April Love Story (6 page)

“More misguided souls,” said my mother.

“Smart as whips,” muttered Lucas.

The house was an old frame building with front porch, side porch, and back porch. From the front you could look out over our little valley, gaze up the rounded hill in front of us, and see beyond it, smoky and blue, the distant mountains of the Ridge. From the back, a huge garden space sprawled in weedy abandon. The side was enclosed by a thick, dense screen of white, blooming shrubs.

I didn’t want to look at mountains or shrubs or weeds. I wanted to use my binoculars out the east window of my eleventh floor and watch the construction of the high-rise parking lot going up where an old hotel had been.

We went into the house. I began to see more clearly why the previous owners had left for better surroundings. There was nothing indoors that was not going to require scouring, sanding, painting, or staining.

“Mother,” I said, after a complete tour, during which I opened every single door and cupboard.

“Yes, dear?”

“Where is the bathroom?”

There was a pause. She seemed to deliberate how to answer that.

“Uh oh,” said Lucas.

“I guess I forgot to mention it, Marnie,” said my mother, “but this house doesn’t have indoor plumbing.”

“I think this is Tibet,” said Lucas.

“Do you mean to tell me this house doesn’t have a bathroom?” I shrieked. After two solid days of driving, when all I wanted was a tiled bath and a long soaking tub or a good hot shower and some nice humid privacy where I could cry in peace—and there was no bathroom?

Lucas and I located the outhouse without difficulty. It looked just the way they do in cartoons. “Another field trip,” said Lucas.

“The first of many, I’m afraid,” I said. “Lucas, I can’t believe this.”

There was no question of whether to laugh or cry. Crying won very easily.

Sitting on the side porch was a pile of split wood. Uncle Bob lit a fire in the huge black wood stove in the kitchen and hauled buckets of water from the well pump to heat up in an enormous bucket on the stove. “In summer,” said my father, “we’ll rig up an outdoor shower. Gravity will be enough to make the shower work from the spring up on the hill, and the sun’s heat will warm it up right through a rubber hose.”

“For now?” I said.

“For now, we sponge off.”

So we had a women’s bathtime and a men’s bathtime. There wasn’t enough water to hide my weeping.

“This is fun, Marnie,” said my mother and Aunt Ellen together.

“This is insane,” I said.

Our parents were on a high that never touched Lucas or me. In the other world my only chore had been making my bed, if I felt like it. Now the chores never ended. I lay like glue on the mattress, while the adults leaped up at dawn—yes, dawn—full of verve and energy and even joy.

The vegetable garden was a staggering chore. Although we tilled it with the tractor (Uncle Bob turned out to know all about driving tractors and even all about fixing tractors, which was particularly good, since our twelfth-hand wreck broke down regularly), we had to hand-rake the entire two-acre garden until it satisfied the grownups as to tilth and texture. Then we planted about fifty things at intervals so we’d have harvest all summer and fall instead of everything coming ripe at one time. Seeds are very small. You have to plant them one at a time. Stooping.

And in my case, you have to do this with Lucas. Once we had an actual conversation in which we talked about sabotaging the garden. But we decided that wouldn’t get us back to the city. We’d just have to live here and starve, instead of live here and eat.

The asparagus trench was probably the worst chore of the summer. This had to be dug, with shovels, eighteen inches deep. Eighteen inches doesn’t sound like much until you have to lift it up on the end of your shovel. Furthermore you’re supposed to backfill half of that with rotted manure. We obtained the manure from our nearest neighbor, Mr. Shields, who was a very nice man who nevertheless had a small mountain of horse manure he’d been shoveling out of his stable for years. We forked this up on a flat trailer we pulled behind the tractor, and it took one load of manure for the asparagus trench and eleven loads for the rest of the garden. If anybody had told me I’d be shoveling manure instead of dating Joel or experimenting with eye shadow …!

“And I don’t even like asparagus,” said Lucas. “It’s slimy and green. It looks like congealed scum from a pond.”

“Look at that,” I said.

We stood there like convicts on a road gang. Through the meadow on the hillside, our parents ran up to the orchards, laughing, kissing, and actually singing from pure pleasure. “Morning has broken,” they sang, “like the first morning. Blackbird is singing, like the first dawn.”

