by Liza Nelson
As soon as I stepped inside Wyatt’s, a blast of air overhead practically knocked me over with its roaring heat. I repeated my little cheer, “I’ll find you, yes, I will,” as I unzipped my jacket and forced myself to smile back and forth at the paunchy man and rather gaunt, gray-faced woman who were sitting behind counters at opposite ends of the room. On the hardware side, among a disarray of tools, fishing gear and paint cans, the old man puffed a smelly cigar and gave me a once-over. I wasn’t about to let him think I didn’t know what I was about. I hitched up my bag to strut over to the woman on the grocery side. A blue can of Maxwell House was the first thing I recognized on the shelf behind her, so in a loud voice I announced that I wanted a pound of coffee. She put down her People and nodded with the grimmest smile I’d seen since the Wicked Witch. “You must be looking for the Melon Place?”
I shrugged as if I knew what she was talking about. The article said nothing about melons or anyone named Melon.
“They expecting you to call?”
“Not exactly.” I tried to sound forceful.
“Most of their visitors are unexpected, youngsters same as you wanting to see a real commune in action. You want I should ring them up?”
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” I told her, nonchalant as could be.
“Well, I’m Miss Jane. If you change your mind, just ask.” She turned back to her magazine. When she bent her head I noticed she was wearing a wig.
“If you could just give me a local map.”
She started laughing then. You probably remember her laugh. No one could forget it. Miss Jane has a laugh that takes over, fills a space and pushes everything else out. She screeches actually, like chalk scraped across the board only not unpleasant. That laugh is unnerving the first time you hear it. At least I was unnerved. After what seemed like forever but was maybe thirty seconds, she stopped to rub her mouth with a Kleenex. When she repeated her offer to call the Melon place, I lacked the will to resist. I nodded curtly, with as much dignity as I could scrape up, and she went into a back room to make her call.
I wanted to hear what was said, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to follow her. The man was watching me. I pretended to browse through a rack of yellowed paperbacks, until she came back and said it was all set up, they’d send somebody as soon as they could. I don’t know if I can express how elated the words made me. I had this crazy faith that a car would drive up and out you’d step. I’d walk up to the car, you’d take one look at me and know. You’d throw your arms around me and off we’d go, happily ever after.
I can picture you so exactly. The poster says 6’1” and 180 pounds which is pretty thin. But you’ve probably gained some weight as you’ve gotten older, become the burly, fatherly type who wears black-and-red plaid flannel shirts. And maybe, I don’t know, just a hunch, you limp. Life on the run doing odd jobs and menial work has to have taken its toll.
To state the obvious, you didn’t show up at Wyatt’s. For a long time no one came into the store at all. Eventually, a couple of silent men hunkered over to the hardware side to buy nails and small goods from inside the case near the man, and a tired, raw-faced woman with a couple of heavily bundled, raw-faced children clutching her pants pockets bought a bag of groceries. Meanwhile, I took a Newsweek and stood leaning against the corner of the magazine rack, pretending to read. I was expecting to leave any minute. After a while, the store got pretty warm, what with that heater blowing all the time.
“I wondered how you was standing it,” the man said when I finally gave in and slipped off my jacket. “Lewis is my name.” He offered me a paper cup of Kool-Aid which I gulped down.
“Give her some of that fruitcake you’re hoarding back there,” he called over to Miss Jane. She went into the back room again and returned with a big white plate piled with sliced fruitcake. I hate fruitcake as a rule, who doesn’t, but I had not eaten since Spider’s steak dinner last night.
I finished off two slices fast and was debating my third when Miss Jane said it was time for lunch. Canned spaghetti warmed on an antique hot plate, cream cheese and apple butter sandwiches, hot chocolate. One of the all-time best meals ever in my life, better than the room-service steak or my first shrimp dinner in Florida. Lewis spread a striped towel over some low boxes where he lay out the food, then another towel for us to sit on, like an indoor picnic. That’s how Lewis and Miss Jane eat lunch every day.
