In the Wilderness (15 page)

I had seen hippies only on Nan’s TV, and their wondrous hair, bright colors and dangling beads amazed me. Even so, I could hardly connect them to the monsters the townspeople spoke of over coffee at the cafe. If we weren’t careful to run them off the minute they set their sandaled feet inside the village, they said, the hippies would poison our water tower with LSD. The results would be disastrous: normally decent men, women and children running naked through the streets of Pierce, murdering their neighbors, throwing themselves from the hotel’s balcony, addicted until death to the mind-altering drug. The entire population of our community would be destroyed, the wiser ones said, shaking their heads in grim contemplation.

I could hardly imagine the carnage. I pictured the burly Mr. Butler with his ax, running bare-chested after his neighbor Mrs. Ball, her enormous breasts flopping loose in front of her. I wasn’t sure what the “orgy” was that I heard spoken of as a result of this behavior, but it must be something close to “ogre,” and certainly Mr. Buder and Mrs. Ball barreling down Main Street naked fit that bill.

My last gift from the Langs would help guard against such evil. It was the blue Bible I had seen at the Christian Gift Center in Lewiston, my name embossed in silver on the cover. Inside they had written, “To a
very
lovely girl by the Rev. & Mrs. Joseph Lang May 1970.” It was the most important thing I could carry with me into my new life, they said. I hugged it to my chest, loving the smell that rose from its cover of morocco leather.

I can’t look at that photograph with its promise of hot July days without remembering the summer before, the last summer we spent in the woods, when we had gathered at the parsonage, piled into several cars and gone deep into the forest to where the North Fork ran the color of jade. Matthew was alive then, and while he, Terry and Luke dove from the jutting boulders and swam the strong current from one side of the wide river to the other, the women arranged potato salad and lunch meat on paper plates, shaded by cedar and pine. It was a celebration of summer, of friendship, and the prayers we offered over our dinner echoed through the trees.

It would be the last time any of us would ever see the river free, and that, finally, is why we had come—to see it once more before the giant slab of concrete already rising miles downstream blocked the flow and sent the river back on itself, flooding the land.

I could not know what the dam would mean to my life any more than I could have foreseen Matthew’s death, my father’s
demon or the physical and spiritual upheaval of the next two years. The cycle of the river would be broken. Salmon would die by the thousands, snouts abraded to bone from their attempts to break through the barrier. As I folded my clothes into the cardboard boxes, I knew things would change, that our move to Lewiston would mean a new house, new people. But I had moved many times as a child and had come to believe that even in strange homes and new schools, some things would always remain constant: the love of my parents, the circle of our family and my belief in God.

When we drove that last time from the house in the hollow, I didn’t look back. We crossed the river at Greer, down to Orofino, where my father pulled onto the shoulder of the road. At first I could not see it, so large it seemed another mountain—but then the sheerness of it, the steep, smooth expanse. Dworshak Dam braced itself between the canyon walls. I had never seen anything man-made so immense, and I stood still, letting my eyes adjust to the vision of something foreign in a familiar landscape.

Even now, when I drive the few miles east to Orofino, the dam catches me by surprise, looming up from the river, towering over the small town below. It flooded my place of memory, my place of birth. As the dam rose, so did the walls that severed my ties to my family, my god, the land. Sometimes, trying to find my way back, I want to go at the concrete and steel with my fists, beat it until the real water flows and I, like the salmon, am raw to the bone. That last summer, the syringa just beginning to spray its heavy sweetness into the air, I hung my head out the window to watch the dam disappear, then turned to the road ahead, the wind in my face.

I trace the road from the dam west to Lewiston, where the mill spews its poison, where, in winter, the Nez Perce once gathered their families close along the joining banks of the Clearwater and Snake rivers. The town itself is not large—thirty thousand, another ten thousand in the sister city of Clarkston, Washington, connected by two short bridges spanning the Snake. But for me, coming out of the woods, the place seemed never to stop, to sleep. Even at night the traffic continued, the stores stayed open and people went on about their business as though they had no home to go to.

