The Sudden Weight of Snow (21 page)

I saw something register in Vera’s face. She blinked quickly, like coming up out of water. “This is not going to help, attacking me, turning everything around.” Vera sat without moving, her lips pursed, before continuing. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Sylvia, but I don’t like it.”

“Maybe you’d better ask yourself what’s happened to you. Your life is nothing but that church and they don’t even think you’re fit to sit on council. I suppose you think that’s my fault. Nick and I are going to leave eventually and then what will you have? No kids around, shitty job, no husband and no hope of one, and a church full of hypocrites. Oh yeah, and poor. That sounds great. That sounds like exactly what I’d like to aspire to.” I told myself that I didn’t mean to make Vera cry. No one likes to see her mother cry – mothers are supposed to be resilient, immune to anything as weak as tears. I simply wanted to expose things, bring them to the surface. For years, this had meant happening upon words and situations that could disarm her. Once I did, though, I couldn’t take what was bared, so I sought easy exits.

I got up from the table and walked toward the door, pulled my jacket off the hook. Vera was behind me and as I reached for
the door her arm shot around, pulled the handle closed. Her other hand dug into my arm and turned me around. “Sylvia,” she said, speaking through her teeth, eyes wet.

“Let me go.” I twisted my arm out of Vera’s grip and my shoulder slammed back against the door. “We obviously can’t talk about this, so let me go.”

“We
are
going to try talk about this.” She now had me by both arms against the door, her spit a spray on my face. I struggled out of her hold but she turned and blocked me. As I tried to open the door, she grabbed my coat and I instinctively thrust my forearm toward her. Vera shoved it away, then we each got a hold of the other’s clothes and fought with little more than fabric, our meek blows blunted by uncertainty. At some point, she faltered and I ducked, pulled at the door, and ran into a slap of cold air. I slipped as I rounded the path around the house. Tears gathered in the back of my mouth. I swallowed, turned, and kept running.

I fell two more times on the hard-packed road before I got to the corner store and called Gabe. When he picked me up, I shivered while he drove wordlessly, pulled me over to him on the bench seat and rubbed my thigh with his one free hand. I glanced up repeatedly at the rear-view mirror, not knowing why I expected to see Vera’s car appear there. “I don’t want you to have to keep doing this,” I said. “Coming to get me. I don’t want you to feel like you have to bail me out.” Gabe kept rubbing my thigh, his eyes on the road. When I started to cry, he pulled my head down onto his shoulder. As he drove, I could feel his muscles shifting, and, in me, something altering, steeling me against tears.

I didn’t ask Gabe to take me to the farm. He didn’t ask if I wanted to go. He simply drove there, brought me into the converted shed and then said, “You can stay here as long as you need to.” He ran his hand through his dark hair, twisted it into accidental curls and watched me like he had no idea of what to do with me, or what I might do.

The next day, we returned when Vera was at work and Gabe waited for me in the truck. It didn’t take me long to pack. When I had, I left the way I had come in, locking the door behind me.

My arrival at Pilgrims was virtually unnoticed by most of the people there. I figured the people who lived at the farm expected mutable family situations, transitory living conditions, people moving in together within a month of meeting.

As the son of one of the first families on the farm, Gabe had been given, though not a cabin, a relatively good shed to live in. It was close enough to the outhouses that it was convenient, far enough away that the smell didn’t reach him. It had electricity wired to it from the cookshack, a narrow wood stove, good for heat and boiling water, and a space heater. There were no storm windows, but it was relatively airtight, which was more than could be said about some of the sheds on the property. It was split down the middle, vertically. One half was a narrow, insulated room – a makeshift home – the other was essentially a workshop with a concrete floor, tools, implements.

He told me that around the farm, there were various living
accommodations, some more lacking than others. As I would soon find out, the old Pilgrims establishment lived in charming log cabins with lofts and wood stoves and window panes in formations – Stars of David, pyramids. There was a tree house that rotated tenants. The hayloft in the big barn had been converted into an apartment and that was where Thomas lived. The rest, Gabe explained – the grown-up children, the hangers-on, the volunteers who appeared in the summer to receive a back-to-the-land experience like a benediction – lived where they could. In tents and vans during the summer. In sheds and outbuildings the rest of the year.

For the first two days, I did little more than sit on the bed, look at the walls, and nap often. I was exhilarated by thoughts of a new kind of freedom, but I felt stripped of both energy and emotion. I couldn’t comprehend what I had done in any way that made sense. I had called home and left a message with Nick to tell Vera that I was fine but I wouldn’t be coming home soon. That I was now at the farm, eating and sleeping there as though this were normal seemed both inevitable and at odds with everything that had come before. Gabe brought me food, the remnants of dishes other people had made, mostly vegetarian and stinking of garlic, hot with ginger. I didn’t eat a lot of this, preferred the bread and peanut butter in the mini-fridge, soups I could add water to and heat up in the microwave. At night, Gabe and I pressed up against each other. I kept on a T-shirt and long johns, moved away from him when I got too hot.

