This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [93]
Papa ushered the group across the farm to continue the party at the campground. In attendance was Marshall Dodge, the Yale linguist known for his “Bert and I” monologues, a comedy act that utilized the Maine accent to great effect. He launched into one of his jokes as Anner played the guitar and the party drew Heidi and me into its embrace.
“Watch out for them socialists,” Marshall said, in reference to the Nearings, telling a story about a fellow named Scott, who liked to preach socialism over the fence to his neighbor, Enoch:
“ ‘So you mean to say,’ Enoch asked the socialism advocate, ‘that if you had two farms, you’d give me one of them?’ ” Marshall began in the classic Maine dialect that made his jokes so funny.
“ ‘Yes,’ said Scott. ‘If I had two farms, I’d give you one a them.’
“ ‘So if you had two hay rakes, say, would you give me one of them?’
“ ‘Yes, if I had two hay rakes, I’d give you one of them.’
“ ‘If you had two hogs, even,’ Enoch asked slyly. ‘Would you give me one of them?’
“ ‘Darn you, Enoch,’ said Scott. ‘You know I got two hogs.’ ”
Everyone laughed hard and shouted for more. My favorite “Bert and I” joke came next, the one about the farmer who saw a moose on his farm and got out his rifle to shoot the moose in the leg, “just so as to wound him, you know,” explained Marshall.
“Then he put up a big sign on his barn that said, ‘See the moose, ten cents, fifteen cents for families.’ Well, a family comes along and the man gives the farmer his fifteen cents. The farmer takes one look at the man, and one look at his family, and gives the man back the fifteen cents.
“ ‘Keep your money, mister, I don’t want it. It’s worth a hell of a lot more for my moose to see your family, than it is for your family to see my moose.’ ” After I stopped giggling, I delivered a butchered retelling of the story to anyone who’d listen.
By the time Papa got everyone settled and returned to the farmhouse, Clara had been born. Mama was nursing in bed on the oven-sterilized sheets, a yellow orb of moon hanging in the darkening sky out the window.
“I got on all fours and slid her out, the way the goats do,” Mama casually told an astonished Papa. “Then I reached back with one hand to catch the head.” She hadn’t felt any fear, she said. Something in her knew just what to do. The new baby had a blond fuzz of hair and a high forehead like Heidi.
“Another Coleman,” Papa noted with admiration, once he regained his composure. And another girl, he mused, thinking of his theory of child gender—well, he was certainly more stressed at that moment.
When word of the birth reached Marshall Dodge back at the campground, Marshall quoted a line from another of his jokes. “I could take a sharp knife and a piece of knotty pine, and whittle me a better-looking baby than those two made.” The laughter and party continued unhindered late into the night.
Mama and Papa settled on the name Clara, also from the book Heidi, for Heidi’s beautiful invalid friend who was healed by goat’s milk and the fresh mountain air when visiting her in the Swiss Alps. And indeed, soon after Clara was born, the sun finally returned for good, its warmth drawing everything out of itself. Fiddleheads uncoiled into ferns. Seeds poked twin-tipped leaves from the earth. Mama’s bleeding heart flowers dripped in pink formation over lacy fronds. Fields yellowed with dandelions.
In the evening twilight, Mama nursed her third child on the front patio as the earth released its damp smells of new life. Fireflies blinked come-hither signals across the clearing as a male woodcock performed his mating ritual, rising in a spiraling flight with a buzzing sound that increased in velocity as he rose, then exploding in a loud twittering that echoed across the clearing as he dived back to earth. It was the sound, Mama thought, of the ecstatic orgy of spring that she was both a part of and apart from, as a new mother. She felt such love for the small being in her arms that it momentarily replaced the missing passion in her marriage. Soon the days