This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  Most of our water came from the stone-lined well below the house that Helen guided Papa to dig that first spring via her mystical skill with the dowsing rod. Finding water, Papa had learned, was one thing; managing it was another. When he was building the well, the stones that held in the earthen walls loosened and fell out with muddy splashes until he conceded to using Helen’s cement to stabilize them. Once completed, the well had a homemade well sweep for fetching water that the Nearings had seen used abroad. It looked like a giant fishing pole braced on a stand, with another smoothed cedar pole hanging down like the fishing line and a hook for attaching the bucket. You’d pull the pole down and it would push the bucket into the water while at the same time lifting a rock weight attached to the fishing-rod end. When the bucket was full, the weight of the rock as it sank back would lift the heavy bucket from the depths of the well.

  Papa also learned from the Nearings how to make a wooden yoke that fit over the shoulders, with cords hanging down on each side and hooks for buckets. When you shouldered the yoke, it took the weight off your arms, making it easier to carry the heavy five-gallon buckets of water.

  Mama looked like an ox in her yoke, with Heidi on her back, as I followed her the quarter mile to a spring in the woods to fill the containers for the sailboat-style hand pump used in the kitchen sink. We used about a bucket of water a day, so every two days the containers needed refilling. Whenever anyone offered help, Mama refused, saying she enjoyed the task. The spring flowed silent and pure down from the “mountain” behind the farm to the ocean, passing through what we called our “enchanted swamp,” and gurgling into a pool formed by a fallen and mossy cedar log that curved from one sphagnum bank to the other. We paused a moment to stare at our reflections in the crystal face of the pool before Mama lowered her bucket in and pulled up quickly.

  “Dammit,” she’d said more than once last summer. The spring got so low that the bucket hit the bottom, sending a swirl of organic matter through the water. She waited for the specks to settle so she could fill the second bucket and then, turning our backs on the disruption, we headed up the path. Mama’s shoulders were heavy with the weight of Heidi and the buckets on the yoke, her head bent down to watch the path for roots.

  Not long after that it had rained, and the gardens were for the most part saved, but Papa wanted to prevent such a close call from recurring this summer.

  “I have to focus on the garden,” Papa said, justifying it to himself as much as Mama. “The backhoe can do in one day what it would take me all year to dig myself.”

  The Nearings had a pond with a stream running out to the edge of their garden for ease of irrigation, and local legend was that Scott had dug the pond by hand, a legend that was for the most part true, though he’d certainly had helpers. It never occurred to Scott to get a machine to dig his pond for him; it was what needed to be done and he did it, wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load—15,000 total, by Helen’s estimation. It took nearly three years to get it to a good size. Papa used to say he would dig a pond himself, like Scott, but that was no longer an option; he needed water by summer.

  “I don’t blame you,” Mama said. “It’s too much work.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and they were both quiet. Something about the silence said they were both thinking they were getting a little soft.

  Soon enough it was confirmed: the backhoe was coming. I got as excited about the backhoe as we did about the UPS man—both were in the category of “things that came from the outside world.” When the backhoe rolled off the trailer in the customer parking lot, Papa directed it to the mossy area in the stand of cedar trees at the base of the garden. The driver put the claw under the trees to pull them out of the ground, then dug up the earth in mucky scoops and put the soil on a new patch of garden. We watched with wonder as the machine did in minutes what it would have taken Papa months to accomplish, the water rising to fill the hole as if it were dug in sand at the beach.

  The pond was muddy at first but eventually became that rusty tea black—the color of rainwater in the barrels where the billy goats were drowned. That pond would be our salvation, bringing water to the dry months of summer. And for a few short years it, too, became a friendly place where Heidi and I liked to play.

