by Kim Barnes
Television in and of itself was not a sin, but we did not have one and could not have received the distant signals anyway. When I visited my grandmother Nan, who had moved with my new step-grandfather to Lewiston, my parents were vigilant: Gilligan’s Island was acceptable; Bewitched, with its nose-twitching sorceress, was not. Only after my parents were gone would my grandmother allow me to watch Dark Shadows, a Gothic soap opera complete with werewolves and vampires. I fell madly in love with the resident Transylvanian, Barnabas Collins, whose tragic and noble desire to resist his thirst for blood seemed to embody the human condition: in order to regain his soul, he must deny his body its pleasure.
IT WASN’T UNTIL THE ARRIVAL of the new preacher and his family that I came to understand such visceral desire. By 1968, the year the Langs took over pastorship of our church, the last of my uncles had taken his wife and children and moved to the city. We claimed Brother and Sister Lang, their two sons and one daughter, as kin.
There were long sessions of Bible study and sermons, midday suppers of fried deer meat and mashed potatoes, the grown-ups laughing and happy, the children wading the creek or hunting squirrels in the meadow. In the hours after evening service, I would sit in the parsonage stairway with Luke—at thirteen the preacher’s youngest son. Tall and lean, with blue eyes and full lips, he was handsome enough to turn any girl’s head, and in the feel of his hand stroking my knee, I came to an awareness of a truer temptation, too sweet not to be sin. Yet even as I prayed for forgiveness, I longed to be next to him, longed for the pleasure his closeness might bring.
What little I knew of sex had come to me via school-yard rumors and from a single book my mother handed to me a few months before I turned twelve, although what it had to say about my rapidly maturing body I’d already learned, and what it had to say about intercourse was, Don’t. Mostly I heard about sex in the dire warnings against it. Kissing would lead to petting, and petting was going-too-far and might lead to going-all-the-way. This I knew from the endless lectures on the subject given by our Sunday-school teachers and the preachers themselves. They seemed, in fact, obsessed with man and woman’s desire for each other, and I came to understand that all other wide and crooked roads led to this one intersection: the illicit coming together of the sexes outside the marriage bed. Drinking led to fornication and adultery, as did going to pool halls, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. Rock and roll was nothing more than an excuse to bump and grind: the beat—the hard-driving insistence of the drums and guitars, urging us back to our animal desires, our savage roots—told it all. Anything that throbbed or pulsed, shimmied in the darkness, was there for one reason and one reason only: to lure our souls away from Heaven, to fill the coffers of Hell.
During those long Sundays of church and covered-dish socials and hours spent in the stairway with Luke, I never thought to question this truth. I believed that, should Christ return while I sat with the preacher’s son, his fingers brushing my thigh, I would be doomed. No matter how much my father had encouraged me to think for myself, I knew that to question moral law was to doubt, to doubt was a weakness in faith, and faith was everything. The answers were all there, in the King James Bible: “There hath no temptation taken you but that which is common to man.” I prayed that God give me strength to resist the new feelings flaring within me, feelings that I believed arose not from the physical maturation of my body or from my elemental need for Luke’s attention but from my ancestral transgression: it was Satan who whispered in my ear so that I in my weakness would take with me this other soul, whose only excuse was the man’s natural and predictable passion for a woman made easy by sin.
AT SCHOOL, in the aging brick building that smelled of sour wool and paste, I felt protected by the innocence of my peers, few of whom seemed yet aware of their own sure damnation. I prayed over my sack lunch while the other children nibbled their cheese sandwiches in teacher-imposed silence, yet I never felt marginalized by my habits and appearance. There were so few of us, each with his or her eccentricities: Terry wet the bed and bit her nails to bloody stubs; Linda was a Jehovah’s Witness, worse than any religion I could imagine, since they didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas; Gordon’s father was a drunk; Janet’s mother cried at the PTA meetings, but no one knew why. Whatever group designations and boundaries might later form were not yet present my last year in the woods, when I met my sixth-grade friends at the monkey bars, tied my sweater around the steel pipe, and twirled myself into a dizzy freedom I have not known since.