The next thing you know, the three of us are sitting together talking it up like old friends. Once those two start with their stories and jokes and questions there’s no stopping them. I heard from Lewis all about Miss Jane’s chemo treatments in Wilmington, the reason she wears a wig. I looked at every one of two albums’ worth of photographs Lewis took of their six grandchildren when they visited last summer. Miss Jane and Lewis hate that they live so far away, one set in Idaho, the other in Nebraska. They can’t even get together for Christmas.
“What’s a holiday without family?” Miss Jane said, putting the albums in the drawer under the counter. She didn’t expect an answer, luckily. Christmas last week with Godiva was a matter of going through the motions. I didn’t know for sure if Godiva noticed, but I was counting the minutes.
Miss Jane and Lewis were obviously curious what I am all about, but unlike most adults they didn’t push or dig. I could hear how lame my story sounded when I told them my name was Cass Wild and that I had a good friend at the Melon Place. They smiled a little oddly. It turns out they know everyone out there. Over the years they have lent Melon Place tenants tools and know-how, and probably, though they would never say so, money. They refrained from asking my friend’s name and I didn’t offer. I learned my lesson with Spider. Besides, I wouldn’t have known what name to give them.
“Here, look at this.” Lewis pulled out a small batch of photographs still in the developer’s envelope. “Here’s a picture I took out there years ago. And this one is from a few years later.” Lewis is not the world’s greatest photographer. The pictures were group shots, mostly out of focus and distant, but believe me I looked carefully. Your face was not there.
Which made me even more impatient for my mystery ride to appear and take me away to my future. I had to bite my tongue a dozen times to keep from badgering Miss Jane. The thirteenth time I couldn’t hold back.
“Do you think maybe you should call again?” I asked her, casually sipping the last dregs from my mug of lukewarm chocolate as if the idea of another call had just that second popped into my mind.
“Sure she’ll call,” Lewis said. “But you know how it is around here, don’t you, honey?”
I was beginning to. Every so often a car parked in the lot. I would tense all over until Miss Jane glanced up from her magazine and said it was the Smiths come for their daily milk and bread or the Grace boy from down the road or someone else equally inconsequential.
The afternoon was wearing out. What happened, I wondered, when the Wyatts wanted to close up and I was still hanging around. Lewis and Miss Jane were the kindest, nicest people I have ever been around. I was glad to know them, to know people like them could be part of my world. If it wasn’t for you, I could imagine going back and staying with them indefinitely. If I asked, I had a hunch they’d let me. But I was not about to ask.
It was already dark enough outside for headlights to beam in at us through the glass as another car pulled up.
“Oops, here’s Isaac come at last,” Miss Jane said relaxed as toast.
Tickety tickety tickety, my heart began beating so loud Lewis could probably hear it straight across at hardware. I struggled into my coat and grabbed my bag.
“Tell Isaac to come in and warm up if he wants,” Miss Jane was calling after me, but I could not wait. I had a destiny to meet. I was about to make my first connection. I mean, I could not believe I’d actually done it, really and truly connected with your world, just as I’d planned. And it was basically so easy. Mumbling thanks and goodbyes, I was out the door. A plank of cold walloped me in the face.
Standing by his car, stamping his feet against the cold was a small, elegant black man in a pinstriped suit and gray flannel topcoat. Isaac would never be taken for a hippie or a revolutionary, that’s for sure. I’d say a businessman or a fancy lawyer. Maybe even an undercover cop, except the Wyatts weren’t the kind to turn me in as a runaway unless they told me first. And besides, he was too polished and too beautiful to be police. With his close-cropped beard and narrow eyes, he suggested an oriental majesty.
“Haiku called me at the office.” His voice was friendly, soft yet precise. He held out his hand, a thin blade of steel that gripped my hand and then relaxed. He smiled, but his eyes riveted in on me. In the news photos I studied this fall, many of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale especially, had Isaac’s same military elegance, but they never dressed in well-cut suits.
What could I say to this man? My tongue was not working. I could not form the words Henry and Fierstein.
