Rachel asked us to bless the cabin, so while Laurel read a passage from The Prophet, I surveyed her abode. Tom built the table and Rachel made her own benches. There’s a wooden counter but no sink yet, just two tin washbowls. There are bookshelves near the door and a ladder that leads to the loft. Her bed is upstairs. She’ll be cozy enough, but I’ll miss her gingerbread and maybe even her nighttime fiddle playing . . .
A few days later, Mara and Benny moved to their new home, at dusk, without any ceremony. It was raining and thunder threatened in the west. We loaded their worldly goods in the back of the Jeep pickup and Tom drove them to town. There was no joking around, no cries of good luck. All this happened after I quit my job for lack of a reliable vehicle and just before Laurel announced, as we harvested the potatoes in the garden, that she was thinking of joining a folk dance troupe in Philadelphia this winter.
I’m on my knees with my hands in the dirt and look up, shocked. I had no idea Laurel too was thinking of leaving.
“I’m tired of grubbing in the earth,” she tries to explain. “Of always being cold or hot or dirty.” I start to cry, and when I wipe my tears I get mud on my face. Laurel is leaving! I’m not just crying for myself, but for Stacy and Mica . . . for all of us.
I shift on the grass, still staring up at the stars, next to Tom. A bobcat screeches twice down in the hollow, a sound like a woman crying. Tom takes my hand. “I’m sad about the community, too, but doesn’t it seem cozy to have our own place? I think we might be happier this way. I like it.”
Why does this guy always have to be so optimistic? His cup’s always full. Mine leaks like a sieve.
“I tried that nuclear-family scene once before, in Minnesota, remember?”
“But the falling star is a sign, Pats.” Tom flops back with a chuckle and extends his arms.
I know he doesn’t believe in signs and I don’t see anything positive about the dissolution of our commune. It’s a slow landslide and there’s no way to stop the erosion. We’ll just finish the trim on Rachel’s little cottage, get it insulated, then preserve our food for the winter . . . then . . . I don’t know . . . For the first time in years, I’m out of visions, out of dreams.
“Did I tell you the Marathon Natural Gas guy that takes care of the well at the corner of Anne Margaret’s land, Mr. Vogler, asked me if I wanted to be on the Roane County Emergency Squad?”
“You didn’t say anything.” I take a deep breath and attempt to blow away my bad vibes.
“It’s a volunteer squad, with only a few paid workers, but the EMT course is free. I thought it would be something I could do, meet some local people, and maybe eventually even earn some money. Classes are held at the hospital. I’d have to go in every night for two weeks. Mr. Vogler said he’d pick me up.”
I shrug. “Sounds all right, especially if it doesn’t cost anything.” Tom spoons around me in the dry grass, but I’m stiff as a board. Above us, a million stars, tiny silver nails, wound the night.
Work Party
The sun is just rising over the hills. Morning has broken, like the first morning, we sing as we bounce up Trippet Run in the back of the jeep. Goldenrod and deep purple aster line the road. It’s almost like the old photo, pinned to the wall in the kitchen, the one of the truck filled with happy communards, laughing, full of visions of the new world.
“Hold on tight,” I tell Mica. I know it isn’t safe to ride in the pickup bed, but since the Volvo accident, the jeep truck is all we have.
I turn to look in the cab window where Mara sits holding baby Orion with Ben on one side and Stacy on the other. Her hair’s almost as long as mine before I chopped off my braids. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but Stacy, who’s driving, laughs and thumps the steering wheel. Tom isn’t with us. He’s working a twenty-four-hour shift with the emergency squad as part of his EMT training. Black birds have spoken, like the first birds . . . Rachel, Laurel, Mica, and I sing in the back.
At the end of Tripplet, where the dirt road dead-ends under the pines, we park and walk along the top of the hill for a quarter of a mile. You can smell the downfalls before you see them, sweet, warm, and alcoholic.
