Free In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes

lips, breasts high and pointy, waist narrower than her hips by half—she was beautiful. I brought her to my nose. Even her smell was exotic—spice mixed with the smoke of Aunt Edith’s cigarettes.
    I took her to show my mother, who was quietly crying as my aunt’s car bumped up the driveway for the last time. I did not think then to consider how my mother saw in the older woman the shape her own future might take. What would be left to the widow of a logger whose house squatted on borrowed land and existed only by the favor of the company? The choices were few: find another man to marry, or leave. But I was too young to see these things and took off with my brother to explore the outhouse and meadow, leaving my doll to my mother, who cradled it gently, as though it held all the hope and fragility of her life.
    We arranged our few pieces of furniture, unpacked our boxes of books and clothes, and I began to believe that we’d be there always: nestled in the draw, protected from wind, a few distant neighbors, a school-bus stop at the top of our road.
    My father worked so close we could hear the thrum of machinery, the saws catch and whine, the trees crack, the dull echo of their falling. When the other men began their talk of new equipment and less land, my father leaned harder into his cut, feeling in his arms the strength of pine and muscle, the familiar ache in his back. He was blessed by wood, blessed by God to be there with his wife and children safe in the draw with the woods all around where, unless you had been there, you would guess no house existed, no people lived.
    Between Dogpatch and Pierce lies Cardiff Spur, a cluster of faded trailers and creosote-stained shacks named after a sawmill operator. One of those shacks was the parsonage, which shared a large open space between the road and Trail Creek with the Cardiff Spur Mission, the Pentecostal church my parents had chosen for us to attend. Our first meetings were around a potbelly stove, scooted so close the preacher was made to circle behind us, calling on us to confess our latest sin.
    The men who attended were loggers and mill hands, men who blended easily with the small population of the area. On Sundays, they wore freshly pressed shirts, suitcoats and trousers; other days, they were distinguished only by their profession: black boots and stagged pants cut to mid-calf, out of the way of saws and snags. The women who attended our church, however, with their long skirts, plain faces and coiled hair were easily identified as holy-rollers. I became aware of thefact that I, as a girl approaching adolescence, was being dressed accordingly—no shorts, short-sleeved blouses, blush or pierced ears—only when we made our visits to Lewiston, where Nan would shorten my dresses and trim my hair, clucking all the while about never having seen such nonsense. She believed I could be a beauty queen: how was that to happen if people’s only notice of me was the simple curiousness of a girl dressed like a dowager?
    I signed the church’s youth pledge and carried a white waxy card listing the regulations governing my behavior. I promised never to dance, drink, smoke or swear. I would not go to movie theaters, frequent bowling alleys, swim with the opposite sex or dance except under the Spirit. The hem of my dresses would measure two inches below my knees, and I would refrain from wearing pants. I would wear no jewelry, makeup or other adornment that might draw attention to my physical self and cause another to lust after me in an unholy way. I would pray daily, fast frequently and believe always in the Lord as my Savior. I embraced these commandments, thrilled to have in my new purse a card bearing the large script of my signed name. When I made my commitment public, my parents and the other adults beamed with approval and prayed with hands on my shoulders that I forever follow the path of righteousness and turn not from the hard road onto the wider path of wickedness