“I’m not playing at anything. Did you ever consider that? What are you trying to say?”
“I’m talking about that farm, the drugs, the New Age nonsense that they’re feeding you.”
“New Age nonsense! Yeah, they’re brainwashing me, Mom, stripping me naked and painting me with menstrual blood. What did Matthew tell you, anyway? What do you think is going on?”
“I don’t know, Sylvia, but I don’t think you do either. Why don’t you try to explain to me what you think is going on.”
“Well, for one thing, Matthew is lying to you.”
“I understand, you confided in him, but let’s not talk about Matthew, let’s talk about you.”
“What about me? It was New Year’s Eve. I got tired. I didn’t want to face coming home and going to church again. We went to church all last week. I didn’t want to face you and your accusations, all the Friends’ fake smiles, the self-righteousness. I can’t believe that you would take Matthew’s word over mine. I’m not even going to repeat some of the things he said to me.”
I refused to let my emotions misfire and make me cry. I realized that Matthew, hypocrite that he was, had been counting on me not saying anything that would implicate my brother. Without even being there, he had me pinned. Anything I said now would come off as an attempt to protect myself. I wanted to tell Vera that the pastor’s successor was dealing dope to her son. Instead, I blew. “You are so self-righteous. Why don’t you ask some of your so-called friends exactly what they think of you and then see if you still want to take all this out on me. Mom, open your eyes.”
I saw something register in Vera’s face. She blinked quickly, like coming up out of water. “This is not going to help, attacking me, turning everything around.” Vera sat without moving, her lips pursed, before continuing. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Sylvia, but I don’t like it.”
“Maybe you’d better ask yourself what’s happened to you. Your life is nothing but that church and they don’t even think you’re fit to sit on council. I suppose you think that’s my fault. Nick and I are going to leave eventually and then what will you have? No kids around, shitty job, no husband and no hope of one, and a church full of hypocrites. Oh yeah, and poor. That sounds great. That sounds like exactly what I’d like to aspire to.” I told myself that I didn’t mean to make Vera cry. No one likes to see her mother cry – mothers are supposed to be resilient, immune to anything as weak as tears. I simply wanted to expose things, bring them to the surface. For years, this had meant happening upon words and situations that could disarm her. Once I did, though, I couldn’t take what was bared, so I sought easy exits.
I got up from the table and walked toward the door, pulled my jacket off the hook. Vera was behind me and as I reached for the door her arm shot around, pulled the handle closed. Her other hand dug into my arm and turned me around. “Sylvia,” she said, speaking through her teeth, eyes wet.
“Let me go.” I twisted my arm out of Vera’s grip and my shoulder slammed back against the door. “We obviously can’t talk about this, so let me go.”
“We are going to try talk about this.” She now had me by both arms against the door, her spit a spray on my face. I struggled out of her hold but she turned and blocked me. As I tried to open the door, she grabbed my coat and I instinctively thrust my forearm toward her. Vera shoved it away, then we each got a hold of the other’s clothes and fought with little more than fabric, our meek blows blunted by uncertainty. At some point, she faltered and I ducked, pulled at the door, and ran into a slap of cold air. I slipped as I rounded the path around the house. Tears gathered in the back of my mouth. I swallowed, turned, and kept running.
I fell two more times on the hard-packed road before I got to the corner store and called Gabe. When he picked me up, I shivered while he drove wordlessly, pulled me over to him on the bench seat and rubbed my thigh with his one free hand. I glanced up repeatedly at the rear-view mirror, not knowing why I expected to see Vera’s car appear there. “I don’t want you to have to keep doing this,” I said. “Coming to get me. I don’t want you to feel like you have to bail me out.” Gabe kept rubbing my thigh, his eyes on the road. When I started to cry, he pulled my head down onto his shoulder. As he drove, I could feel his muscles shifting, and, in me, something altering, steeling me against tears.
I didn’t ask Gabe to take me to the farm. He didn’t ask if I wanted to go. He simply drove there, brought me into the converted shed and then said, “You can stay here as long as you need to.” He ran his hand through his dark hair, twisted it into accidental curls and watched me like he had no idea of what to do with me, or what I might do.
