by Lisa Alther
‘Jesus,’ Mona sighed, sinking lower in her chair and sticking her feet out straight. ‘I’m really getting off on that grinding. It’s enough to totally bliss me out.’
After a few more minutes, having finally satisfied herself as to the sharpness of her blade, Atheliah oiled it and sheathed it in a tan leather case, for all the world like a mother bathing and oiling and dressing a well-loved baby.
‘Thanks for taking us in,’ Atheliah said.
‘It feels good having you here,’ Eddie said. ‘And we could use a couple more backs on the land.’
I laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ Eddie asked affectionately.
‘It’s just that I haven’t been referred to as a “back” since my football days. A brain, a cunt, a piece of ass. But never a back. It’s refreshing, to say the least.’
The next morning Atheliah showed us how to fell trees. There had been a small supply of firewood on the front porch when we arrived, but it had almost all been used for cooking. Now that autumn was upon us, we needed wood for heat. It unsettled both Eddie and me that we hadn’t realized this fact until recently — that we had taken heat for granted, as something supplied automatically by one’s landlord. Luckily, we now had two extra backs.’
Dressed in a red plaid lumberjack shirt and olive army fatigue pants and green rubber boots, Atheliah nicked the ax blade with her thumb to test it, as though she hadn’t spent an hour the previous evening honing it to razor sharpness. She planted her legs firmly and raised her treasured ax in both hands high over one shoulder like a baseball bat. Her frozen breath encircled her Medusa-esque head of red hair like an aura. Then she brought the ax down diagonally on a birch trunk. Working the ax back and forth, she withdrew it from the trunk and swung again. A large triangular chunk of white barked wood flew out. Half a dozen carefully positioned strokes later, the trunk was cut halfway through. Then she shifted to the other side of the tree and whacked out a chunk slightly higher than the original cut. The tree listed slowly. Atheliah threw her shoulder against it, and it came crashing down.
‘Where did you learn that?’ Eddie asked in awe.
‘I used to be a Curved Bar Girl Scout back in Ohio,’ Atheliah admitted.
‘Far out,’ Eddie said.
Mona took the ax and began deftly trimming off branches. Her chopping technique was less dramatic than Atheliah’s, but was equally effective; she chopped with short quick strokes, her back hunched, throwing up a shower of tiny wood chips. When the flurry of chips settled, the log was cut to order.
A pattern developed at the Free Farm, as we had come to call the place. Every morning when we got up, I would cook breakfast. Then as I did the dishes, Eddie and Atheliah and Mona would hitch up the workhorses we had bought and would go up the hill to the woodlot. We soon had nearly enough wood for the winter, but the others wanted to fill the wood bin at the sugar shack now so that everything would be ready for sugaring in late February. While they were up the hill, I stayed at the cabin and cleaned. I also spun and dyed wool and used it to crochet rainbow curtains for our bare windows. I felt like Snow White, the others of course being the dwarfs.
And by the time I heard the clanking of the horses’ harnesses coming down the hill, I would have a hearty lunch ready -soybean fritters or sprouted soybean sukiyaki or soy grits pilaf. Each noon we four would sit at our groaning board as I’d serve up a new culinary delight. Everyone would take a cautious bite, wait for a moment, and then Eddie would say, “Well! This is certainly delicious, Ginny.’
‘Delicious,’ the other two would echo.
‘And so much roughage,’ one would add.
One morning as I sat crocheting the violet band of my fifth rainbow curtain, there was a knock at the door. I was startled because I hadn’t heard any car or truck arrive. When I opened the door, there was Laverne, a knapsack on her back and a duffel bag in her hand, looking luscious in faded bib overalls and a flannel shirt, with her curly blond hair waving around her fresh face.
‘Hi, Ginny.’
‘What do you want?’ I asked, trying to sound disapproving.
‘To move in with you all.’
“You’re kidding? What’s wrong? Did your boyfriends kick you out?’
‘I’m through with men forever! I’ve had it with them!’
