“Yes.”
“What year?”
“Nineteen twenty, I think. Here in the States, anyway.”
“Oh goodness, it took that long, did it? I have so many questions. Is she going back? Are you going back?” She looked at me with a desolate face, handing me something folded up in a cloth napkin. “I brought you a treat. A bribe, really, to induce you to stay. Some of Elisabetta’s almond sponge cake.”
I opened the napkin. A square of golden cake was nestled into the cloth. “No inducing necessary,” I said. “I’m staying.”
I was still far from convinced it was 1906, but I wasn’t leaving without looking around a bit more.
“For the day,” clarified Martha.
“Goody!” said Fancy, clapping her hands. “There’s so much we have to talk about.”
Suddenly I was aware of how bad I must look. My shirt was smeared with mud. I smelled of Wilbur, of barnyard. I tried to smooth my hair down, untangle it with my fingers, but it was hopeless.
“You’ll want to clean up,” said Martha.
“I’d love a quick shower,” I confessed.
Martha filled two large pots with water and put them on the woodstove. “Fancy, help me with the tub. It’s in the scullery.”
The two women carried a tin tub into the kitchen. There was no such thing as a quick shower here.
“I didn’t mean for you to go to all that trouble. I’ll just wash up at the sink. Or in the bedroom,” I said, remembering the basin and pitcher.
“Nonsense,” said Martha.
She emanated calm. She was a woman who dealt with the facts. I was here. I was dirty. I needed a proper bath.
“Your clothes will have to be washed. Get her something to wear in the meantime, Fancy,” said Martha.
“You mean like a corset?” Was Martha wearing one right now? Her waist was tiny.
“I don’t wear corsets and neither should you, Lux,” said Fancy. “Constricts the lungs and the liver. Death traps. I believe in a more natural look.”
The conversation had taken a disturbingly intimate turn.
“You may find me in the parlor when you’re done,” said Joseph, disappearing.
“There is nothing natural about your look, Fancy,” said Martha.
Fancy’s brightly colored silks were definitely not the norm, but I appreciated them.
“It’s the latest style, I’ll have you know. From Shanghai,” she sniffed.
Once the water was hot, Martha poured the contents of the two pots into the tub, retrieved a towel and a cake of soap, and handed them to me.
“Martha makes the most brilliant soaps,” said Fancy.
I smelled the soap. Lavender.
Martha abruptly left the room without speaking. Had I done something wrong?
“Don’t take it personally. She’s not good with hellos and goodbyes,” said Fancy. “We are going to be friends, I just know it.” She smiled. “Would you like to know a little about me? I’m sure you’re very curious.”
She gazed at me expectantly.
“Of course,” I said.
“Well, I’ve never been married. I’ve come close. I was engaged to Albert Alderson, but I called it off at the last minute, and do you want to know why? He had horrible breath, like blue cheese. Edward, my father, was so angry. He said, ‘You’re calling off a marriage because of halitosis? Give the poor man a mint! Or breathe through your mouth.’ Yes, Father dear, I’ll breathe through my mouth for the next fifty years. Ah, poor Edward. I’m afraid both his children gravely disappointed him. Are you married, Lux?”
I hesitated. “Yes,” I lied. If she really was from an earlier era, I didn’t want to put her off.
“Really, you lucky girl! There’s nobody interesting here. What’s your husband’s name? Tell me all about him.” She leaned forward, her eyes bright.
“Oh. Well, I sort of misspoke. I was married, but I’m not anymore.”
Her face fell. I could tell what she was thinking. Was I a divorcée? To her, that was probably even worse than having a child out of wedlock.
“I’m a widow. I have been for a while. He, my husband, died years ago.”
Who knows? Maybe Nelson and I would have gotten married if he’d lived. It was another lie, but it wasn’t that much of a stretch.
“Oh, Lux, how awful.”
“It’s okay, we don’t have to talk about it.”
“I’m so sorry. How rude of me to interrogate you like this when we’ve only just met.” She stood. “I’ll go upstairs and gather up some clothes. You have a lovely, long soak.”
—
I didn’t have time for baths at home. Something about the experience made me feel like a child. I trailed my hands through the warm, soapy water and took inventory of the room. Pots of herbs lined the windowsill: chives, tarragon, and mint. On the shelves, stacks of simple white crockery. On the wooden table, bowls piled high with fruit and vegetables: peaches, plums, a basket of corn. It was so perfect—I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was on a movie set.
My mother once told me impossibility was a circle. You started at the top and immediately fell, plunging down the curve, all the while saying to yourself, This can’t be. Then you reached the hollow at the bottom. The dip. A dangerous place. You could lose yourself. Stay there forever, devoid of hope, of wonder. Or you could sit in that dip, kick your legs out and pump. Swing yourself clear up the other side of the curve to the tippy-top of the circle, where impossibility and possibility met, where for one shining moment they became the same thing. I pointed my toes underwater in the tub and gave a kick, so small it barely disturbed the surface of the water.
When had I grown so cautious?
