Arms Wide Open

by Patricia Harman

  The stout upright pine log walls are pale yellow, almost cream. A drywall partition at the end closes off Rachel’s room. An enlarged photo is tacked near the door, a picture taken that first spring, five years ago, of the group of us in the back of a pickup. I step closer to inspect the faces, radiant with hope, laughing and raising tools in our fists like communist revolutionaries or young farmers on a kibbutz.

  I blow out the light and feel my way up the stout two-by-four ladder to the center room. Here, I stop to check that the boys are tucked in. Tom waits for me under the covers in our room. I pull my flannel nightgown on and climb into the nest of his arms.

  “Good night, Rachel,” I call down.

  “ ’Night, Patsy.”

  “ ’Night, Mara,” I project to the far bedroom. Though the thick log walls keep out the elements, sound travels inside as through bamboo screens.

  “ ’Night, Patsy.” Mara laughs. She gets the joke. We’re the TV family on The Waltons.

  And good night to all the others who were once part of this commune . . . . gone now. Since the war in Vietnam ended, one by one, our friends, no longer needing the strength of solidarity, have drifted away to get real jobs, organize poverty programs, or go back to school. Every time someone puts on his or her backpack and walks away, it’s like a tiny sliver of my heart is sliced off.

  “ ’Night, Ben,” Tom says, deadpan.

  “ ’Night, Tom,” Ben answers in his lower voice. I can feel his sardonic smile.

  “ ’Night, Mica and Orion. ’Night, Stacy and Laurel, asleep in the Little House,” I whisper.

  “ ’Night, dancing maples and barn owl. ’Night, stars.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Morning

  Morning has broken, like the first morning . . . I set my two buckets of water down carefully, flex my sore hands, and stretch out my arms to greet the world. From here, my view goes on for miles, but I can’t see a single dwelling or road, not even smoke from a chimney. We’re standing on the roof of Roane County. Where there isn’t pasture there are trees, thick forests of yellow poplar, red maple and oak. There’s no vehicle noise; no voices but the ones I know.

  Rise. Shine. Give God your glory, glory. That’s Stacy, from the porch of the Little House, singing his morning song. Rachel scrapes on her fiddle out in the woods where she won’t bother anyone. Mara laughs below in the garden as Ben does a rowdy rendition of “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.”

  We found this seventy-five-acre farm by chance, on our first trip into West Virginia. For months, in pairs, we’d been making forays from our temporary headquarters in Batavia, looking for cheap land. On our first trip together, Tom and I, driving Shanti’s green Dodge, stumbled onto a long-haired dude with ripped jeans sitting on the curb in Spencer.

  “Hey, man.” Tom squatted beside him. “We’re looking for a cheap farm in the area. Heard of any land for sale?” While I’m sometimes shy, he’ll talk to anyone.

  “Ask Ira at the Growing Tree.” The elfish longhair pointed to a small whole-foods store upstairs in a corner brick building. There, we were shown a handwritten note, in shaky script, on the bulletin board. For Sale: Seventy-five acres—good hardwood timber and open fields. $7,500. Firm. 927-3008. Sadie Shoepeck.

  After reporting back to our communal center in Batavia, consulting with the rest of the group, and gathering up what little savings the members had, Colin called a friend in Atlanta.

  Honey Harriman, Peacemaker, heiress to a cleaning-product fortune, who, like Stacy, didn’t believe in inheritance. She wired us the money and the land was ours.

  This morning, the curved green horseshoe ridge is the green of Ireland, so clean and smooth, with the hay cut short by Randall’s mower . . . Randall Shoepeck is the previous owner’s one-armed forty-five-year-old son. His left arm was torn off in a motor-vehicle accident on a narrow county road when he was a teenager, but he can still work and drive. The whole Shoepeck family has adopted us.

  There’s Sadie Shoepeck, who sold us the land, the matriarch, a stick of a woman, eighty years old, a timberman’s widow since she was fifty. There’s Randall the one-armed, and his spouse, Essie, and their almost grown children, Junior and Betty . . . and Randall’s older brother, J.K., who lives with his wife, Willene. They all reside along Little Spring Creek at the end of the hollow. This is the way of it all across West Virginia; families living so close they can throw a loaf of bread from one house to the other.