The next day, we returned when Vera was at work and Gabe waited for me in the truck. It didn’t take me long to pack. When I had, I left the way I had come in, locking the door behind me.
My arrival at Pilgrims was virtually unnoticed by most of the people there. I figured the people who lived at the farm expected mutable family situations, transitory living conditions, people moving in together within a month of meeting.
As the son of one of the first families on the farm, Gabe had been given, though not a cabin, a relatively good shed to live in. It was close enough to the outhouses that it was convenient, far enough away that the smell didn’t reach him. It had electricity wired to it from the cookshack, a narrow wood stove, good for heat and boiling water, and a space heater. There were no storm windows, but it was relatively airtight, which was more than could be said about some of the sheds on the property. It was split down the middle, vertically. One half was a narrow, insulated room – a makeshift home – the other was essentially a workshop with a concrete floor, tools, implements.
He told me that around the farm, there were various living accommodations, some more lacking than others. As I would soon find out, the old Pilgrims establishment lived in charming log cabins with lofts and wood stoves and window panes in formations – Stars of David, pyramids. There was a tree house that rotated tenants. The hayloft in the big barn had been converted into an apartment and that was where Thomas lived. The rest, Gabe explained – the grown-up children, the hangers-on, the volunteers who appeared in the summer to receive a back-to-the-land experience like a benediction – lived where they could. In tents and vans during the summer. In sheds and outbuildings the rest of the year.
For the first two days, I did little more than sit on the bed, look at the walls, and nap often. I was exhilarated by thoughts of a new kind of freedom, but I felt stripped of both energy and emotion. I couldn’t comprehend what I had done in any way that made sense. I had called home and left a message with Nick to tell Vera that I was fine but I wouldn’t be coming home soon. That I was now at the farm, eating and sleeping there as though this were normal seemed both inevitable and at odds with everything that had come before. Gabe brought me food, the remnants of dishes other people had made, mostly vegetarian and stinking of garlic, hot with ginger. I didn’t eat a lot of this, preferred the bread and peanut butter in the mini-fridge, soups I could add water to and heat up in the microwave. At night, Gabe and I pressed up against each other. I kept on a T-shirt and long johns, moved away from him when I got too hot.
On the third day, as if to rouse me from my lethargy, Gabe said, “I need you to help me with something.”
“What kind of something?” I looked up from the bed.
“We’ll be outside.”
“Oh, I get it, it’s a mystery,” I said as I started to get my coat, my sign that I was willing to go along.
Gabe wanted to keep what we were doing a surprise so I followed instructions. He gathered an armload of old hockey sticks from the back of the truck. “I just picked these up yesterday. This guy at the arena’s been collecting them for me.”
Old hockey sticks did not excite me. “I know, we’re starting a league – the hippies against the religious freaks.” He just looked at me and rolled his eyes.
In the shed, we made holes into the blades of the sticks, G
abe holding the shafts against the workbench, me drilling. It was the first time I had ever used a drill. I loved the way the point entered the wood, how it could render something that had once been solid into shavings. When we had eight drilled, Gabe said, “Okay, I think that should do it,” and weighed large hammers against his palms contemplatively, put a bag of large nails in his pocket. He found a place on the porch of the cookshack where a plastic-coated wire emerged out of a small hole. Gabe nailed one of the hockey sticks to a post on the porch, blade up and turned out, slid the wire through the hole. “We’re going to string this wire back to the shed. You good at climbing trees?”
“Show me what to climb and I’ll climb it.”
“No, actually, you stay on the ground, I’ll climb. You can hand me the sticks. I’ll have to nail them to the trees so it could be hard.”
“Whatever you say.”
