This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “Oh shit,” Mama had said. “Oh shit!” I didn’t turn around. Everything was always, “Oh shit.”

  Now she was screaming, “Water, I need water!”

  I stared at the flames as Mama ran outside the back door.

  “Mama, Mama,” Clara sobbed from the bed. “Don’t go.”

  The walls were streaming with flame, reaching up to the ceiling, when Mama returned with a bucket in her hands, water splashing over the edges.

  “No, Mama,” I said. “Papa said not to put water on it.”

  “Fuck him!” she said, pouring the bucket on the fire. It slowed the flames on the floor at first, but not the ones climbing the walls. She came back with another bucket and splashed it on the walls, but the water just slid to the floor and the flames kept climbing.

  “Mama, no, no more water,” I cried. “Papa said no water.” I wanted to grab her and pull her away, run from this place, never return. But Mama kept pouring the water on the fire, splashing it on the walls. Finally she grabbed a soaking rug and used it to smother the flames on the floor and wall. And then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The walls and floor were wet and smoking, but there were no more tongues of red.

  Mama stood in the middle of the burned space, her body shaking, the skin of her face and hands smudged black as her eyes.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said to the smoldering walls.

  Shiva showed up on a silent and gray morning as I sat at the table playing with a cornhusk maiden someone had showed me how to make.

  “You are the most beautiful maiden in all the world, you must be very lonely,” I said.

  “The beautiful are never lonely,” she said.

  “Everyone is lonely.”

  “Not lonely.”

  “Lonely.”

  “Someone’s coming.”

  I looked out the front windows and the corncob doll was right. Over the rise of the hill by the orchard came three shapes. They walked down past the farm stand and up the path. The tall one had shoulder-length hair and tan skin and was smiling down at Mama. Clara clung to Mama’s hand, stumbling along as Mama looked up at the man with a smile. It was rare to see her smile like that, but I didn’t like it.

  Shiva turned out to be the head gardener from a Hindu retreat in Connecticut that Mama called the Snatch-a-Banana ashram. He had a heft to his body and a look around the eyes as if he’d been crying, but he hadn’t. Mama had met Shiva through our old apprentice Michael, who said Shiva had been a brilliant gardener at the ashram and could help us with our garden. Mama still cried a lot in big wet bouts that left her nose red and swollen, but now Shiva would come up behind her in the kitchen, turn her to him, and kiss her. She leaned into him, but something in her was also pulling away.

  “Kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss,” I said, from across the room. Being in the room around two kissing people made me feel out of place in my own home. It was like the long-ago time I saw the naked couple out in the water of Secret Cove, the bare, entwined bodies caught in the beam of the flashlight.

  When they weren’t kissing, Mama and Shiva spent hours on the floor in headstands and meditation.

  “Mama,” Clara and I would plead. “We’re hungry.”

  “In a minute,” she’d say. The minutes stretched on and on.

  When Shiva was out working in the garden, I would try to make Mama laugh, like at Stan’s, but she would say she had to meditate, which meant sitting cross-legged on her hard round cushion, a zafu, she called it, with a mat called a zabuton under her feet. I imagine her sitting there on the cushion, trying to make peace in her heart, but her mind fought her every step of the way. As wonderful a tool as meditation can be, if you don’t have the right instruction, the right teachers, it simply becomes a means for the mind to attack itself. I know that madness is inside us all, but we each decide whether to make it comfortable, to give it a chair to sit in. Her meditation cushion became that chair.

  As she sat on her zafu, her mind kept coming back to that day in July, circling it like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. It had rained the night before and the air was humid, as if waiting to rain again, but it was too hot for rain. The heat rose up at sunrise in visible waves, filling the bowl of the farm. The rain made the pond dark and deeper, but it was so hot the rain was forgotten. The cicadas fitz-fizzed. The birds were silent.

