This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “It was a hard life then,” Lucy said, nodding over the stones.

  In the quiet of winter, when I’d asked Mama about the people who came before us, she got books from the library about the Indians who first inhabited the land, the warrior Micmacs and peaceful agrarian Wabanakis. The Wabanaki creation myth told of a god named Koluskap who came down from the sky and turned stones into the Mihkomuwehsisok, little elves who dwelled among the rocks and made music with flutes. I was sure I’d seen them myself. Koluskap then shot arrows from his bow into the trunks of ash trees, and men and women stepped out, strong and graceful with light brown skin and shining black hair. Koluskap named them Wabanaki, People of the Dawn.

  Another book told of Leif Ericson and a crew of Viking sailors who explored the Maine coast in their Viking ship with its dragon head and many oars, and of John Cabot, an Italian sailor employed by King Henry VII of England, who sailed to North America and explored the Maine coast six years after Columbus. Our cape was named for James Rosier, an explorer hired by Captain George Weymouth to write an account of his 1605 voyage. According to the report, they found a land of dense forests with pine trees two hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter, “birch, ash, maple, spruce, cherry tree, yew, oak very great and good.” The natives, he said, referred to the land as “Mawooshen.”

  In the mid-1700s, we learned, Massachusetts offered hundred-acre lots free to anyone who would move to the northern province. It was during this time that Cape Rosier and surrounding towns were settled by our predecessors, but the land was later abandoned after the Civil War, when many pioneers headed west to find new fortunes. Papa said the oldest tree he’d cut down on our property had eighty-three growth rings, indicating that at the turn of the century the area was fielded land created by the original settlers, but as people moved away, trees reclaimed the land once again. My favorite tales of this time were, of course, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, especially Little House in the Big Woods, as I often felt I had more in common with Laura than with my contemporaries.

  By the 1900s, Henry Ford’s success at mass-producing the automobile brought a new type of settler, summer folk and out-of-staters, like us, who would become Maine’s grudging bread and butter. With them came Robert McCloskey, who wrote and illustrated some of my favorite stories, Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, and Time of Wonder, at his summer home on Scott Island, just off the coast of Cape Rosier. These books, and others by E. B. White, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Elizabeth Coatsworth, captured Maine’s remote beauty and brought more visitors, including Helen and Scott in the 1950s, who found that the rugged nature of the landscape and the long winters afforded the privacy they sought and provided the ideal setting in which to re-create the lifestyle of the original settlers.

  But as much as we had in common with our earlier predecessors, the difference was that even in our remote corner of Maine, the modern world, in my parents’ opinion, was still too close.

  The sound of a plane tore the quiet blue of morning sky. Customers were chatting on the green swath of grass in front of the farm stand while Papa weighed and bagged their vegetables and Heidi and I sold potted flowers.

  “That son of a gun!”

  Papa’s voice was like the plane, too loud for the morning air. He strode out with hands on hips looking up, the silver in his hair catching the sunlight like the glint of the plane as it passed. Our heads all tilted to follow his.

  “That SOB is spraying,” he said, waving his arms, save-our-ship style, in big crosses over his head. Papa marched out to the parking lot, and we could hear the sound of the jeep sputtering away as he went, as usual, to take it up with Herrick, who owned the blueberry fields. He’d once tried getting a group of people to stand in the field in protest, but the planes always returned. It was an ongoing fight that eventually saw some concessions, but Herrick, for the most part, kept spraying.

  “Guthion,” Papa spat when he returned, “is a fancy name for a nerve gas used to kill people in wars.” People didn’t know much about it at the time, but Bayer, of the aspirin, a Nazi-owned company during World War II, had registered azinphos-methyl, a neurotoxin derived from nerve gas, as an insecticide for fruit and berries in 1959. Guthion became popular for management of the wild blueberry fruit fly, as it could be sprayed on the large, rocky barrens by plane. This also meant it was easily carried to nearby areas on the breeze, but manufacturers and advocates claimed the levels were too small to do any harm to humans. Papa trusted his gut—if pesticides killed bugs and were derived from nerve gas, they couldn’t be good for us.