It took longer than I expected, Gabe finding foot- and handholds that would lead him up trees, me handing hockey sticks to him from the ground. “We have to get this high enough so that it won’t be in the way.” I looped the wire through the drilled holes first, then handed Gabe the sticks. He reached as high as he could, nailed the shafts to trees. The last stick was nailed to the shed. “Okay, we just have to bring it in now,” Gabe said. We went back inside and Gabe knocked on walls, stood back and peered, knocked again. Eventually, he drilled a hole in the frame of one of the windows in the workshop and pulled the wire through. “Ta da!” he said when he was finished, his cheeks bright with cold and exertion and what I could only describe as glee.
“Ta da!” I repeated. “What is it?”
“A phone line! It’s been ready to go for a few years now but no one’s ever bothered to wire it over. Now you can talk from here, you won’t have to go to the cookshack to call Krista, or whoever. I mean, it’s not quite ready – we’ll have to get a guy to come out and put a jack in – but almost!”
Gabe seemed oddly excited about the prospect of having a phone in the shed, and so happy then. Perhaps it was his way of welcoming me. His gesture meant something else. He expected me to stay long enough to use it.
Susan thought so as well. She came into the shed on the fourth morning without knocking and sat down on the edge of the bed. Gabe wasn’t around.
“So, you planning to stay for a while?” she asked.
“Um, I’m not sure, things aren’t great for me at home and –”
She cut me off. “Yeah, well, they never are, are they?” When I didn’t answer, Susan continued. “We don’t expect much here at the farm. Everyone does what they can – that’s about all you can expect from anyone, really – and Gabe has a bit of money, as I’m sure you know. Just pitch in where you can.” I nodded, not quite following along. How I was to pitch in was unclear, as was the part about Gabe having some money.
Susan continued, “Okay, well.” Paused. “Gabe tells us that you go to that church out on Pleasant Valley Road.” I nodded. “Now, I don’t know much about your church but I know they have some pretty strong beliefs and we don’t want anyone butting in here, Harper. We don’t want this to become an issue.”
“Oh, no, I, you don’t –” I started, but Susan cut me off.
“It’s okay. I’m sure everything will be fine, I just wanted to make that clear. I’m sure everything will be fine. Just let us know if you need anything.” With that, Susan got up, left the shed.
When I couldn’t sleep that night, I got dressed, went to the cookshack and used the phone. I called home twice before Nick answered. When he did, I asked him to wake Vera.
“Come on, Harp. You know how hard that is.”
“I know, but you can do it. You have to do it. For me.”
A few minutes later, Vera was on the phone, her voice coming through a haze of sleep. “Sylvia?”
“It’s me, Mom. I just wanted to call – I wanted to let you know I’m at the farm. Pilgrims Art Farm.”
“I know. Your brother told me.” She sounded more awake now but her voice was still quiet. “What is it, Sylvia? What is it you think you’re doing?”
“I’m going to stay here for a while.” I stopped before continuing, “I need you to understand that this is what I have to do right now. I just wanted to let you know.” I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. “Mom?”
“Yes. I heard you. In case you wondered, the school called to ask me why you haven’t been going to classes. How do you think I felt when I couldn’t give them an answer?”
“I’m going back to school. I’m going back. Don’t worry.”
“Sylvia, listen to me, I am going to worry,” she said. “You can’t just leave the way you did, not come home, and expect me to be fine with it.”
“I was suffocating. Look, I love you but I don’t want to live in a house where all that seems to matter are the mistakes you made in the past and how the church can absolve all of us from them. The church isn’t going to do that, Mom. They’re still blaming you for those mistakes.”
Vera was silent for a moment before she said, “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”
“I’m sorry, too. But you can’t go on trying to protect me from making my own mistakes. I really need some time to sort some things out on my own, without you or anyone from the church.”
I began to feel dizzy with exhaustion, my mouth dry, an ache stretched taut across my forehead. We were not going to reach a resolution. I wasn’t going home, and while Vera wasn’t giving me her blessing, she wasn’t insisting I return either. I have wondered many times since, what that must have cost her.
