Anthem

by Deborah Wiles

  “It’s almost suppertime,” said Sadie. Her skin shone a burnished brown in the firelight and her voice was smooth and soothing, like a body of cool, still water.

  “Loving Earth Mother,” said Norman. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “Right here!” said Sweet Caroline. “I just told you!”

  Sadie held up a hand to silence Sweet Caroline, and Sweet Caroline obeyed.

  “I came in to see if you were hungry,” Sadie said to Norman.

  He groaned. “No.”

  “Well, I am,” said Molly. Her voice was laced with relief. Her cousin was awake, had no fever, and was going to be all right, but not in time to get them to Albuquerque before nightfall. She had sat by his side while he slept and had come to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t be leaving tonight. Now she tried to think of something comforting to say, but what came out was, “You’ve been sleeping for hours! Come out when you’re ready.” She gave him two swift, hesitant pats on the hand and walked out of the adobe.

  “We’ve got peppermint tea for your stomach and plenty of rice and beans and tortillas,” said Sadie. “And Barb made a lemon meringue pie.” She put a warm hand over Norman’s cool one. “Sleep more first. Drink water.”

  “I’ll sit with him awhile,” said Sweet Caroline.

  Norman slid back under his blanket. Flam settled himself at his feet. They both sighed.

  Outside, Molly walked across the grassy llano in time to watch the sun explode, its yellow orb turning into prisms of deepest purple and pink and red and orange as it slipped behind the mountains in the distance. Waves of green wheat danced in front of her, where a man leading a horse from the field to the barn cast long shadows.

  Sadie came to her side. “Isn’t it magnificent?”

  “Yes,” Molly said emphatically. “I never knew a sunset could color the whole sky. Where are we exactly? I know I’m at New Buffalo, in New Mexico …”

  “That’s the Sangre de Cristo mountain range over there,” said Sadie. “It’s the southernmost part of the Rockies. You’re on a mesa; it’s flat, like a tabletop, and it goes on for miles. On the west side, there’s a sheer cliff drop at the gorge of the Rio Grande. It’s our version of the Grand Canyon. You can watch storms develop here on the mesa from a great distance — and look, there’s snow on top of the mountains way over there, even in June. See the sunset reflecting on the snow?”

  Molly admitted it was beautiful, like nothing she’d ever seen in Charleston, where they lived almost in the sea, surrounded by water and the familiar smells of the mud and marshes.

  “How did you all get here?” Molly asked.

  “Different ways. We are seekers. We heard about this place one way or another. And there are others, you know, living in similar communities in Vermont, Tennessee, Oregon, California … but none of them has this.” Sadie gestured around her to the scrub oaks, the juniper, the piñon, and the desert grasses fading into shadows. “Most of us here felt drawn to this place, as if we didn’t have a choice. It’s magical, don’t you think?”

  She did. “Where did you come from?” she asked Sadie.

  “Everywhere,” Sadie answered. “Paul is from New York City. Sharon is from Chicago. David is from Virginia. George is from Ohio. I’m from California. I was in college. I dropped out a year ago. Three years was long enough.”

  Molly did the math in her head. Sadie was twenty, then. “Are you the oldest here?” she asked.

  Sadie smiled. “Age isn’t a number,” she said. She put a finger to her forehead. “It’s where you’re at.”

  “Where is Sweet Caroline at?” Molly asked.

  Sadie laughed. “She’s new here. I don’t know much about her yet. She’ll settle in. Nobody is much over twenty-five or under eighteen, except the children, of course. These are my brothers and sisters now, my family. This is the New Buffalo commune. We’re changing the world.”

  Molly looked at the young woman beside her. “How?”

  “Come to supper,” said Sadie. “We’ll tell you about it. This way.”

  They walked through a beautiful arched adobe entryway with mallows growing around it into a courtyard and past a communal fire ringed with logs, where two boys thumped softly together in unison on homemade hand drums. A sunburned man carrying a sack of something on his shoulder walked past them, wearing jeans, boots, and no shirt. He dumped his sack on the ground and began to wash up beside a basin of water at an outdoor sink. A bearded man who had been chopping firewood joined him.

