This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “Frost coming,” Papa said. “I need to get that extra roll of plastic I stored with you.”

  I stayed in the jeep, having no desire to enter the shed, which might contain the carcasses of butchered pigs or chickens.

  “At least they know where the meat comes from,” Papa would later concede. “Much better to eat animals you feed well yourself than buy the crap they raise under poor conditions in the commercial feedlots.” If it hadn’t been for the lack of refrigeration and the Nearing taboo against “carcass eating,” perhaps Papa would have added more meat to our diet, but in the competition for the Nearings’ favor between Papa and Keith, like competitive siblings, vegetarianism was the one thing Papa had on his side.

  As it was, Papa couldn’t hold too high a candle over Keith, because he killed animals, too, the ones that got into the garden. When the dried blood sprinkled around the crops and the radio left on at night didn’t scare the coons away from the sweet corn, you could hear Papa out taking shots with his old .22. He hated to do it, but had few options in the competition with wildlife for our food supply.

  Papa and Keith came out of the shed on either end of a roll of plastic and loaded it in the jeep. We hightailed it back to protect our food source from frost, leaving the silhouette of the buck swaying from the tree, its blood seeping into the ground in a darker circle beneath it.

  In the quiet of winter, we found some of our old happiness. The pace of the farm slowed to the rhythms of hibernation as Mama sewed and mended and Papa rested and dreamed over seed catalogs and snow fell endlessly outside the windows. Oh, the beauty of those snowstorms! The flurries muted the landscape and united the details of the farm under one soft blanket, silhouetting the bare ash branches and accumulating on the boughs of fir and spruce trees, hanging them to the ground. Squirrels, chipmunks, jays, and chickadees retreated to the inner parts of the forest to wait out the storm, and we followed their example in the house, the dark lifted up by white outside the windows, our faces glowing from the charge of negative ions in the air.

  “Snowstorms remind me of living in the mountains as a ski bum,” Mama said.

  “Yes,” Papa agreed, an old light in his eyes to match Mama’s. Determined to heal his thyroid on his own, he’d been taking B vitamins, kelp tablets, and concoctions fortified with seaweed to provide the much-needed iodine he seemed to be lacking.

  Heidi and I snuggled on the padded benches with our blankets and warm milk and honey, kerosene lanterns humming, and listened to The Spider’s Web, a radio program on WBGH that featured English-accented readings of children’s books.

  “It’s a web like a spider’s web, made of silk and light and shadow,” the theme song began, as Heidi and I leaned close to the Zenith. “Spun by the moon in my room at night. It’s a web made to catch a dream, hold it tight till I awaken, as if to tell me the dream is all right.” We shivered with excitement at the familiar words.

  A story called Otto of the Silver Hand particularly captured us. It was a complex tale about a boy who was raised in a monastery until age eleven, when he was retrieved by his father, who told him of his mother’s death and family’s dark past. “This tale that I am about to tell is of a little boy who lived and suffered in those dark Middle Ages,” the story began. “Of how he saw both the good and the bad of men, and of how, by gentleness and love and not by strife and hatred, he came at last to stand above other men and to be looked up to by all.” The world expanded around me as I wandered the far places of the tale, the snowy night outside transforming itself into the dark castles and towns of Germany in the Middle Ages.

  The next day, temperatures dropped and sunshine sparked the whiteness into a field of diamonds that made the sky seem vastly bluer. Our snowshoes pushed through the drifts on the way to the outhouse, flakes clinging to our pants and falling in explosions from the trees. Soon the paths around the clearing became packed underfoot, our boots squeaking against the hardened snow. Heidi and I tunneled with our hands and kitchen bowls through the banks below the patio to carve a maze of passages like voles in the earth of the greenhouse. We’d lie for hours in the caves and retell stories from The Spider’s Web, safe from the cold in our snowsuits, the walls glowing a pale ice blue with the light beyond, peace of the snowstorm preserved within.

