Watermelon Summer

by Anna Hess

  "Before you were born. Yep, Mom dropped me off with our dad because she wanted to go to Burning Man and didn't want a kid in tow. Can't say that I blame her, although I'm pretty sure your mom didn't know I existed. You know there are more of us, right?"

  "More...?"

  "More siblings. Not whole siblings, of course, but Dad was quite a lady's man. Serial monogamist, I call him. Pretty easy to have so many kids if you don't end up having to raise any of them. Before the two of us, he had another wife with two daughters, and after you he hit the jackpot and got a son, finally. Our little brother is sixteen, lives in Florida, I think—I've never met him."

  I couldn't quite figure out how I didn't know about this huge extended family that—if Kat was right—spanned the entire east coast. My two oldest sisters lived in New York state and Maryland, and Kat was from Knoxville. ("Although lately I've been traveling around all over," she added.)

  "And my mom knew about all this?" I asked. Sure, Mom was a bit cagey about my bio-dad, but my understanding was that she was working hard not to say anything negative, rather than actively hiding three half-sisters and a half-brother.

  Kat tilted her head to one side and frowned. "Honestly, I'm not sure if your mom knows about all of us or not. She definitely knew about me...once I showed up on her doorstep. I really liked her, but I also figured I might have been the reason she left our dad as soon as she popped you out. He's already twenty years her senior—having a kid he'd never told her about might have been the last straw."

  Kat had a point—I could easily imagine how confusing it would be for my mom to have a step-child show up when she was pregnant with me. But I couldn't help thinking back to how alone our little family had felt for much of my childhood, especially when classmates talked about family reunions and heaping handfuls of cousins. Would it have killed Mom to at least let me talk to my bonus siblings now and then?

  "Bonus sibling! I like it!" Kat crowed when I muddled my way through an explanation of how I was feeling. "But if you want to meet Angela and Jessica, that's pretty easy. They're driving down to Tennessee for a reunion this weekend, and they sent me an invitation. I'm sure they'd be thrilled if you came along!"

  And that's how I ended up waking on my second morning in Appalachia in a completely different hayfield, with possible-cousins running around in all directions outside my tent.

  "Family reunion" probably wasn't really the right word for what I'd landed in the middle of. The schedule that had been thrust into my hand by an excited eleven-year-old (possibly a relation, but who knew?) proclaimed that this was the Tenth Annual Viking Festival and Softball Tournament. Planned events included a river flotilla, underground cookery, raiding and plundering, an official ball game (and unofficial "games we just made up"), dog shows, and barn dance. Under "Time Line," the organizers had explained that "Vikings kinda scoff at schedules," but a rough time of day was listed for each event, including "recovery and further revelry" for Sunday.

  Since I was still fighting off jet lag, I'd slept late, and by the time I woke up, Kat was gone from the car where she'd spent the night. This is just the kind of situation where my usual MO was to pull out a novel and hide in my tent until someone I knew turned up, but I had to use the bathroom, and after finding the latrine, the sound of singing drew me deeper into the crowd.

  The source of the sound turned out to be a dozen people ranging in age from middle-schoolers to long-bearded adults. They were sitting in a circle, intent on the music, but one looked up long enough to motion me to join them. The music didn't stop as the circle made way for another participant, but when the current song drifted to a close, the woman who had beckoned me in explained that we were singing rounds, and not to worry—they'd be sure to start the next one with a teaching round. So, for my sake, we sang the ditty several times all together while people drifted in to join the circle (and a few singers wandered away), and before I knew it, I was singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in a round...backwards.

  The rounds got more complicated, but also more beautiful, as the day progressed. I was a bit light-headed from lack of breakfast, and maybe that's why I suddenly felt embraced by this crowd of strangers, rather than terrified of them? No matter why, when the last song ended, I didn't retreat immediately in search of Kat, but instead turned and introduced myself to the woman I'd spoken with earlier.