First we collect the fruit still hanging, golden globules of light. There aren’t many without wormholes or scabs, but the best are gently placed in baskets to carry back to the truck and will be stored in the root cellar on beds of straw. The rest we dump in buckets to make dried apples, applesauce, and apple cider. I wipe one on the back of my pants and take a big bite. Crunchy, sweet and sour! Thank you, apple tree!
All morning we fill our crates and baskets, making trips back and forth to the jeep. It’s a treasure hunt, like trash-picking, only better, because no storeowner or cop is going to chase us away. Orion fusses and I let him out of the baby carrier to crawl in the yellow grass while we have lunch.
“Think that’s wise?” Laurel asks.
I look around. What does she mean? Is she concerned about the rocky soil? Is she worried about reptiles? Just this summer, a copperhead bit our hippie neighbor, Tobbie, who lives on the other side of Steele Hollow. She was walking barefoot at dusk, going out to the pasture to check on her horse. She got an anti-venom shot at Roane General. Without it she would have lost her foot, or maybe her life.
“The yellow jackets . . .” Laurel glances with dramatic eyes at the feisty stinging insects that swarm over the fallen fruit. She’s right. A yellow jacket’s sting is worse than a bee’s. I pick Orion up, wondering what to do with him.
“Here.” Mara reaches out. Our one-year-old leaps into her arms. “My back is tired. I’ll go up to the truck and change his diapers.”
This is what I love about raising children in community. It’s not just up to me. Everyone looks out for our little boys. It’s one of the things I will miss most. I wonder how women who live in nuclear families survive . . . I guess I’ll find out . . .
I watch Mara waddle up the trail. Sometimes I forget how pregnant she is. Eight months is a little far along for this work. As her midwife, shouldn’t I be taking better care of her? On the other hand, pioneer women did much harder labor.
Ben and Stacy, imitating angry gorillas, climb the tree above us as high as they can and shake the brittle old branches. Rachel and I laugh as the fruit falls on our heads. Mica’s snatching up apples as if we’re on an Easter egg hunt. When all the usable fruit has been gathered and packed in a bucket or basket, we leave the rest for the deer and head back.
Tom has missed this good day, but I trust he’s enjoying his emergency medical training. I climb into the pickup bed with our harvest, zip up my jacket against the cool evening, and pull Mica into my lap. Orion is again riding up front with Mara.
The pickup rumbles and bumps over the ruts as the sun drops into waves of red. No one tries to talk over the engine noise. Feeling like Midas, I survey our precious treasure of gold; but who will be left on the farm to eat it?
Fall Returns
CHAPTER 13
Siren
I sweep the honey-colored pine floor, wipe off the table, then slide into Rachel’s old room, now the new bathroom in the Long House.
“Isn’t it pretty?” I ask Orion, who’s riding in the back carrier while I work. Our enamel potty sits in the corner on a remnant of gold and green linoleum, trash-picked from behind McIntosh Hardware. Yellow flowered curtains hang in the window. There’s a clothesline for laundry, my old green woven rag rug that Ila made me on her loom, and, best of all, an actual porcelain bathtub that Tom discovered in the Shoepecks’ dump. All we are missing is indoor plumbing.
We still have to carry and heat bathwater, but it drains through a pipe in the floor, and what a luxury, to recline in warm liquid instead of standing up in a galvanized washtub! Mica and Orion can even play in their bath, a treat they’ve never had.
“Why’d you let me sleep so long?” Tom complains as
he comes down the ladder. “I wanted to finish the insulation on the back of Rachel’s house.”
The Roane County Emergency Squad has hired Tom on a regular basis. He’s now taking two twenty-four-hour shifts each week and sleeps until noon the next day. Together we studied the thick Emergency Management workbook from front to back. I’d never seen him so focused. The laid-back hippie Tom was suddenly inhabited by a new guy, sharp, disciplined, confident.
“I was down there this morning with Stacy and Laurel,” I explain. “It’s almost done. You can finish what’s left after lunch . . . How’d it go last night? I heard the siren in the distance about midnight.”
Orion reaches for his daddy and Tom takes him, balancing him on his head with one hand and clip-clopping around the room like a horse. Orion squeals with delight and Tom’s grumpy mood evaporates.
