This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [126]
I sensed movement, heard muted voices, and my feet led me to a lower plot beyond the farm stand, where Pam and Paul were pulling squash from the vines to load in a wheelbarrow.
“Hello, Lissie,” Pam called as I approached.
“Hello, Lissie,” Paul echoed.
Pam held the fleshy shape of a butternut squash in her hands, baby Mariah in a sling on her back. The fall air filled the space between us as if we were swimming in the pond—warmish on top, cold underneath.
“Where’s Mama?” I asked, arms crossed over my chest, bangs heavy on my forehead. Pam and Paul moved slowly toward me, as if trying to catch a goat. Paul rested his hands on both knees so his eyes were at my level, his face boy-cute beneath a dark bit of beard.
“Your mother has left on a trip with Shiva,” he said. “She took Clara but couldn’t bring you. I’m trying to get ahold of your father.”
“I want to stay here,” I said, bracing my feet. They were bare and brown below my knobby goat knees sticking out of my shorts. “Stubborn as a goat,” Mama always said. “Stubborn as a goat with horns.”
“Well, of course you do,” Paul said.
He looked over my head at Pam. Rocked on his heels.
If I were to copy a quote for that moment into my journal, as Mama used to do, it would be this:
We live from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and at each point we are a little different. If there is no change, this is the open door to death. Life is a progression. It is not a standing still. It is either a plus or a minus.
—Scott Nearing
Two days later, unable to locate Papa by phone, Paul drove me in his red pickup to school. Brooksville Elementary was a low, white, many-windowed building. I walked through the double doors, down the empty hall, to the classroom shared by the third and fourth grades. From the safe island of my desk, I practiced holding my breath—one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand—in case I needed to swim a long distance underwater to safety.
“Attention, please,” Mrs. Clifford said, and cleared her throat before taking attendance. When she called my name, I raised my hand and said, “Here.” She looked at me over the moons of her glasses and made a note on her list. “Such a sad little girl,” said the thought bubble over her head.
Once everyone was accounted for, we stood with right hands on our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in perfect Maineglish. “Ah pledge-a-lee-gence to the flag, of-the-Un-i-ted-States-of-A-mer-i-cer, and to the-re-pub-lick-far-which-it-stands, one nay-ton un-dah God, in-vis-i-ble, with lib-er-dy and jus-tice-fa-all.”
My mind drifted and wandered, following the trail of the never-ending story Frank used to tell me the spring of Mama’s first leaving.
“Why does the story have no end?” I asked Frank that summer.
“Because the universe is a big circle,” he said, nonsensically, it seemed. “With a circle, you always come back to the beginning and start over.”
He drew a circle in the air with his finger, starting at the tip of my nose and coming back around to the tip of my nose.
“See,” he said as my eyes crossed on his finger.
Frank said everyone knew this was true. For example, he quoted the poet T. S. Eliot, who, he said, went to Milton Academy and Harvard like him: “And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end.” That didn’t make much sense either, but made me think of how Papa said his classmates used to josh, “T. S., Eliot,” meaning “Tough Shit, Eliot,” when things weren’t going his way.
I pictured Papa as he looked the last time I saw him, across the space under the ash tree by the woodshed, lifting firewood in his arms to bring into the house before saying good-bye. His breath came out in clouds in the early-morning air. My throat tightened, knowing he was going