  Skates was coming that day. Papa and Bess ate breakfast together. She knew her marriage was over, had been for a while now, though she kept holding on. There was so much she needed to hide from herself, and now from Skates. We kids were restless. The house needed cleaning, lunch needed cooking, Clara wanted nursing. The little fires went off in her mind, a scream, a need, someone’s disaster, something important forgotten, she’d run out of butter, no, you can never run out of butter, Eliot will be mad if there is no butter. And then her mind scrambled, trying to figure out how to get some butter as the pot of oatmeal frothed over onto the stove. She swung to catch it, hit her funny bone, swore as the oatmeal became a volcano, but no matter, there was no butter anyway. Someone was screaming now, she ran toward the sound, the girls fighting over a toy. Heidi took it, Lissie wants it back. “Work it out!” she yelled. Her face became a mask of her mother. She was her mother, she was herself, and she was the person her daughters would become.

  “Out!” Mama screamed at us on that humid July morning, pointing at the door, the sweat shining on her forehead from the heat of the wood cookstove.

  “You kids get outside. Now!”

  Years later, Mama’s shrink would tell her it started when she was a child. A need not met by her parents that made it hard for her to meet others’ needs, most of all her own. Her therapist would also say that when she lost a child, she lost a part of herself, and was afraid to love again for fear of further losses. But aren’t those just reasons not to love?

  What Mama never talked about with anyone is when Heidi returned to the house that day, after I wouldn’t let her up the woodshed ladder to play with me. Mama, too, sent her away again, but Heidi kept coming back. She begged to come inside the house, perhaps sensing Mama’s confusion and wanting to be near to make sure she was okay.

  “Let me in,” Heidi pleaded, standing on the stone step outside the latched screen door, the distinct outline of her hand silhouetted against the mesh. “I want to come in.”

  “No, I’m trying to clean,” Mama replied.

  “I wanna play,” Heidi begged.

  What Mama did next is something any parent might have done in a hurried moment and then forgotten about when it had no consequences.

  “Well, then, go float some boats,” Mama said, tossing the red wooden tugboat, the one that didn’t float right, out the door to Heidi.

  I hover now with compassion near Mama as she breathed in and out on the zafu, trying to erase her words and their results. Her secret only grew more terrible there in the darkness where she kept it hidden. After she left the farm, she would wander from Arizona to North Carolina to California, finally settling in San Francisco, where she lived in a sequence of one-room apartments. She often dreamed of the birds, she would tell me, the white-throat, the swallows and scarlet tanagers soaring over the farm, and comforted herself by imagining that Heidi flew with them now. But it would not be until recently, when she realized I was afraid I was the one responsible for Heidi’s death, that she shared her words from that humid July day with me. Exposed to light, they are simply what they are—innocent words with terrible consequences—but in claiming them she took responsibility for the guilt we’ve all carried, and with that action it has at last begun to fade.

  Fall painted the leaves with its cool fingers as daddy longlegs gathered under logs in the chilly evenings, entwining their gangly legs to keep warm. There was again the smell of wood smoke, of loss, as I walked through the woods on the path to the bus. New England’s seasons are so exact, you can f
eel a chill in the air on the first day of fall, as if Mother Nature had a calendar in her pocket. Ask me how a world ends, and I’ll say it’s like the end of summer. The cold seems to arrive with a bang, not a whimper, but looking back, you realize cool tendrils had begun slipping into the warmth long before, you just didn’t want to notice.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” Mama was always saying, about the vegetables not getting harvested and canned or me not having shoes that fitted and forgetting my lunch for school. “Oh shit.”

  As the 1979 energy crisis waned in the following year, so too would the accompanying desire to live more simply. By the 1980s oil glut, jobs and opportunities would become so plentiful in the cities that few could resist the pull to return. Many families, like us, would succumb to divorce or separation, and as Helen had long ago predicted, those who stayed put were generally the homesteaders without children. Soon the back-to-the-land movement would be a distant memory to all but the most stalwart. In the mid-1980s, I would even neglect to mention to teachers and friends that I’d ever been part of something so odd. It wasn’t until the 1990s that organic gardening rose from the derision of hippie stigma to find its place in a changing world. Papa’s ideas from the 1970s were suddenly being touted by those very same people who’d said he was full of shit. And slowly a more balanced off-the-grid-with-Internet lifestyle has developed. But for Mama there were only memories of what she’d lost.