“Everything go OK?” I’ve become intensely interested in my companion’s new medical life and quiz him for every detail.
“Not really. You know old Mr. Nutter . . . goes to Steele Hollow Church with Sadie Shoepeck and her family? He used to be the pastor there.” I shake my head no. Tom sits down on the bench, now serious. “Yeah you do, we met him when we went to the chapel to sing. He lives way out on Tripplet. I was partnered with Mr. Vogler last night. We came up Steele Hollow and then took the dirt road almost out to the orchard. The old man was dead when we got there. Massive heart attack. Maybe a stroke. I knew when I saw him that it was too late.
“But that wasn’t the worst,” my husband goes on.
“Not the worst? How can it get any worse than picking up a dead guy?”
“Well, we transported Mr. Nutter to the Sinett Funeral Home by 2:30 a.m. and were just back in bed when we got a second call, a fight down at the Road House, that place along Route 33, the joint with the strippers. The state cops were there. Some babe thought her husband was cheating and came down with his rifle and shot him in the arm. While we were trying to get the bleeding stopped, the woman was still trying to attack him. The scene was out of control. They say these kind of domestic situations happen all the time.”
I glance at the window seat where Tom threw his shirt when he got home; the new blue long-sleeved uniform shirt with the patch I’d proudly sewn on the sleeve. For the first time, I notice the dried blood on the front.
“Do you still want to do this?” I stare at my friend, the father of our child, stroking his baby’s fuzzy head. He looks tired, big circles under his eyes, with a two-day-old beard. He had to shave when he joined the squad. Tom stands and tosses Orion into the air. The baby throws out his arms, laughing.
“Sure, it was great!” He follows my gaze to the bloody garment and flashes a grin. “But we’ll have to get a few more EMS shirts.”
DYLAN
“Finally!” I squeal.
“Shhhhh.” That’s Tom. He doesn’t want me to wake Orion. It’s 6:00 a.m. and I’m on the phone with Mara, who’s two weeks past due.
“Is the fluid clear?” I’ve become paranoid about meconium since the Blundell birth, and meconium-stained fluid is more common in overdue pregnancies.
“I think so, but it just keeps trickling. I put on a pad,” Mara tells me.
“Contractions?”
“I’m not sure. They don’t hurt, but my abdomen gets tight clear up to my neck. I’ve been up and down to the bathroom all night. Nice to have a flush toilet instead of an outhouse.”
A few hours later, I’m checking Mara on her bed upstairs in their new house on the state mental hospital grounds. A worn green and white patchwork quilt covers the hand-me-down full-size double-spring bed, a housewarming present from Sadie Shoepeck. Benny has set up some board and brick bookshelves, and in the corner stands a white crib they bought at a yard sale.
“So, tonight sometime?” Ben asks, sitting on the corner of the mattress, holding Mara’s hand. I notice that he’s cut his curly hair short and now trims his beard. “Sorry if we made you come too early.”
“It’s OK. Things might go quicker than you think.”
They don’t go quicker. All day Mara walks the bare hardwood floors, squats and slow dances with her husband, but mostly stands leaning over the bathroom sink swaying her hips and looking into Benny’s brown eyes in the medicine-chest mirror. Her face is pink and her golden hair is coming out of her ponytail. She looks beautiful and strong, the way women look in labor when they aren’t afraid.
Ben rubs her lower back. Laurel sits on the toilet seat and massages Mara’s legs to keep her loose. I stand at the bathroom door, watching, thinking it’s too bad you have to have a baby to get all this attention. Then, about dawn, without warning, Mara hits the floor on her hands and knees, moaning and wagging her bottom like a dog. “God, that was a hard one. I want to push!” I notice blood trickling down one leg.
“Better lie down so I can check you. It may be time.”
“No shit?” says Ben, running his fingers through his short hair so it stands on end. “You really think so?” Tom and Stacy watch from the doorway. Rachel, with Orion on her hip, slips by, her dark eyes asking if everything’s OK.
