In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes Page B

sweet shock traveled to the bone and began a fire that spread its warmth to my crotch, a feeling so pleasurable I shuddered with the sure sin of it.
    When we returned to the company of our parents, I could still feel the heat of his hand. Even if I could not articulate what I was feeling, I understood that what we were doing fell into the category of sin called “petting”—touching between young men and women that brought on our elders’ direst warnings. I burned with shame to have given myself so easily to his caress. I prayed for forgiveness, for strength, for whatever temptation this was to leave me. But even in sleep Iremembered his palm pressed against bare skin beneath the hem of my skirt.
    The more I tried to forget the pleasure of being close to Luke, the more I longed for it. This was a symptom of Satan’s influence I recognized: the greatest sin was desire for anything other than God. Desire for money, whiskey, the touch of another without the marriage blessing—any possession or wordly place—was lust and must be controlled, purged and destroyed.
    I saw that something had begun its slow possession. How could I be both healer and sinner? How could I close my eyes in prayer when all I could see was the face of the preacher’s son? I was lost, no language to describe how I savored this sin, no one to prophesy my salvation or damnation. I huddled beneath the covers of my bed, hearing the wind rise, the pinecones tacking the ground. Surely God would cause a tree to fall, send it crashing through the roof. I imagined Luke’s kiss, then the slide of his hand between my legs. The night held still. I could dream of no more.
    Enlightenment came via my teacher, Mrs. Nichols, a young and beautiful woman who sang opera and demanded that we sing with her, her high soprano voice rattling the windows in their panes. She seemed especially fond of Handel’s
Messiah
, and we belted out
hallelujahs
no matter the season. Blond beehived hair, red nails that clicked like beetles against our chairs—we could hardly believe she lived in our town. As eccentric as she was, there were still some things she would not tolerate in her charges: a clumsily held pencil (she would sneak up behind us, jerk the pencil from our hand, rap us sharply on the head, then slide it back into our quickly corrected grasp), a messy desk and, oddly enough, given her ownpropensity for adornment, pierced ears. She held to her own kind of fundamentalism, a code that dictated her expectations of our demeanor.
    We sat one drowsy afternoon, warmed by the popping steam heaters working to keep at bay the below-freezing temperatures. (Even in winter the girls were forbidden to wear anything but dresses, except during the periods of bitterest cold, when, with a special dispensation announced by the principal, we were allowed to don pants under our skirts. My church’s rules governing modesty seemed little displaced.) We nodded over our Idaho history books, which were hopelessly outdated, with no sympathy for what stood in the way of Manifest Destiny. Lewis and Clark were nothing short of rustic gods adorned in their buckskin and high leather boots. I tried to focus on the illustration of Sacajawea pointing toward the west with a sweeping, grand gesture, as though she could see every bend and bog that lay ahead. She was beautiful—slim and burnished atop her rocky pinnacle—and the aura radiating out from behind them left no doubt that the three were ushering in a golden era.
    We did our best to stay awake, knowing that at any given moment our teacher’s displeasure could take new and startling forms. When she stopped at the desk next to mine, I closed my eyes and flinched, the dates of gold discoveries and town settlements swirling through my head: history was a whirlpool, and I was hopeless in the face of chronological sequence. My mind worked in other ways. I could recite the story of Polly Bemis, the Chinese girl bought and lost in a game of poker. I