The Girl They Used to Call "Bitch"

The Girl They Used to Call ‘Bitch’

One night after dark, my phone rings from an unknown caller. We are eating dinner around the family table, just me and the kids; my husband is working. New in the area and seeing it’s a local number, I take the call. An angry voice, a woman’s voice, is accusing my kids of meddling with her mailbox. It’s on speaker, and the kids hear the rancor. I look them each in the eye, eyebrows raised with apprehension. It just doesn’t seem like them, and they return my look, bewildered.

The one-sided harangue continues for a minute or two, hot and raving, with threats of calling the police. Our minds are turning like a kaleidoscope, jumping to images of what kind of person might belong to this nasal, bitter voice. My youngest daughter tiptoes to the door and locks it. Then as abruptly as it started, the caller hangs up with a click that speaks more than its volume, like a cymbal crash during the finale of a discordant Schoenberg piece.

Our family has recently relocated from upstate New York to Idaho County, North Idaho, an area, we gather, is not known for its refined pretenses or intellectual sophistication. It’s canyon land, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, inhabited by independent, freedom-loving nonconformists. Everyone lives armed. I am not eager to misstep here; I do not wish to stir a viper’s nest. Quickly, I call a recent acquaintance from down the same road to ask for advice.

“Oh,” the neighbor tells me, “Probably be a good idea to wait till daylight tomorrow. You know people call her ‘Shooter Barb’.”

“That’s interesting,” I say, noncommittal.

“She shot her second husband and ran the third one off the road on the canyon side.” The narrow gravel road we live on, nicknamed ‘Shit Your Pants Road’ has some stretches that drop off a sheer 2,000 feet, where the roaring river below appears like a thin silver ribbon. No guard rails.

The next morning, I maneuver my truck down her steep driveway, a scant quarter mile from my house, and stop in front of a rickety porch. The paint is peeling, and the corrugated tin roof is bowed. I have a pie in hand, and my eleven-year-old daughter along to see if we can reach an armistice-- without the arms.

The porch creaks with each step; my knees knock just slightly; my daughter stands just behind me trying to make out what’s behind the dark windows. I knock on the frame of the twisted screen door after finding no sign of a doorbell. A face appears, framed with short, chopped white hair. Her eyes are sharp, her mouth set tight. She looks at me deeply, as one who is quick to pass judgment on someone. Maybe a survival tactic? I wonder.

She wrenches the door open and reaches for the pie I offer. I try to make conversation and apologize for my kids’ supposed shenanigans at her mailbox. She nods, but doesn’t take her words back. I try to prolong the conversation, curious about this new neighbor of ours.

I’m a hugger and try to reach for her before we leave, but she pulls back, evasive in a fragile way.

Next week, I’m back with my daughter, and we meet her outdoors, hacking in the bush around her house, hauling debris, and uncovering daffodil shoots. We quickly find common ground on the theme of gardening. I’m new in the area and am keen to pick her brain, wise in the subject of all things growing.

This time she brings me into her house. She offers her big chair, and I try not to make the brushing away of cat hairs too obvious. My daughter is an intent listener; I wonder how much she understands, but she is nodding in all the right places as Barb launches into her life story. No edit. “No time like the present to gain some life lessons—birds and bees, facts of life, and wow, talk about perspective,” I think to myself.

“My dad always wanted to kill me as a kid. I could escape his grasping, cruel hands, and soon got good at dodging the flying objects that he hurled at me. I was strong and angry. My sister was the beautiful one. Beautiful, and cruelly abused. My younger sister was the youngest, he never touched her. What was I, the middle one? I was nothing. I only learned my name when I started school in the first grade. I always thought my name was ‘Bitch’.”

I draw in a breath and glance over at my daughter. My heart is about to break for this woman.

“I asked my mom, ‘What do I tell them at school when they see my black and blue bruises?’

"‘Tell them you fell in a hole,’ she’d say.”

Barb’s dog, Rufus waddles over and rests his moist snout on Barb’s lap, its understanding doggy eyes look at her in a mournful way. Rufus has bulges bigger than goose eggs on his legs and sides; “Cancer,” Barb says curtly. “We look at each other and wonder, who’s going to go first?"

We've been there a while, and I start planning how to end the conversation smoothly when she drops the question, “Do you know the hymn about roses? ‘I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses?’ I remember standing at my mother’s grave when I was nine, and they sang that song. She got killt in a car accident.” I sit back down and let her continue.

Barb’s English teacher tried to adopt her after the tragedy; she had noticed her bright mind, ability to devour books, and her way with language.

She had also noticed Barb’s ubiquitous bruises.

The hymns ended, the flowers bedecked the fresh earth, and her father appeared and threw her into his truck. After a grim ride along back roads, she arrived at yet another new home, a tar paper shack with no running water or electricity. Four crying kids and a haggard woman stared blankly at her. These were her half-brothers and sisters she didn’t know existed.

