by Kim Barnes
David and I rode in silence. He was tired, he said. He needed to sleep before hauling out that night. When he dropped me off at my apartment, I did not encourage him to stay but waved as he drove away. Inside, I filled a jelly glass with water, unfurled the limp shoot. I worried that it would not live, that even the short trip between houses had been too much, but when I awoke the next morning its leaves had plumped, and I believed that I could already see the white nubbins of roots forming along the stem. “Anybody,” my mother had often said, “can grow a philodendron.” I would need a planter and some soil. I would trail it like ivy along the corners of my cupboards. I would polish the leaves until they shone.
A FEW WEEKS LATER I lay in the dark of the sleeper, listening to the wind that had forced us to pull off the road. The cab of the semi shuddered and bucked. We were miles between cities, somewhere in the desert of eastern Washington. David had turned off the engine to conserve fuel, and in the absence of our light the blackness seemed an ocean. We were floating, our world a four-by-six room of vinyl, metal, and glass pushed and pulled by deep currents.
I was frightened by the wind’s intensity. I’d seen the trailers blown sideways, the loads tipped. I could feel the framework twist, the many wheels lift and settle. Tumbleweeds of sage scratched along the truck’s underbelly; the windows whistled and moaned their sad news.
David sat behind the steering wheel. I wanted to touch him, wanted to feel the length of his body warming the cold mattress on which I lay. I wanted his words of comfort to calm me, and the only way I knew to ask for this was to caress and proffer, draw him to me with my hands and lips.
He ignored my imploring, pushed me away. He had to keep watch, he said, be ready to go the minute the storm lessened. But I knew it was more than this; he was angry in a way I had not seen before. I knew, too, what had brought about David’s wrath: in Seattle we’d come to a heated disagreement over the next step of my initiation. I wasn’t to the point he had hoped I would be, unwilling to allow the permanent markings he wanted to be placed upon me: the piercing rings and lasting tattoos, his rites of ownership, my rites of passage into the world he imagined for me. There were places on First Avenue, he said. Some of the work could be done there. My refusal was soft at first, then steady. “No,” I’d said. “I’m not ready.”
He had studied me for a moment, gauging my resolve. Perhaps he saw clearly what I, as of yet, could not: there were places I would not willingly go. I was beginning to see that what David offered had not brought me the kind of freedom I had anticipated. I was tired of dancing, tired of the loud music coming from David’s tape player, his radio, the jukeboxes and bands in all the bars we entered. I no longer wanted to perform for David, and I had begun to understand that I could never perform for the men who gathered in the blue-lit clubs. In the truck-stop bathrooms, I locked myself in for long minutes, breathing in the smell of disinfectants, calmed by the white metal stalls and country music—Dolly and Merle singing me back home. I needed to get away, leave the parking lot with its lineup of trucks, but I could not imagine the steps I would take from that room with its stainless steel walls scratched with names and numbers. And I would think, “I can leave if I really want to.” And even now, I think, “He could have hurt me worse, but he chose not to. How can I condemn him for that?” What damage had I incurred? What trauma did I hold as evidence? My face was not cut. My arms were not broken. Whatever lay in front of me was the projection of my own desire to know what I should not know, to feel what I was not meant to feel.
Through the last hours of the storm, I lay with my eyes open, hoping for light. When the sun finally rose up before us, a salmon medallion in the east, David pulled onto the highway, and we passed by the wheat fields and dairy farms, the schools with their bicycles all in a row, the town halls and neat cafés advertising their special of the day. We were joined by other trucks and cars, people headed to work, to coffee with friends, and in the face of such common things the nightmarish hours before seemed suddenly false.
BETWEEN US THEN THERE WAS SOMETHING not new, but newly recognized. It had always been there—that awareness David and I had of each other’s strength, how we held so deeply to the belief that one would outlast the other. David had pared me down to the bone, to that point where I would offer up scapula and femur, pubis and spine, but not the marrow he wanted, the life core.
