This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [74]
Heidi slept on her stomach with her head turned on one cheek, lips pouted, legs bent froglike beneath her bum. When I tickled her chin to wake her, her eyes were blank for a minute before the spark of her being returned from somewhere far away and lit her pupils with an iridescence of blue. Some mornings I’d wake to Heidi singing below me in the bunk. Oooo auuuu iiieees in her own kind of tune. Her secret language.
It started with Heidi trying to sing a song Mama sometimes sang:
Go tell Aunt Rhodie
Go tell Aunt Rhodie
The old gray goose is dead
Drowned in a millpond
Standing on her head
But then I realized Heidi was talking to someone in her bird language. “Go tell Aunt Rhodie” had become “Tel-on-Ferdie.” Mama called her an imaginary playmate, but that wasn’t exactly correct—Telonferdie came and went on her own. She came from a place of wisdom about all things of the world. Sometimes I could see her and sometimes I couldn’t.
As Heidi sang to Telonferdie, the birdsong shattered down on us like rain in the early morning, coming as if from everywhere, from the trees and the woods, even, it seemed, from beneath the earth. At night you heard the frogs instead, rising from the low wet places of the farm—the pond, the drinking water spring—places that turned misty when the air was warmer than the water. The frog voices were like music on the radio, echoey and squarky, calling you to them. If you walked by the pond it was as if someone turned up the volume dial, each crick-crick part of the whole, becoming so loud you couldn’t hear anything else, then fading back into the night as you walked on.
I wished I could hold all these beautiful sounds safe in my belly, to keep them for my own the way Heidi used to put the things she loved into her mouth as a toddler. But when the sun rose, the sounds escaped me and spread out into the world.
“You cannot own these things,” one of the apprentices told me when I tried to catch a bird once, “because they belong to God.”
“What’s God?” I asked.
God was something I did not understand the way kids who went to church did. They said God was a man in the sky with white hair and a beard like Santa. This seemed strange to me. When I thought of God, I imagined only mist over the pond, a sliver of moon in a dark sky, scatterings of stars, birdsong.
The only person I knew who went to church every Sunday was Skates. She was “an Episcopalian,” she told me, the sound of the word rolling nicely off the tongue. Skates said Heidi and I were heathens. Pagans. Atheists. Unbaptized.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if you kids were Episcopalians too?” Skates said. When we visited her over Christmas, she took me to church to pray. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” the voices hissed around me. Our collected souls rose to sing, then sat, then rose again. Skates was tone-deaf, though it didn’t matter to me because so, it seemed, was I. While the singing in the church was beautiful, it could never match for me the sounds of Heidi and the birds in the morning.
“Even though we do not belong to any organized religion, we are very religious people,” Mama had written in her journal a couple years earlier. “We believe in the individual who can be trusted, who is capable of loving, who can carry his own weight and who has a basic goodness.”
But by the spring of 1975, Mama was no longer so sure. The principles of trust, love, hard work, and basic goodness that Mama and Papa had founded their lives on were changing as their relationship began