I, like my friends, was the child of a logger, that was all. We did not have neighborhoods. We did not have blocks. We had in-town and out-of-town. We had camps and settlements and a new development built by Potlatch Forest Industries to house its workers. Some of our parents stayed home at night; some went to the bars, where they drank and danced and, more than once, shot one another to death in fits of jealous rage. Some were Protestant, some Catholic, some knew no religion at all. My schoolmates did not care that I had been gifted with the power of healing, that the visiting evangelist had announced it to the congregation, that I felt the heat come rushing to my hands whenever I touched the sick.
Everyone was struggling to get by, keep up, stay ahead. Simple survival bound us together, and when the sheriff or supervisor knocked on the front door with his hat in his hands, each wife felt her heart leave her. Injury and death came too often, brothers and sons and husbands caught by a barber-chaired hemlock, crushed by a loader, cut by a saw. My great-uncle was killed by a felled tree; the sawyer did not know he was near. When my grandmother remarried, it was to a man known as the Little Giant, a Norwegian logger who, only months after the wedding, was crushed by a load of logs. Although he survived, the damage to his brain left him doddering and disabled. My father ruptured a vertebra after tripping backward over a half-hidden stump, then endured several operations and months in a body cast before returning to the woods. Yet he loved his life there, and my mother loved him, and so we stayed, ferrying our meager belongings from one camp to the next, sometimes renting a house in Pierce, until 1969, when we took up residence in Dogpatch, in the line shack of my dead uncle.
It was there, in the spring of 1970, in that hollow where I turned twelve, that a brilliant light roused my father from sleep—the presence and voice of God, he believed, telling him we must go and never come back, away from that land in which we had made for ourselves a good life. It was the answer my father had been questing for: what could he offer his god? He had no desire for money or material things. He didn’t drink or dance or lust after other women. He was poor in the eyes of men but rich with happiness in the life he had chosen: he had a lovely wife who shared his bed and beliefs; his children were strong and healthy; he rose each morning pleased with the light, savoring his work in the woods. What then? What could he give up as a token of his commitment to God?
He locked himself in the root cellar, intending to fast and pray for forty days and forty nights. It was his quest, his spiritual journey inward toward greater understanding. I often wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t been interrupted by the surprise arrival of my youngest uncle and his family, who could only interpret my father’s actions as verging on insane. He’d gone too far, some people thought, alarmed by my father’s self-dependency and direction.
What I’ve come to understand is that it was his life in the woods that my father loved more than anything—more, even, than his wife and children; he has told me so. He had found his haven there, his safety and his comfort—the very things my father believed he must sacrifice.
Within days, we had left it all behind: the elk, the coyotes who wove their song through the forest. The raccoons had one last go at our garbage; the pack rats took what baubles they could from the cupboards and closets. I carried from that house in the wilderness a box of books, a suitcase of dolls I’d outgrown, the Bible given to me by our pastor and his family for my twelfth birthday.
I believed that the Bible would be my map through the world, a jour
nal of warning and direction. As we drove the narrow road, past the logging camps and small settlements, across the Weippe Prairie, down the Greer Grade to the Clearwater River, I held it in my lap, feeling a loss I could not make sense of. I thought it was the boy that I missed, the preacher’s son. I believed he would someday be my husband, that I would save myself for him, keep myself pure. With my mother’s ballpoint pen, I wrote his name again and again in the palm of my hand as we followed the Clearwater toward the city of Lewiston one hundred miles west, down the same highway my mother had driven to reach the hospital in which I was born.
