The Sudden Weight of Snow (30 page)

“Oh fuck, this can’t be happening.”

“Do you like it at the farm enough to make a case to stay?”

I was about to answer, “Yes, of course,” but stopped. I saw several images at once: lines of static moving across the television in the cookshack, Gabe’s back turned away from me in sleep, Thomas’s hand on my jaw, the slope of the ceiling above my bed at home, Vera sitting at the kitchen table.

When we got back to the farm, Thomas headed for the cookshack, and I scanned the yard for Gabe’s truck. It wasn’t there.

“Come on, I’ll make you a coffee, the way you like it,” Thomas said.

I followed him in the back door, into the kitchen. “You know what, Thomas? I don’t actually like my coffee black. I like it with lots of cream and sugar just like you said I would.”

Thomas laughed. “Harper, you really are something else.” He leaned up against the counter, looked at me and crossed his arms over his chest. I registered that flick, the quick etching of my body with his eyes.

“Yeah, a liar and a thief, who knew?” I moved toward Thomas slowly. “I’m also probably desperately looking for a father figure.” I stood directly in front of him and unfolded his arms, put them at his sides. I made sure I didn’t touch Thomas but stood close enough that I could feel the fabric of our clothes shift against each other when we breathed. I lifted up on my toes and turned my head so that my cheek and mouth were against his neck, not pressing but just placed there. I could feel the heat off his skin. We stood like that, unmoving.

“Harper,” he finally said, his voice quiet and rough, hot on my hair. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” I moved my face back a bit and stared at him without expression. I could see things pass across his face – desire, something that looked like pain, perhaps that was restraint. I wanted to stand there like that for a long time, watching the emotions change his features in small ways. I could do this to Gabe but that was unintentional, a side effect. I wanted to be able to will Thomas to feel things, my body a conduit. He broke the spell, his face moving towards me. He stopped when his mouth was almost on mine. I wanted to open up to it, to crawl inside. Instead, I pulled back, turned and left the kitchen. I went into the shed and waited for the sound of truck tires in the yard.

After the first week, you move out of Susan’s spare room and into a shed on the farm. At first you think it might be the shack from your childhood memories but you ask Susan and she laughs, says, “Don’t be ridiculous. That thing was used as kindling years ago, thank God. Not good for much else.” You are relieved. That would have been too much of a mockery, returning to live in the place where your parents were last together.

The shed is livable – half of it like a bachelor pad, complete with mini-fridge and microwave, half of it a workshop. This might be even more of a mockery, Peter in prison and you basically living in a workshop. It is the first space you’ve ever had completely to yourself. One night, when you are listening to how quiet it is, you realize that you will probably never have to hear Peter and Anise having sex again. You will never hear that sound that comforted and disgusted you at once.

You will also never have to go through the torment of the girls’ nightly antics to keep themselves out of bed. This was called “carrying on,” and ranged from launching water wars in their shared bath, to running down the hall screaming, nighties trailing behind them, and falling into a laughing heap, to asking for glasses of water repeatedly. The girls’ tactics variously
worked and didn’t work; the unpredictable results, you are convinced, providing an incentive for them to try again. There was always a chance their ploys might be successful. Sometimes they were up for hours, delirious with exhaustion, slurring their words and laughing at inappropriate moments like miniature drunk people. Sometimes Anise or Peter would set aside their belief that they should never raise their voices long enough to yell, “Not another word! Get. To. Bed! Now! I mean it!” and you would feel strangely vindicated.

You wonder if it is homesickness that you feel, but it is something more akin to relief and loss at once. You wouldn’t want to go back there, though there is no “there” to go back to. Anise has sold the split-level, moved into a low-income housing co-op with the girls. There isn’t even space there for you to come back and visit. The offer is extended, nonetheless.

After a couple nights of insomnia at the farm, you seek solace in the cookshack, hoping there will be other people doing the same. The farm isn’t like it was those summers that you visited, though. Most of the people here are families or older, like Susan. There are no wisecracking young philosophers smoking around the long table in the cookshack. Unfortunately, there are also no young women doing yoga by the wood stove in transparent clothing. There is a television. Two channels and, thankfully, one of them gets Letterman. You watch Dave toss cards and clean his teeth, the idiot band leader stumble through words and grin maniacally, and stars teeter in tans and heels, throwing their torsos forward when they laugh, holding their tiny garments against their chests and flashing the camera thousand-watt smiles. You become
foolishly and unrealistically nostalgic for the States or, as you’ve come to think of it,
America
.

Things pick up. In December, everyone at the farm assures themselves that it’s the winter solstice, absolutely not Christmas, that they are excited about. After all, Christmas is simply the co-opting of a pagan winter celebration by the Christians. At Pilgrims, they are determined to celebrate the original holiday, as though it were more worthy, more real. The cookshack is transformed into a craft barn. For several evenings there are people baking without using refined sugar, playing music by the wood stove, and weaving baskets, mixing oils, firing pots, knitting scarves. Each activity is stretched out, strung through days and weeks with breaks for herbal tea, coffee, smokes, and banter. The women your mother’s age wink at you, pinch your ass, and say, “You’ve grown up very nicely, there, Gabriel Miller,” and you can tell they feel racy for doing so. You already know this game, and these women are the most familiar thing here, the element that makes you feel most like you’re back at home.

