April Love Story

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “For now?” I said.

  “For now, we sponge off.”

  So we had a women’s bathtime and a men’s bathtime. There wasn’t enough water to hide my weeping.

  “This is fun, Marnie,” said my mother and Aunt Ellen together.

  “This is insane,” I said.

  Our parents were on a high that never touched Lucas or me. In the other world my only chore had been making my bed, if I felt like it. Now the chores never ended. I lay like glue on the mattress, while the adults leaped up at dawn—yes, dawn—full of verve and energy and even joy.

  The vegetable garden was a staggering chore. Although we tilled it with the tractor (Uncle Bob turned out to know all about driving tractors and even all about fixing tractors, which was particularly good, since our twelfth-hand wreck broke down regularly), we had to hand-rake the entire two-acre garden until it satisfied the grownups as to tilth and texture. Then we planted about fifty things at intervals so we’d have harvest all summer and fall instead of everything coming ripe at one time. Seeds are very small. You have to plant them one at a time. Stooping.

  And in my case, you have to do this with Lucas. Once we had an actual conversation in which we talked about sabotaging the garden. But we decided that wouldn’t get us back to the city. We’d just have to live here and starve, instead of live here and eat.

  The asparagus trench was probably the worst chore of the summer. This had to be dug, with shovels, eighteen inches deep. Eighteen inches doesn’t sound like much until you have to lift it up on the end of your shovel. Furthermore you’re supposed to backfill half of that with rotted manure. We obtained the manure from our nearest neighbor, Mr. Shields, who was a very nice man who nevertheless had a small mountain of horse manure he’d been shoveling out of his stable for years. We forked this up on a flat trailer we pulled behind the tractor, and it took one load of manure for the asparagus trench and eleven loads for the rest of the garden. If anybody had told me I’d be shoveling manure instead of dating Joel or experimenting with eye shadow …!

  “And I don’t even like asparagus,” said Lucas. “It’s slimy and green. It looks like congealed scum from a pond.”

  “Look at that,” I said.

  We stood there like convicts on a road gang. Through the meadow on the hillside, our parents ran up to the orchards, laughing, kissing, and actually singing from pure pleasure. “Morning has broken,” they sang, “like the first morning. Blackbird is singing, like the first dawn.”

  According to my father’s manuals, wood for heating homes had to be cut at least six months before burning, so it would season, or dry out. We took to our woodlots, cutting down only the dead trees, using the chain saw to remove their branches and cut everything into usable lengths. The chain saw was a wonderful thing, fast and efficient, and it made a noise like a convention of dentists’ drills. I hated that sound so much I would turn my back to the others and scream at the top of my lungs when it was going. Nobody noticed and it made me feel a little better.

  Then came splitting the wood. Lucas, Dad, and Uncle Bob tried this with the axe and after that, as Lucas said rather grimly, they all had a lot more respect for Abe Lincoln. Then they tried using wedges and a sledge hammer. After one weekend of that, we had about ten logs split and a lot of blisters to treat.

  “Got a hydraulic log splitter you could rent,” said Mr. Shields, grinning. He often dropped by in late afternoon, for laughs, probably. My parents never seemed to mind how inept or confused or clumsy they were. They’d earnestly ask what to try next, and even take notes on what he said.

  I hated not knowing how to do things.

  I felt like such a baby, being assigned something, and then not having the remotest idea how to go about doing it.

  Lucas learned techniques with a sort of grim determination, as if this were war, and as long as you had to fight, you might as well win. I never heard him complain, though possibly that was because my own complaints drowned his out.

  Lucas and I had the dubious honor of being in charge of our flock of chickens. Mr. Shields sold us a dozen eight-week-old pullets and let us dismantle an old hen coop of his and haul it over to our place to rebuild, paint, and fence in. The chickens were surprisingly cute and I actually enjoyed feeding them. It took me one minute to scatter the feed and fourteen minutes to watch the chickens eat, so I told everybody it was a fifteen-minute chore and no one questioned me.

