This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “No-no-no!” Heidi said when I put a creepy beetle on her hair.

  “Stop picking on Heidi,” Mama yelled as she carried a basket of tomatoes into the house. “Mama doesn’t like fighting.” When I followed Mama inside, I found her singing under her breath as she made farm lunch.

  “Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bony fingers—bloody fingers, more like it,” she mumbled. “Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bloody fingers.”

  “Why do you have bloody fingers?” I asked. Mama hunkered over the stove, sizzling onions in a pan as she talk-mumbled. She was so tired from the new baby, she said. Mumble. Mumble. The first three months were always the hardest.

  “But you don’t have a big belly,” I interrupted, surprised.

  “No,” she said. “The baby is just a sprout. It hasn’t gotten very big yet.”

  Something about the thought of a baby made me feel needy.

  “Mama, uppie,” I begged like Heidi did, hugging the back of her legs.

  “No, Lissie, get off, please, I’m cooking.” She pulled away from me. “You’re a big girl, I can’t lift you up anymore.” I slunk back to the table and hung there for a minute, trying to act like I didn’t care, then snuck out the back door and kicked over a bucket set under the edge of the roof to catch rainwater.

  Back in the garden Heidi had dumped over the can of potato beetles. She stood watching as they crawled all over each other, sliding on shiny backs in the straw around the potatoes.

  “No-no, Heidi,” I said. “Bad!”

  “No-no,” she repeated. “Bad!”

  I picked up the beetles in handfuls mixed with the straw mulch and put them in the bucket. They tried to crawl on my hands and cling to my fingers and made me feel like they were crawling all over my body. My thoughts felt like that, too, thinking about Mama.

  “Heidi!” Mama called.

  “Lissie!”

  L’s and i’s and e’s echoed across the curve of the beach as my bare feet sank in the sand beneath the water, pants clenched up in fists against my legs. The surface of the bay was covered in an excitement of diamonds that sparkled and bounced in the swell. I was wading toward that place of light, but as I neared, it always moved farther away.

  “Where’s Heidi-di?” Mama’s voice tripped across the beach.

  I turned, dropping the grip on my pants, to look back at Mama. She stood in her green galoshes in the ragged band of seaweed that had washed up at high tide, a wood-handled three-tine pitchfork in her hands to harvest seaweed for mulching the gardens for winter. Mama worried because Heidi liked to go right into the ocean, as if she had a magnet on her for water. I pointed behind the rock island, where I could see Heidi bending over, looking for sand dollars, and Mama nodded her head and returned to work, her pregnant belly protruding as she slid the pitchfork into the seaweed and lifted a mop of it onto the old wheelbarrow.

  Heidi came to me bearing a perfect round sand dollar. When I shook it to rattle the small bird-shaped bones inside, her eyes grew nearly as round as the sand dollar. “Let’s go find snails,” I said, the wet hem of my pants pasted to my legs. Nearings’ Cove—so called because it was directly below their property—fanned out in a clamshell shape around us, wide and gradual at the top where the seaweed lay, and deep and narrower down by the water. The sizable rock island slumbered in the middle of the beach at low tide, its surface full of crystal pools left behind in the crevices where you could find snails and starfish. A whole universe lived inside those tide pools, everything fresher and more beautiful when wet and magnified by water. We pulled up the snails and marveled at the way the coil of the shell was similar to the coil of fiddleheads in spring, or the coil of the lines that made up the fingerprints on our fingers. What kind of magic was this?

  “Lissie,” Mama called again. “Bus-sss!”

  “Oh.” I sighed. Time for school. It was not fair, nature was so much more fascinating than school. I scrambled down the rock, found my wet shoes, and ran up the beach to the bus waiting above on the road by the Nearings’ driveway. I was always missing the bus, it seemed, and we’d gotten a note from the town, asking that since the bus had to come thirty minutes out of its way to get me, and since gas prices were so high, could I try to be there. Especially since they would be plowing in winter for the bus, unlike in previous years when the local plowman might “forget” our road simply because he didn’t like hippies.