  The blueberry industry, as Papa saw it, had gone the way of big agriculture, stripping the nutrients from the soil and replacing them with chemicals. In the early 1900s, when True Cannery began canning blueberries in Hope, Maine, blueberry farmers developed the wild lowbush blueberry barrens for commercial harvest, fostering the plants with an age-old method learned from the Native Americans—burning. Every other spring, marsh hay was spread over the fields and set aflame. The seedless hay didn’t spread weeds and burned low, so as not to damage the humus layer of the earth, but killing diseases and weeds and replacing carbon in the soil. The plants recovered quickly and vigorously after a burn and produced higher yields the following year. However, when machine burning later gained popularity, marsh hay was no longer needed, and as the berries received less nourishment without the hay, they began to attract more diseases. Calcium arsenate was initially used to kill the fruit fly, but was highly toxic to the farmers who spread it manually, so airplane-sprayed Guthion became the potion of choice. Not until 2006 would the EPA finally begin phasing out Guthion due to its adverse affects in humans—including respiratory problems, abnormal heart rate, anxiety, and coma; but a full ban won’t take effect until 2012.

  In those days, people were getting sick from pesticide drift but had little support for or acknowledgment of their complaints. A number of local miscarriages, including Mama’s, were thought to have been induced by commercial blueberry spraying, but such theories were dismissed by doctors and the chemical industry alike.

  “Sons of bitches,” Papa swore about the sprayers, once out of earshot of the customers.

  Come August, millions of dusky blueberries covered the field across from our driveway, and Heidi and I snuck over to the hollow above the gravel pit where no one could see us stealing them. We weren’t allowed to for two reasons, the spray plane and the seagull gun, which shot a loud report every few hours to scare the seagulls.

  “If Herrick sees anyone picking blueberries he’ll shoot them with the seagull gun,” Papa said, to deter us from the spray-covered blueberries, but we just couldn’t resist the call of plentiful snacking material across the road.

  “The seagull gun won’t kill us, will it?” I asked Papa, just in case.

  “It might bust your eardrums,” he said.

  Eardrum-nervous, we walked elflike on our toes across the crinkly carpet of stems with folded leaves. We’d figured out the gun didn’t shoot bullets, just made the sound, and once you got used to it, it wasn’t so scary anymore, even though it made me jump and Heidi cry.

  “Shush!” I’d say before she cried out. “They’ll catch us.”

  There were so many berries in the hollow, you could sit in one place and eat handfuls without having to move. The best ones were nearly as big as Helen’s big-bush berries. We pulled them off in handfuls and blew away the leaves before depositing the berries in our mouths all at once, the juice dribbling from the corners of our lips.

  “Boom!” went the seagull gun, and we jumped. “Shush,” I said to Heidi. A car crawled by on the gravel road, raising puffs of dust, and we hunkered low in case it was the dreaded Herrick. From that position, I realized we could eat the berries right off the bushes with our mouths, like the bear in Blueberries for Sal. It was much easier that way, and more filling.

  When we got home Mama took one look at us and said, “You’ve been int
o the blueberries.”

  “Nunh-uh.”

  “Well, your faces are covered in blue. You better wash before Papa sees.”

  “I have a tummy ache.” The sick feeling would remain, I knew from previous experiences, until I pooped all the blueberries out like bear scat.

  “You ate too many blueberries with spray on them,” Mama said.

  “Nunh-uh.”

  “Well, whatever you do, just don’t tell your papa.”

  “Did you hear they accidentally dug up some graves above the gravel pit?” our neighbor Jean asked Mama when delivering the bread and sticky buns she baked to sell at the farm stand. “Yeah, just across from our driveway.” Heidi and I slunk nearby like foxes around the chicken coop, our mouths watering at the thought of cinnamon and honey on our tongues, hoping a stray bun might find its way into our dirty little hands.