  The next day I put on the snowshoes the Tomten had given me and trekked the half-mile path down to meet the school bus, which now picked me up at the end of the Nearings’ driveway. “Not many kids get to snowshoe to school,” Papa said with enthusiasm.

  On March 30, Mama and Papa made time to listen to the “non-lectures of ee cummings” on Maine Public Radio, cummings being one of Papa’s favorite poets.

  “Less than nothing’s more than everything,” cummings read, his Old World Harvard accent reminding Mama of her father.

  Mama copied the line into her journal, one of her few entries that year.

  “Beauty is more now than dying’s when,” she added, a line from another cummings poem, and sat for a while after the program ended, staring out the windows at the remnants of melting snow.

  Reliably as always, spring and the white-throat returned. Another blanket, this one of mist, settled on the farm with the thickness of a cloud falling. It filled the spaces between tree branches, lying heavy in the hollows and blending all colors together into one pale shade of blue-green-gray. I watched out the window from the table while eating breakfast with Mama, as the mist wound between the rows of the garden and danced in muscular bodies with the plants.

  We could hear the thwack of the ax and the tumble of logs falling apart as Papa chopped wood out by the shed. The mist and birdsong surrounded him with mystery. When Papa came in to make his breakfast muesli, his hands shook as he grated apple over the oats, cinnamon, and goat’s milk. He was often in a state of low blood sugar from the hyperactivity, but food didn’t soothe him, and he became easily upset about things Mama did—not cooking the oats right, forgetting to pick up something in town, harvesting the wrong lettuce from the greenhouse. The more Mama tried, the more she got it wrong and the more needy and insecure she felt in the wake of his rejection. Instead of fighting or even arguing, they went inside themselves and stayed apart. Papa to work, and Mama to the house. I could feel the elastic cords of their connection stretching further and further, becoming thinner and thinner with the strain.

  Mama, Papa, and I sat in silence at the table by the window, eating our oats. Light from a lantern bit a semicircle of yellow into the blue-green vapor outside the window, but as the sun burned through from above the mist fell back like a curtain, exposing all that it had kept hidden.

  Papa was teaching a part-time course at the College of the Atlantic for the spring semester, which meant driving the hour and fifteen minutes to Bar Harbor and back one day a week to share the joys of farming with a group of ecology students. The students were drawn to his youthful energy and contagious enthusiasm for plants. Mama was not so enthusiastic. The class was taking Papa even farther away from her and the farm than the trip to Europe had, and she worried about the beautiful young students. There was a female student in particular that he sometimes drove with to MOFGA meetings. While Papa enjoyed having a driving companion, Mama imagined he was more interested in the student than in her of late, but she was afraid to speak about it and make it become real.

  Heidi slept on her stomach with her head turned on one cheek, lips pouted, legs bent froglike beneath her bum. When I tickled her chin to wake her, her eyes were blank for a minute before the spark of her being returned from somewhere far away and lit her pupils with an iridescence of blue. Some mornings I’d wake to Heidi singing below me in the bunk. Oooo auuuu iiieees in her own kind of tune. Her secret language.

  It started with Heidi trying to sing a song Mama sometimes sang:

  Go tell Aunt Rhodie

  Go tell Aunt Rhodie

  The old gray goose is dead

  Drowned in a m
illpond

  Standing on her head

  But then I realized Heidi was talking to someone in her bird language. “Go tell Aunt Rhodie” had become “Tel-on-Ferdie.” Mama called her an imaginary playmate, but that wasn’t exactly correct—Telonferdie came and went on her own. She came from a place of wisdom about all things of the world. Sometimes I could see her and sometimes I couldn’t.

  As Heidi sang to Telonferdie, the birdsong shattered down on us like rain in the early morning, coming as if from everywhere, from the trees and the woods, even, it seemed, from beneath the earth. At night you heard the frogs instead, rising from the low wet places of the farm—the pond, the drinking water spring—places that turned misty when the air was warmer than the water. The frog voices were like music on the radio, echoey and squarky, calling you to them. If you walked by the pond it was as if someone turned up the volume dial, each crick-crick part of the whole, becoming so loud you couldn’t hear anything else, then fading back into the night as you walked on.

