Hungry for the World Read Free Page B

stopped, my father and I, so that he might strike a match: for a moment, all the light in the world blazed in the cup of his hands. When the fire went out, I closed my eyes, then opened them to a bank of stars. My father traced the Little Dipper’s handle with the red ember of his cigarette, and the outline became something solid, a trail leading toward Polaris—the brightest, my father told me, the one I might always find myself by.
    Our trailer made of pine boards was warm, the windows dewy with the steam of my mother’s cooking. We stomped our feet, left our boots at the door. I didn’t like the brown beans she had prepared, and so I crumbled my cornbread into a bowl and covered it with milk. In the morning, hours before the horizon lightened toward dawn, my father would do the same—it would keep him full while he cut and limbed and skidded the timber from which we took our living.
    My brother, Greg, slept in my parents’ room, in the crib I’d known as a bed the first four years of my life. But I was five,and I must share. Whenever he gurgled, we stopped our chewing and waited. I thought it was my silence that lulled him back to sleep. I wanted this time with my mother and father to last without interruption. I wanted the snow to come soon, sugaring the windows shut. I wanted one path to the outhouse, one to the woodpile, one to the shed where the deer hung, so that we might stay warm and eat but not have to leave for work or town.
    Outside, the wind rose, the darkness rolled in, night bellied up against our windows. Full and sleepy, I lay on the couch and watched my mother wash and rinse the dishes; my father watched too, sitting and smoking, his legs crossed, his socks damp with the sweat of his boots. The coyotes yipped and howled, but I wasn’t afraid of what was outside. We were safe, with our light and heat. When I woke, I was in my father’s arms, being carried toward bed, the lights going out behind us as my mother followed. My father laid me down and covered me. I curled away from the cold sheets, curled into myself like a leaf touched by fire.
    They whispered to each other across the small room—my mother’s light voice, the deeper resonance of my father’s. I heard the crib rattle, felt the weight of my parents settle on either side of the bed, the warmth of bodies, the cotton long johns they both wore to fend off the chill. They kissed once, twice, in the air above my head, then my mother lay with her back to me so that she might nurse my brother, who murmured and suckled, hiccupped and coughed. I felt my father shift, the solidness of his shoulders, the long length of his spine.
    I was warm, the bed gently rocking with the movement of an arm, a leg. I could not fall or be snatched away. Nothingcould find me there in the nest they had made for me, and when my mother rolled my brother onto her chest and then over between us, I smelled his sweet-milk face and the musk of her breast. All around I felt the bodies, the close boundaries. My fingers traveled the seam of a thermal sleeve and I slept, and I dreamed of nothing beyond the clearing, beyond the meadow where the elk would whistle their calves in. I did not dream of the deer where it hung from the rafters, turning slowly in the current of wind sifting through barnboard. It was safe there from the bear, who came for garbage, and from the coyotes, who came for bones. When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but a rivet of star through glass.
    I HAD ALL THAT A CHILD COULD NEED and more: loving and devoted parents, a doting grandmother, a tight-knit clan of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Raccoons trailed their kits across the meadow we called our yard. The creeks were full of tadpoles and bullfrogs, brook trout lured to strike by nothing more than a bit of red cloth. We gathered pinecones in burlap sacks and sold them to the Forest Service for pennies a pound, hands sticky with pitch that my mother scrubbed off with turpentine. In August we spent entire