This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [107]
“Your wrists are so skinny, I can circle them with my thumb and forefinger,” Jennifer said one day in the playground, but when she tried to clamp her finger and thumb around my wrist, I twisted out of her grip.
“Don’t touch my wrists!”
“Why?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
There was a blank space in my memory. Hands reaching for mine. Don’t. Don’t touch. Don’t touch this feeling. It hurts.
Papa left on his second European farm tour that fall as planned, struggling to keep his thyroid—and life—in check. Secretary of Agriculture Butz had resigned in October after outing himself as a bigot by quipping, “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.” Despite Butz’s departure in disgrace, the USDA remained attached to the well-entrenched purse strings of the chemical and commercial agriculture industries.
Through grants and savings, Papa had raised enough money that summer to take a group of adults to a conference on biological agriculture in Paris, followed by a ten-day tour of organic farms. The itinerary included France, Germany, and Holland. Papa wanted to share with others the secrets of these European farmers, whose soil had been worked for centuries to produce some of the happiest and healthiest plants he’d ever seen. In these small farms and their ancient soil, he saw hope for the future, if only he could translate their methods for the American mind. It was a passion that grew with the loss of his daughter, as if through his dedication to this work, her short life would be redeemed.
Our apprentice Paul traveled ahead to work the grape harvest with a vintner in France, then met up with the group in Paris. It was there that Papa finally opened up to Paul about Heidi one night at a bar. He’d been holding it all in, trying to keep moving forward, not letting himself feel a thing. That night with Paul, far away in another country, Papa broke down and cried for the first time since July.
“He was completely devastated,” Paul told Pam later; the loss of Heidi was coupled with the loss of the dream that happiness could be achieved through purposeful effort alone. Life, in the end, had demanded its pound of flesh. Papa’s most tender feelings of joy, he realized, had been the moments when he left off farmwork and sat on the grass to let me and Heidi climb onto his back like two little monkeys, giggling and tumbling to be near him, or as he carried the solid weight of baby Clara’s sleeping body from the jeep at night and settled her into bed. They were memories he could taste only in short sips, before retreating again behind the reserve learned from his father. There he was safe, more or less, as he returned from Europe to the demands of the farm. But the pain continued to wreak havoc on his thyroid, until the doctors told him surgery or radiation treatment were the only options.
The low sun of late fall streamed through the windows at an awkward angle, illuminating the residue on the glass and magnifying the dust that covered every surface. Mama and Papa joined each other for meals, but ate in silence. There was a screaming in my heart as I sat with them on the old tree-stump chairs, the wood worn to a smooth patina beneath me.
Mama looked across the table and knew in the angle of his jaw and distance in his eyes that Papa was lost to her. If she could have talked with him about that day in July, things might have been different. If she could have aired how her suspicions about his friendship with Bess had come out as anger at us kids, how her innocent dismissal of us had turned deadly, he might have felt compassion for her. He could have told her that nothing ever happened with Bess, or with any of the others. Perhaps they might have helped each other