In the face of our battle, everything else fell away. Just as David had reduced me to my most basal self, his fervor to dominate had brought him to the zenith of his power. He no longer hid his ambition. I knew that while I filled the hours when he was away with Star Trek and paperback romance, he would do what he had told me he would do: find the women in Seattle who most pleased him.
I was not allowed jealousy or any other sense of possession. I stayed with him because I wanted to, he said, because what I wanted was not only him but every man like him and even the women that he lay with. I wanted them all around me, all at once, my bed full of mouths and teeth and tongues, didn’t I?
No was a whisper I hardly remembered. What David demanded of me left me weak. I exhausted myself suppressing awareness. I must not hear, must not see myself as I was, powerless, unable to scream. And if I had been willing to call out, who would have heard me? It was too late, I knew. I’d gone too deep into the forest. I had only the night and its darkness and the hunger all around.
“Are you afraid?” David would ask, those times when I faltered, when I failed to do what he asked of me. I didn’t know how to answer. “Yes,” and he’d breathe in my fear and become more cruel. “No,” and he’d smile because soon I would be, I must be afraid.
“THERE ARE SOME THINGS BETTER LEFT UNSAID,” my mother has told me. I wonder what those things are. I wonder if somewhere in those untold stories I might have found a map of experience I could follow, some way to believe I was not alone in my confusion and misjudgments. What we fear most we bury deepest, so that the very thing we must detail manifests itself in abstraction: “Stay away from that kind of man.” What kind? The kind that doesn’t kiss you on the first date, doesn’t maul you on the second? The kind that buys you flowers, makes good money, doesn’t leave you with blackened eyes and a broken jaw?
We give what directions we can: keep your nose clean, your chin up, your legs together, your mouth shut. Yet, so often the truth lies in what we cannot say. Blind cartographers, tongue-tied guides, we send our children off with maps drawn in invisible ink, pointing down the Yellow Brick Road toward Oz without a word about flying monkeys.
Nothing about the bedside table, its drawer holding scarves of various color, the weave of knots whose tying must be learned, intricate details, instructions passed on from one initiate to the next.
“Like this,” David whispered.
Like this.
THERE WAS RELIEF IN LEAVING BEHIND my life-insurance portfolios, the calculating of cost and benefit, worth and risk. I got on at the local drive-in, where the most demanding task was mastery of the milk-shake machine. What money I brought home paid for rent and little else. When it became clear that David’s truck driver’s salary could not keep up with his lease, the parties, and freeloading druggies, he cleaned out his apartment and moved in with me, bringing with him his guns, knives, and great horned owl, which he hung above the fireplace, its yellow glass eyes persistently fixed on some point just above my head.
And so, with our clothes in the same closet, our dishes and pots and pans nested in the same cabinets and drawers, I began to imagine a life with David, one that would redirect our course, offer us both good shelter. Perhaps I still believed what I’d been taught—that it is the woman who determines the character of the man, feminine virtue that tempers male vice: with our quiet selves we give comfort; with the infinite grave of our suffering, we swallow transgression. I would make for David the home he had never had, create for him a life to make up for his own fractured past. I would nurture him, keep him fed, his clothes laundered, his sheets clean. He would find more comfo
rt in my bed than in the arms of dancers. He would learn to give love instead of pain. I’d mend the story, make it work. I’d focus on what we shared, what I believed had brought us together in the first place.
Like David, I was drawn to the romance of self-sustenance, of living on wild meat and native trout, frozen huckleberries, watercress picked from the wash of a mountain spring, morels sprung up beneath the northward shading of yellow pine. The few times we spoke of the future, it was in terms of isolation: how far into the country we’d like to settle, how far away from highways and quick-marts.
