This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  Jonathan Jo

  Has a mouth like an “O”

  And a wheelbarrow full of surprises.

  Every Monday night, people gathered after dinner on the lawn in front of the Nearings’ house to listen to Scott talk about social, political, and agrarian issues. These gatherings became known as Monday Night Meetings and were open to all. Monday nights also meant potential young friends; even though the guests were mostly grown-ups, there was always the chance that a child or two might be brought along. After work we’d throw buckets of water from the well over our heads to wash up before Papa carried me down the path on his shoulders. Apprentices and visitors hung around on the back patio, talking and playing music. From my shoulder perch, I scanned the crowd for small persons, and if there were any, we’d chase each other around the wide lawn until it was time to “pay attention.” We all sat in a circle around Scott holding court in his chair as he talked in his low melodious voice, the vowels bumping and rolling over each other like stones in a riverbed. Popcorn was served in large wooden bowls, and the question-and-answer period evolved into lengthy discussions into the summer evening.

  Once, when Helen interrupted Scott during a particularly long ramble, he cut her off by saying, “Quiet, woman.” The younger onlookers were scandalized, but it didn’t faze Helen. Though they were progressive in their teachings, the Nearings’ marriage was rooted in an earlier era.

  While Monday night was Scott’s domain, Sunday night was Helen’s music night, when she played classical records on the phonograph. Though Helen no longer practiced the violin with regularity, sometimes there’d be a live concert. We all sat on the floor of the Nearings’ long living room, me in the V of Mama’s legs, the room full of smells from a potluck and the sweat on the skin of the people gathered in the warm summer evening. Arranged before the fieldstone fireplace was not your traditional quartet, certainly, but one pulled together by Helen to take advantage of the talents in attendance.

  Helen played a recorder or her violin. There might have been a lady with a dulcimer, similar to a violin but with a longer hourglass shape, that lay flat on her lap, three strings plucked by her fingertips to produce a folksy dulcy sound, or a Middle Eastern oud, a tear-shaped guitar with multiple strings over wood rosette, and perhaps someone with a hammered dulcimer, a trapezoid on legs topped with strings struck by small mallets to make tinny reverberating sounds. Whatever the odd combination, on Sunday nights at the Nearings’, music connected us to the world.

  Papa said he’d learn to play an instrument if he wasn’t genetically tone-deaf, like Skates. The joke was that Skates couldn’t even sing in the shower. During his Dr. Zhivago phase, Papa fancied taking up the balalaika, but it mostly just hung on the wall. Mama had more of a natural gift for music. She tried to teach herself to play the dulcimer in the evenings, but claimed she didn’t have the time to get good at it. If Mama and Papa were to have musical themes the way Zhivago and Lara did, Papa’s would be the boogie-woogie on the piano, the popular bluesy dance music from the 1930s and ’40s with an upbeat rhythm and funky beat that made you want to get up and, well, boogie.

  Mama’s theme song would have to be “Simple Gifts,” a hymn composed in the Shaker community of Alfred, Maine, in the mid-1800s and made popular by Aaron Copland in the 1940s. Mama loved to sing it as she worked or walked the paths in the woods.

  ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

  ’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

  And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

  ’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

  When true simplicity is gain’d,

  To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

  To turn, turn will be our delight,

  Till by turning, turning we come round right.

  Music, I was learning, both came from the outside world and was uniquely our own. As I sat with Mama at the Nearings’ concert, drifting off on the river of sound, a familiar tune rose from the melody of strange instruments, and a friendly woman began to sing along beside us:

  Oh Susanna, don’t you cry for me.

  I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.

  While most of the flower children at the Nearings’ came and went, there was one cheerful face we began to see week after week. Susan showed up for a session and proved proficient at following Scott’s directions, so they asked her to stay the season and help run the summer workshops. Susan’s path to Cape Rosier was similar to that of Mama and Papa—she’d also found a copy of Living the Good Life at a health food store. She heard the Nearings were offering weeklong seminars, and decided to drive from Maryland to Maine to participate.

