Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Page A

with me on my visits home. My father, though he seldom looked my way, would talk to John—conversations about calibers and quarterbacks and carburetors—and I would stand at the edge of the kitchen, where my mother cooked. I knew I should help her with the meal, but I couldn’t resist the pull I felt when the men began their tales of treks into the woods. I listened for what I might learn: look for the saplings stripped by antlers, the earth pawed clean for wallows; if you jump the deer and it runs, be patient—the prey will sometimes circle back, curious, drawn by its own fatal interest; always remember to mark your trail, gauge your direction by the progress of light.
    When dinner was ready, my mother, John, Greg, and I would gather at the table while my father remained in his chair, plate balanced on his lap. He seemed unaware of our hushed tones, the loud emptiness that filled his place at the head of the table, where no one else dared sit. After the mealwas over, I left as I had come, aware of my place at the margins, wondering how long my shunning would last, wondering what I could offer in place of my liberty that might make my father see me again.
    Finally, there came a time when I gathered my courage and suggested that we go hunting together, my father, my brother, John, and I. I thought my father might see that I had taken up where he left off, picked up the rags of our life and pieced them back together.
    That hunt took us deep into Big Bear Canyon, where I partnered up with my father, working to match his stride, to convince him he didn’t have to slow down or rest for me—so little room between us for weakness, vulnerability. I wore myself out trying to keep up, denying my lesser legs and narrow shoulders, my thin wrists and ankles, believing that the race between us might never end. Without the need I felt to prove my worth, without his need to teach me worthiness, what would exist between us?
    Winded, my thighs aching, I wondered at my father’s stamina, his long-legged march, the hint of a hitch in his walk—the vertebrae fused solid in his lower back. He had shown me once, when I was young—the long, clean gash along his hip, from which they’d taken the shaving of bone; the larger cut that grew from the base of his spine, the skin pink and shiny as pulled taffy. When I had touched him there, pushed at the scar with my small girl’s finger, I’d felt a strange and fragile resistance, the membrane of flesh so thin I feared I might hurt him, rupture the wound, cause him more pain.
    Miles into our hike, we had stopped to watch a buck the color of ripe wheat cavort in a too distant field, made foolishby the doe he had followed into the open. My father smiled like some benevolent god until the deer disappeared into a tangle of hawthorn and elderberry.
    “Boy, that was pretty,” he’d said.
    “Yes,” I said. “It was.” How long since I had seen that look on his face, that simple delight in the world, appreciation of something neither good nor evil, something that existed outside our realm of moral reasoning? How long since affection for anything had come unweighted by the baggage of obedience, sin, punishment, betrayal?
    There would be not one hunt but several, and what I would remember is that nothing is as simple as memory. For each of our journeys into the forest, there would be a lesson I must learn: to mark my passage, to depend on no one but myself, not even my father, who walked me in, then let me lose myself and wander for hours before guiding me home.
    There was no place of comfort with my father, no margin for weakness. If this was how I chose to “prove up,” then my rites of passage back into my father’s esteem would be on his terms, not my own. It seemed to me that nothing short of abject humility would win my father’s uncompromised love. At some point, the rigors of the trial were no longer worth the little that I gained with my stoic endurance—the nearly imperceptible nods