—
The clothes were surprisingly comfortable. A pale blue blouse, velvety soft from being laundered so many times, and an oatmeal-colored cotton skirt, loose enough that it didn’t bind at the waist. I felt strangely liberated wearing the outfit, grateful to leave my jeans behind. Fancy had given me a tortoiseshell clip, but I had no idea how to use it to pin my hair back. Instead I braided it loosely and bound the end with a bit of twine I found on the counter.
Finally I made my way to the parlor, where I found Joseph sitting in a leather chair, his eyes closed, listening to opera on a gramophone. An Italian soprano keening in a minor key.
The room felt intimate and cozy. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A piano and a large mahogany desk that was covered with letters, papers, a microscope, sheet music, and—was that an ostrich egg? The air smelled pleasantly of candle wax and tobacco.
“All freshened up?” he said.
How long had he been watching me?
“It’s a beautiful room. Inspiring.”
“Inspiring? How?”
“I don’t know. It just makes you want to do things. Discover things. Get out into the world.”
“Ah,” he said.
I was tongue-tied, seemingly incapable of saying anything intelligent while still occupied with casting about for an explanation. I needed to find some sort of strategy to calm my mind. I decided I would act as if this was really 1906, without truly accepting it. In that duality I was able to move forward.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You look—” He trailed off, as if he thought better of what he was about to say.
“Shell-shocked?” I offered.
He nodded. “You find this impossible to believe.”
“Well—yes,” I admitted.
He sat erect in his chair. “How can I help?”
How can I help? Had anybody ever asked me that? He had such a calm, steady presence about him. His gaze didn’t flit away from mine. He looked directly into my eyes without blinking. I was hanging on a rock face, searching desperately for my next handhold. He was offering to throw a rope up to me, to be my belayer.
“You’re not lying, are you?”
“I don’t lie,” he said.
“You really believe it’s 1
906.”
“It’s 1906, Lux.”
“Do you believe I’m from 1975?”
“I must confess I’m struggling a bit with that.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“No. I think you believe it’s 1975.”
“Then you think I’m crazy.”
He hesitated and then said, “It has crossed my mind.”
“So we’re both thinking the same thing. That the other is a lunatic.”
I don’t know who began laughing first, but the laughter was contagious. I stood ten feet away from him, but that distance closed rapidly, our communal astonishment at the madness of our situation serving as a bridge, connecting us to one another.
Finally he stood. “I think a tour of Greengage is in order.”
“You want to give me proof that this place is really what you say it is.”
“Proof and a chance to show the farm off.”
“You’re the one in charge? The owner?” I suspected he was—everybody looked to him.
“I bought the original parcel of land, but as far as I’m concerned we all own Greengage Farm equally.”
“Greengage? Oh, because of the plums? You must grow them. I love greengage jam.”
“We don’t grow greengage plums. They are notoriously hard to grow.”
“Then why did you name the farm Greengage?”
He frowned ever so slightly. “Would you like a tour?”
“Sorry. Yes, please,” I said. Stop asking so many questions, Lux.
—
As we walked, Joseph explained to me what he’d set out to do, what kind of a community he’d envisioned: a residential farm where all jobs were equally valued and all jobs, whether done by men or women, paid out the same wage.
“Women still don’t get paid as much as men,” I said.
I watched his reaction carefully. Would he be surprised to hear that fact? He didn’t seem to be.
“You were quite forward-thinking for your time, then,” I said. “A real feminist.”
“A feminist?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Somebody who supports women’s rights.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course.”
Unless he was a brilliant actor, he’d never heard the word feminist. You couldn’t open a newspaper or magazine in 1975 without reading an article about feminists protesting some inequity or another.
Despite my skepticism, my heart lifted. What he was describing was a truly egalitarian society. I was in the presence of an honest-to-God idealist. I wanted to share with him that I was an idealist, too, but the idealist in me had been driven underground. Buried by the past five years of a shitty, low-paying job, and my inability to figure out how to better my and Benno’s lives.
Please let him be real. Please let this place be true, a little voice inside me said.
It was August and the fields were high with corn. In the orchard the last of the peaches clung to their branches and the apples were showing their first pinkish blush. The vegetable garden overflowed with produce: peppers, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. It was the farm’s busiest season, he explained.
There were people hard at work everywhere. Some ignored me when he brought me by; others stared boldly. I didn’t sense unfriendliness, more of a stunned curiosity. Would I help them? Would I hurt them? I tried to appear as unthreatening as possible. I said hello whenever I caught somebody’s eye; still, I knew they were relieved when I moved on. I felt like a voyeur. Perhaps they felt like an exhibition.
“How do you decide where to put people to work?” I asked.
An elderly man picked corn. For every ear of corn he put in the basket, the woman beside him picked a dozen. It obviously wasn’t an easy task for him.
“I don’t decide, they decide,” Joseph said. “If they want to be on the garden crew, they’re on the garden crew. If they want to be on the animal crew, they’re on the animal crew.”
“But what if everybody wants to be on the animal crew and nobody wants to be on the garden crew?”
“That’s never been the case. The numbers always work out.”