  “You’re soaking wet,” Mama squawked when I passed, but there was nothing she could do as I left her world for the world of school.

  Skates showed up that fall of 1975 with Lyn and Lucky and the kids in a fancy rented motor home. It was the fall of heiress Patty Hearst’s arrest for bank robbery and Charles Manson’s acolyte Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. Our wayward lifestyle seemed harmless by comparison.

  “If Boots won’t get modern conveniences, we’ll bring them ourselves,” Skates quipped, radiating pleased-ness with herself for having overcome the obstacles of our remote lifestyle by bringing what we lacked—generator, bathroom, kitchen sink, stove, and comfortable beds—all coupled with the ultimate in mobility and modern style. They established the motor home in the customer parking lot, generating much amusement and joking at Papa’s expense by the apprentices in the campground.

  “You sure you don’t want to get one of those for yourself?” they teased. “Or how about one for us?”

  Skates brought gifts to appease us, chilled brown bottles of Guinness beer for the apprentices and Papa, and for me and Heidi a stuffed beaver and a Fisher Price farm set with animals and a barn door that mooed. It was better than Christmas. “Plaaastic,” Papa commented out of Skates’s earshot, with a half-joking, half-derogatory nasal accent, but we didn’t care, mooing the barn door endlessly until its batteries were stolen in a pinch for a flashlight and not immediately replaced.

  Skates also brought Papa the infamous red Mustang convertible that fall, driven up by Lucky in tandem with the motor home. Skates had recently purchased herself a shiny new Pontiac and decided to donate the Mustang to the cause of her penniless son, as she generally did with her cast-off vehicles. It was a bright red 1963 convertible with leather seats, reminding Papa of a sweet little MG he had back in his school days.

  “A car is the biggest expense of homesteading,” Papa always said, referring to the constant repairs our old vehicles required, not to mention the pricey state registration we were always late to renew and the insurance that was generally beside the point. Our history with the automobile had certainly been an eclectic one, from the white VW truck Mama and Papa had in Franconia, with its built-in camper on the back, to the old army jeep of Skipper’s.

  The problem for me was that I’d always been particularly prone to car sickness, especially on those curvy hilly roads of the cape. Once Papa let me drive in his lap, hoping it would build my resistance, but instead I caused the jeep to go off the road into a ditch and dinged the fender. After years of such mishaps and the work of pulling out tree trunks and hauling trailers full of seaweed and other creative loads, as well as serving as our only form of transportation, Good Ole Jeepie was starting to fail us, so Skates had volunteered the Mustang. It wouldn’t last the winter. On the winding road to Harborside, Papa hit a patch of ice going around a ninety-degree turn, and the car slid into the tree at the corner.

  “Wrapped the car around a tree,” he said to Mama, after walking the two miles home. Papa was unscathed, but the car sat there for a few days before he could get it towed into a garage in Bangor. When it turned out Skates hadn’t kept up the insurance, Papa, lacking the money for repairs, quietly disappeared from the garage, leaving the mechanic an unexpected, and rather valuable, gift. Only the mark in the tree remained as a memento of the car’s short life with us.

  Sometime after that, Skates gave us the silver Pontiac station wagon that Papa
dubbed the “Silver Bullet,” back in the quiet days before its muffler fell off, never to be found again. He said it drove like a dream, but my sensitive stomach didn’t agree. We had to roll all the windows down, summer and winter, to prevent vomiting. Once Heidi and I were on an errand with Mama that took us over the Waldo-Hancock, a long-span suspension bridge passing 135 feet above the Penobscot River narrows near Bucksport. Mama’s hair flipped wildly in the front seat, windows wide open, wind rushing in, as Heidi and I, carseatless as always in the back, hung out the windows to see the river far below. Heidi had her little hand-knit brown Greek fisherman’s sweater on backward, and her blond hair was blown into its customary nest over her tall forehead. She looked over at me with that little tight-lipped smile and began flapping her arms like she was flying. I joined her, and we flapped our wings on both sides. The ride was so smooth and the water so far below us, it really did feel like we were flying.

