by Lauren Groff
Abe goes pale, and clutches at his useless knees. Bit stands and puts himself between Handy and Abe. He can feel Handy’s breath on his face. They look at one another for a while. Bit’s heart is so loud it overwhelms the day.
I meant, of course, the worm in the age-old apple, Handy says, beaming into Bit’s face so intensely that Bit has to fight the smile echoing behind his lips.
We’re taking this inside, Abe says and turns his wheelchair and slowly squeaks into the Schoolroom. Handy, playing the same cheery tune on the banjo, follows him in. What just happened? says Ike, and Bit presses his friend’s arm. I don’t know, he says. A few moments later, Hannah runs up from the Soy Dairy, her legs embarrassingly long under too-short cutoffs, and then a few other adults pour in, Lila and Titus, Horse and Midge. When the adults’ voices again begin to rise, the little children scatter from the Schoolroom, a handful of seeds.
Helle, lolling on the flat stone by the Pond on a hot, gray day, her pupils swallowing her golden irises. Helle, in the common area, playing rummy with the other Ados, boneless, leaning up against Harrison, rubbing her heel against Arnold’s thigh, smiling through her eyelashes at Bit, none of the three boys looking at one another. Helle, asleep in the sunflowers when Bit runs back from watering the Pot Plot, awakening only when he slaps her. Helle, coming up from the Runaway Quonset at dawn, nearing Bit, who stands in knee-deep Queen Anne’s lace, waiting for her. Helle, close to Bit and he can smell the marijuana on her, the sweat, the vanilla, the kerosene from the lamps, and she puts her head on his shoulder, and holds him closely to her, and he can feel her ribs against his, her knees hard on his knees, and he wants to be angry but can only put his arms around her. Pulling away her head, eyes full of tears, Helle says: You’re my only friend, Bit, and holds his hand as he walks her back to her room. With every step, something goes wobbly in him.
He takes photograph after photograph of Helle, and she vamps for him, blushing under his attention, flaring her fingers like gills, moueing like a model. Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper.
Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you.
She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of.
It is a week until Cockaigne Day. The third-grade kidlets have put an enormous kraft-paper calendar on the Eatery walls, and the days are filling up with beaming, big-maned suns. Time is slippery in Arcadia; the gong rules the days, the seasons rule the rest. The calendar feels to Bit, unused to such order, like an imposition. Arcadia seems strangely hushed since the great fight during the Tutorial, which has taken on epic tones as the rumor of it has passed from person to person. There is a sickness in the air.
At dinner one night, they flee the tension, Hannah and Abe and Bit. In three mornings, Hannah and Bit will go to harvest the crop, and spend the next few nights in the Sugarshack to cure it. Every subtle changing tone in the daylight brings them closer to the end point. They are thrilled, they can hardly sit still, even Abe, who has no choice. Now they are together on a blanket spread under the copper beech, in the cool summer evening, and Bit feels the old happiness circling him, watches his mother’s hands flying like swallows to portion out the food, sees the way Abe looks at Hannah with his heart in his face. If he weren’t undone by gratitude for this old companionship returned to him, he wouldn’t say the silly thing he says. Which is: What if the Pigs find the Plot before we can pick it?
How odd that this deep, murmuring fear would choose now to emerge. Between Hannah and Abe, a line tightens, a subtle disappointment in Bit.
Unbearably, his parents ignore Bit’s question. They talk about the fireworks Clay and Peanut bought for Cockaigne Day, the shameful waste of funds. They talk about Hannah’s lecture, how the slides have come out beautifully, thanks to Bit’s new photography skills. They talk and talk, and Bit is alone in the chilly shadow, food in his hands, as he watches his parents move off into conversation without him, leaving him to sit alone in his clammy worry.
Verda is the best thing Bit can think of to give Helle. She is the biggest unknown piece of him; her wisdom, her calmness can give Helle an anchor, the way the old woman anchors Bit. Until they can slip away today, though, they are with the rest of the Ado Herd, weeding the corn. Bit loves the breeds: Blue Baby, Reid’s Yellow Dent, Bloody Butcher. Dorotka has been collecting seeds for a decade, and people send her the strangest ones they can find as gifts. He loves the carrots: Dragon, Scarlet Nantes, St. Valery, Paris Market. The potatoes: Caribe, Desiree, Yellow Finn, Purple Viking. The peppers he skirts because he once touched the leaf of a Fatalii and rubbed his eyes and could see nothing but a shifting red light for two weeks, which he spent in bed in the Henhouse. Blind, a birth was a horrible event to overhear.
