This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  I kicked the log along the edge of the path until my shoes filled with damp sawdust. Heidi always got to do everything now that I was in school. My lips started to curl away from my teeth. The cry was there right beneath the surface, waiting for this to happen.

  “Don’t cry,” Papa said.

  I tried, but I couldn’t stop. I sat down in the sawdust as the tears fell out the corners of my eyes, down my cheeks, and into my open mouth.

  “Come on,” Papa said, reaching for my hand. “Let’s go in and get you something to eat.”

  “No.” I pushed him away.

  He lifted me up and I kicked against his knees, screaming. When he put me down in the house my legs became rubber and I lumped to the floor. I lay on my back and screamed louder. Crying made the anger go away and replaced it with sorrow. Sorrow was gentler.

  “Why don’t you lie down for a minute,” Papa said, lifting me to my bunk. There was a calmness to him when he was certain about things. Something had been decided, and it was done. Pretty soon everything faded to dark.

  Papa later told me he showed up that morning with a rental car and asked Mama to drive it down to Westport to stay with her family for a while. Something had slid shut inside him with the smooth clunk of the old wood latch on the farmhouse door. “I don’t know why I did some of the things I did,” he said. “Sometimes I didn’t realize in my haste to solve a problem that my solution might hurt the other party.”

  “It’s not working out,” he’d said to Mama, hands shaking, heart beating too fast. The solution seemed simple—remove the emotional burdens so he could focus on work, his old escape. As if anything is ever that easy.

  “Mammm-maaak.” The sound came from my throat like a hiccup when I woke to a kerosene lantern in the darkness. Papa was reading at the table. Papa. I slipped out of my bunk and shuffled across the floor to climb onto his lap. He didn’t say anything, but his arms wrapped around me as he rested his chin on the top of my head. I leaned back into the warmth of his chest, the way we used to sit when he seeded flats.

  Mama was miserable and misunderstood at her parents’ house, her mother, Prill, fearing the situation might give my grandfather another heart attack. Mama tried to figure out where things had gone wrong, thinking as far back as the winter Papa was building the addition, pushing too hard to finish before Heidi was born. With the hyperactivity he’d become a different person, and said he was no longer in love with her. Her only hope was that Papa’s condition would improve, and things would return to normal.

  After school let out, the long summer days sighed lonesome and empty without Heidi. I longed, more than anything, for companionship. If Papa was my air, coming and going, Mama was more internal. I didn’t know how to adjust to Mama’s absence; the shape of her had been with me since before birth. She was a lung. The other lung could still breathe and keep me alive, but there was a hollow space on one side of my chest that made me “needy-needy,” as Mama called it. Needy was not good, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Play with me, Papa,” I begged, and he would try, but he was racing across the farm trying to finish the work of both parents. “Just a minute, Lissie, I’ll be right there,” he’d say. He always came for me as promised, but those minutes might turn to hours.

  Then Frank arrived, his glow as big and warm as a bear eating honey, intent on the joy in front of him. The son of a southern lawyer, he’d gone to boarding school and recently graduated from Harvard. Inspired by the Nearings’ maple sugaring book, he decided to stop and visit them while hitchhiking to Canada, and, hoping to find himself through the work of the body rather than the mind, he’d returned to apprentice with us.

  The wooden screen door slammed behind as I leaped off the patio and into the green space beneath the ash tree. Where might Frank be? I listened to the sounds of the farm filling the bowl of the clearing—metal of garden tools clanking against buckets, birdsong, whispering of the trees. Across the back field I heard the scrape of a shovel and then saw a curved toss of earth fly up to a pile at the edge of a hole. I ran over and looked in at Frank’s bare back, glistening as he dug. Giggling, I took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it down so it stuck to the sweat on his skin. He spun around, brown eyes alert behind horn-rimmed glasses, then shook his head at me in exasperation.

  “Don’t put the earth back in, okay—I’m working hard to get it out of here, can’t you see?” His laughter started small at first but got bigger until it burst like thunder. The rumble filled the hole, making me laugh and filling the hole inside me, too.