“But what if somebody isn’t suited for the particular kind of work they want to do?”
“There’s always some way they can contribute. If you tell a man he’s useless, he becomes useless.”
Yes. And if you tell a woman she’s only good enough to clean up people’s dirty plates, she’ll always be cleaning up people’s dirty plates, I thought.
“How many crews are there?” I asked.
“Garden, fields, orchard, brambles, animals, building, medical, domestic, kitchen, winery, and school,” he rattled off. “There’s also the herb garden, but that is Martha’s domain—she works alone.”
“Brambles?”
“Blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, too, even though they’re not technically a bramble. The bramble crew is mostly children, who end up eating practically everything they harvest. But it’s a fine first job for them. They have to learn how to pick around the thorns.”
“How many people live here?”
“Two hundred and seventy-eight: 55 children, 223 adults.”
“And you can produce enough food to feed you all?”
“More than enough. In fact, since the fog, we’ve let some fields and gardens go fallow.”
He led me into a large two-story building. “This is the workshop, the building crew’s home base, although most of them are out on the grounds this time of day.”
The workshop was cavernous. Tucked into the corner was a blacksmith station. Every kind of tool imaginable was neatly hung or stacked against the back wall. There was even a horse mill.
Maybe Greengage was a living-history museum, like Old Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg, where the employees were paid to dress up and stay in character no matter what.
A man sanded a plank at one of the tables. It looked like he was putting together a tiny house.
“Magnusson!” Joseph called out.
The man stalked across the workshop floor. He was an intimidating figure; he towered over Joseph. His hair was white-blond, his eyes cornflower blue.
He stared at me, clicking his massive jaw.
“For God’s sake, don’t be a cretin. Be polite and say hello,” said Joseph.
“Hello,” he grunted.
“What are you building? A house for elves?” I said nervously.
Magnusson rolled his eyes.
“A privy,” said Joseph.
A privy. Right. No flush toilets here.
“Sorry,” I said, then cringed. Act normal, Lux; they’re just people. I was surprised how badly I wanted them all to like me.
“What do you mill?” I asked.
Magnusson walked away without a word, done with me and my ridiculous questions.
“Grain,” answered Joseph. “Oats. Wheat and corn.”
“Oh,” I said in a small voice. “I’m sorry. I live in San Francisco. I don’t know how you do things on a farm.”
“That’s fine. I love talking about what we do.” He led me out of the workshop.
“I’m afraid I made a bad impression on your friend.”
“Magnusson is a Swede,” he said, as if that explained everything.
We walked past pretty little cottages and two dormitories. On our way to the schoolhouse, Joseph told me they didn’t keep to a regular school year. When the children were needed to help with a harvest, school let out. When the community work was done, school was back in session again.
The schoolhouse was empty today. Written on the chalkboard was a Walt Whitman quote.
Now I see the secret of making the best persons: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Sun streamed through the windows and birdsong filled the air. How I would love for Benno to go to school in a room like this. How I would have loved to have gone to a school like this. Against my better judgment, my spirits soared.
“Whitman is Martha’s patron sa
int,” Joseph said.
“Did you and Martha meet here on the farm?”
“We met at a lecture on cross-pollination methods for corn.”
Was he serious? He didn’t crack a smile. Yes, apparently he was serious.
“Is she from California?”
“She’s from Topeka, Kansas. A farmer’s daughter.”
He told me how Martha had been raised by her Scottish grandmother, a feisty old woman who ate bacon sandwiches, befriended the Kiowa, rode bareback, and practiced herbal medicine, as had her mother, and her mother before her. It was this grandmother who made sure Martha knew her digitalis from her purple coneflower, this grandmother who transformed her into a gifted herbalist.
“Martha’s a midwife as well,” he said.
“Wow. So she takes care of everybody?” Two-hundred-something people? That was a lot of responsibility.
“We have a physician here, too. Dr. Kilgallon, better known as Friar. They have an agreement. If it bleeds or is broken, it goes to Friar. Everything else goes to Martha.”
“So she treats people with what—tinctures?” I’d seen the row of tinctures at the co-op. I’d always been intrigued, but I was doubtful they’d work as well as Tums or Tylenol.
“Not just tinctures. She makes eye sponges and wine cordials, fever pastes, catarrh snuffs, blister treatments. But more often than not, her prescription is simple. Chop wood. Eat a beefsteak. Kiss your children,” he said.
“That works?”
“You’d be surprised. Never underestimate the power of having somebody pay attention to you.”
I wanted a Martha in my life.
—
He took me to the wine cave. Past the hay shed and the chicken coop, the sheep barn and the horse barn. We climbed into the hills and he proudly showed me one of the four springhouses on the property. Then he proceeded to give me a long lecture on gravity-propelled irrigation systems while we gazed down upon the farm, which was set in the bowl of the valley, a verdant paradise.
I was enchanted. My chest ached with longing. There was something here that was familiar, that I’d been missing but I hadn’t had any idea I’d been missing until this man had shown it to me.
“Well, if you have to be trapped, this is the place you’d want to be,” I said.
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