The Good Daughters (12 page)

Bones and Teeth

A
FTER MY MOTHER
had given birth to her fifth daughter, it became clear that for the first time in ten generations there would be no male heir to inherit Plank Farm. One of my father’s brothers was childless. Another, like him, had only girls. The last brother fathered a son—a boy they had started talking about as the possible inheritor of the farm, though Jake Plank had never seemed remotely interested in the idea.

As things worked out, it never came to that. Three days after landing in Vietnam, at the age of twenty, Jake was killed by friendly fire near an army base in Da Nang. All that remained of the next generation then were daughters, and not a one of us in possession of sufficient enthusiasm for the farming life to fight as hard as would have been necessary to overcome the gender problem.

Of the five of us, I was the only one with any interest in the farm, but for me, that had less to do with farming than with spending time with my father. I wanted to make art, not grow corn.

When my sisters and I were little, everyone was too busy to think much about the family legacy. Just getting through the days, and then the seasons,
was all my father could manage. But as he got older, you could see the problem weighing on him. And Victor Patucci, out in the equipment shed, oiling the tractor, or going over the orders for fertilizer and seed, like a fox prowling the henhouse, licking his chops.

This became particularly evident as our financial problems grew more severe. Although my father had always maintained the Yankee tradition of paying cash and avoiding debt, by the time I left home he and my mother were taking out a loan every winter just to make it through another season. By 1973, the year I turned twenty-three, we had a mortgage on our property of more than fifty thousand dollars.

I was living in Boston at the time, working for a graphic design firm (and still, amazingly, collecting the occasional check from
Sexual X-tasy
), but I came home one fall weekend to help sell pumpkins a few days before Halloween.

Once again we’d been experiencing a drought, and though it was past the season for worrying about crops, my father was still keeping his eye on the rain gauge and not liking what he saw. In among the dots of orange where the pumpkins lay, our fields had seldom looked so dry.

It was around sunset, and you could tell the weather was changing. Black clouds had gathered over the horizon. The cows, back in the barn, were making restless sounds. Right after his old friend Don Kent, the weatherman for WBZ, my father looked to the cattle next to tell him what was going on meteorologically.

My mother was just clearing away the dinner dishes. Winnie was over, to work with our mother on a crib quilt for the daughter of a woman from church who’d just had a baby. Our father had settled in with the paper, expressing displeasure with the news. He’d voted for Richard Nixon, but after Watergate he observed that he’d never trusted the man.

At first I thought someone had fired a gun in the yard. Then came the sound, like an explosion. When the second crash came, we knew it was thunder. I stepped out on the porch just in time to see a lightning bolt strike the barn. A minute later, there was a burning smell, and smoke curled from the roof.

“Edwin, get the hose,” my mother screamed. She was dialing the emergency dispatcher.

I’d never seen a building burn before. This one was engulfed in flames within minutes, the lines of the roof no longer visible beneath the tongues of fire. My father had pulled his boots on—no time to lace them—racing to the barn. After thirty years of fighting fires on other people’s property, nobody had to tell him what a barnful of hay looked like when a spark got to it.

The hoses were coiled next to the baler. Even if we could have connected them up in time, there was no way of getting to them; the heat was too intense. And beside the hoses sat our precious Massey Ferguson, its tank filled with gasoline, and a second gas can beside it.

By the time we got to the barn, the flames had reached the stalls, and they were lapping up the walls toward the roof. All my life I’d lived around cows, but I’d never heard them moan as they did now, with the flames devouring them. The air was filled with the cries of burning cows and the sound of our own voices, screaming and shouting, and the smell of burning flesh. In the blazing darkness I saw the swing in the loft outlined in flames, spinning like a lasso from a rafter as it crashed to the ground, and with it, our weather vane.

My sisters’ husbands came running—first Andy, then Chip and Steve and Gary. We were hauling anything we could find in the kitchen that would hold water—our canning kettle and mop buckets, the coffee percolator, but it was an effort as pointless as spitting on the flames. They had reached the sky now, where a full harvest moon hung like a medal. Even the leaves of the maple next to the barn were burning. The line of scarecrows my father had built to attract pumpkin customers blazed like a parade of Vietnamese villagers fleeing a fire-bomb attack. In the bizarre way fires traveled, the sign I’d painted that afternoon—
BEST PUMPKINS AROUND! PICK YOUR OWN!
—remained untouched, but beside it, a row of diapers belonging to my sister Winnie’s baby flapped, burning, in the deadly breeze. Beside our old Dodge truck, my father stood like a man witnessing the end of the world. Which in a way he was.

Finally the fire trucks were there, and the hoses shooting a wide, powerful
spray, but by the time they arrived it was too late to save our barn, or anything that had once resided there. Cows, tools, equipment, cats. Gone.

