After I was finished speaking, David asked if anyone else present wanted to add a few words. At first no one moved. And then one of the Planks—Edwina—walked to the front of the room.
“My sister Ruth is having a baby today,” she said, unfolding a piece of lined paper. “She asked me to read this.”
It was only a handful of sentences. I pictured Ruth writing them, in the early stages of labor perhaps. I wondered if she knew already what had become clear to me within that last hour.
“Our families met when Dana and I were born at the same hospital on the same day,” she read, a little stiffly. “And you might not think that would form the basis of any particular bond. But if I’d never met Val, growing up, I might never have known a woman could be an artist. Because she was one. And that made me believe I could become an artist myself.”
Edwina refolded the paper and took her seat. It seemed that the service was finished, with nothing to add but a brief Sufi prayer. But a gaunt figure I had not noticed before, who’d been seated in the back, rose and moved toward the front of the room now. It took me a moment to realize who this was.
More than twenty years had passed since I’d seen Ray. I might have supposed that after all this time of what had no doubt been a difficult life, those good looks of his that made women love him wherever he went might have disappeared. He was certainly thin, with a deeply lined face—a suit jacket that looked as if it might have been purchased from a thrift shop, with sleeves that ended a good five inches up his long, thin wrists. His hair was as short as an inmate’s.
It didn’t matter. Even now, Ray was a handsome man, but it was something else that struck me, seeing him again after all that time: the old flair and charm that I—the stolid one, the one lacking all capacity to impress anyone by any other means besides sheer hard work and constancy—had so admired and envied in my dazzling older brother. I would not have expected him to smile as he spoke, but when he did I saw the flash of surprisingly white teeth, and those eyelashes people always used to say should have been mine instead of going to a boy.
He told a story about the summer we’d packed up and moved to Maine to take over George’s friend’s clam shack on roughly twenty-four hours’ notice.
“When we got there, it turned out the place had been condemned by the health department,” my brother said, shaking his head. “All clam digging in the Gulf of Maine had just been suspended due to red tide, which inspired Val to turn the place into a takeout smoothie joint, selling fruit drinks and vegetable juices. Not much market for those yet, as it turned out. I guess you could say she was a woman ahead of her time. So George lost his shirt on that venture, as usual, and my mother just kept painting pictures. She wasn’t really cut out to be the mother type, if you want to know the truth. Though she could make fantastic yogurt.”
This was meant to be a funny story, and you could make out a little ripple of uneasy laughter, but the group quickly fell silent after my brother finished speaking. Mostly what his words conveyed was how directionless our family had been, how lost.
You were never sure, with Val and George, where you were or how long you were going to be there, or where you were going next or even who you were. In my case, anyway, I was right to wonder. For over forty years, I’d gotten it wrong.
When Ray was finished speaking, he just stood there for a surprisingly long time. Then he reached into his pocket, and for a second I could almost feel our small, uncomfortable group considering the possibility that my brother might be one of those postal worker shooter types. Who knew? He might pull out a gun.
But it was a harmonica. He started playing “Shenandoah”—sad, slow, and sweet. He cut it off abruptly, right in the middle, in the part where, if a person was singing, the words would be “I’m bound to leave you,” which may or may not have had any significance. Then he put the harmonica back in his pocket and returned to his seat.
After the service was over, I scanned the group, looking for Ray. At first I thought he must have stepped into the men’s room, but when he didn’t appear I understood. Once again, my brother had vanished.
I felt bereft then. Whichever woman I called my mother, both were dead now. Any chance I might once have had to understand our story was gone. Gone, too, the brother I adored. Clarice not gone, but going. And George had never been there for me at all.
It was only then, oddly, that the other fact hit me: there was one parent left, and that was Edwin Plank.
I felt a small surge of joy. I had no mother, but for the first time in my life, I had a father.
RUTH
Losing Ground
MY SISTERS SAID very little to me about Val Dickerson’s funeral. But they told me Ray Dickerson had been there.
Two days earlier I had given birth to my son, Douglas, who was nursing at my breast even as we spoke. An odd time for a woman to be inquiring about a man she’d last seen almost twenty years ago, a person might have said, but still I asked.
“So how was Ray?”
“He looked thin,” Naomi told me. “A little odd. But he always was.”
I asked if he still lived in Canada. If he was married. What he was doing. But they had no more information to offer. Dana was sitting with a woman, they said. The two of them were holding hands. But, as they’d just been saying, the Dickersons always were strange.
Looking back, I now believe, they must have discussed among themselves what it was like seeing Dana Dickerson. But my sisters and I were never ones for sharing stories, and there was plenty else on our minds at the time, anyway.
For a long time now, the farm had been in financial trouble, but another worry overshadowed that of our growing debt. Our father’s Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point where it was getting increasingly difficult to care for him at home. Esther had made an appointment for us to go check out a nursing home.