  The trouble with these cute, pecking chickens was you had to clean up their droppings every day. And add them to the compost pile—or mountain—Lucas and I were also in charge of.

  One way or another, I saw as much of Lucas as I did of dirt, bugs, and outhouses.

  At least the amount of work cut down on my homesickness. There was no time to bring out my grief and mull it over. Even at night, a time I always used to reserve for curling up into a little ball and running my mind over my problems, the only thing I had time for was sleep.

  I did love my loft bedroom, though. Part of the attic had been ripped out when the black stovepipe for the living room’s Fisher stove was run up to the roof. The part that was left—barely eleven feet by five feet—was shored up by two posts and railed with one thick beam.

  Built flush with the inner wall and the rest of the attic were built-in drawers and a closet. There was space, then, for my mattress, my hope chest, and me. In summer the loft was gaspingly hot, but in winter I found that the heat rose, making it delightfully cozy.

  When I wasn’t destroying underburrs, tending chickens, figuring out how to milk a goat, shelling peas, chasing the goat when she got away, leaning on my shovel, puffing, or fixing holes in the goat’s fence, I was in the kitchen.

  We ate at least four times as much as when we didn’t work outdoors. It was nothing for the six of us to go through four loaves of homemade bread in a day or polish off a pie at lunch and two bread puddings at supper. I became the bread baker. This meant mixing and kneading and then leaving the kitchen for other chores during the first rising. Then I’d scrub off the accumulated dirt from that chore, punch the dough down to rise again, and go off to rake out the chicken coop, or something equally charming. An hour later, scrub again, form the dough into loaves. More yard work. Scrub. Put loaves in oven. Stand there checking our erratic wood stove for fire, heat, wood, and so on. Take the loaves out to cool and have Lucas literally take an entire loaf with him to eat while he was driving the tractor among the apple trees, dragging the mower after him to cut the tall meadow grass. It was a sweet-smelling job, where you got to sit down, and I envied Lucas, although I didn’t envy the terrible burn he got once. The loaves weren’t even done when it was time to bake more. I knew Lucas was hungry, and I knew the reason I’d baked was for people to eat, but I couldn’t stand to see anybody eat my bread, because all it meant to me was having to bake more.

  And, of course, there was laundry. We had an old washer that you handpumped to make the clothes and suds churn. We had to haul the water and heat it on the woodstove to get it hot enough to melt the soap. “Please, please, please, let’s just drive to a laundromat,” I said. But Mother and Aunt Ellen actually loved the laundry that way.

  We got mail, which did not make up for the fact that we had no telephone, and the mail itself was as depressing as no telephone.

  Joel wrote exactly once, four lines scrawled on a postcard to say he’d been accepted at NYU and would major in accounting. It sounded like such an urban thing to do. I could just see him in a vested suit, pinstriped and citified. And here I was in bibbed overalls.

  Susannah wrote weekly at first, and then her letters came less and less often. She had begun dating a friend of Joel’s. “And I have you to thank for it,” she wrote, describing her social whirl. “If I hadn’t been sitting next to you during all that commotion about you going farming, Pete would never have noticed me.” Joel, she wrote, took a girl named Victoria to the senior prom. Somebody from parochial school. Three juniors made the cheerleading team. Susannah wasn’t one but sh
e didn’t mind, Pete was keeping her busy. They had gone to three movies. Had I seen any of them? I must not miss the super thriller about the almost nuclear explosion. How many cute boys had I met so far? Was farming fun? Susannah bet we had lots of fresh tomatoes. No more time to write, she was off to tennis camp.

  “One thing for sure,” I said to my mother. “I’d play a mean game of tennis now. Look at my muscles.”

  “Another thing for sure,” she said, reading Susannah’s latest letter, “she’s right about having lots of fresh tomatoes.”

  Gardens, especially your first garden, are supposed to include a few failures. At least something is supposed to have the decency not to grow.

  Not our garden.

  Everything grew.

  And grew, and grew, and grew.

  We had millions of beans to snap and billions of tomatoes to can. If we’d had electricity, we could’ve dropped everything into plastic bags and thrown them into a freezer, but we had to can everything to have food for the winter.

