This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [71]
According to the standard medical explanation for Graves’ disease, which is what Papa had, the hypothalamus region of the brain senses a need for increased output and instructs the pituitary gland to release more thyroid-stimulating hormone, which in turn tells the thyroid to release more thyroid hormone. This stimulates the metabolism and the sympathetic nervous system, which speeds up body functions with adrenaline. Papa, as we know, found comfort in the adrenaline from hard labor, easing as it did his mind. While certain people are genetically inclined to Graves’ disease, it takes a trigger to set it in motion. Perhaps that trigger was our low-protein diet, which, as we know, was lacking in B vitamins, the absence of which can cause the body to experience more stress on top of the natural stresses in our lifestyle. Papa went into his extra gear, and I imagine that each time he went there, the hypothalamus set its emergency plan into action. Eventually his body finally said, Enough. You’ve pushed too hard. I’ll force you to rest, take care of yourself, change course.
As Papa usually did when someone or something tried to tell him what to do, he became furious. And because there was no one person responsible for the cause of his anger, it came out in various ways on whoever crossed his path, most often Mama. What about this? his actions seemed to be saying to Mama. Will you put up with this, too?
It was around then that Chip decided she should clear out. Keith invited her to live with him and Jean in the unfinished second floor of their house, and she accepted. The log cabin in the campground was cold, and besides, she thought things were getting a little too intense on the Coleman farm.
The voice on the Zenith battery-powered radio squawked flat and tinny on the ledge by the window. It talked about President Nixon’s resignation that August, Muhammad Ali preparing for the Rumble in the Jungle that October, poet Anne Sexton’s suicide, and Ed Sullivan’s funeral in New York. When it talked about the weather, Papa, as usual, turned up the volume and moved close.
“Temperatures for Penobscot Bay and the surrounding area were in the high fifties today, and partly cloudy,” the voice droned. “Temperatures will drop to the teens tonight.”
“I’ll be damned,” Papa said. “Frost.” He shot for the door and slammed out.
“Weather’s changing,” Mama had said earlier, looking up at the clouds and pressing a hand to her back. The air wrapped cool fingers around me when I jumped down from the patio and followed Papa through the garden. The two things that made the most trouble for us were animals, like voles, raccoons, and deer, that ate plants, and frost that could freeze them—not the hardy plants like kale and cabbage, but the tender tastier things like lettuce, tomatoes, and summer squash. In the morning after a frost, the plants were covered in white crystals that sparkled and glinted when the sun first caught them. Anything not protected by plastic, greenhouses, cloches, or cold frames might be dead. The leaves looked fine at first, but after a few hours of sunshine, they would turn translucent and soggy, then wilt. The fall before we’d lost a whole patch of late lettuce to a sudden frost when the covers weren’t on the cold frames. “Damn it all to hell,” Papa had said. We wouldn’t have salad until the light returned in February and new little lettuce seedlings could germinate.
Now he had rolls of plastic that he spread on the garden like long blankets.
“I need more plastic,” Papa yelled to Mama, heading for the jeep.
“I want to come,” I begged.
“All right, hop in.”
He tore out of the parking lot, past the campground, and down the road to Keith and Jean’s driveway, long and close with trees, rutted in the middle, dark with foreboding. Keith had been slaughtering livestock for