  Chapter Seven

  Tribe

  Lissie, Heidi, and Eliot in the garden (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  From the time Heidi was old enough to walk and at last a real companion, age one and a half to my five, I took responsibility for her education in survival. Barefoot training began as soon as the snow melted. She ran after me down the damp sawdust paths of the garden, the tilled soil of the beds, the cool indent of the wooded paths, the packed-pebble ruts of the back road. We worked ourselves up to the gravel of the main road, limping like cripples,“Ouch, ouch, oh, ooh,” knees bent, swaying side-to-side to take the weight off, our heads bent to watch for sharp rocks that dug into tender arches and filled us with quickly passing thoughts of putting shoes back on.

  “Where are your shoes?” Mama was always asking whenever we had to go to town. Heidi and I looked at each other with empty stares, trying to remember the last time we’d seen them. Most likely they were growing daisies.

  By the time the first strawberries were ripe, the soles of our feet had hardened into a thicker type of skin, like a callus. Tan mixed with dirt—hobbit feet. Now we could go anywhere. We walked on the hot tar roads in town, lost-shoe shoeless, on the rocks along the edge of the ocean, and on the prickly-needled forest floor of the mountain.

  “Walking barefoot is like getting a whole-body massage every day,” Davora, one of the Nearings’ helpers, told us. Mama was sitting on the grass with her foot in Davora’s lap as Davora pressed on her heel. Davora was into reflexology, which she said was an ancient Chinese belief that the bottom of the foot is a map of the body. She had a chart in her book that showed the foot divided into different colored regions relating to specific organs.

  “The Achilles tendon is for the reproductive glands,” she told Mama, and they smiled at each other and giggled.

  Naked started as soon as the air was warm enough to get freckles. At first just shirts came off, revealing bellies white and rounded, arms skinny with a few permanent freckles that quickly multiplied on shoulders and noses and cheeks.

  “Freckle face,” I said to Heidi.

  “You.”

  “No, you.”

  “You.”

  Soon the pants came off, left where we stepped out of them, as if a person had just vanished. Our legs were skinny and straight, with knobby knees, and the hairs on them made fine curves that glinted blond in the sun, not like Mama’s, which were dark on her calves.

  “It’s because I shaved as a teenager,” she complained. “The hair always grows back thicker.”

  Heidi and I loved that our skin was smooth and continuous all over, without rough patches of hair under the arms and between the legs like grown-ups. Pretty soon we didn’t even get dressed in the mornings. Our whole bodies brown and freckly, we wandered the gardens, eating things that were ripe, bending our knees to pee when we had to pee. We relished without embarrassment the thrilling shiver through the body when we were peeing and the deeply satisfying release of pooping.

  “Not in the garden!” Papa yelled. He got especially mad if we pooped near the pick-your-own strawberries. “The kids are shitting all over the place,” he complained to Mama one day. “This has got to stop.”

  “Put on your clothes,” Mama shouted after us, but Heidi and I didn’t listen. We ran off to hide in the Enchanted Asparagus Forest or graze through the rows of snap peas, reveling in the curve of our bellies and
the knot of our belly buttons, the single line between our legs, the smooth round peaches of our buttocks. The shapes of our footprints in the dust.

  Mama emerged from the farmhouse, hair pulled back under a bandanna, and set a stack of wooden bowls on a picnic table shaded by the ash tree. Hearing the slam of the screen, Heidi and I came running bare-bodied from the woods, the heat of the day warm on top of the head. I reached the house first and pulled a little cord by the door to make the lunch bell chime out across the clearing.

  “Luunnccchhh,” a voice called in reply.

  “La-uuuunch,” Papa echoed from somewhere.

  Susan unfolded out of a crouch in the lettuce patch, where she was weeding in one of the peaked rice-picker hats Helen had brought back from China, her short bangs made sweaty by the band above her vibrant blue eyes. She and David were in charge of the handful of full-time apprentices that summer, overseeing the daily tasks of harvesting vegetables and running the stand, which was a steady success, with a record of nearly one hundred people on busy days and lots of cars in the parking lot.

