Hungry for the World (21 page)

T
HAT 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. The 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.

I thought of the young boy David had once been, napping in this same bed perhaps, or playing outside in the barn, where one summer he helped his aunt raise an orphaned fawn. He still remembered the way it suckled, pulling at his fingers, the smooth leather of its mouth around the bottle’s nipple. I had never seen the affection I heard in David’s words, but it was there, somewhere, and I would, through my patience, my sacrifice, coax it from him.

Lying in the damp room, smelling wood smoke and the yeasty odor of bread dough rising near the stove, I realized that what I was feeling for David was something like love. I realized, too, how much I missed the calm and constant safety of family, how much I longed to re-create the circle that had once protected me.

At that moment I made a traitorous decision: no matter what David said, no matter how many other women he chose to bed, no matter what he believed he wanted and must have, I would no longer lie with other men. I whispered the promise to myself, felt a new determination. I gathered the blankets tighter, tucked my chin to keep in heat. Outside an owl made its silent sweep across the meadow; the voles scattered seeds in their burrows of grass. The deer came with their luminescent eyes and drank from the river, dipping their heads, offering themselves to the moon, then turned back to the narrow paths so that the sun might not find them on the open aits, vulnerable and exposed.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, we learned from a neighbor that the howls we heard had come from a yearling bear, gut-shot and dragging its intestines across the forest floor. I can still hear its
bawling, its distraction and pain filling the canyon like fire. I hear, too, the recorded cries of a dying rabbit, projected from the camouflaged tape player David used to call the coyotes in. I remember how we would rise from our blind and shoot the coyotes where they stood, looking our way, ears pricked forward, curious, nearly hopeful, then, at the last moment, sure.

D
ECEMBER 24
, I
LAY ON MY COUCH
, trying to concentrate on whatever sitcom David was watching to keep my mind off of the pain wracking my stomach. A virus had left me weak-kneed and pathetic, sipping 7-Up instead of champagne.

The week before, my mother had called to invite me to the holiday dinner. Roast turkey, ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, sugared yams, chocolate pie.

“What about David?” I’d asked.

My mother sighed. “You know how we feel about him,” she said. “Your dad wouldn’t have it, even if I would.”

How long had it been since I had seen her, my father, my grandmother or brother? My thoughts of them came to me like distant memories, images from a photograph: mouths frozen in silent smiles, eyes peering into the dark lens of my face.

Les and Marc stopped by with gifts that Christmas Eve. Les sometimes seemed the only tie left, the lone thread tethering me to my family. David devoted a great deal of attention to Les, invited her to the parties, plied her with dope. She met his interest with casual disregard, took what she wanted
and left. I wondered if she knew the truth of my life, the stories that I could not tell her. I watched as she and Marc drank wine with David while I sat at the end of the couch, shivering with fever. I felt disoriented, as though I were separated from the others in the room, as though I were in a box of glass, cut off from their conversation and laughter.

When I rose to use the bathroom, I saw David avert his eyes, not wanting to see me still in my robe, my hair unwashed, my colorless face. I closed the door and rested my head against the tub’s cool porcelain. My resolution of fidelity had not brought the reward I had hoped for. Instead of drawing us closer, my refusal to play the role of communal concubine had only served to alienate David. If what I longed for was deference and compassion, what I’d gained was neglect and isolation. “This is not
my way,”
David had said, arguing that I was ruining what was good between us. If I thought I could change him, he said, I was wrong.

When I came back into the living room, Les and Marc were preparing to leave. As I slumped onto the couch, I saw in their eyes not just sympathy but something else: pity. I felt disgust for myself then. They had seen how David ignored me, had heard him say he’d be going out for the night. They may have wanted to gather me up and take me with them, feed me broth and sweet tea, but David stood between us, ushering them outside.

I closed my eyes and heard the door latch, then the sound of David dropping change into his pocket, the slide of his wallet against his hip. I pretended sleep when he walked past the couch, heard him hesitate for a moment at the door, then felt the cold rush of air from outside. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. Christmas lights flared against the frosted
windows. I became aware of the songs coming over the FM station, songs of joy and celebration, God and angels, peace on earth and a star in the East. On the mantel beneath the owl, I’d pegged two of David’s wool socks. I studied them for a while, wondering what I’d thought might appear in each, what bauble I might rise to Christmas morning.

I wanted the sickness to be over, and the holiday too. I wanted nothing more to remind me of how alone I was and how I’d chosen this path and had no one to blame but myself. “You made your bed, you lie in it,” I whispered to myself. I looked at the owl, its outstretched wings so large they might cover me where I lay. I imagined the shadow of its body descending, the softness of its breast. I’d always loved the owls, suddenly there, looming white in the headlights, their solemn, monastic calling.

And then I realized I was angry, that the anger had been with me from the beginning, when I had first seen the owl and realized that David had shot it—not for food or even for money but because it came into his vision and he desired to possess it.

I thought of my father, whom I had never known to kill except for meat or protection, who came to the forest as though to worship. I remembered the story he had once told me of the rare white raven he’d seen while working in the woods. “I saw it there among the others,” he said, his voice still reverent, “like a ghost. Only that once, and never again.”

My father did not covet the raven, as some would have, because he understood, because he had taught me, that some things are sacred, that some things are gifts.

I studied the owl, as though there were secrets it might tell me. I thought of the nights it had flown through, the distant
stars that guided its flight. I thought of my father that night the demon came, how it was nothing he could make sense of, how it frightened him. He quit believing in light, in the solid shapes of walls, and began walking through the dark as though it were day, knowing what he may or may not see a mere reflection of what he carried within himself—like memory, or sin.

Could he have known what journey lay before him? Did his vision warn him of our family’s fragmentation, his daughter’s rebellion, her desire to run and be lost and never be found? I wondered if he cared anymore, or if he simply believed my destiny already sealed, with nothing he could do but wait.

And what if my father had come for me there, where I lay on my couch, sick and exhausted? Would I have feared him, as I always had—feared him for all that he did not do but was capable of, as though in the repression of his rage lay the greatest threat of all? What if he had gathered me up in his arms and taken me home? I might have resisted him just as I had John, my pride and bitterness disallowing such rescue. Or maybe to have him come would have seemed such an act of uncompromised love that I would have welcomed his strength, his protection. I wanted to imagine the walls broken down between us, our mutual forgiveness, the coming days full of a new and tender awareness. I wanted to be only his daughter and not the daughter of Eve. But I knew that any freedom I might gain should I go back was only imaginary; the rules would still be the same, an exchange of one prison for another. Better that I suffer because of the choices I’d made than to have no choices at all.

———

T
HAT
J
ANUARY
the cold came down hard, busting pipes, icing the streets. The snow settled into the draws, the twilight turning the mountains deep blue. As David had predicted, the coyote pelts were good, seventy dollars for each hide brought in.

There is so little I remember from that winter, so few images I can recall. David came off the road high on bennies, unable to sleep. When I stood beside him in front of the bathroom mirror, I was startled by his wild hair and beard, his dilated pupils, his wrinkled clothes. I got out the iron and did what I could, what I’d been taught to do for a man: crease the sleeves, smooth the placket, give the collar some starch. It was my mother’s map I followed now, what I did to impose order, to make sense of the course my life had taken—hot-water laundry, bleach-cleaned toilets, sheets snapped straight and folded tight around their mattress.

I remember the strange weakness that took hold of me: at work, my knees gave way as I stood over the deep-fat fryers; my hips locked, and I fell, momentarily paralyzed from the waist down. The doctors injected dye, took X rays, performed their small surgeries. They showed me fine bits of cartilage and bills I could not pay.