This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  This Life Is in Your Hands

  One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone

  Melissa Coleman

  For my sister Heidi

  —but beauty is more now than dying’s when

  —e. e. cummings

  Contents

  Map

  Prologue

  One

  Family

  Two

  Livelihood

  Three

  Sustenance

  Four

  Seclusion

  Five

  Companions

  Six

  Water

  Seven

  Tribe

  Eight

  Paradise

  Nine

  Bicentennial

  Ten

  Loss

  Eleven

  Atonement

  Twelve

  Mercy

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  View of Nearings’ Cove (Photograph by Ian Coleman.)

  We must have asked our neighbor Helen to read our hands that day. Her own hands were the color of onion skins, darkened with liver spots, and ever in motion. Writing, digging, picking, chopping. Opening kitchen cabinets painted with Dutch children in bright embroidered dresses and pointed shoes. Taking out wooden bowls and handing them to my mother, Sue, to put on the patio for lunch. As Mama whooshed out the screen door with hair flowing and child-on-back, the kitchen breathed chopped parsley and vegetable soup simmering on the stove, and the light glowed through the kitchen windows onto the crooked pine floors of the old farmhouse where I stood waiting.

  It was a charmed summer, that summer of 1975, even more so because we didn’t know how peaceful it was in comparison to the one that would follow.

  “Ring the lunch bell for Scott-o,” Helen called out the window to Mama. She liked to add an o to everyone’s name. Eli-o, Suz-o, kiddos for the kids, Puss-o the cat. We were the closest she had to children.

  As the bell chimed, Helen took my small hand and turned it upward in hers. The kitchen was warm, but her skin cool and leathery. Mama returned with Heidi as I stood long-hair-braided and six-years-brave, holding my breath. We knew about Helen that when she didn’t have something interesting to say, she’d change the subject. She smoothed my palm with her thumbs and looked down but also in, her cropped granite hair holding the dusty smell of old books.

  “Tsch, what’s this?” she asked of the marks I’d made with Papa’s red magic marker.

  “A map,” I told her, proud of the artistry on my fingers. “A map of our farm.”

  “Pshaw.” She tossed my hand aside like an old turnip from the root cellar.

  So she read Heidi’s palm instead. Heidi was a blue-eyed two-year-old, “an uncontainable spirit,” everyone said. Even she held still, mouth open, breathing heavy, snug in the sling on Mama’s back as Helen smoothed out her little fingers.

  “Short life line,” Helen muttered, bending toward the light from the window, then paused as if catching herself too late.

  “What do you mean by short?” Mama asked, brown eyes alert, mother-bird-like. “Thirty, forty years?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t mean a thing,” Helen said, and began to mutter about the overabundance of tomatoes in the garden.

  Seven years earlier Helen had thought differently, perhaps, as she read my father, Eliot’s, hands when he and Mama visited, looking for land. Some say hands hold the map of our lives; that the lines of the palm correspond with the heart, head, and soul to create a story unique to each of us. Understanding the lines is an attempt to understand why things happen as they do. Also a quick way to figure out who might make a good neighbor. Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life, wanted young people around who would find the same joys in country living as they did. Their philosophy held the promise of a simple life, far removed from the troubles of the modern world. The good life.

  “Very strong lines,” Helen told Papa that summer of 1968. He had the deepest fate line she’d ever seen, and wide, capable hands. With hands like his, they could do anything. And such a nice-looking couple, too, young and clean-cut—Papa with his sandy tousle of hair, blue eyes, and straight nose, Mama’s long, dark hair parted in the middle and kindly chestnut eyes. Shortly after that visit, my parents received a postcard from Helen and Scott offering to sell the sixty acres next door. That’s how we came to be back-to-the-landers, living on a farm cut from the woods without electricity, running water, or phone on that remote peninsula along the coast of Maine. Trying something different to see if truth could be found in it.

  “The Vegetable Garden,” the sign at the end of our drive said, “Organically Grown,” with the vegetables in season listed beneath: carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini. Past a gravel parking lot, the driveway thinned to a grassy lane curving around the orchard and down a gentle slope to a wood-timbered stand with wet-pebble shelves full of fresh produce for sale. Customers and farmworkers came and went as the surrounding gardens ripened beneath the pale disk of midday sun and cicadas thrummed regular as your pulse. On the rise by an overarching ash tree sat our small house, its slanted roof and front eyes of windows looking across the greenhouse and gardens below. The only home I’d ever known.

  Heidi and I were always outside, naked and barefoot, dancing on the blanket of apple blossoms, skipping along wooded paths, catching frogs at the pond, eating strawberries and peas from the vine, and running from the black twist of garter snakes in the grass. We lay in the shade under the ash tree, gazing up at the crown of leaves and listening to the sounds of the farm—birds calling, goats bleating, chattering of customers at the farm stand, and whispers of tree talk.