  I wished I could hold all these beautiful sounds safe in my belly, to keep them for my own the way Heidi used to put the things she loved into her mouth as a toddler. But when the sun rose, the sounds escaped me and spread out into the world.

  “You cannot own these things,” one of the apprentices told me when I tried to catch a bird once, “because they belong to God.”

  “What’s God?” I asked.

  God was something I did not understand the way kids who went to church did. They said God was a man in the sky with white hair and a beard like Santa. This seemed strange to me. When I thought of God, I imagined only mist over the pond, a sliver of moon in a dark sky, scatterings of stars, birdsong.

  The only person I knew who went to church every Sunday was Skates. She was “an Episcopalian,” she told me, the sound of the word rolling nicely off the tongue. Skates said Heidi and I were heathens. Pagans. Atheists. Unbaptized.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if you kids were Episcopalians too?” Skates said. When we visited her over Christmas, she took me to church to pray. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” the voices hissed around me. Our collected souls rose to sing, then sat, then rose again. Skates was tone-deaf, though it didn’t matter to me because so, it seemed, was I. While the singing in the church was beautiful, it could never match for me the sounds of Heidi and the birds in the morning.

  “Even though we do not belong to any organized religion, we are very religious people,” Mama had written in her journal a couple years earlier. “We believe in the individual who can be trusted, who is capable of loving, who can carry his own weight and who has a basic goodness.”

  But by the spring of 1975, Mama was no longer so sure. The principles of trust, love, hard work, and basic goodness that Mama and Papa had founded their lives on were changing as their relationship began to grow and change. Over the course of history, organized religions had developed to provide a compass for small tribes of outcasts like us. The Old Testament, it seems to me, was essentially a guide for the survival of a tribe of Jews as they left behind the civilized world of Egypt to make a new life in the Promised Land. In the Ten Commandments, Moses gave his people the moral laws needed to survive in the wilderness.

  Our small community, too, had become a tribe of its own, one consisting of Helen and Scott, Keith and Jean, our family, Greg (a new neighbor), and the seasonal apprentices in the campground, all living on the Nearings’ original hundred acres and following the customs and rituals of homesteading. As with any group of people united by certain customs, our tribe was fortified by the belief that its way of doing things was the best way to survive the myriad dangers of the world.

  We didn’t have a connection to God in the traditional sense, but rather a spiritual reverence for nature. We appreciated the power of the sun to germinate our crops, the rain to keep them growing, the beauty of a sunrise, the glory of the sea sparking with diamonds. Each found his or her own sources of wonder and mystery in the unfolding of the universe, without the guarantees and assurances that church provided. This life was the priority, and in the effort to survive we didn’t worry about what would happen afterward.

  The problem with our unorganized religion was that we had no constant, no Bible or church, no compass—aside from Living the Good Life and the now-expired five-year plan—to refer to in times of confusion. And Living the Good Life didn’t provide guidance for more personal matters outside the Nearings’ experience. Mama knew how to put away food, but what she needed was advice on the increasing distance in her marriage, and other more esoteric concerns.

  Helen believed in the Theosophical tenet that all religions were explanations for the bigger mysteries of the universe and therefore each religion held a piece of the truth, although little discussed in the Good Life books. She espoused the Eastern idea of karma, similar to the Christian saying, “What ye sow, so shall you reap,” and reincarnation, which holds that the spirit is undying and is transferred into a new body after the body’s death.

  Our neighbor Jean said she once saw Heidi running through the woods like a little sprite; when asked where she was going, her reply was a familiar, “Helen’s.” Helen likely treated Heidi as if she were an adult, the way she did most kids, respecting an older wisdom inside each child’s body, and Heidi perhaps connected to a shared spiritual spark in Helen. Despite Helen’s spiritual inclinations, the Nearing formula of four hours a day each for work, intellect, and society was missing the quadrant of the spirit.