  “Lissie Lissie bo bissie, fi fie fo fissie,” Susan said whenever she saw me coming, her voice bubbling up from some deep well of joy. “Banana-nana, bo bissie. Lissie!” I thought this was the coolest thing.

  “Say Heidi, say Heidi,” I begged.

  “Heidi Heidi do didi, fi fie fo fidi, banana-nana do didi. Heidi,” Susan unwittingly chimed, and I collapsed in laughter because we called the cloth diapers—which Heidi hated to wear as much as I had—didis.

  “Heidi-didi,” I sang, “Heidi didi, diaper breath,” which of course made her pout.

  Kent, the young gymnast from Springfield College, left off tending the farm stand, and David leaned his pick against the stump he was extracting, pulling back his long ponytail. Sweat shone on their tan backs as they came to the farmhouse like bees to a flower, the stone patio edged by the full bloom of daylilies panting their tongues in the dappled light under the ash tree.

  Papa followed, carrying something as he did, never making a trip across the farm without accomplishing a task at the same time. He was so skinny that summer, his cut-off shorts bunched around his waist with an old belt to keep them from falling down. His eyes seemed bluer than ever, almost too blue, popping from his lean face. Sometimes he moved so quickly you couldn’t quite get a fix on him, the backward toss of his short silver hair lending the impression of constant motion. He talked fast like that, too, about all the things that needed to get done. There was less time lately for shoulder rides, and what remained was shared with Heidi.

  “Papa, Papa,” Heidi called, running to him, screaming in delight as he lifted her up in his arms, her sparkle of blue eyes meeting his. We all loved him like that.

  “Double piggyback,” I begged him, and he acquiesced because it was lunchtime, getting down on all fours so I could climb onto his back and Heidi onto mine.

  “Giddyup, Papa,” we cheered around the yard, until he tumbled us off to get food.

  Mama brought out the soup pot with two hands, elbows up, skin dewy from the steam, the air filling with the smell of sautéed onions, herbs, and vegetables. “Watch out, watch out, hot!” Next came a large wooden bowl of salad dressed with olive oil, vinegar, and sesame seeds, followed by a basket of raw carrots scrubbed bright orange.

  Kent smiled at Mama with his carefree grin as she tucked back wisps of hair framing her face. He saw Mama as the beautiful earth mother who fed and sustained him with her delicious lunches. She smiled back at Kent with a shrug and her shy laugh, though it was not, I knew, her private in-the-house laugh, with its ascending throaty oh, oh, ohs and occasional snort when she really got going. While she liked and appreciated the apprentices, the commotion of summer and the demands of so many young people were sometimes too much for her. The more she fed everyone else, the less she fed herself.

  After washing our hands in a bucket of water from the well, we served ourselves into our personal wooden bowls. As they ate, the apprentices talked with Papa, who rallied the helpers by inspiring them with the mysteries of the garden and sharing his books on soil and plant health. In Papa’s telling, the soil held within it the secrets of the universe. One topic of discussion that summer was why plants grew so much better in soil recently turned over from the forest. Papa called it the X-factor, and everyone was always trying to solve the mystery. Even after he left, Kent sent Papa materials that helped to explain the phenomenon of what they eventually learned was the release of nitrogen stored in the forest floor.

  Mama sat apart at the shadier end of the patio, sipping her soup, her navy-patterned bandanna pulled low over her forehead.

  “Mama,” I said, planting my naked bum next to her on the cool stone of the ledge. “Can we go pick berries?”

  “Yup, sure, um-hum,” she said in her checked-out voice, the profile of her face outlined by flickerings of light in the trees.

  “You come,” I begged, tugging her arm with my fingers. “The big patch.”

  “No, too busy,” she said, setting down her unfinished bowl of soup.

