In the Wilderness (7 page)

My mother grew her hair long until it hung in satin ringlets, which she backcombed and pinned into a shapeless mass. Her cheeks and lips remained clear, no trace of the paint a ruined woman might wear. Plain, wide-cut skirts brushed her legs mid-calf. Only the tiniest holes scarred the lobes of her ears.

It is this mother I remember most, cloaked and colorless, her virtues defined by what she covered and erased rather than by what she presented to the world. She could not be aware of her own beauty, lest others become aware of it too. Because her husband was the hammer and she the nail, she built a house of acquiescence, allowing herself only the reward of steadfastness, holding the walls together with silent compliance. Because a quiet woman was a treasure, she seldom spoke except to offer and agree. It was as though my mother had disappeared, as though the doctor had once again come with his ether.

We lived for a while in one or the other of the identical houses built by Potlatch Forests Incorporated on the outskirts of Pierce—a development called Whispering Pines. The rent was often more than our budget allowed, but my mother had
learned early the worth of hard work. She took the most abused houses, the ones left filthy and broken by previous residents, because no one else wanted them and the owners would lower the rent. Then she would barter a month’s payment for fixing up the place, scrubbing and painting, trimming shrubs gone wild, planting colorful, even rows of marigolds. One house was littered with straw, the floor covered with the leavings of dogs and goats that had been allowed the run of the home. She shoveled and bleached until her back ached and her hands were blistered. No one would have guessed the tidy rooms trimmed in calico curtains were once a stable.

It was my first real neighborhood, a place where children gathered at the end of the block to play hopscotch, a place where my brother and I could set up a lemonade stand and depend on a customer an hour. It was also the first place where I saw clearly how different the world was outside our extended family. The couple next door filled the evenings with screams and curses; even the voice of Jim Reeves singing his heart out on our old stereo couldn’t compete with the noise. I never asked why the man and woman were screaming, nor why the woman often appeared at our door, bruised and bleeding. My mother would lay her on our couch, call to me to bring her a cold rag, then shush me from the room. I’d lean against my bedroom door, straining to hear their muffled conversation: the woman’s voice high and hysterical, my mother’s sometimes soothing, sometimes stern. Before she left, I knew the woman would bow with my mother in prayer.

I never knew what reasoning passed between the two women, but I cannot imagine my mother counseled her to leave her husband. Even my grandmother once told me that sometimes when a woman got to thinking too much of herself,
got a “smart mouth,” she needed to be “shaped up,” “put in her place.” And while the church never condoned abuse, I always understood that it was the woman who was responsible for her husband’s actions toward her. I wondered what it was our neighbor had done to deserve her beating.

The last year we lived in Whispering Pines seems a golden time in memory. I had a best friend, Glenda, who believed that her dolls came alive at night to keep her company and that her mother’s washing machine groaned when it worked: I
don’t WANT to wash, I don’t WANT to wash
. I saw nothing strange in this and chose to think that whatever spirits possessed toys and appliances must be friendly. Glenda and I listened to her older brother’s music, jiggling our larynxes to mimic the quivering voices of Tommy James and The Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover.” I watched with fascination as her mother melted wax in an aluminum pan and then applied it to her upper lip, waiting a specified number of minutes before ripping the mustache from her face.

That year, I had one of the few conversations about sex I would have with my mother, when she asked me if I knew about menstruation. I said yes, my best friend Glenda had told me, which was true, and my mother seemed satisfied. Glenda prayed for the day she would “get her little friend,” as her mother put it, and kept a pink-belted pad in her top drawer just in case. Every time I went to her house, we’d get out the Kotex and consider its mysteries. When finally it was I and not Glenda first beset by the ritual bleeding, she was mute with envy. I would have gladly given her my status. I didn’t tell her that when the rusty stain appeared on my panties, I thought I was dying and locked myself in the bathroom to await my fate. Finally, after much cajoling, I let my mother in and explained my condition. Her shoulders slumped and a
look of pity and regret showed on her face. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’ve started your period.”

