This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “Attaboy, Boots,” Skates likely said about the tiff. She ruled the home, children, and Skipper with a confident belligerence to any view outside her own. Skipper, who was slightly shorter than Skates’s five feet eleven inches, was a quiet and gentlemanly husband, some said henpecked. He served in the navy and after the war commuted to Manhattan, where he worked as a stockbroker, making a decent living at it, though never enough to be rich. Instead they did what they should have known better than to do—spent the capital from his inheritance. Skates’s sister and friends were all well-to-do, driving her to keep up with her tennis partners both on the court and off.

  “Those were the years of the Hemingway model of adventure,” Skates explained. She and Skipper passed on their love of sports and the outdoors to their children, teaching Boots and Lyn to fish and ski as soon as they could walk. They had a cruising boat, the Here We R, that they took out on summer weekends, and in winter they escaped to warm locales to fish or up to Uncle George’s lodge in Stowe, Vermont, to ski. Papa began to notice that when his parents were outdoors, they seemed happier and drank less, and he felt his own spirit lift and heart beat more rigorously as he skied or climbed in the clear air of the mountains.

  “Hello, Bootsie,” Skates and the Callens chorused when Papa emerged from the farmhouse to greet them. Skates kissed us all with her red-lipsticked bow-shaped mouth, smelling of soap and something brighter than soap that made a shield around her, separating her from the dirt and organic smells of the farm.

  “That perfume is enough to take the paint off a car,” Papa said when she was out of hearing, wrinkling his nose about the smell, and Mama laughed. To Skates, we must have seemed victims of rural poverty, and boy, did we smell. Skates gave Papa a hard time about needing to take a bath, and especially about us not eating meat.

  “You’re too skinny. You need protein, working so hard out here,” she said. “Kids need protein too; are you sure it’s okay for Melissa?”

  Papa was eloquent as always in his defense of vegetarianism, explaining that humans had been vegetarians for centuries, and animals had as much a right to live as we.

  “Boots says he doesn’t believe in killing animals,” Skates said pointedly to Lyn in reply to Papa’s lecture. “Well, neither do I. I have the butcher do it.”

  Everyone got a good laugh at that, and tensions eased, until Papa yelled at the boys for playing with their cork gun in the garden.

  “No guns on my property!” Papa admonished.

  “It’s just a harmless toy.” Lyn defended her children, but put away the gun.

  “Why does he have to be so self-righteous?” she complained to her mother when Papa was out of earshot.

  “If it weren’t for that motorcycle accident,” Skates liked to tell us, “your father would have gone on to become a respectable stockbroker like his own father.” Skates also liked to say, as only a mother can, that with his sandy hair and chiseled features her son looked like a cross between Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman. His desire to be a farmer was beyond her upper-middle-class sensibilities. Pour her another Scotch, and she’d look over her glasses and tell you the neck injury made him crazy.

  “Why else,” she’d ask, “would a person with everything going for him move to the woods and live on a farm with no electricity, running water, or toilet?”

  The accident happened during the spring Papa was considering enlisting in the army, on the verge as he was of flunking out of Williams College, the private liberal arts school in western Massachusetts that had also been attended by his father. Papa was on the cross-country running and ski teams and a fraternity brother at St. Anthony Hall. There he made two lifelong friends, Jan and Tony, who happened to own a pair of Triumph 150 motorbikes for riding the trails in the woods around campus. They were a handsome and athletic trio, skiing, mountaineering, and chasing women together, but Papa found himself lacking in commitment to his studies.

  “There’s a nice girl in Bennington,” Papa told Tony one evening, it being customary for Williams boys to visit Bennington, Vermont, for the women’s college and younger drinking age. “Let’s ride your bike up there, find you a date, and take them out.” After dinner it was decided that the girl, Muffy, would come back to Williams, and they climbed on the bike, Tony, Muffy, and Papa in that order. They weren’t going very fast along the winding backcountry route, but darkness obscured a boulder lying on the tarmac. The front wheel hit the obstacle, throwing the bike sideways and tossing Papa across the road into a signpost.