  Dowsing had worked for finding water before, when Helen divined the spot for our other well, so someone went out with a rod and walked in a grid across the field. When the rod dipped downward to purportedly indicate a vein of underground water, Frank started to dig. He had a regular old curved shovel with a smooth wooden handle. Each time I came to find him, he was deeper into the earth. Up to his knees, then his waist, then his bushy head. He dug and dug, but the water didn’t seep up from under the earth the way it did when the backhoe dug the pond.

  “Might as well stop digging,” Frank grumbled at me. “There’s no water here.”

  Soon more apprentices began to arrive, eventually forming the biggest group we’d ever had. When running through the garden looking for Frank, I would find Julie, Naomi, and Michèle harvesting carrots in the nude. It was Michèle who started going naked in the gardens that summer, and everyone followed suit, competing with me for the best overall body tan, a fact that visitors found much more notable than the nudity of a child.

  “Bonjour, ça va,” Michèle called out, teaching me French words. “Comment allez-vous?”

  “Come on tally who?” I repeated, and she loved that, tinkling with laugher, her body slender with small breasts and hips and a long brown ponytail hanging like a rope down her back. Passionate about learning to farm and happily existing in the moment, Michèle was from a politically inclined family in Montreal, her father a union leader who knew of Scott Nearing. Having lost interest in her anthropology major, she attended a farm conference where Papa was speaking and, feeling inspired, asked if she could come work for him. “Write me a letter,” he said, as usual, which she did. There being a mail strike in Canada, she didn’t bother waiting around for a reply, so with tent and sleeping bag in her backpack, she took the bus to Bangor and hitched to Cape Rosier. A neighbor drove her the last ten miles to the farm. As she walked up to the house in darkness, she felt herself surrounded by the growing plants of the garden, the earthy smells of spring evening in the air.

  I’ve come to the right place, she thought, and smiled. Papa brought her to the cabin to stay with Frank. “I was an impressionable baby goose when I first came to the farm,” Michèle liked to say. “Frank was the first apprentice I met, so I imprinted on him.”

  When Kent, the gymnast, returned for his second summer, he was thrilled to find Michèle out at the well in the cool of morning, stark naked, dumping water over her head for a shower, and singing “le soleil, le soleil,” her arms stretched above her head to the rising sun.

  Everyone was in love with Michèle, but most of all Frank and another newcomer, Greg. Michèle meted out her joy slowly to those around her, but Frank wanted it all for himself, so she was careful with him, letting him have only enough to keep him wanting more. While Frank was warm and bearlike, Greg was a mystery Michèle wanted to solve, his silence like a pool reflecting you back to yourself. The summer before, he’d come to the cape in his International pickup while on a road trip around the country. He found an elderly woman trying to roll a rock out of a ditch alongside the road, and she, of course, turned out to be Helen. After he helped her with the rock, she invited Greg to join her for a dinner of beans and ketchup, and Scott asked him to stay.

  Lean and muscular, Greg became Scott’s helper, looking after him in his increasing dotage so Helen didn’t have to worry he’d fall or get lost in the woods. Recently,
when dumping a wheelbarrow load of unneeded gravel over the slope to the cove, Scott had tumbled heels-over-head after it. Scott eventually sold Greg the piece of land on the other side of our farm, where a Franconia student had built a cabin before he left to sail around the world and the land reverted back to the Nearings.

  In the evenings, when I missed Mama most, I’d visit Michèle and Frank in the log cabin. You could get so much more out of human friends than animal friends, I was learning, but there were tricks to it. You had to give more to get more. The secret to Frank was that he enjoyed telling stories. He knew how to use his mind in structured ways, he told me, from growing up with an attorney father who expected him to be a lawyer, too, but he was still searching to find his own way. As he worked in the garden, he liked to let his thoughts flow freely and see where they ended up, his mind drifting into what he called the never-ending story, a magical tale he narrated to me about a little girl who went on adventures to other planets. Though he never said she was me, I knew it was so. She came across troubles and strange creatures that threatened to take away her powers, but she always won out in the end. Every time I found Frank, there was another adventure to be told. And as the girl in the story was saved each time, so, too, was I.