She brought in her purple box of Kotex and handed me an elastic belt like the one Glenda kept in her drawer, then left me to work out the mechanics of attaching the pad to the two hooks, which I finally managed to do in a haphazard fashion. I hated it already, hated the attention and concern and the look on my mothers face that said I was now doomed to my life as a woman. I hated to think that I would be strapped and uncomfortable for a week each month, and that someone might notice the bulging pad or discover me in the bathroom at recess, struggling to bandage and bind myself and staunch the betraying flow of blood.

Then the cramping started, and for one day each month I lay doubled up in the school’s sickroom, pleading constipation or food poisoning but determined to never admit that the ache I felt somehow stemmed from the weakness of my gender. I had never felt anything that hurt so badly. It began in my thighs and rose in spasms to my pelvis, where it settled into a constant dizzying pain. My mother had explained that this would happen—it was part of what we must expect to endure as women.

One such day the principal, concerned by my pallor and the fact that I was lying on the cot with my knees drawn tight to my chest, called my mother to come and take me home. But my mother had gone to Orofino to buy groceries, so he called a neighbor, who swooped me into her car and led me into Kimball’s Drug to be inspected by the white-frocked pharmacist. Dr. Kimball was no physician but we respected his college education. The nearest medical attention was a hard hour’s drive in good weather, and anything that required less than surgery could be attended to by our one local nurse
or the pharmacist. Most of the men’s wounds they treated themselves, and the women’s maladies, usually “female problems,” Dr. Kimball might remedy with laxatives and vitamins.

He asked me a few questions, pushed at my abdomen, then pressed my nails to check the color. I didn’t say a word, but he must have known. Undoubtedly, I wasn’t the first tight-lipped Pierce girl to be ushered into his presence, suffering from the same condition. (I would read one day in the paper that the pharmacist’s wife had reported him missing. The search that was launched covered three counties—everyone suspected foul play—and when they did discover him, not dead or even lost but simply hiding out, safe and supplied with enough food and clothing to last a while, the townspeople were stunned, the sheriff furious. How could the man on whom everyone depended suddenly disappear into the woods, leaving his family and community in torment? The county sent him a bill for thousands of dollars, and though he resumed his place behind the apothecary’s counter, he never again held the trust of the people. I wondered what affliction he suffered from—what had driven him into the wilderness—but knew without question what words would be spoken of him from the pulpit the next Sunday, his a lesson we all might learn from:
Physician, heal thyself)
.

Dr. Kimball suggested rest and that I be kept warm, and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the neighbor’s house beneath a pile of blankets, nearly happy to be there since she had a TV and I could watch a
real
doctor at work—the dreamy Dr. Kildare, not at all like our bespectacled, sterile-smelling practitioner with hands white and dry as cornstarch. I didn’t think I’d mind Richard Chamberlain prodding my insides, knowledgeable as to the intimacies of my sex.

That winter the snow fell for days on end and only by
constant shoveling could we guarantee our escape from the house. My brother and I charged ten dollars to scoop the heavy snow from the nearby roofs. Soon the berms and piles covered the windows, and we could step from the peak of our own house and sink neck-deep into star-shot whiteness.

Uncles, aunts and cousins came back to visit for Thanksgiving, piling into our small house with sleeping bags and pillows. But no one was prepared for the sudden drop in temperature to 40 degrees below zero. We were even less prepared for the electricity to go out. We woke Thanksgiving morning to rooms frosted in ice and our breath falling into crystals. Potlatch, in a fit of misplaced modernizing, had equipped each residence with baseboard heaters, and only my fathers boss down the road, Max, had a fireplace. To his house we went, our large extended family snuggling close with his around the inadequate fire.

Whatever prayers were offered for heat failed to bring the desired results, and we must have finally decided that our being brought so intimately together had divine purpose. That purpose became clear when the woman of the house, Sandra, doubled over in pain.

