You, Me, and the Sea

by Meg Donohue

  My father had felt this way many times about the farm in Nebraska, but he had never heard someone who spoke quite like Marigold. He had poetic thoughts like this, too, and listening to Marigold made him think that he ought to have the courage to start saying some of them out loud.

  “You like the shifts on the land more than the shifts in the city,” he said.

  She thought about this. “I guess I do.” The bright way she looked at him made him glad he’d said it.

  When they stepped off the streetcar, Marigold’s long hair whipped around her head. She lifted the blue scarf from her shoulders and tied it around the billowing brown and blond strands.

  The ocean pulled at my father. If the sky here was smaller than he expected, the ocean was bigger. The waves rose and crashed with a roar; the water seemed both darker and more sparkling than it had in any movie or photograph. It was loud and powerful and riotous in a way that made his heart race. But the air did just what he’d always thought it would, filling up his chest like it belonged there, like it was returning home.

  They took off their shoes. My father dug his toes into the sand and found it warm on top and cool below. He rolled up his dungarees. Marigold knotted her dress above her knees. They waded in. The water was bracingly cold, surprising him, but Marigold didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t believe he was finally here.

  “That’s where our land is,” Marigold yelled through the wind. He shielded his eyes and followed the line of her finger north. In the distance, beneath a trace of fog, a stretch of golden cliffs stood tall despite the battering of the waves.

  “On the cliff?” At that point, it was impossible for him to imagine a farm by the sea.

  “On the cliff,” she said. Her hand found his and squeezed, and as he told me this, he always squeezed mine again, too, and I was right there with them, looking north toward the land by the sea.

  FOR THREE YEARS, they lived and worked together at Freedom Farm. The farm had a disorderly beauty that spoke to my father. The soil required the kind of steadfast attention that reminded him, happily, of his home, but there were so many surprises, too: the bunkhouse with its cots that glowed in the dark, the colorful banners that fluttered from the trees, the spiky wildflowers that looked like they’d been dropped from outer space, the purple tractor with its crackling radio, the distant roar of the ocean, the thick and romantic fog, the bluff-top meadows of wind-stamped shrubs, the fancy hens with their pale blue eggs.

  Marigold was unlike anyone he’d ever met. She believed wholeheartedly in the Free Movement, and thought that the path to world harmony would be found through binding person to person in a string of kindnesses and generosity, giving and receiving and passing on, a sharing of warmth (like stories, my father thought, remembering those ancient myths of the sea, passed on for generations, that had brought him such relief as a child). Marigold loved the ocean, and her skin seemed always speckled with salt, her blond hair just a little bit wet. She could hold her breath underwater longer than my father had known was humanly possible; just when he grew frantic, she would surface, calm and satiated as an animal after a meal. When he watched her swim, he thought of the merrows in the Irish folktales he used to read with his mother—mermaids whose true home would always be the sea.

  When he missed his family, the big sky of Nebraska, his quiet childhood bedroom with its filmy white curtains that billowed at the slightest whisper of breeze, Marigold’s kindness buoyed him. In truth, he was not sure how he felt about the Freedom Collective—Louie and the others were welcoming in a boisterous, zealous way, but living among so many people felt unnatural to him. As much as he loved living on the coast, he missed the quiet thrum of family life as he’d known it. Freedom, he was learning, did not mean the same thing to everyone. In the early hours of morning before the rest of the group was awake, he helped a neighboring farmer with carpentry work. Someday, he thought, it would be time to move on from Freedom Farm, and when that day came, he wanted to have some cash saved. But he knew that he would stay with the group as long as Marigold was happy. He loved her.

  After a few visits to San Francisco, my father traded his city shifts for farm shifts, content to stay up north. More often than not, Marigold stayed with him. She was not always animated and talkative. Sometimes the light behind her eyes flickered and dimmed. Her spirit grew heavy, each hard-won smile seeming to surface from a dwindling supply of joy. The color drained from her face. When my father saw the early signs of these mood shifts, he learned to take her by the hand and walk with her along the beach. His silent company seemed to help. The sea air dampened her skin, making it shine.

