Mama didn’t mention the miscarriage. She’d found a four-leaf clover a couple days before it happened, always a sign of good luck, so she told herself that maybe it was the right thing; perhaps the baby was not healthy enough. She’d been working so hard, it was likely she didn’t have enough nutrients left over for the baby to form correctly. But none of those thoughts mattered to her body. It was in mourning. All that blood, gone now.
“I feel very alienated to most women in town,” Mama wrote. “Here I am a woman at the peak of reproduction and child bearing and cannot talk about it to anyone.”
I must have felt her sadness, and my own. I really wanted a friend. Mama read me a story about a fledgling bird that fell from its nest and went around asking the other animals, “Are you my mother?” I was like that bird, but I went around asking, “Will you be my friend?”
“Be my friends?” I asked the chickens. They clucked and nodded.
We had about a dozen hens and one rooster. The rooster had a red wattle on his head like a wound and liked to crew and strut his iridescent tail feathers. Some of the hens were pale beige, some speckled brown and white, one brownish, others black. They taught me to roll in the dust to get clean. Brownie was my favorite, friendly and gossipy. She told me she would always be my friend.
We collected eggs from the coop and the secret places where the grass was matted by the shape of the hens’ bodies. Most eggs were tan and perfectly shaped, like magic stones with speckles and rough bumps in the shell, but the bantams’ were pale blue, like robins’ eggs. When I held a blue egg in the palms of my cupped hands, it felt so hard and strong, like nothing could break it, but I knew that the littlest drop or bump would turn it into a sticky mess of slippery clear bled into by yellow yolk. The shattered egg was nothing so strong after all.
Every once in a while a fox would get one of the hens.
“I guess the fox needs to eat, too,” Papa said, but it sure made him mad. As replacement, we’d let some of the eggs hatch, and I’d thrill to find the chicks lying under the mother like feathered eggs.
At first Mama and Papa loved having fresh eggs. “Look at the difference in color between our yolks and the pale store-bought ones,” Papa said to Mama. “Ours are a rich orange. Makes you think how much better your human eggs must be, eating a good diet, compared to the eggs of other women eating junk.”
“Maybe I miscarried because I wasn’t getting enough vitamin E,” Mama said in reply. She kept hidden the fear that the hard work might have also been the cause. She didn’t want Papa to think she couldn’t hack it.
The Nearings didn’t eat eggs and didn’t believe in keeping animals of any kind, and after a while Mama and Papa began to wonder if it was good to eat eggs, not only because the Nearings disapproved but also because the chickens were more mouths to feed in the lean months of winter. Then one day, just like that, Papa packed up the chickens into crates and gave them away.
Later when I thought of the chickens, one of those rare pale blue eggs rose up into my throat. The chickens had been part of our family, and the egg in my throat was the feeling of something missing. It was hard and smooth and heavy, but also so fragile it might break and make me cry. It was the feeling of growing out of a favorite shirt, milk spilled on the floor, the last bit of honey in the jar, falling apple blossoms. It was the lump in the throat behind everything beautiful in life.
Norm had been missing all morning. We looked out the front windows for him, the sky hanging low and gray over the dormant earth of the garden. There had been little snow that winter of 1972, and what had fallen so far had not stayed on the ground. Normie’s brown-black coat usually blended into the colors of the earth as he did his morning rounds of his territory, sniffing to find what animals had visited in the night and lifting his leg to pee and let them know whose farm this really was.
“I’ll go give a holler for him,” Mama said, putting on her wool coat and hat with earflaps.
“Hope he didn’t get into a porcupine,” Papa mumbled.
