When Pussy Tats had not come to the house for a couple of days, I looked everywhere for the black shape of him with his short stub of tail. We found him lying in the woodshed, cold and stiff in an area under the workbench where he liked to sleep. You could tell he was no longer alive just by the way his fur was not shiny from licking but dull and dirty. It had been cold enough that there was no smell.
I think it was Chip who helped me bury the body by the spring, digging a hole in the nearly frozen peat moss. Pussy Tats lay in the position I had found him as we covered his body with the stiff earth.
“Was it my fault?” I asked Chip. Keith and Jean were still in the process of splitting up, but Chip would eventually take Jean’s place as Keith’s wife.
“No, no, he must have been sick,” she said, but it didn’t sound very convincing. I was sure it was my fault, because I didn’t really like cats, because I didn’t like him to purr and knead his claws in my lap. Just like I was becoming sure that Heidi was my fault.
There was something else I didn’t want to remember. When Heidi drowned, my heart grew a hidden thought. Maybe now I’ll get the attention I need, it whispered. Maybe now our family will be happy again. But it didn’t work out like that at all.
Chip made a small cross out of two pieces of cedar wood and stuck it in the ground over the grave.
“There,” she said.
“We worried about you,” Paul told me much later. “That you would feel guilty, that you would feel responsible. And you were too young to speak to about it. No one really had the ability to check in with you or get at what really happened. So there was this very sketchy sense of whether or not you were there with Heidi. Seven is little, too little to deal with that, but it doesn’t change the fact that Heidi tipped into that water and drowned.”
The next time I followed Mama down to the spring to get water, she said, “What is that?”
“Pussy Tats’s grave,” I said. “We made a cross for him.”
“What? You buried that cat by the spring?” Her anger was refreshing in its strength. “This is not a graveyard!”
“Chip helped me,” I said.
“It will pollute the water,” she said. “Ask Chip to dig him up.”
Mama slipped out of the water yoke and walked over to the cross. She looked at the grave for a minute and then pulled the cross out of the ground and flung it into the forest. She stared into the woods for a few minutes, beady-eyed, before coming back for the yoke.
“I can’t bear to get water from this spring now,” she spit.
I didn’t remember Gerry telling me about Pussy Tats’s food sensitivities, but when she got back, she said of course she had. Perhaps she told Mama, but Mama didn’t care.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
Gerry asked to see where he was buried, and I took her down to the spring, but the ground was covered in snow by then and I couldn’t find the grave.
“There was a cross,” I said. I didn’t say Mama had torn it out.
Gerry was smileless about Pussy Tats for a long time. After that, I didn’t give her any more spankings.
Mama no longer brushed and braided my hair for school or made me new dresses, even though my clothes were all old and too small. Once when Mrs. Clifford called me up to the blackboard, I had on a jumper dress from last year with straps up the back that buttoned on my chest. When I reached up to write, I heard the kids sniggering behind me. The skirt part must have risen up to show my underwear—at least I think I was wearing underwear. I quickly finished writing and went back to my chair. No one met my eyes. They were laughing so hard Mrs. Clifford made everyone put their heads down. I loved to put my head down and watch the condensation of my breath on the Formica desktop—there I was safe.
When the bus pulled up to Jennifer’s trailer in the big field on Varnumville Road, she stood tall and proud, blond hair twitching in the breeze, as if she were just hanging out there, as if she couldn’t possibly live in a trailer. She got on the bus and looked right through me, heading back to sit with a new friend. They were the popular girls now.
During recess, I tried to grab Jennifer’s hand and make her walk with me around the edge of the playground, but she ran ahead like it was a game and she was running from me. I caught up with her and stood in front so she couldn’t run.
“Count my freckles,” I said, holding out my arms.
She didn’t take my arms and start counting; she just looked at me, her eyes flat and hair flipping like a cape around her shoulders.
“Hey, you have a freckle right there,” I said, lifting my pointer finger and pressing a vagrant freckle on her nose. She ducked away from my finger and made a pointer finger at my face. Her eyes got narrow.
“Well, you have a freckle right there,” she said. “And there, and there, and there, and there.” Her finger came forward onto my nose again and again, the sharp edge of her fingernail pecking like a bird.
“Oww,” I said, but I didn’t move until she ran away.
I was running up the path from the Nearings’ after the bus dropped me off, always running to the beat of some increased urgency in my heart, when my toe snagged a root and I fell forward onto the damp earth and pine needles, arm crunching beneath my chest. A tiny protest shot through the bones near my wrist. Broken, I was sure. I ran again toward the brightness at the end of the path where it opened out into the back field, trunks of trees flashing past, dark-light, in the fading light. “Mama,” I called, though I knew she couldn’t hear me yet. “I broke my arm.”
A boy in my class broke his leg, and I’d watched with interest to see that everyone gave him a lot of attention. One or the other of his parents drove him to school, the teachers helped him to the bathroom, and all of us kids wrote on the white plaster of his cast, drawing bright pictures with markers. I imagined Mama would hold me sobbing in her arms. Drive me to school and pick me up. Forgo work to tend to my needs. But the protest in my arm was already fading, blood pumping to soothe the ache, so I held my arm out to smack it against a tree. The pain sprang back into my wrist from the impact. Broken, I was sure.
