JANUARY 17, 1975
Deb’s happy at the commune, happier than she’s ever been, and yet. There’s still something adrift about it; these characters too much like her, with their wingless ambition, their unhardened dreams. Tim has left. Ginny cannot bring herself to slaughter the chickens or slaughter the ducks; the ones that stop laying live on in the coop, and Deb has to drive to Nelson for expensive chicken grain every week. When she doesn’t, the hens go hungry, cluck all day, watch her every move.
Bird leaves, taking her Nina Simone and Bessie Smith and Gil Scott-Heron records with her. The farmhouse does not seem the same without their singing. “Too fucking white here, my loves,” she said on her way out the door, kissing their cheeks. “The snow and all of you. Who wants to be an anomaly?”
The roof of the farmhouse begins to leak, and they climb up there with tarps and scraps of tar paper, move out of the rooms where the water pools, where the plaster drips and the wallpaper peels.
Deb is broke. They are all broke. She knew she would be, and yet she’s never felt it in her bones before. She borrows Randy’s car, the only one they have, his grandmother’s old Ford, to drive to town, but its brakes are shot and she keeps her hand on the emergency brake the whole time, heart racing, ready to pull.
She wanders the streets and the bright, nearly fluorescent aisles of the grocery store, eyeing the facets of the material world, wanting them all with a hunger that surprises her. She wants oranges. Grapefruits. Pretzels. Lemons! Red tomatoes.
The food they eat at the farm all starts to taste the same: potatoes and rice and beans. She craves meat, craves wine.
“We’re too broke for wine,” Ginny has announced, and so they are drinking the rotgut homemade cider that Randy and Feather have made in the basement. They pressed the apples in an antique Mast & Co. cider press that came with the barn, added sugar, added yeast, have let it sit all year in wooden barrels. It tastes like vinegar, makes Deb’s stomach hurt, but it’s all they have, so they drink it. With fervor.
Randy plays old folk songs he’s learned from Woody Guthrie records. The girl, Opal, winds around his feet and laughs. It’s Opal whom Deb eyes most often.
She’s seven, beautiful, a string bean, her blond hair in tangles.
“Here, let me,” Deb says, trying to brush it for her, but Opal screeches or laughs and runs away.
Opal carries chickens in her arms, paints on the farmhouse walls, pees her bed at night.
“Do you think she’ll go to school?” Deb asks Feather, who says, “I don’t know.”
Opal crashes into the room; Opal spins. Opal cries out, “I’m hungry!” and Deb leaps up to fetch her an apple from the root cellar.
WINTER IS LONG. THE ROOF CONTINUES TO LEAK. THEIR road isn’t plowed. They stay in and cook rice, cook beans, eat the potatoes and squashes and apples from the basement. The wood stove keeps them warm, if they stay inches from it; the records keep them sane: Dave Van Ronk, Aretha Franklin, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Randy plays his plunky banjo.
“Do you know any other tunes?” Deb asks, staring at the wall.
Deb moves into Bird’s empty room in the attic and wakes to frozen water in the jar beside her bed, wakes to limbs so cold she has to force herself out from underneath the covers. She never takes her long underwear off—top or bottom.
“Screw this,” she whispers, running downstairs to warm her ass next to the wood stove. Her skin is slack, her hair thinning, she needs protein. And vitamin D. As does Opal.
Deb writes her mother telling her of her cold bones. She tells her about Opal, that apple from the cellar. She writes, “I think I underestimated the hardiness of pioneers.” She thinks of her grandmother, Zina, in Russia, and what she might not have told her about life on a farm. The scarcity. The hard ropes of muscles in each of their arms. Deb walks the letter to the mailbox at the bottom of the road, and one week later a check for five hundred dollars arrives. Deb cries, she’s so happy to see it. She cashes it and drives Randy’s car straight to the grocery store, where she buys chicken and hamburger meat in bulk, the cheapest she can find. She fills a shopping cart with produce. She buys three jugs of sweet wine.
She brings it home and cooks a feast on the wood stove, which they devour, Feather and Randy and Ginny and Opal and Deb. “Thank you,” Feather says, with tears in her eyes. “I’m so grateful.” Opal eats the meat with her fingers, laughing, runs over to Deb and gives her a greasy, meat-drunk hug.
Deb sleeps that night in Bird’s attic room above the kitchen, limbs at last warmed from red meat, limbs warmed from wine. She picks up her Thoreau book and reads it by candlelight: “Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”
Deb laughs, drifting into sleep, while snow piles up on the roof and water drips from the rafters.