When he wasn’t guarding the compost heaps from squirrels and coons, Norman the Normal Dog, as he’d been dubbed by Papa’s college fraternity brothers, was often getting into some kind of trouble or other. Chasing Puss-o, Helen’s Maine coon cat, onto roofs and trees. Getting sprayed by a skunk and stinking up the whole house so Mama had to wash him in tomato juice. Worst of all for Normie was getting into a porcupine. He couldn’t resist the lumbering animals that poked about the woods and looked so much easier to catch than a raccoon. But when he pounced at them, the wiry gray-white hair stood up on end like armor and the quills seemed to shoot out, hooking barbs into the soft flesh of his mouth and tongue. He’d yelp and skitter away, tail between his legs, his head a pincushion of hurt. “Son of a gun, not again,” Papa would say. I cried, too, as Norm whined and squirmed while Papa pulled out the quills with a pair of pliers.
After the chickens left, Normie had taken their place as my best friend. I liked to nap with him on the padded benches, fitting my head in the soft hollow where his leg haunch and stomach met and waking from common dreams of chasing rabbits in summer, he whining and leg-twitching in his sleep.
“He fell in the dry well hole,” Mama said when she came back from looking for Norm.
She settled him on the couch, his back legs limp and dragging behind. He looked at me with his dark eyes and tried to lick my face.
“Poor old guy,” Mama said, hugging him to her chest. “Your legs are giving out on you.”
“Poor ole Norm,” I said, patting his fur.
“Time for an extra-special diet,” Mama said, heading for the kitchen. “Grated carrots and olive oil have resurrected him many times before. I’ll add some herbs and raw veggies mixed with cooked millet, cod liver oil, brewer’s yeast, and lots of garlic.”
From the couch, Normie-dog rolled over and groaned.
With Normie out of commission, I turned to books.
“Books,” Papa often said, “are the truest of friends.” Papa sat at a long table in the dusky great room of the local library. He had a stack in front of him and was writing into a notepad as columns of light from the windows cut tunnels through the dust and made the curved parts of his ears glow.
“Papa, read me books . . . ,” I said, but Mama gave me a look under heavy brows.
“Shush.” She pressed her finger to her lips. “Whisper.”
“Sss,” I repeated huskily, pressing my finger to my nose. “Whispure.”
Mama tried not to smile.
“Papa is doing research,” she told me softly. “He needs to con-cen-trate.”
Mama took my hand, and we walked down the rows of grown-up books to the children’s section. The books surrounded us like wrapped presents. It was only by opening them that you could find out if they held anything special. I picked out the ones I wanted and we sat at a table with the stack in front of us, just like Papa.
“This one,” I said, choosing one with a picture of a green island surrounded by blue sea on the cover.
When Mama opened the book and started to read, the story reached out and took my hand; it told me I was not alone in the world. In a good story, the characters were telling a secret that you knew was true because you remembered it from somewhere deep inside.
“The cat looked underwater and saw that the island was connected to the earth . . . ,” Mama read. My scalp tickled from the hair rising up. All the islands around our home were connected, too. If someone swallowed the sea, like in one of my other books, we could walk out on the land between the islands. So the island was connected to the land, but it liked to have the sea there to keep it separate from the rest of the world.
Just like us.
“Had a wonderful sauna and supper with Dick, Susan and Carl and kids and work crew for their boat,” Mama wrote in her journal. Dick and his wife, Mary, moved from Connecticut to Brooksville to semi-retire, followed by
their son Carl, whom Papa met when he was working for extra cash as a carpenter to restore the schooner Nathaniel Bowditch in Bucks Harbor. Best of all for me, Carl and his wife, Susan, had two kids, Jennifer and Nigel, who was my age and would become a playmate.
Not only was it a rare treat to meet like-minded folks with kids, but Mary, who was of Swedish descent, shared with us some interesting traditions from Scandinavian culture. Dick and Mary had a Swedish-inspired wood-fired sauna in their house on Horseshoe Cove and invited us to join them on Sunday nights. We all piled into the cedar-planked room and sat naked on the wooden benches until we couldn’t bear the heat anymore, then ran out and jumped in the ocean to cool off. It was supposed to be great for cleansing the blood, and certainly left us cleaner and better smelling than our small metal bathtub at home, which we filled with water heated on the stove.
