“What was your name back then?”
She smiles. “Eileen. Eileen McQuiddy.”
“Do you ever think about moving back?”
Sirona leans backward, resting on her hands. “My parents died in a car accident when I was five. My grandma Lula raised me, taught me most of what I know about midwifery and healing with herbs. She was my anchor. She died three years ago.” Sirona sits up straight and looks at Harmony, then back to me. “And when I’m there, Blue, I miss here. I miss all of you.”
The cowbell clangs two short gongs followed by a space, then two more. Sirona peers out the window to see who rang the bell. “It’s Lois Fuller. Must be a baby coming.”
Once word got around about Sirona being a midwife, people outside SFC started asking her to deliver their babies. The only problem is we don’t have a phone so they have to call our neighbor Mrs. Fuller, and she runs over here to get Sirona.
Sirona gathers her basket and kisses my head on her way out. “I’ll be back soon to check on our little sister.”
I carefully climb onto Harmony’s bed to try to eavesdrop on Sirona and Mrs. Fuller’s conversation, but Sirona is already running toward her truck. Mrs. Fuller looks up and waves at me.
“Hey, kiddo, why aren’t you down here enjoying lemonade with the others?”
The Fullers live on the farm just north of our leased land. Mrs. Fuller is one of the few outsiders allowed into SFC. Most of the locals just know us as “that hippie commune” off Bodega Highway.
I check to see if anyone else is within earshot before answering her. “Harmony’s sick. I’m staying with her until she wakes up.”
“Is she okay?”
I glance at Harmony and back to Mrs. Fuller. “I don’t know. She’s pretty sick.”
Mrs. Fuller shocks me by kicking off her shoes and climbing up the ladder of the treehouse. When she comes through the doorway she takes one look at Harmony and gasps.
“She looks so pale! Probably the heat. Is she staying hydrated?”
“She got bit by a baby rattlesnake.”
Mrs. Fuller drops to her knees and uncovers Harmony’s bandaged leg. “Did they take her in for an anti-venom shot?”
I shake my head. “Goji doesn’t believe in Western medicine. Sirona’s been using herbs and clay and stuff.”
“How long ago was she bitten?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Mrs. Fuller’s mouth falls open. “Too late for anti-venom. But she still needs to go to the hospital.”
“Goji won’t allow it. We tried.” I swallow hard, trying not to cry. “Maybe you have something in your medicine cabinet that will help?”
“I have some antibiotic cream. And aspirin to knock her fever.” She feels Harmony’s forehead, then gently runs her fingers through Harmony’s hair. “Let me go see if I can talk some sense into that man.” She whirls around and pads back toward the ladder.
“Mrs. Fuller? What are you doing up here?”
I jerk my head toward Harmony. She tries to smile but it takes too much effort.
“Hey! You’re awake! How do you feel?” I think about calling Mrs. Fuller back but I want Harmony all to myself for a few minutes.
“Thirsty.” Her voice is barely above a whisper.
I grab a mason jar of water off the crate next to her bed and hold my hand over hers so she won’t spill it. Together we tilt the glass to her cracked lips. She takes a sip, then chokes when she tries to gulp it.
“Easy,” I say, and set the jar on the floor next to me. She curls her finger, signaling for me to come closer. I put my ear next to her mouth.
“I peed the bed.” She lets out a faint laugh.
“I’ll get you some clean sheets. I’ll be right back, I promise!”
I scramble down the tree, shouting toward the others. “She’s awake! Harmony’s awake!”
* * *
Everyone can’t fit in the room at once and Goji is afraid the oak tree will weaken on this side so he lets people in two at a time. Once Mrs. Fuller and the family have gotten a peek at Harmony he shoos them away. Everyone but me and Sirona, who’s already back from a false alarm.
Sirona hums to herself as she changes the dressing.
I plug my nose. “How can that stinky stuff possibly be helping?”
Harmony holds the sheet over her nose and mouth. “Worse than hummus farts.”