  "I know exactly who you are," she said, her face curling up into a wrinkled smile. "You must be Glen's youngest daughter. Am I right?"

  "How did you know?" I asked, intrigued that this woman was familiar enough with my father to suss out our relationship. After all, I didn't share his last name, so she must have been going on something physical—the color of my eyes, maybe, or the way my nose turned up at the end. I had no clue, having never even seen a photo of my bio-dad. "Is he here? Or maybe my oldest sisters are? Kat brought me to the Viking Festival so I could meet them."

  "I'm afraid neither Angela nor Jessica made it this year," Susan told me. "But, look, you should come have lunch with my family and you can pick my brains about anything you want."

  When I woke up that morning, I'd checked my cell phone and seen that I had plenty of bars (unlike at Greensun), and I knew I should excuse myself now to call my mother. She was probably worried sick about me, even though I'd explained on the drive down from the airport that I wouldn't be able to call her while I was on the farm. We'd resolved to write letters instead, and I knew that her promised parcel containing empty envelopes and stamps (so I could write back) was probably in the Greensun mailbox at this very instant. Wouldn't it make her day to get a call instead?

  And yet.... Here I was at a Viking Festival (and Softball Tournament), and I was feeling decidedly piratical. Not that I was going to raid and pillage, but maybe for once I wouldn't worry too much about whether my mother was (in turn) worrying about me. So I let Susan draw me away to her campsite, which appeared to be empty, except for a kid (presumably Susan's grandson) who handed me a chocolate bar from his nest under the covered top of a pickup-truck bed.

  "I recognized you because you look just like Angela," Susan explained as she handed me an egg-salad sandwich on homemade, whole-wheat bread to go with my chocolate bar. She went on to explain how my father (with Angela and Jessica's mother in tow) came down to Kentucky from Pennsylvania in the late 1960s as an Appalachian Volunteer. "Your father is my age, you know," she explained, clearly aware I was doing the mental math and realizing my mother was probably in diapers at that time. I'd known my bio-dad was twenty years Mom's senior, but didn't quite grok how old that made him until I started peering at Susan's lined face.

  In Susan's story, Glen was a combination hippie and social-reform crusader. In one breath, she mentioned how he'd gotten into a car accident while stoned and barefoot, but then in the next breath, she mentioned how hard he'd worked to help his coal-mining neighbors find support for black lung. When Glen bought Greensun with money gifted him by his parents, Susan (another Appalachian Volunteer) was living just down the road in a tiny house with no electricity or running water, and her landlord soon kicked her out when he saw who Susan was hanging out with. Glen let her move into the Greensun farmhouse with him and his family, charging no rent in exchange for Susan's help with his two young daughters.

  "You have to take what Kat tells you with a grain of salt," my informant warned. "She's understandably bitter that her father was never a part of her life, but Glen didn't have a harem, as she likes to describe the women who ended up living at Greensun in those early years. He was 100% in love with his wife, and he had a vision that we could help the Appalachian people, our own little third world right in the middle of the prosperous United States. Anyone who was willing to join in the fight was worthy of his protection, and his protection generally meant a mattress on the floor in the kids' room.

  "But then the Appalachian Volunteers organization fell apart, the money started to dry up, and we all got sucked back into the real world," Susan finished, the nostalgia evident in h
er voice when she talked about those youthful days. "Glen's first wife left him and took the kids, and the rest of us drifted away too. I don't really know much about what happened to your family after that, although I see your older sisters from time to time at events like this. In fact, I see one now."

  I looked where Susan was pointing and noticed Kat walking toward us through the crowd. She was clearly searching for something, and her face lit up when she saw me. "Forsythia! There you are! We've got to go," she hollered as soon as our eyes met, and I clambered to my feet. My sandwich—and the story—were done, but I didn't feel quite ready to step out of the 1960s (and Susan's life).

  Susan seemed to understand what I was feeling because she clasped one of my hands between her two, the older woman's papery skin feeling comforting against my own. "Don't worry, Forsythia, I'm not going to disappear. I'll see you at the Greensun meeting next month, and if you need me in the meantime, let me program my number into your phone."

