“Listen,” she said. I felt the shift inside as my mind drifted into the flickering of light upon the leaves. All knowledge was in that moment; the trees were merely gossiping about it.
“See,” Heidi said, nodding at me. “Rain.”
The rain began the next day and continued for weeks. Leaks ate their way through roofs, moss grew on the vacant tent platforms, and our clothes never came dry. The mist collected in fine drops on the skeins of cobwebs, and the pond grew deep and dark as night. We began to forget what the combination of blue sky and sun looked like, growing morose and dull as mushrooms despite ourselves, our faces puffy and pale, eyes wary. A beam of sun falling through a brief patch of clear sky was godlike in its rare beauty, similar to finding the exotic lady’s slipper flower in the forest, but the moments of brightness hurt the unaccustomed eye, making us squinty and sullenly ungrateful, as if seeing an old friend we were sure had forsaken us.
Anne arrived before the white-throated sparrow on a wet day in early April. Her tan Ford Fairlane, with a trunk big enough to sleep in, crunched over a crust of snow clinging stubbornly to the north side of the driveway, despite the rain. She was pregnant, due in winter. We did what we did with everyone: we took her in. Mama, due in May, immediately felt the connection pregnant women sometimes feel with each other. Anne had a short bounty of curly chestnut hair and equally brown and large eyes. She radiated the spiritual purity of a nun, coupled with a beautiful singing voice and skill at the guitar, leading someone to call her a brunette Maria from The Sound of Music.
Coming from a Catholic family of seven kids in western New York, Anne had sought her own path by majoring in French and spending a year in France before taking a job at the whole food supplier Erewhon in Boston, cooking for employees. She later decided to apprentice at Wildwind Farm—where Frank had also apprenticed—and there she found herself pregnant. Things didn’t work out with the father, so, seeking a new home, she heard about us, and decided to visit in hopes of finding refuge.
“I was not a person with my feet solidly on the ground,” she realized about herself. “My head was in the ether.”
Anne found the cabin occupied by another new apprentice named Bruce. Despite his offer for her to move in, she insisted on putting up her tent on a mossy platform below. Papa started her on spring seeding, along with Michèle, the French Canadian nymph of the previous summer, who was living with Greg in his cabin, Greg having temporarily won out in the competition with Frank for Michèle’s heart. It would be Frank, however, with whom Michèle would eventually settle and raise a family. Particularly taken by Anne’s serene purity was Brett, who’d built the log cabin in the campground a couple years earlier and was now the chief carpenter for the woodwork in the Nearings’ stone house. Papa had recently sold Brett a couple acres of our land, passing on the original Nearing discount of $33 an acre, and Brett planned to build a cabin of his own when he finished work at the Nearings’.
The gardens began to fill with naked bodies and new growth alike. A blond woman named Bess, beautiful and reserved, with fair Norwegian skin and eyes, arrived to stay with Bruce in the cabin, and a couple from Connecticut took up residence in the lean-to behind Greg. Two curly-haired guys named Larry and Barry arrived in a pickup, having driven across the country from California to work for the Nearings. Everyone thought they were gay because they slept in the back of the truck together, but they were just friends who’d connected over the Nearings’ books back in San Luis Obispo.
Larry’s interest in organic farming began while he was running a wholesale tree nursery, when he nearly passed out from exposure to Metasystox, a chemical spray that was used to control aphids at the time. He began to experiment with beneficial insects for pest control and got a degree in soil science from Cal Poly. Then, while starting a community garden in San Luis Obispo, he met Barry, who’d read Living the Good Life. Barry wrote the Nearings to ask if he could apprentice, and when Helen replied in the affirmative, Barry asked Larry to drive to Maine with him. Today Larry oversees, with his wife, Sandy, a cooperative of certified organic farms in Baja whose cherry tomatoes can be found at Whole Foods markets around the country.
“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear,” blared Buffalo Springfield from the battery-powered transistor radio in the campground.
“For the times they are a-changin’,” Bob Dylan’s worldly-wise voice followed, as prescient as when he first sang those words more than ten years earlier.