Sirona smiles as she clips the bandage in place with a safety pin. “The warm clay helps to absorb any leftover venom near the site. It only works for the first twenty-four hours or so. After that we need to use herbal remedies to prevent necrosis.”
I hate when people use words I don’t know. “What’s necrosis?”
“Death of the tissues.”
Harmony bolts upright. “My leg could die?”
Sirona takes Harmony’s foot in her hand. “We won’t let that happen.” She kisses each toe one at a time. “I won’t let that happen, sweet girl.”
Sirona gathers her basket of rags and herbs. “I need to get more supplies.” She nods toward the mug on the crate. “Drink your echinacea and goldenseal tea.”
As soon as Sirona is out of earshot I blurt it out. “I’m sorry, Harmony. I shouldn’t have played that game of closed-eyes walking with you. I should have known it was dangerous.”
“It was my idea, Blue.”
“I know but . . .”
“I’m tired. I don’t want to talk.”
“Would you like me to read?”
“Yes please.” Her breath reeks of garlic. Sirona must have added it to the tea.
“Which one?”
Harmony runs her finger over the stack of books we got from the library before our snake encounter. While she was sleeping I arranged them from top to bottom alphabetically, by title, starting with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and ending with A Wrinkle in Time. Harmony stops at To Kill a Mockingbird and plucks it from the pile. She pats the bed and I climb in next to her. I start reading but she falls asleep before I get halfway through the second chapter.
I put my finger to my lips when Sirona comes back to check on her. She gently unwraps the loose rag and replaces the herbs. Harmony grimaces in her sleep but she doesn’t wake. Goji was right about Harmony getting better, but I think it was mostly luck that she survived that bite. We should have taken her to a hospital.
When it’s dark outside I climb out of Harmony’s bed and creep down the ladder one rung at a time. I’m a little shaky from skipping meals and not getting enough sleep. Halfway across the moonlit compound I stop and pee in the dirt, spelling out her name instead of mine.
6
September 1976
Goji doesn’t call them rules. He calls them guidelines because people don’t have to abide by them if they have a good reason. All the guidelines are voted on and even if just one person objects we keep talking until everyone can agree. Once in a while we have to change one of them. Like when we added fish as a type of meat after Coyote came home with a trout one time. Goji told him humans evolved from fish so it would be like cannibalism. Doobie ended up using that fish for fertilizer on a few pot plants. Those plants grew like crazy that year.
Birth control is another example. The guideline states that we should avoid Western medicine. The women insisted that the world is overpopulated and that they need to be in charge of their own bodies, so birth control is allowed. Today we made another exception to that guideline; the sister-mothers bought a snake-bite kit.
The community guidelines are written in a huge volume that we just call The Book. It sometimes gets passed around the table during sharing time after dinner. People can write notes in The Book or draw pictures like Harmony sometimes does, or press a leaf or a flower between the pages to remember events. I found a snakeskin last week and I put it in there to remember the day Harmony got bitten. Harmony drew a smiley face on it, which kind of made me mad. It’s not funny to me.
Goji keeps The Book in his shack for safekeeping, but we’ve all had to memo
rize them:
1. New people must be unanimously welcomed by all community members. If someone new wants to join, they have to live at SFC long enough to know they want to stay and the family feels like they’re a good fit.
2. We live in harmony with the earth. Our water comes from an artesian spring and anything that needs to be kept cold is stored in a metal cistern in the creek. We cook and heat on our propane stove or wood-fired oven. Our shower is a bag of water warmed by the sun, leading to a hose with holes, propped from a tree branch.
3. The only drugs permitted are marijuana and mushrooms. These are considered soul medicines. We also don’t permit alcohol in the community but I once saw Coyote drinking a beer in a tree.
4. Chores are divided equally. Sometimes men do laundry and cook and sometimes the women chop wood. We Youngers are expected to help with the worm bins, sweeping the kitchen area, hauling compost, gardening, gathering eggs, and doing dishes.