  Her words startled a breathless laugh out of me. Susan seemed to come from an entirely different era, and I wasn't prepared for her to be so adept at using cell phones. (Maybe more adept than I was—smartphone technology was new to me as of this trip, and I was still struggling to figure out what all the menus did.)

  "You'll have to walk to Cell Phone Hill to call me, of course," she added, then quickly gave directions on how to navigate down the valley at Greensun and up the mountain on the other side in case I ever wanted phone reception. Then Kat's adamant gestures pulled me away, and by the time I looked back over my shoulder, Susan and her grandson had merged back into the melee of Vikings and were gone.

  Kat was wound up about the guy she'd met, who'd invited her to join him at a cob-building workshop starting that evening (thus the rush leaving the Viking Festival), so I didn't have to do much talking on the ride home. Her excitement washed over me while I digested Susan's story, and before I knew it, I was getting out of Kat's car and waving farewell as she shot out of the driveway and back into her fast-paced life. My half-sister had promised to come back to visit soon, but I could tell the thrill of a new-found younger sibling had faded into the background behind the brilliant glow of her crush.

  For a minute, I felt very alone in Greensun's parking field. I couldn't call anyone unless I made the trek to Cell Phone Hill, and although there were houses across the road, I knew no one within walking distance. After the cheerful hubbub of the Viking Festival, Greensun felt very...empty.

  Then my eye settled on the mailbox, and I remembered that I should have a parcel from Mom by now, and maybe a letter, too, in her illegible (but always heartfelt) scrawl. Sure enough, a brown-paper-wrapped package was sitting under a few fliers for local businesses, but that's not what first caught my eye. Instead, I opened the mailbox and was immediately faced with a cluster of perfectly ripe bananas, and after extracting my mail, I discovered a bumpy envelope with my name on it (but no stamp or address) slipped between Mom's package and the junk mail.

  The maternal note could wait. I immediately unfolded the flap on the strange letter, and out spilled a pen, a blank sheet of paper, and another page with careful hand-lettering that read:

  Forsythia,

  I hope you don't mind me writing you a note. (This is Jacob from the airport, in case you've met so many other people here that you've forgotten my name.)

  When I got home, Mamaw was mad as a hatter that I'd left you there alone. She says there's no phone down in Hippie Holler, and what will you do if you need help?

  I was going to walk down and check on you, but didn't want to intrude. So I decided to write a letter instead.

  I pass by your mailbox just about every day, so feel free to write me a note, even if you don't need help. Don't put up the flag, though, or the mailman will take your letter by mistake.

  —Jacob

  P.S. I hope you like bananas.

  Suddenly, the smile on my face was just as big as Kat's. I took off my backpack and sat down in the shade of a pear tree to enjoy a snack and to write a reply on the spot. One banana later, I'd let Jacob know that I appreciated his thought, that he was welcome to come down and check on me anytime, and that I did like bananas very much. I also wrote Mom a quick note on the back of one of the fliers and added it to my outgoing mail, scrawling "PLEASE LEAVE FOR JACOB" in big letters on the relevant envelope so that I could raise the flag after all. Feeling a bit like Scout, who found unexpected gifts in a tree knothole in To Kill a Mockingbird, I wandered the rest of the way down the hill with a grin on my face, rereading Mom's and Jacob's letters while juggling the box and fruit in my other hand.

  It was a couple of hours after I got home and finished baking the apple-raspberry pie Kat had helped me start when the cramping and diarrhea started. When researching my original summer-traveling adventure, I'd learned that it's not always safe to drink the water when you're on the road, but I'd assumed the admonition only applied to places like Mexico and Africa. So I'd seen no reason not to fill my water bottle from the jugs hand-labeled "Spring Water" at the Viking Festival—big mistake! Apparently, spring water is full of microscopic this-and-thats, which you get used to if you grow up in a place like Appalachia, but which can tie the intestines of city slickers into knots. Like most parts of living in the countryside, you'll grow accustomed to untreated water in time, but you'll likely get heartily sick first.

