This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [124]
Our book version of the Selkie story was slightly different. A man found a wounded Canadian goose, instead of a seal, and nursed it back to life. After the bird was healed and he set it free, a beautiful woman with dark hair and eyes came to his home and offered to be his wife. When she bore him a child, he thought he could find no greater happiness, but they didn’t have much money, so she wove special cloth for him to sell. A merchant wanted a large quantity of the cloth, and the man begged his wife to weave it for him. She said the weaving took all of her strength, but he continued to plead, so she agreed, though she asked that he not look in on her when she was working. She spent many days and nights in the room, and the man grew impatient and decided to check on her. He saw not his wife, but a large bird at the loom, plucking the last of the feathers from her bloody chest to weave into the fabric. She screamed when she saw him, and suddenly they were surrounded by a flock of geese. The geese lifted the mother in a storm of beating wings, leaving the daughter behind with her father as the birds disappeared into the sky.
I knew Mama felt about this book the way I felt about some of my books—that it explained her feelings better than she could herself. I could tell by the downward turn of her mouth that she wanted to say, “See, he pushed her too far, and she had to leave her child behind.”
We’d been having trouble with porcupines in the orchard. When they ate the bark off the trunks, the apple trees would die. There was one porcupine bigger than the others, his body the size of an anthill, with a small head and surprisingly wise eyes nearly obscured by quills sweeping back over his body. Though they looked like hair gone white at the ends, I knew from Normie-dog that the quills were nothing so friendly. If Clara and I surprised that big porcupine in the back field, he turned his back to us and the quills rose up like a lady’s fan, quivering as if about to eject across the distance at us.
“Run, Clara, run,” I cried. “Or they’ll shoot into you.” We’d tear screaming back to the house, grass catching between our bare toes, and Shiva came out to try and catch him, but slow as that old porcupine was, he always managed to escape Shiva’s wrath.
Heading to the path for the bus in the morning, I saw Shiva over in the orchard, checking on the damage to the apple trees. Those dwarf varieties of russets, Northern Spy, and Spy Golds planted the year I was born were finally coming into maturity; Papa would be heartbroken if they died now. He’d always tended them carefully—fertilizing, pruning off dead and volunteer branches, and mending the fence to protect them from deer and porcupines.
Every spring that I could remember, the trees burst with pale five-petaled blossoms that intoxicated the air, and every summer small fruits grew from the center of the bloom until, in recent years, the branches became heavy with apples that we harvested and made into applesauce or stored in the root cellar. They weren’t always as big as the contraband at the Holbrook sanctuary, but they weren’t half bad, as Papa liked to say. Orchards, stone walls, and foundations, Papa also told me, are the only things that remain after a farm is abandoned. Long after the gardens grow up with trees, the barns cave in, and farmhouses turn to rubble, the apple trees might still be producing fruit.
At school Jennifer pretended to be nice to me again, taking my hand, but instead of counting freckles she folded back my fingers with her small, strong ones.
“Mercy?” she asked. I locked eyes with her, refusing to give in. She bent my fingers backward until my palm became the curve of a bridge, the muscles and tendons stretching