by Lee Lynch
The burning had not disappeared; only Ginger was gone. Ginger was the dance of love, always dancing away, Jefferson always in pursuit.
Dawn had grown silent. Jefferson glanced at her. She really was a pretty woman. Sitting by her side was a pleasure. Dawn looked her way. They smiled. She kissed her fingertips and touched Dawn’s cheek again, overcome with a shyness she’d never experienced before.
“Your farm,” she said as it came into view, “is picture-perfect.” They had passed miles of summer corn and now she saw a herd of hefty cattle off in the distance. Herefords, Dawn told her. The two-rail picket fence along the road was a pristine white, and the stone wall by the entrance to the driveway was in perfect shape. As they drove around to the back of the house she noticed that the kitchen garden had rows of lettuce, squash, green beans, strawberries, spinach, and more. The deer fence around it must have been eight feet high. The house glowed white with neat dark blue shutters and clean many-paned windows that looked like originals.
“Dawn,” cried a small woman with rouged-looking tan skin darker than Dawn’s.
“Aunt Tuyat.” Dawn put her arms, black purse dangling, around her aunt.
“You stay for lunch?”
“We had lunch, Aunty. This is my friend Jefferson.”
“Jefferson?” Dawn’s aunt seemed to be tasting the name. “How do you do?” She looked at Dawn. “Older friend,” she commented, smiling at Jefferson.
“I am very pleased to meet you, Ms.—”
“Call me Aunty, like Dawn does. Come in, come in.”
Dawn whispered, “They never know who’s a friend, who’s a lover. She thinks you’re too old for me.”
Following Dawn into the house, Jefferson nodded, even as she admired the slight shimmy in Dawn’s walk. Aunty was probably right.
The Northways’ kitchen was big. A young boy sat at the table eating from a bowl with a fork.
“My nephew, Tong,” Dawn said. The boy smiled and nodded, mouth full.
A woman very like the one who had greeted them outside entered the room with a tray of empty dishes.
“Mom, meet my friend Jefferson. Is Dad awake?”
“Yes, yes. He is still awake, finishing his coffee and his cigarette. He will sleep soon. Go see him.”
Mr. Northway was in bed, gaunt, pale, his legs long under a dark green comforter. The room smelled like rubbing alcohol and was very hot. Her dad had given Dawn her height and then seemed to have run out of the tall gene, as her siblings were shorter. He smiled broadly as Dawn hugged him.
“He smiles all the time,” Dawn said as she led Jefferson out a back door. “No matter how bad he feels. He treats my mother like a porcelain doll. That’s their song together, ‘China Doll,’ the Grateful Dead song, not the old one. He’s a happy man. It’s like, he is still so happy to have gotten through Vietnam alive and to have found something beautiful to bring back from his experience, he’s content despite being so sick.” Chickens ran up to her, away from her, and under Jefferson’s feet. “These are Rhode Island Whites. They’re good layers and hardy in the cold, except for their combs. Come on, girls, let us through.”
The barn was next, clean and modern. Dawn hugged one of the young men working there. “Another cousin,” she explained. “Eric.” Once outside, Dawn lowered her voice. “Mom brought over as many of her relatives from Vietnam as were left. Her family worked so hard on the farm with Dad that he was able to expand it. Now that he’s so sick, there’s plenty of help. Northway Farm doesn’t have to sell out to developers like so many of my friends’ parents have.”
“This place must be as big as Central Park,” Jefferson said. They were headed toward woods that bordered one side of the Northway land. She remembered the tiny space behind the candy store Angela had lived in with her parents and thought of how far they both had traveled from that first glorious kiss.
“Oh, at least twice that size. Dad and Mom own 1,560 acres and raise corn, soybeans, and hay. They have 110 head of dairy cows and a good-sized herd of sows over across the road.”
“That’s all the same farm? With a road running through it?”
“Happens all the time.” Dawn looked to their right and said, “Race you to the wall.”