Another group of developers was after us now to sell our land, and though their best offer still fell far short of what my sisters and their husbands believed our place to be worth, I was the only one of the five of us who remained adamantly opposed to a sale. Diminished as he was, our father was alive, and we all knew where he would have stood if he’d been able to hold his ground, but these days he spent his time watching television, or just sitting in his chair looking out the window. That brief moment in which he’d been so stirred by news of Val Dickerson’s death represented a rare example of anything approaching coherence.
“If they took a vote tomorrow, you know how things would go,” I told Jim, after the most recent offer had come in from the Meadow Wood Corporation. “My sisters can’t quite bring themselves to move our dad off the land while he’s alive, but once he dies, they’ll want to take the money and run.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” my husband said. The idea to move back to the farm, full-time, after my mother’s death had been mine, and though he’d gone along with it, he’d never been a country boy. The commute to Boston had been getting to him, and it would only get harder now that we had a second child.
“Esther and Sarah want to buy side-by-side condos in Florida,” I said, of two of my older sisters—one divorced now, one widowed. “Naomi and Albert want to move closer to the grandchildren in Las Vegas. Winnie and Chip have their eye on one of those giant RVs the size of a Greyhound bus, so they can drive around the country staying in Walmart parking lots and visiting casinos. It may actually be a good thing Dad’s out of it, so he can’t understand what’s happening.”
“Your sisters have a right to their lives,” Jim said. “Frankly, I wish this place didn’t take up as much of ours as it does these days. I’d think you’d be happy for the money and freedom too. You could start painting again.”
“I’ve got a new baby and an eleven-year-old to think of,” I said. “I’m not about to run off and rent a studio somewhere and try being a painter. And there’s my father to take care of.”
“Your father needs to go into a home. Your sisters are just being practical.”
&nb
sp; “He loves this farm. I do too.”
“Maybe if you weren’t so occupied with the farm you’d have a little more time for our relationship,” Jim said, quietly.
“People with new babies aren’t exactly the most romantic couples around,” I told him. “That’s normal.”
But I knew the truth. We weren’t that way before the baby either.
Dana
Close to Perfection
FOR AS LONG as Clarice and I were together, I told her everything that happened in my life, same as I believe she did with me. More than that, I told her all that I was thinking and feeling. It was a superstition, almost, to never leave anything out, as if once either of us started doing that a small but insidious division might develop between the two of us that could only grow wider.
Her diagnosis changed everything. Now, when I thought about the future, and the prospect—the certainty—of a life without her, I kept my grief to myself, and because grief was now the dominant emotion in my world, the old closeness we’d known changed. No less love existed between us—only more, if that was possible. But I went through my days with her like an actor, playing the part of a happy person.
She needed it, I believed. She had made a clear, unspoken choice to proceed, as long as possible, as if things were the same as always, and because I would do anything for her, I went along with the act. But the cost for me was great.
I wept only when alone—in the barn, generally, milking our goats, and overseeing the cheese, jobs that allowed my brain room to pursue thoughts and images and memories, of which there were too many.
I saw us, on a trip we’d made two years back, to Mount Desert Island, in Maine, picking blueberries and feeding them to each other and making towers of flat stones, balanced one on top of the other. And I remembered how it was later, in our tent, when a thunderstorm hit, clinging to each other for warmth.
I thought about the dream we’d had, and then abandoned, of being parents together, and imagined Clarice pregnant—Clarice, who loved the prospect of pregnancy. I had loved the thought of her pregnant breasts, her full round belly.
Early in our time together she had told me how, when she told her parents that she loved women, her father had set her belongings in the front yard of their Iowa home and lit a match to them. Every family photograph, every childhood toy and adolescent memento—all were destroyed in the inferno as her mother looked out through the window. She trembled in my arms when she told me the story, and for hours after, I had stroked and held her, having no words that were adequate, but no need for words.
Now though, having finally learned the truth about my family—the reason for Val and George’s mysterious remoteness, and Connie’s grasping, and the deep, warm sense of safety I’d always felt toward Edwin—I said nothing to Clarice. It seemed to me that to do so would demand more than I wanted to ask of the woman I loved, someone facing her own terrifying series of losses. As much as was possible, who I would be to her now, I decided, was a partner free of her own needs or problems—other than the one great and terrible problem of Clarice’s imminent death.
And because I had decided I could not tell Clarice the truth of my discovery, I could not tell Ruth, either. This was not such a difficult decision, actually. Linked as we had been all these years by Connie’s birthday sister obsession, I barely knew the woman. All focus and care now went to caring for Clarice, and as much as possible, maintaining the illusion of our old life, which I now understood to have been nothing short of miraculous.
FOR THE FIRST YEAR AFTER we got the news of Clarice’s diagnosis, we carried on much as before, though with an acute sense of the preciousness of every day. At first Clarice’s symptoms were minor enough that I allowed myself to believe the doctors might be wrong. Maybe her particular case was different from most, and this was the full extent of the disease. We could live happily with the numbness in her fingers, the way her leg sometimes gave out, and the trouble she had using a fork and knife, particularly at the end of the day when she was tired.