“Hot damn,” Papa said about the farm that year. “Things are taking off.”
After the success of the farm stand the previous summer, Papa’s dream for the farm seemed just within his grasp, but still a mountain with no top, still so much to be done, his thyroid driving him with supernatural energy. He was tired beneath it all, but it was a fatigue that nudged him onward. I sensed that familiar summertime distance in his attentions, as if he were constantly looking toward his goals and unable to focus on me standing in front of him. Or perhaps, like Mama, I needed more from him than he had to give at that time.
Mama’s belly was taking off, too, filling the space of the kitchen as she tried to prepare lunch for the new crew until Anne, with her experience preparing meals at Erewhon, offered to cook lunch, much to Mama’s and Papa’s appreciation. We kids also liked having Anne around. Heidi called her Anner, short for Anner Eater Alligator, and the nickname stuck.
“Anner,” Heidi would say, “sing me a song.” Heidi would listen intently to the tune and then jump up and say, “Gotta go,” and she’d be off to graze in the garden or run down the paths, leading Anner to call her “the little wanderer.” There was something otherworldly about Heidi, one foot in this world and one in the next, Anner thought to herself, wondering as she did about the child forming in own her belly.
“When Heidi walks through the garden, it’s as if she never touches a thing with her feet,” Anner said to Mama.
By the final weeks of first grade I’d become proficient in the skills of school—hula-hoops, jump rope, “onesie-twosies I love yousies,” monkey bars, kickball, wearing underwear, and taking baths. I’d even earned the role of Mrs. Grindle’s teacher’s pet, entrusted with the coveted task of cleaning the chalkboard erasers by clapping them against the tarmac in the playground. But unlike other kids, I still had to walk the half mile down the path to meet the bus every morning.
“Lissie, keep your shoes on!” Mama called out the door after tying the laces double for me with a firm tug, but my shoes were already coming off as I ducked into the cover of the path. Going-to-school rules were getting in the way of barefoot training—I had to catch up to Heidi’s school-free feet.
Spring walking-to-the-bus-alone mornings were the quiet of the day waiting for itself to happen. You could hear the morning’s beginnings, little clinks and shushes like someone getting up early and fixing breakfast before anyone else is awake. I hung the heels of my sneakers from my fingers, swinging them just enough to keep balance with the pace of walking and not too much to send them flying. Telonferdie joined me, chattering about this and that, and the morning sun slanted through the trees in zigzags as the pale sky brightened to Heidi’s-eye blue. The path sweated, hard and bony here, loose and cedary there, air warming, humid, and fat. Passing from the forest, I crossed under the scent of lilac trees by the Nearings’ barn, past the sounds of Scott working behind the stone wall of the garden, and down to the bottom of the driveway, where I waited for the bus. Telonferdie drifted away when I unknotted my sneakers and put them on, my socks soaking up the muddiness to remain slightly damp all day.
On the days when Mama and Heidi walked me to the bus, I had to keep my shoes on and we sang Mama’s favorite songs along the paths. “Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free,” Mama belted out to the audience of the forest. “Tis the gift to come round where you ought to be.” Or she sang Heidi’s favorite, a round, with her nickname Ho in it: “Hey
ho, nobody at home, no meat, no drink, no penny have I none, but still will I be merrrrry. Hey ho, nobody at home.” They came with me less now that Mama was so pregnant. The last time Mama had to stop three times along the path to pee.
“Mama?” I asked. “Are you peeing again?”
She looked up at me squarely from her squatting position, eyes black in the shade of the tree.
“The baby is taking all the room, so there’s no place for pee. You’ll see. When you’re pregnant someday, you’ll have to pee a lot, too.”
While waiting for the bus, I worried about what would happen if I had to pee a lot like Mama. It would be no good, though I enjoyed going to the school bathroom, with its clean tiles and running water. The problem was that I liked to use lots of toilet paper to make up for what we didn’t have at home, my favorite trick being to roll the soft paper around my hand, pretending it was a bandage. I used the bandaged hand to wipe, dropped it in the water, then bandaged the other hand and did it again. When I flushed, the white wads swirled down toward the hole in the bottom. One time, however, the water slowed, the whirlpool disappeared and the bandages rose in the yellow water toward the top of the bowl. Afraid it would overflow, I ran back to class. After that Mrs. Grindle made an announcement. She said we had to CONSERVE. That meant not using too much toilet paper and not flushing too much. She was looking right at me when she said it.