Isaac did not seem to notice.
“We still get a handful of you kids every spring,” he was saying, “but this time of year is a rarity. Marcus might even bake you one of his carob custard pies.”
YOU NEVER WERE in Eden after all, were you? I guess I’d begun to suspect as much before I got here. But that’s okay, I’m the opposite of discouraged. I know it’s only a matter of time until we’re together. Besides, I have lived so much in this last week. Randall Spider Gervais was a whole lifetime and now Eden is another, a much better one.
I’ve never been on a farm before. What is ironic is that one night not that long ago, Godiva and I were eating dinner and she started in about farming, that farming was a lifestyle we should explore. She even asked me if I’d like to learn to ride a horse. When I said no thanks, she asked was I sure because Joe Rainey, Philip Rainey’s father, whom I met at Thanksgiving, had offered to give me a lesson. I said I was sure; I fell out of love with horses when I turned thirteen. Godiva said okay, and that was it for our farm conversation.
Godiva obviously did not have the Melon Place in mind. The five days here have been a new experience. They’ve grounded me, as Godiva would say. I have felt more peaceful than I have in ages, despite being mixed up about where to go next. I would not have been ready for you before, but every day I am more and more prepared. I’ve had time to think; the farm has been teaching me to think. The pieces are all starting to fit into place.
You do exist. That’s the main thing. I have to keep pinching myself, but it’s no dream. Isaac, Haiku and the others all recognized the name right off although none of them has actually met you. The first night they told me what they knew about you, not a lot, but more than I ever learned from Godiva. For one thing, everyone calls you Henny, or did before you went underground. Hank Flint was probably a total coincidence; no one ever called you Hank that they knew. As for Gerry Flint himself, they said they were sick of talking about him. I guess reporters had tracked them down before I did. Of course, none of them ever heard of Godiva.
Isaac told me that you got into your trouble in Oregon, that you were part of a group that was indicted there, but he didn’t know the details. At least he said he didn’t. Which is fine. You can give me the details, if you want, when we are together. My new friend Haiku told me something else you probably wouldn’t mention.
“He had a real way with women,” was how Haiku put it, “but then they all did.”
“All who?” I asked her, putting down my glue brush.
We were in Haiku’s preserving shed, labeling preserves and packing them up to ship. Haiku sells them to health-food stores and cooperatives all over the Eastern seaboard under the brand name Life’s Gift. My job was to adhere the labels after Haiku wrote “raspberry,” “gooseberry” or “blueberry” in the matching color with her fancy calligraphy pen. Then Bethel and Dru packed them into the crates, eight of each kind to a crate.
“All the heavies. Radical rock-star types.” Haiku took a jar. “At your high school, don’t all the girls get crushes on the football players?”
“Gross, no,” I told her, but I knew what she was getting at.
Crushes. That’s what I was all about B.D. Dreams of popularity and love. I remember standing in the shadows of the Dairy Queen among the crushed cups, the dirty straws and sticky napkins, yearning after Jimmy Cryder. I always made sure to have an ice cream to lick while the others talked. They talked so easily, or so it seemed. Now I see it differently. Each of those girls, and the boys, too, had her own internal agenda I knew nothing about. Look at Cass. I’m beginning to think Cass may be miserable, yet everyone assumes she has it all. Just because people aren’t unhappy in the exact way you are (you in the general sense, I mean, not that you are personally unhappy) doesn’t mean they are happy. Anyway, I am not jealous anymore, or yearning.
There were no radical rock stars at the Melon Place that I could see. It got the name because Mr. Melon, who is about ninety, leased the farm out before he went into the nursing home. Eight women and six men live there now. I can’t tell if some of them are couples or not. Are Bethel and Isaac a couple, the way they tease each other? But she has a single room this month. There are only so many single bedrooms and who gets a single changes on a rotating basis. There seems to be a code of unwritten rules that keeps order. Everyone except Haiku has an outside job plus farm chores. Haiku’s job is managing the farm, or at least it was while I was there.