David’s aging aunt lived in such a place, on a homestead near a small north Idaho town, where David had spent much of his boyhood, exploring the forest with his .22 rifle. In the late fall we went there to hunt elk. While the old woman told the old stories, frying bacon on the wood-fired cookstove drawn up the river sixty years before by a pair of mules on each bank, I peeled potatoes and thought of the lumpy little bed where I’d sleep that night, alone in deference to her aged authority.
The intimacy of early cold light is what I remember: rising to pull on my long johns and jeans, a jar of home-canned pheasant for breakfast, filling the Thermos with coffee and my pockets with shells and homemade jerky.
As David and I walked toward the crest of the mountain, I felt again that which I have always loved—the encompassing sanctuary of wilderness. Sunlight shot lacy and low through branches of Ponderosa pine. Tamarack lit the hillside, yellow beyond yellow against the dun of frost-killed whortleberry. What leaves of sumac remained had gone from blood red to black. We crossed through thick stands of Douglas fir, over the small streams that washed across rock and emerald moss. The smell of forest floor rose up wet and green, spiced with juniper and the hard red berries of kinnikinnick.
I followed David through the woods, felt the life come back to my arms and legs. This is what it could be like, I thought, if the rest of the world would fall away. I believed, simply and absolutely, that it was what was outside the wilderness that corrupted, believed it with the earnestness of my father when he was young.
Every few minutes I reached out and bent a limb of vine maple, raked a thumbnail of bark from a sapling. I scanned the horizon for landmarks—split-top firs, an exposed shoulder of rock. The day was clear, and I plotted the sun’s course across the sky, relieved by its sure rise toward noon. When we stopped to listen, I dropped my jaw to quiet my breathing; bent down to press the small, round droppings of deer between my fingers, testing for warmth; raised my face to sniff the air for musk, the pungent odor of a urine-marked tree.
After hours of walking, we’d seen no sign of elk or deer. I slowed, let David lengthen the distance between us. As I leaned against a lightning-struck pine to catch my breath, I held my arms away from my sides to catch the breeze.
I’ve got to keep up, I thought, will my feet to go forward, my lungs to hold air. “You should be able to walk this kind of country all day”—my father’s words. I felt a sudden longing for his presence, for his voice urging me farther along the trail. “It’s all up here,” he’d say, those times during the hunt when I stopped to rest. He’d tap his finger against his forehead. “If you think you’re tired, then you’re tired. If you think you ain’t, then you ain’t.”
Always, this code of mind over matter, the belief that endurance has less to do with physical strength than a steely determination to overcome the body’s inherent weakness. Such stoicism had split our family into those who would never be broken and those who already were. It was my father I aligned myself with, a man who could empty his mind and never feel the pain, who could, if he must, reinvent the word.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, caught the incense of David’s tobacco mixed with yarrow and wild onion. I balanced the Winchester in the crook of my left arm, remembered all the times I had seen my father handle the rifle in just this way. I spread my fingers across the walnut stock, studied the shape of my knuckles and nails, so much like his. I touched the trigger, felt its light resistance, looked up to see David almost out of sight.
I’d nearly caught up when I saw him stop. I heard it too: the high whine of a voice rising to a scream. My skin prickled and I looked at David, who stood with his head cocked, gathering in the sound. Again the shrill howl echoed up the canyon. Not coyotes, I knew—it was too early in the day, the sound too human. But not human. Something else, moving in pain, in fear.
“Sounds like a bear,” David said.
“Trapped?” I asked, then the scream rose again, more distant this time, farther down the draw. David shook his head and turned back to whatever invisible path we were following.
I shrugged the rifle onto my other shoulder, still bothered by the keening cry, worried about the suffering. We’d seen other hunters; a helicopter had flown over us, illegally transporting a roped and bundled bull elk, hanging down like a pendulous tongue. I thought of the army chopper David had shot from, felt the hair on my own neck rise as the rotors beat the air above us.