  “He let go to save the girl,” Tony said later. Muffy and Tony slid on the bike, which protected them from impact. In the aftermath, everyone was conscious, though Papa and Tony were soon in a lot of pain from road rash. As they waited for help, a party truck that some college guys had rigged up with couches and music in the back pulled up beside them. They didn’t want Muffy to get in trouble, so she climbed aboard and glided away on one of those couches as an ambulance arrived to take the two boys to the hospital. (In a happy aside, Tony and Muffy would cross paths a couple years later and, while commiserating over the accident, fall in love—eventually getting married and having four children.)

  “We lay on gurneys beside each other, while the nurses picked stones out of our behinds, trying to hide our groans as the pebbles plunked into a metal bucket,” Tony recounted. Skates showed up at the hospital dressed for a party, pale hair coiffed, red-lipsticked, tall, and no-nonsense. She kept a cool head. On top of losing his front teeth, the doctors soon realized, Papa had ruptured a kidney and was bleeding internally. Then they found a cracked vertebra in his neck and immediately put him in a brace. At that point, the boys at the frat house began taking bets as to whether he’d make it or not.

  In the final tally, Papa had a ruptured kidney, three splintered ribs, a broken arm, and a fractured neck. “It’s only because he was in such good athletic shape that he survived,” Tony claimed, relieved to have been spared the death of a friend. After the internal bleeding was stabilized and Papa’s neck set in a brace, his life was no longer at risk, but he was immobilized and confined to the hospital for a month and a half to recover.

  “I’ve never been very introspective,” Papa told Tony. “But sitting in this damn hospital is making me look over the merchandise for the first time, and there’s not much of note.” He began to read anything he could get his hands on, from health books to tales of adventure. When Papa was finally released from the hospital, able to walk but still fragile, the doctor recommended he avoid school and physical activities for the rest of the year. Convalescing at home in Rumson, he began to see more clearly the depths of his father’s quiet despair and the casual alcoholism of both his parents. Skipper and Skates smoked and drank as much as their friends, so they never worried it might have been too much, using alcohol to soothe some unnamed feeling of discontent created by the relative ease of their existence. The gnawing sedative made pale a world where Papa wished to find brightness and the grit of more difficult challenges. Skipper arranged an apprenticeship for Papa on the floor of the stock exchange in Manhattan, and a couple weeks later he received a Christmas bonus, a whole week’s pay. Papa was dumbfounded at landing all that cash for such little effort.

  “If I follow this path, all I’ll ever make in life is money,” he told his father, and to his surprise, his father agreed. “If you end up doing what I’m doing, you should have your head examined,” Skipper remarked. That’s when Papa’s search for another way of life began in earnest. He didn’t say outright that he was rejecting his parents’ lifestyle, he just began to slip away.

  “Oh, but he had everything going for him,” Skates lamented.

  Age twenty-one and fully recovered from his near-fatal motorcycle accident, Papa wanted to celebrate his luck. His love was outdoor sports, so he began to pursue that passion full-time, getting a summer job as a ski instructor in Chile. Any sport he heard about, he had to try—rock climbing, m
ountaineering, and whitewater kayaking. His instinct was ahead of his time; back then, if you saw a kayak on a car, you likely knew the person. After finishing Williams, Papa received his master’s in Spanish literature at Middlebury’s program in Spain, then landed a job at Colorado Academy teaching Spanish and coaching the ski team. In summers he ran a whitewater kayak program near Aspen, helping kids build their own fiberglass kayaks. Teaching provided the perfect schedule to support his habits—during school vacations he could climb volcanoes in Mexico and summit Mount Logan or go on kayak trips down the great western rivers with his students.

  “Bootsie’s off on some expedition or other,” Skates began to brag jovially to make up for the fact that he wasn’t settling down to make a good living like her friends’ sons. Soon he was offered the job at Franconia College, which seemed like a good place to continue his chosen lifestyle.