Leif curses the weeds as he pulls them, ever more inventive. Bloodyballed codpiece, he says. Funkadilic dildo, he says. He hates any time spent away from his art. That boy loves puppets more than people, Bit heard Hannah whisper in the spring, watching Leif at a Circenses Singer performance. Takes after his father, Abe muttered out of the side of his mouth, and both his parents snorted, then flushed when Midge turned around and hushed them furiously.
Helle comes to him at the end of a row, and they steal off together into the woods. The air is cool, brushing past his skin like water.
Helle says, with a catch in her throat, I saw something today. A girl out in the garden. It was really early. She was super little, like five or something and naked, and she was crouched there under a cucumber, chewing on an ear of corn. Like a wild child, like one of those feral children you read about. And I got so upset, looking at her, that I wanted to throw up. I mean, this little girl. So hungry she’d run out in the morning to eat unripe vegetables. With all these people showing up every single day, these strangers. I mean, what if one of them was a bad person? What if a Trippie saw her and flipped out and hurt her? Who was there to protect her? I’m sorry, I don’t get what’s going on anymore, I just don’t get it. I don’t. Helle’s voice has a tremble in it, but her face is pale and blank.
I don’t either, Bit says.
It’s so weird, says Helle. Nothing’s right. Remember when we were little, Bit, and no matter how bad it was, we were always this tight little unit? I keep thinking of felt, the fabric, you know? I mean when you take a sweater or a piece of knitting and you soap it up and rub until all of the threads and rows blend together in this one inextricable mass. But now we have like a million insane knitters all doing their thing in their own little directions, and this guy’s making a belt, and this chick thinks she’s making a pot holder or something, and we’ve got the biggest, ugliest, dumbest blanket of all times that can’t even cover us and keep us warm. She stops and laughs and says, low to herself, Holy fucking metaphor, Helle.
It’s dead on, says Bit. Listen, he says, and then, feeling as if he is pushing against a current that is just about to dash him over a waterfall, he tells her about Hannah and Abe’s project, the Great Pot Plot, the cash, the relief that will be sure to come.
It’ll be all right, he says. After Cockaigne Day. Don’t worry. We’ll have enough then.
She looks at him, biting her thumbnail, and says nothing at all.
They come into Verda’s yard, the stone cottage, the cherry. Verda is out in the garden, tossing corn to her chickens. She frowns when she sees Helle and looks at Bit narrowly, her meaning clear: Another visitor? Don’t you know I choose to be alone?
He looks at her with hope in his face, and she sighs and says, Might as well come in.
They do. Helle and Verda sit stiffly across the table, sipping tea, studying each other through their eyelashes. The conversation is surface-bright: weather, Cockaigne Day, Bit. If he didn’t know Verda so well, he would say the visit was going swimmingly, but
her nostrils have flared as if they smell something off, and her answers have become increasingly curt.
They stand to go, and Helle bends to pet Eustace on the floor, and Verda, uncharacteristically, reaches and pulls Bit to her. She smells good, like sun-dried clothes and Amish soap. She says in his ear, fast and low, Careful, Ridley. Most powerful people in the world are young, beautiful girls.
Then she releases him and shows them to the door.
Out in the day, Helle looks unsatisfied. They are halfway home when she says, I know she’s your friend, but . . . , and she trails off. Later, she shivers and says, That whole time? I was imagining how I’d feel to be so old and so alone like her. I think I’d kill myself.
Oh, Helle, Bit says, choked.
She looks at him, and says, I’m just kidding, Bit. But her voice is heavy, and when she goes up to her room to take a nap, he can hardly bear to let the door close between them.