Mary also gave me an illustrated book called The Tomten about a Scandinavian gnome with a long white beard and red pointed hat who lived on farms and took care of the people and animals. Susan told Mama that in the Swedish tradition the Tomten brought gifts for children and animals, like an ongoing Santa Claus. Mama and Papa began to do the same for me.
“Someone I know was born three years ago today,” Papa said one morning, lifting me up and bouncing me on his knee on the stool by the bookshelf. I’d been standing nearby as he read, eyeing to get into the sphere of his attention.
“On this day, you came out of your mama’s belly over there in the loft and started nursing,” he said, eyes alight. “Not many kids can say that about their birth.”
When he lifted me up, I felt the shape of my own body within his arms and the tickle of his unshaven cheeks. He smelled of damp earth from working in the greenhouse.
“Why don’t you go check outside and see what the Tomten brought for your birthday,” Papa said.
“Tomten?” I looked into his eyes. His face was serious, but there was a sparkle in the blue and a smile hiding beneath the stubble on his cheeks. He looked over at Mama by the sink and winked.
“Outside the door,” Papa said. “I saw it when I came in.”
I hopped off Papa’s lap and ran to the door, reaching up on tiptoes to slide the handle. If I could ever see the Tomten, with his red cap and long beard, I wanted to ask him to be my friend. And just maybe, I hoped, he might bring me a doll with real hair. I opened the door to damp spring air and a yard spotted with remnants of snow. No Tomten. No doll. My eyes trailed back to the house. There by the doorstep was a little pair of sinew-and-wood snowshoes with bindings just the size for my feet.
“Bring them in, quickly, and close the door,” Mama said. Papa helped me lay the snowshoes out and put my feet into the bindings so I could clomp around on the floor. All of our snowshoes were the old-fashioned kind, made by Indians, woven from the sinew and tendons of animals around an oval wooden frame. The snow was gone now, but next winter I could go on treks with Mama and Papa on the snowy paths, and in a couple years I would snowshoe the half-mile path down to the Nearings’ to catch the school bus.
“The Tomten is pretty smart,” Papa said. “He knows what we need out here in the woods.”
“Most important for making this homesteading experience work, is having needs precede wants,” Mama wrote in her journal that evening.
Mama whooshed in the door one morning, her cheeks and nose flushed red.
“Goatski is having a kid,” she said. Every morning Mama went to the goat pen behind the house to milk and feed the goats. She liked to get creative about their food as she did with Norm, adding oats or wheat groats to their chow, and fresh carrots and seaweed in summer. The goats didn’t seem to mind like Norm did.
“Does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” Mama liked to sing. “A kid’ll eat ivy, too, wouldn’t you?”
“No!” I chimed.
“Goat’s milk is the best kind of milk for you to drink,” she told me. “It’s easier for kids to digest.” Some people wrinkled their noses about the taste, but I didn’t know any differently.
Mama taught herself to milk her first goat in Franconia. She held an old waterlogged how-to-milk book her father had given her in one hand and practiced squeezing the heavy finger-shaped teats with the other. After a few tries the milk squirted out in hot, hard streams to make a lonely patter into the stainless steel bucket. Her hands and arms got cramps at first, but once she got the hang of it, calluses built up on her palms and she could get a pail in ten minutes. The milk squirting into the liquid of a full bucket made a satisfying cheeeeet sound. Once the females gave birth, we could get milk out of them for nearly a year. We’d keep or sell the baby girls, but the boys were in less demand.
Papa looked up from his bowl of oats. “Let’s hope it’s not a billy.”
Papa didn’t like to talk about how to get rid of the billy goats. We needed only one billy, who got to visit with the female goats when they were in heat. Brutus was big and black and a little scary as he stood in the doorway of the old camper with eyes glowing out of the darkness, or sometimes snorting and stamping around his pen like the bull in my book The Story of Ferdinand after he got stung by a bee.
“I’m going back out to make sure Goatski does okay,” Mama told Papa. She felt a bond with goats during birth; she’d been there, too.
“I want to come,” I said.
“Okay, bundle up.”
