This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [77]
Papa later told me he showed up that morning with a rental car and asked Mama to drive it down to Westport to stay with her family for a while. Something had slid shut inside him with the smooth clunk of the old wood latch on the farmhouse door. “I don’t know why I did some of the things I did,” he said. “Sometimes I didn’t realize in my haste to solve a problem that my solution might hurt the other party.”
“It’s not working out,” he’d said to Mama, hands shaking, heart beating too fast. The solution seemed simple—remove the emotional burdens so he could focus on work, his old escape. As if anything is ever that easy.
“Mammm-maaak.” The sound came from my throat like a hiccup when I woke to a kerosene lantern in the darkness. Papa was reading at the table. Papa. I slipped out of my bunk and shuffled across the floor to climb onto his lap. He didn’t say anything, but his arms wrapped around me as he rested his chin on the top of my head. I leaned back into the warmth of his chest, the way we used to sit when he seeded flats.
Mama was miserable and misunderstood at her parents’ house, her mother, Prill, fearing the situation might give my grandfather another heart attack. Mama tried to figure out where things had gone wrong, thinking as far back as the winter Papa was building the addition, pushing too hard to finish before Heidi was born. With the hyperactivity he’d become a different person, and said he was no longer in love with her. Her only hope was that Papa’s condition would improve, and things would return to normal.
After school let out, the long summer days sighed lonesome and empty without Heidi. I longed, more than anything, for companionship. If Papa was my air, coming and going, Mama was more internal. I didn’t know how to adjust to Mama’s absence; the shape of her had been with me since before birth. She was a lung. The other lung could still breathe and keep me alive, but there was a hollow space on one side of my chest that made me “needy-needy,” as Mama called it. Needy was not good, but I couldn’t help it.
“Play with me, Papa,” I begged, and he would try, but he was racing across the farm trying to finish the work of both parents. “Just a minute, Lissie, I’ll be right there,” he’d say. He always came for me as promised, but those minutes might turn to hours.
Then Frank arrived, his glow as big and warm as a bear eating honey, intent on the joy in front of him. The son of a southern lawyer, he’d gone to boarding school and recently graduated from Harvard. Inspired by the Nearings’ maple sugaring book, he decided to stop and visit them while hitchhiking to Canada, and, hoping to find himself through the work of the body rather than the mind, he’d returned to apprentice with us.
The wooden screen door slammed behind as I leaped off the patio and into the green space beneath the ash tree. Where might Frank be? I listened to the sounds of the farm filling the bowl of the clearing—metal of garden tools clanking against buckets, birdsong, whispering of the trees. Across the back field I heard the scrape of a shovel and then saw a curved toss of earth fly up to a pile at the edge of a hole. I ran over and looked in at Frank’s bare back, glistening as he dug. Giggling, I took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it down so it stuck to the sweat on his skin. He spun around, brown eyes alert behind horn-rimmed glasses, then shook his head at me in exasperation.
“Don’t put the earth back in, okay—I’m working hard to get it out of here, can’t you see?” His laughter started small at first but got bigger until it burst like thunder. The rumble filled the hole, making me laugh and filling the hole inside me, too.
Dowsing had worked for finding water before, when Helen divined the spot for our other well, so someone went out with a rod and walked in a grid across the field. When the rod dipped downward to purportedly indicate a vein of underground water, Frank started to dig. He had a regular old curved shovel with a smooth wooden handle. Each time I came to find him, he was deeper into the earth. Up