Jefferson, with her menopausal weight gain, felt cumbersome running after her. “I used to be faster than that.” She was laughing and out of breath, rubbing a stitch in her side.
They stepped over another stone wall, then climbed a hill. She wobbled a little going over, but caught herself before Dawn looked back. That darned arthritis again. Dawn pointed to another farmhouse some distance away along the road that split the farm. There was no mistaking that Dawn loved the place; her eyes shone with that gladness she so often saw in Dawn.
“Dad and my uncles built the other big house. The Vos—Mom’s maiden name is Vo—live there. Two of my nieces and nephews are going to college, but four want to be farmers. Lan, my oldest cousin, has already bought adjacent land and is working it with Dad’s equipment in exchange for her labor here. She wants to get into heritage seeds and sell to restaurants and gourmet shops.”
“To each her own.” Jefferson imagined the land covered with snow, the isolation of winters. Where she’d grown up in Dutchess at least had movies, local theater, concerts, and the train into the city. Here there were cows.
“Dad didn’t have to marry my mother and bring her here. He didn’t have to make a new home for her family. My father is quite a guy, Jefferson. He kept on being a hero even back in the States. I don’t really want to move to Concord, especially with him so sick.”
“Then why go?”
Dawn made a 180-degree turn and pointed to a distant house in a clump of trees. Jefferson could make out a yard littered with cars stripped of tires, an old refrigerator, and other large refuse. Some tethered goats worked the grass. “That’s where I came out. In that half-wrecked manufactured home you can see back in the woods. Her name is Dee Buchman. She sits out on that back porch drinking beer all day. Walks the empty cans to the tree stump and target-shoots. Her brothers sold all the family land except where the house stands, mostly to us, and they work at the ball-bearing factory in Laconia to support their families and Dee, all living in that house along with their mother, who’s in her nineties now. Her brothers probably blame themselves for their little sister Dee being gay. They fooled around with her when they were all kids.”
Jefferson could picture herself in that woman’s shoes, surrounded by her cats and a dog and a goat, always ready to bring someone out with her touch, her hands. She’d seen homes like that before, on rides around New Hampshire: old couches and folding chairs lining the sagging porches, antique pickup trucks gutted and rusting, always a goat munching tufts of crabgrass. You saw pictures of the South looking like that, but not of New Hampshire. These run-down homesteads were hidden alongside narrow roads tourists didn’t frequent. Penniless, as exhausted as the land on their family plot, generations stayed on penniless, bitter, ambitionless, the whole clan drunk.
“She won’t talk to me,” Dawn said. “Or look at me, ever since I broke up with her when I went to college. What a character she is. Her hands were rough from farm work, but she always had a row of girlie tools on her kitchen table: hand lotions, nail clippers, little scissors, ceramic files, buffers, cuticle pushers—lined up like references. Since then I’ve seen her in town with one woman or another. She’s there for the straight women who want a break from roadhouse boyfriends or old-hat husbands. Maybe, some day, one of them will stick with her, show her a better life.” She looked at Jefferson, sadness—no, tragedy—in her eyes. “I knew there was no place good for me with her.”
“Hey,” she said. “That’s pretty amazing.”
“What?”
“To know what you needed before you started. I’m impressed.”
“Oh, Jefferson.” Dawn opened her arms as if to hug her. “How could anyone not know?”
She shrugged. “I stumbled along, tripping into jobs and relation
ships.”
“Until now?”
She surveyed the farmland, thinking how grateful she was to have been born where and who she had been. “I knew I needed a change.”
“Exactly,” Dawn said. “But how do you know what change is best?”
The sky had clouded over and she felt chilly. In the city, the streets would be bustling; here only a flock of some small dark birds seemed to have business outdoors. It was a moment so low that Ginger’s betrayals, both leaving and dying, felt like newly sharpened blades. She felt like screaming, but of course never would. Instead she covered the lower half of her face with a hand and squeezed her eyes shut.