We stayed with Nan for the first few weeks, and my memories of that time are heavy with nostalgia, sweet as the lilacs that grew in a hedge outside her door. Early summer in Lewiston couldn’t be more idyllic: crocus and daffodils begin their
bloom in March, and by May the valley is rich in color. Morning winds clear the air. People rise at dawn to vie with their neighbor for earliest garden, bragging in June of two-pound tomatoes and knee-high corn.

I luxuriated in the warm weather, burrowing my bare feet into the ground we turned to plant potatoes. I loved my grandmothers house, the worn chair where we cuddled together to watch her soap operas; the kitchen, where something was always baking or boiling; her bedroom, where I slept curled against her back, wearing my Grandfather Edmonson’s T-shirts.

My step-grandfather had been killed the summer before, the summer I turned eleven. Nan had been waiting for him to come home from his sales rounds when she saw on the evening news that he had been hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street. She sat stunned, watching the police mark the distance between one scuffed Romeo slipper and the pool of blood.

When I was told, I felt numb and far away, not just out of grief for my grandfather, whom I would miss, but also out of grief for Nan. Why was she given so much to bear? It didn’t seem fair that she should lose her mother, then her first husband and father, and now this other husband who had once embodied the promise of a new life.

Even now, I wonder at my grandmother’s fortitude. Once, a few months after her open-heart surgery and a year before she died at seventy-three of heart failure, I asked her how she had stood it. She told me, “You just go on, Sister. There’s not much choice.” I looked at the still-red scar splitting her chest, her face drawn with the effort to breathe. Yet in her eyes I could see the spark, that will to survive.

Those nights as a child when I lay in my grandmother’s bed, comforted by her soft presence, I felt little nostalgia for
the woods, or even Luke. Instead, I thought of the faces of young men I had seen on Nan’s TV: Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, others with pearly grins and hair brushing their shoulders. Nan gave me money to buy the teen magazines that held their pictures, then gave me half the wall space in her room to hang the glossy centerfolds.

I don’t know what my parents thought of this. I’m sure they were not pleased, but what could they say? Nan still held sway as the family matriarch and harrumphed mightily at the stodgy teachings of our church. She trimmed my hair, painted my nails, asked me to stay up late to watch Dean Martin and the Gold Diggers. I leaned into her shoulder, eyes down, imagining her staring my father cold in the eye, daring him to challenge her. I was thrilled to feel some nick in my father’s omnipotence, but I know now that she was only slightly less intimidated by his sternness than I was, and that he often demurred to her as much out of amusement as authority.

During the course of those long summer days in Lewiston, I became more and more aware of the changes in my body. The hair on my legs and under my arms had set in with earnest. Now could I shave? Absolutely not. My mother passed on the answer from my father, then looked at me sympathetically. She knew that dark hair sprouted above my kneesocks, but she would never consider compromising my father’s authority.

Ronnie, my father’s eldest brother, lived with Nan then. He and Dorothy had divorced, and he played guitar with his own country-western band, traveling around the Northwest, wildly popular with the locals. He was a tall, handsome man, blue eyes and black hair, and his voice held just enough edge to make the women wonder what he had suffered in love. He’d come home late, and I often woke to hear him humming in the bathroom. The next morning, I could still smell the
sharpness of his aftershave mixed with the bar smells of stale cigarettes and whiskey. I breathed it in, wondering at the way it moved me, as though what I inhaled were attached to some memory.

I found my uncle’s razor in the medicine cabinet. I picked it up, considered its edge bristly with whiskers, then carefully replaced it next to the can of shaving cream. The next morning, Sunday, I told my parents I didn’t feel well, then watched them pull from the driveway, headed for church. Nan was in the potato patch, a mason jar of gasoline in her hand. Normally I would have run to help her. I liked pulling the striped beetles from the leaves and dropping them into the amber liquid, not because of the killing but because of the good it did: less bugs, more spuds. I was drawn to these kinds of easy efficiencies.

This day I had something else in mind. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, then opened the cabinet. The razor lay as I had left it. I memorized its angle on the shelf, the direction it pointed. I didn’t think Uncle Ronnie, who wouldn’t be out of bed for hours, would notice if I were careful.