The whole thing was over by midnight, though the embers continued to smolder for two days after that. My mother, the one who did best at functioning in the face of crisis, suggested that we harvest the pumpkins ourselves and take them down the road to a neighbor’s place to sell. Nobody would want to come to Plank Farm now for a fun outing with children. Only to deliver casseroles and sympathy.

We had insurance, though not close to enough as it turned out. One of the cows had actually escaped the blaze—an old milker named Marilyn, whose stall was closest to the one open door. Ignoring the firefighters’ words, my father had run in the barn to free her moments before the main beam crashed down. Of the rest, all that remained were a few bones and teeth. My mother dealt with those. My father, though he didn’t weep, could not have handled the sight.

In the spring we rebuilt, in a fashion. To economize, and to get the new building up as fast as possible, my father chose a prefab metal barn structure Victor had located, with a laminate roof to replace the old wood barn that had stood on the property since my great-great-great-grandfather Gerald Plank first raised the beams with the help of his neighbors in 1857. It had been a day his wife had recorded in a letter to her mother.

“Once the last beam was in place,” she wrote, “the men descended the ladders for a meal of cornbread and beef stew I and the other wives prepared. All but my own fine husband, who, as tradition would have it, secured a young sapling to the highest peak. It will remain there a few seasons, I reckon, but the barn itself I expect to be standing long after Gerald and I are safely returned to the soil.”

We bought another tractor of course—a used Ford 8N, purchased at auction. “This one won’t have to last us so long anyway,” my father observed quietly to my mother when he brought it home—a sorry comedown from our shiny red Massey Ferguson. “It’s not like there’s another generation of Planks standing at the ready to take over this place.”

He replaced our tools, and bought a mower, but the fire marked the end of the days of fresh milk and cream on the table from the cows my father spoke of as “our girls.” My father didn’t have the heart for that part again, he said.

A week after the fire, my father received the first call from a developer—a conglomerate out of Nashua that had got wind of the disaster and evidently judged this as good a moment as any to make an offer on our place. The Meadow Wood Corporation was looking for land to construct communities of tasteful yet affordable homes in rural areas close enough to hospitals and shopping to provide an attractive climate for housing the coming generation, the man said—a two-tiered project that would begin with homes for growing families and eventually include assisted living and a twenty-four-hour care facility. They’d be more than happy to send a representative to come and talk with our family about a possible sale, terms highly attractive, he assured us.

“Some nerve that guy had,” my father said, after he set down the phone. “Barging into a family’s private business at a difficult time, flashing his wallet.”

Come January, he was making his order from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds, same as always. But we all knew if something didn’t change, there were only so many seasons left before they had us.

A Universe of Three

A
FTER MY GRADUATION
from art school—a ceremony attended by both my parents, for once—I stayed on in Boston. I was working for a design firm but making my own paintings, too, on nights and weekends. Certain things I missed a lot about our farm—the smell of the barn, the taste of fresh peas eaten raw, right off the vine, the night sky as it can only look when no other light exists in any direction to diminish the brightness of the stars themselves.

Mostly, though, it was a relief to discover, after so many years, that the old sorrows I had known all my life—the chill wind of my mother’s disappointment, my sisters’ attachment to one another and distance from me—no longer stung as they once had. My father represented the one person in my family to whom I felt a deep connection—but even his tenderness and care seemed, sometimes, like a too-obvious attempt to make up to me what the others failed to provide.

“You have a special someone there in the big city?” he asked me once, when I was home for a weekend visit that May, helping to get the tomatoes planted. For my father—a man who generally confined his conversations with me to new varieties of corn, or the differences between the milk fat content of Guernseys
versus Holsteins, or the progress of his attempts to create a new variety of super-sweet early strawberry—this was an unusually intimate question.

“I go on dates now and then,” I said, not so much opening the door to further discussion as closing it.

The truth was, the rare occasions in which I went out with men during those years were almost invariably uncomfortable experiences. Nearly every time a man suggested we go someplace together—to a movie usually, or dinner, or a beer in Harvard Square—I’d find myself counting the minutes until I could be back in my apartment again.

There was nothing so terrible about these men. There was just never anything that excited me, and in the absence of that I couldn’t see the point of the whole thing. When they kissed me, I registered the feel of their lips on mine, their hands moving down my back or possibly over my breast, but with the detachment of a person drawing the scene more than living it. Nothing stirred in me.

I was a twenty-four-year-old virgin. The one person with whom I discussed this, oddly enough, was Josh Cohen. We didn’t see each other regularly, but over the years since he had hired me to make the drawings for
Sexual X-tasy
we had developed a friendship.

Josh was wildly experimental. He told me about orgies he attended and weekends spent at hidden-away places in Vermont or Maine or upstate New York, where people walked around naked, moving freely from one partner to another—this being the days before anyone had to worry about the health implications of that kind of behavior.

