Hungry for the World Read Free

just as the crop ripened toward harvest, something came to knock it down? Wind, hail, hordes of locust, and only on the farm that he leased and tilled. Everything he put in for the landowner thrived, while a few miles away his own crop died. Not just bad luck, my father insists, but the manifestation of the struggle between my grandfather and God.
    My great-grandfather Barnes had been a Baptist minister and believed that this calling had been passed on to his son, a calling that my strong-willed grandfather would not heed. Instead, he began drinking—days when he lived on nothingbut alcohol and cigarettes, nights when his own sons would find him at the bar, unable to stand but still fighting, mornings when they carried him from the hidden stills and back-road juke houses, bleeding from falls, beaten and cut by men he fought for moonshine. He was no longer the man gifted with uncommon insight and knowledge but a man who let the whiskey possess him, who allowed himself to forget that he once held dominion over the serpents.
    The day my grandfather died—his car slammed into the baked clay of a dry creek bed—my father was miles away on a high school field trip, but he knew: he had dreamed it the night before. Already, he had willed the grief from his mind and taken it from his eyes and buried it deep in his chest. All that was left for him to do was nod when they told him, take his sobbing mother by the hand, and lead her home.
    His senior year, he drove the school bus mornings and afternoons and gave his mother the earnings, keeping for himself only enough to buy cigarettes—my father’s single and enduring vice. He never forgot the chaos created by his father’s failure, how it left my crippled grandmother without comfort or support, engendered his siblings with grief and resentment. That summer he answered his uncle’s call for workers in the timberland of Idaho, and it was there that he found the isolation he craved, there where he could labor from sunup to sundown, felling cedar, skidding poles, alone with the noise of the saw and the loader, alone with his thoughts of the way things happened, in his mind a growing sense that he could make an ordered and enduring life for himself, there in that place where the trees grew thick as hair on a dog’s back, where a man with a rifle and rod should know no hunger.
    It would be not his father’s life but a life of his own, and he thought of his sweetheart left behind in Oklahoma and knew that he would call her and she would come and he would have all he might need in the world.
    M Y MOTHER—FULL LIPS , blue-gray eyes, hair cut short and wisping at her neck and temples—was two years younger than my father, only sixteen the first time he picked her up in his brother’s ’42 Ford and, with no money for a movie, drove for hours around the Oklahoma backroads for no other reason than to be in her company. They cruised Highway 66, through Arcadia, Wellston, Stroud, Depew, past the oil rigs and hog barns, marginal farms and corner bars. Sometimes they went with friends to the drive-in movie in Oklahoma City, hiding in the car’s trunk so they wouldn’t have to pay the quarter each, holding hands in the backseat while William Holden and Jennifer Jones pined their way through
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
.
    Her own family waylaid by wanderlust and alcohol, my mother lived with her grandmother on a dairy ranch. Her father had been a professional gambler in Oklahoma, a con artist, a grifter, never content to stay in one location long enough to let his game catch up with him. Her first years were spent in a constant state of financial and emotional flux: depending on her father’s winnings or losses, they were filthy rich or dirt poor. They left town in the dead of night, arrived at the new motel with the sun just breaking the horizon. My mother’s self-awareness came to her stained and secreted. Even now she fights her desire to hide.
    They went well together, my mother