  Sometimes he took her for long drives in one of the slowly rusting cars that were always parked along the side of the tractor barn. He’d pack her favorite sandwiches, hummus and cucumber on Free Bread. She liked listening to the Byrds as the car’s wheels stuttered over the crumbling roads. They drove past small, shaggy farms and stopped for lunch on hidden beach coves. In Osha, my father traded Freedom Farm eggs for fresh blueberry muffins from the café. In front of the co-op, he found a soft, knitted shawl in the bin of clothes labeled FREE. He draped it around Marigold’s beautiful neck and kissed her. They walked the dirt road that ended at the beach, passing cottages with surfboards on their porches and clotheslines bowed by beach towels and the violet-colored schoolhouse with the sign, stuck in the dirt out front, that read LITTLE EARTH. He could not imagine this part of the country ever not seeming remarkable to him. Nebraska no longer claimed him in the way this land by the sea did. He felt as enchanted as one of the characters in the myths he so loved.

  “Look,” my mother said one day as they drove. My father turned to her, relieved. It was the first time she’d spoken in hours. She pointed through the window and he pulled the car onto a patch of weedy dirt on the side of the road. Even before the car had completely stopped, she’d opened the door.

  My father stepped out and circled the car to join her at a split-rail fence. A field rose gently away from them. On it, a handful of cows grazed on the sort of scrubby brown grass that would have made Nebraska stock turn up their noses. At the end of the field there was a red barn painted with a huge white peace sign.

  There was yearning in the deep breath that Marigold took then. “This looks like a happy home,” she said.

  My father felt his heartbeat quicken. He had been waiting for her to give him some sign that she was ready to leave the Freedom Collective and start a different sort of life with him. After three years of carpentry jobs and living for free at Freedom Farm, he had saved eight thousand dollars.

  He managed to take his eyes off her face long enough to look at the farm before looking back at her. “Is this the sort of place you’d like to call home?” he asked.

  Her brow wrinkled. For a moment my father felt disappointment looming. But then she put her arm around his waist and drew him closer to her. “Wouldn’t it be perfect,” she said, “if we lived in a place like this with a view of the sea?”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the bank’s auction, after he’d walked Horseshoe Cliff, my father lay awake thinking of stories his grandfather had told him. The bank believed Horseshoe Cliff was like a fruit that was flecked with rot, that only the most desperate would seek juice below its puckered skin. After walking the land, my father didn’t feel desperate, but he knew that the water from the well would not be enough to farm the land at Horseshoe Cliff. In the morning, hours before the auction, he called his grandfather.

  Dry farming, his grandfather told him, involved tilling and pressing the soil during the rainy season so it formed a crust that held in the moisture accumulated during the wettest months. It was risky business to be at the mercy of nature, most successful when farming low-water crops that could survive on the moisture provided by the coast’s summer fog when the land below was driest.

  “Potatoes,” his grandfather recommended. “Tomatoes. Onions. Garlic. Sunchokes. Most greens. Pumpkins. Watermelons, believe it or not. Oh, and apples, sure. They won’t be bi
g or pretty, but see if they’re not twice as flavorful as any irrigated orchard pickings. The water deficiency stresses the fruit, concentrating the sugars and nutrients. Small but mighty fruit is what you’ll grow. ‘Good for pies,’ your grandmother is saying in my other ear.”

  By the time my father hung up the phone, he was already pacing out the orchard in his mind, mentally tilling the sandy soil until it became a sponge that pulled water from secret depths and the fog above. He envisioned the neat rows of an ambitious garden, the first green sprouts striving toward the sun. Barrels that could store the winter rain. A farm stand by the road where anything more than they needed could be given away for free to those less fortunate.

  My father was young and full of hope for the future. With the clouds of my mother’s latest dark mood parting, he would not allow himself to see anything but happiness ahead.

