This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  Come daybreak we heard that at 3:00 a.m., around the time Sandy was hoping for sleep under a tree, Jean, two weeks overdue, finally went into labor. A new child, a boy named Dagan, was born to our neighbors at 9:00 a.m. the day after we lost our own.

  We drifted around the farm like shadows. We didn’t talk or feel, or, in Mama’s case, eat. Mama’s parents came up to help, camping in the blueberry field, but there was nothing they could do. Mama hardly spoke to them. I watched the light fade through the windows at the end of the day, pale sunbeams full of dust. Come night the farmhouse was quiet save for the whooshing of kerosene lanterns and Clara’s hunger cries. Helen and Scott held a memorial service in the long room at their old house, and everyone sat on the padded benches in numb silence while Helen played Mozart’s Requiem on her phonograph. Skates, silenced with shock, retreated to Carolyn Robinson’s.

  By Monday Papa couldn’t stand it anymore, his mind commanding his body to turn back to the only thing he could trust—work.

  “I’m opening the stand,” he said. Mama wanted to yell at him, shake him, punch him. Instead she cried in the woods along the paths.

  “Heidiii!” Mama called. “Oh Heidiii!”

  It seemed to her that the whole of the forest was permeated with Heidi’s spirit. She felt something move in the bushes and spun around, expecting to see Heidi come running out. When Anner tried to console Mama, Mama ended up consoling her, still thinking in her shock that somehow everything was going to be all right.

  “Heidi was just there behind that bush, scurrying away,” she told Anner. “I feel her everywhere. In the leaves and the grass and the breeze. She’s all around us.”

  Sandy felt Heidi’s spirit, too. When she rose in the darkness to fetch water at the well for baking bread, Heidi’s energy seemed to pulse in the darkness. As she dipped the bucket into the water with the well pulley, the spirit shape ballooned bigger and bigger around her until she couldn’t breathe. Fearing the intensity of those morning excursions, she began to wake Larry and make him come with her.

  I sat in the woodshed loft in the golden light of afternoons repeating Heidi’s names to myself in a litany, a song to call her back to me.

  “Hieds, Ho, Hi, Heidi-didi, Heidi-Ho, Hodie.”

  I sang and sang, but she never came to the foot of that ladder again.

  Around the campfire in the evenings, Anner sat in silence now, hesitant to raise her voice or guitar in song.

  “Remember that crow? It was wise somehow,” someone said into the darkness.

  “It was an omen,” another agreed, the myth of ravens and crows as messengers, harbingers of death, coming to mind. The crow had showed up that spring before Heidi died, the hush of its black wings cutting the sky. It landed on the patio and cawed down at the gardens, guttural and insistent. “Caw-akkkk.”

  “Nevermore,” an apprentice said in an ominous voice, evoking Edgar Allan Poe’s famous raven. We’d gathered around in a circle where the bird had hopped to the grassy space beneath the ash tree. It was larger than most crows; perhaps it was in fact a raven. It nodded its head, strutted on ringed feet, and made a gurgling noise in its throat, its obsidian head jutting forward and back from its body and ocher beak like a dark cave when it cawed. It was different from the many other crows that ate from the compost heaps and struck dark silhouettes in the trees around the house. There was a wise knowing in the dark marbles of its eyes.

  Larry had noticed a feather hanging out of alignment from the ebony curve of one wing and wondered if it had been hurt and was slightly lame. He leaned forward and tried to pull the stray feather free, but the crow hopped just out of his reach as he scrambled after.

  “Stop,” Anner had said. “Don’t mess with it.” It flapped onto the patio, then dropped off the rock edge, catching air under its wings, and flew up onto a branch of the ash tree.

  “You know why they call it a murder of crows?” someone asked. “Because a group of them will gang up on a solitary crow and kill it. Maybe they tried to do that to this one.”