  Heidi, with her innocent joyfulness, was our primary representative.

  Chapter Eight

  Paradise

  Heidi and Lissie with snow fort (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  Young animals were everywhere in the spring before Mama’s leaving. Our remaining milk goat, Swanley, named after the goat in the book Heidi, had a kid, not a billy, luckily, that we called Turnip because she was white like her mother. She had soft noodle legs and liked to butt her head into my hand, the way she butted into Swanley’s udder to nurse, so you could feel the bumps where her horns would be.

  Mama and I were walking down the path to the Nearings’ when we saw a fawn with its mother in the woods next to the path. They stopped to watch us over their shoulders, the small one with white freckles across its back and dark wet nose and eyes. Suddenly the mother flicked her ears as if to say, “Come on,” her tail flashing white as they leaped away, cracking sticks through the woods.

  “When you see a deer, that means something new is coming,” Mama whispered. “We saw a baby so maybe it means we’ll have a new baby, too.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Will you be able to take care of it?”

  “Of course,” Mama said. “That’s what mamas do.”

  “Really?” I felt like asking. It seemed a challenge for Mama to take care of herself that spring. The business of readying the farm for summer overwhelmed her body, which longed to remain in hibernation mode. Checkout times had been more frequent, and fasting was often the culprit, as she resorted to juice diets for energy.

  Then Papa found six baby mice when cleaning up the woodshed and brought them out to us in a wood box. I peered in to see a pile of small brown tear shapes with pointy noses and eyes sealed tight as peapods.

  “Where’s the mama mouse?” I asked.

  “She must have gotten lost or hurt,” Papa said. I held the box against my stomach so I could show Heidi. She looked in, then up at me, that sweet smile of hers flooding her eyes and twisting her mouth into a bow. We gave them goat’s milk and water, but had to push their noses into the milk so they would drink. The first thing I did when I woke the next morning was look in to check on the mice in the box next to our bunk. Some were making cheep-squeak sounds, but two of them did not wake up. We tried to get the others to eat lettuce, oatmeal, and more goat�
��s milk, but they just crawled to the far corner of the box. The next morning there were no more cheep-squeak noises. I sat next to the box for a while, swallowing at the lump in my throat, then took the dead mice to bury them with the others by the compost heap.

  When I found a young bird that had knocked itself out against the front windows, I was afraid it would die like the mice if I helped it, so I left it next to the greenhouse. A little later I snuck out to find the bird still there in the leaves with its eyes closed, as if sitting on a nest. Worried about foxes, I picked it up and carried it inside, a warm shape in the palm of my hand. To my surprise, it began to perk up, and its eyes brightened. When I took it back outside, it flew out of my hand, flopping to the ground at first, then lifting up and alighting on a tree branch. After a while I saw it fly away with some other birds, and over dinner Papa said the fledgling was just stunned and would be just fine, thanks to me for helping it recover.

  “Some will die, and some will survive in nature,” he mused.

  I may not have known much about wood-paneled station wagons, shag rugs, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Wheel of Fortune, or other high points of 1970s culture, but I was learning to understand the laws of nature. The one thing you could count on was its predictable unpredictability.

  “It’s paradise here,” I once overheard a woman say to her friend.

  “The very nature of paradise,” the friend replied, “is that it will be lost.”

  On an afternoon not long after my sixth birthday, I walked up the soggy path from the bus, the last crusts of snow still hunkering in the dark hollows of the forest, to find the farmhouse empty. Papa was out in the garden spreading compost.

  “Where’s Mama?” I asked.

  “She went to visit your grandparents,” Papa said.

  “Where’s Heidi?”

  “Heidi went too.”

  “Why did Heidi get to go?”

  “Because Heidi is still little, and you are in school.”