This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [115]
I was that boy. I even looked like a boy after Gerry cut my hair short so it wouldn’t appear messy and unkempt. The stories lived in a safer place. The solution was to find books that lasted a long time. I’d already made it through The Hobbit and was working on The Fellowship of the Ring, and there were two more books in the trilogy. They would last me at least to winter. My favorite tales told of the hero’s journey—of the hero who was called, often guided by an aged mentor like Gandalf, to another world where he or she must find the sword of knowledge to fight the dragons blocking the way to the ultimate discovery, in the darkest hour, of some secret to save the land.
“It’s too dark under there,” Gerry said. “You’ll ruin your eyes.” She gave me a little flashlight so I could trace the sentences with the beam of light, like Luke Skywalker’s light saber. I would have stayed under the desk forever, but the beam soon become paler and less yellow, like the sun on a wintery day. When it started to flicker and waver, you knew the end was near, and we were always out of fresh batteries.
That’s when I realized I could live in the world of the book in my head. Papa always told me I could be anything I wanted, and through my imagination I knew it was true. I could be Frodo. Even better, I could be Strider or Arwen, Galadriel or Gandalf, and raise my staff to make bad things slink away into their caves. As in the Narnia books, I could go to my own private country as I walked the paths in the woods, passing through the wardrobe into a world where there was something to believe in again. I could do this while going back and forth between the log cabin and the farmhouse, while lying in bed, on the bus, in the outhouse. At any time I could escape through the door of my imagination. The words “once upon a time” hold the comfort that the world is a rational place. If we can weave the threads of the story into a pattern that makes sense of things, we can believe it so.
It was then that Telonferdie came back. I was on the path to the Nearings’ when I heard her voice whispering in the trees.
“It’s me, Telonferdie,” she said.
“You’re still alive?” I asked, astonished. “Even without Heidi?”
“Of course,” she said. “I never die.”
Chapter Twelve
Mercy
The farmhouse kitchen with wood cookstove, grain grinder, and hand pump faucet (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
Gerry left for home near the end of November. Papa told us she’d gone to visit her family for the holidays, which she had, but the truth was, she couldn’t take the tension at the farm.
“If you go to Topsfield I might join you there,” she told Papa. The Coolidge Center in Topsfield, Massachusetts, had offered him a job running an experimental organic farm and a big house with electricity, running water, and an office and phone. His thyroid was showing signs of shrinking enough to bring its symptoms into check, but he would have to take pills for the rest of his life to do the work the healthy organ had once done. Though it would get worse before it got better, there was hope that he could reclaim control over his body and relief in the thought that he might be able to focus on just the intricacies of organic farming, leaving his illness and the work of homesteading behind in Maine.
A light snow dusted the winding roads as Papa drove away from the farm in the Silver Bullet with his few immediate belongings and a staticky tune on the radio. Much, much later he would look back and say those years on Greenwood Farm, despite the heartbreak, were when he felt the pulse of life beat the strongest. It hurt him to leave, but it was time for him and Mama to part ways, there was no mistaking it. He knew she had to find her own strength; he could never give that kind of thing to