  When you focused on the leaves fluttering in the dappled light, they vibrated and shimmered into one, becoming a million tiny particles. You felt a shift inside, and you began to vibrate too, on the same frequency as everything else. All secrets were there, all truths, all knowledge. You had to scan with your heart to find what you were seeking. It might not be spoken in words, it might be hidden in rhyme, in song, in images. You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you, made of particles, like you, come together in a different form. You loved it all as you loved yourself.

  There are reasons why nothing lasts forever.

  Papa says it was the little red boat Heidi must have carried down to the pond and set afloat. One of our farm apprentices said she was the kind of child who wasn’t afraid of anything. Another thought it was the black crow that hung around the farm that spring, a single crow being an omen of death in the family. Someone else suggested it was her lost caul, the rare birth sac myths say will protect against drowning. Others blamed it on our lifestyle—not a proper way to raise children.

  Mama usually says it was the rain. She didn’t worry about us girls playing by the pond because it wasn’t that deep during the dry months of summer. But when it rained, the pond filled and turned black as the water caught in barrels under the eaves.

  None of these things alone tells the whole story. Only in looking back can you see a pattern in the threads of life, interwoven with the events that would tear them asunder, and within that pattern lies the knowledge I’m seeking—the secret of how to live.

  Chapter One

  Family

  Eliot with goat kid and Sue with
Lissie, a few days after birth (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  For the first nine years of my life, Greenwood Farm was my little house in the big woods, located as long ago and far away up the coast of Maine as it was from mainstream America. Five hours from Boston, three from Portland, along winding roads that became successively narrower from Belfast to Bucksport to Penobscot, until they finally turned to dirt. If you were a bird, you could shorten the trip at Camden by cutting over the scatterings of fir-pointed islands on Penobscot Bay—North Haven, Butter Island, Great Spruce Head, Deer Isle. Viewed from above, the islands formed bright constellations in the dark sky of water, a mirror of the universe leading you back in time.

  Just past Pond Island, you’d see the forested head of Cape Rosier reaching into the sea from the mainland and a sandy line of beach, beyond which a narrow road wound up through a blueberry field and disappeared into a dappled stretch of forest. A mile in, our land was surrounded by the cape’s uniform blanket of fir, spruce, and the purple scrub of blueberry barrens.

  On a morning in early April of 1969, as my future parents were clearing brush under the bare crown of the ash tree next to their new home, two sparrows circled once, twice, then alighted on a branch to announce their arrival with a familiar melody of clicks and twseets. Surprised by the song, Mama raised her head to spot the diminutive brown birds with patches of white at the throat. “The white-throat,” she exclaimed, an armload of brush resting on the pronounced swell of her belly. She’d always loved sparrows best—so joyous in their simplicity. “They mate for life and come back every year to the same place to build a nest,” she added, having checked it in her Peterson’s before.

  “A sure sign of spring,” Papa replied, giving a low whistle through his teeth before returning with renewed vigor to his work. Easter would fall that Sunday, though they’d lost track of such dates by then—spring was a resurrection with or without a holiday.

  It was not the spring of hyacinth, lily of the valley, and drunken bumblebees, but the New England spring that comes just before. Mud season. The last pockets of snow melted away as rain fell from the sky in steady gray sheets, filling hollows and ruts with dark puddles. Ice crystals released their hold on soil that sank into a primordial muck.

  “Son of a gun,” Papa said. “The ruts in the driveway are up to my knee.” The white VW truck wallowed like a pig when he revved up and tried to drive through. Sometimes he made it, sometimes he didn’t.

  “Looks like we’d be having the baby at home even if we didn’t want to,” he said after one unsuccessful attempt.

  Mama’s belly was the perfect half round of the wooden bread-mixing bowl, a defined mound under her favorite anorak with the fur-trimmed hood. It appeared before her when she exited the outhouse and entered the door of the farmhouse. Her face was round too, glowing like the moon. Standing at the kitchen counter preparing lunch, she looked normal from behind, but when Papa came and put his arms around her, they could rest on the curve of her belly as his hands searched for the shape of a foot or leg.

  “There, Eliot, there again,” Mama said. “Movement.”

  His larger hand pressed next to hers, waiting for another kick.

  “Yes, I felt it,” he said. “I really did that time.”

  “It could be any day now,” Mama said. She felt something changing inside, a slowing down and getting ready.

  Scientists say my waiting self could already hear the chirp of Mama’s voice, the ha-has of Papa’s laughter, the thump of feet and the click of Normie-dog’s paws on the wooden floor of the farmhouse. There would have been the shush of sweeping, the crack-shatter of Papa chopping kindling, an explosion of firewood dropped into the bin, the crunch of gravel outside, goats bleating as they waited to be milked, water splashing at the spring. Most of all, I would have felt the constant sound of Mama’s heart beating, a steady drumbeat on a rawhide surface, blood rushing through valves into arteries and capillaries, keeping me alive. A new home awaited, one Mama and Papa had worked hard to make safe from what they saw as the dangers of the outside world.