As for me, the secrets of my own nature and yearnings were contained within the pages of my notebook. Even there, I had no interest in the kinds of activities Josh engaged in on weekends he drove his convertible to one of these spots, “to play,” as he called it. Josh liked hot tubs filled with beautiful women and fit young Boston businessmen on the move, energetically climbing over one another like a pile of kittens in the hayloft. From what I gathered, avoiding all emotional attachment was the main objective. It held no appeal for me.

“Nobody who saw your drawings would believe you live like a nun,” he said, one night when we were having dinner at a Cuban restaurant around the corner from my apartment. “You think up all these wild things people could do with each other. Then you never do them yourself.”

“I never meet anyone who makes me feel like I’d want to,” I said.

This was not completely true. There had remained, after all these years, a picture in my head—not even a picture so much as a feeling—of one man with whom I could imagine myself making love as easily as breathing. This was Ray Dickerson.

So I lived partnerless in Cambridge. My sexual experiences took place when I painted and drew. I didn’t always create erotic scenes in my artwork, but when I did, it was as if I were not simply depicting but living them. I stayed up all night sometimes, painting, and when I finally lay down to sleep my body would be damp with sweat. Nobody saw these paintings but me. They were too raw for other eyes.

It was the fall, 1974. The first frost had come, and the leaves were turning. I remember this because I’d had one of my rare dates that evening, with a nice man who had taken me to see a movie.

This man, Jim, was an exceedingly decent man who seemed to like me a lot, for reasons that never failed to mystify me, considering how little enthusiasm I displayed toward him. I felt no desire for him and could never pretend.

Jim had walked me back to my apartment. I remember the dry leaves on the sidewalk, and thinking with a certain wistfulness of the maple tree in front of our house back home—where my father used to make us a giant leaf pile for my sisters and me to jump in. As we walked home, Jim was telling me something about the insurance industry—his chosen field—and how few people understood it properly. I tried to listen but felt my mind drifting.

We reached the door to my building. “I’d like to see you again,” he said, moving toward me in a way I knew meant he was planning to kiss me.

“Could I come upstairs with you?” he said. “Maybe we could listen to music.”

“I’m working tomorrow,” I said. “I have to get up early.”

I did kiss him, or at least, our mouths touched, though I felt nothing when they did.

It is one of the mysterious things I have spent years considering—how it can be that one person may have a way of touching you that can make your skin practically burn, and another (a much better man, perhaps, or at least a very good one who loves you as well and truly as any person ever has) may simply not possess a talent for that touch. And if he doesn’t, none of the other things matter in the end. If a person doesn’t move your heart, there’s not a thing your head can do about that.

I could draw all these couples making love in a wide variety of positions, and Josh could end up selling enough copies to get him well on the way to where he eventually landed—a very rich man with his own publishing company, at the wheel of a 1987 Porsche heading to Esalen (he had moved to L.A. by this point) with a couple of former Playboy bunnies in the jump seat. Somewhere out there were a hundred thousand people who had evidently studied those pictures, or at least bought the book.

But in the end, the book does not exist that can tell a person how to make love, and, saddest of all maybe, no amount of love in a person’s heart will necessarily instill in him the ability to make another person feel desire if it’s not there. Either he touches you in a certain way, or he doesn’t. This is not something you can teach anyone. I knew this that night on the doorstep with Jim when I told him good night, firmly expecting I’d never see him again.

Hours later, I heard the phone ringing. But I was in the middle of a dream. I let it go. Only the ringing resumed. Stopped for a moment. Then started again.

When a telephone rings in the middle of the night—and rings and rings and rings—you can only suppose something terrible has happened to someone in your life. So I threw off the covers finally and picked up the receiver.

“Ruth.” That’s all I had to hear to know whose voice it was. Ray. I had not laid eyes on him since the day he climbed into that van leaving Woodstock and rode away without even looking back out the window.

“Where are you calling from?” I said. I had seen Dana once or twice over those years, when she’d stopped by our farm. I had taken pains not to reveal the intensity of my interest in her brother but I had asked, as casually as possible, what he was doing, so I’d heard about Canada. The draft. Also the silence. Now here he was.

“I’m living on an island in British Columbia,” he said. “I work as a carpenter. There’s a few of us up here, who left when the army came after us. I keep to myself mostly though.”

I can still remember how I felt, standing in my little apartment that night holding the phone. A current running through my body, a dam unstopped, water tumbling over rocks.

“I always hoped you’d call,” I said.

“I was thinking you might come out here,” he said. “It would be good to see you.”

I knew enough by then to be cautious, but I felt only longing and desire. This was the only man who’d been able to reach me, touch me deep below the surface of my skin. He’d been able to walk away from me so easily. But he’d also come back.

That day I quit my job and my apartment, threw away most of the paintings I’d been working on except for a few I put into storage. I told my parents very little. I was going to see a friend in Canada, was all. Four days later I was on a plane heading west.