  Canning is horrid.

  First you dip the tomatoes in boiling water (on top of your fired-up woodstove) and slide off the peel. Then (it’s August and ninety degrees outdoors and probably a hundred twenty in the kitchen) you core the tomatoes, force them through the strainer, and pour the juice into Mason jars. Aunt Ellen puts these in the pressure canner also on top of your woodstove and the three of you stand there gasping for breath, fanning yourselves, trying not to burn each other on hot Mason jars.

  While I panted, Mother and Aunt Ellen chattered about things like goat milk. They had figured out how to make one soft and one not-so-soft cheese, but they had not managed to make a decent goat butter.

  “We need a cow,” said Uncle Bob, coming in for a glass of goat milk.

  “We need a cow,” said Lucas, getting himself tomato juice, “like we need a hole in the head.”

  I was very glad to see the tomato juice go anywhere other than a jar I had to boil and seal. “Holes in the head,” I told him, “are what we have most of around here.”

  “Marnie, I am not amused,” said my mother.

  The men went back out. Sweeping the floor I found a letter to Lucas from one of his friends back home. Temptation overcame me and I read it. The debate team, said his friend, had won the regional championship, without Lucas, obviously. So much for Lucas and me being necessary back home. He’d been as easily replaced as I’d been by this Victoria, may she rest with nightmares.

  I wondered vaguely how much Lucas hurt over that. I’d never know. Lucas never told anybody anything, and least of all me. He just worked, and ate, and worked some more. He came back a few hours and a million tomatoes later for another drink. “Having fun, girls?” he said.

  “Oh, yes!” cried our mothers, actually meaning it.

  “Oh, yes,” I said sarcastically.

  “For laughs, Marnie,” said Lucas, “come on out back and help me. The old outhouse hole is full. I just covered it and now I’m digging another hole.”

  I decided canning wasn’t so bad.

  “We’re out of canning jar rings, salt, sugar, and a few other things,” said Aunt Ellen. “Lucas, would you mind very much going into town and getting them?”

  Lucas allowed as how he wouldn’t mind too much. “Would I mind?” he said reverently. “No, ma’am, I wouldn’t, I’m going, I’m leaving, it’s no problem whatsoever.”

  “I need to go, too,” I said quickly. “Lucas wouldn’t know a jar ring if he tripped over it.” Considering that Lucas had indeed tripped over jar rings, and even bought them before, that was a statement full of loopholes, but our mothers overlooked this and said I could go along. “Wait till I change, Lucas,” I said.

  “Wait till you change?” he replied. “I’m the one who was digging a latrine.”

  So we both changed and got into the old VW bus to drive into the village. We were so excited you’d have thought we had tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet. We got groceries, picked up the jar rings, got goat feed at FCX, and sunglasses for Lucas at the tiny “department” store (if it had any departments, they weren’t visible), and then we walked around the village. There wasn’t much to it. To our city-starved eyes the whole town wasn’t much more than a single block. There wasn’t even a traffic light, let alone traffic.

  We arrived at the school, which had a hot, blank look, the look of all schools closed up for August. Valley Consolidated High School. It didn’t look promising, but it would undoubtedly beat subsistence farming.

  “Next week,” said Lucas. He sighed.

  Seven more days, I thought. “Do you think it’ll be any good?”

  “If you can believe it from a bookworm, Marnie, I don’t even care. I’m just so eager to get away from the manure piles, the orchards, and the wood that needs splitting, it can be the lousiest school in the U.S.A. and I’ll love it.”

  I laughed. It wasn’t a sound I’d made much that summer. “I used to think of school as a place where I had to work, work, work all the time. Now I’m looking forward to school as a place to escape work, work, work.”

  Lucas laughed, too. It was a nice sound.

  We walked back to the VW and things didn’t seem quite so awful. School was beginning and we still knew how to laugh.

  I wondered if there were any decent boys in the junior class. If they’d like me. If there would be a girlfriend or two for me—a girl who wouldn’t laugh when I told her about homesickness, a girl who cared about clothes, and would let me use her makeup, and read her magazines, and invite me home to watch her TV.

