Hungry for the World (26 page)

I sat on the mattress’s edge and undressed as he watched, following the familiar routine. But something had changed. He could no longer reach that part of me that had once tensed beneath his hand. He had taken of me what he could; there was nothing he could do to resurrect some remnant of that girl I had once been, the woman he had worked so carefully to gain, to teach. What he had wanted was my willing trust, but
trust
was a word that now meant nothing to me. I observed myself from a distance, pleased by how little I was feeling, how great was my control: no emotion, no physical response. In this, there was power. I might never have to be afraid again.

It was a simple act between us, then, common and homely: I, as though the lumpish wife-servant, giving herself to duty; he, the coarse husband, taking his pleasure, taking his due. When it was over, I watched him dress, listened to the sound of his pickup grow more distant, and I knew he would not return, and that if he did, I would not know him.

I gathered my clothes, felt the seep of him between my legs, and this was the first time, for always before he had remained unfinished. In the beginning, I had thought this a sign of his control, his selflessness, his willingness to give and give without taking. Over time, I had come to see how it was he could not let go, could not allow that second’s death to make him vulnerable, unwary. It was like an illness with him, a disease, and if at first I had wondered what it might take to bring him to that moment of completion, I had come to fear what it might necessitate, where it might lead.

Curious that it would happen now, as though the seed he spilled were emptied into nothing so different as his fist.

I cleaned myself with delicate rags. I found my book and cigarettes and took them out onto the porch, where I would wait for my roommates to come home. I lifted my face to the air, smelled the rain moving in from the south. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smoke, holding it as long as I could, until my skin tingled. I’d never felt so free.

I
REMEMBER THE SPRING OF
1980,
AN
afternoon of May sunshine. The doors were open, birdsong and the smell of locust blossom dispelling the last rumors of winter. Michelle dozed on the couch, while I nodded over the texts I meant to study:
Child Psychology
, Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
, Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest, Physical Geology
.

There is a sweetness to this memory because it is the beginning of what will become my new life. After months without direction, I had filled out the one-page application to the local four-year school, Lewis-Clark State College. There, through the grace of Pell Grants and government loans, I had begun my work toward a degree.

I’d opted for geology over algebra: as a child, I’d collected jasper and pyrite from the local rock shop, intrigued by the homely thunder-eggs with their secret vaults of crystal. Our professor, a compact man with white hair and mustache who smoked a pipe while lecturing, promised us experiments and field trips. He said we’d come to learn the difference between aggregates and achondrites, feldspar and shale. I loved the names, the sounds they made: smoky quartz, yellow wulfenite,
Pele’s hair. And the maps—the measured contours, the calculated distance. I understood the logic of creation and negation—the buckle and shift, continental drift, the core of iron and nickel, the cool outer core of molten metal, warm rocky mantle, thin cool crust. The faults and layers, the ruptures, the ancient heave of lava—once thought to be the spill of immortal anger, our professor said, now predictable, nearly done.

Michelle and I must have noticed the sky darkening at the same moment, for we both bolted for the clothesline to save our towels and sheets from the impending storm. The bank of clouds was moving in from the west, black with the promise of lightning and bone-jarring thunder. I’d never seen such a solid, dark mass, cutting the sky in half.

I was thrilled. I loved the change a storm brought with it—the sense of being safely sheltered while trees snapped and the booming concussion rolled off the mountains. I noticed the absence of wind, although it often happened like this: one moment the air gone breathlessly still, the next moment, a howl of dust. I waited for the rumble of first thunder, but what I heard instead was the barking of dogs, beginning somewhere distant, taken up a block at a time, moving up from the valley bottoms until it touched the ears of our neighbor’s large mutt, who sent up a wail of recognition.

We threw the laundry on the couch, then stood at the open door. We, too, felt it: something not quite right, a shift in the known and expected. A few houses down, the crazy lady’s chickens made for the henhouse; the robins left their worm beds to gather in the poplars and preen dust from their wings. I knew that animals could sense tragedy, impending
disaster; I’d heard such stories from my grandmother—the chained hounds baying for days after the death of my grandfather, the fowl and beasts of burden given the power of speech at the moment of Christ’s birth. Watch the cows: if they lie down in the field, rain is coming. Watch the horses: if they skitter and jump for no reason, there’s a fire racing the field miles away, hail coming to beat the roof down. I thought of these things as the chorus of dogs rose and fell, then rose again, a warning or lament, I couldn’t tell which.

Street lamps flickered on. The dogs stopped their howling. And then the ash began to fall. We thought it snow at first, stepped out and caught it in our palms, rubbed it between our fingers like moth wings.

I can’t remember how long the darkness lingered, how long it took for the main body of ash to pass over our town, but it seemed only an hour, maybe less. The light came back slowly. The birds chattered. The roosters, fooled by the false morning, crowed hoarsely, buoys in the dry fog.

Back in the house, our soap opera had been interrupted by the Emergency Broadcast System. Mount St. Helens was exploding four hundred miles away. Michelle and I watched the news flash in wonder. Of all the things we’d been warned of in our lives, no one had ever mentioned volcanoes.

If you know what to look for, you can still see windrows of it along the highways and backroads, scraped to the sides, though it is no longer white, having taken on the color of dirt. There’s a potter in Lewiston who pays one hundred dollars a truckload for the ash. He mixes it to a fine glaze that fires iridescent and makes coffee mugs, salad bowls, garlic keepers. I have several pieces,
MT. ST. HELENS
1980 stamped on the bottom, reminders less of the volcano than of the general
feel of that spring as a time of second chances, of new horizons forming.