  Chapter Two

  One of my earliest memories was of my brother promising me chocolate cake. It was my fifth birthday. Bear told me the cake was in the eucalyptus grove, and I believed him. So many wonderful treasures could be found in the grove; why not, among them, chocolate cake? I loved the grove as I loved all of Horseshoe Cliff, my home by the sea.

  My father sat in his chair on the back porch, whittling one of his tiny houses, looking out from time to time toward the line where the land fell away. From the back porch, the ocean was an enormous silver sail pulled taut. The eucalyptus grove was on the other side of the house, closer to the road. My father couldn’t have seen what happened.

  As Bear and I walked away from the house, the distant rumble of the waves seemed to rise up through the soles of my feet.

  The grove was a different world from the sun-bleached coast. Above, fog clung to shaggy trees; below, my feet rustled a blanket of decaying, dagger-shaped leaves. At five years old, I already knew that my father worried over the grove during lightning storms, that the oils in the trees and the dry footing of leaves could easily spread wildfire. But butterflies, orange-hued and polka-dotted, flitted through the grove, and I loved to chase them, imagining they were stars that would float into the sky at nightfall.

  As Bear led me along a winding path through the ancient-looking trees, I searched for fairies in the shadows. I felt my stomach growl. The warm and minty air of the grove, its sleepy stillness, always made me hungry.

  My father gave the pumpkins that we grew to our friend Rei from town, and sometimes Rei returned to Horseshoe Cliff with a pumpkin pie that had a whipped cream smiley face on top. Maybe, I thought, she’d taught Bear how to make that pie, and he planned to give it to me for my birthday. So what if it wasn’t really a cake? I would be happy with a pie. But I hoped there would be candles. I wondered if Bear would keep me company while I ate it. This idea excited me. My brother never wanted to play with me. I would gladly share the pie with him, I decided.

  “Look, Merrow, there’s the cake.” Bear was ten years older than me and lately his voice had become strange, falling and rising and falling like a bat hunting something I could not see. He pointed at a canvas bag tucked into a nook among a tree’s roots. I called these nooks “tree pockets” and spent hours of my days hiding little treasures within them. More often than not when I returned, sure I’d remembered the right spot, I would find the treasures gone. I would press my hand against the cold dirt and wonder how I could have forgotten something so important.

  I raced to the bag. Overhead, the trees shivered in a breeze that didn’t reach me. I looked in the bag and thought, Chocolate! But what I pulled from the bag was a fistful of black mud. A pale worm as thick as my thumb dropped onto the bare skin of my thigh. I yelped and fell backward. The ball of mud hit the ground beside me, writhing with worms.

  Bear was laughing. “Did you really think I’d put a cake in a bag? God, you’re dumb. It was only a joke.”

  My legs were streaked with mud. I looked up at my brother and began to cry. “I want Daddy.”

  Bear’s face changed when he became angry. “‘I want Daddy,’” he whimpered, imitating me.

  Something inside of me went still when my brother looked at me like that. A thumping sound began in my ears. I stood to walk back toward the house, but Bear grabbed my wrist and pulled. I fell and then he was above me, one knee on each of my arms, pinning me down. It was hard to breathe.

  I already knew to be careful around Bear. He was more than twice my size, and you had to be alert around people and animals that were bigger than you because they could hurt you without meaning to. Like when my pony, Guthrie, whipped my eyes with his tail when he’d only been trying to get a fly off his back. Bear was like Guthrie, I thought. He had patches of whiskers around his lips that made his face always look dirty, and his hair hung around his neck like a mane. I admired how strong and brave my brother was, how he always had blood beading from some scrape on his arm or the purple stain of a bruise on his shin. I’d never seen him cry. He couldn’t help that he was so big, or that I so often ran into his hard elbow and wound up on the ground, or that his long feet clipped my ankles and made me fall. His eyes were always empty when he looked down at me, like he couldn’t even see me because I was so small. Bear was a horse and I was a fly, as difficult to see as any fleck of dust.