  In the evenings, if he had the energy, it was Papa who would make a batch of popcorn with butter and brewer’s yeast and bring it over to the campground to hang out with the apprentices and increasing numbers of random visitors who came to see the Nearings and now our farm, too. The oil embargo had ended in March, but not before the country’s energy innocence was lost, leaving many seeking a simpler lifestyle and finding in us an example. The visitors were young and free and adoring of Papa, especially the women. When they turned to him, they shone brighter. It wasn’t a party in the traditional sense, but everyone was high from hard work, fasting, and the low-protein diet. They talked into the night about soil and compost mostly, but also of the effects of the energy crisis, Nixon and Watergate, and other more personal topics. Papa enjoyed the attention and gave it back in return, while Mama stayed home and kept to herself.

  In the warmth of July Mama often sent Heidi and me out to pick berries, “for pie,” she promised as a bribe to keep us from coming home belly-full and bucket-empty. It’d been difficult of late to buy the mason jar lids for putting away the magic stores of raspberry juice. The reason was said to be because people were nervous over the oil shortage and were growing and storing their own food in numbers unanticipated by the lid manufacturers. Happily for us kids, we made pies instead of canning.

  Heidi and I walked barefoot and bare-bellied under the coolness of the fir trees, where the air smelled of sap and the ground was covered in brown and fallen needles, soft underfoot. The trees opened up to the scraggly berry bush area around the foundation from the early settlers, with the campground to the left, empty tents flapping in the breeze.

  Raspberry bushes loved places inhabited by the people who lived before us. The old stones of the foundation were sunk into the ground, round and bleached from the sun. Nearby the shallow dry well was full of berry bushes, too, but harder to get in, so the berries weren’t eaten by others as quickly. I made Heidi wait at the top as I climbed down the well. Cobwebs tied the spaces between the brambles, and the air was heavier from the heat of sun on the stones, berries red and overripe. They fell off into my hands so easily I had to eat them because they would be too mushy in the pail. My fingers quickly stained red.

  “Wa ba-ba,” Heidi said from above. Her eyes were blue pools of want, bare belly pushing out.

  “Just testing them,” I said. “Yum, yup, pretty good.”

  “Me!” she said.

  I put some of the less ripe berries into the empty bucket. They made plink-plink sounds like those in our book Blueberries for Sal, and the thorns on the bushes left raised welts on my arms as I reached into the deeper clumps. Soon the berries made a layer in the bucket and didn’t plink-plink anymore. When I climbed out of the well Heidi reached in for a handful and put them all in her mouth, leaving her with red lipstick lips like Skates. She took a
nother handful.

  “Stop eating all the berries,” I said and held the bucket up so she couldn’t reach in. “Let’s go, you can pick your own.”

  Down in the larger space of the foundation the berries had been combed over by others. We scavenged what we could find, but the bucket wasn’t getting any fuller for pie, and our arms and legs were covered with scratches. I knew where more raspberries might be. Old places. Secret places. The big patch past the graveyard with the many granite headstones above the blueberry field—but I was scared to go over without Mama. Sometimes I could hear the sounds of people who lived here before, just beneath the surface, like layers of time in the earth. Every so often they reached through and touched, leaving a trail of goose bumps across my skin.

  A local elderly lady named Lucy, who sometimes stopped at the farm stand, told Papa she was related to the people who lived on our land over a century ago. “They were the Colsons,” she said. There were two daughters, Christina and Eliza, who was her great-grandmother, and both married Blakes, also Irish. She said most of them had farms, and the men worked at sea as Grand Bank fishermen and at other odd jobs. The children harvested blueberries and sold them door-to-door in Castine. There were no cars, and horses were too expensive to keep, so they often went around by boat. “Some walked all the way to Bangor for work,” she remarked. Most of the Blakes were buried in the graveyard by the blueberry field, but she also said a Colson child was buried next to another headstone in a little graveyard on our property. She took Papa out to show him the spot near the road and just down from our driveway, overgrown, but still an opening in the forest around two small stones sinking into the earth.