On May 14, a Friday, there was a party for a large group of students and teachers to celebrate the completion of the semester at College of the Atlantic, where Papa continued to teach his farming course. Papa asked Anner to help with the cooking, since Mama was more or less pinned to the padded benches by the weight of her belly. There’d been a full moon the night before, and she felt its pull, drawing the waters from her. The house was chattering with guests waiting for dinner when Mama motioned to Papa.
“I’m going into labor,” she said. “I need space.”
“Let’s get you to the hospital,” Papa replied. The plan was, as with Heidi, to go to Dr. Brownlow in Blue Hill for the birth.
“No,” Mama said. She’d been in for a checkup that morning, and though she was having contractions, she hadn’t mentioned them to Dr. Brownlow. He’d proclaimed her and the baby in great shape, giving her the confidence to carry out her secret plan. Over the past few weeks she’d been getting ready, sterilizing sheets in the oven, acquiring clamps and other items from a nurse friend.
“What do you mean?” Papa asked, hesitating to raise his voice around the guests, but Mama could see the fear in his eyes.
“Just get everyone out of here,” she said, suddenly in charge. “We’ll figure it out when you get back.”
Papa ushered the group across the farm to continue the party at the campground. In attendance was Marshall Dodge, the Yale linguist known for his “Bert and I” monologues, a comedy act that utilized the Maine accent to great effect. He launched into one of his jokes as Anner played the guitar and the party drew Heidi and me into its embrace.
“Watch out for them socialists,” Marshall said, in reference to the Nearings, telling a story about a fellow named Scott, who liked to preach socialism over the fence to his neighbor, Enoch:
“ ‘So you mean to say,’ Enoch asked the socialism advocate, ‘that if you had two farms, you’d give me one of them?’ ” Marshall began in the classic Maine dialect that made his jokes so funny.
“ ‘Yes,’ said Scott. ‘If I had two farms, I’d give you one a them.’
“ ‘So if you had two hay rakes, say, would you give me one of them?’
“ ‘Yes, if I had two hay rakes, I’d give you one of them.’
“ ‘If you had two hogs, even,’ Enoch asked slyly. ‘Would you give me one of them?’
“ ‘Darn you, Enoch,’ said Scott. ‘You know I got two hogs.’ ”
Everyone laughed hard and shouted for more. My favorite “Bert and I” joke came next, the one about the farmer who saw a moose on his farm and got out his rifle to shoot the moose in the leg, “just so as to wound him, you know,” explained Marshall.
“Then he put up a big sign on his barn that said, ‘See the moose, ten cents, fifteen cents for families.’ Well, a family comes along and the man gives the farmer his fifteen cents. The farmer takes one look at the man, and one look at his family, and gives the man back the fifteen cents.
“ ‘Keep your money, mister, I don’t want it. It’s worth a hell of a lot more for my moose to see your family, than it is for your family to see my moose.’ ” After I stopped giggling, I delivered a butchered retelling of the story to anyone who’d listen.
By the time Papa got everyone settled and returned to the farmhouse, Clara had been born. Mama was nursing in bed on the oven-sterilized sheets, a yellow orb of moon hanging in the darkening sky out the window.
“I got on all fours and slid her out, the way the goats do,” Mama casually told an astonished Papa. “Then I reached back with one hand to catch the head.” She hadn’t felt any fear, she said. Something in her knew just what to do. The new baby had a blond fuzz of hair and a high forehead like Heidi.
“Another Coleman,” Papa noted with admiration, once he regained his composure. And another girl, he mused, thinking of his theory of child gender—well, he was certainly more stressed at that moment.
When word of the birth reached Marshall Dodge back at the campground, Marshall quoted a line from another of his jokes. “I could take a sharp knife and a piece of knotty pine, and whittle me a better-looking baby than those two made.” The laughter and party continued unhindered late into the night.