  An old beat-up Wonder Bread truck with its circles turned into blue and red and gold Van Gogh–like suns and stars and swirls rattled into the parking area, and two young men began unloading piles of quilts into the waiting arms of those who met them, including Molly. “From the Lutheran church ladies,” said the driver. “Enough to go around! Especially if we share.”

  “And we got egg money!” said another. “We traded it for chicken feed, a bale of hay, flour, and salt.”

  “And a little sugar and four lemons,” said the driver. No one seemed to notice that Molly hadn’t been there forever.

  Molly and Sadie entered the pueblo and walked through a washroom, an enormous pantry room, and into the kitchen. “Sink’s fixed!” said a man with hair longer than Molly’s. It spilled across his shoulders. “You still have to tote water from the Hondo, but now it’ll drain into the garden.”

  “Pea soup!” said a woman stirring a pot at the woodstove. She wore cowboy boots, a short white dress, and pigtails. “How many for supper tonight?”

  “We’re rich!” said the young man who drove the bread truck. He planted a kiss on the cheek of the woman at the woodstove. She turned and threw her arms around his neck and ardently kissed him back.

  Soon they were all in the common room. Four earthen steps led down from the kitchen into the large circular room built into the earth, where a fire burned and smoke curled through a hole in the roof. Earthen benches lined the circular walls. Everyone stood together around the fire holding hands. Molly had no idea whose hands she was holding, and she didn’t know what else to do, so she stood as still and quiet as everyone else and watched. The sunburned man began.

  “We thank you for the food made here with loving hands. We thank you for the food from other hands. We ask your blessing on our efforts in the fields, in the community of man, and with one another. We ask for strength and wisdom and compassion in a world of materialism and greed and war. We pledge to use our gifts and talents for good. We will continue to strive to open our hearts and minds to the ultimate consciousness and light. May peace continue to grow. Amen.”

  Molly looked from face to face in the firelight as the sunburned man spoke. They were young and younger, poor and poorer but claiming they were rich. They were all shades of black and white and brown. They were short and tall, skinny and skinnier, and all of them from somewhere else. Their faces were earnest and serious, determined and dedicated, worn and weary at the end of a long workday, and somehow shiny, too. Carol smiled at Molly. Molly smiled back.

  She wondered if this place would feel like home to Lucy. She had a wild thought to write her a letter. She knew the address.

  She remembered her nightly phone call, but there was no phone here and no way to call her mother. And for some reason, in this common room, holding hands with strangers, that thought was a good one. If Norman were not with her on this trip, no one she knew in the entire world would know where she was.

  The thought was thrilling. She was surrounded by a sense of safety here that surprised her. She could live here, she thought. Maybe she would.

  “Amen” went around the room, and Molly blinked out of her reverie. “Amen,” she said. Amen and Amen.

  PEOPLE GOT TO BE FREE

  Written by Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati

  Performed by the Rascals

  Recorded at Atlantic Studios, New York, New York, 1968

  Drummer: Dino Danelli

  After their communal supper, couples drifted to
small campfires on the mesa or sat around the fire at the community gathering place with their homemade drums. Someone was always drumming. Someone else had a guitar. Someone produced a flute, and someone else a harmonica.

  “Tomorrow’s solstice!” said a young dancing boy wearing pants but no shirt or shoes. “We get to sleep in the meadow!”

  “That’s right,” said a woman with long brown hair in a bedraggled ponytail. She scooped the child into her lap. It occurred to Molly that her own ponytail was sloppy, too, and that was fine with her.

  Norman wandered out from the adobe building, blinking his eyes. He walked toward the flickering communal fire with its bodies softly talking, and saw smaller fires beyond that one, dotting the darkness, along with the black outlines of tall ponderosa pines. As he tried to make out what he was seeing, a body walked between the fire and something behind it. “A tipi!” he whispered. There were several.

  The smell of supper had beckoned him from his adobe room near the common room. He was hungry after all. They made room for him on a log, and Sadie brought him a tin plate of pinto beans, brown rice, and a hunk of bread baked over the fire in a covered kettle.