  “The guys were digging gravel when they struck something buried in the earth up there,” Jean said. “Turned out to be a coffin.”

  Mama made the appropriate facial expression in reply.

  “There’s that one big gravestone for the Blake family over there. When I went over to check it out, I noticed the husband and wife died the same day in 1894. That’s kind of odd, I thought to myself. Then I looked at the dates for all the kids. November 23, November 29, November 30, all in 1863. Six of them died within three weeks of each other. That poor mother, I thought. So I asked in town if anyone knew what happened. You know what Louise Grindle said?”

  Jean paused and pushed up her glasses, working her audience. Mama was busy arranging vegetables, part listening, but something about this story made her stop and look up.

  “Diphtheria, she told me,” Jean said. “It used to wipe out whole towns. Very contagious before people knew about those things. Often brought back from sea. A terrible way to die—they get this thick membrane in their throats and can’t breathe. They choke to death.”

  “Oh,” Mama said, looking as if she felt a constriction in her own throat.

  “Yeah, well, I was thinking to myself,” Jean added in a casual tone, “what with those graves opened up, who knows if there might be old diphtheria germs floating around in the air. I’m taking Becca in to get her DPT shots. Diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus. I know you and Eliot don’t want to get shots for your kids, but you might want to think twice about it.”

  “I’ll mention it to him,” Mama said.

  “Well,” Jean said, smiling a bit, “you can pretty well assume the Blakes were eating a good pioneer diet. Some of these diseases don’t care how healthy you are.”

  “Hmmm,” Mama said, not liking to be bossed into anything.

  “Scram,” Mama added, when she saw Heidi’s and my fingers on the glass lid of the wood breadbox containing the cinnamon buns. “Hands off!”

  Mama and Papa didn’t like the idea of inoculating their children with vaccinations that might contain harmful chemicals, but the local school, where I would be attending kindergarten, required it. After some debate, Mama took me in to the doctor’s office to get the necessary shots. The first time we went, I got to push the button for the elevator, an entirely novel and magical contraption similar to a time machine I’d heard about. You went in one place and came out another. The button with the number 2 lit up, and the doors magically slid closed behind us. My stomach dipped as we time-traveled to arrive at a destination that would become my worst nightmare.

  The second time we were also taken to the same small room with bright lights and paper-covered table. The same nurse as before came in, all large and white-jacketed. Her eyes were small and crinkly, reminding me of the pain she had inflicted on my behind during the previous visit. Knowing all too clearly what would happen next, I quickly stood up and opened the door.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “Lissie . . . ,” Mama called; Heidi was on her lap, so she couldn’t grab me. I ran down the hallway to the elevator and pushed the smooth button. The nurse hustled out the door and down the hall after me, calling, her white jacket pressing against the swaying of her bosom. Another nurse came along behind her, and the people in the waiting room looked my way. The magic doors slid open.

  “Hey! Stop!” the nurse yelled as the doors slid closed. Saved by the time machine.

  When we got home, Mama told Papa what happened.

  “The nurses had to chase Lissie up and down the floors by the stairs to try and catch her when she came out of the elevator,” Mama said. “Boy, were they huffing it. She must have gone up and down a couple times before they got her.”

  Papa’s eyes went from hard to soft, and he began laughing gently.

  “Not funny.” I pouted from the couch.

  “She screamed and kicked when they brought her in,” Mama continued. “She was really pissed. They kept missing her butt with the needle because she wriggled away. The other nurse had to hold her by the hips. When the shot finally went in, she screamed like hell.”

  It made my bum hurt just thinking about it.

  “The nurse told me we could stop there,” Mama said. “She was still red and sweaty from chasing. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Absolutely!’ the nurse said. ‘You can do the rest next time.’ ”

  “One smart little kiddo,” Papa chuckled, sensitive himself about doctors as he tried to diagnose what would turn out to be a hyperactive thyroid.

  “Well, at least we got the tetanus,” Mama said. “Whatever everyone else thinks, that’s the most important one, with kids going barefoot around rusty nails.”

