Hungry for the World (4 page)

In that place of possibility, I did not yet know that there was a battle being waged for my soul, that the man who lay near me, that the woman whose lap I rested in, were searching
for safe haven from the evil they believed might swallow us. By the time I was thirteen, I would have forgotten the small pleasures of discovery, my world used up and ugly. By then I would have come to understand that it was Eve who desired the fruit and its store of hidden knowledge, Eve who had damned us all from the Garden. Years away from that child sleeping in her mother’s arms, I would enter into my young woman’s life knowing these two things: by my gender I was cursed, and my mind would destroy me.

I
DON’T REMEMBER THE FIRST CHURCH
we attended, nor do I remember the first time I saw the men and women with their hands raised, praying loudly, stomping and clapping, swaying, dancing, some falling, some weeping, some singing a solitary chorus in a sweet, high note. Nor do I remember that moment when I laid my own soul on the altar. I must have been nine, maybe ten—coming into my age of awareness, coming into possession of my own destiny, my own free will.

It was my mother’s example I followed: at the urging of the minister who had married her and my father, she had begun attending the Pentecostal Church of God. She missed the friends she had left in Oklahoma, missed even her fractious uncles, her grandmother, whom she had left crying on the porch of the farm. In the church she found women who called her Sister, a family willing to take her in.

It was then that I watched my lovely mother put away her makeup and jewelry, summer shorts and swimsuit, as directed by the dictates of her new faith. As a woman, she must compensate for the flaw of her gender by extreme modesty. Her hair was her glory and could not be shorn. For a woman
to don pants mocked the male’s superior station. Her arms must be covered, her shoulders, her knees—any part of her that might entice, intrigue, attract, cause another to sin. Silence was her virtue.

It is here that the few stories I have of my mother end—those tales of her youthful courage, how she had sped down the rutted logging roads in her brother-in-law’s ’47 Chevy, kicking up dust for miles; how she clambered onto the running board of the timber-loaded truck her husband steered down the steep mountains, its brakes lost to roots and stumps, how, at the tightest of corners, she held to the door and side mirror and sailed like a tethered kite above the drop-offs and gullies; how she was not afraid of the bears or the absolute darkness or the height to which a stiff-boomed jammer might take her.

This was before the minister held her beneath the cold water of Orofino Creek and raised her up reborn; before the women of the church had shown her the way with their own plain faces and long skirts, their Bibles whose pages held the teachings of Paul, his warnings concerning the capricious and treacherous female nature; before she bowed her head and covered her shoulders freckled with sun and said, “Teach me to do Thy will.”

She had found the order she believed would negate the past she feared might one day manifest itself in her own life: the alcoholism she saw as her birthright, the violence and dislocation. Her silent and submissive role was an extension of the self-protection she had learned while growing up with a father made rageful by his weakness for drink and his frustrated desire for wealth, a man who ridiculed her for every mistake, until her very existence brought with it its own kind
of humiliation. Here was a way to redeem her future, a place far away from the rejection and shame. She came home from her meetings glowing, collected, and still.

My father watched her, listened as she spoke of her newfound peace, her absolute salvation. He read the Bible she had left near his chair. Soon after my mother’s conversion, he laid his own soul upon the altar.

The Scripture was familiar to my father, but as he began to study more carefully the teachings of Christ and His followers, he came to understand how his own father’s life had been ruined by willfulness. How different would it have been had his father heeded his call to the ministry, taken up the cross instead of the bottle, if it had been tent meetings where he met his brethren and not the riotous bars where he badgered the man with the moonshine into floating him another jug?

My father vowed that he would do God’s bidding without question, and in this way he would gain salvation not only for himself but for his family as well. He would embrace the faith his own father had abandoned, commit himself to a life of spiritual submission, gain absolution for all past sins.

Here, too, was argument for the simplicity he longed for. He possessed a holy man’s antimaterialism; his contentment often seemed linked to our lack of anything beyond the barest of necessities. Even after we had moved from the camps to the small logging towns, when we lived in houses with running water, my father preferred to stop at the spring and dip his hand and drink. Given a choice between an outhouse and an indoor toilet, my father chose the rough-hewn privy. He was a loner, a hermit, a would-be anchorite, if not for his family, whom he loved, and his need to support them. But now his eccentricities, his seeming lack of ambition,
were no longer odd or ignoble but necessary to his quest toward spiritual enlightenment.

It seems, too, that my father’s inherent mysticism had to find this home. In the time and place of his childhood—in the Oklahoma Bible Belt—his uncanny sense of the future, his dreams that seemed less dream than prophecy, must needs come from somewhere, and as far as his people knew, there were only two possibilities: such powers came from Heaven, or they came from Hell.

After his redemption, my father’s dreams were no longer dreams but
visions:
sometimes they foretold the future, which he could not change. Sometimes they were apparitions—demons that fouled the air with their breath. There were times when he fasted and prayed for days so that God’s will might be made clear.

This new father was the same and not the same. He still played the guitar and sang in his fine tenor’s voice, but now the songs were not the country ballads he’d learned on the leaning porch in Oklahoma; now they were songs of redemption and revival. Instead of Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, he spent his spare moments immersed in the King James Bible. When he read, we knew not to interrupt him, not because he might be angry but because it would do us no good: once fixed on his chosen text, nothing short of a shout could gain my father’s attention, and no one in our house was allowed to raise his or her voice except in prayer.