In the middle of the Photography Tutorial, Bit has a moment: there is the evening sun and the heft of the Leica in his hands, so right, so his, to him the most valuable thing in Arcadia. There are the other Tutorials in the courtyards, the young heads alongside older ones, and he feels, with a gathering of wonder, how this is exactly what makes Arcadia great: this attention to potential, this patience for the individual, the necessary space for the expansion of the soul; and he sees the way Helle darts glances at the glorious warm sky, the chipmunks chittering on the eaves of Arcadia House, her own dirt-crusted feet, how she sees Bit looking and smiles her rubber-band smile, and it fills him to overflowing. And when, at last, the children in the Kid Herd launch into a spirited version of “Tea for the Tillerman” with bongos and tambourines, it is all he can do to be cool, to not get up and dance like a holy fool filled with the ecstatic light of god, like the print Hiero showed them last week by his namesake Hieronymus Bosch, a garden where nude people gathered in mussel shells and fruit, spilled from organlike pink huts, rode joyously in a rodeo of pigs and leopards, let finches drop berries into their mouths, every person on the canvas filled with a quiet, green joy. Bit has to hold himself in and breathe in and out until the happiness returns to a safer distance, until it becomes a blanket of sun, of children, of calm, of Arcadia, and Bit is once again only one thread within the greater whole.
At supper, Bit watches Simon sidle up to Hannah and whisper. A bolt in the gut when Hannah flushes. She says, loudly enough to carry to Bit: All right, then. Dawn.
All night, he imagines Hannah vanishing. He imagines waking up to a world empty of her forever, that old fear from deepest childhood. Bit is at the front door when Hannah comes out, her step soft, her feet bare under her overalls. She sees him and murmurs, My knight in shining armor, and ruffles his hair.
The nitid knight of nighttime delight, he says to make her laugh, but she doesn’t.
Together they walk to the field. Simon meets them, pacing anxiously, where the sunflowers pour from the throat of the woods. Aztec Sun, Irish Eyes, Velvet Queen. His hair is wet and parted down the middle; he is wearing jeans so new they creak when he walks. He frowns when he sees Bit and looks at Hannah meaningfully, but she is examining a mosquito bite on her arm. Simon says, Oh, come on, and turns his back and strides off through the plants. They follow. Hannah’s hand grazes Bit’s, and Bit lets her hold it. The day is only a new shine on the furry leaves. In the center of the field, Simon’s work stands, a fist covered in tarps. The flowers are at shoulder level and shush as they walk through, and by the time they wend their way to the center, the sky has already flushed with light.
They stand before the sculpture for minutes, in silence. When Simon judges the light to be perfect, he goes around the back, and they hear a hatchet strike twice. The rope releases, the tarp falls like a skirt.
Bit laughs, but Hannah pinches his upper arm, quick and searing. She says, Simon, it’s wonderful. Simon looks at her, his eyes pools with stony bottoms.
What seemed to be a humble windmill, beginning to spin in the slight wind, reveals its parts to be more. The spokes are rifles, the heart the nose of a bomb. When Bit goes to touch the legs of the structure, they are sharp.
Swords to plowshares, Hannah says. Her cheeks are flushed.
Bit says in his manliest voice, Really? Did it have to be so literal?
Don’t be a teenager, Hannah hisses, and Bit is stung.
Simon ignores Bit, explains. On one of the Motor Pool’s scavenging missions up near Canada, Simon had found an abandoned automobile with a cache of rifles in the trunk. Old bootlegger, he thought, lost in the woods. That’s where the idea came from. Then in an army-navy store, he found the bomb nose, mounted like the head of a deer. The swords he’d made himself on the forge. It was supposed to be an embodiment of all that was great about Arcadia. The peace, the work, the simplicity.
It’s magnificent, Hannah says. It works?
It works, says Simon and flips a small lever, and the windmill spins and hums. There is a bitter tone to his voice when he says, In this blasted place, there is no use making something that doesn’t function. Even I know that.
Bit thinks of giving a gift of art, something he’d put his whole being into, and having it fall so terribly flat. For a brief spasm, his empathy for Simon floods the irritation, glazes the strange-looking windmill with a beauty born of Simon’s love.