Mama and Papa settled on the name Clara, also from the book Heidi, for Heidi’s beautiful invalid friend who was healed by goat’s milk and the fresh mountain air when visiting her in the Swiss Alps. And indeed, soon after Clara was born, the sun finally returned for good, its warmth drawing everything out of itself. Fiddleheads uncoiled into ferns. Seeds poked twin-tipped leaves from the earth. Mama’s bleeding heart flowers dripped in pink formation over lacy fronds. Fields yellowed with dandelions.
In the evening twilight, Mama nursed her third child on the front patio as the earth released its damp smells of new life. Fireflies blinked come-hither signals across the clearing as a male woodcock performed his mating ritual, rising in a spiraling flight with a buzzing sound that increased in velocity as he rose, then exploding in a loud twittering that echoed across the clearing as he dived back to earth. It was the sound, Mama thought, of the ecstatic orgy of spring that she was both a part of and apart from, as a new mother. She felt such love for the small being in her arms that it momentarily replaced the missing passion in her marriage. Soon the days would warm and lengthen, and the garden would come back to life. Soon, she hoped, things would be right again.
The glass bell of night settled over the farm, turning the sky the midnight blue of church windows against the glow from the lighted house. Kerosene lanterns whooshed and sighed as Mama put Clara to sleep in the addition, and I read in the light as Heidi dangled her feet on the doorstep, looking out for Papa to return from the campground to tuck us in, the cool spring air breathing through the door.
“Bedtime,” Mama called to us, but she was nursing Clara and couldn’t do anything about it. The peepers increased in volume with the darkness. I knew the cricking came from the inflated sacs on the throats of the frogs, but it was hard to understand how the slimy shapes we caught at the pond with our bare hands could make such a piercing sound. Their concert filled the night with a noise so distinct it had a three-dimensional presence, solid with longing. The noise shapes came right up to Heidi’s feet, praying to her like their goddess.
I looked up from my book to make sure she hadn’t drifted from the doorstep, pulled sleepwalker-spirit-like into the night, across the dew-damp garden, but she just sat on the step, listening. I began to fade off, Papa coming and going in the distance, Heidi floating out over the night, be
coming bigger and bigger like a balloon of light until she became the morning.
A chorus of first-light birdsong shattered the morning sky with the same velocity as the peepers. Papa had returned last night but was already long gone out to the gardens, the endless list of all the things that needed to be done cycling in his head. No sooner had he recovered from his amazement at Clara’s birth than Mama’s baby blues set in, and his unsuccessful efforts at helping her left him afraid to try again. He began to confide instead in Bess as they worked together in the garden. It was simple talk about day-to-day details and the bigger questions of existence, but it filled for Papa an innocent need for connection and camaraderie. Mama began to imagine otherwise.
I knew Mama wished she could sleep all day, her body molded into the soft mattress tossed off by summer folk, the seldom-washed sheets, the old striped Pendleton blanket pushed down to her feet. The back addition was cooler and darker than the rest of the house, shaded as it was from the south-facing windows, luring her toward ever-elusive sleep. “Sleep deprivation is a form of torture,” someone had told her recently.
I could hear the sounds of Clara’s mewing cries as Mama pressed her breast to the tiny mouth. Then peace. Nursing was Mama’s escape, her imprisonment and her freedom, when her mind could wander away from the more familiar and well-trodden paths of her darker worries. Papa’s thyroid. Work your fingers to the bone. Bess and Papa eating breakfast together on the patio as they planned the workday. European farm tours she wouldn’t go on. Broken seals on the mason jars that meant her canning efforts had been compromised. They all became someone else’s troubles. But soon the milk would drain from her breast, Clara would satiate and squirm and beat her tiny fists in the air. Time to get up.
Mama slid from the bed, the sound of her bare feet padding on the cool of the wooden floor. From my bunk I could see Mama in the kitchen drinking water from a jar with a glug-glug sound as she looked out the front windows. She wore the same T-shirt she’d slept in, the same loose pants, her fine hair conformed to her head in yesterday’s braid.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 21