  But now, something was changing. Bear looked right at me and he had knives in his eyes. “Stop crying,” he said.

  “I can’t.” I twisted below him. My arms and my belly hurt. There was a sour taste in my throat, but I fought it, sensing how angry it would make Bear if I became sick.

  “I’m not letting you up until you’re quiet.” He put his hand over my mouth. It smelled of the grove, this place that I loved, and the smell made me cry harder. I thought about biting him, but then I looked up into his narrowed eyes and couldn’t.

  “Stop crying,” said Bear. “Stop.”

  “You’re hurting me!” I managed to say beneath his hand.

  My brother’s face was flat and hard. “I don’t care. You’re not allowed to cry. You know why.”

  How did I know, suddenly, that the “why” was our mother? No one had told me when our mother had died, or why. It was a question that I carried around with me, always and never asking at the same time. It was what I was asking my father when I sat next to him on the porch and listened to his knife scrape against wood. It was what I was asking Bear when I followed him around the orchard, hoping he’d play with me. It was what I was asking Rei when I thanked her for that pumpkin pie.

  Why is Mama dead? When will she be back?

  “I want Mama,” I said, releasing the words quickly.

  Bear’s knees pressed down on me. I could hardly see him through my tears, but I thought I heard him say, “It’s your fault she’s dead.” His knees dug into my arms.

  I closed my eyes and thought of following butterflies as bright as stars. Something happened to time after that. When I opened my eyes, Bear was gone, and the light in the grove was fading. My arms ached. Bear had never hurt me like this before.

  Later in my life, I would think of this moment often. It seemed to me that it was the first time I felt true fear. True fear was different from worrying over howling wind outside my bedroom at night. It was different from the feeling of looking at an empty plate after another meal that wasn’t quite large enough to satisfy my hunger. It was different from the hard ball of loneliness that rolled around in my heart from time to time. This fear did not feel like the sort of thing that came and went; it felt like something that was meant to last, like a rope with a double knot.

  Still, I loved Bear. It was a strange and awful and confusing feeling to love someone I feared.

  I found my father sitting on his chair on the porch just where I’d left him, but now he was asleep. The tiny house he’d been carving had fallen off his lap. So had his knife. I picked up the house and turned it on my palm. It was a miniature farmhouse with a peace sign carved into its tiny door and a cat curled on the top step. There were holes bored into the chimney so I knew that the house was meant to hol
d salt, and he’d soon whittle a matching barn to hold pepper. Sometimes my father tied a red ribbon through a notch as small as a sliver and turned the house into a Christmas ornament. Other times he nailed tiny brass hinges below the roofline, and the house became a jewelry box. Our friend Rei sold the houses at the fairs she traveled to every month. The orchard had not borne much fruit that fall, and my father spent more and more time working on the houses.

  I wondered where this one would end up. Not a single toothpick-wide spindle on the house’s tiny porch railing had broken in the fall from my father’s lap. I longed to keep the house for myself, to hide it deep in a tree pocket where I could play with it during the long hours of the day that I spent alone. But if I put it in a tree pocket, I would probably only end up losing it. I set it down beside my father’s chair.

  The knife handle had smooth indentations the size of my father’s fingers. The blade curved like a fang from the handle. I turned the knife in my hand, studying it, wondering over the fluttery feeling that was released in my belly as I held it.

  When my father stirred, I set down the knife and crawled into his lap. His head rolled up from his chest. He blinked at me a few times and then shifted back in his chair. He didn’t ask where I’d been. I was just five, but I had free roam of the property, including the curve of cliff that hung over the ocean. Whenever Rei visited, she told me not to go near the cliffs, and I would laugh at how scared she sounded. Rei was a grown-up and grown-ups weren’t supposed to be scared of anything.

  “Bear sat on me,” I told my father, tears welling with the words. My arms were sore and streaked with dirt. “He wouldn’t let me up. He hurt me.”

  “Poor girl,” Dad said, pulling leaves from the tangle of my hair.

  I sunk against his chest. His arms were warm around me.