In the Wilderness Read Online Free Page B

and political wreckage that was our country during those years. Oklahoma has always symbolized hardship and grit, peopled by the disenfranchised and disillusioned. Anyone who could survive the hostile weather, could scratch out a living from the hard red clay, was made of something extraordinary, like the blackjack oak growing from the creek bottoms, twisted by wind and stunted by drought, strong as steel at the core.
    But for my mother, there was nothing novel about herparents’ absence, nothing humorous in the stories they told of their adventures on the road. She distanced herself from them, went to school, took care of her aunt Sarah, Granny’s youngest daughter, born nearly ten years after my mother, and did her farm chores. One day, she came home to find Princess missing. She searched the barn, the creek bed, crawled beneath the house, where the cat lay blinking, nursing her newest litter, and called until her voice cracked and the sky darkened.
    Several years ago, I overheard a relative say that my grandfather had needed money to pay a gambling debt and sold the dog. As tough as Granny could be, I imagine her telling my mother that Princess had been hit by a car, holding her while she cried, stroking her hair, shushing her. “We’ll get you another dog, now. Don’t you worry.” And then to herself, the words I myself have heard her say:
Always knew he was a snake in the grass. Man never was no good
.
    What my father and his family left to come to Idaho was economic hardship and the painful memory of a man who had once been a caring husband and father. My mother left even less—a family connected only by blood. That first camp my parents shared was made up of orphans—my father and his brothers; my mother, running from parents already dead to her; my grandmother, at once widowed and made fatherless; her sister; and my uncle Clyde, raised by his sister after losing his parents in a flu epidemic. That circle was more than a practical formation of community: it held all their pain and remaining strength, the combined belief that they could survive.
    My mother was drawn into the circle by my father’s love, and what remained of his life became hers. My grandmother,whom everyone called Nan, cast herself in the role of matriarch, and the relationship they had was both fiercely intimate and silently combative. From the beginning, Nan, whose strong nature had given her an indomitable will and a ruling tongue, took on the task of turning my mother into a fit and proficient wife and daughter-in-law. Since my father had no money of his own to pay for the wedding, having given it all to Nan, it was she who paid for—and picked out—my mother’s wedding dress: a blue wool suit, simple white blouse, and pillbox hat. My mother wanted a traditional gown, but Nan scoffed at the idea of spending so much money on something that could never again be worn. The suit, she reasoned, would do for church and funerals as well.
    As disappointed as my mother was, the only emotion that showed in her face as she prepared for the wedding was joy. The photographs catch her tucking in her blouse, elbows akimbo, nearly knocking the walls of the small shack. Her elegance belies her age—sixteen—and the suit gives her an air of sophistication. Tall, with a thin waist and shapely legs, she resembles the movie stars her own mother as a teenager had cut from the pages of magazines and pasted in a scrapbook, one of them, Claudette Colbert, her namesake.
    When the short ceremony ended, my uncles chased my parents through the streets of Pierce and down the hair-raising descent of Greer Grade (Roland passing on the right, making my flatlander mother nearly faint with fear that he would sail off the road and plunge into the canyon below) to a little tavern on the river. There, they drank and laughed till nearly dawn, then drove the grade back to the dirt roads rutted by logging trucks and into the woods, speeding alongside the creeks and onto even