Across the field of stiff shorn cornhusks that poked through my sneakers, past the woodshed, the ash tree with its dangling swing, up the stones of the patio, the granite slab of doorstep. The wooden latch fell away, and the house opened its emptiness to me.
“Mama?” Back out the door. Scanning with ears and eyes across the clearing. Mama? I slipped off my shoes and ran through the autumn remains of the garden, dampening sawdust clinging to my feet, its coolness creeping up my legs. The tears began to come, not from any pain in my wrist, the impact already forgotten by the resilience of my young muscles, but from the hollow pain in my throat, the egg rising up.
“Mama,” I called. “I broke my arm.”
Dew washed the sawdust from my feet as I ran by the farm stand full of storage, up the grassy lane, past the orchard of shriveling apples, and out to the parking lot. Mama’s VW Bug was gone. The Silver Bullet gone, too. Only the sunken shape of Good Ole Jeepie remained, rusted and beaten down from years of work. The campground spread out on the other side of the parking lot, cook shack and tent platforms empty, rope swing hanging still and straight. I already knew the log cabin would be empty, but I went anyway, up the driftwood steps of the porch, repeating the words to the empty room. “Papa, I broke my arm.”
Then I did something that seemed strange even as I watched myself doing it. I ran up and down the packed stones of the back driveway, running to keep myself running so when someone returned it would seem like I had just come up from the bus, just broken my arm. I ran until the lump in my throat blocked the air from my lungs. My legs weakened, muscles slackening as dusk closed around me, but I kept walking up and down the drive, willing the tears to roll down my face for effect, but they were gone, dried up, and by the time Mama returned from her errands the welcome p
ain in my arm was gone, too.
I see now that beneath it all was a feeling I didn’t want to admit to myself. It felt like relief. Relief because for so long I was working to prevent just this from happening, the falling and falling apart, but when it actually happens, you realize that once spilled, your life never goes back in the same way. It isn’t supposed to. It’s only then that you know you are alive, and that despite the uncertainties, you will survive.
Books are what save us. The best place for reading was the space where the feet were supposed to go under Papa’s built-in desk in the log cabin. I read in the story of The Snow Queen about a goblin who made a mirror that had the power to shrink everything beautiful and magnify everything evil. The goblin carried the mirror up to heaven to turn it on the angels, but it slipped from his hands and fell to earth, where it shattered into a million pieces. A little boy and girl named Kay and Gerda lived across the eaves from each other, and once, when he was sitting by the windows, the little boy felt something stick into his heart and eye. It turned out to be bits of that magic mirror, which made his eyes unable to see beauty and his heart into a lump of ice.
I was that boy. I even looked like a boy after Gerry cut my hair short so it wouldn’t appear messy and unkempt. The stories lived in a safer place. The solution was to find books that lasted a long time. I’d already made it through The Hobbit and was working on The Fellowship of the Ring, and there were two more books in the trilogy. They would last me at least to winter. My favorite tales told of the hero’s journey—of the hero who was called, often guided by an aged mentor like Gandalf, to another world where he or she must find the sword of knowledge to fight the dragons blocking the way to the ultimate discovery, in the darkest hour, of some secret to save the land.
“It’s too dark under there,” Gerry said. “You’ll ruin your eyes.” She gave me a little flashlight so I could trace the sentences with the beam of light, like Luke Skywalker’s light saber. I would have stayed under the desk forever, but the beam soon become paler and less yellow, like the sun on a wintery day. When it started to flicker and waver, you knew the end was near, and we were always out of fresh batteries.
That’s when I realized I could live in the world of the book in my head. Papa always told me I could be anything I wanted, and through my imagination I knew it was true. I could be Frodo. Even better, I could be Strider or Arwen, Galadriel or Gandalf, and raise my staff to make bad things slink away into their caves. As in the Narnia books, I could go to my own private country as I walked the paths in the woods, passing through the wardrobe into a world where there was something to believe in again. I could do this while going back and forth between the log cabin and the farmhouse, while lying in bed, on the bus, in the outhouse. At any time I could escape through the door of my imagination. The words “once upon a time” hold the comfort that the world is a rational place. If we can weave the threads of the story into a pattern that makes sense of things, we can believe it so.
It was then that Telonferdie came back. I was on the path to the Nearings’ when I heard her voice whispering in the trees.
“It’s me, Telonferdie,” she said.
“You’re still alive?” I asked, astonished. “Even without Heidi?”
“Of course,” she said. “I never die.”
Chapter Twelve
Mercy
The farmhouse kitchen with wood cookstove, grain grinder, and hand pump faucet (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
Gerry left for home near the end of November. Papa told us she’d gone to visit her family for the holidays, which she had, but the truth was, she couldn’t take the tension at the farm.