An hour later the warm room is crowded with cheerleaders, Tom, Stacy, Rachel and the boys . . . Laurel wipes Mara’s red face after each contraction. Tom pours warm olive oil over my fingers as I massage her perineum.
“I’ve figured it out,” Mara tells us. “If I growl at the beginning, even if I don’t have the urge to push, once the baby starts moving, the urge follows and my uterus takes over and makes me bear down.
“Grrrrrr!” she demonstrates.
“Grrrrrr!” Rachel growls, too, finally finding her role.
Thirty minutes later. “Oh, it stings. Oh, Patsy, it burns bad!”
“Pant, Mara! Pant!” Everyone in the room pants with her, their eyes riveted on the emerging new life.
Mara delivers the infant into my hands, first the head with its chubby cheeks, then the shoulders, then the rest. Her body works perfectly to produce this new life and I remember that this is the way it’s supposed to be. This is the way, if not interfered with, most women can give birth.
Laurel pulls open the blinds, and everyone blinks as the golden sun pours into the room. Like the first morning, I think. Mica crawls on the bed to say hello. Orion watches from the child carrier on Tom’s back. Mara reaches out for her baby. “It’s Dylan, right?” She looks up at Benny and laughs.
CHAPTER 14
Rebirth
“I hope my shirt’s dry.” Tom clomps up the ladder, shakes the wrinkles out of his uniform, and stands buttoning it in the bedroom doorway. I’m folding laundry with Orion on the bed. I observe that after three washings, the bloodstains on his EMS shirt are gone.
“You like your job?” I know he does. I just like to hear about it.
He drops down beside me to help match the socks, our big wool ones, Mica’s little-boy tube socks, and Orion’s tiny cotton ones. “The runs are scary sometimes and hanging around the station gets boring, but I told you about the fight at the rooming house didn’t I? Two old guys in Spencer beat each other almost senseless. One man’s face was kicked in so bad you could hardly recognize him as human.
“It’s hard when we don’t have a paramedic with us . . . someone to start an IV. Like that run with the gunshot at the Road House; the guy might have died if Vogler hadn’t been there. He and Molliann are the only paramedics in town and they each only work two twenty-four-hour shifts, so three days a week, the emergency medical technicians are on their own. I’ve watched them both put in the intravenous catheter and think I could do it, but an EMT isn’t certified for IVs.”
Tom’s confidence about such technical procedures amazes me. Though I knew he was good at fixing things—old trucks, musical instruments, windup alarm clocks, and kerosene lanterns—I wouldn’t have dreamed he had an aptitude for fixing people, or the ability to
learn so quickly.
The Tom I’ve always known is this loose hippie bass player, a quiet long-haired dude in the background, someone you can rely on without ever realizing how intelligent, fearless, and competent he is.
“What would you do if you were without Vogler and thought a patient might bleed to death? Would you have the guts to just start an IV? I mean, without being a trained paramedic?”
Tom looks up from tying his boots. He’s shaved his beard, just left a mustache so you can actually see the cleft in his chin, and I understand now why women are attracted to men in uniform.
“Probably try to get the needle in. It’s important to get a line started before the victim loses too much blood and his veins collapse. I might get fired for it though.”
“Maybe not, if you saved someone’s life. They might give you a commendation!” He knows I’m kidding. The way most bureaucracies work, he’d most likely get canned.
He changes the subject. “I heard Molliann tell someone that Community Action has funding for grants to the LPN program at Arch Moore Vocational School.”
“LPN, like a licensed practical nurse? Maybe Rachel would be interested.”
“No, I mean you. Community Action would pay a salary while you went to school. We could use the money. I’m sure you’d get in.”
I snort a short laugh, flashing on a vision of me as Florence Nightingale. “I can just see me with a little nurse’s cap and white stockings!”
Tom pulls on his new blue zip-up EMT jacket. He bends to kiss the baby, who’s curled on his side in our big bed, almost asleep. “Well, think about it.” He gently kisses Orion without waking him. “I’ll stop and say good-bye to Mica up at the Little House.”
Arms Wide Open Page 17