  “Thank you, Sadie,” he said sincerely. He wanted to tell her how much her touch had meant to him earlier, and how it had helped him sleep, but he didn’t dare.

  He ate slowly and silently and listened as the children played near the fire and a German shepherd tried to make friends with Flam, who stuck close to Norman and was rewarded with Norman’s bread.

  Norman looked for Molly and caught her eye. She gave him a You okay? look and he nodded I’m okay. You? They shared their story with these new people and in turn heard about ideas that were new to them.

  “We don’t need things for the sake of having things,” said a girl with freckles and glasses. “We don’t need a lot of money. What we need is community and caring.”

  “Caring about one another?” asked Molly.

  “Yes, and caring about the planet, caring about Mother Earth, Father Sky, and the possibility of an expanded consciousness. We are all one, you know.”

  Molly didn’t know.

  “We are trying to tend the land in such a way that it sustains us,” said a young man with thick, unruly black hair and a bushy beard. “We want to be self-sufficient, not relying on the man to take care of us. We can supply what we need here, grow it or make it, and share what we have with one another without expecting anything in return. This is freedom.”

  Land of the Free. Home of the Brave.

  “We call this place New Buffalo to honor the buffalo who sustained the Indian tribes here years ago.” This from the sunburned man.

  “The Taos Pueblo are still here,” said a boy in a football jersey, with a shock of blond hair that kept falling in his face. He tucked it behind his ear. “They showed us how to make the adobe bricks to build this place. They lent us tools, and this is really their land. They were here first.”

  Facts that weren’t expounded upon in An Adventurer’s Guide to Travel across America, thought Molly. Ah. She understood.

  “They helped us after the fire, too,” said the jersey boy. “Last year we accidentally burned down part of the adobe. The Taos Pueblos were the first to show up afterwards with blankets and food.”

  “But they really don’t want us here,” said an older man with weathered skin and circles under his eyes. “They tolerate us.”

  “That’s not true,” said jersey boy. “They have the most loving and generous hearts. People like Little Joe Gomez, Joe Sunhawk, Frank Zamora, Henry Gomez. They know our hearts are in the right place.”

  “Love has nothing to do with it,” said the weathered man. “If you want freedom, that’s one thing. Don’t expect the Pueblo to show you how to get it. Their spirituality and sacred practices and way of life belong to them, not us.”

  “It’s not the Taos Pueblos or even the Hispanos that want us out,” said the sunburned man. “It’s the white people in Taos, the Taosenos. They think we’re invaders.”

  “We are invaders,” said the weathered man.

  “They don’t like longhairs,” said jersey boy. “That’s what they call us.”

  “They call us dirty hippies,” said Ben, suddenly appearing and sitting next to Carol. “She’s asleep,” he told her.

  Someone threw a log on the fire and everyone’s face was illuminated.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Molly said. “But you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That’s the point,” said Sadie. “We want out of the cities. Away from the noise and the materialism and crass commercialism of our parents’ generation. We want to be free. This is our family now.”

  I like my family, Molly wanted to say. She felt the first pangs of homesickness as she realized Lucy might be suited to this life but she, Molly, wasn’t. She wanted electricity and a grocery store and a record player. She wanted the beach. She’d grown up and lived around the rhythm of the tides all her life. Her family was in Charleston … wasn’t it?

  Norman put his empty plate at his feet and picked up one of the drums. He was still a little lightheaded, but now that he’d eaten, he felt fine. More than fine, next to this fire, with these people.

  “What does freedom sound like?” he asked Sadie. He started a beat on the drum first with his fingers, then a little palm, back to the fingers, then both hands, trying to find a new rhythm, a new cadence, something to match the way he was feeling by the fire. Free.

  “Sounds like that,” said Sadie. She tossed a stick onto the fire and watched Norman settle into a groove with the beat. Soon more drums joined in and copied Norman’s creation. Then a flute and a guitar tossed notes back and forth until together the little band birthed a sweet new tune that swirled around them all and floated up, over their heads, heading for the twinkling blanket of stars in the chilly night sky.

  So many stars! thought Norman. What a beautiful sky.