When we passed the dam at Ahsahka, I studied the giant flatness of its face: in less than a year its construction would be complete, the water that flowed past our camps gathering at its base, turning back on itself, flooding the North Fork beneath fifty miles of manmade lake. Already the good smells were gone—fresh-cut cedar, wood smoke from the shadowed houses, the late wild cherry, the early syringa. At Spalding, where the Nez Perce had listened to the missionaries’ words, where some had begun to believe, we could already see the brown pall that covered Lewiston and crept up the valley floor. I held my nose against the sulfuric stench of the Potlatch pulp-and-paper mill. Red lights winked from its smokestacks, high above the perpetual light of its industry.
The ink in my palm bled into long blue lines, the boy’s name a smudged tattoo. I opened my Bible: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” I closed my eyes, and the stars, for a moment, were there, fading, then gone before I could name them.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GOOD LIFE IN Lewiston, except for what went wrong. My grandmother was there, and we took shelter with her until my father could find work. My step-grandfather had been killed the year before, run over by a drunk driver while peddling ointment and spices, and now the care of their one-acre lot had fallen to Nan, twice widowed. She was our anchor, our point of stability, bedding us down beneath thick quilts, feeding us the potatoes and pot roast she believed would sustain us through anything.
Nan was a small woman, dark-haired, with eyes the color of smoke. Her greatest delight lay in her grandchildren, and I enjoyed long hours of her company and attention, playing checkers, watching forbidden TV shows, helping her in her meticulous rounds of housecleaning. That summer I shared her bed, wondrously soothed by the room’s pale lavender paint and sacheted pillows. She said two of the four walls were mine to decorate, and so I hung torn-out pages from Teen Magazine on my side: Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman, a group photo of the Partridge Family. My parents allowed this, an indulgence less of my particular whims, I think, than of my grandmother’s: above her side of the headboard she’d taped a toothy Engelbert Humperdinck.
Each night I watched as she wrapped her beauty-shop hairdo in tissue paper, rubbed her feet and hands with Jergens. I would fall asleep to her quietly singing “Good Night, Irene,” comforted by her warm presence and soft perfume, while above us the airplanes flew low, headed for the runway a few blocks south. I would listen to the resonant thrum of engines, an unfamiliar and exotic sound, and I would try to imagine such travel, being held aloft by nothing but air. The thought would quicken my pulse, and I would burrow deeper beneath the covers, grateful for the touch of my grandmother’s feet against mine, the whisper of her nightly prayers.
THERE WAS ANOTHER hard-timer in that house, below us in the downstairs bedroom. He was the son of my dead step-grandfather, and I called him Uncle, but I hardly knew him. Whenever he emerged, beetle-browed and growly, my brother and I gave him wide berth. Only when he left on some mysterious errand did I venture down into his corner room with its walls of painted concrete and its single, high window opened to air the musty smell.
Often it was my girl cousin Les, a year my junior, who accompanied me, who didn’t need to be dared. Meeting her for the first time may be my oldest memory: my uncle, her new stepfather, carrying in his arms a little girl of two, white-blond hair and green eyes. My being a year older than she was gave me the only advantage I would ever have over Les. She ran faster, hit harder, bit deeper than any other child I knew. She won basketball free-throw contests when girls were not supposed to compete, set records in the one-hundred-yard dash, alternately pampered and beat her huge stallion, Smokey, and broke the hearts of any number of boys whose affections she relentlessly trashed.
While my grandmother took her afternoon nap, we would sneak to the basement and begin our sleuthing, uncovering clues as to the life of our fearsome relative. What we found was a wooden wardrobe, several shirts pressed into neatness by Nan, a pair of black wingtips. In the bureau drawer was a pocket watch, matchbooks advertising various bars, important-looking papers, several handkerchiefs, shoestrings, bottle openers, military insignia, and a fistful of foreign coins. Next to the metal bedstead, in the magazine rack made of black iron, we discovered something far removed from the airbrushed portraits of teen idols hanging on the walls in the room above our heads: copies of True Detective and True Crime, on their covers the colored illustrations of women clad in slips and garters, hands to their mouths to stifle the scream, their eyes wide and focused on the dark male figure in the doorway.