  Heidi took a particular liking to that crow, following it around and talking to it in her own bird voice. It would gurgle-purr back at her. Perhaps she could understand it the way she understood the trees and Telonferdie. It came by every day for a month or so, dropping in at lunch to eat scraps and establishing itself as a member of our eclectic community. Jean also reported seeing it next door at her house. Someone finally looked up the old rhyme and recited it at lunch:

  One crow for sorrow, two for mirth,

  Three for a wedding, four for a birth,

  Five for silver, six for gold,

  Seven for a secret not to be told.

  Eight for heaven, nine for hell,

  And ten for the devil’s own self.

  Heidi was especially upset when we didn’t see our feathered friend for a number of days and realized the crow was not coming back. To ease her distress, we blamed its departure on the fact that someone had finally pulled out that stray wing feather and scared it away.

  Lacking neat scientific summaries on the news at night and a minister at church every Sunday to provide comforting religious sermons, our little community was left to determine our own rationale for the things that happened. So it wasn’t surprising that after Heidi drowned, people thought of the crow and felt something tingle up their spines.

  One crow for sorrow . . .

  As everyone shivered around the fire, a Theosophical Society friend of Helen’s who was said to be clairvoyant—a medium—emerged from the log cabin. Robyn was a grumpy older woman who often complained about the living conditions and ate a lot of garlic, its sweaty smell permeating her skin. She was on a sprouted wheat cleansing diet that made her act a little strange, in Sandy’s opinion. As she approached the fire, sparks shattered from a collapsing log and brought forth exclamations from the group. Robyn raised her bare arms for silence.

  “I’ve communicated with Heidi,” she announced. “She said she’s fine, and she doesn’t want to come back.”

  Anner and the others stared at her in stony silence, eyes glinting in the firelight. Just who was this woman to make such a claim?

  “I wouldn’t want to come back either,” someone muttered after Robyn returned to the log cabin. “Not if I saw that woman calling me from the ever-after.”

  Soon after, Papa, in his sorrow, began to fill up the pond, shovelful by shovelful, returning it to the forest. Its waters bled back into the earth, leaving a dark wound beneath new moss, and eventually, the beginnings of alders.

  Chapter Eleven

  Atonement

  A view of the gardens from the orchard in spring (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  When the inexplicable happens, everyone wants to find a culprit. Where was the mother? The father? “It’s because they were heathens, because they didn’t abide—they had it coming, living like that,” some said. The attending sheriff has since passed on, and the files from that year burned in a fire, so I don’t know for sure what the law thought, but as if we didn’t have enough pain, my parents were blamed for the accident by the moral world at large—especially Papa, he being the man in charge. Sometimes the crucified are redeemed, sometimes they aren’t. For our family, redemption would come through sorrow.

  By August the fields were covered with the swaying blanket of Queen Anne’s lace, but all I could see were those thousands of drops of bloodred at the center. On the Hebrew Day of Atonement, a goat was sent off to perish in the wilderness, carrying the sins of the people on its back. A scapegoat, and the thread tied around the goat’s neck was red for sin and guilt, red like Heidi’s boat.

  We went about life, needing still to make a living at the farm stand during the summer months. Mama and Papa created the facade of normalcy for others, working together by necessity but avoiding each other and the urgings of their emotions, as if by ignoring the pain in their hearts, it
would magically disappear.

  Into the stunned warmth of that month came Winnie and John, of Bullfrog Films, with their young child, a handsome cameraman named Robert, and a 16mm camera. They stayed in a cabin at nearby Hiram Blake Camp, slipping into a week in the life of Forest Farm as the Nearings transitioned from the old farmhouse to their nearly completed stone house on the cove. At first Helen and Scott, perhaps in shock like the rest of the community, all but ignored the camera, feigning indifference to the project. But soon enough Robert was able to work his easygoing charms on Helen and win her interest by gently poking fun at her. She began to emerge in the mornings with rouge on her cheeks and engage in something of a flirtation with the camera.

