Watermelon Summer

by Anna Hess

  I'd been lulled by Mrs. Walker into feeling like I was home, but now Mom's words came back to me in a rush. "Mountain men," she warned, "love guns and dogs more than anything else. They can't be peaceful when bullets and teeth are in the picture."

  And yet, when I glanced over at Jacob, he not only seemed peaceful, he seemed stung by my hasty words. When in Rome, I reminded myself....

  "I'm sorry," I said, when the silence seemed to be lengthening past the point of no return. "I was just shocked. You don't see guns much in Seattle, and you don't think of them in the hands of kids. Can we start this conversation over?"

  Jacob nodded, and seemed to be gathering his composure. "Around here, it's pretty normal to put a picture of a kid's first deer in the paper," he explained. "Davey was extra proud he'd got a four-point buck, much more exciting than my first doe. He knows to never aim a gun at a person, and he's a pretty good shot. Plus, his uncle takes him hunting, which helps make up for the fact that his no-good father's in prison and can't be in his life."

  This didn't seem to be the right time to ask why Davey's father was locked up and for how long. (And whether Jacob and Davey were half brothers since Jacob had said "his" instead of "our.") I simply nodded, and Jacob seemed to unwind a bit, almost as if he cared what I thought of his family. I filed that thought away for future reference and just listened while Jacob explained that deer season was a time to spend with men in your family, plus it provided a cheap source of meat. "I've been giving Mamaw most of the money I make, but it's still hard to raise two kids on a nurse's salary," he went on. "Davey's deer gave us about thirty pounds of really good meat—probably over a hundred bucks worth of food for the cost of a bullet."

  I didn't admit to Jacob that I'd never thought about meat being expensive and that the idea of eating a deer seemed nearly as unpalatable as the concept of a kid holding a gun. "That makes sense," I murmured instead.

  "So, would you like to try your hand at some target practice?" Jacob asked with a straight face, and I blinked at him in horror for a couple of seconds before realizing he was making a joke. If my laugh was louder than the statement really deserved, the extra vigor probably came from relief. For a minute, I'd thought I'd irrevocably broken something precious before I'd really had time to hold it in my hands, but Jacob's levity proved everything was still all right.

  I didn't know what to say to apologize for my faux pas, but I knew I owed Jacob some kind of gift to make up for my blunder. So I gave him Greensun.

  Well, not literally, of course, since the property wasn't mine to give, but I did open up and tell Jacob about the farm and about Glen's letter. And I wasn't just trying to build bridges by sharing my dilemma either. Davey's recitation of his brother's entrepreneurial efforts had set a little wheel spinning in my head. Sure, I could wait and see what solutions other people came up with at the Greensun meeting in a few weeks, but who's to say I couldn't get the ball rolling on my own? And maybe Jacob was just the business partner I needed.

  Jacob's eyes lit up as I tentatively explained Glen's challenge, and before I knew it, he was brainstorming potential business ideas. Over dinner, my host had been quiet and a bit shy, and his explanation of the hunting photo had felt stilted, as if he was trying hard to speak in a dialect he didn't entirely understand. This, though, was his language.

  "What do you think of me borrowing my uncle's tractor and coming down to plow up a plot tomorrow?" he asked. "I've heard you can make quite a bit of money selling pumpkins around Halloween, but I don't have the land to give it a try. I can hunt down some seeds too."

  I have to admit that I'd been paying more attention to the sparkle in Jacob's eye than to his words, so when he paused, it took me longer than it should have to answer. Jacob's face closed in a bit as he backpedaled. "Assuming you want to try something like that, of course," he said. "I didn't mean to invite myself along or anything...."

  "You're not inviting yourself along," I answered. I wasn't entirely sure Glen's Greensun challenge was something I wanted to sink my teeth into, but I was sure that having Jacob around was a plus. "You're 100% invited." I stopped myself just in time before adding in the usually innocuous, but now-loaded, words: "It's a date."

