This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [69]
Papa was our air—our bodies becoming listless and slack in his absence. Soon I realized I was still breathing on my own, but it was an effort to take those first breaths. There was the feeling of something stuck in my throat, not a loneliness egg, but a hollow robin’s egg, the kind you find in a bird’s nest in summer after the other fledglings have hatched and flown away. The stuff inside simply vanished, leaving only the fine tiny blue shape of the shell in the matted palm of mud and straw.
On the way home Mama stopped at Bucks Harbor Market, the coming of the storm making everything restless. The Condon’s Garage sign creaked back and forth on its metal hooks. Boats sighed against the docks in the harbor as people readied for the storm. Houses along the ocean braced themselves. Birds sought shelter. My bones ached.
“She’s a comin’.”
“It’s a gonna blow.”
Our nerves tingled with the charge of electricity in the air. You could feel the blood pulling in your veins to join the water gathering in the atmosphere. At the same time your brain said, “Hurry, rush, go deep into the forest, find safety under a rock.” The stop sign shuddered in the wind at the turn onto the cape road. Halfway home, along the open stretch by Carolyn Robinson’s drive, the rain hit us. It pounded horizontally against the jeep, driving in through the canvas flaps. The raindrops were furious on the windshield, wipers working at high speed, twap-twack, twap-twack, and dead branches cluttered the hood. When we entered the woods by Hiram Blake’s, the forest shielded us, a bubble of peace, then out again into the open by Hoffman’s Cove, where the wind was driving the ocean to madness, a roil of wind, rain, clouds, and waves washing up nearly onto the road.
The Vegetable Garden sign wavered dangerously at the end of the driveway as we turned in and drove up the back road to the house. You could feel the floorboards shifting under the high pressure when we stepped inside. Then, slam! The outside door blew open against the side of the house, knocking a clatter-crash of snowshoes from the outside wall.
Mama rushed to close the door, and we huddled in the kitchen as she tried to light the stove, hair wet to her face.
“Ma-ma, Pa-pa, Ma-ma, Pa-pa,” Heidi repeated in a murmur to comfort herself, rocking beside me on the floor by the stove. Outside the wind tore the air like fabric and trees shuddered and cracked. The next day we would find trunks toppled, roots askew as if the backhoe had pulled them from the earth, exposing white piles of ancient shell middens, the only remaining evidence of the ancient peoples who had once lived off our land.
While Papa was in Europe, a female apprentice named Chip helped Mama with the many chores of readying the farm for winter. Chip was twenty-four, a couple years out of Springfield College, with short brown hair, thick glasses, and a compact athletic build so that from a distance she might be mistaken for a guy. Her mother had died at a young age, leaving her a comfortable sum, but she barely touched the money, preferring to live simply on the road and in the woods. After hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, she finished the last segment of the trail at Katahdin and hitched to Brooksville to see Doc Brainard, whom, like Kent, she’d met when studying at Springfield. Doc brought Chip over to see our place, and while helping search for a runaway goat, Chip had the sudden inspiration to ask Papa if she could stay and work. “Sue could use some help while I’m in Europe,” he replied, so just after Halloween, Chip returned with her stuff and moved into the log cabin in the campground.
Chip, it turned out, was a meat eater. She loved to hunt and often tanned the