5. We consume a humane diet. We grow most of our own food and mostly eat fruits, vegetables, tofu, rice, and beans. Eggs are allowed because the chickens are part of our family.
6. Nonmembers are not allowed inside the SFC boundaries. We make an exception for Stardust, the tarot card reader from Sebastopol who buys weed from Doobie. Also our neighbor, Mrs. Fuller, who buys our fresh eggs.
7. We have everything we need to heal ourselves. Goji believes in holistic medicine. A lot of herbs grow nearby, like arrowroot, chia, and thimbleberry. We use them in our cooking and Sirona grows special plants for her medicines.
8. Yoga and meditation help expand our minds and our bodies. Every day begins with sun salutations and ends with group meditation.
9. Sex is sacred. It’s only supposed to be allowed in the Sacred Space, a yurt that sits kitty-corner from Goji’s shack. This is probably the loosest guideline. Over the years people have started crawling into each other’s beds or going for “walks” together.
There are more guidelines, but these are the main ones besides the stuff about lessons for the Youngers taught by the Olders. Today’s assignment came from Goji. Now that Harmony has recovered, he wants us both to write about what we learned from our experience. Goji is big on these essays. He calls it critical thinking.
I chose fear as my topic because I’ve never been so panicked in my life as when Harmony got bit by that snake. Goji likes when we write about emotions so I think he’ll love it. Harmony’s writing a paper about staying aware of your surroundings. Goji uses the word awareness a lot so I think he’ll dig hers, too.
What I really want to write about is how stupid some of the rules are. The one about no Western medicine scares me. When I think of what could have happened to Harmony I get mad. The new bite kit doesn’t have anti-venom. It’s just stuff to help until you can get to a hospital. Goji teaches that rules are made to be broken and that mindlessly following the masses leads to destruction of the mind. He tells us we should question authority but he always has an answer that makes sense and it sometimes makes me feel stupid for asking.
Harmony and I sit under a willow tree, her on one side and me on the other, as she dictates her essay. I like writing but Harmony doesn’t have the patience for it. She tells me what she’s thinking and I put it into words; then she copies it in her handwriting.
She scooches closer to read over my shoulder. “Did you get all that?”
I tuck my pen into the crease of her lined notebook and close the cover.
Harmony frowns. “Hey, why’d you stop?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something’s bothering you, Blue, I can tell. Did you ask Goji about—”
“Nothing’s bothering me.”
She slaps me on the leg, her way of telling me she knows I’m lying.
I pick up a smooth stone and finger it. “Have you ever wondered why Goji gets his own house while the rest of us sleep together in the tree house?”
“Not really. It makes sense. He needs a quiet place to study and meditate.”
“But Goji’s the one who says we should be able to meditate anywhere, even in the middle of a crowded city.”
Harmony moves so she’s facing me. Her two loose braids fall down to her belly. She crosses one leg over the other so the ankle with the bruised snakebite scar is on top. “I think he deserves his own house since he leased the land.”
“Okay, well how about the rule that says we’re supposed to honor all the creatures? What about the ants we step on every day and the honey we stole from our bee boxes?”
She finds a stone of her own, bigger than mine but not as pretty. Her voice changes to a more serious tone. “We gave the bees a place to live and they gave us honey, right?”
“You already asked him, didn’t you?”
She laughs. “Yeah. It was a good answer.”
“He has an answer for everything.”
“I think we’re supposed to just do the best we can.”
I toss my stone and it pings off a rock before landing in the brush. “When the queen bee left so did all the others. I suppose if Goji left everyone else here would leave, too.”
She looks at me with the same expression Willow gets when she’s worried. “Why are you upset? You love this place. Did you see all the kids on the school bus we passed the other day? That could be us!”
“I don’t know. I just have questions, is all. I love it here, I really do. But I wonder about the outside world sometimes.”
“Me too. But then I remember being dragged all over the place by Ruth and staying in awful places and one time even being forgotten.”