Thank you, Hannah says, and Simon nods. He seems crestfallen. They walk back together. Hannah gives Simon a hug, and Bit finds himself gauging the length of the embrace, its force, the way Hannah doesn’t look Simon in the face when she pulls away. He thinks of Abe still sleeping, his legs shrunken under the sheets. Because of this, he escorts Hannah back to her small room. He waits until she knocks and Abe’s voice answers and she goes in, and only when she is safely back with Abe does the eel thrashing in his stomach swim away.
Bit and Hannah were awake long before dawn to cut and load the hemp into a pickup truck; now their hands are raw, their clothes steam with sweat in the chilly morning. In the deep blue minutes before sunrise, they hustle the flour sacks of bud and leaf into the Sugarshack and park the pickup they used back in its spot in the Motor Pool. When the Eatery doors open, they beg entrance, though it isn’t their shift, and sit, exhausted, over coffee. Eden stops by, pregnant for the eighth time, and whispers that there is an Emergency Council of Nine called for tonight in the Octagonal Barn. Bit watches her waddle away and, with a terrible sense of sorrow, sees the old, zaftig Eden superimposed over the one whose body has been flattened by the eight tiny steamrollers of her babies.
All day, a sense of panic taints the air: someone, somewhere, advertised Cockaigne Day, although nobody knows who, or nobody will admit to knowing. But here it is in High Times, Whole Earth Catalog, Henderson’s. A tiny write-up in the Voice. Arrivals have picked up this week, thirty on Monday. Today, the Thursday before Saturday’s Cockaigne Day, Bit walks to the Gatehouse and finds a zoo: two hundred visitors. Though Titus has emergency backup to keep people from crashing, his method worked only in the beginning of the week. The visitors have begun to find their way in through the woods. Now they pitch tents in the forest, sleep in the cars, mass up at the Eatery for grub. They grumble when the food runs out. They go into Ilium and come back swinging greasy bags of burgers, and even though Titus pitches a fit that roars all the way up to Arcadia House, they persist.
At dusk, it is so crowded in the Octagonal Barn for the Emergency Meeting that there is no place to sit. People stand, and some climb the lofts and rafters and sit in the dark up there. The Council is at the fold-out table, Abe on one end, Handy at the other. On hot humid nights like this, the ghost scents of ancient animals rise from the floors and fill the air. Hannah rushes in. She leans over Abe, whispering, and runs back out.
Bit watches his father go paper white. Steady Abe loses his composure so entirely that the debate is well on its way before he seems to snap to. Titus is roaring, reading out a list: What if we’re harboring a murderer? A pedophile? What if one of our people gets kill
ed? Raped? What if some of the Runaways’ parents are trying to find them? What if the girls lie about their age in the Swingers’ Tents and they’re underage? What if we’re hiding a terrorist?
For three pages, he goes on, and in these words, Bit can hear Abe. Something relaxes in Bit, now that Titus is firmly on his parents’ side.
Then Handy opens his hands on the table. He says, First of all, it’s only going to be for Cockaigne Day, and then they will all have to either go or live in Newbieville for the month, as per our rules. And secondly, he says, going very stern, Titus, I resent your bigotry. Even murderers, he says, deserve a second chance.
There is a whoop and holler, voices all over the Octagonal Barn rising in agreement.
When it calms, Abe says, What about food? We have no money to feed anyone, Handy, especially with the dough we’re sending to Astrid’s Midwifery School, and the other stuff that’s happening. Even our own Trippies and the medicine for the Hens strain us. You know this. You of all people know this, Abe says.
Handy says, I stand, as always, humble in the knowledge that the Universe will provide.
On and on they debate for an hour, until Regina with her black brows claps the mallet. We’re not getting anywhere. Vote time, she says. Lanternlight glimmers on her cheekbones.
The vote passes to the Council of Nine; five yea to allow the gate-crashers to stay, four nay to drive them out. Down the stretch of the table, Abe and Handy look at each other, fury against gloat. Bit thinks of a high front meeting a low, the storm that ensues.
Abe is tongue-tied, scarlet: he would kick something, if he could. The meeting moves on.
It is too much tension for Bit, and his stomach goes sour. He leaves and runs across the twilit lawn down to the Sugarbush, to see why Hannah was so agitated. He gives a long knock, three short; two short; one long, Bit in Morse code. Hannah opens for him.