  “Pants dance!” Michèle called out with her French lilt, the urgent code to announce the 10:00 a.m. opening of the stand. At the warning, apprentices scrambled to find their clothes, shed in the heat of the morning sun. Running for the Enchanted Asparagus Forest, they tugged and pulled into T-shirts and shorts, and casually emerged to greet the string of summer folk walking down the grassy lane from the parking lot. Kent always looked cute enough with his muscular gymnast’s chest and cutoff shorts not to scare them away.

  “At least they weren’t friends of my parents this time,” Papa said over lunch with a laugh, referring to the last, less successful pants dance incident when Frank tried to hide his nakedness behind the compost heaps to the horror of some visitors from New Jersey.

  “You should have just stood there buck naked, pretending you were the normal one,” Kent said, and Frank’s trademark laughter rolled over the patio.

  The local gossip lately was about Mama leaving and the apprentices riding nude on a hay wagon through the sleepy—but not sleepy enough—town of Harborside. It was all a bit more excitement than the locals could appreciate. Papa had volunteered to help clear the hayfields around Harborside in exchange for free hay. Lacking a tractor, he and Scott usually cut hay the old-fashioned way, with a scythe, the ancient blade from Europe and Asia popularized in art as the tool the Grim Reaper used to harvest souls. Its long wooden shaft was slightly curved and as tall as a person, with two handles, one at the top and one in the middle. At the bottom was a pointed metal blade the length of a man’s arm. Papa and Scott held the scythes like dance partners, swinging the shaft around their bodies as if it were a lady in a ball gown as they waltzed across the fields, each stroke of the blade cutting a swath of grass that fell under the feet. Once they got into a rhythm, they could make significant progress, stopping every so often to run the sharpening stone across the blade.

  On the large Harborside fields, the scythe was no match for a mower pulled behind a tractor, but the owner of the fields needed help loading the hay and carting it to the barn. Papa and the apprentices hitched a wagon to the jeep and everyone rode over in the back, armed with pitchforks. They tossed the hay from the field onto wagons and unloaded it into the barn until, hot and sweaty and itchy, they headed home on top of a full wagon. Michèle, of course, had been chafing at working in her clothes, so she stripped down and let the breeze cool her skin as the wagon weaved through town.

  “Well, I’ll be a hot crossed bun, that’s something you don’ see every day,” a local allowed.

  “Hippies,” others said, frowning.

  Either way, it got people talking, which Papa wasn’t very happy about, worried it would scare customers away from the farm stand. As it turned out, it may have scared some, but those were replaced by others who came in hopes of catching a glimpse of Michèle’s glorious full-body tan.

  I, too, loved to ride naked on the hay wagon like Michèle. It was a soft bed, if a bit itchy, smelling so sweetly of clover and timothy, you could almost imagine eating it like the goats. But Papa said I couldn’t go over to the hay fields, I was too little to help, so I had to stay behind with the apprentice tending the farm stand. I sulked all day until they returned, then ran up to climb onto the wagon.

  “We’ve got to unload the hay,” Frank said. “Time to come down.”

  Everyone else climbed off, picking stems from their hair.

  “No,” I said.

  Frank laughed his booming laugh, and it was hard to resist him, but I wanted to stay on the wagon.

  “Come on down,” Frank said.

  “No,” I said, throwing some hay on him.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hay is for horses.”

  I threw some more. It blew back in my face and got stuck in my mouth, so I spit it out. The spit fell on Frank below me.

  “No spitting,” he said.

  His face was calm, but the glow was gone from his eyes.

  I spit out another piece of hay on him and laughed.

  “If you do that one more time,” he said, very serious now, “I’ll give you a spanking.”

  Frank was my friend, but I felt like a wild animal, trapped. So I spit on him again.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Frank said. He climbed up and grabbed me under my armpits, lifted me screaming off the wagon, turned my naked body over, spanked me twice, then put me back down. It was still a common punishment then. Papa had spanked me before, usually behind the woodshed, where he’d make me sit and consider the errors of my ways.

