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Lacking neat scientific summaries on the news at night and a minister at church every Sunday to provide comforting religious sermons, our little community was left to determine our own rationale for the things that happened. So it wasn’t surprising that after Heidi drowned, people thought of the crow and felt something tingle up their spines.

One crow for sorrow . . .

As everyone shivered around the fire, a Theosophical Society friend of Helen’s who was said to be clairvoyant—a medium—emerged from the log cabin. Robyn was a grumpy older woman who often complained about the living conditions and ate a lot of garlic, its sweaty smell permeating her skin. She was on a sprouted wheat cleansing diet that made her act a little strange, in Sandy’s opinion. As she approached the fire, sparks shattered from a collapsing log and brought forth exclamations from the group. Robyn raised her bare arms for silence.

“I’ve communicated with Heidi,” she announced. “She said she’s fine, and she doesn’t want to come back.”

Anner and the others stared at her in stony silence, eyes glinting in the firelight. Just who was this woman to make such a claim?

“I wouldn’t want to come back either,” someone muttered after Robyn returned to the log cabin. “Not if I saw that woman calling me from the ever-after.”

Soon after, Papa, in his sorrow, began to fill up the pond, shovelful by shovelful, returning it to the forest. Its waters bled back into the earth, leaving a dark wound beneath new moss, and eventually, the beginnings of alders.

Chapter Eleven

Atonement

A view of the gardens from the orchard in spring (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

When the inexplicable happens, everyone wants to find a culprit. Where was the mother? The father? “It’s because they were heathens, because they didn’t abide—they had it coming, living like that,” some said. The attending sheriff has since passed on, and the files from that year burned in a fire, so I don’t know for sure what the law thought, but as if we didn’t have enough pain, my parents were blamed for the accident by the moral world at large—especially Papa, he being the man in charge. Sometimes the crucified are redeemed, sometimes they aren’t. For our family, redemption would come through sorrow.

By August the fields were covered with the swaying blanket of Queen Anne’s lace, but all I could see were those thousands of drops of bloodred at the center. On the Hebrew Day of Atonement, a goat was sent off to perish in the wilderness, carrying the sins of the people on its back. A scapegoat, and the thread tied around the goat’s neck was red for sin and guilt, red like Heidi’s boat.

We went about life, needing still to make a living at the farm stand during the summer months. Mama and Papa created the facade of normalcy for others, working together by necessity but avoiding each other and the urgings of their emotions, as if by ignoring the pain in their hearts, it would magically disappear.

Into the stunned warmth of that month came Winnie and John, of Bullfrog Films, with their young child, a handsome cameraman named Robert, and a 16mm camera. They stayed in a cabin at nearby Hiram Blake Camp, slipping into a week in the life of Forest Farm as the Nearings transitioned from the old farmhouse to their nearly completed stone house on the cove. At first Helen and Scott, perhaps in shock like the rest of the community, all but ignored the camera, feigning indifference to the project. But soon enough Robert was able to work his easygoing charms on Helen and win her interest by gently poking fun at her. She began to emerge in the mornings with rouge on her cheeks and engage in something of a flirtation with the camera.

Scott, too, saw an opportunity to expound on his favorite topics, from the importance of building up the soil to his distaste for bankers and big business, even remarking upon what he saw as the wayward career of his adopted son John, who had abandoned his once stalwart Communist beliefs to work