  We now see the Shoepecks two or three times a week, but when our spring ran dry that first summer, Randall brought containers of water up the steep hill in his four-wheel-drive truck every evening. I glance back at the well near the barn, where three peeled oak posts make a tripod from which hangs a cylindrical bucket on a rope and a pulley, and remember.

  Water Witch

  The August day Randall Shoepeck bumped up the hill with old man Booker, the full moon shone in a clear morning sky. A good sign, I thought. At an elevation of one thousand feet above sea level, the chance of hitting water was remote, and we needed all the luck we could find. It was our second spring on the farm. All along the curved ridge, the redbud and dogwood were blooming and the hills beyond were dotted with white wild-cherry blossoms.

  Mr. Booker, a water witch recommended by Sadie, was known to be reliable and cheap. Our commune was divided in faith. The men were doubtful, but we women thought, Why not? Surely a specialist, no matter how bizarre, would be more successful in discovering water than we would.

  Booker, wearing clean black pants pulled up too high, suspenders, and a white button-down shirt, climbs out of the truck, surveys the scene, and then, without a word, begins to stroll back and forth along the open ridge, his divining rod pointing out from his chest.

  Some divining rods are made of metal, even bent coat hangers, but Zebidiah Booker’s is a forked peach tree branch. Back and forth he marches in the heat through the tall yellow grass, back and forth, without a break, his thin face a mask. Twelve of us silent hippies, varying in our optimism, trail behind. We look like the twelve apostles.

  For three hours Booker trolls, and then halts abruptly. We all stop with him. Twenty yards from the barn, which was then our kitchen and community center, the forked stick trembles and points straight to the ground.

  “Here,” Zeb grunts, his first crusty words since Randall introduced him. “You’ll have to bore deep.” And he was right. The drilling machine we hired, two weeks later, hit good, clean, cold water at seventy-five feet.

  I pick up the five-gallon buckets and trudge on, thinking, This is ridiculous! We’ve got to save money to have another well drilled closer to the cabins. At the top of the rise, just before the path turns downhill, I set down my buckets and rest one more time. Before me, the well-worn dirt path leads through the forest, past Stacy and Laurel’s Little House and down another narrower wooded ridge to the Long House. Turning, I stare back down into the valley. The sun is just coming over the trees. I hold my arms wide again, palms outward, saluting the morning, saluting those who bear water, saluting the silent, empty sky.

  Trillium Stone

  Tom pulls me closer and adjusts the quilt over our shoulders.

  We’re lying naked under the outcrop of sandstone that is our special place, a tiny open cave, down in the woods where the trillium flowers bloom in the spring. Actually they bloom in forests everywhere from Minnesota to Georgia, but here among the rocks you can find them in profusion, large, single, white or occasionally purple-tinted, trumpets. Mara is watching the baby and this is Mica’s week to stay with Stacy and Laurel. He has a bed and toys in both houses.

  There won’t be many more days of Indian summer in which we can escape to make love outside. Fall equinox has come and gone without celebration. Trillium Stone, that’s what we call this hideout. Tom gets the joke. “Trillium Stone” was my pen name when I wrote for The Wild Currents.

 
“Hey look.” A fuzzy black caterpillar crawls up Tom’s wrist. “Sadie Shoepeck says it will be a hard winter. You can tell by the length of the black stripe on the woolly. See here?” He places the two-inch-long black and brown fuzzy larva in my hand. “The bigger the dark area, the colder the season. This one’s half black in the midsection. Sadie says we can mark her word, a bad winter coming!”

  I let the little caterpillar go into the fallen leaves and snuggle against his body. I’ve had other lovers, beautiful and exciting men, but this one makes me so happy.

  As a young woman I never thought about marriage, except in a negative way, a constraint of the government or a rocky path to divorce. I never aspired to be anyone’s wife.

  Tom and I had been sleeping together for months when he asked me in a conversational way, “Want to be married?”

  “No.” I responded. “Why spoil a good thing?”