I filled the tub with hot water, undressed and stepped into the steaming water. I had read in one of my magazines to soak for a few minutes to allow the hairs to plump and rise. While I waited, I studied the razor: black handle, a broad triangular head, the blade a long ribbon of steel that could be rolled forward with the twist of a dial to expose a fresh edge. I turned the little plastic knob until the old blade and whiskers disappeared, then lifted my left arm.

The hair had curled and tightened in the water. I pressed the blade above the dark mass and drew it downward. It didn’t come off as easily as I’d thought it would: a clump fell into the water, but scattered patches of hair remained, and even where
I had shaved looked dark and prickly. I tried again, this time pressing harder and adjusting the angle of the blade. After several strokes, I paused to admire the scraped and bleeding skin, thrilled to have the ugly hair gone.

I shaved underneath my right arm, an even more awkward task, then emptied the tub and ran fresh water. Dark, telltale hairs stuck to the sides and I wiped them up with toilet paper. I listened for Nan, less afraid of what she would think of my shaving than the fact I was using my uncle’s razor without asking. How many times had I heard my father and uncles and other men complain about their wives using their razors, returning them dulled, somehow tainted?

Beginning at one ankle, I made several passes upward to my knee. The blade seemed slow and sticky, catching every few inches, nicking me until little rivulets of blood ran down my leg. I checked the razor and saw it was clogged with hair. This was taking longer than I had thought it would. My armpits burned.

I twisted the dial, but nothing happened. I twisted harder. The plastic snapped and fell into the water. The narrow blade, curled inside like the keyed band of a coffee can, sprang out into a yard of glinting metal.

Fear set in. My punishment for disobedience had begun before I could even finish my sin. Hands shaking, I gathered the pieces from the water. Everything was there. Nothing looked truly broken. Maybe I could get it back together and no one would know. Laying the plastic parts along the edge of the tub, I saw that the first thing I had to do was re-coil the blade. After that, it would be easy.

I picked up the long strip and began straightening it. Suddenly, blood was pouring from my hands. I dropped the blade and held up my palms. Along one thumb ran a gaping, inch-long cut.

I grabbed a towel, then put it back: blood would stain the cloth. Pulling the plug, I held my hand over the drain, watching the darker liquid join the clear, then swirl and disappear.

How could I hide this? My parents would be enraged, not only at my rebellion but at my disrespect for my uncle’s possessions and my grandmother’s house. The bleeding from the cut slowed, and I ran more water, splashing it over my shoulders and along the sides of the tub. Holding my thumb over the toilet I dried myself with one hand, then rummaged through the linens until I found a frayed rag. I wrapped it around my thumb, swept the destroyed razor into the garbage and covered it with tissue.

Nan was in the kitchen, drinking iced tea, fanning herself with her apron. I entered the room slowly, head down.

She turned to where I stood, seeing first my stricken face and then the blood-soaked rag.

“Oh, Sister, what have you done?”

She pushed herself from her chair and pulled me to the sink. When the rag was undone, she let out a sigh of relief: the appendage was still attached. She clicked her tongue at the thumb as though it and not I were responsible for the fear she had felt.

I began to confess, to tell her how I planned it all. I had lied to her and my parents, then stolen my uncle’s razor, and now it was broken. She held my hand beneath cold water, then dried it gently with her good tea towel. I flinched when she poured half a bottle of iodine into the wound. She studied it thoughtfully, then cut several strips of white tape, which she crossed back and forth across the cut.

“Will I have to have stitches?” This possibility worried me. I had cut my leg several years before, and I had never forgotten the sting of the numbing needle.

Nan shook her head; I couldn’t tell if that meant she didn’t know or simply no. She was muttering to herself, louder and louder, building up to something.

“… should’ve let you do it months ago.” I could tell now that she wasn’t mad at me, but she was still angry. “All this foolishness. Never seen the like.” She began pulling pots from the stove drawer, canned corn and shortening from the cupboard, banging them onto the counter.