I was more or less assigned to her from the first night. No one else paid particular attention to me. At the big farmhouse dinner we ate together at seven o’clock sharp, conversation tended toward planning the next day’s schedule. I don’t think Magic House was like this. I have been trying to remember Magic House better since I got here. My memories are not very specific, but there seemed to be a lot of shouting and laughing, people always moving around me. Of course, I was little then. The Melon Place is more like some kind of monastery. No excess talk, a lot of enforced quiet time, rules and schedules. Yet from the occasional question or comment thrown my way, I can tell everyone knew all about me.
My guess is Bethel talked to the others about me. Not Haiku; it’s hard to imagine Haiku blabbing. She is very quiet; it is impossible to read what she’s thinking. The first night when I came into the kitchen with Isaac, she was leaning over the stove with her back to us stirring what turned out to be the most delicious carrot and lentil stew you can imagine. Isaac went over and tapped her lightly on the shoulder, then went off to change out of his suit to do his chores. Anyone else would have said hello and asked who I was and what I was doing there, but she didn’t even look up. All her attention went into stirring the pot. Finally, she glanced over and gave me a short, but dazzling smile. “Welcome,” she said, then pointed to a drawer full of silverware. “Please set the table for fifteen.” I’m not sure why, but I felt a lot more comfortable then.
I admire Haiku in so many ways. Haiku’s name fits her. She could be Godiva’s flip side, the same and opposite if that is possible. Haiku is small and delicate but extremely strong. She can lift a fifty-pound feed sack and not even notice. She takes care of the goats and chickens and the three milk cows, not to mention the various dogs and cats. Her garden is huge. She’s built a greenhouse. It’s something to walk in there with snow on your boots and breathe in the warm wet earth, the green growing.
I think she is more comfortable talking to her plants, whispering them along, than she is talking to people. With plants she baby-talks and coos and flirts; with people she can be almost curt.
“Irrelevant.” She cut me off when I began to complain how unfair it was of Godiva to keep secrets about you. “The past does not interest me at all, mine or anyone else’s.”
Maybe not, but this morning she woke me before dawn with big news.
“There is a woman, a friend of a friend, who says she knows Henny, or knew him.”
“How did you find her?” I was in shock, electrified, as you can imagine.
“Never mind that. What matters is that she is willing to meet
you. Get yourself packed and be ready to leave in half an hour. Isaac will drop you at the bus on his way to his office. She’s in Ohio.” Haiku handed me five twenty-dollar bills out of her apron pocket. Then she frowned.
“You should seek Henny only if he is part of your present and future, not if he’s a relic from a past, yours or your mother’s.”
Yes, I know that’s the kind of thing Godiva would say given half the chance, but I didn’t resent Haiku saying it. Look what she’s done for me. I started to tell her I’d write. She shook her head slightly, the way she does before she gathers herself up to speak, but she didn’t say anything more. She took my face between her slim, powerful hands and kissed my forehead, then walked out of the room.
Fourteen
I’M SITTING IN the station cafeteria on my way to Cincinnati, Ohio. The wall I’m facing is all mirrors. When I stare straight ahead, I see a girl I know is me, but she’s much prettier looking back from over there than I am sitting here. Past her I can see a man talking excitedly into a pay phone in the corridor out in front of the cafeteria. The mirror is divided into three panels. When he gestures with his hand, it separates from his body in front of me. At the only table between me and the mirror a woman is staring straight ahead, letting tears roll down her cheeks. I shouldn’t know this since she has her back to me. All I should know is the back of her head, blondish hair fluffed above a starched baby-blue collar. But looking ahead, I can’t avoid seeing the mascara running down the grooves of her cheeks. I’m embarrassed, not because I’ve caught her crying exactly, but because I can see all 360 degrees of her at once. That should be impossible. It’s as if I have superpowers. The woman is almost close enough to touch. If I whispered, “I’m sorry,” no one but her would hear. At the same time, her sorrow is all the way across the room. Close and far at the same time. The same sensation I felt at the farm sometimes.