  Which is why I spent my second afternoon at Greensun—and half the night—running back and forth to the composting toilet. At first, I'd thought this structure was inspired—doing your business with a view of the creek and hillside seemed like bliss. It was much less paradisiacal at midnight during the pounding rain when I arrived in the outhouse soaked, turned off my flashlight because I knew I'd be making a dozen more trips and didn't want to run down the batteries, and then repeated the endeavor five minutes later. I do have to admit that the sound of water pounding on the tin roof was comforting, but only a little bit.

  So when I woke up the next morning, I was all set to laze in bed reading for hours. My stomach felt much better, but I wasn't quite ready to put anything into my mouth. So I just lay there, enjoying how good the sun shining in the window felt on my skin. The creek, which had been a gentle gurgle the previous morning, was now a solid roar, and the noise had almost lulled me back to sleep when I heard a male voice hollering above the water. "Hello!" whoever-it-is yelled. "Is Forsythia Green there?"

  Now didn't seem like the time to split hairs and mention that I'd taken my step-dad's last name and went by Forsythia Hall. Or to ponder the notion that my bio-dad came up with the term "Greensun" to memorialize himself. Both fathers aside, there was yet another stranger on my doorstep, and it definitely seemed worth crawling out of bed to see who this one might be.

  When I made my way out onto the porch, though, I discovered that stranger 2.0 (or maybe 3.0 if you counted Jacob in the airport) wasn't actually on my doorstep at all. The previously mild-mannered creek had flooded up to the top of its five-foot-high banks and was beginning to spill out over the sides, so the stranger was marooned on the opposite shore. Or, perhaps more realistically, I was marooned on this one.

  "Hello?" I called as I walked across the sodden lawn to within speaking distance. This stranger, actually, didn't look any more scary than the last visitor, and it seemed rude to be yelling at a sixty-year-old man who had such a kindly twinkle in his eye. "I'm Primrose," I added when I was near enough to speak instead of shout.

  It turned out my newest visitor was even less a stranger than the last one, as I soon realized when he told me his name. Arvil was the sole Greensun-affiliated person Mom had stayed in touch with, and she'd given me his number in case of emergencies. Which this seemed to be.

  "I don't want to alarm you," Arvil said after the introductions were concluded. "But I have some news. And I'd really feel better if I told you while we're both on the same side of the creek." He and I scanned the raging floodwaters, watching Lucy leap into the fray, swim madly against the current, and still
end up twenty feet downstream before she reached the other shore.

  "I'm really okay over here," I said finally. "Whatever's wrong, I can handle it."

  I later realized that Arvil's chivalry was in large part due to his sense of adventure, in the face of which a flooded creek was akin to a red flag waved at a bull. "There's a fallen tree down there," he pointed. "I could probably walk across."

  The tree he'd noticed did seem to be well-anchored and pretty level as it spanned the creek. And if the trunk had been a foot above solid ground, I would have pranced across it laughing. (Well, maybe not pranced, but you get the picture.) Still, I could easily imagine Arvil slipping and falling, hitting his head on the wood, and sinking beneath the muddy waters before I could leap in and rescue him. Lucy would probably be the only one left alive.

  But Arvil was already striding downstream toward his found bridge, so I rushed after him on my side of the creek. "No, I'll cross!" I called. What else could I do? The guy was almost geriatric.

  The log really wasn't that bad once I took off my shoes and could grip it with my bare feet. I'm not sure I actually breathed until I got to the other side, but the wide smile on Arvil's face made the effort worthwhile, even after Lucy joined the party and shook muddy water all over us. I grinned back at both of them, letting the shoes I'd slung around my neck fall to the ground, already thinking of the log as an adventurous story to tell someone (other than Mom) in the near future.