I looked at her suspiciously, but stood aside and let her enter. She dumped her gear on the floor and looked around. I was proud of the place, which was a model of cleanliness compared to the disaster area she had just fled from.
‘I don’t know, Laverne. I don’t know if you can stay or not. You’ll have to see what the others say. They’ll be back for lunch soon.’
‘I know they don’t care for my sexual proclivities.’ She had a habit of wetting her lower lip with her tongue and then slowly rubbing the lip with her middle finger.
‘That’s putting it mildly.’
‘But that’s over. I’ve reformed. I never want another man again as long as I live.’
Just then the others entered, clomping across my clean floor in their muddy boots. ‘Take off your boots!’ I shrieked, like a housewife on a daytime TV commercial.
They all bent over to remove their boots, but one by one they became aware of Laverne’s presence.
Finally Eddie said, ‘Well, well. If it isn’t the Wife of Bath. To what do we owe the pleasure of your lascivious presence in our chaste abode?’
Laverne giggled nervously.
‘She wants to move in,’ I explained.
‘Here?’ the three asked simultaneously.
‘I never want to see another man.’
‘He can do whatever he wants to with you just so long as you don’t have to see him?’ Eddie inquired.
“Honestly. I’m through with men. They’re just one disappointment after another. Their readiness and their stamina are just so unreliable. Believe me, I just want to be left alone with my vibrator.’
We all laughed at this, yet another example of job obsolescence, men being replaced by their machines. Then we stopped laughing as we sat down to curried soybean cutlets.
The time had come, we decided, to involve ourselves with The People. We had kept to ourselves for too long, allowing a mythology to spring up among the Stark’s Boggers: The Soybean People were Communists, lesbians, draft dodgers, atheists, food stamp recipients. Our seclusion had been necessary to get the Free Farmlet going. But now the sparse stunted produce from our overgrown garden was in jars and trays of sand in the musty dirt cellar. Wood for the cabin and for the sugar shack was cut and split and stacked. It was time to descend into Stark’s Bog and mix and mingle with the folk with whom we had cast our lot. It was time to win over their heads and their hearts to The Revolution!
Our first gesture of solidarity was to attend the local blood drawing, which was being held at the grammar school. It was here that I first saw Ira face to face. I’m sure I must have seen him earlier — he being one of the active young businessmen about town, president of the Stark’s Bog Volunteer Fire Department, veteran square dancer with the Wheelers ‘n’ Reelers, and member of the Stark’s Bog Cemetery Commission. But it is from the blood drawing that I retain my first clear picture of him.
The five of us walked into the school gym en masse, identical in our plaid wool lumberjack shirts and khaki army fatigue pants and green rubber boots. A hush fell over the large room as we gave our names to the kindly gray-haired lady behind the table. We sat side by side in folding chairs, waiting to be called for medical histories by a white-starched volunteer nurse. Part of the gym was occupied by wooden pallets on wheels with plastic bags strapped to their sides. Tubes led from the bags and into the arms of the supine Stark’s Boggers. In one corner was a refreshment area, where the survivors stood chatting and munching doughnuts. I recognized the bag boy from the IGA, the owner of the feed store, a farmer down the road from us, a couple of other familiar faces. It gave me a great feeling of kinship to know that my plastic bag would nestle in the blood bank next to t
heirs. We were all in this business of life together.
One by one we were called for a conference with the nurse. Eventually, we lay on the tables, donating our life’s blood for the well-being of our community — blood that would go into the veins of Vermont farmers who had had tractor accidents, Vermont women hemorrhaging during childbirth, Vermont children cut by their sled runners. We felt very good about the whole thing. Afterwards we mingled with our neighbors, endlessly exchanging such profundities as ‘Cold enough for you?’ and ‘Looks like snow clouds blowing in from the north.’ After doughnuts and Coke, we headed for the door.