  “Flying-di-dying,” Heidi chimed.

  “Flying-di-dying,” we chorused. And we were.

  Until it was replaced a couple years ago, I thought of Heidi every time I drove over that bridge, her hair nested and sweater on backward, arms flapping, eyes alight. Flying-di-dying still.

  My eyes opened to a child’s cry in the night, air cool, fire banking in the stove. Outside I could hear the branch of the ash tree rubbing with a creak-shush on the edge of the roof, my skin prickling with goose bumps.

  “I half to pee, I half to pee,” Heidi cried from below me in the bunk. “I haaalff to peeee.”

  No rustlings came from Mama or Papa in the addition, so I slid down the bunk ladder and patted the lower bed with my hands until I found Heidi’s taut shape and fingers reaching out to meet mine in the darkness.

  “Come on.”

  We shuffled to the door and lifted the latch to a wall of subzero air. The moonlight lit the snowy clearing with a pale luminescence, like the wintry scenes in our book about the Tomten making his night rounds.

  “Mama says no pee scars by the doorstep.” The outhouse being too far to go in the dark, I pulled Heidi over the edge of the patio to the snow-covered yard, teeth clicking furiously, the cold burning our bare feet. Heidi squatted and pulled her leggings down, moonlight lighting the perfect rounded W of her bum hanging over bent legs, steam rising around her from the hot rush of pee.

  “Ggg-got on my leg.”

  “Just pull up your pants, hurry.”

  “Got-a wipe.”

  “Use snow,”

  “No-no-c-cold.”

  Unwiped, we left the pee scar in the snow and dashed for the door. I pulled the edge of it open with my fingernails, pushed Heidi up the step from under her bum, and helped her back into bed.

  “Snug me,” she said into the dark. I clambered into her bunk, pulled the blankets over us, and Heidi stuck her ice-block feet between my calves until our combined body warmth began to thaw us out. There was the odor of pee, but underneath Heidi smelled like baby, clean as if she’d just been born and hadn’t gone for weeks without a bath. You couldn’t help but love that sun-warmed honey smell, the comfort of it filling my chest as I fell to sleep.

  We learned to hold our poop at night because a trip to the outhouse was too scary in the dark. Our outhouse didn’t have a toilet seat and lid like the Nearings’ did, just a slit in the floor that we squatted over above the hole in the ground. In the dark you were afraid of what was down in that hole, and even more afraid you might fall in.

  About once a year we moved the outhouse, which meant Papa or an apprentice dug a hole as deep as he was tall. Then they lifted the small A-frame and carried it to the new hole, covering the old one with the dirt of the new one. At first, Papa found spots that had nice views of the farm through the window, but after a while it was more about privacy and distance from the house. Sometimes you’d forget that it’d been moved and follow an old path to find a filled-in hole indented in the earth from the sinking of the decomposing organic matter, like an ancient grave. “Old poop paths,” we called them.

  “If the ground doesn’t thaw soon, we’ll be up shit creek,” Papa said one morning that spring. The poop mountain was rising closer below the gap in the floorboards, and he had to push it down with a shovel.

  “Pee-yew,” Mama said as it began to thaw. “Be sure to use lots of peat moss.” The soft tufts of moss were harvested from the swamp and dried for wiping our bums and dumping in the hole to absorb odor.

  “Yikes!” Heidi and I agreed when using the outhouse.

  One day Mama heard Heidi’s crying coming from the woods. Running in the direction of the sound, she followed it along the path to the outhouse, where, to her shock, she found Heidi down in the hole, screaming like bloody hell, of course.

  “Luckily it was so full I could just grab her out,” Mama told us. “Otherwise it would have been a disaster!”

  “Ha-ha, you fell in the outhouse,” I teased Heidi for a while after that. “Hidi-didi, poopy breath.”

  “Yuck,” Heidi admitted.

  Later I’d take pity on her tears and hug her tight. Even falling in the outhouse couldn’t erase that tender sweet smell.

  Heidi sang-talked in the bunk below me, having a conversation with herself about my tree-branch fort.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered to my stirring. “We half to see if she’s there.”

