Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Read Free Book Online

forest. The raccoons had one last go at our garbage; the pack rats took what baubles they could from the cupboards and closets. I carried from that house in the wilderness a box of books, a suitcase of dolls I’d outgrown, the Bible given to me by our pastor and his family for my twelfth birthday.
    I believed that the Bible would be my map through the world, a journal of warning and direction. As we drove the narrow road, past the logging camps and small settlements, across the Weippe Prairie, down the Greer Grade to the Clearwater River, I held it in my lap, feeling a loss I could not make sense of. I thought it was the boy that I missed, thepreacher’s son. I believed he would someday be my husband, that I would save myself for him, keep myself pure. With my mother’s ballpoint pen, I wrote his name again and again in the palm of my hand as we followed the Clearwater toward the city of Lewiston one hundred miles west, down the same highway my mother had driven to reach the hospital in which I was born.
    When we passed the dam at Ahsahka, I studied the giant flatness of its face: in less than a year its construction would be complete, the water that flowed past our camps gathering at its base, turning back on itself, flooding the North Fork beneath fifty miles of manmade lake. Already the good smells were gone—fresh-cut cedar, wood smoke from the shadowed houses, the late wild cherry, the early syringa. At Spalding, where the Nez Perce had listened to the missionaries’ words, where some had begun to believe, we could already see the brown pall that covered Lewiston and crept up the valley floor. I held my nose against the sulfuric stench of the Potlatch pulp-and-paper mill. Red lights winked from its smokestacks, high above the perpetual light of its industry.
    The ink in my palm bled into long blue lines, the boy’s name a smudged tattoo. I opened my Bible: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” I closed my eyes, and the stars, for a moment, were there, fading, then gone before I could name them.

 
    I T MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GOOD LIFE IN Lewiston, except for what went wrong. My grandmother was there, and we took shelter with her until my father could find work. My step-grandfather had been killed the year before, run over by a drunk driver while peddling ointment and spices, and now the care of their one-acre lot had fallen to Nan, twice widowed. She was our anchor, our point of stability, bedding us down beneath thick quilts, feeding us the potatoes and pot roast she believed would sustain us through anything.
    Nan was a small woman, dark-haired, with eyes the color of smoke. Her greatest delight lay in her grandchildren, and I enjoyed long hours of her company and attention, playing checkers, watching forbidden TV shows, helping her in her meticulous rounds of housecleaning. That summer I shared her bed, wondrously soothed by the room’s pale lavender paint and sacheted pillows. She said two of the four walls were mine to decorate, and so I hung torn-out pages from
Teen Magazine
on my side: Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman, a group photo of the Partridge Family. My parents allowed this, an indulgence less of my particular whims, I think, thanof my grandmother’s: above her side of the headboard she’d taped a toothy Engelbert Humperdinck.
    Each night I watched as she wrapped her beauty-shop hairdo in tissue paper, rubbed her feet and hands with Jergens. I would fall asleep to her quietly singing “Good Night, Irene,” comforted by her warm presence and soft perfume, while above us the airplanes flew low, headed for the runway a few blocks south. I would listen to the resonant thrum of engines, an unfamiliar and exotic sound, and I would try to imagine such travel, being held aloft by nothing but air. The thought would quicken my pulse, and I would burrow deeper beneath the covers, grateful for the touch of my grandmother’s feet against mine, the whisper of her nightly prayers.
    T HERE WAS ANOTHER hard-timer