  Sweet Caroline danced lightly into the circle and joined them. She cupped Norman’s ear as she danced past him and announced to everyone, “The veil between the worlds is very thin at solstice.” Norman smiled. He didn’t mind this at all.

  Molly picked up a homemade tambourine, gave it a little shake, and thought about Dennis, who now seemed so pale in comparison to the sunburned man or the weathered man or even Ben. She smiled to herself. Well, Dennis was pale, compared to Ben, who wrapped an arm around Carol and pulled her close to him. Carol laid her tousled head on his shoulder.

  Molly thought of Barry then, of how often she had leaned her head on his shoulder, of how, when she was little and he scooped her up, she tucked her face into the crook of his neck to smell his particular Barry smell. In the summer, like right now, that smell would be suntan lotion and salt and sweat and the sea.

  Barry always knew just what to do. She trusted him.

  Come on, Molly! I won’t let go! he’d say as he took her deeper into the ocean at Folly Beach and taught her how to ride the crests back to shore. And when a wave took them under, he never let go. She coughed and cried, and he pulled her close. Come here, Polka Dot, let me count those freckles.

  Molly caught lightning bugs in a jar at night, and Barry released them before morning so they wouldn’t die. He cut her the largest slice of his birthday cake. He listened to her when she fought with Mom and he always whispered, I’m on your side, even when she knew she was wrong.

  Barry was steadiness. Barry was kindness. He was not the sort of person who would go to another country and kill anyone.

  Molly’s heart twisted into a tight little knot. She was homesick for her family in the days before the war came between them, before Walter Cronkite rattled off his statistics every night and gave her dad heartburn, before Barry fell in love with Hendrix and grew his hair longer than hers, and Uncle Lewis left the family and her dad got hard and angry, and Barry stayed away more and more and then everything erupted and Barry left home and stayed gone, and Dad didn’t care and Mom didn’t know what to do, and Molly wa
s fourteen and sitting outside in a commune in New Mexico with Norman, who knew less what to do than her mom did, and who was going to take care of them now? What was the plan?

  The young man with a thick head of wild black hair and a bushy beard interrupted Molly’s thoughts. “There are lots of us here,” he said. “We’re trying to create what we never had, or we’re making room for whatever is coming, because something is coming, something is asking for expression.”

  “It’s the Age of Aquarius,” said Ben. “Harmony is coming.”

  “Struggle is coming,” said the weathered man. He nodded to Norman and Molly. “Maybe you’ll find what you seek here with us. We’re all meeting tomorrow in the Aspen Meadow above Santa Fe for solstice. Come with us. Bring your bus. You can go on your way from there, if you want. But come see.”

  “We leave early in the morning,” Molly said before Norman could answer.

  “Too bad,” said Sadie. She smiled at Norman, who blushed.

  “Go in peace,” said Ben.

  BORN TO BE WILD

  Written by Mars Bonfire

  Performed by Steppenwolf

  Recorded at American Recorders, Studio City, California, 1967

  Drummer: Jerry Edmonton

  Norman and Molly slept in the common room, which doubled as a hostel for travelers passing through. Four enormous tree trunks held up the ceiling of vigas — wooden beams made from smaller tree trunks that had been stripped of their bark and fitted together like a dome. Smoke from the fire in the center of the round room drifted lazily toward the hole in the ceiling and out into the brisk night air. The common room, tucked into the earth and waiting for them like a mother, was warm and snug and welcoming, and Molly realized, as she crawled into her sleeping bag, how exhausted she was, and how grateful, too, for a safe place to sleep. She was too tired to consult her maps. She could do it in the morning. She slept like the dead who had inhabited the mesa centuries ago. If the veil was as thin as Sweet Caroline said it was, she could feel their spirits in her sleep.

  When morning came, a rooster crowed and a young woman gave birth in one of the tipis. Her laboring cries could be heard across the community, which gathered near her. By the time Molly had emerged to find out what was happening, Norman was already standing at the edge of the crowd with a tin plate of oatmeal in his hands. Sadie stood next to him. She placed a hand lightly in the middle of his back, and Norman found he liked it. He settled into her touch with a sigh.