While her husband and my father remained with the children, my mother and Uncle Roland, not so far gone to California that he couldn’t maneuver through an Idaho snowstorm, drove Sandra to the drugstore, where Dr. Kimball promptly and accurately diagnosed appendicitis. The forty-mile trip to the hospital in Orofino seemed impossible given the weather, but there was little choice.

They made their way across the white expanse of the Weippe Prairie, along roads closed by blowing drifts. Max had a short-wave radio in his basement, allowing those left behind to communicate with the four-wheel drive, at least until it
reached the icy switchback curves of Greer Grade. Whenever Sandra raised up from the backseat to say with hope in her voice that the pain had stopped, my mother and uncle glanced at each other and then away. They knew that while the pain continued she’d be okay, but once the appendix ruptured, the relief from pain was temporary: peritonitis would set in.

My uncle had seen it before, when they lived in Oklahoma. The youngest brother, Barry, had been diagnosed too late and lay for weeks on his hospital deathbed, brought back to life, they believed, by nothing more than their mother’s prayers and constant presence even after the doctors had told her to go home, they couldn’t save the boy.

This night they made it in time. Sandra was immediately admitted to surgery, and after making sure the operation had gone well and she was resting comfortably, my mother and uncle found their way back to their families, who were done up like Eskimos and eating whatever food could be found not frozen.

I was happy in that place, bundled against the cold, surrounded by people I knew and loved. My cousins and I made a game of it, serving Kool-Aid milkshakes and congealing cereal. Even after the electricity came back on and we returned to our own house, we bumped and huddled against one another for the remembered pleasure of closeness.

The warm spring days passed quickly. My brother and I played with the other children from morning until night, stopping only to heed our mothers beckoning us to lunch or dinner. Weekends, we built forts in the woods behind our yards and pretended the muddy gouges left by bulldozers were pits of quicksand. We walked the two miles to town grouped tight as a clutch of chicks, the dimes and quarters we’d earned selling lemonade sweaty in our palms. Back home we’d come with bags of penny candy, racing one another up the hills,
balancing on the logs that bridged the gullies, made brave by our independence and wealth of treats.

But our time left in that place was short. Even as my brother and I filled our days with childhood adventures, something was at work in my father. It was nothing that Dr. Kimball or a hard days labor in the woods could heal or fix, and I’m not sure that even now I understand it. For most of his life, as a sinner and a Christian, my father had felt the workings of otherworldly things through dreams and intimations. His conversion to fundamentalism made him even more aware of the division between the forces of good and evil, and he had come to understand that dreams could be visions, that a sudden and overwhelming sense of darkness and despair could be the presence of Satan himself. In that tract house on the hill, in a place that represented the realization of modest ambition for a man striving to feed and shelter his family—to provide for them a safe and simple life—my father saw a demon.

It is a story I’ve heard told only twice but remember with a child’s sense of horror, how he woke chilled by the sudden false movement of air, damp as wind across rotting snow. He turned his face slowly toward the bedroom door, the stench of decay filling his nostrils, and saw the dark body and hollow face. It offered no word or sound, peering from its place at the threshold as though gauging my fathers wariness, sucking from his night breath the secrets of his soul.

He had never felt such fear, such abject, mute helplessness. He could not scream or move his hand to touch his wife’s shoulder so that she might bear witness to the specter. Even the simple rote of exorcism—
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I command you to leave
—was more than he could utter. For a long moment the demon held its place, then vanished. My mother woke to the bed rattling, my father violently trembling. In the next room, I felt the house shudder,
the mountain possessed by wind. I heard my fathers whispering. I thought,
prayer
. I snuggled deeper beneath my covers, nothing in this world to fear.

One afternoon in early fall, my mother picked Greg and me up at school before we could board the bus. Her eyes were red and she pinched her nose with a handkerchief. I peered intently out my window, fearing what she was going to say. She patted my hand.

“I’ve got some bad news, sweetie.”

I waited, my breath coming out shallow and quick. Greg was already crying in the backseat.