  Six months earlier, on October 21, 1968, my parents had moved from Franconia College in New Hampshire to a makeshift camper on the sixty wooded acres Helen and Scott Nearing sold them for $2,000. There was no mail service, no telephone or electrical wires, no plumbing. All of that ended a mile down the road at the Nearings’. Mail was picked up at the post office, the one public building in Harborside, a tiny town located four miles from the homestead along the western side of Cape Rosier’s coast. Calls were made fifteen minutes away on a pay phone at a store off the cape in Bucks Harbor, also home to the famous Condon’s Garage, where Sal gets a spark plug as condolence for her lost tooth in the children’s book One Morning in Maine.

  “Cape Rosier looks like the profile of a moose’s head.” Mama pointed out to Papa on the map. Holbrook Island and its neighbors to the north made the distinctive shape of horns above the dot for the town of Harborside, a round unnamed pond in the middle was the eye, the head of the cape was the nose, and the Breezemere Peninsula hung below like a chin under an open mouth. This moose head appeared to be almost an island, with only a thin neck holding it to the mainland. They laughed when they learned that the Indian name for the cape was Mose-ka-chick, which actually meant “moose’s rump.”

  Their sixty-some acres made a nostril in the moose’s snout, about a mile from the ocean and two hundred feet in elevation above it. A dirt road wound up from Nearings’ Cove to curve along the southern edge of the property before heading back out to the sea on the other side. Across the way were the undulating rock and scrub of a blueberry barren, and beyond that stretched the uninhabited head of the cape at the tip of the moose’s nose.

  The site of my future home was only a rise in the forest surrounded by spruce and fir, a cluster of birch, and the large ash with its healthy crown of branches. “This seems like a good place to begin,” Papa had said, standing beside the tree. “We’ll have to start building right away before winter.”

  “A home of our own, at last.” Mama sighed, and that image alone soothed her. She felt a twinge in her stomach, like a feather stroking the inside, and hugged her expanding belly with her arms. She hadn’t realized how homeless she’d been up until that point.

  While Mama’s father was Harvard-educated and her mother descended from a passenger on the Mayflower, they never aspired to be part of wealthy Boston society or had the money to become so. Papa’s parents, Skates and Skipper, though not rich, were in the Social Register and part of the beach, tennis, and country club circles of Rumson, New Jersey. “Fonsy people,” Mama liked to joke with a blue-blood affectation. Young and in love, my parents hoped to make their way without concern for the Social Register and Harvard degrees and to leave behind their respective family affairs—shuffling off the shell of the past to grow a future of their own making.

  During the last two weeks of October, Papa shoveled out a hole eight feet deep, six feet wide, and ten feet long—where the root cellar would sit beneath the house—and laid the foundation with rot-resistant cedar posts. A self-taught carpenter and woodworker, Papa learned from odd jobs and projects, including renovating the interior of the hunting lodge where they lived in Franconia. Though he’d never actually built a home before, he had a book, Your Engineered House by Rex Roberts, that broke down the process into an easy-to-follow plan.

  He sketched a layout based on the blueprint in the book, eighteen by twenty feet, slightly longer than wide, with south-facing windows in the front. A shed roof rose from the back at an angle and extended past the face to provide an overhang for the front porch. Reverse board-and-batten construction would be used for the exterior siding, as Roberts suggested—meaning the inner wall studs made the seal beneath the exterior boards to save on wood. After the $2,000 for the land and other expenses, their $5,000 savings was dwindling quickly. Papa wished he could have cut and used the trees from the property
, but there wasn’t time to let the wood cure, so the lumber came from the local sawmill—cedar posts, planed pine boards, and two-by-fours. Regardless, they were able to keep the cost down to $680 to build the house we called home for the next ten years, at a time when the national average for a home in town was closer to $20,000.

  Papa’s tools consisted of a handsaw, hammer, level, measuring tape, and carpenter’s square. On top of the foundation he laid the beams that supported the floor, then the corner and roof supports and wall studs. He nailed on the floorboards, roof, and walls, leaving breaks for windows. Rock wool insulation was unrolled between the studs, and black tar paper served for exterior roofing. The easy part was that there were no electrical wires or plumbing to worry about, no refrigerator, washer, dryer, toilet, bath, or other appliances to buy. Food would be stored in the root cellar, accessed by a trapdoor from the kitchen, and the bathroom was an A-frame outhouse located in the woods at the edge of the clearing.

  As Papa worked on the house, Mama returned to Franconia with a trailer attached to the VW truck for the rest of their things. Noticeably pregnant, she managed to move the cast-iron cookstove onto the trailer with the help of friends. Next she herded the goats and chickens into the back of the VW and drove the seven hours to the farm. The chickens lived in a coop next to the camper, and the goats ran free. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Monkees drifted in from the outside world on the battery-powered transistor radio as Mama and Papa cooked over a portable Coleman stove and showered with a plastic bag of water hung from a nail to warm in the sun. The camper was cramped and cluttered, but they kept up the illusion that they were on an expedition and it was base camp.