  She had a cherubic smiling face and long brown hair in thick braids with a short line of bangs across her forehead. At twenty years old, she was about as excited to be alive as anyone we knew. Her bright eyes always seemed to be either slightly surprised or on the verge of laughter, and her musical voice could be heard exclaiming at the size of the zucchini in the garden in an extended “Ohhhhhh!” or singing along the forest paths. Susan’s laugh of ringing bells filled the Nearings’ patio at lunch as everyone gathered around her like bees to honey.

  Susan was not alone in her desire to learn how to farm organically. The summer before, a large event held at Thomas Point Beach in Brunswick, Maine, brought together experts on organic gardening and farming with Scott and Helen as guest speakers. From that meeting, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, MOFGA, was started to bring small farmers together through local chapters, potluck suppers, and garden tours. MOFGA soon sponsored a no-spray register, a campaign focusing on the hazards of pesticide drift, an organic certification program, and an apprenticeship program. Soon there would be many more workers like Susan looking to us for training.

  “We work in the gardens—planting, harvesting, building stone walls—and cook our meals from the food we grow,” Susan told her mother. “I’m in heaven!”

  “A farmer’s footsteps are the best fertilizer,” Papa told me as I rode on his shoulders while he walked around the garden at the end of the summer day, keeping tabs on the crops. My legs fit snugly between his jaw and shoulders, hands clasping his ears or across his forehead, his silvery hair tossing back under my chin as he held my feet with his callused hands.

  “You can do anything you set your mind to, little one,” he said. “Look what we’ve done with this farm.”

  We gazed out over the neat plots of vigorously growing plants. It was hard to imagine it had been forest only a few years earlier. Papa’s seemingly superhuman feats were bringing more and more reporters to our farm to take pictures and talk with him about the innovations he was making in his garden. Other people, it turned out, were eager to learn from him. He’d decided to follow the Nearings’ example and raise money for education and research, starting an organization called the Small Farm Research Association to provide a network of small farmers with the latest information about organic gardening.

  “Don’t we have enough on our plate?” Mama asked, wary of the undertaking, complicating as it might the simple pleasures of homesteading. But Papa’s nature needed a challenge—he’d figured out how to homestead, and now he sought to take on agriculture. His goal that year was to be able to live off the summer sales of vegetables and the income from the research association so he could focus on the farm without taking outside jobs.

  “Members receive copies of all our publications and are entitled to our agricultural advisory service,” he explained in the introduction to members. “All questions and letters will be answered on the basis of the best and most comprehensive information available.” A sponsoring membership was $20 per year; other memberships were “whatever you can afford.”

  “Nothing is impossible,” Papa said, dreaming to himself, as we continued our rounds of the garden.

  “But I can’t fly,” I’
d giggle, coming up with games to lengthen our time together.

  “You’re flying right now,” he said, tipping me this way and that, and suddenly I was. When you looked at it through Papa’s eyes, anything really was possible.

  Papa knew it would take tremendous effort to make the farm profitable, but since the Wall Street Journal article, visitors wanted to stay and learn, and he realized the extra hands could help him meet his goals. Like the Nearings, he would teach the apprentices to garden and then put them to work building a new farm stand for the growing vegetable business. The problem was where to lodge all the eager workers. The Nearings didn’t like the expense of putting up helpers at the rental houses in Harborside, and sought to provide a better option.

  Recently, they’d decided to sell a section of land to a young couple named Keith and Jean. The couple met in high school biology class in Ohio; both were from working-class families, Keith a tall, square-jawed football player, Jean a bookish type with long hair and glasses. After graduation, Keith spent two tours in Vietnam, and out of sorts with the world after combat, he began to talk about living off the land. They’d read Living the Good Life, and like Mama and Papa, took a land-hunting trip in their VW bus and stopped to visit the Nearings. Seeing potential in the young couple—and the lines of their hands—Helen offered them a deal similar to ours on the thirty acres that lay between us and the Nearing farm.