I lay in my bed that night, the ash still falling, and my dreams were full of the words I was learning, the stories that filled the books, the poems whose puzzle I might yet unravel. Prompted by my English professor, I was already planning to take more literature courses, perhaps even a creative writing class. I didn’t know how her encouragement would define my future, how I would rediscover that lost part of myself—that child who had spent hours at a time reading and rereading the legends of King Arthur and the trials of Robin Hood, swept away from her house in the woods by words so lovely and exotic, she repeated them for days:
Excalibur, Nottingham, crab-tree staff, a flagon of rich Canary wine
. Somewhere in me, there was still that young girl, sifting the water for jewels, unearthing the pearly sarcophagi, testing the flint with her teeth, tasting the world’s salty promise.

W
HERE
I
LIVE NOW
, with my husband and children in the canyon above the Clearwater, is only a few miles from those feeding streams of my childhood. During spring thaw the trees, ungrounded by the wash of high current, float past us fully rooted. Old logjams from previous floods break loose; new ones pile against the bridge footings and small islands. Each becomes a nest of lost things: fishing lures, loops of rope, men’s undershirts, women’s shoes, a single dowel from the rail of a crib.

I wonder, sometimes, if my own life’s mementos are contained in those tangles, perhaps a barrette I lost while fishing Deer Creek, or one of my mother’s pie tins that my brother
and I used to pan for gold. Or the tree itself, fallen from the creek bank I sat on as a child while searching for the mussel shells we called angel wings, though they were mahogany brown and often broken.

What the river takes, the river gives, and so it is with my life here. Each hour I spend with my feet near water, I feel more deeply rooted; the farther away I get, the less sure I am of my place in the world. I have known this river from its feeding waters to its mouth where it meets the Snake. I have known it before the dam and after. I have known it as a child knows water, as a lover knows water, and now as a mother who watches her own children bend at the waist, leaning forward to bring up the pods of periwinkles, the sandy shells and broken bits of blue glass worn smooth by the current’s rush and tumble.

Many afternoons I pull on my vest, gather my rod, walk into the river one step at a time. My feet slide from the shoulders of rock; my toes wedge between boulders. I am timid about this, moving out toward center, where the water is deepest, where the big fish might lie.

The Clearwater is not easy. Too wide to cast from shore, too swift, too pocked with hidden currents and sudden holes. I go at it anyway, determined to find my place of stability, the water at my belly, my thighs numbing with cold.

My husband fishes below me. On shore, our daughter and son dig pools in the sand. I watch as they flash in the sun, and it is as though I am reliving my own young life, as though I exist in two dimensions and know the pleasure of each—the child’s pure delight in the moment; the woman’s recognition of continuance, of the water around her, the sun on her face.

I choose a fly I think the fish might favor, its color that of
the day’s light and leaves and wings. I praise its tufts and feathers, its hackle and tail. I load the line, thinking not of the S I must make through air but of the place above sand where the water eddies, the V above whitecaps, the purl below stone.

I do not think of the line or the fly or the fish as much as I think about the water moving against and around me, how the sky fills my eyes and the noise that isn’t noise fills my ears—the hum of just-waking or sleep, blood rush, dream rush, the darkness coming on, the air.

I forget to watch for the fish to strike, forget to note the catch, the spin, the sinking. I pull the line in, let it loop at my waist, sing it out again, and again. The trout will rise, or they won’t. The nubbin of fur and thread will turn to caddis, black ant, stone fly, bee, or it will simply settle on the water and remain a human’s fancy. Either way, it’s magic to me, and so I stay until my feet are no longer my own but part of the river’s bed. How can I move them? How can I feel my way back to shore, where my family is calling that it’s time to go home? They are hungry, and the shadows have taken the canyon. They are cold.

From my place in the water, they seem distant to me. I must seem like a fool, numb to my rib cage, no fish to show. But I am here in the river, half in, half out, a wader of two worlds. I smile. I wave. I am where nothing can reach me.

I
T HAS TAKEN ME TIME
to understand the need I feel to be consumed by the river. I want its sound in my ears, its smell, its taste. I want to be immersed—my hands, my feet, my hips—just as I was as a child, when the preacher leaned
me back into the icy waters of Reeds Creek and I felt my legs let go, floating for that moment without resistance, without air or sky or land, baptized, reborn, swept free of all sin.

Perhaps what I see in the river is some mirror of the contradictions that make up my own life—the calm surface, the turbulent pull beneath, the creation, the infinite capacity for destruction. Several times a week I drive the river road to Lewiston, where I teach at Lewis-Clark State College, where I mark the chalkboards I once took notes from, where I lead my students through the same books that jolted me into awareness. The drive takes me past Cherry Lane Bridge and its fragrant fields of alfalfa, past Myrtle, where there once was a bar famous for its fights and fast women, where my uncles, pressed into child care, had often felt the need to stop for a cold beer before logging the final miles of our trip. I remember how they came back to the Chevy, smelling of whiskey and Kools and pepperoni, suddenly happy in the company of children entrusted to them for the day.

As I drive, I see how the dark silhouette of my travel wavers across the river’s shallows, grows fat, then thin, disappears altogether at the deepest curves. I think how that twin has always been with me—through my memories of childhood journeys, from the woods to town and back, always the long blue ribbon of water, the blacker thread of road, our outline weaving between sun and shade, an apparition through yellow pine and red fir, through the tight growth of paradise trees, through snake grass and the shiny, oiled leaves of ivy.