  The one thing Mama could bring herself to do—between the never-ending, face-reddening headstands and prone-seated meditation, the marijuana for her nerves, the long mornings in bed with Shiva—was read a particular story to me, tears welling up in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks at certain parts. She’d first heard the Selkie story at a Gordon Bok concert, the song “Peter Kagan and the Wind” being about a man who found a seal that turned into a woman, became his wife, and later turned back into a seal to save him from freezing when his boat was lost at sea.

  Our book version of the Selkie story was slightly different. A man found a wounded Canadian goose, instead of a seal, and nursed it back to life. After the bird was healed and he set it free, a beautiful woman with dark hair and eyes came to his home and offered to be his wife. When she bore him a child, he thought he could find no greater happiness, but they didn’t have much money, so she wove special cloth for him to sell. A merchant wanted a large quantity of the cloth, and the man begged his wife to weave it for him. She said the weaving took all of her strength, but he continued to plead, so she agreed, though she asked that he not look in on her when she was working. She spent many days and nights in the room, and the man grew impatient and decided to check on her. He saw not his wife, but a large bird at the loom, plucking the last of the feathers from her bloody chest to weave into the fabric. She screamed when she saw him, and suddenly they were surrounded by a flock of geese. The geese lifted the mother in a storm of beating wings, leaving the daughter behind with her father as the birds disappeared into the sky.

  I knew Mama felt about this book the way I felt about some of my books—that it explained her feelings better than she could herself. I could tell by the downward turn of her mouth that she wanted to say, “See, he pushed her too far, and she had to leave her child behind.”

  We’d been having trouble with porcupines in the orchard. When they ate the bark off the trunks, the apple trees would die. There was one porcupine bigger than the others, his body the size of an anthill, with a small head and surprisingly wise eyes nearly obscured by quills sweeping back over his body. Though they looked like hair gone white at the ends, I knew from Normie-dog that the quills were nothing so friendly. If Clara and I surprised that big porcupine in the back field, he turned his back to us and the quills rose up like a lady’s fan, quivering as if about to eject across the distance at us.

  “Run, Clara, run,” I cried. “Or they’ll shoot into you.” We’d tear screaming back to the house, grass catching between our bare toes, and Shiva came out to try and catch him, but slow as that old porcupine was, he always managed to escape Shiva’s wrath.

  Heading to the path for the bus in the morning, I saw Shiva over in the orchard, checking on the damage to the apple trees. Those dwarf varieties of russets, Northern Spy, and Spy Golds planted the year I was born were finally coming into maturity; Papa would be heartbroken if they died now. He’d always tended them carefully—fertilizing, pruning off dead and volunteer branches, and mending the fence to protect them from deer and porcupines.

  Every spring that I could remember, the trees burst with pale five-petaled blossoms that intoxicated the air, and every summer small fruits grew from the center of the bloom until, in recent years, the branches became heavy with apples that we harvested and made into applesauce or stored in the root cellar. They weren’t always as big as the contraband at the Holbrook sanctuary, but they weren’t half bad, as Papa liked to say. Orchards, stone walls, and foundations, Papa also told me, are the only things that remain after a farm is abandoned. Long after the gardens grow up with trees, the barns cave in, and farmhouses turn to rubble, the apple trees might still be producing fruit.

  At school Jennifer pretended to be nice to me again, taking my hand, but instead of counting freckles she folded back my fingers with her small, strong ones.

  “Mercy?” she asked. I locked eyes with her, refusing to give in. She bent my fingers backward until my palm became the curve of a bridge, the muscles and tendons stretching past their space of comfort. The pain ran up my fingers, wrist, arm. I felt it in my jaw. When I could bear no more, I finally said it. “Mercy.” And it stopped, just like that.

  When you have suffered enough, that is all you need to say. Mercy.