After we said goodbye, I sat at a table in the main hall of the cookshack in the fallout from the kitchen light. When I went back to the shed, I didn’t wake Gabe as I slipped into bed. As I fell asleep, I thought about rites of passage, about baptism. In the Free Church, we were baptized more than once. The first time as babies or – in the case of Nick and me or other kids who hadn’t been part of the church as infants – as young children. A liquid brand to remind our parents that we were marked as one of His. The second time was when we could accept Christ into our hearts on our own and be conscious of Him entering our bodies. For this, I was baptized in the Salmon River. Even though the Friends of Christ had no problem with bathing suits, to be baptized everyone wore clothing head to toe, then pulled on a long white smock like an enormous Victorian nightgown. I stood in the river with Pastor John, my hands on my heart and my back to him while Vera smiled so hard it brought tears to her eyes and other women thanked the Lord.
It was the middle of the summer and the river looked swollen and unmoving but the volume of water hid a tricky current on the riverbed. After Pastor John said his part and I fell back as planned, expecting his palms to cup my head and keep my eyes tipped to the sky, I simply floated downstream. Pastor John had lost his footing and gone under. I paddled back to the shore and struggled through river weeds, weighed down and waterlogged. I made my way back to the congregation upstream, relieved to see that Pastor John looked jovial in his wet robes. “God works in mysterious ways,” he chuckled. Other people laughed but Vera didn’t. She looked at me as though what happened had been my own fault. After I was dipped again, we ate hot dogs and drank warm Pop Shoppe soda through straws. Vera had forgotten to bring me a change of clothes, so I spent the afternoon drying, river scum trapped in my underwear. I never forgot the look Vera gave me that day.
The next morning I woke sweating, the sheets soaked. When I pulled off my clothes, the feeling of the blankets against me was a dull ache, the air that slipped through pricked my skin. I moaned and when I did, my teeth began to knock against each other, seemingly of their own will. Everything ached – even my hair hurt, felt like it was forcing out from my scalp, breaking the skin. Gabe woke up and began to ask me questions. Each of my responses was a moan. I struggled against the blankets and he pushed me back under them, then got up and added new wood to the stove, blew until fire cracked, then he left the room. He returned with aspirin and wate
r and told me he’d boil up some tea. I fell asleep to the sound of liquid rolling, the wood snapping and hissing.
I woke with my hair wrapped around my neck, in my mouth, or stuck to my face. I woke again and again, fighting it off. It held me there, roped me to the bed. By the second night, everything seemed to smell of it – the pillow slips, the sheets, the blankets. Even Gabe smelled like it.
I sat up in bed and announced, “I need to wash my hair right now or I’m going to go crazy.”
Gabe came in from the workshop. “Wash your hair? Okay. You want me to bring a basin in here or you want to go to the bathhouse?” The bathhouse was between the cookshack and the kitchen garden and adjacent to the sauna. It had been built with the sauna in mind – a place to wash off impurities steamed from pores, not a place to bathe daily. As such, it was a fair-weather structure, not at all airtight.
I craved hot water, wanted to scald the last of the fever out of me, to force each pore open and drain myself. I couldn’t get water that hot with a sponge bath. “I’ll go to the bathhouse,” I told Gabe.
January and February were the coldest months in the valley. I put on layers of long johns and sweats. I wore boots, mitts, and a hat, and wrapped a wool blanket around myself. The path from shed to sauna was slick with hard snow and ice. Because both hands held the blanket I couldn’t balance myself. Gabe steadied me down the path. He started the shower and steam was created instantly by the contrast in temperatures. I got undressed under the blanket that he held around me. I no longer felt sick but the steaming air was a sharp pain all over my body. I yelled, laughing and crying at once. Gabe held me, then gently pushed me into the shower where I continued to shriek, this time because of the heat. I shook with laughter, sobbing, as extreme cold and heat ripped across my skin, but after I was under the water for a minute, I felt my body release. I stood in the pounding stream for a long time then reached for the soap and tried to wash myself but even holding the bar made my muscles contract. Gabe was waiting on the bench beside the shower with his jacket, hat and boots still on. I called to him. “Gabe? Will you wash me?”
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 15
