This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  One of the boys hit the body square on, making the piñata swing haphazardly. He braced and struck again. There was a ripping sound as the paper gave out, and suddenly the butt of the cow fell off and confetti, pieces of candy, and small toys stormed to the floor.

  Kids rushed in, pushing and scrambling to grab anything—stuffing pockets, filling shirts. There were swirled candy sticks, wrapped suckers, penny boxes, party horns. By the time I realized I had to grab my share, all that were left were the penny boxes. They were small clear plastic boxes the size of a hard candy with a penny inside and a lid with a raised magnifying orb so that you could look through and see the ridges on Abraham Lincoln’s brow.

  Arriving home, still crazy with the thrill of candy and toys falling from the sky, I proudly showed my penny box to Papa.

  “Amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “They give you kids money like it’s a toy.”

  I kept my penny magnifying box for a long time in my collection of treasures, a token, as it was, of the incomprehensible world of money and politics to which school was introducing me.

  As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Papa was concerned that autumn about money as he made plans for his first European farm tour. Through the Small Farm Research Association and the money from Scott, he’d raised just enough to do research that winter in libraries and on farms as far away as England. Papa wanted to bring back Old World secrets of “biological agriculture,” as organics was called in Europe, to convince those in power to pay attention to the emerging voices of organic farmers, the little guys. He was ready to get pushy about it.

  “My mother was a pushy realist and my father a laid-back idealist,” Papa liked to say. “Now my sister is the laid-back realist, and I’m the pushy idealist.”

  Papa hoped to see organics taken seriously by the agriculture industry rather than being dismissed as some hippie thing. “The scorn in which organic agriculture is held by the University of Maine and by the Extension Service is something which should be changed,” he told a reporter for the local paper. “Their attitude probably isn’t based on malice but on misinformation. The organic idea has been presented in a naïve sectarian way, and I can understand the reaction of the professionals but can’t condone it because they are not fulfilling their hired role to be investigators instead of front men. They should be the first to say, ‘Let’s look into it.’ Instead they are the first to pooh-pooh it.”

  Papa had a button pinned to one of his jackets that read, “The meek are getting ready,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Papa was getting ready, but he was finding that action required a lot more power and money than the farm stand could provide. The outside world was far more concerned with financial returns than with Sir Albert Howard’s law of return.

  In Washington, Secretary of Agriculture Dr. Earl Butz had made sweeping changes in the 1973 Farm Bill that would significantly alter the course of agribusiness in the United States, but not for the better, in Papa’s opinion. Butz’s motto, “Get big, or get out,” further encouraged agribusiness to buy up small farms and plant thousand-acre crops of government-subsidized, pesticide-sprayed corn. As some farmers saw it, Butz’s policies gave the chemical industry carte blanche to control the nation’s food supply and push all but the most determined small farmers out of business. While Butz’s motivation was born of the scarcities of the Great Depression, his solution—cheap food for all—had its own set of consequences. High-fructose corn syrup and corn-fed beef, two by-products of cheap corn, were soon sold into every channel of the American diet, leading to the prevalence of fast food, which in turn contributed to what would become a nationwide health and obesity problem. Papa hoped to encourage a healthier alternative.

  Hurricanes blew up the coast from the tropics in fall. You could tell one was coming by the heavy-humid-warm feeling in the air. The gulls lined up on the rocks, waiting. Clouds slunk in from the sea. The radio squawked out staticky warnings.

  “She’s a comin’,” the locals said on such days in Robert McCloskey’s book Time of Wonder, written about his summer island just off the coast from us. “It’s a gonna blow.”

  “Let’s go!” Papa—the Departure Nazi, as we called him—hollered. The clouds hung just above the farm, full of the coming storm. Papa moved out the door with a force greater than his wiry body, a strength beyond muscle. His hair stood up with the energy of it. There were airplanes and faraway places in his eyes and a thrill in the smoothness of his shaved cheek. Papa would be doing research in Europe for two weeks, the longest he’d ever been gone from us. We followed him out the door, Mama trying to button her shirt after nursing, Heidi and me hustling behind. The farm was quiet, waiting to see what would happen. Papa swung his satchel into the back of the jeep and clapped his hands.