The air steamed from the goats’ nostrils and they stamped their tulip hooves in the mud at our approach. Ma-Goat’s udders swayed back and forth when she trotted up to the fence, her own pregnant belly hanging like a water balloon from the knobby ridge of her spine, knees bulbous under the weight. The goats were my friends, but they were complicated. Their eyes were not warm and gentle like Norm’s but urgent and impatient, swirled marbles with the distinct black bar of the iris in the middle. Once their needs were met, they became playful, rubbing their pointy-ridged horns on the cedar fence posts and butting at each other, but never becoming exactly cuddly.
“Give them this,” Mama said, handing me a head of lettuce she’d brought from the greenhouse. “Make sure everyone gets some, but stay outside the fence.”
Barley’s square teeth snapped out of her delicate mouth at the leaves. Through the opening of the door, I could see Goatski lying on a nest of hay in the shed, her body heaving and lurching as Mama squatted beside her.
“Here it comes,” Mama said. Soon I heard the bleating of a baby goat as Mama helped pull it free of the birth sac.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered. “It’s a boy.”
We left the kid to nurse and went in to tell Papa.
“Better to get it over with,” he said as he put on his coat.
“I want to come,” I begged, sensing a disturbance in Papa’s mood.
“Not this time,” Mama replied, her lips firm.
Papa, I imagine, tried not to let his feelings get wrapped up in it as he headed to the goat shed. The billy had short black hair in cowlicky curls like a child’s, legs long and gangly, hooves still soft. He must have bleated and searched Papa’s hand for a teat as Papa put him in the burlap sack filled with cast-off rocks from the garden and tied it tightly. The oak-staved rainwater barrels sat under the eaves of the farmhouse to catch the runoff and in early spring grew a dark skin of ice overnight. Papa punched the crust through with an ax and dropped the burlap bag into the water, forcing himself to stand next to the barrel and make sure it ended quickly. The bubbles rose furious and opaque in the dark water as broken shards of ice tapped against themselves. When the bubbles slowed and stopped, he reached in to grab the bag, the cold water stinging his hands. It always seemed so much heavier coming out. He would bury it in the apple orchard with the others. Papa was glad to get away from the house and put effort into digging hard and fast into the thawing ground until his blood flowed again and his mind drifted to a calmer place. Still, he knew he’d feel a heaviness in
his chest for days afterward.
“The reality of this way of life is that you have got to keep at it even when you don’t feel like it,” Mama wrote in her journal to ease her mind while Papa was outside. “Otherwise you won’t make it. It’s no life for dabblers. You’ve got to dig it wholeheartedly, for if you don’t, you just simply won’t be happy nor successful at what you do.”
The trials of the colder months were forgotten as the cape exploded in flowers. Lupine came at the tail end of May, their fronds of purple-blue pea shapes rising from the concentric-leaved clumps covering hillsides along the roads. Yellow dandelions exploded into seeded tufts that floated on the breeze and gave way to the taller but sparser cover of yellow buttercups. Our rose-hip bushes, planted the spring I was born, blossomed with pink heart-shaped petals, bumblebees dipping into the pollen-filled centers. On walks in the woods, Mama always kept an eye out for the rare pink lady’s slipper among the white bunchberry dogwood, wild lily of the valley, and starflowers carpeting the forest floor. The delicate pouch hung from a single stem and leaf, regal in its solitary beauty against the tangle of the forest.
“It looks like a scrotum,” a visitor said once, and Mama blushed as if she’d been caught looking at his.
There were other flowers showing up, too, “flower children,” Mama joked. The Nearings’ farm was overrun with students attending a seminar on how to homestead. They came in one-week shifts, and stayed in rental houses four miles down the single-lane road in the town of Harborside. Scott taught them to transplant lettuce and make compost, and then put them right to work doing whatever he needed done.
“It’s paid labor of the best kind because the laborers are the ones paying $100 a week,” Papa noted in amusement.
Whenever I saw Scott’s hunched and lined figure, often pushing a wheelbarrow, my young imagination was reminded of the A. A. Milne poem “Jonathan Jo,” which Mama often read to me.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 10