  In my mind, the only good thing about the whole episode was Papa’s and Mama’s laughter together, something that I had been missing of late.

  By the end of August, June’s bottomless light began seeping away from us and the trees rustled around the farm, whispering about it. Heidi and I lay under the ash tree by the house, grass thick beneath our backs, and listened. The firs, spruce, and cedar kept quiet while the birches, maples, oaks, and ashes chattered amicably. In winter when their branches were bare and gray, they didn’t have much to say because they were hibernating, like the animals, but in summer they were full of talk, full of themselves.

  Gazing up at the rustling leaves, we suddenly felt as if our backs were glued to the ceiling and we were hanging above everything, looking down from the surface of the earth into space. The tree roots went up under us, and the branches went down below us. My stomach lurched, but then, just as suddenly, everything shifted, and I was lying on the grass under a tree again. The light made patterns through the leaves as they shimmered with the breeze and played across the walls of the farmhouse. Pretty soon my mind drifted with the movement, and I could hear what the trees were saying in my head, as if reading words from a book.

  Change is coming, the big ash said, old and wise-sounding.

  I lifted my arm over the top of my head and clasped my opposite ear with my fingers. As if on cue, the wind shivered the leaves of a distant oak and the acorns shattered the ground, their impact reverberating in my chest.

  Papa told me I was old enough for school when my arm could reach over my head to grab the opposite ear with my hand. Some back-to-the-landers homeschooled their children, for a variety of reasons, but Mama felt she had enough to manage as it was. So despite my initial protests, on a cool September morning she took me to meet the bus off the cape on the main road, the closest it would come to us at that time. The narrow door of the yellow beast cranked open, and the driver looked down at us with a scowl.

  “Mornin’,” he said.

  I clung to Mama’s hand and twisted my body behind her legs.

  “Go ahead,” Mama said.

  “No.” I wouldn’t let go of her hand. “Mama, I want you to come with me,” I pleaded into the back of her knees.

  “I don’t think I’m allowed,” Mama said. She looked up at the bus driver.

  “You can com’on u
p.” He nodded.

  So Mama led me up the steps, and we sat down in a seat a couple back from the front. The bus was not that bad with Mama on it. She looked pretty with her Nordic sweater and clean hair, smiling and happy next to me, her eyes big and skin glowing. When the other kids got on, Mama stuck up higher above the seats than anyone else, so she tried to hunker down to be little like me, and we giggled together. I cried when it was time for me to go into the school building and for Mama to ride back to the jeep on the bus, but that was easier than getting on the bus alone would have been.

  At school was where I began to realize I was different from other kids. I was the only one whose mother came on the bus that day, for starters. At lunch everyone had white bread sandwiches with pale flat meats. If I was so lucky as to have a sandwich, my bread was dark and heavy with peanut butter and honey on it. No one else had half an avocado and a spoon to eat it, or a jar of yogurt with a dollop of jam. My treat was a mixture of sunflower seeds and raisins, rather than Hostess Twinkies or potato chips.

  Another problem was that I didn’t always remember to put on underwear, as no one cared about those things at home. The teacher said young ladies must wear underwear and pull up their tights in the bathroom, but the bathroom was yet another source of trouble. At first I would forget to flush and was reprimanded for that. Then, once I got the hang of it, I began to flush too much. It was a miracle to watch the water swirl down the hole and then fill up again. I flushed until the toilet wouldn’t flush anymore and got in trouble for that, too.

  The other kids played kickball, Red Rover, jacks, marbles, and jump rope and had exotic things like piñatas at birthday parties. At one such party, the piñata hung by a string from the center of a room that smelled of cookies and chocolate milk, its rainbow crinkly paper on the outside like colorful curly hair. Someone said it was a cow, but it looked more like Ma-Goat to me, with her horns and short legs. All the kids were boiling around underneath, chasing each other in circles, until we lined up and one by one were blindfolded and sent out in the room swinging a stick, trying to break open the cow/goat.