It’s a strange thing, how swiftly a person’s world reconfigures when illness settles in. One day you’re thinking it’s a problem that the person you love can’t separate one coffee filter from the next one in the box; a month later, all you hope for is that she can hold the mug on her own.
She continued to teach that first year. Apart from one friend in the department, she had told no one about her condition, and neither did I. Even with each other, we spoke of it surprisingly seldom. There had been a time when we made plans—to build a greenhouse someday, to celebrate her fiftieth birthday with a trip (Europe, or perhaps the long-deferred cross-country drive to Yellowstone). Now we avoided all talk of the future, beyond the few days or weeks before us.
A new carefulness overlay what we allowed ourselves to tell each other, or even imagine. A sentence that began “Next year” or even “next summer” now required us to consider other questions. How well could Clarice walk by then? (Could she walk at all was not a question I allowed myself to ask.) Could she get up and down stairs? Would she have trouble with her speech? If the phone rang, could she pick up the receiver?
Five of our goats were due to deliver kids that spring. The first one arrived in the middle of the night, around Valentine’s Day, when the temperature was ten below. I had gone out to the barn to check on the animals, and there was the baby. Normally I would have simply left her there to nurse, but cold as it was, I decided to bring them both into the house.
Under normal circumstances, Clarice would have carried one, and I the other, but I brought them both in and laid them on blankets in the kitchen by the woodstove.
Clarice, in her pajamas, knelt beside them. She lay down on the floor by the mother and the baby, her head on the blanket.
“It’s good you’re strong, Dana,” she said. “You’ll have to be soon.”
By late spring—a few months after Val’s death—Clarice was using her cane all the time. By the time I was getting the tomato plants into the ground, she needed a walker, and though she wanted to spend time with me outside, it was hard for her, negotiating the uneven terrain.
“I think we have to sell Jester,” she said. “It’s not fair leaving him in his stall all the time with no one to ride him.”
As she had for several seasons now, on warm days she stretched out in her chaise lounge by the porch while I worked in the strawberry patch. Still developing our perfect strain of plant, I brought her plates of berries to compare for sweetness.
“I think you’re getting close to perfection here, honey,” she said, when she was finished sampling every one. “They’re all wonderful now. Not a single dud in the lot.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said. “This is the summer I’ll get the paperwork and testing under way for registering the new variety.”
I had always felt the urgency of my timetable lay with Edwin’s advancing age—the fact that he was almost seventy-five now. The man I now understood to be my father was no longer farming, and his memory was going. Long before I’d known of our blood connection, I had regarded him as my mentor, and so I felt deep regret that we had missed the chance to pursue the patent on our strawberry plants together, as I had always hoped we would. But there was another force bearing down on me now, more oppressive than the prospect of Edwin’s death.
“I wish this could have gone on a lot longer,” Clarice said, wiping a drop of strawberry juice from her lip. She had always been the most fastidious person, but lately, it was getting harder for her to take care of herself. “Nothing’s over,” I said.
“It will be.”
ONE OF THE THINGS A person learns to live with if she’s a farmer, is dying.
We lost goats sometimes—a kid born dead, or too weak to survive. Chickens, if one got out and a fox was in the neighborhood. Katie, our dog, who we buried under Fletcher Simpson’s plum tree.
It was not only animals, but crops, too, that reminded you nothing was permanent but the changing of the seasons. For
all the years I tended one piece of land or another—flower gardens, strawberry beds—I never got over the sadness that descended every summer, as harvest season approached. The goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace came into bloom, and the days got shorter. The nights were cooler, and I knew that frost would come soon and with it, death.
Somewhere along the line I heard that George had died. That news had come to me in the form of a bill from a funeral home in Austin, Texas, where George had spent his last years. But apart from its inconvenience, that event had seemed to me as distant and removed as George himself had been when he was living.
But picturing Clarice dying was like trying to fathom the ocean drying up, color gone from the world. Nobody I ever knew was more alive to me than Clarice. I could no more imagine her frozen and motionless as the doctor had told us she would be than picture a hummingbird whose wings were stilled. I could no more imagine myself without her than imagine the sky without the sun.
RUTH
All This Time
FOR ALL THE years my sisters and I were growing up, my father had prided himself on being debt-free. In the eleven generations that Plank Farm had been in operation there had never been a mortgage on our land. Sometimes, if a winter had been hard, my father would pay a visit to the bank for a five-hundred-dollar loan to help him pay for his seed order and fertilizer, but only until spring, when the money started coming in.
Then came the big rise in fuel prices and proliferating supermarket chains, then the drought, and most crushing of all, the barn fire. Encouraged by Victor, his own right-hand man, my father had taken out a note to build a big new greenhouse for cultivating early-season hothouse tomatoes, but by the time he got it up and running he realized he could not compete with the prices the chains were charging. Then there was the year Esther got a divorce, and my father lent her money to buy out her former husband’s share of their house, which had been built on our land.
The Good Daughters Page 21