This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [108]
Some lives are made of the hope that something not quite right might turn out right in the end. When did that kind of hoping begin for Mama? When was that first sign of dismissal from Papa, the first hint of her happy homestead slipping away? It must have been long before the spring Papa rented the car and sent her down to her parents. Perhaps she knew the moment she served him the mashed potatoes at Franconia College that they could never fully meet each other’s expectations. Looking back now, it seems possible that Mama’s passive nature needed Papa to reject her in the end. The only way to grow, her heart insisted, was to suffer.
When the meal was done, Papa rose from the table, rinsed his bowl, and headed out the door to the shortening day. Silence remained in the farmhouse, but the screaming in my heart would not hush.
The Nearings didn’t know how to solve the troubles next door, and preferring to steer clear of the vagaries of emotion, they let us be. Their own children, and many surrogates, were always falling short of their hopes, it seemed. Angered at what he saw as the capitalist rebellion of his adopted son John—the editor at Time who had a big house in the suburbs—Scott had been returning John’s letters unopened via his other son Robert. Then on December 1, John, still estranged from his father, died of a heart attack at age sixty-four, while on a speaking tour in Chicago. It’s hard to know how the news affected Scott, as he never spoke of such things, but certainly it must have hit hard on the heels of Heidi’s death.
Then, as always, it seemed, life renewed itself. A baby girl was born to Anner in December. Gabrielle, feminine in French for Gabriel, an angel of god. Gaboo, we called her.
By January, the snow came to cover the farm and our hearts with its cool blanket. Sometime after that, Mama, Clara, and I were eating breakfast by the front windows when Papa and a strange woman walked up the front path, the distinct outline of their figures set off from the backdrop of white. The woman wore a fitted coat and tan scarf and moved with a deliberate aloofness, as if she only just happened to be in the neighborhood.
When Papa introduced us to Gerry, her smile emphasized how much fuller her mouth and lips were than Mama’s, and though her eyes were almost the same color, they were a more reliable brown, with no flecks of lighter colors in them. Her skin was olive in tone, and she had a defined nose like Mama’s, but with more emphasis on the nostrils. Straight brown hair fell from a cowlick on her forehead and down over her shoulders. She wasn’t prettier than Mama, but she seemed to me more assured of her presence in the world.
Papa and Gerry met at a MOFGA conference where Papa was speaking about the most recent European farm tour. “Would you like to buy a cow?” Gerry asked him when they were introduced, a slight smile in her brown eyes. She’d come to the conference with her husband, Zeke, and some friends from their homestead in Wytopitlock, a small settlement in the remote reaches of Maine’s Hancock County. Having grown up an only child on a quiet middle-class cul-de-sac in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gerry found another world while attending Temple University. Dressed in the hippie wardrobe of the time, she met Zeke, who with his long hair, Hells Angels beard, and jacked-up motorcycle represented the rebellion her young heart sought. After college, they’d moved to an abandoned shack in Maine to start a homestead, but the thrill was fading with the realities of their relative poverty.
“Actually, yes, I am looking for a cow,” Papa said. Our goats were gone by then, and our neighbor Keith seemed to be benefiting from his new cow, and his new relationship with Chip. As Gerry and Papa conversed, he was drawn to her self-assured manner. Unlike Mama, Gerry didn’t seem to need anyone or anything. Papa never did buy Gerry’s cow, but when Mama looked out the window that