  My relatives might have marveled as Mama milked the goats and sawed firewood with me on her back, carried water from the spring, and used the woodstove for cooking, baking, and canning, and were amazed when Papa showed off the root cellar stocked with the summer’s bounty from the garden and talked of plans for clearing more land. But at the end of the day they were glad to retreat to a nearby ocean-side guesthouse with electricity, running water, and other modern comforts. The lodge was owned by Carolyn Robinson, who with her husband, Ed, wrote The “Have More” Plan: A Little Land, a Lot of Living, a bestselling do-it-yourself home-gardening book published ten years before Living the Good Life, and credited with launching an exodus of the middle class from the city to the suburbs after World War II. Staying at the Robinsons’ was the glorified good life. Skates could eat meat, drink Scotch, and have a bathroom at night, then come see us during the day. Visiting her son was an adventure, just the way Papa liked it, but she was nonetheless relieved at the end of the trip to return to her own, much safer world.

  The days grew short and cool as the endless light that had fueled us all summer lost minutes per day. Mama and Papa were busy as the squirrels, harvesting and putting away food. Some days Mama would sink under the weight of it all—the work of keeping life in order that never ended, the urgency to put away food to survive, and the burden of another being strapped to her body, nursing from her, needing her for everything.

  Then there was the bucket of dirty cloth diapers, and no fresh ones. Dirty bowls in the sink and no clean ones, stains on her favorite shirt, a broken mason jar. Seaweed that needed to be hauled by the trailer load from the Nearing and Hoffman coves to cover the garden beds and provide potassium as it decomposed over the winter. Carrots and beets to be placed in sand in the root cellar, string beans to be canned in mason jars, winter squash to season on the patio, onions and garlic to braid and hang from the ceiling alongside spearmint, chamomile, and lemon verbena for tea and basil, rosemary, and thyme for seasoning. Meanwhile, Papa was occupied building a glass greenhouse on the front of the house to extend the growing season by bringing Skates’s temperate climate in New Jersey nine hours north to Maine.

  When I cried, the noise must have vibrated inside Mama’s brain, sending an alert down each nerve ending in her body. An instinct in her bones responded to the sound, and she tried to soothe my cries with a mental checklist of generally successful actions. Nurse, change diaper, make sure I wasn’t too hot or cold. On bad days, when I cried about everything, whether she nursed or changed my diaper, the noise inside her brain was like a million mice gnawing away at the cords of her sanity.

  If I could not be silenced, I imagine Mama set me down and covered her eyes with her hands for a moment, her forehead creasing. Behind her lids she saw her mother in the same gesture and her own mother’s hands falling from her face to reveal the panic in her eyes. She felt the rise of anger paralyze her jaw. Instead of letting the anger strike out, she pushed it away as her mother had done. Anger was ugly, Papa would not approve. Her eyes went flat, and she “checked out,” as she later came to call it. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back for hours.

  Papa began to wonder if Mama had a split personality. One minute she was the strongest woman he knew, as in childbirth. She’d sensed just what to do—he’d been the helpless one. Other times she got weepy and depressed for seemingly no reason. “Take some B,” was his usual advice. From his reading, he suspected a vitamin deficiency as the cause of the moodiness, perhaps not enough vitamin B due to their vegetarian diet. Of vitamin B’s many variations, B12—which assists in the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system—is not found in plants, leaving vegetarians deficient. The Nearings later admitted to getting B12 shots to supplement their diet, but did not widely discuss this fact, as it contradicted their claims of self-sufficiency. Later research has shown that the vegetarian diet is not as perfect as it then seemed, and may have indeed been responsible for Mama’s mood swings as well as Papa’s stress levels and eventual thyroid imbalance, an illness that would threaten the life they’d worked so hard to create.

  Mama, however, generally resented Papa’s attempts to fix her with vitamins, saying she had B-rich brewer’s yeast coming out her ears, which was true, until her supplies ran out and she had no money to order it, or time to go to town.

