JUNE 14, 1974
There are seven of them who live there, sometimes more. There is Ginny (thick auburn hair, long-limbed, a laugh like a seal), there is Tim (skinny, acne, unbearably shy), Feather (quiet, pale) with her daughter, Opal, bearded Randy with a banjo, and a petite black woman named Bird.
“Bird?”
“Yes. Just Bird.” She smiles at Deb, eyes gleaming.
Ginny, in a loose dress and red rain boots—braless breasts and jutting collarbones—gives her the lay of the land. There is the farmhouse, ancient, paint-flaking, on the hill, where they cook and rest and sleep and read. The walls are covered in artwork painted directly onto the plaster: a large, rough portrait of Emma Goldman with her arm around Martin Luther King, a picture of Woody Guthrie’s guitar bearing the words This guitar kills fascists, various poems and sketches of mountains, forests, deer. Where there are not paintings on the walls there are bookshelves—pine boards resting on concrete blocks—filled to the brim and teetering in multiple directions.
Deb would like to spend all day looking at those bookshelves, but Ginny is leading her out the back door to the vegetable garden downhill of the house, a sea of green, which Deb assumes from where she stands is lettuce and spinach and peas but which, she finds out, once she’s standing closer, is mostly weeds. The seedlings are in there, doing their best to surface and grow, but weeds and rocks, Deb discovers in the weeks to follow, always win.
There is the rusted school bus, resting on large stumps, where Opal was born, which now houses three ducks, twelve hens, and three roosters. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to cut their heads off—yet,” Ginny says, pointing to the three cocksure roosters, vying for their mothers’ and sisters’ love.
There is a barn where Ginny tells Deb they plan to someday have goats, sheep, cows, and pigs. “We want to make cheese—goat and cow’s milk—and sell honey, too. Wool from the lambs,” Ginny says. Her grin is radiant: spitfire.
Ginny takes one last look in the empty barn and lingers for a moment—tired perhaps, at the prospect of it all—and Deb decides she likes her. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail that rains down her left shoulder. She is a realist, Deb thinks, despite her gazelle bones and cotton frock.
“And then there is the print shop,” Ginny says, pointing the way.
The print shop is clearly where Ginny wants to be.
It’s an old milking shed with a cluster of assorted tables gathered into its center. On one of the tables is a letterpress machine. On another is a printing press like the one in Deb’s college art class.
“You’re not messing around,” Deb says.
“No,” Ginny says.
There are stacks of papers everywhere, clotheslines running from one side of the room to the other, poems, etchings, and woodcuts pinned to them. There’s a stack of flyers with a picture of Guthrie’s guitar on it. “We hand those out in town,” Ginny says, nodding toward them.
“Groovy,” Deb says.
“Yes. It is,” Ginny says, not smiling, but her green eyes warming. “We have to try and change the world, you know? Disrupt quiet New England any way we can.”
“Yes,” Deb says, fingering the flyer and thinking of her cousin Pierce, whose father bought his way out of Vietnam, thinking of her own half-assed activism and resistance. But she’s here now. She has five $100 bills of her father’s in her backpack, which she dreams of burning but doesn’t dare.
“So,” Ginny says, walking toward the door, and Deb follows. “You want to stay?”
THEY OFFER HER THE DAYBED ON THE PORCH AND TELL her the deal: you can stay for as long as you like, but you must work. Chip in. Do your part. If you don’t, you will be politely asked to leave. It’s Ginny who’s talking, and Deb understands that Ginny is the wheel and the spoke around here. Both the feather boa and the center that holds. She also understands that if Ginny politely asks you to leave, you say thank you and leave.
In the farmhouse kitchen Bird flips potato cakes on the big wood stove. A Nina Simone record spins on a table in the living room. Deb offers to help, and Bird hands her a bowl of greens and nods toward the sink. Deb runs them under cool water but wonders what they are. They’re nothing like her mother’s iceberg lettuce.
“Dandelion. Sorrel. Plantain. Wild and foraged,” Bird says without looking up. Deb nods, pats them dry with an old dish towel, arranges them in the wooden bowl Bird hands her.
They eat at a big table in the living room, making space for their plates amid the books, canning jars full of flowers, and candles stuffed in the necks of empty wine bottles.
They laugh and tell stories that weave around one another. They talk about the Revolution, and Deb wonders what that word means for them. What is the revolution here in the woods? Bird quotes Frantz Fanon, whom Deb has never read (but she does, a few weeks later). “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity,” Bird says with tears in her eyes. She turns to them all: “And you, bitches. What will your mission be?”
Ginny lifts her glass of wine and toasts them all.
Randy says, “Fucking well. Fucking well is my mission,” with a grin.
Ginny rolls her eyes. Bird says, “Asshole.”
Feather gets up and puts on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and Randy and Ginny argue about whether goats are easier to milk than cows—teat size, milk production—and then Bird shouts, “Let’s dance!” and Ginny switches the Dylan to Ruth Brown and everyone gets up and starts dancing to “Lucky Lips.” Drums. Horns. That irresistible Memphis swing.
Is she dreaming? Deb is bone tired. Unable to talk or keep up. After a second glass of wine she slips out the door to the screen porch. What will her mission be?
She takes off her pants and climbs under the heavy army-navy wool blankets, surprised by how cool it is already out here in the dark. There are peepers, stars, an occasional cluck or crow from the school bus. In the distance she can hear truck brakes from the highway, but that highway feels far away now. Moonlight falls on Deb’s face through the battered screen, and at some point in the night she slips out from under the covers, opens the screen door, and steps out into that light. She’s barefoot, bare-legged, an old T-shirt slipping off her shoulders. She thinks: here I am. She thinks: have I ever been alive before now? Her legs and arms are covered in goose bumps. She squats to pee in the grass, and the piss hisses, then steams between her bare feet. The air smells like grass, like woods, like the heat from the chicken’s coop. My life, she thinks. Is just beginning.