  In the summer of 1972, the Nearings and Papa made a deal with Keith to section off three acres between our two properties for a campground, and the Nearings financed the building of tent platforms and a cook shack. Visitors set up tents to work for us, the Nearings, or Keith and Jean, walking up and down the path in the woods between the three homesteads. Lunch and garden produce were provided in exchange for work, and there’d often be a potluck at Monday Night Meetings. Music, the smell of wood smoke, and voices talking and singing, drifted from the campground in the evenings. From my perch on Papa’s shoulders I could see the fire pit glowing in the dusk and knew that soon the chords of a guitar would join the stars twinkling above.

  Screaming in delight, I held tight to Papa’s ears and tightened the grip of my legs around his neck as he flew me across the farm and home for dinner. “Your father has the confidence of a natural athlete,” Skates always told us in that complimentary way reserved for the most important attribute a person could have. It was a confidence you couldn’t help but love. The problem for me was that the more people came to our farm, the more competition I had for his attention. When they came, I forgot why I’d wanted friends so badly in the first place. Mama agreed; she wished everyone would leave us alone.

  “Went for the most refreshing swim today—best I’ve had all summer,” Mama wrote on September 27, 1972. “We are trying to get back to normal after a busy hard-working summer. It’s great to be six months pregnant and enjoy all of our usual pleasures thoroughly.”

  As well as the friends in the campground, it seemed I would also get that sibling I’d dreamed of for so long. The birth would be at a hospital this time because Eva, the midwife who’d delivered me, wasn’t available. Papa considered doing the delivery himself, as Mama’s grandfather had done for his children, but decided against it when the hospital agreed to a natural birth and to allow Papa in the room, requests that were rarely granted at the time. The fact that her mother was so enthusiastic about a hospital birth made Mama, who preferred to have the baby at home, even madder, though she eased her stance after her father suffered his first heart attack that fall, relieved as she was at his recovery and not wanting to add to his stresses.

  “I’ll only stay the required twelve hours,” she stated. “Then I want to come straight home with the baby.” Papa knew better than to argue with a very large pregnant woman.

  Our new neighbor Jean was fascinated to hear of my home birth and Mama’s resistance to the hospital. Products of midwestern upbringings and recent military service, Keith and Jean were trying to navigate the strange world to which they now belonged. It wasn’t until after they moved up that the Nearings discovered, much to their not always silent disapproval, that Keith and Jean were “carcass eaters,” as Helen and Scott called nonvegetarians.

  The arrival of our new neighbors is perfect timing, Mama thought to herself, despite their carnivorous inclinations. Or maybe Helen planned it that way. Mama had explained to Helen that she wouldn’t be able to do the book work come winter with the new baby, and Papa had been too busy with his own plans to help Scott as much as he used to. They would have to forgo the money earned from the Nearings with the hope that they could make it at the farm stand the next summer. The Nearings needed a new couple to do their bidding, and planning to be away that winter again, they offered discounted land; then Helen asked Keith and Jean to take care of their house and do the paperwork as Mama had done.

  The campground was clearing out for the winter, but one hearty soul remained. Brett, a marine biology major with fine carpentry skills, had visited the Nearings with his girlfriend on bicycles the summer before. They’d ridden across the country from Ohio, stayed for a couple weeks to work for the Nearings, and then biked home. During his short stay, Helen asked Brett to bring up our mail—the Nearings’ mailbox being, at that time, the farthest the postman would deliver. Papa noted Brett’s quiet manner and solid frame, square face with heavy brows, long ponytail, and professed skill with carpentry, and invited him to work for us. Brett had returned in May, clearing stumps to expand the back field, doing small construction projects, and living out of his VW bus in the campground with Susan and the other apprentices. That fall, Brett stayed on for a job finishing restorations on the Nathaniel Bowditch in Bucks Harbor.

  “The doors of the bus keep freezing shut at night from the moisture of my breathing,” he told Papa one morning. “I had to break a window to get out.”

