This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [78]
“Might as well stop digging,” Frank grumbled at me. “There’s no water here.”
Soon more apprentices began to arrive, eventually forming the biggest group we’d ever had. When running through the garden looking for Frank, I would find Julie, Naomi, and Michèle harvesting carrots in the nude. It was Michèle who started going naked in the gardens that summer, and everyone followed suit, competing with me for the best overall body tan, a fact that visitors found much more notable than the nudity of a child.
“Bonjour, ça va,” Michèle called out, teaching me French words. “Comment allez-vous?”
“Come on tally who?” I repeated, and she loved that, tinkling with laugher, her body slender with small breasts and hips and a long brown ponytail hanging like a rope down her back. Passionate about learning to farm and happily existing in the moment, Michèle was from a politically inclined family in Montreal, her father a union leader who knew of Scott Nearing. Having lost interest in her anthropology major, she attended a farm conference where Papa was speaking and, feeling inspired, asked if she could come work for him. “Write me a letter,” he said, as usual, which she did. There being a mail strike in Canada, she didn’t bother waiting around for a reply, so with tent and sleeping bag in her backpack, she took the bus to Bangor and hitched to Cape Rosier. A neighbor drove her the last ten miles to the farm. As she walked up to the house in darkness, she felt herself surrounded by the growing plants of the garden, the earthy smells of spring evening in the air.
I’ve come to the right place, she thought, and smiled. Papa brought her to the cabin to stay with Frank. “I was an impressionable baby goose when I first came to the farm,” Michèle liked to say. “Frank was the first apprentice I met, so I imprinted on him.”
When Kent, the gymnast, returned for his second summer, he was thrilled to find Michèle out at the well in the cool of morning, stark naked, dumping water over her head for a shower, and singing “le soleil, le soleil,” her arms stretched above her head to the rising sun.
Everyone was in love with Michèle, but most of all Frank and another newcomer, Greg. Michèle meted out her joy slowly to those around her, but Frank wanted it all for himself, so she was careful with him, letting him have only enough to keep him wanting more. While Frank was warm and bearlike, Greg was a mystery Michèle wanted to solve, his silence like a pool reflecting you back to yourself. The summer before, he’d come to the cape in his International pickup while on a road trip around the country. He found an elderly woman trying to roll a rock out of a ditch alongside the road, and she, of course, turned out to be Helen. After he helped her with the rock, she invited Greg to join her for a dinner of beans and ketchup, and Scott asked him to stay.
Lean and muscular, Greg became Scott’s helper, looking after him in his increasing dotage so Helen didn’t have to worry he’d fall or get lost in the woods. Recently, when dumping a wheelbarrow load of unneeded gravel over the slope to the cove, Scott had tumbled heels-over-head after it. Scott eventually sold Greg the piece of land on the other side of our farm, where a Franconia student had built a cabin before he left to sail around the world and the land reverted back to the Nearings.
In the evenings, when I missed Mama most, I’d visit Michèle and Frank in the log cabin. You could get so much more out of human friends than animal friends, I was learning, but there were tricks to it. You had to give more to get more. The secret to Frank was that he enjoyed telling stories. He knew how to use his mind in structured ways, he told me, from growing up with an attorney father who expected him to be a lawyer, too, but he was still searching to find his own way. As he worked in the garden, he liked to let his thoughts flow freely and see where they ended