“If you go to Topsfield I might join you there,” she told Papa. The Coolidge Center in Topsfield, Massachusetts, had offered him a job running an experimental organic farm and a big house with electricity, running water, and an office and phone. His thyroid was showing signs of shrinking enough to bring its symptoms into check, but he would have to take pills for the rest of his life to do the work the healthy organ had once done. Though it would get worse before it got better, there was hope that he could reclaim control over his body and relief in the thought that he might be able to focus on just the intricacies of organic farming, leaving his illness and the work of homesteading behind in Maine.
A light snow dusted the winding roads as Papa drove away from the farm in the Silver Bullet with his few immediate belongings and a staticky tune on the radio. Much, much later he would look back and say those years on Greenwood Farm, despite the heartbreak, were when he felt the pulse of life beat the strongest. It hurt him to leave, but it was time for him and Mama to part ways, there was no mistaking it. He knew she had to find her own strength; he could never give that kind of thing to her, no matter how he tried. Though his later successes would be built on the humility learned from these early struggles, it didn’t seem likely on the day he left. Deep down he felt only the pain of his marriage coming to an end.
As he turned from the cape onto the paved road heading south, the snow on the pavement fluffed up into the engine and stalled it out.
“Son of a gun,” he muttered, fingers burning with cold as he fiddled under the hood by the side of the road. The memories came to him then, faint but determined, of rising at dawn to cut branches from the trees for emergency firewood, fixing the rototiller by kerosene lantern on a spring evening, Mama’s singing along the wooded paths as she carried water from the spring, patching the flat tire on the trailer to get manure to the gardens, building the addition in the cold of December before Heidi was born, and the warm little bodies of his children sitting in his lap as he seeded the flats for spring. Through clenched teeth, he said the words to himself, then, under his breath, his old mantra, though the words held little comfort.
“Just how many sons of a gun are lucky enough to be doing what I’m doing right now?”
Only later would he realize that he could still trust in his findings—gleaned by trial and error—that anything really is possible if you set your mind to it, that attention to detail is the best teacher, and that if you’re not getting anywhere, it’s time to change course. Though his health and family had been broken in the process, he’d found his purpose in life—to share the ancient key discovered anew in the garden: if we feed the earth, it will feed us.
I see that is the secret, too, to living. Though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return.
As if there hadn’t been enough sacrifices of late, when Papa called Gerry to say he’d reached Topsfield, she told him her father had just died of a heart attack. She’d gone out for a jog on New Year’s Day and returned to find him on the floor at the bottom of the basement stairs, surrounded by broken flower pots and EMTs. She and her mother could do no more than stand aside as the supine form of father and husband was wheeled out the front door.
At the sound of Papa’s voice, Gerry felt an inexplicable urge to get pregnant—to meet death with new life. Papa’s voice dangled the cord of a rescue rope, and she reached out to grab it. After her father’s funeral, she packed up her bag and boarded a bus—with her widowed mother’s blessing—bound for Massachusetts.
Mama wrote to former apprentices Pam and Paul asking for help. They arrived in a red Datsun pickup with their new little baby, Mariah. The gardens no longer teemed with naked bodies, and music rarely drifted from the campground at night. There were only Pam and Paul in the log cabin, and the occasional visitor who hadn’t heard the party was over. In Papa’s absence the air became thinner, like the first time he left for Europe. It left us fatigued, as if climbing at high altitude.
I thought of Papa chopping wood out by the woodshed on the day he left, clouds of his breath rising in the cold air, or pushing the rototiller into the dark of evening to get the gardens ready for summer, and I knew we were lost without him. It was by the force of his will alone that we had lasted as long as we did. His was the strength the pi
oneers had possessed, but the world had become an easier place since then, and people didn’t need to work so hard to survive, so they didn’t. It was insanity to do so.
When I went down the path to catch the school bus in the mornings, I waited on the Nearings’ former lunch patio for my new friend John to come out and join me. John’s family had moved up from the city to rent the Nearings’ old house and try homesteading. As we walked to the bus together, John said I was weird, so he would teach me how to be normal. These are the things he taught me:
Boys are better than girls.
Gilligan’s Island is better than The Brady Bunch.
Oreos are better than Chips Ahoy.
Cowboys are better than Indians.
Mom and Dad are better than Mama and Papa.
Fall birthdays are better than spring birthdays.
John had a dark blond bowl cut and two square front teeth with a gap between them. While we waited on stumps at the end of the Nearings’ driveway, now his driveway, John taught me how to lie. He told me the plotlines of the previous night’s TV shows so I could say I’d watched them, and what it felt like to zip your penis in your fly so I could pretend to be a boy. Once I got started, it was hard to stop. The stories you could tell by lying were much more interesting.
The bus driver yelled, “No runnin’!” as John and I scrambled to beat each other up the steps and down the aisle to get the smaller of the two back seats. Along the way to school, my friend Paul came back and sat with us. John said Paul was his friend now, and that I could play with them only if I pretended to be a boy. It was much preferable to play with John at his house than stay at home, so I decided to be a boy so I could watch TV and eat junk food. Given the choice of my two gender role models at that time, Mama and Papa, being a boy seemed the better choice. Mama couldn’t win. Nothing worked out for her. She was always saying how hard it was to be a mother. Nursing all the time, cooking and cleaning. Work-your-fingers-to-the-bone.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 26