Her tone all kindness and concern, Dawn asked, “Jefferson? Are you all right?”
How easy it would be to turn to Dawn, put her arms around her, and submerge herself in the woman. What was stopping her now, when she so needed the comfort? The honesty and kindness of this woman left her incredulous. She didn’t know a lesbian could be this unguarded and unfettered. Now that she’d found Dawn, she wanted to keep her in her life.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’m trying to answer you, but how can I when I’m guessing at the answers myself?”
“But to move here—that was a big decision. How did you make it?”
She smiled, turning to Dawn. “I put on my ruby running shoes, clicked my heels together three times, and said, ‘There’s no place like home.’ And here I was.”
Dawn shook her head, smiling too, and, as they walked, sometimes running off to see a wildflower, sometimes leaping at a tree limb as if to climb, and leading Jefferson to highbush blueberries, the last of the raspberries and gooseberries, which she’d never tasted before.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Jefferson parked outside the Pipsborough General Store, which was also the only gas station in town. Shannon worked there part-time. Dawn Northway’s car, a red Subaru with a bike rack on the back and a ski rack on the top, was out on the street next to a pile of red, gold, and brown leaves instead of in the lot, as if she’d been in a hurry.
There was no sign of either woman in the front of the store. A CD player was set to repeat Macy Gray’s song “I Try,” and it boomed out the door. From the back she could hear what sounded like boxes and crates being slammed one on top of another. She hesitated at a bin of cut-rate tools and gizmos in the kind of plastic packages that required an engineering degree to open and was deciding that she should leave when she heard Shannon say, “Then maybe I should go wherever the Guard sends me if you don’t want me around.”
She could hear Dawn’s low, kind voice answer. “That’s not what I said, Shannon.”
Before Jefferson could leave, Dawn came out of the back room, her cheeks pink.
“Jefferson,” Dawn cried, a big smile erasing her troubled expression.
She could see now that Dawn had been crying. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Shannon,” Dawn whispered, leading her outside. She was massaging her forearm as if it was sore. “I try to be her friend. She asked me to stop by to help her figure out what to do about the Guard.”
She’d never seen Dawn rattled. “Did she hurt you?”
“No! I keep hurting her.” Dawn obviously saw the puzzled look on her face. “I’m not interested, Jefferson. I only want to be friends, not lovers.”
“Did she force herself on you?”
“No. Nothing like that. Not physically, but she won’t accept my disinterest and keeps threatening to hurt herself. I don’t know what to do.”
“Okay. I know this is none of my business. Believe me, I don’t want to make it my business.” The thought scared her. She’d come to the lake for peace. “I’m trying to be a go-along-to-get-along kind of person.”
“I’m not trying to involve you. Really. I’m venting,” Dawn said, with a sad little smile. She wore a T-shirt with a rainbow that read, Rainbows Are So Ghay.
God, she thought. I don’t even know how to be a good friend. She knew what she’d do had Dawn been a lover or an ex-lover, but they were friends—and she’d fallen in love with Dawn’s family. She dropped by the farm perhaps more often than she should. Dawn, in the safe context of her family, had become her confidante, as had, for some subjects, Dawn’s bedridden dad, a soft-spoken guy and a good listener. He told her about the lakes region, the history of the Northways and the Hills, his mother’s people. He knew everyone but the newcomers. He told her stories of the houses and merchants. She consulted him about keeping up her house and who was the best boat mechanic, the most honest car-repair shop. She felt protective toward his daughter.
“Dykes get ridiculously messed up,” she told Dawn, thinking, except you. “Let me talk to her.”
“Would you?”
She shook her head. “Either that, or I follow you out of here.”
“And you know what Shannon will think if you do that.”
“I thought life with Ginger was complicated,” she joked, giving Dawn a fast hug.
Dawn laughed, the sadness erased from her eyes. “Ginger and what’s-her-name, and who’s-a-madig, and this one and that one and all the others.”