There were other magazines, too, but instead of drawings, they had black-and-white photographs. In my mind’s eye, I can no longer see the nude bodies or the settings or anything else that appeared in the smudgy pages—nothing except the black bars of ink covering the eyes, which I understood were meant to shield the men and women from shame, the shame I myself felt as Les and I lay on our uncle’s high-sprung bed, reading in the basement’s cool light, our skin tingling, our hearts racing with fear that we’d be caught.
It was there, in the room shut off from the drowsy heat of a summer afternoon, that Les and I found the book. On its cover was a woman, sitting on a chair, bound and gagged. Behind her, the men were dark and menacing silhouettes, shades of gray, sharp blue lines, black eyes and mouths. Les and I took turns reading the details aloud, how the rich, spoiled virgin had been kidnapped and held for ransom, how her captors raped her repeatedly and in all ways, how she had hated it at first, then how she came to want it more than anything. How foolish and childish she had been! Now she knew some part of herself she had never known before. She understood her truest nature.
And it must be true because I was dizzy with the buzz in my ears, the ache between my legs, and I knew it was sin and that sin came from what we should not know and feel.
Les and I read until we had memorized the most graphic pages, and then we foraged again and found another such book—the supposed diary of a Hong Kong madam. Whereas the first paperback taught us of a woman’s desperate need to be dominated, the second taught us how a woman might please a man: with her knowledge of sexual secrets, her store of coveted tricks.
I had no context for the emotions and physical yearnings the books incited, no one to ask or tell, no one who would not be horrified, who would not punish. I could never bear the shame of confession, nor could I deny that dark part of me that wanted, more than anything, to protect the books from confiscation.
It was a dividing point for me—between what I had not known and now knew, between what I feared and what I longed for. My new knowledge separated me from my mother and father, from my grandmother, from my brother, whose face had not yet taken on the mask of guarded transgression. It was as though I were permanently stained, as though some part of me had gone underground.
Les and I made a pact that we would not tell anyone, ever. We cut our fingers with our uncle’s razor and swore blood truth. Now we were more sisters than cousins, and over the next decade, our lives would be informed and directed by those stories in ways we could not then imagine. By the time I left my grandmother’s house that summer, I possessed a knowledge of sexual deviation that would stun my friends years into the future. When they asked me how I knew, I would smile and shrug, thinking how it had always been with me, somewhere near the beginning, when I had first understood that women want what men give, that what power I might possess could be found by
mastery of the erotic, that in submission lay the greatest pleasure of all.
But I could not submit—not then, not later, not when it was what my father demanded of me, not even when I believed it was what I must give or else be destroyed. Always, some part of me resisted. Yet even as I prided myself on the strength of my will and fierce independence, I heard the whisper, the oldest voice telling me that my time would come, that my woman’s fate would someday find me.
BY AUGUST 1970 my father had found nighttime work in Lewiston as a truck driver, hauling sawdust and chips, two or three trips upriver, back to that land we had left, where the smaller mills would load his trailer with wood scraps, which he carried back down to Potlatch, Inc., to be ground and bleached and pressed into tissue paper and cardboard.
We left my grandmother’s and moved into a white, hacienda-style house with a patio and goldfish pond instead of a meadow and creek outside the door. It was more than we could afford, but my mother had swung a deal, bartering paint and yard work for low rent. I’d never lived in such a grand house, with a laundry chute and multiple toilets. The air inside felt hollow, the rooms too large and numerous for our sparse furnishings; our voices echoed from the walls. We could have danced in those rooms, but my father came home weary, his back stiff with the pain of hours behind the wheel, and I was too old to waltz atop his feet. I preferred to keep to my bedroom, where I secretly listened to the local rock-and-roll station and danced solo in front of my dresser mirror, imitating the miniskirted teenagers I’d watched on American Bandstand, moving my hips, my shoulders, gesturing seductively to my phantom love.