According to my father’s manuals, wood for heating homes had to be cut at least six months before burning, so it would season, or dry out. We took to our woodlots, cutting down only the dead trees, using the chain saw to remove their branches and cut everything into usable lengths. The chain saw was a wonderful thing, fast and efficient, and it made a noise like a convention of dentists’ drills. I hated that sound so much I would turn my back to the others and scream at the top of my lungs when it was going. Nobody noticed and it made me feel a little better.

Then came splitting the wood. Lucas, Dad, and Uncle Bob tried this with the axe and after that, as Lucas said rather grimly, they all had a lot more respect for Abe Lincoln. Then they tried using wedges and a sledge hammer. After one weekend of that, we had about ten logs split and a lot of blisters to treat.

“Got a hydraulic log splitter you could rent,” said Mr. Shields, grinning. He often dropped by in late afternoon, for laughs, probably. My parents never seemed to mind how inept or confused or clumsy they were. They’d earnestly ask what to try next, and even take notes on what he said.

I hated not knowing how to do things.

I felt like such a baby, being assigned something, and then not having the remotest idea how to go about doing it.

Lucas learned techniques with a sort of grim determination, as if this were war, and as long as you had to fight, you might as well win. I never heard him complain, though possibly that was because my own complaints drowned his out.

Lucas and I had the dubious honor of being in charge of our flock of chickens. Mr. Shields sold us a dozen eight-week-old pullets and let us dismantle an old hen coop of his and haul it over to our place to rebuild, paint, and fence in. The chickens were surprisingly cute and I actually enjoyed feeding them. It took me one minute to scatter the feed and fourteen minutes to watch the chickens eat, so I told everybody it was a fifteen-minute chore and no one questioned me.

The trouble with these cute, pecking chickens was you had to clean up their droppings every day. And add them to the compost pile—or mountain—Lucas and I were also in charge of.

One way or another, I saw as much of Lucas as I did of dirt, bugs, and outhouses.

At least the amount of work cut down on my homesickness. There was no time to bring out my grief and mull it over. Even at night, a time I always used to reserve for curling up into a little ball and running my mind over my problems, the only thing I had time for was sleep.

I did love my loft bedroom, though. Part of the attic had been ripped out when the black stovepipe for the living room’s Fisher stove was run up to the roof. The part that was left—barely eleven feet by five feet—was shored up by two posts and railed with one thick beam.

Built flush with the inner wall and the rest of the attic were built-in drawers and a closet. There was space, then, for my mattress, my hope chest, and me. In summer the loft was gaspingly hot, but in winter I found that the heat rose, making it delightfully cozy.

When I wasn’t destroying underburrs, tending chickens, figuring out how to milk a goat, shelling peas, chasing the goat when she got away, leaning on my shovel, puffing, or fixing holes in the goat’s fence, I was in the kitchen.

We ate at least four times as much as when we didn’t work outdoors. It was nothing for the six of us to go through four loaves of homemade bread in a day or polish off a pie at lunch and two bread puddings at supper. I became the bread baker. This meant mixing and kneading and then leaving the kitchen for other chores during the first rising. Then I’d scrub off the accumulated dirt from that chore, punch the dough down to rise again, and go off to rake out the chicken coop, or something equally charming. An hour later, scrub again, form the dough into loaves. More yard work. Scrub. Put loaves in oven. Stand there checking our erratic wood stove for fire, heat, wood, and so on. Take the loaves out to cool and have Lucas literally take an entire loaf with him to eat while he was driving the tractor among the apple trees, dragging the mower after him to cut the tall meadow grass. It was a sweet-smelling job, where you got to sit down, and I envied Lucas, although I didn’t envy the terrible burn he got once. The loaves weren’t even done when it was time to bake more. I knew Lucas was hungry, and I knew the reason I’d baked was for people to eat, but I couldn’t stand to see anybody eat my bread, because all it meant to me was having to bake more.

And, of course, there was laundry. We had an old washer that you handpumped to make the clothes and suds churn. We had to haul the water and heat it on the woodstove to get it hot enough to melt the soap. “Please, please, please, let’s just drive to a laundromat,” I said. But Mother and Aunt Ellen actually loved the laundry that way.

We got mail, which did not make up for the fact that we had no telephone, and the mail itself was as depressing as no telephone.

Joel wrote exactly once, four lines scrawled on a postcard to say he’d been accepted at NYU and would major in accounting. It sounded like such an urban thing to do. I could just see him in a vested suit, pinstriped and citified. And here I was in bibbed overalls.