  “What we need is a cabin,” Papa said. He suggested that Brett put his carpentry skills to work building himself a place to stay. The Nearings put up some cash, and Brett scavenged pine boards for the 250-square-foot interior while tearing down a house in Harborside. He used driftwood he found on the beach for the porch and covered the A-frame roof in sheets of cast-off galvanized steel. But by the time the cabin was completed, Brett had to leave it behind, having accepted an invitation to sail down the coast on the Nathaniel Bowditch.

  Meanwhile Susan, the Nearings’ star apprentice, was looking for a place to stay that fall, and took up residence in the new abode. One of the visitors passing through caught her notice. A recent Dartmouth College grad, David had a long brown Walt Whitman beard and sparkling blue eyes. His quiet and methodical soul was immediately drawn to the playfulness of Susan’s carefree spirit. Little did they know at the time that they would eventually marry and have kids; they are still together, farming organically, to this day. David slept on the porch of the cabin, and they talked late into the night. When it got too cold for camping, he invited Susan to work with him on a farm near Hanover, New Hampshire, for the winter, and they made plans to return to the cape the following summer and help manage our growing workforce.

  Papa was busy building that December, too, finishing an addition to the farmhouse so we would have room for our growing family. As the cold of December closed around us, he spent the short days and into the night adding a twenty-by-eighteen-foot room behind the house.

  “You need to take it easy,” Mama said, already in bed with third-trimester fatigue, when he came in from pounding nails in the dark.

  “I have to get the roof up before the snow,” he replied, eyes closing the minute he lay down. Once the roof was up, he said he was pushing hard to finish before the baby came, but Mama thought there was more to it than that. When Papa was tired, he became more obsessive about work. It was as if overworking set off an alarm in his mind telling him he needed to work more. Instead of taking care of himself, he pushed harder.

  “I’ve always had an extra gear I can count on when thi
ngs get tough,” Papa explained to Mama over breakfast, trying to ease her fears. During his years as a mountaineer, when the climb seemed the hardest and he wanted to give up, something in his body said, “Don’t stop now or you’ll die,” and the adrenaline kicked in and carried him through to safety.

  “It seems you’ve shifted into that gear permanently,” Mama replied.

  Mama worried about Papa as she worried about her father and his heart. While Grandpa was sensitive to life, its stresses taking their toll on his health, Papa had seemed the opposite of that, so vital and invincible, but now Papa, too, was weakening, showing signs of being human. Sometimes Mama’s fears were not a problem to be solved, but simply an emotion that needed release. If they weren’t, her fears ballooned inside and became bigger than all else. Mama longed to relax into Papa’s arms, slip into the cave created by the touch of skin on skin. When Papa resisted her need, she tried to hold on more tightly, but already he was slipping away from her grasp. Putting on his coat. Going to work.

  “Wait, Eliot,” she called. When he turned back, his eyes were hard, and words failed her. She didn’t know how to ask for what she needed. He didn’t know how to listen to her silences. He went out the door, and the back of his head disappeared into the day.

  Snow fell in tiny pricks against Papa’s cheek, and the cold nipped his fingers as he rolled the tar paper onto the new roof. His heart seemed to beat too quickly in his chest, and he had a cold he couldn’t kick, despite gallons of rose-hip and raspberry juice. Even his old mantra, “How many son of a guns are this lucky?” held little comfort.

  He tried to make sense of things in his mind. Health insurance, he believed, was on the table at every meal. In other words, the best way to deal with illness was to invest in prevention—eating a good diet that kept the body healthy. As with plants, Papa believed that if you became sick, it meant your body wasn’t getting what it needed. He’d read up on vitamins and minerals, learning which foods were highest in A, B, C, D, and minerals like calcium, magnesium, and zinc. He drank rose-hip juice for vitamin C, ate garlic and echinacea to build immunity, used peppermint and lemon balm tea to soothe the stomach, and used chamomile to calm the nerves, but perhaps all this wasn’t enough.