  Frank later apologized to Papa for the spanking. He felt badly, but also thought things were a little too loose around the farm, quite different from the parental strictness he’d grown up with in the South. He’d simply reacted to the situation as he’d been raised. While I was mad at Frank for a long time after that, I also felt a reverence of sorts. He’d drawn a line, the boundary I so badly needed in Mama’s absence, and I loved him for it.

  After haying, the shorn fields of the cape sprouted a white blanket of Queen Anne’s lace. “Queen Anne was sewing her lace when she pricked her finger and a drop of blood fell on it,” Mama told me once when I was younger. “See.” She showed me the small maroon dot of dried blood at the center of the lace doily flower.

  “Drop of blood,” I’d repeated.

  That tiny drop of blood was so much more interesting than the lace.

  On a warm day in June, six weeks after the day she left in the rental car, Mama walked down the grassy lane with Heidi and Papa, as if they were just coming back from the store. I looked up from selling potted flowers, and there she was. Mama. My first instinct was to run to her. She was more beautiful than ever, her hair flowing back from her face and skin glowing. She was nervous, too, but her beauty covered that. She looked around the farm, breathing it in. Something in me held back for a beat—the torn place was used to being torn, and I wondered if it was easier to keep it that way—but then I gave in.

  “Mama,” I shouted and ran across the grass to her. The sun was warm on my face as she bent down and opened her arms. “Lissie,” she said, and drew me into a bear hug, wet where our faces touched. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Heidi was glad to see me, too. She looked so much bigger than I remembered her, the baby fat disappearing into her longer frame. I couldn’t help but love her, though underneath I was angry, too. She got to go with Mama, and something would always feel unequal after that—she was favored. It didn’t matter that she got to go because she was still nursing, and I had to stay because I was in school; it made me want to pinch the soft juicy places under her arms. The sibling rivalry that had smoldered between us ever since she got all the attention as a baby caught the tinies
t bit of flame, the way coals ignite in the firebox.

  Uncomfortable at her parents’ home, the weight of their disapproval prodding the tuggings for her own home and family, Mama somehow managed to get Papa on the phone. “Please, I want to come home,” she whispered into the line so Grandma couldn’t overhear from the next room. Papa was silent on the other end, standing in the Nearings’ new hand-laid stone garage, his ear resting on the black earpiece of the phone Helen had installed there with a pad and pen next to it to record calls. He’d been taking his cupfuls of vitamins religiously and his doctor was amazed to say the blood tests showed tremendous improvement. Unsure of his feelings for Mama, but missing Heidi dearly, Papa made plans to pick them up at the bus station in Bangor.

  It must have been something of a happy reunion, family being an organism that when separated wants to pull back together. Mama and Papa’s wedding anniversary was a few days later, marking the day they got married by the justice of the peace in Littleton, New Hampshire, nine years earlier on the way to Colorado. Nine years was a long time, when you thought about it.

  As happy as Mama was to be home, summer was still summer, her quiet homestead overrun, the farm teeming with youthful naked bodies. Everywhere you looked, apprentices and visitors were climbing out of tents or rolling up sleeping bags from the ground. You had to be careful where you squatted in the woods to pee, as someone else might be squatting nearby—and there’s nothing worse than having your bum unwittingly exposed in that vulnerable position. They bathed under buckets from the well, cooked in the kitchen, and ate lunch on our patio, coming and going from the house as they had in Mama’s absence. They were like kids, too, each competing with the gardens for attention, their energies pushing Mama into a smaller and smaller space for herself.

  Heidi and I fought more often—pinching, screaming, pulling hair. Mama covered her ears and ran from us, the sounds of our crying at odds with her capacity for calm. She felt, more than ever, other people’s emotions as if inside herself. It doubled the confusion in her mind. She needed quiet to sift through the feelings and throw out the ones that weren’t hers. So she did what she always did in times of overload: she checked out.