  I rubbed my eyes, stars popping and swirling behind the lids.

  “Who?” I asked, protective. The fort was my place, made from a heap of spruce branches cut from the trunk of a tree and left in a pile a little way into the woods on the path to the drinking water spring. The curve of the branches formed a dome, and I’d noticed that the bristles were falling away to make a space to crawl inside. While I was still in school that spring, Heidi’d been hiding in my secret places. Disappearing and making Mama crazy.

  “Telonferdie,” Heidi said.

  “She’s coming?” I asked, goose bumps rising.

  “Yes.”

  Covers shuffled and bare feet padded the wooden floor.

  “Wait.” I climbed backward down the bunk ladder, dirty toes clinging to the rungs as my hair parted like grass around my face. Heidi waited by the door of the cabin, skinny legs and arms sticking from the shirt and shorts she slept in, blue eyes deep as a well, hair a bird’s nest atop her forehead. She turned on tippy-toes to reach the latch, and the heavy wooden door swung open. We exploded from the house into the morning. The air was warm and moist, full of light that vibrated where the treetops formed the crooked edge against the sky of a broken eggshell, trunks fading into darkness down by the earth.

  “Race you!”

  Our bare feet leaped across the grass of the yard and onto the smooth, cool indent of the path in the woods. The forest closed around us with the smells of cedar and spruce and the white of bunchberry dogwood flowers popping from the muted greens and browns. We hopscotched over the exposed roots and past the old log covered in wiry-green moss and an army of red-hatted British soldiers.

  When we neared the fort, I reached out to hold Heidi’s three-year-old hand, so much softer than my seven-year-old one. We slowed and ducked into the trees at the edge of the path around the fort. It was quiet down there below the cackle and chirp of birds above. We crawled into the cave of branches and waited.

  “She’s not here yet,” she told me.

  I had to trust her on this.

  “She’s coming,” Heidi said.

  After a while I could sense more than see an outline of something against the forest. The shape was constantly shifting, like tree leaves in a breeze. I could make it look however I wanted. “Yes, I see her!” I said to Heidi.

  With a voice of rustling leaves, Telonferdie began to tell us an ongoing story that always picked up where it left off the last time. It was woven of the details of the day-to-day—the names of animals and plants and the little worries in our he
arts—together with the greater knowledge of the world that flows through all our brains. Telonferdie became the key to this wisdom that would, in its way, save me.

  When we’d tell Mama and Papa about the things we did with Telonferdie, they’d smile gently, but the more Mama and Papa began to fade in their vibrancy, distracted by their own troubles, the more clearly I could see Heidi’s imaginary friend.

  Chapter Nine

  Bicentennial

  Eliot weighing vegetables at the farm stand (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  As the days warmed, Heidi and I often sat on the swing together under the ash tree by the house, gazing up at the crown of still-bare branches. I can see our two little figures hanging over the face of the curved green earth, the universe sighing above us, vast and unknown. The soil, forests, and waters held in them the promise of survival if we could learn their secrets, but pumping our legs together on the swing, Heidi and I hoped only to reach the sky. We were, all of us, caught up in the excitement of the apex, the high before the decline.

  Soon the chartreuse buds would unfurl in the breeze like miniature flags as the sun relaxed across the farm, igniting the edges of new leaves. A kaleidoscope of young people would again fill the campground to work for us or help the Nearings finish their stone house, and the pregnant bellies swelling on many of the women—Mama, Jean, and Bobbie—would turn into babies. Soon July of 1976 would mark America’s bicentennial, two hundred years of democracy, and shortly after, Viking 1 would capture images of what looked like a face on the surface of Mars, sparking countless imaginations.

  “The universe is ever expanding,” said some. “Democracy begins to fail after two hundred years,” said others.

  “Rain coming,” Heidi said from next to me on the swing.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  She turned to me, hair falling across her forehead so it didn’t seem as oblong as it used to. The skin of her hands was still soft as a baby’s, but she was becoming a little girl, an impish sparkle in her pale blue eyes.