  “All aboard.”

  “I love Papa so much, I don’t want him to leave,” I said to Mama as I followed her to the jeep, and knew she agreed by the way her face went soft and distant. When we dropped Papa off at the church in Penobscot to meet his ride to the airport, I remember kneeling in the back seat watching Papa out the window as Mama drove away down the hill. He stood beneath the white upward angles of the steeple, his figure getting smaller and smaller, and when he finally disappeared over the crest of the hill, I began to cry.

  Papa was our air—our bodies becoming listless and slack in his absence. Soon I realized I was still breathing on my own, but it was an effort to take those first breaths. There was the feeling of something stuck in my throat, not a loneliness egg, but a hollow robin’s egg, the kind you find in a bird’s nest in summer after the other fledglings have hatched and flown away. The stuff inside simply vanished, leaving only the fine tiny blue shape of the shell in the matted palm of mud and straw.

  On the way home Mama stopped at Bucks Harbor Market, the coming of the storm making everything restless. The Condon’s Garage sign creaked back and forth on its metal hooks. Boats sighed against the docks in the harbor as people readied for the storm. Houses along the ocean braced themselves. Birds sought shelter. My bones ached.

  “She’s a comin’.”

  “It’s a gonna blow.”

  Our nerves tingled with the charge of electricity in the air. You could feel the blood pulling in your veins to join the water gathering in the atmosphere. At the same time your brain said, “Hurry, rush, go deep into the forest, find safety under a rock.” The stop sign shuddered in the wind at the turn onto the cape road. Halfway home, along the open stretch by Carolyn Robinson’s drive, the rain hit us. It pounded horizontally against the jeep, driving in through the canvas flaps. The raindrops were furious on the windshield, wipers working at high speed, twap-twack, twap-twack, and dead branches cluttered the hood. When we entered the woods by Hiram Blake’s, the forest shielded us, a bubble of peace, then out again into the open by Hoffman’s Cove, where the wind was driving the ocean to madness, a roil of wind, rain, clouds, and waves washing up nearly onto the road.

  The Vegetable Garden sign wavered dangerously at the end of the driveway as we turned in and drove up the back road to the house. You could feel the floorboards shifting under the high pressure when we stepped inside. Then, slam! The outside door blew open against the side of the house, knocking a clatter-crash of snowshoes from the outside wall.

  Mama rushed to close the door, and we huddled in the kitchen as she tried to light the stove, hair wet to her face.

  “Ma-ma, Pa-pa, Ma-ma, Pa-pa,” Heidi repeated in a murmur to comfort herself, rocking beside me on the floor by the stove. Outside the wind tore the air like fabric and trees shuddered and cracked. The next day we would find trunks toppled, roots askew as if the backhoe had pulled them from the earth, exposing white piles of ancient shell middens, the only remaining evidence of the ancient peoples who had once lived off our land.

  While Papa was in Europe, a female apprentice named Chip helpe
d Mama with the many chores of readying the farm for winter. Chip was twenty-four, a couple years out of Springfield College, with short brown hair, thick glasses, and a compact athletic build so that from a distance she might be mistaken for a guy. Her mother had died at a young age, leaving her a comfortable sum, but she barely touched the money, preferring to live simply on the road and in the woods. After hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, she finished the last segment of the trail at Katahdin and hitched to Brooksville to see Doc Brainard, whom, like Kent, she’d met when studying at Springfield. Doc brought Chip over to see our place, and while helping search for a runaway goat, Chip had the sudden inspiration to ask Papa if she could stay and work. “Sue could use some help while I’m in Europe,” he replied, so just after Halloween, Chip returned with her stuff and moved into the log cabin in the campground.