The church reinforced our family’s already existing patriarchal structure—God to rule over man, man to rule over woman. The man was the physical and spiritual leader, the lawgiver, the interpreter, the one on whom the task of discipline fell most heavily. No decision could be made without
his approval. My father’s authority had always been absolute, his command of every aspect of my life unquestioned. He believed, as his own father had believed, that a child’s love for her parent came only through respect and fear. Stoic and not given to negotiation, my father ruled with the intensity of his eyes and the strength of his hand. Any breach of proscribed conduct was met with immediate punishment, and that punishment was most often a spanking made more agonizing by my being sent to my room to await and think about what I had done. I would lie on my bed wide-eyed, listening for the sound of my father’s footsteps coming down the hallway, the slap of the leather belt in his hands.

After his conversion, the discipline my father meted out came just as surely and suddenly as it always had, but now my misbehavior displeased both him and the Heavenly Father, whose punishment, I was promised, would be even greater.

What both my father and my faith demanded of me was complete obedience, the total submission of my will. And it was my will, even at a young age, that I seemed unable to surrender. I learned early on how not to cry when whipped, to let the sting of the hand turn from burn to icy numbness, to let the arm wear itself out trying to draw from me tears. I never learned to give in, make it easier on myself, pretend the chastisement I did not feel. Stubborn, strong-natured, my elders said, and shook their heads in foreboding.

But it was not so simple. Along with unflagging obedience, there was this other, seemingly contradictory thing that my father required: he wanted me to use my mind. It was my father who taught me to question, who teased me with riddles and word games, asked me to tell him which way the wind
was blowing, how many miles we’d traveled at certain speeds, why it was that Christ insisted upon washing the feet of Simon Peter even though it was the disciple’s heart that bore the greater stain.

From my father I learned to challenge the explication and interpretation of Scripture. He spent hours referencing and cross-referencing various texts. He argued loudly and obstinately with ministers, evangelists, and deacons, taking, I think, his greatest pleasure in the argument itself. Like him, I read from my Bible each day, so that by the time I was in fifth grade, I had memorized any number of begetting lineages, and I knew that
dross
was the imperfection that must be separated from the pure, just as Christ would return to claim His church and leave the sinners behind. It would be years into my adult life before I realized the relative, physical limitations of our holy text: the story of creation and original sin, only a few chapters long, goes on for pages and pages in my mind, so carefully had I been taught to embellish the Garden, the conflict, the Fall.

Reading was my solitude, my escape from boredom, from my younger brother’s demands to play, from my cousins and their constant bickering. Even after we moved closer to town, into a frame house with interior walls, we were still miles from the nearest television, isolated by the impenetrable barrier of mountains and trees so that the only radio we pulled in were the midnight skips from a station in Texas. I would read not only the Bible but whatever script came into my hands. The club my mother had joined in my name gave me the miracle of books by mail, and I raced my brother home from the bus on days we thought the thick cardboard envelopes might come. Cereal boxes at breakfast, the instructions
on cases of motor oil, the trials of Bazooka Joe—I was ravenous for words, for some connection to the outside world. I read the set of
World Book Encyclopedia
and Children’s Classics my parents had purchased when I was in third grade, cover to distant cover.
Robin Hood, Science World, Le Morte d’Arthur, Big Red:
I learned about the universe in which I lived from the pictures and tales, and from the words whose sounds I did not recognize but hoarded like a raven nesting silver. I learned
puma
and
ermine; friar, Excalibur, longbow, Fey Morgan
. I learned that the Eskimos wear boots called
mucklucks
, that Nez Perce ate
pemmican
made from venison and the boiled berries of
kinnikinnick
.

I was teased by peers and berated by uncles for burying my nose between pages. My poor eyesight was blamed on too much reading, as were my allergies and pale skin—all that lingering over the impossible, all those daydreams and big words that put even bigger ideas into my head. But it was my father who encouraged and challenged me. “Look it up,” he would say. “Find out for yourself.” From him I learned the nuance of language, how each phrase could be read and reread, each time different. Words were jewels to be turned and examined for every facet, every refraction of light. The only absolutes were the legalities of my faith—the rules for behavior and salvation—and my father’s authority, his word that could not be questioned.

I wonder now if my father may have foreseen that the analytical skills with which he engendered me might someday lead me away from the beliefs he himself embraced. For even as he insisted that I think for myself, he cautioned me against thinking too much. To think was to know, but the desire to know more than had been granted was blasphemy.
There were doors that must not be opened, passages that must be foregone. Satan lurked there, waiting to snag the wayward traveler, to lure him away with the promise of wisdom, knowledge—the fruit of the tree that Eve could not leave be.

B
Y THE TIME
I was eleven, the easy companionship my father and I once shared was gone. My sudden maturation had caught us both by surprise. I remember one evening near the end of my fifth-grade year, lying back in the tub so that my mother could rinse my hair. The Prell shampoo, stringent as paint remover, got into my eyes, and I let out a howl of pain that reached my father where he sat in the living room, reading his Bible. He thundered down the hall and swung open the door, thinking only of injury. The sight of my unclothed body froze him where he stood, and I saw the look on his face turn from alarm to embarrassment and then to anger. This intimacy was not to exist between us, and I, through my babyish caterwauling, had forced him to see what should remain hidden. For days afterward, I believed it pained him to be near me, so shamed was he by my nakedness.