On the third day, as if to rouse me from my lethargy, Gabe said, “I need you to help me with something.”

“What kind of something?” I looked up from the bed.

“We’ll be outside.”

“Oh, I get it, it’s a mystery,” I said as I started to get my coat, my sign that I was willing to go along.

Gabe wanted to keep what we were doing a surprise so I followed instructions. He gathered an armload of old hockey sticks from the back of the truck. “I just picked these up yesterday. This guy at the arena’s been collecting them for me.”

Old hockey sticks did not excite me. “I know, we’re starting a league – the hippies against the religious freaks.” He just looked at me and rolled his eyes.

In the shed, we made holes into the blades of the sticks, Gabe holding the shafts against the workbench, me drilling. It was the first time I had ever used a drill. I loved the way the point entered the wood, how it could render something that had once been solid into shavings. When we had eight drilled, Gabe said, “Okay, I think that should do it,” and weighed large hammers against his palms contemplatively, put a bag of large nails in his pocket. He found a place on the porch of the cookshack where a plastic-coated wire emerged out of a small hole. Gabe nailed one of the hockey sticks to a post on the porch, blade up and turned out, slid the wire through the hole. “We’re going to string this wire back to the shed. You good at climbing trees?”

“Show me what to climb and I’ll climb it.”

“No, actually, you stay on the ground, I’ll climb. You can hand me the sticks. I’ll have to nail them to the trees so it could be hard.”

“Whatever you say.”

It took longer than I expected, Gabe finding foot- and
handholds that would lead him up trees, me handing hockey sticks to him from the ground. “We have to get this high enough so that it won’t be in the way.” I looped the wire through the drilled holes first, then handed Gabe the sticks. He reached as high as he could, nailed the shafts to trees. The last stick was nailed to the shed. “Okay, we just have to bring it in now,” Gabe said. We went back inside and Gabe knocked on walls, stood back and peered, knocked again. Eventually, he drilled a hole in the frame of one of the windows in the workshop and pulled the wire through. “Ta da!” he said when he was finished, his cheeks bright with cold and exertion and what I could only describe as glee.

“Ta da!” I repeated. “What is it?”

“A phone line! It’s been ready to go for a few years now but no one’s ever bothered to wire it over. Now you can talk from here, you won’t have to go to the cookshack to call Krista, or whoever. I mean, it’s not quite ready – we’ll have to get a guy to come out and put a jack in – but almost!”

Gabe seemed oddly excited about the prospect of having a phone in the shed, and so happy then. Perhaps it was his way of welcoming me. His gesture meant something else. He expected me to stay long enough to use it.

Susan thought so as well. She came into the shed on the fourth morning without knocking and sat down on the edge of the bed. Gabe wasn’t around.

“So, you planning to stay for a while?” she asked.

“Um, I’m not sure, things aren’t great for me at home and –”

She cut me off. “Yeah, well, they never are, are they?” When I didn’t answer, Susan continued. “We don’t expect much here at the farm. Everyone does what they can – that’s about all you can expect from anyone, really – and Gabe has a bit of money, as I’m sure you know. Just pitch in where you can.” I nodded, not quite following along. How I was to pitch in was unclear, as was the part about Gabe having some money.

Susan continued, “Okay, well.” Paused. “Gabe tells us that you go to that church out on Pleasant Valley Road.” I nodded. “Now, I don’t know much about your church but I know they have some pretty strong beliefs and we don’t want anyone butting in here, Harper. We don’t want this to become an issue.”

“Oh, no, I, you don’t –” I started, but Susan cut me off.

“It’s okay. I’m sure everything will be fine, I just wanted to make that clear. I’m sure everything will be fine. Just let us know if you need anything.” With that, Susan got up, left the shed.

When I couldn’t sleep that night, I got dressed, went to the cookshack and used the phone. I called home twice before Nick answered. When he did, I asked him to wake Vera.

“Come on, Harp. You know how hard that is.”

“I know, but you can do it. You
have
to do it. For me.”

A few minutes later, Vera was on the phone, her voice coming through a haze of sleep. “Sylvia?”

“It’s me, Mom. I just wanted to call – I wanted to let you know I’m at the farm. Pilgrims Art Farm.”

“I know. Your brother told me.” She sounded more awake now but her voice was still quiet. “What is it, Sylvia? What is it you think you’re doing?”

“I’m going to stay here for a while.” I stopped before continuing, “I need you to understand that this is what I have to do right now. I just wanted to let you know.” I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. “Mom?”

“Yes. I heard you. In case you wondered, the school called to ask me why you haven’t been going to classes. How do you think I felt when I couldn’t give them an answer?”

“I’m going back to school. I’m going back. Don’t worry.”

“Sylvia, listen to me, I am going to worry,” she said. “You can’t just leave the way you did, not come home, and expect me to be fine with it.”