Who can blame Barb for running away at the age of fifteen and getting married? She dropped out of high school and birthed a child every year while living in her in-laws’ shack. Four children before she turned twenty, no pampers, no running water. At night she did the homework for her husband. Her husband graduated, but in this backwoods school, he could hardly read or write.

Then with three feet of snow on the ground, four small children, and no paycheck, her husband simply walked away and never came back. She found a new man, and the cycle repeated: alcohol breath, screaming, anger. One day he chased her with a knife; another time she was thrown down the stairs.

By then Barb was a strong woman and getting smarter. She called the cops. She prepared her own defense. She got a restraining order on him. Acquaintances told Barb that they had heard her husband boasting at the bar that he was going to kill her. This wasn’t new news for Barb. She barricaded herself and the kids in the house every night. Triple locked and pushed furniture against the door.

At two in the morning, she woke with a streak of panic like a blade of lightning through her heart. The all too familiar cursing, yelling, abusive hostility of a drunkard. She yelled right back, “I’m armed, and I will shoot if you dare enter!”

Here, Barb’s voice quavered just a little. Was it age, or did she still have a sliver of emotion, a live branch left on a trampled tree? He cut the lock, broke the door down with a shattering crash, and knocked through the barricade.

“I tried to shoot low, but he stumbled, and I shot him in the head.”

“Were the kids all with you at the time?” I ask incredulously, almost in a whisper.

“Yes. There was a lot of talk. I was so alone,” she says. A silence stretches between us, a silence echoing of old nightmares, an endless nightmare of screaming pain and hurt. “People told me to move out of the area, but why should I? It was my house. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Barb stayed put. Law was on her side, and she knew it.

I wrap my arms around her sturdy frame, knowing her gruff, austere frame is but an eggshell around a splintered, fragile soul. “Barb, you are one strong woman, and I love you.” This time she flinches just a little, and hangs limp.

When I learn her birth date, my kids and I plan a birthday party in our backyard. A cake with eighty-three candles, presents, and a sign. She drives up in her small red car and unfolds her arthritic knees. But for an octogenarian, she is as sharp as a tack and steady. Her smile says all, and she presides over the feast like a queen in her palace.

“I’ve been waiting eighty-three years to have a birthday party, the first one of my life,” she says. The kids look at her awestruck. Among the kids, she remembers some of her less painful stories, stories of a bygone era living in the logging camps along the North Fork of the Clearwater River in company-owned cabins with no plumbing or electricity; the one-room schoolhouse and the kids who had to cross the river to get to school; the time a classmate fell through the ice and was rescued, half frozen by the older boys. Her face lights up recounting her rendezvous with a bear on her way to the outhouse and her panicked retreat. With her animated descriptions, it’s like we’re along with her, touring the backcountry seventy years ago: a world of tamaracks and pines, chainsaws, cables, loaders, and kickbacks, rivers that turned red with the migrating kokanee, mountain lions, moose, and elk.

We can almost hear the sound of the log decks being released into the roaring rapids, the spiked boots of loggers maintaining their footing on the slippery logs, freeing the jams with their peaveys and pike poles. It’s like she’s there again, visiting the wanigan, the floating kitchen and bunk house, where the frozen, exhausted loggers ate and slept during the three-week spring log drive.

Now I visit her once a week. She looks forward to the hugs, hugs she never received all her years growing up. In some ways, she is still the same child, a child with a bruised soul, fed on the venom and the taste of shame and despair. She spent time in the city Children’s Home and some years dodging foster care. At times a helpless rage boils in her throat and a stony hatred rears its head. “So many knew what me and my sisters were going through, and they didn’t do nothing. I wouldn’t wish my life on anyone in a thousand years.”

“But let me show you my garden,” she says, abruptly changing the subject. We wander among her rose plants, plants tended with the patience and tenderness of a mother. The bank is steep, but she maneuvers between each one and adjusts the drip tape or tugs at the fabric blocking the weeds. She shows me a particular climber with massive, hooked thorns. “The sharp thorn often produces the delicate roses,” she chuckles and I wonder at the metaphor.

Inside her high deer fence, Barb has over sixty different roses, each with a story, where it came from and when, where the species was developed and by whom. She’s got climbers and floribunda, polyantha, and grandiflora. Each bush has names that sing of their beauty and fragrance: Ashley Rose, Bourbon Rose, Mr. Lincoln, New Dawn, Emily Bronte, Musk Rose, and even a Voodoo rose.

Often I try to imagine walking in Barb’s shoes. Many sayings abound about not judging by thorny exteriors, wise words about understanding the hills and valleys others have passed through. Barb, (“Just call me Bobbie,”) is one such person who deserves this understanding. She’s a gruff, mean old lady with a heart and soul of purified gold, refined in the furnaces of suffering. May there be waiting for her a special place in heaven, and may that place have gardens of roses.