By the time the annual Pilgrims Art Farm Solstice Fair rolls around, you are embarrassed to admit that you really are excited. You know you shouldn’t be. It will start off full of women and children and deathly boring, and will end a freak show of aging hippies, like any one of Peter and Anise’s gatherings. You avoid the craft fair and go to the potluck afterward, pleased that everyone else seems as eager as you to get the food out of the way and start drinking. Thomas asks you if you want to hook up the horses and help him take people out on sleigh rides. He is letting you know that he trusts you, that he thinks
of you as a man able to handle large animals and small crowds of people.

You meet her after the sleigh ride. Actually, you don’t notice her in the mass of people that piles onto the sleigh, although you are disappointed that your radar didn’t alert you to the presence of teenage girls sooner. It is afterward, when you have already lit up a smoke on the porch that you notice them in the yard. You hear her laughter first. It comes at you almost as an assault. When you turn to the noise, you see the two of them on the ground, all hair and sweaters and thin teenage limbs. You look at Thomas and he raises his eyebrows, says, “Well, seems we have two damsels in distress. It would be wrong not to help.”

When you help her friend up and hold her against your body, you think of how good it is to be close to another person, a girl, but it is the one you later find out is named Harper that you are looking at. Harper is the one laughing so hard she can hardly stand, Thomas trying to keep her upright. The way she laughs – like there is nothing as large and all-encompassing as her laughter – makes you want a piece of it. You think, if you can get close to her, her laughter will open you, empty you, and fill you back up with something light, something good. You will tell me this later.

S
omething shifted with the weather. It was the beginning of March, a time in the valley when pressure builds up – warm air moving in fronts, colliding with cold – so that banks of clouds meet and press up against each other and the sky seems as though it will split. When it did, it would be spring. But until then the TV weatherman droned on about the barometer, people got restless, and though November yielded the highest number of suicides each year, in March more people escaped from the south wing of the hospital – the psych ward – than at any other time.

The air got warmer but things seemed to be held in stasis. Tight, still. Then they tore open.

The people at Pilgrims decided to throw an event to cheer everyone up. We called the party Raise the Roof, believing we
could lift the ceiling of clouds and the roof of the cookshack simply with the power of celebration. What I had never realized until then was how quickly things we feel are solid can topple, however small the push. I didn’t recognize the precariousness of all that holds us.

I called Krista to invite her to come, telling her she could bring Mike if she wanted. “Are you kidding?” she answered, as if it was a ridiculous suggestion. I didn’t know if she meant it for herself or for Mike.

“No, why? Did I miss something – you two are still together, aren’t you?”

“Why wouldn’t we be? I just don’t think Pilgrims Art Farm is the right place to bring Mike. He’ll probably get drunk and threaten to ‘boot-fuck some fairy.’ God, he is too embarrassing sometimes.”

“Krista, you do realize you are going out with someone who has terms like ‘boot-fuck’ and ‘fairy’ in his vocabulary? I don’t know how you can do it.”

“Oh, listen to you. This is Sawmill, Harper. Not everyone can be with some sweet, sensitivo guy from California. The rest of us take what’s available.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to –”

“Ah, forget it, Harp.”

“You’ll come, though, right? To the party?”

“Yeah, of course. Hey, can you pick me up? Therese has taken up – get this – line dancing and I know she’ll take the car to the Wildhorse. She never gets picked up at home, always goes either by herself or picks up her ‘friends’ – those skanks
that hung out behind shop – Oh, sorry! I didn’t mean you.”

“I know. Yeah, I’ll come by with Gabe and pick you up. Eight o’clock.”

The next night, I helped make posters in the cookshack. We gathered around one of the big tables and I tried to keep up conversation, laugh at the right jokes. I wasn’t used to being around so many people on a regular basis. I hadn’t even thought of the implications of this when I first came to the farm. Gabe and I kept to ourselves in the shed or in the one corner of the cookshack that we had taken over. I decided I would make more of an effort to feel like part of the community. It would just take some getting used to.

Poster-making was like a kids’ craft class – the table spread with paper, coloured pens, things that sparkled, glue – except a few people had to smoke up first to get back to a childlike feeling, one of “expansive weightlessness,” as Brenda, the potter, called it. I thought about that for a moment. I didn’t recall feeling particularly expansive or weightless as a child, confined to various small spaces – car, classroom, bedroom – reluctantly led by others through grocery stores, church services, school days.

I offered to put up posters at the library and on the main street. I was armed with stickpins and a large roll of tape, left a trail of sparkles. When I had pinned a poster to the Community Announcements board outside the Super Valu, I turned and saw Pastor John striding toward the store, his legs kicking
out from his knees. He was approaching the black mat that would swing the doors open. When he turned and saw me, he smoothed a smile over his face, the same kind of expression that he had in the pulpit, too uniform to convey any real emotion. He nodded and said, “Well, hello. Sylvia.”

“Hi,” I said, and smiled back, hugging the posters to my chest.

Pastor John had one foot on the motion sensor and the door was wide open, making lurching movements as it repeatedly attempted to close. He looked into the store, squinting as though he was trying to locate something or someone. I wondered where his family was. The last time I had seen him without the entire troop he had been in my living room. He moved away from the door and took a step toward me. My instinct was to move back but I couldn’t. I was against a row of grocery carts. “Let’s sit down for a moment, shall we?” Pastor John said, his voice level and light, a forced smile on his face. He looked around as if to motion to a bench, but there weren’t any.