  Chip, it turned out, was a meat eater. She loved to hunt and often tanned the pelts of her prey—anything from squirrels and skunks to roadkill—on the cabin balcony. The Nearings were, of course, scandalized by her predatory ways, but our neighbor, Keith, also a hunter and carcass eater, connected with Chip over their shared passion for game. Mama was too busy to care about Chip’s choice in diet; she was just glad for any help she could get, and Chip was a hard worker. If it was tough raising two children and running the farm for a couple, it was twice as hard for a woman alone. In Papa’s absence, Mama gained new respect for all he did on a daily basis to keep life running smoothly. She wrote down the litany of tasks in her journal:

  November 14, Thursday

  Got two loads of seaweed before lunch at Hoffman’s Beach. Lots more too. Took Liss between loads to catch bus.

  November 17, Sunday

  Looks, feels, smells like snow. Rained instead. Worked on wood stack and also immediate firewood. Took goats a load of rhubarb chard. Brought in entrance, welcome and park signs. Spaded up entrance flower bed.

  November 19, Tuesday

  Took Jeep’s starting motor to Steve to check it. We need a new one, plus bushing. It made me realize that I don’t take care of Jeep very well since I don’t know enough about what to listen for: When something doesn’t sound right, I just ignore it.

  November 20, Weds

  Moved frames into garden and placed over parsley and for lettuce. Transplanted lettuce—25 Boston and Webbs into frame #1. Covered back field kale frame with windows. Rototilled manure in the well and rose hip patch. Also cross-tilled back corn field. Anne took Tansey and young goats.

  We’d been caring for a herd of Nubian goats over the past year as a mutual favor for the owner, but it was time to cut back on numbers and return them to their home, leaving us just one milker. They bleated and flapped their short tails as we herded them into the trailer where they looked out through the slats in the walls, the black bar of their pupils making a minus sign in the round unblinking marbles of their eyes.

  Mama, though relieved to have one less responsibility, cried dearly to see her goat friends depart. After keeping herself together for a week on her own, she couldn’t hold back any longer. Heidi and I cried, too, for the goats and because we couldn’t bear to see Mama sobbing like that.

  “Don’t cry,” we pleaded, pulling at her hands that covered her face as she knelt in the kitchen by the stove. “Please, don’t cry.” The top of her head leaning toward us was divided by the jagged part of her hair as she rocked her upper body over her knees.

  “It’s okay,” she said finally. “It’s okay.” But we weren’t convinced.

  Mama was learning in Papa’s absence both that she could hack it on her own, and that she preferred not to. Life without Papa made her sluggish and lethargic. As long as she was working, she was fine, but the minute she stopped, fatigue slipped in and all she wanted to do was sleep.

  When Papa returned we nearly suffocated him, we so desperately wanted to fill ourselves up with him, but though happy to see us, he seemed preoccupied, his hands shaking and eyes popping with the excitement of all he had learned in England. The timeless techniques of the farmers he visited made more sense than anything he’d seen in America and laid the foundation for his later contributions to the organic movement. He was also skinnier than before and the lump like an enlarged Adam’s apple in his throat was bigger. Not long after he returned, the heart palpitations began. He knew the doctor in Blue Hill wouldn’t tell him anything new, so he went to see a specialist in Bangor.

  “They want to put me under the knife,” he said to Mama, shivering from the cold drive home in the jeep. “To remove the part of the thyroid that isn’t functioning right.” The only option to surgery was ingesting a radioactive iodine capsule to shrink the overactive gland, but Papa thought that sounded even worse than the illness.

  “No!” Mama whispered. It was their greatest fear—expensive doctor bills accompanied by the loss of Papa’s manpower while he recovered—but Papa was most disturbed by the fact that he’d gotten sick in the first place, considering all the effort he put into eating well. Somewhere along the way, he’d pushed too hard and his body rebelled. Instead of slowing down and resting, he pushed harder, did more.