He was waiting for me at the airport in Vancouver. We didn’t even say that much on the long drive north—an hour to the ferry at Nanaimo, an hour on the ferry, another three up north to Campbell River, and another ferry ride over to the island where he lived, Quadra.

He had his hand on my leg the whole time. I could feel his palm against the flesh of my inner thigh, warm beneath my skirt.

I did not ask him to fill me in on the particulars of what he’d been doing, how things worked for him in this place—certainly not his plans for the future or how I might fit into them. Sometimes he looked at me without saying any
thing. Mostly, driving along the highway, he’d stare straight ahead at the road toward the outline of the mountains against the horizon. Though I had never been to this place I had no doubt where we were headed.

That last ferry crossing was short. Ten minutes after we’d driven onto it, the boat pulled into the landing, and Ray started the engine on his truck. Slowly we rolled off onto the dock and past the town, which wasn’t more than a few buildings—a post office, a grocery store.

It was another twenty-minute drive on a dirt road where we hardly passed a single car, to the point where he told me, “We’re home.”

No other houses within sight. No power lines or, as I later learned, running water.

That night, by the light of an oil lamp, he undressed me. What happened then bore no resemblance to any of the drawings I’d made for the book. For the first time, the eye that always seemed to be looking down at my life, observing it—drawing it, even—had closed, and I was simply Ruth, a woman inside her own body, exploring his.

I have no idea how long we stayed on that bed. Until morning, and long past. Now and then we’d fall asleep for a while. When we woke up, one of us would reach for the other, and it would begin again. I kept no track of time, or anything else.

IT WAS LATE FALL WHEN
I arrived on the island with Ray. A few weeks later the first snow fell. A layer of ice formed on the spring where we got our water and Ray broke through it with an axe. Even with the fire going all day, the two-room house—uninsulated, with single-pane glass in the windows—was so cold there would be mornings I’d wake up and see my breath in the air, or frost on the blankets.

I cared about none of this. Or that we hauled our water from a spring a few hundred feet from the house. Or that money was so low we lived on rice and beans and peanut butter. In summertime, Ray had worked on construc
tion, but there were no jobs for an unskilled carpenter on the island, once winter came.

I posted a notice at the general store, advertising art lessons. No takers. It seemed we weren’t the only ones on the island with limited disposable income.

But we were rich in other ways. Outside the window we saw eagles sometimes, and always deer. We took long walks. He washed my hair and brushed it dry. Ray hauled water from the spring, heated it on the woodstove, filled an old iron tub, lit the candles, and bathed me.

Sometimes Ray would start a building project at our place—a wood-fired sauna with a stove made from an old oil drum, an art studio for me. He’d make a sketch, and sometimes we’d get materials together, or spend a few days hanging Sheetrock or planing lumber. But I learned early on that Ray’s projects usually didn’t get finished. We’d run into a problem and he’d get frustrated.

“I don’t really need a studio anyway,” I told him. “I like lying here drawing you.” This was true. Something about the sight of him splayed out naked in bed reminded me of Christ on the cross. Those long outstretched arms, sinewy legs, and a certain expression that combined both pain and rapture. It was hard to say which one more than the other.

We spent a lot of hours on that bed. Ray had a low, drowsy voice, and he loved to read out loud to me. We went through all the
Lord of the Rings
books, and
The Chronicles of Narnia,
and
Dune
. He read me poetry—Yeats and Browning, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Blake. Sometimes, reciting certain lines, he would be so moved by the words he’d start to cry.

Even then, he was a fragile man. But at the time, this only made him more wonderful to me. Where my own father seemed so stoic it was often hard to know what he was feeling, every emotion that passed over Ray showed on his face. If he was happy, he might break into wild, crazy dervish dancing. When he was sad—and this was surprisingly often—he wept openly. Many years later I learned a name for this behavior, but at the time I called it honest and real.

We had this fight one time. I’d remarked to Ray about how he’d failed to get back to a man down the road who’d asked him to come and help put up his roof.
Not great money, but something at least. Only Ray had waited so long to stop by that the guy found someone else.

“I let you down,” he wept. “I’m an idiot.”

“You never let me down in the important way,” I said. “How much you love me.” In this area, it was true, I never doubted him. As I spoke my hands moved through his long tousled yellow hair, the color of mine—but where my own hung straight, his was a mass of curls I liked to bury my face in.

“I love your hair,” I said. Then no more talk, only kissing.

We smoked a lot of marijuana. He wouldn’t have had the money to buy any, but he’d planted a big crop the summer before, and unlike the rest of the plants he’d started, he had a successful harvest from those. Except for a handful of times—including Woodstock—I had never smoked before, and even now I didn’t like the feeling of starting every day with a joint the way Ray did. But I liked how it felt getting stoned before we made love. And we made love all the time.