  On the way home from the bus, as I walked across the back field to the house, I could see Shiva still out in the orchard, his hair slung back from the sheen of his forehead, the glinting steel of a machete in his hands.

  The next morning there was the bloody head of that old porcupine on a stake in front of the house, its rounded nose drying beneath the prunes of closed eyes. Shiva had chopped it off with his machete and carried it in bloody hands back to the house to show Mama, a cat bringing home his prize. He put it on the stake, he explained, as a warning for the other porcupines.

  In the light of early mornings, it seemed I might see or hear the secret to it all. A map of meaning. As my eyes opened, the light from the windows made broken shapes on the yellowed pine walls around my bunk. Brightness and shadow danced in the space of those shapes from the movement of the trees near the house. My mind drifted and caught on the patterns as they vibrated and hummed. They brightened to fade the shadow and darkened to fade the light. I watched for answers. I knew this would last only a few minutes, but in that eternity my mind could wander within a truth not spoken in words, a connectedness to all things. Dead and alive did not exist. All was just a coming and a going. What remained was mercy. The broken shapes of light fitted together into one. At-one-ment. Atonement. My eyes were closed, but the light remained.

  I can feel, as if it were my own, Heidi’s longing. Water, with its infinite permutations, called to her. The cushions of sphagnum moss welcomed her bare feet as she approached the edge of the pond with her little red boat, the dark water reaching higher than usual up the slippery banks from the rain. Did the boat drift beyond her reach? The water was a welcome cool on her skin at first, but her feet couldn’t find the ledge. Her hands reached out for the boat, fingers grasping, closing only on emptiness. Pale blue eyes slipped below the surface. She breathed the water in. The lack of oxygen, someone once told me, feels like falling asleep.

  In the Narnia books, the lion Aslan said there was a law older than time: if a willing victim, a scapegoat, offers his life in a traitor’s place, the stone table will crack, and death itself will be denied. Heidi was our scapegoat, and with her death she was set free.

  I opened my eyes in my bunk to the feeling of a hollow space in the quiet of the farmhouse, like
the empty stomach under my belly button. Lump the shape of an egg in my throat. Chill of October morning in the air.

  Earlier there’d been whispering. Clara crying. Footsteps across the wooden floor. My sleep self was waiting for Mama to say, “Wake up, Lissie, it’s time to go.” The words didn’t come. I should have called out, “Wait, wait for me,” but sleep held me under. The wooden door latch slid across the smooth spot, closing with a solid sound, then only the scuffling of mice in the insulation and flies bumping the windows.

  My body seemed too heavy, muscles hardening as if made of clay. There was the sound of voices outside. “Mama?” My head hit the ceiling boards as I sat up and slid down the bunk ladder and out the screen door, slamming it behind. The garden spread from the house down to the well in a tired patchwork dissected by log-lined sawdust paths. A few beds had shriveled tomato vines and dried beanstalks in them, some covered in seaweed for winter, most ragged with witchgrass. I scanned for the familiar curve of Mama’s brown back bending over the earth in her bandanna-print halter top, braids hanging below the half-moon of her forehead. The soil was cool under my toes, making goose bumps scatter up my shins. I was a young animal not finding the shape of its mother in the wild.

  The air filled with the shushing of feathers, a flock of geese heading south, wings beating the sky in the ancient pattern of migration. One bird had fallen off the end, having lost the draft, his wings pumping to catch up. Honk, honk, he called, wait, wait for me. I could feel his heart beating in my chest as my neck arched to watch the dangling V disappear over the broken edge of forest.

  I sensed movement, heard muted voices, and my feet led me to a lower plot beyond the farm stand, where Pam and Paul were pulling squash from the vines to load in a wheelbarrow.

  “Hello, Lissie,” Pam called as I approached.

  “Hello, Lissie,” Paul echoed.

  Pam held the fleshy shape of a butternut squash in her hands, baby Mariah in a sling on her back. The fall air filled the space between us as if we were swimming in the pond—warmish on top, cold underneath.