  Seven days, I told myself. And then school.

  Chapter VII

  OUR STOP WAS THE sixth of nineteen that the bus made, so there were plenty of empty seats when Lucas and I got on for the first time. Inquisitive faces stared at us. My insides knotted up and I had a moment of absolute panic. Where to sit? Cling to Lucas? Force myself on one of these kids? They were all ages, kindergarten to senior high. I tried to see if the older kids sat in the back, or if there was some sort of seating arrangement that people would expect me to know, but my eyes felt blurry and I couldn’t tell what to do.

  “Hey,” said a freckled girl in the very back of the bus. (“Hey” had turned out to be Southern for “hello.”) “Come sit with me. A bunch of rotten boys will be getting on at the next stop and I need a girl to fill up my seat.”

  I sat with her gratefully and we introduced ourselves. “I’m Connie,” she said, “and I’m a junior, too. You don’t know how glad I am to have another junior girl on the bus. All last year I rode with a sixth grader.”

  I was so glad to be talking with her! I felt like a puppy wagging my tail.

  “Who is that handsome hunk?” she said.

  I looked around, eager to see a handsome young man.

  Connie giggled. “Silly. The guy who got on with you.”

  Lucas? Lucas was this handsome hunk? I stared at him.

  Well, his complexion had cleared and tanned in the sun, and he had gotten pretty fit and muscular working at heavy jobs for five months. But if there was one thing I didn’t want to talk about, it was Lucas, who meant nothing more to me right now than the other half of a farm chore. “Oh, he’s the kid of the other family farming with us,” I said.

  “You’re the city people who moved down the lane from the Shields, then,” said Connie. “How I’d love to be from the city. The day I graduate from high school I’m headed for Atlanta. Or maybe Nashville. I want to work for an airline or a bank.”

  “There’s quite a difference.”

  “I’ve got two years to make up my mind. So how do you like it here?”

  I didn’t want to risk offending anybody who was a native, even a native who yearned for a city. “The mountains are beautiful,” I said, which was certainly true. “But I get homesick sometimes.”

  “Me, too. My parents divorced and when mother remarried we moved here. Two and a half years ago now. This is my stepfather’s hometown. I like Valley High, but sometimes I’m so homes
ick for Tennessee I could cry.”

  “I do cry,” I said.

  That was all it took: five minutes conversation between bus stops and Connie and I were friends.

  It was an incredible relief to have a friend. In the next several weeks nothing meant more to me than sitting with Connie on the bus, during class, at lunch.

  Connie could understand so much that I couldn’t say to my parents. My parents just confused me with all their joy and exuberance. And I couldn’t tell them what my feelings were without hurting theirs. As for Lucas, with whom Connie felt I should be discussing all this, since we shared it, well, he was certainly no longer an enemy (you can’t be an active enemy of the person who’s holding the chain saw when you’re holding the log), but he wasn’t exactly a friend either.

  Connie showed me around, introduced me, got me started with lots of other girls, and all in all, being a newcomer in school turned out to be something of an asset. There were hardly any rough moments, and no lonely ones.

  The homesickness didn’t go away, though. It moved to the back of my body, sort of, coming out when I least expected it, like indigestion.

  The boys in the junior class were polite and nice. Everybody said sir or ma’am to the teachers, and held doors for the girls, and complimented me on my pretty blouses. But nobody even hinted at wanting to ask me for a date. And since we had no telephone, nobody could have a sudden whim to call me to chat, or ask about homework, or invite me anywhere.

  I wanted so much to be part of a group. Any group. Gathering after school for hamburgers, or rehearsing for a play, or practicing for a ballgame. But after class, I had to catch the bus and go home to do chores.

  Sometimes when I thought about the dating ladder I’d be on if I were back home I’d have to choke back tears,, and I’d feel dowdy and plain and boring. I had to train myself not to think of home when I was in school.

  Lucas seemed to walk into the senior class and take over as Big Man On Campus. I wondered once if it surprised him as much as it surprised me.