There, handing out small red plastic hearts, was Ira Bliss IV, Missouri Mutual Insurance agent and owner of Sno Cat City. He looked like Victor Mature in The Robe, with high cheekbones and a firm mouth with full lips and wide dark alarmed eyes with bushy eyebrows that gave him a perpetually startled expression. His dark wavy hair hung so as partially to conceal a high forehead. His forehead and cheeks were ruddy and gleamed with sweat, making him look as though he’d just come up from some enforced rowing in the galley of a Roman ship. He wore a red soft-collared sports shirt, too tight, so that his biceps and chest muscles rippled the shirt when he moved. Three buttons were undone, and shocks of black curly chest hair peeked out. He stood just inside the doorway, his nostrils flaring like a racehorse’s. In retrospect, I could swear that he and I exchanged lingering stares fraught with meaning. At the time, though, I merely stood still and allowed him to pin the plastic heart to the collar of my lumberjack shirt, like a young man’s pinning a corsage on his date.
When he had pinned the hearts on all five of us, he nodded and said, ‘Thank you, girls, for helping out our boys in Vietnam.’
In unison we did a double take. ‘Is that what happens to it?’ Eddie asked. ‘I thought it was for the blood bank that serves our area.’
‘Usually it is,’ he said with a pleasant smile. “But today is a special drawing for American troops.’
Eddie blanched and clutched my arm all the way back to the truck. We rode to the cabin in politically uncomfortable silence, and not entirely because of Ira’s patriarchal faux pas in referring to us women as ‘girls.’
The next time I saw Ira was under considerably less friendly circumstances, in our birth control information center on Main Street. Our personal finances had started rankling: We had continued to send checks to underground theater groups and countercultural coffee houses in Boston. But, not being there to survey their operations, Eddie had become uneasy. She insisted that a drug rehabilitation center we were helping was a front for FBI infiltration of radical policies. So we abruptly cut them off. Besides, we wanted to brighten our own immediate corner. Each time we had ventured into town for supplies, we had seen women our own age, grossly overweight with no teeth and greasy hair, being dragged in four directions at once by as many small children. These women were our sisters. They merited our help more than a bunch of storefront rip-offs in Boston.
And so we had rented a vacant shop. We furnished it with castoffs and stocked it with free literature on family management from Planned Parenthood. We put a sign out front that euphemistically read ‘Family Planning Center.’ One of us was there at all times during working hours, prepared to discuss birth control devices and to refer women to the local doctor to acquire one. We also planned to refer women under the table to sympathetic doctors in Montreal for illegal abortions and to lobby at the statehouse in Montpelier to liberalize the state abortion laws.
All of us did these things except Mona, who explained one night, ‘Kill yourself first, but don’t have an abortion. Not if the father is a man you love, or have loved. It’s like ripping off one of your own limbs and stomping on it.’
‘Sometimes you have to sacrifice a limb for the well-being of the tree,’ Eddie replied curtly.
After ten days, we had had two clients. The first was a frail young woman with darting eyes. She sneaked through the door, glancing nervously up and down the street to be sure she wasn’t being observed by her friends and neighbors.
‘May I help you?’ I inquired cordially, as she stood squirming in front of the desk.
‘I -1 want to do it,’ she stuttered, blushing.
‘Yes, certainly,’ I said, assuming that she was a young virgin about to embark upon the treacherous sea of sexuality, a high school girl perhaps whose illegitimate pregnancy I would prevent. ‘Won’t you have a seat?’
She perched tentatively, prepared to flee.
‘Now!’ I began, searching for tactful terminology. ‘Your — partner, have you known him long?’
She looked at me strangely. ‘Well, yes. I mean, we been married four years, but nothing happens.’
I pondered this revelation carefully. ‘You mean you — uh…’ I broke into a sweat.
The girl’s eyes whirled in their sockets with stress.
‘I’m not sure I understand. You’re been married four years, you say. But you’ve never — ah — done it?’ When in doubt, resort to the client’s phraseology.
‘Done what?’
‘Well, you know.’ I had used the verb ‘to fuck’ for so long that I couldn’t remember its socially acceptable synonym. ‘It.’
‘It?’
‘Well, when you came in, you said you wanted to “do it.”’
‘Yes. Plan my family,’ she mumbled. ‘It said on the sign “Family Planning Center.” Is this the wrong place?’