  Scott, too, saw an opportunity to expound on his favorite topics, from the importance of building up the soil to his distaste for bankers and big business, even remarking upon what he saw as the wayward career of his adopted son John, who had abandoned his once stalwart Communist beliefs to work for Henry Luce at Time. And Scott never missed an opportunity to denigrate banking, the chosen profession of his other son Robert. Uncomfortable in the realm of emotion, Scott far preferred the intellectual critique of the sociopolitical.

  One scene in the documentary took place during Helen’s music night, with Sandy and Larry and other apprentices gathered in the Nearings’ living room. It was only a week or two after Heidi’s death, and a collective mourning was palpable. Helen explained that she had selected “music of protest” by a young Vietnamese girl for that evening’s score in response to Scott’s opposition to the “dribbly” music of the previous weeks, played in memoriam for Heidi.

  “Can’t we listen to something of social significance?” Scott had requested.

  I hover here in shock at Scott’s words, but also with empathy. We were all prone to that self-serious and emotionally distant tone set by the Nearings, the intellectual realm being so much safer than the emotional. Those tidy little stages of grieving—from denial to anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were unavailable to hearts clutched in the grip of the intellect. There were no gardeners of grief in our community.

  Fall air holds the smell of wood smoke more than any other time of the year. For me it will always be the scent of lost things. As I walked the path to the bus, the ashy disintegration of maple and pine mingled with a wistfulness for the barefoot freedoms of summer and life as it had been before.

  Everyone in second grade knew about Heidi. They stopped whispering when I came near and looked at me with blank eyes. It made me different, so I didn’t want to talk about it. My friend Jennifer and I were playing hula-hoops in the playground when I fell on the tarmac and cut my hip. Everyone ran away, screaming at the sight of blood. The third- and fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Clifford, came and took me to the nurse’s room to swab and bandage the wound. She had to unbutton and pull down my favorite pink pants to get to the cut, which made me uncomfortable. When I cried at the sting of alcohol, Mrs. Clifford looked at me with eyes made large behind her rimmed glasses.

  “You have a lot to hurt about,” she said. I thought she meant the cut was very bad.

  “It must be quite hard.”

  “No,” I said, crying more.

  She stood back, the tears in her eyes disappearing behind the glare of her glasses.

  “Can I go now?” I didn’t want any more people’s sadness. I buttoned my favorite pants, now stained with blood, and wiped my eyes with my knuckles.

  On the way home on the bus my friend Paul let me choose from his marble collection. There was one that reminded me of the blue of Heidi’s eyes, with swirls of light and dark blues that went deep into its center, and he let me have it even though it was his favorite. I held the cool orb tightly in my palm so as not to lose it.

  In the mornings I sat with Jennifer on the bus, and she counted the freckles on my arms. We both had long hair, but hers was summer blond, with streaks of almost white next to her pale unfreckled skin. She said that even though I had freckles and brown hair, I was pretty, too.

  “We’re the prettiest girls in our class,” she said. “Be sure to save me a seat because I don’t want to have to sit with anyone else.”

  We walked around the edge of the playground holding hands as she talked of plans to make us popular. I didn’t understand why it mattered so much, but I practiced hula-hoops in the courtyard with her and did jump-rope tricks. When everyone lined up and held hands to play Red Rover in the big field beyond the swing sets, I would run as fast as I could toward Jennifer in the line of kids, knowing she would let her hand break free so I could go back to my team and get cheered. I did the same for her. When we were together, it didn’t matter what the other kids said. That she lived in a trailer. That I was a hippie with a dead sister.

  The second-grade teacher, Mr. McGuffie, was new and a bit of a radical. He organized our chairs in a big circle, rather than traditional rows. I sat between Jennifer on my left and, on the right, Nigel, the grandson of Dick and Mary, our friends who had hosted the sauna parties of earlier years. With the two of them I could forget about my troubles and feel like a normal kid—until Mr. McGuffie had to separate the three of us for whispering and giggling.

