In the Wilderness Read Online Free Page A

would be back the next fall to finish school. She climbed into the car with Roland, her future brother-in-law, who had bartered and sold what was left of the family’s possessions and was headed for the woods. It would be years before she returned, holding me by one hand, my brother straddling her hip.
    She has told me the first months were hard, even though she loved my father and wanted to be with him. The weeks before the wedding, she stayed in my grandmother’s small shack, sharing the double bed with her future mother-in-law. Unlike my father, she had no siblings, and the unaccustomed closeness of another left her unable to settle into sleep, fearing the movement of her own dreaming body.
    As cramped and self-conscious as she was, she still believed herself lucky. She had spent much of her childhood in Oklahoma City. Her father was a professional gambler, a grifter, and their conditions were determined by his winnings. One day they would be rich; the next they would spend in a cheap motel where she and her mother waited the long hours for my grandfather’s return. She remembers a period of several months, when she was four or five, spent in California, in a hotel whose lobby was draped in red velvet. There, while her parents slept late, she would wander the halls, accepting candy and coins from the bellboys and an old black porter, who placed in her palm each morning a new and shiny dime. She explored the surrounding avenues and stores, taking Princess Diamond Jill with her, the champion-sired English bulldog won by her father in a card game.
    Princess moved with them to the house my mother remembers as a mansion, and in my own imagination the home and its contents have taken on fairy tale proportions: in the closets the relinquished clothes of a wealthy lawyer and his wife; brocade furniture; china plates and silverware and a pantry full of food; my mother carrying each dish from kitchen to table with painful care, feeling the fragility of crystal, trembling with the weighty roasts and brown gravy, while Red, as my grandfather was known, settled comfortably into the captain’s chair, pulling from his pocket the heavy gold watch won from the man between whose elegant and ironed sheets he would soon sleep.
    Then one night her mother woke her, wrapped her in a blanket and led her to the car—a shining Mercury with plush upholstery. No matter what else her father might win or lose, he always had a fine new car.
    They left the house as they had found it—clothes neatly pressed and hung, the dishes nested in their windowed cabinets—asthough their presence there had been weightless. Her father hunched behind the wheel. She could smell on him the hot bar smells—the sawdust mixed with spit and spilled beer, the rank whiskey, the perfume of someone she did not know. They headed west out of town. She watched the lights of Oklahoma City fade, and when she could see them no more, she laid her head against the window and gazed into the starred night sky, gently stroking the strong, broad back of the dog.
    From California, they moved back to Luther, a small town southwest of Tulsa, where her maternal grandmother kept a small herd of dairy cows. After a time, her parents drove away, leaving her to a more stable life, normal in ways that seemed to matter: regular schooling, solid meals, a bedroom she could wake to each morning and believe herself home.
    Certainly they made a wise decision. During the few periods my mother returned to live with them, she would sometimes stay at the bar they were running, eating when she felt like it, going to bed in the back room when she pleased, long before the last drinkers had stumbled out into the Oklahoma air, thick with the whir of cicadas. She watched the headlights trail across her walls, still hearing the clink of glasses, her father’s rough laughter pushing her into sleep.
    It’s easy to romanticize my grandparents’ ramblings, easy to see them as exquisitely lost in the economic