  According to the standard medical explanation for Graves’ disease, which is what Papa had, the hypothalamus region of the brain senses a need for increased output and instructs the pituitary gland to release more thyroid-stimulating hormone, which in turn tells the thyroid to release more thyroid hormone. This stimulates the metabolism and the sympathetic nervous system, which speeds up body functions with adrenaline. Papa, as we know, found comfort in the adrenaline from hard labor, easing as it did his mind. While certain people are genetically inclined to Graves’ disease, it takes a trigger to set it in motion. Perhaps that trigger was our low-protein diet, which, as we know, was lacking in B vitamins, the absence of which can cause the body to experience more stress on top of the natural stresses in our lifestyle. Papa went into his extra gear, and I imagine that each time he went there, the hypothalamus set its emergency plan into action. Eventually his body finally said, Enough. You’ve pushed too hard. I’ll force you to rest, take care of yourself, change course.

  As Papa usually did when someone or something tried to tell him what to do, he became furious. And because there was no one person responsible for the cause of his anger, it came out in various ways on whoever crossed his path, most often Mama. What about this? his actions seemed to be saying to Mama. Will you put up with this, too?

  It was around then that Chip decided she should clear out. Keith invited her to live with him and Jean in the unfinished second floor of their house, and she accepted. The log cabin in the campground was cold, and besides, she thought things were getting a little too intense on the Coleman farm.

  The voice on the Zenith battery-powered radio squawked flat and tinny on the ledge by the window. It talked about President Nixon’s resignation that August, Muhammad Ali preparing for the Rumble in the Jungle that October, poet Anne Sexton’s suicide, and Ed Sullivan’s funeral in New York. When it talked about the weather, Papa, as usual, turned up the volume and moved close.

  “Temperatures for Penobscot Bay and the surrounding area were in the high fifties today, and partly cloudy,” the voice droned. “Temperatures will drop to the teens tonight.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Papa said. “Frost.” He shot for the door and slammed out.

  “Weather’s changing,” Mama had said earlier, looking up at the clouds and pressing a hand to her back. The air wrapped cool fingers around me when I jumped down from the patio and followed Papa through the garden. The two things that made the most trouble for us were animals, like voles, raccoons, and deer, that ate plants, and frost that could freeze them—not the hardy plants like kale and cabbage, but the tender tastier things like lettuce, tomatoes, and summer squash. In the morning after a frost, the plants were covered in white crystals that sparkled and glinted when the sun first caught them. Anything not protected by plas
tic, greenhouses, cloches, or cold frames might be dead. The leaves looked fine at first, but after a few hours of sunshine, they would turn translucent and soggy, then wilt. The fall before we’d lost a whole patch of late lettuce to a sudden frost when the covers weren’t on the cold frames. “Damn it all to hell,” Papa had said. We wouldn’t have salad until the light returned in February and new little lettuce seedlings could germinate.

  Now he had rolls of plastic that he spread on the garden like long blankets.

  “I need more plastic,” Papa yelled to Mama, heading for the jeep.

  “I want to come,” I begged.

  “All right, hop in.”

  He tore out of the parking lot, past the campground, and down the road to Keith and Jean’s driveway, long and close with trees, rutted in the middle, dark with foreboding. Keith had been slaughtering livestock for cash, and this made Mama less keen on my visiting young Becca, since you never knew what gruesome chores might be in progress. We bumped into the clearing and braked abruptly beside the barn-style house.

  A large buck hung from a tree by its hind legs, the rack of horns dragging on the earth with the swaying of the rope. Its fur was dark burgundy, and burnished with blood along the center of the white belly, cut open to reveal a complication of innards. I couldn’t look away. The deer was both majestic and robbed of its majesty as it hung there, eyes turned to black stones in the encroaching dusk.

  “Looks like Keith got his deer,” Papa said.

  Keith emerged from the house, bearlike, an uneasiness beneath the contours of his strong jaw. There might have been a human hanging from the tree, the way he looked at Papa. Continuing to hunt and eat meat, despite the Nearings’ disapproval, lent Keith the unapologetic guilt of an addict who didn’t know how to quit.