‘No, no,’ I assured her hastily. ‘Yes, that’s what we do here all right — plan families. Now, all right, yes. Four years you’ve been married, you say? Yes, so what have you been — using, as it were?’
‘Using? Using for what?’
‘For family planning.’
She stared at me with consternation. ‘Well, you know, the same as what everyone else uses.’
I realized that I wasn’t as up on the contraceptive folkways of Vermont as I should have been. ‘What’s that — condoms or a diaphragm or what?’
She looked at me blankly. ‘I thought you didn’t use none of that stuff when you’re trying to have a family?’
‘No, but I thought you were trying not to?’
‘I said I come in here because the sign said “Family Planning Center.” I been trying to have a family for four years now and nothing happens.’
I looked at her, horrified. ‘You mean you want to get pregnant?’
‘Thank you all the same, ma’am,’ she whispered, sidling toward the door and bolting out.
Our second client had been handled by Eddie with somewhat more finesse. She was a high school girl, premaritally pregnant. The father of the child was desperate to marry her, according to her. But she wanted nothing to do with him. Eddie made arrangements with a doctor in Montreal and lent her some dividend money. She wrote Eddie the next week saying that the operation had gone well, that she had gotten a work permit and found a waitressing job, that she intended to stay in Montreal, and she was very happy and very grateful.
Soon afterwards, Ira came storming into the clinic, his nostrils flaring and his forehead glistening with sweat. With him was a short stout man in green work clothes who slammed the glass door with a shuddering crash.
I looked up from a pamphlet on breast self-examination, which had just convinced me that I was dying of breast cancer. Recognizing Ira, I smiled. After all, we were fellow volunteers to the cause of alleviating human suffering, never mind if that suffering was self-inflicted in the case of the blood drawing for troops in Vietnam.
‘May I help you?’
‘Yes, you can!’ Ira’s fat friend growled. ‘Get the hell out of this town and take your goddam bull-dyke friends with you!’
I stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I was going to marry that girl!’ he informed me, his voice quivering.
‘What girl?’
‘That girl you and your lesbo friends sent up to Montreal to be butchered!’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to marry you.’
‘
Of course she didn’t,’ he growled. ‘That’s why I knocked her up.’
I looked first at Ira and then at his friend in wonderment. ‘You did it on purpose?’
‘How else could I get her to marry me?’
‘Do you know what it’s like to be pregnant if you don’t want to be?’ I asked, implying that I did.
‘Shut up, cunt!’ he shouted, and stormed over to my desk, Ira lingering by the door. ‘Bunch of goddam Commies! Comin in here tryin’ to bust up The Home and The Family!’
‘You wanted to marry her,’ I snapped, gaining gumption. ‘What about what she wanted? Don’t you care about that? Maybe she didn’t want a home and a family.’
‘What she wanted was to get knocked up and have to have a home and a family. You women are all the same! That’s what you all want!’
‘Garbage!’ I screamed, leaping to my feet. ‘Bullshit! You men…’
The man reached out his stubby hands and wrapped a bumper sticker around my mouth, ending my stream of antimale invective. ‘And you want it, too, baby. Don’t kid yourself,’ he informed me as he stomped out.
Ira looked at me apologetically and said by way of explanation, ‘Rodney is a broken man. He loved that little girl.’ He left, climbing into a beige Bronco outside. Rodney sat inside, doubled over, sobbing. Ira threw the Bronco into gear and roared off. A sticker on its rear bumper read ‘Abortion Is Murder.’
On my way home that afternoon I passed the beige Bronco parked at the back side of the hills that bordered our beaver pond. On its roof was tied a huge black bear corpse. Blood dribbled down the back of the Bronco and onto the ‘Abortion is Murder’ sticker. To each of the front fenders was lashed a small bear cub. I stopped the truck and gazed in horror, my stomach churning with nausea.
Eventually I walked to the edge of the road and looked into the woods. I saw a faint path leading up through our land. I squatted down and let the air out of each tire. For good measure, I grabbed the radio antenna and snapped it off.
The war was on.