“Your mom forgot you?”
Harmony chews on her bottom lip before answering. “She was partying with friends and left. Didn’t come back for two whole days. I don’t remember much about it, but it was scary being left with strangers. She was more interested in screwing around and smoking dope than taking care of me.”
“That stinks. Gaia used to be so much fun to be around. It was almost like she was one of us kids.”
Harmony rolls her eyes. “Exactly.” She stands up and hands me the rock she’s been holding.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
She points to my hand. “Look closer.”
I turn the rock over and notice a small vertebrate encrusted on one side. When I try to hand it back to her she drops her hands.
“You keep it.”
* * *
Sirona drives a few of us to the little store in Freestone to pick up supplies for Rain’s upcoming welcoming ceremony. Harmony and I also need new notebooks for our essays. We buy most of the food we don’t grow ourselves from the co-op in Santa Rosa but sometimes we run out of things like baking soda or aluminum foil that we can get here. It’s also where we buy our gas.
They only have one person working at the store so the owners let customers fill their own gas tanks. Sirona unhooks a hose from the pump and sticks it in the side of the truck. “You guys go ahead,” she says.
Willow, Wave, Harmony, and I head inside to shop for supplies. I choose a black notebook and Harmony picks one with a red cover. She pauses at the candy counter filled with rows of jawbreakers, suckers, and chocolate bars, giving Willow her best sad puppy face. “Can we get something?”
Willow glances at the candy shelf and shakes her head. “You’re not eating that crap.”
As soon as she turns back toward the cash register, Wave slips us each a penny for the gumball machine and winks. “Spit it out before we get home.”
When we come out of the store, two men are standing between Sirona and the truck. She’s trying to hold her skirt down in the wind. The driver’s side door of the truck is open but the men are blocking her way.
Wave curses under his breath and motions with his hand for us to keep behind him. “Stay cool,” he says.
We carefully walk up and set the bags in the back of the truck. The fatter man has one thumb tucked into his waistband above a big buckle that’s pushed under his belly. A too-small cowboy hat s
its high on his head. The shorter guy is wearing clean black shoes under neatly creased slacks. He leans back against the pump and grins.
The cowboy drapes an arm around Sirona. “Hey, how about sharing some of that free love you long hairs are always talking about?”
Wave looks from one man to the other. His arms are strong from chopping wood, but like all of us, he’s taken a vow against violence in all forms, what we call The Peaceful Way. He holds out his hand to Sirona. “Come on, let’s go.”
The townie pulls Sirona tighter against him. “I think your bush bunny here likes me.”
Willow opens her mouth to speak but stops when a cop car pulls up to the other side of the pump. The sheriff gets out and nods at the men. “Freddie, Dale.” He senses something’s off and looks over the rest of us like he’s deciding which side to take. After what feels like forever he moves to our side of the pump. “Leave ’em alone, boys.”
Sirona yanks her arm away from the man, who spits on the ground in front of us. “Fuckin’ freaks. Go take a bath!”
The fat one laughs. “Stinky-assed pussy, I bet.”
The sheriff steps in front of them. He’s almost a foot taller than the bigger one, even with the cowboy hat on. “Watch your mouths. There are women and children present.”
The three men stare at each other. Harmony runs behind the pump near the two men. My heart speeds up. Knowing Harmony she’ll do something stupid like kick or bite one of them.
Willow curls her finger. “Come on back over here, sister.”
Harmony stays put. After a long pause the sheriff steps aside and the two men walk back toward the store. The smaller one stops halfway to pull a ribbon of bubble gum from the bottom of his shoe. Harmony peeks out from behind the gas pump and sticks out her tongue to show me her empty mouth. I can’t help but grin. I often think about doing brave things but Harmony is the one to actually do the things.
Wave nods at the sheriff as we get back in the truck. “Thank you, sir.”
The sheriff gives Wave a long look up and down but he doesn’t say anything.
7
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