“It’s no good,” he said. The forest seemed full of noise and movement, cheating us of surprise. There was no silence, no isolation from the sounds of guns and motors. When David turned, I knew we were headed back toward the river, toward the house with its small beds and water pumped from the spring. It wasn’t the sun that told me so, or the geography of trees and ridges; it wasn’t anything I could name. I just knew—that way—and knew that it was right. But I did not trust it yet. I’d let David lead me down the ravines cutting into one another, the deer trails that wove through the woods. I watched the sky darken against itself in gradations of blue—indigo, navy, cobalt, true—the last light at our backs as we stepped from the forest into the clearing and walked the few feet into a home not our own, but one that took us in and, for that time, made of us who we might otherwise be.
THAT NIGHT David and I visited the only tavern for miles, a small wooden building with two tables, a counter bar, a jukebox. The sole patron present left a few minutes after we arrived, tipping his cap to me on the way out.
David knew the owner, a middle-aged man who introduced himself to me as Smith.
“Order what you want,” said David. “Smith’s a magician.”
The tavern served beer and wine—no hard liquor without a license, which Smith didn’t have, but he did have a locked closet. From it he drew David’s Jack Daniels and the vodka and Kahlua he needed to mix my drink. He made me six Black Russians during the course of the night, each heavily dosed, as I listened to the stories—the same stories I’d heard at other bars, around campfires, at the holiday table: the wealthy man from Texas who shot one of his hunting guide’s mules; the politician from California who came girded with enough Weatherbys and Berettas to bring down every deer for miles, hit nothing, then offered a wad of bills for someone else’s kill.
The talk of good families and bad years, when the snow got more than the hunters, years when all you had to do was step onto your back porch and pick your shot—I felt comforted by the men’s words, the rhythm and reason of story. I had heard the same tales all my life, the cycle of seasons marked and defined by meat, the narratives passed from one generation to the next, in each telling the understood message that to be accepted inside the circle, you must prove up, survive with grace whatever weather, grief, or danger comes your way. You must, above all, take responsibility for your own failed doings. I never questioned the dictates of this code, and much of me still believes in its simple truths. I know, also, that such harsh judgment can silence those narratives whose telling might offer the comfort and continuity of shared experience. Without the truths that are lodged in every life’s telling, the old narratives thin, become brittle, and shatter, and we are left in chaos, no trail to follow home.
By the time I staggered from my stool that night, I was singing along with Jimmy Buffett, “Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville.” We were nowhere near a Mexican sunset, but the liquor warmed me and I felt strangely at peace. We left the bar and stepped into the cold. Th
e sharp smell of wood smoke, the stars so bright and distinct they made of the black sky a thing of light, the air itself an incense of cedar— I shuddered with love for it, for the rush of knowing I belonged there. We drove the few miles back to the house, where David’s aunt was already sleeping. I crawled into the narrow bed she had made for me, beneath quilts worn thin by the pull of hands.
In the next room I heard David cough, the rap of his bed against the wall between us. I felt a sudden yearning to touch him with tenderness, as a wife might, to rise in the morning made new by pure air and a desire born of love.
I believed in this possibility because I believed in redemption, in rebirth, because even though I had left the faith, there yet existed some faith that had not left me. I had felt the conversion that comes of spiritual and emotional purgation; I had seen how a drunk could stagger to the altar and walk away sober, how a mother could suffer the death of her child, kneel down and rise in peace. Souls saved, bodies healed, families mended, the blind made to see—I lay there, without prayer, without intercessor, yet still believing in that directive given by Saint Paul: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
I imagined the miracle of a good life, the life that my father had dreamed of, how I could circle back and pick up the trail, follow the path back into the wilderness, return to that spot where the demon had found him, chart a new direction. I believed that if I could just stay in that house, where the stove huffed out its honest heat, stay in that clearing by the river and live by the codes of sustenance and provision, I would be happy. I could hunt with David, cook for him, pick fruit from the trees and seal it in jars, follow him across mountains and sleep in the meadows—be everything that my mother was, and everything that she was not.