  Of course, nothing ever goes entirely as planned. There was a familiar car in the parking area when Jacob dropped me off at Greensun, and when I reached the bottom of the hill, I discovered that Kat was back...to stay.

  "I got Dad's letter, and I figured we'd better get started if we're going to save the farm," my sister informed me as I walked in the door. She was struggling to haul a mattress down the stairs by herself, and I pitched in immediately to help tug the mass out the door even though I had no clue what she was up to. We dragged the hulking weight out onto the front porch, where my sister proceeded to beat it with a broom until dust rose all around us in a cloud.

  "You don't mind, do you?" she asked me at last, out of breath from her cleaning frenzy, dust coating her lashes. I shook my head, even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to— being around Kat was like that. "Good," my sister continued. "It'll be fun camping out here together."

  And it was. I got to listen to Kat's stories about the cob-building workshop rather than reading seed catalogs over dinner, and we hung out so late that evening that I eventually had to walk back to my tent by flashlight. I learned that Kat had pretty much been on her own since she was twelve, when her mother lapsed back into alcoholism and stopped even bringing home basic groceries of the non-drinkable sort. My half-sister rose even further in my estimation as she explained what it had been like to hop from friend's house to friend's house in high school so she didn't have to go home. Kat was definitely just as stout now as she had been in Mom's stories.

  "So, tell me about this guy who's coming down to plow the field tomorrow," she asked me at last. We were playing cards on the rough wood of the kitchen table, and I had just about gotten a grasp on the excessively complicated rules. Trying to explain Jacob set me back to square one, though, and I quickly lost the hand. I won't repeat my words because they were embarrassing enough the first time around, but there were may "um"s and "er"s, and I think I descended so low as to tell Kat, at one point, that looking into Jacob's eyes was like peering into starlight.

  "You like him, huh?" replied my big sister. At my nod, she continued. "Well, locals can be enticing but a lot of them are trouble. I'll be curious to see if this Jacob passes muster."

  I discovered the next morning that—at least in Kat's eyes—Jacob didn't. When I strolled down the holler from my tent for breakfast, Kat was already hard at work picking over blackberries she'd harvested in the small window of time between dawn and my appearance on the scene, and she'd also discovered a plum tree I didn't know about up behind the farm house. I didn't even mind Kat's bossiness when she suggested I go pick a basketful—Greensun was looking sunnier and more cheerful by the minute.

  Unfortunately, trouble came on a tractor a couple of hours later. I'd been looking forward to Jacob's arrival all morning, but when I heard the rumble of the engine and came hurrying around the bend from the plum tree, a standoff was already in progress. Kat was standing in front of the tractor, her hands on her hips, yelling as loudly as she could to be heard over the roar, and Jacob's face was stuck halfway between confusion and anger. They were so engrossed in their argument that neither noticed me until I was standing right next to the tall wheel of the machine.

  "What's going on?" I called up to Jacob. He saw me at last, and his face shifted over to pure pleasure. Turning off the tractor, he swung down out of the seat, but let Kat do the explaining.

  "He says he's going to plow up this area, but this is completely the wrong spot for pumpkins! Dad grows corn here every year. If he wants to grow pumpkins, he's going to have to go down and across the creek to that area beside the barn," she proclaimed. Kat's adamant belief in the validity of her own opinions suddenly seemed less helpful now that I wasn't the only one being affected, and I could tell Jacob wasn't impressed.
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  But he didn't raise his voice, as most people would have when faced with such a heated tone. "I don't see any corn," Jacob said simply, once he was sure Kat was done. "And it's getting late to plant any. Plus, the tractor would get stuck if we tried to take it across the creek."

  Two pairs of eyes turned to me. The brown set was still shooting angry sparks (metaphorically, of course), while the blue set squinted up into a smile. "I guess you're the tie breaker," Jacob added.

  Just the position I didn't want to be in! But Jacob was clearly right. The tractor he'd borrowed was huge, with wheels that came up to my shoulder, and I couldn't see any way the vehicle was going to cross over the creek (not if it wanted to come back out anytime soon). "I think this is a good spot," I said tentatively, ready for Kat to turn her anger on me.