“Hey, Dawn, dirty pool. Now get lost while I solve all your problems.”
Jefferson headed back into the store. Shannon came barreling from the back rolling a full dolly at top speed.
“Whoa,” she said, stepping out of the way.
Shannon swerved to miss her, slammed into an end-cap display of boxed cereal, flung up her arms to protect herself from flying boxes of Life, and turned red. “Oh, bummer, you heard what we said, didn’t you?”
“I barely got here.”
“What’s wrong with me? I mean, look at me. They all say I’m so adorable, but they don’t want me loving them. Am I really that awful?”
A man came in the store and went to fix a cup of coffee.
Shannon whispered with a desperate earnestness, “I never tried anything with Dawn from the get-go. Never. I only loved her. Love her. Dawn said it nicely, but she basically told me I’m in her psychic space and should get a life.” She went to ring up the sale, head down, dejection in her walk. Jefferson picked cereal boxes out of the aisle.
“Catch anything, Jim?” she asked.
“More trout than I can eat. Want one for your supper?”
Shannon’s voice brightened. “That would be super. I don’t have an appetite and I’m getting tired of sardine sandwiches.”
Macy Gray’s wistful, exciting voice repeated her combination love song and dirge, the music fanning a useless flame in Jefferson.
Shannon, feet shuffling a little to the music, turned to Jefferson. “And you’re not out selling houses because?”
“On my way,” she said, and looked at her watch. “I had some time to kill and thought I’d grace you with my presence.”
The fisherman came in with a trout on a hook. Shannon wrapped it in a brown paper bag, then a plastic bag, and slipped it to the back of the dairy cooler. She came out yawning. “I hope I can remember to take that home. Man, I’ve got to get some sleep. I forget what I’m doing in the middle of doing it.”
“Are you working a lot?”
“Not enough,” Shannon said, turning out an empty pocket. “I’m having a heck of a time sleeping.”
“That’s not helping.”
Shannon protested. “It’s not all about Dawn. It’s the National Guard thing. When I do fall asleep I dream of hundreds of little bombs falling from fighter jets and I can’t find my cat to grab her and run.”
The phone rang. Shannon gave the store’s closing time to the caller.
Partly because Jefferson wanted to know and partly to change the subject, she asked, “Hey, how do you cook a trout anyway?”
Shannon and the fisherman, who’d been making a phone call outside, tripped over each other telling her their favorite recipes, and she faithfully wrote them down. When the guy left, Shannon was all enthusiasm. “We can have a fish fry. You want to have it at your place? Not that I’m inviting myself over, of co
urse.”
A group of kids invaded the store, and Shannon loped back to the register to ring up caramel apples. Jefferson wandered the aisles, letting the memories of the place as it had been forty-odd years ago move through her mind. When the children left, she led Shannon around the store.
“What happened to the post office? There was a little window right here and a woman who took the postcards I mailed to my girlfriend back in Dutchess.”
“I remember the post office too,” Shannon said with a heavy sigh. “My aunt and uncle lived in Pipsborough, and they let me open the box and pull out their mail.”
“Fancy boxes too,” said Jefferson. “Brass, with an eagle.”
“And sun rays. Remember that?”
“My dad and I would walk from the cottage. He’d get cigarettes and I got penny candy. And a cap gun once a summer if he was feeling good.”
Shannon smiled, looking at the floor. “This store had the best water guns.”
“I remember,” Jefferson said with a laugh. “I couldn’t wait to get home to fill it. I climbed down to the stream outside.” She pointed out a window to where water ran toward the lake.
“And got soaked? I did that too. Man oh man, I miss being a kid. Remember how we got all summer off?” Shannon’s face changed, her shoulders drooped. She shook her head. “I should have stuck to water pistols.”
“You learned to shoot in the Guard?”
“No, my dad taught me. We used to go out in the woods. He’d pin a paper target to a tree and we’d have contests between us two. I hit the bull’s-eye my first try and got pretty consistent. Do you shoot?”