  He continued for six months to ask me again every few weeks. “Want to be married?” The answer was always the same.

  And then one day, in the Butterfly Tent, a sloping canvas arrangement on a wooden platform in a field filled with orange butterfly flowers, he asked again.

  The poor guy was sick with back pain and fever, probably a kidney infection or maybe a kidney stone. His face was pale and sweaty, the opposite of sexy, kind of pitiful, really. I was putting warm compresses on his back and giving him willow bark tea for the pain. No kneeling in front of me with a diamond ring, just his usual persistent query: “Want to be married?” As sick as he was, his green eyes still twinkled.

  “OK.” I shrugged. And that was it. No big political shift. No spiritual transformation. It just seemed right.

  The next day, at dawn, after Tom’s fever broke and he was his old self again, we lay on our stomachs looking out through the tent’s mosquito netting at the bright orange flowers and I whispered, “Are we really married?”

  “Yep.”

  “Forever?”

  He placed his forehead against mine as a pledge. “Always.”

  ORION

  Tom and I were together for two years before we decided to have a baby. We miscarried the first one; I didn’t really know it was a girl, but I called her Rainbow. The next one, Orion, stayed with us.

  I was two weeks overdue when I went into labor and noticed discharge in my underpants.

  Bloody show, I thought—a possible sign of early labor. Word spread on the commune. When the contractions started, everyone kept coming by the Little House to check on me. Stacy, knowing how goal-centered I could get, reminded me with a hug, “Pay attention, not to the clock, but to the goodness of the time.”

  Finally, Tom and I are alone. We’ve already fixed up the upstairs of the Little House with all our supplies and Laurel has made up our bed with sterile sheets, so to pass the time we go out on the ridge. The first star appears in the western sky and it gives me courage.

  You can do it, the tiny light says. You can do it. Tom holds my hand and puts his forehead on mine.

  “These contractions are getting hard! Let’s move,” I tell him. Out along the ridge we march, back and forth, singing John Philip Sousa marching band tunes at the top of our lungs. At the well, we laugh and scream as we pour cold water over each other’s heads.

  By midnight, back in the cabin, the contractions are every three minutes. I hold on to Tom and sway in the candlelight. There’s nothing outside our room, just him and me and the baby . . . and our portable radio. The music helps. When the channels begin to go off, I frantically demand he search for another one.

  I’m staring in Tom’s eyes, but I’m looking right through him. He wants to turn me on, rub my breasts like in Spiritual Midwifery, but it doesn’t feel right and I get snappy.

  “Cut it out!”

  At 3:30 a.m. he checks my cervix and thinks I’m five centimeters, but if I’d been my own midwife, I would have recognized that earlier note of frustration and anger. Transition.

  “Let’s go see the star again,” I command with a note of desperation.

  Tom’s caught in the riptide now, doing what he can to keep our heads above water. He follows me out into the dark and up to the ridge but the evening star is below the horizon. I’m on my own.

  “Let the baby be born,” I chant as we march back and forth. “Let the baby be born,” Tom chants with me.

  Then Laurel comes and we’re back in the cabin. “Look at me,” she commands, and I focus. I hold on to Tom, grip his back, swaying like a woman in a hurricane tied to a palm tree.

  Then, all of a sudden, “Uggghhhhh!” like something primeval.

  “Urge to push,” I tell Tom, suddenly myself again and all business.

  “Blow! Blow!” Laurel gets in my face.

  I put my hand inside of me. “The baby’s right there!”

  “Blow! Blow!” Laurel instructs, but I’m already pushing, slowly at first, like a freight train getting started. When I open my eyes at the end of a contraction, Benny and Mara have appeared and Rachel and Dolly, our midwife friend from Chicago, who we invited just in case we needed her. Stacy sits on the end of the bed holding Mica, whose eyes are like saucers.

  “Keep up the good work, buddy.” That’s Tom as he kneels between my legs and massages my perineum. “You’re almost crowning now.”

  “Ow! Ow!” I complain. “Did you use enough olive oil? Let it come out between contractions, so I won’t tear.” Between pushes, I’m shouting directions.

  “Hi, Mica,” I say once, not wanting my little boy to think I’m totally gone.