  But my sister just laughed, murmured something about "So that's how it is, huh?" and turned sweet in an instant. "Sorry to confuse matters," she said, now to Jacob, taking a step closer so she was just barely inside his personal space, her face tilted up to his. I'd watched girls at school wrap guys around their little fingers in just this way, and I felt a knot form in my stomach. If it came to a contest between myself and Kat, there was no comparison—even after a morning picking blackberries, my sister looked lush and kissable, and my clothes had never hugged my curves like hers did. Plus, I was pretty sure I had twigs in my hair from the plum tree.

  And Jacob did smile at my overly appealing sister, but the warmth didn't seem to reach his eyes. "I'd better plow, then, before the heat hits," he replied, stepping back up onto the tractor and turning the key so the engine's rumble made future conversation impossible.

  Kat didn't like to be rejected. Never mind that Jacob was my age, meaning he was seven years younger than her. And never mind that I'm pretty sure she'd hooked up with the Viking-Festival guy at the cob-building workshop. She was still royally pissed off that Jacob had walked away from her flirty advance.

  "I think he's bad news," she told me as we walked over the loose soil the tractor had churned up. I was raking clods flat and planting pumpkin seeds and Kat was mostly hitting the soil angrily and rather randomly with her tool. "And, pumpkins?! What kind of way is that to make money? Now, a CSA would be another matter."

  While I was wracking my brain to remember what a CSA was, Kat's rant continued. "You probably don't realize how careful we have to be about who we invite to join the new community," she said, her tone making it clear that she believed I'd behaved idiotically. This was my first true experience with being a little sister, and I didn't like it. I made a mental note to apologize to my own little brother just in case I'd ever treated him this way.

  "Greensun fell apart before because Dad was too lax and let the wrong people in," Kat continued. "We need to do a better job culling the duds." She peered into my face as if to see whether I understood. "This is a huge opportunity—Greensun is worth a lot more than $30,000—and we need to be careful not to blow it."

  I'm not sure how I would have replied—maybe I would have actually said what I was thinking for a change and asked Kat who put her in charge of the Save Greensun campaign? Luckily, though, Jacob was done plowing, and he joined us just as my mouth opened to let loose words I'd probably regret later. "I brought a watermelon and put it in the creek when I got here," he interjected. "Does anyone want a slice?"

  One of Mom's favorite Stout-Kat tales involved a watermelon-seed-spitting contest that Kat had won against a man four times her size and age. Another pertained to a watermelon-eating contest that Kat had again passed with flying colors. So the answer was—yes, Kat loved watermelon. And, just like that, her anger at Jacob dissipated into a sea of watermelon juice.

  "We need a game plan," Kat declared, once all three of us were covered in sticky juice. "Thia, you can keep notes."

  I'd been musing over how quickly Kat's moods came and went, but mine seemed to be just as simple to affect. Mom had named me after a flowering bush, and even though "Forsythia" was a bit of an odd moniker, I'd somehow never come up with a nickname that stuck. "Thia," though, felt just right, and the glow of a new nickname meant I didn't mind at all being sent into the house after pen and paper.

  When I came back out, Jacob and Kat had already filled our next week with projects. We'd go to the courthouse to figure out who all of the neighboring land belonged to, we'd plan a gardening event and put a notice in the local paper in hopes of finding at least one more community member, and we'd all buckle down to think about business solutions.

  Kat was doing most of the talking, I was scribbling furiously to keep up, and Jacob was generally just nodding along. However, it soon became evident that Jacob was biding his time until Kat's momentum slowed enough that he could interject some outside-the-box thinking. "You're talking about a CSA or teaching gardening classes, but that's not all that's farm-related," he said quietly when Kat paused. "Have you ever considered harnessing the power of the internet?"

  And that's how we ended up huddled around one public computer at the local library, figuring out blogs and social-networking sites. I was emailing back and forth with my stepfather, whose experience was enough to at least set us off in the right direction. Kat was doing what she did best—coming up with lofty flights of fancy that might or might not crash and burn. And Jacob was plugging along making something actually happen based on my technical tips and Kat's dreamy advice.

