.