  “All I need is rest and more support from you,” she countered, a tad hormonally, in Papa’s opinion.

  On the good days it was hard to remember what the bad ones felt like. On the good days, the world was full of beauty. The weather cooled, the pace of the farm slowed down, and we tucked in for winter. There was time again to nurture ourselves. Mama woke in the mornings to the comfort of nursing, the hormone oxytocin relaxing her nerves as the milk relaxed mine. The drug of motherhood. The weight and shape of my body in her arms, the smell and smoothness of baby skin a balm for all sadnesses.

  Papa came into the farmhouse followed by a gasp of cold air, the stomping of boots, and the skittering of Normie’s paws on the wood floor.

  “Wait till you see what happened to the blueberry field,” he said, popping up the ladder to the loft bed, dressed in his warmest much-patched down jacket.

  “What?” Mama asked, propping on one elbow to reveal her sleep-weary face and matted hair. Papa’s blue eyes met her brown ones with a twinkle, the touch of premature gray in his hair a foil to the youthfulness of his mood.

  “Get up, come see,” he said, disappearing down the ladder. A thrill lit up her spine. It was cold even with the stove roaring, the thermometer recording lows of twenty below at night. Mama dressed herself warmly and put me in my snowsuit, setting me into the blue canvas and aluminum Gerry child backpack that had taken place of her sling and squatting to slide it onto her back. Outside the sun was bright against the cold air, the barren ground frozen. Papa had fetched a bushel basket for harvesting, and inside was a coil of twine.

  “What’s that for?” Mama asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said. We followed him and Normie through the dormant garden, past the skeletal rose-hip hedge and the well pulley, up the lane by the orchard, and out to the sign Mama had carved with their names over a year ago. Across the main road, the expanse of the blueberry field opened up in maroon undulations to the sky.

  “Look,” Papa said. The low area in the center of the field had filled with water during recent rains and frozen with the sudden drop in nighttime temperatures to form an Olympic-size skating rink.

  “Perfect black ice,” Papa explained, running to slide across the smooth surface, mimicking skating strokes in his work boots. Like Skates, he’d played hockey growing up, once even competing at Madison Square Garden for a high school championship. Normie skittered on his paws, his legs splaying out of control, as Mama stood by the edge, watching Papa’s joy, afraid to risk falling with me on her back.

  “Here,” Papa said, placing the bushel basket down on the ice. He pulled out the twine, fed it through one of the staves of the basket, tying the two ends in a knot to make a loop, then lifted me into the basket. I reached up with mittene
d hands, unsure at first, as the basket began to slide forward.

  “See?” he said. He pulled a little faster, and Mama slid beside, clapping her hands and smiling to encourage me. The surface was black and smooth as opal beneath her feet, and the weight of her body disappeared as she ran-slid after us.

  Norm gave up slipping on the ice to sit panting on his haunches, and Mama stopped to join him, pulling her camera with the rainbow strap from the case attached to the Gerry pack. I was flying in the basket across the pond behind Papa, my laughter coming in spurts. Papa looked back, grinning, his brown balaclava tipped up. The sun flashed in the blue, blue sky as Mama snapped a photo.

  What joy it is to be alive, Mama thought, to have a handsome husband and a laughing young child. But as she felt the glow of happiness spread through her body, a voice inside couldn’t help but whisper, This joy will not last. Why should it now, when it never has before? Someday, this photo will be all that remains.

  She tucked the fear away and laughed into the sky.

  Chapter Two

  Livelihood

  Eliot working in the garden with a cultivator (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  Our second April brought with it the welcome warmth of sunshine, the damp-cool smell of turned earth, the urgency of the world coming alive. From my bird’s-eye view, I watch my young self playing with pinecones on the warm stones of the patio, barely one year old, big eyes under a cowlick of short brown hair, as Mama’s and Papa’s backs arch below, turning the soil of the garden. The first three years on Greenwood Farm, while physically demanding for Mama and Papa, were by comparison emotionally peaceful years for our small family.