  By the time Kat and I peeled off to return to the farm and Jacob turned homeward, I felt like we'd made an astonishing amount of progress. Plus, it just felt good to be working together with Jacob and Kat on something bigger than ourselves. My eyes were following Jacob's minivan as it turned out of the Greensun driveway when Kat's words took me by surprise.

  "Be careful," she said, her voice firmer than it had sounded all afternoon. "I'm still not so sure about that kid."

  Despite myself, my mood deflated just a little, but I still watched Jacob until he rolled out of sight.

  For the next couple of weeks, Jacob came over just about every day, and I suddenly had two sets of wheels at my disposal. That made it much easier to find spots with cell-phone reception so I could talk to my family, although I soon wondered why I'd craved that access so much.

  "It sounds like you're getting awfully engrossed in this community-building project," Mom said one day while I sat on a bench outside the courthouse. Jacob was inside figuring out tax maps and neighbor names, while Kat had walked down the street in search of the perfect ice-cream cone. I could hear meat sizzling in the background through the phone, and I guessed that Mom was making a family favorite—spaghetti with homemade sauce. The scent of bay leaves was nearly palpable and I could almost see the twinkle in Dad's eyes as he poured in the "secret ingredient"—a quarter cup of brown sugar.

  But I was glad I wasn't going to be sitting down to dinner with the family because Mom was in a nit-picking mood. "Don't forget you're starting college in less than six weeks. I don't want this Greensun thing to stand in the way of your future," she warned.

  "Mom!" I hated my own tone of voice, like a whiny child, and struggled to sound more mature (with little success). "This Greensun 'thing' is important! Maybe it is my future."

  The phone line went silent, and I cringed as I thought back over what I'd said. Mom had been forced to drop out of college multiple times, only finishing up as an adult after marrying Dad. As a result, a post-high-school education had always been a non-negotiable part of my brother's and my future, something we hadn't minded looking forward to since we both enjoyed learning and knew our parents would foot the bill. Realizing my statement would have struck a nerve, I hastened to soften my words. "The community doesn't have to stand in the way of college, Mom. Only two people need to be living at Greensun full time, and Kat and Jacob both seem interested." Well, except for the part where they couldn't stand being in the same room with each other half the time, let alone in the same house, but I didn't think Mom needed that much information.

  "So Jacob's still helpi
ng you?" Mom asked. I'd been hoping she'd change the subject, but now I heard a lecture coming on worse than I would have gotten by insinuating I might skip college. And it seemed patently unfair given that Jacob and I had never so much as held hands, let alone done anything more. I thought he liked me, but there often wasn't room in our conversations for Jacob to get a word in edgewise when Kat was talking. For all I knew, he had two or three girlfriends on the side.

  "Yes," I answered her. Then, not wanting to sound curt, I elaborated a bit. "He generally does at least 60% of the work. Kat's great with big-picture stuff, but she tends to get bogged down in the details."

  "Well, I'm glad she's there, anyway," Mom said. She sighed, and I could tell she wanted to say something else but was holding her tongue. Finally, unable to entirely let the subject go, she finished. "Just promise me you won't make any big decisions because of a boy, okay, Forsythia?"

  I almost wanted to tell my mother that I was going by Thia now, but I knew that wasn't what Mom wanted to hear. "Okay," I replied, but I wasn't sure I was ready to stand by my promise.

  What I didn't tell Mom is that I was starting to wonder if college was the right next step for me. Living at Greensun was turning into a fascinating adventure, and I was pretty sure I was learning just as much by browsing Dad's library as I would have in English 101. Plus, as weird as I found parts of the Appalachian culture—kids toting guns, for example—I felt more grounded here than I'd ever been before. I was literally growing my future when I transplanted raspberries out of the impenetrable patch and lined them up in easy-harvest rows. And the power of working together in a team was inspiring. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was really living, rather than observing the lives of people around me.