  And then the head is out and the body, still and gray.

  “Oh, breathe, baby. Breathe,” I whisper. Orion moves his little face and lets out a wail and I know he’s OK. Soon he’s in my arms, rosy pink. Tom comes up on the bed with me, his face covered with tears. I ask Mica what he thought of the birth and his words knock me over.

  “It is like you were fighting for your life, only it wasn’t your life. It was the baby’s.”

  Laurel stands back with Stacy. She’s crying, too. We are all crying together, every face in the room radiant with light. It’s a still, eternal time, a point of God.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gathering

  “Hey. We need some help down here!”

  Tom, Mica, and I are in town, taking our turns at the collectively owned Growing Tree Food Co-op, which we purchased from the previous hippie owner, Ira, when he wanted to move back to Syracuse. We bought the stock, took over the lease, and paid for the first month’s rent with five hundred bucks, raised from a handful of communes and hippie households.

  I’m on my hands and knees in the funky, canary yellow bathroom, scrubbing the floor, when the call from outside, down on the street, interrupts my reflections.

  “Hey. We need some help down here!” When I stand to peek out the high window, I see Montana, one of the bearded co-op regulars, standing out on the sidewalk next to a big van from the Natural Food Warehouse in Columbus. He’s wearing jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a leather jacket. A leather cord ties back his long hair.

  “The truck’s here!” Montana yells again, unsure if anyone’s heard.

  Tom, with Orion on his back in the baby carrier, Mica, and I, with the rest of the customers, thump down the stairs to the sidewalk, then, like a fire brigade, hand sacks of flour, bags of sunflower seeds, buckets of peanut butter, and five-gallon containers of olive oil up the steps to the shop.

  At six, we turn out the lights, lock the bright green door, and go out into the dusk, to the Roane County Library a block away. The community room, downstairs, smells of vanilla, garlic, and curry. Seven-year-old Mica and I make big eyes at each other, but it’s not time to eat yet and women immediately surround me with babies, many of whom I’ve delivered.

  “No, you don’t,” I laugh as a chubby cherub reaches for my be
ar-tooth amulet and tries to put it in his mouth. His mom takes him back. Then Starlight, Montana’s woman, hands me nine-month-old Willow. The golden-haired baby slobbers down my peasant blouse. Her mom’s got her dressed up for the party in a blue flowered pinafore. Orion sits on Tom’s shoulders, surrounded by a herd of men in jeans and coveralls. Mica scurries under a table accompanied by a flock of shaggy-haired children.

  Everyone on the commune has come down from the ridge tonight for this semiannual co-op meeting. Compared to the Armadillo Commune, Circle of the Sun, or the Mudd Farm, we are, with only nine remaining members, a small intentional community, but we are weighty. Our commitment to social change, the amount of work we’ve done organizing the co-op, and the verbal ability of our members, give us import. When the official meeting and discussion of what foods to order is finished, Stacy, Laurel, and Starlight bring out the dinner.

  At the far end of the table are bubbling casseroles and big pots of steaming white beans and pintos. Next come the salads and buttery golden cornbread, followed by apple pie, pumpkin pie, and Rachel’s gingerbread. Glowing mason jars of homegrown sweet cucumber pickles and pickled beets grace the tables. A pint of our golden honey sits proudly by Tom’s home-baked whole-wheat bread. It’s a real old-time harvest celebration.

  Before we can eat, Montana, compact and blond, the kind of guy who would probably be a Stanford University student president if he weren’t a hippie homesteader, asks all of us to hold hands. Without hesitation we reach for each other. Everyone goes quiet as we stand in a circle, close our eyes, and put our love out to the universe. Then Benny, always quick with a joke, breaks the moment. “Rub-a-dub-dub! Thanks for the grub,” and the crowd erupts in laughter.

  We eat for an hour, go back for seconds, and when every man, woman, and child is full, Montana, Starlight, and Laurel start the singing. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. I will never forget you. I will never forsake you. Listen, listen, listen . . . A banjo and two guitars appear and we move from Sufi songs, to spirituals, to bluegrass, to folk . . .