  “Your wrists are so skinny, I can circle them with my thumb and forefinger,” Jennifer said one day in the playground, but when she tried to clamp her finger and thumb around my wrist, I twisted out of her grip.

  “Don’t touch my wrists!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  There was a blank space in my memory. Hands reaching for mine. Don’t. Don’t touch. Don’t touch this feeling. It hurts.

  Papa left on his second European farm tour that fall as planned, struggling to keep his thyroid—and life—in check. Secretary of Agriculture Butz had resigned in October after outing himself as a bigot by quipping, “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.” Despite Butz’s departure in disgrace, the USDA remained attached to the well-entrenched purse strings of the chemical and commercial agriculture industries.

  Through grants and savings, Papa had raised enough money that summer to take a group of adults to a conference on biological agriculture in Paris, followed by a ten-day tour of organic farms. The itinerary included France, Germany, and Holland. Papa wanted to share with others the secrets of these European farmers, whose soil had been worked for centuries to produce some of the happiest and healthiest plants he’d ever seen. In these small farms and their ancient soil, he saw hope for the future, if only he could translate their methods for the American mind. It was a passion that grew with the loss of his daughter, as if through his dedication to this work, her short life would be redeemed.

  Our apprentice Paul traveled ahead to work the grape harvest with a vintner in France, then met up with the group in Paris. It was there that Papa finally opened up to Paul about Heidi one night at a bar. He’d been holding it all in, trying to keep moving forward, not letting himself feel a thing. That night with Paul, far away in another country, Papa broke down and cried for the first time since July.

  “He was completely devastated,” Paul told Pam later; the loss of Heidi was coupled with the loss of the dream that happiness could be achieved through purposeful effort alone. Life, in the end, had demanded its pound of flesh. Papa’s most tender feelings of joy, he realized, had been the moments when he left off farmwork and sat on the grass to let me and Heidi climb onto his back like two little monkeys, giggling and tumbling to be near him, or as he carried the solid weight of baby Clara’s sleeping body from the jeep at night and settled her into bed. They were memories he could taste only in short sips, before retreating again behind the reserve learned from his father. There he was safe, more or less, as he returned from Europe to the demands of the farm. But the pain continued to wreak havoc on his thyr
oid, until the doctors told him surgery or radiation treatment were the only options.

  The low sun of late fall streamed through the windows at an awkward angle, illuminating the residue on the glass and magnifying the dust that covered every surface. Mama and Papa joined each other for meals, but ate in silence. There was a screaming in my heart as I sat with them on the old tree-stump chairs, the wood worn to a smooth patina beneath me.

  Mama looked across the table and knew in the angle of his jaw and distance in his eyes that Papa was lost to her. If she could have talked with him about that day in July, things might have been different. If she could have aired how her suspicions about his friendship with Bess had come out as anger at us kids, how her innocent dismissal of us had turned deadly, he might have felt compassion for her. He could have told her that nothing ever happened with Bess, or with any of the others. Perhaps they might have helped each other and gone on together. But Mama did not tell Papa the last thing she’d said to Heidi that day. She did not tell anyone.

  Some lives are made of the hope that something not quite right might turn out right in the end. When did that kind of hoping begin for Mama? When was that first sign of dismissal from Papa, the first hint of her happy homestead slipping away? It must have been long before the spring Papa rented the car and sent her down to her parents. Perhaps she knew the moment she served him the mashed potatoes at Franconia College that they could never fully meet each other’s expectations. Looking back now, it seems possible that Mama’s passive nature needed Papa to reject her in the end. The only way to grow, her heart insisted, was to suffer.

  When the meal was done, Papa rose from the table, rinsed his bowl, and headed out the door to the shortening day. Silence remained in the farmhouse, but the screaming in my heart would not hush.