Susannah wrote weekly at first, and then her letters came less and less often. She had begun dating a friend of Joel’s. “And I have you to thank for it,” she wrote, describing her social whirl. “If I hadn’t been sitting next to you during all that commotion about you going farming, Pete would never have noticed me.” Joel, she wrote, took a girl named Victoria to the senior prom. Somebody from parochial school. Three juniors made the cheerleading team. Susannah wasn’t one but she didn’t mind, Pete was keeping her busy. They had gone to three movies. Had I seen any of them? I must not miss the super thriller about the almost nuclear explosion. How many cute boys had I met so far? Was farming fun? Susannah bet we had lots of fresh tomatoes. No more time to write, she was off to tennis camp.

“One thing for sure,” I said to my mother. “I’d play a mean game of tennis now. Look at my muscles.”

“Another thing for sure,” she said, reading Susannah’s latest letter, “she’s right about having lots of fresh tomatoes.”

Gardens, especially your first garden, are supposed to include a few failures. At least something is supposed to have the decency not to grow.

Not our garden.

Everything grew.

And grew, and grew, and grew.

We had millions of beans to snap and billions of tomatoes to can. If we’d had electricity, we could’ve dropped everything into plastic bags and thrown them into a freezer, but we had to can everything to have food for the winter.

Canning is horrid.

First you dip the tomatoes in boiling water (on top of your fired-up woodstove) and slide off the peel. Then (it’s August and ninety degrees outdoors and probably a hundred twenty in the kitchen) you core the tomatoes, force them through the strainer, and pour the juice into Mason jars. Aunt Ellen puts these in the pressure canner also on top of your woodstove and the three of you stand there gasping for breath, fanning yourselves, trying not to burn each other on hot Mason jars.

While I panted, Mother and Aunt Ellen chattered about things like goat milk. They had figured out how to make one soft and one not-so-soft cheese, but they had not managed to make a decent goat butter.

“We need a cow,” said Uncle Bob, coming in for a glass of goat milk.

“We need a cow,” said Lucas, getting himself tomato juice, “like we need a hole in the head.”

I was very glad to see the tomato juice go anywhere other than a jar I had to boil and seal. “Holes in the head,” I told him, “are what we have most of around here.”

“Marnie, I am not amused,” said my mother.

The men went back out. Sweeping the floor I found a letter to Lucas from one of his friends back home. Temptation overcame me and I read it. The debate team, said his friend, had won the regional championship, without Lucas, obviously. So much for Lucas and me being necessary back home. He’d been as easily replaced as I’d been by this Victoria, may she rest with nightmares.

I wondered vaguely how much Lucas hurt over that. I’d never know. Lucas never told anybody anything, and least of all me. He just worked, and ate, and worked some more. He came back a few hours and a million tomatoes later for another drink. “Having fun, girls?” he said.

“Oh, yes!” cried our mothers, actually meaning it.

“Oh, yes,” I said sarcastically.

“For laughs, Marnie,” said Lucas, “come on out back and help me. The old outhouse hole is full. I just covered it and now I’m digging another hole.”

I decided canning wasn’t so bad.

“We’re out of canning jar rings, salt, sugar, and a few other things,” said Aunt Ellen. “Lucas, would you mind very much going into town and getting them?”

Lucas allowed as how he wouldn’t mind too much. “Would I mind?” he said reverently. “No, ma’am, I wouldn’t, I’m going, I’m leaving, it’s no problem whatsoever.”

“I need to go, too,” I said quickly. “Lucas wouldn’t know a jar ring if he tripped over it.” Considering that Lucas had indeed tripped over jar rings, and even bought them before, that was a statement full of loopholes, but our mothers overlooked this and said I could go along. “Wait till I change, Lucas,” I said.

“Wait till
you
change?” he replied. “I’m the one who was digging a latrine.”

So we both changed and got into the old VW bus to drive into the village. We were so excited you’d have thought we had tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet. We got groceries, picked up the jar rings, got goat feed at FCX, and sunglasses for Lucas at the tiny “department” store (if it had any departments, they weren’t visible), and then we walked around the village. There wasn’t much to it. To our city-starved eyes the whole town wasn’t much more than a single block. There wasn’t even a traffic light, let alone traffic.