All You Get Is Me (7 page)

After we walked the property we went back up to the house and pulled open the creaky screen door. The house smelled a bit like rotting wood. Bob had left some furniture behind; basically, all the stuff that didn’t belong in his shiny new life: a La-Z-Boy recliner with worn-out armrests in the living room, a wooden rocker, and a radio the size of a Buick that looked like it was about a hundred years old (my dad was quick to let me know it worked). In the kitchen they left us an old farm table and six mismatched chairs. The cupboards were empty but the pantry held jars of pickles and jams and tomatoes, all carefully labeled and dated in small, precise handwriting.

I went upstairs to my new bedroom and sat on the edge of the iron bed frame. Without a mattress it looked like a medieval torture device. I looked around at the faded rose wallpaper and felt like I was a thousand miles from anything meaningful. Instead of getting ourselves a new life, we’d taken over someone else’s old discarded life. I couldn’t imagine how I would survive in this place. I looked up at the stained, cracked ceiling and vowed that I would find a way out somehow.

My dad hired Javier, an odd-job carpenter and the brother of Jesus, the plumber. Javier arrived very early every morning and set to work with my dad on his list of jobs.

The first job on the list was the bunkhouse, a place for the farmworkers to sleep. Dad chose a storage shed for this and Javier patched the roof and insulated the walls and then nailed sheets of plywood over the insulation. I painted the plywood white, first painting six-foot curse words and then painting white over them. If Javier saw them he never said anything. My dad bought two sets of bunk beds from a now-defunct Christian summer camp and we wrestled them through the door. The final touch on the bunkhouse was an outdoor shower. It ended up looking pretty rustic, but then we weren’t exactly building the Four Seasons Hotel. The outhouse was already there but my dad and Javier “upgraded” it, which means they put a new toilet seat on and fixed the door so you could lock it.

As soon as the bunkhouse was done my dad hired Steve and Miguel so that we could start the business of farming immediately. He found Steve at a farmers’ market in Berkeley and they hit it off right away. He offered him better money than he was making and the position of farm manager. Miguel appeared at our door one morning and my dad hired him on the spot after looking at his calloused hands. Farmer Bob had done a fine job of getting a lot of stuff in the ground before he left (he must have known our first year would be a struggle). All we had to do was water and feed it and let it do its thing. It would be our meager income for the coming months till we got the farm up and running. My dad sweet-talked his way into the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, and getting a stall at the Saturday market here in town was a breeze. Then he started working on local and not-so-local restaurants, promising fresh produce deliveries twice a week. We were the first farm from out here to do that and a lot of chefs were eager to give it a try.

When Javier and my dad finished my darkroom, they moved on to a farm stand on the roadside next to the farm’s gate. It’s sort of like a grown-up version of a lemonade stand. These farm stands are everywhere out here and they work on the honor system. You take what you want and leave the money in a coffee can. Even the Buddhist monastery up the road has one. They sell perfect fragrant ambrosia melons and an odd assortment of exotic Asian produce.

Now, being a city girl, I assumed that the coffee can would disappear in a hot minute, but it didn’t. In fact, I’ve never heard of anyone’s coffee can disappearing. It’s like the coffee cans are considered sacred. Stealing one would be like taking one of those collection boxes next to the candles in a church. You would surely get hit by a bolt of lightning on your way out. Besides, here in farm country people don’t like to mess with one another’s livelihoods.

Somehow (because no one else would do it), it became my job to stock the farm stand and collect the money every day. Whatever we were selling had to be weighed out into little green baskets that held roughly a pound, or else I would have to bunch lavender and rosemary into neat bouquets with a rubber band, which left a scent on my fingers that would last for days. Then I would post the prices on a little chalkboard.

I often pointed out to my dad that, before we moved here, I didn’t have a job, nor did I want one, and suddenly I seemed to be working ten hours a day on something that I had absolutely no interest in. He was always quick to respond with the fact that the alternative was school. I’d wrapped up ninth grade at my city school early after my dad spoke with my teachers and arranged for me to take all my exams before we left. It didn’t hurt that my grades were already good. My grades have somehow always been good. I even skipped sixth grade (a curse back then; I still looked like a little girl among all the developing “young women”). If I’d known that my dad was arranging for all this so that he’d have slave labor, I probably wouldn’t have been so excited about finishing school early. School was never this hard. At night, my dad and I fell into bed exhausted. I’d never been so tired in my life, and a day on a farm starts alarmingly early, so something as luxurious as sleeping in is out of the question. My pale Irish skin had developed little freckles everywhere even with goo-gobs of sunscreen, and I was covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises.

Steve and Miguel got to work putting in raised beds with drip irrigation. We would be growing all things green in these: baby spinach, arugula, pepper cress, and mache. After they finished that, they cleaned out the greenhouse, chased away the pigeons, and replaced the broken glass panes. This is where we would start the seeds for the baby greens and most of the other plants and then transplant them to the raised beds and the regular garden. My dad and Steve also planted a few marijuana plants in there for their “private use” and tended them like they were premature newborns in an incubator.

It took me a solid week to clean out the ancient barn. I hauled out enough crap to make a giant bonfire. You could probably see it from space. I was stung by two bees on two separate days and then I cut my knuckle open on a glass window. Who knew there was so much blood in a knuckle? I lost about a gallon of it before my dad and Steve got me to the hospital. I looked like the star of a slasher movie. I also threw up in the hospital parking lot. Not pretty.

There are three stalls in the barn from back when they kept horses. With a shovel and a wheelbarrow I cleared out all the straw and the thousand-year-old poop. I came across a bat and her tiny baby bats, sleeping upside down with their leathery wings wrapped around them like Dracula’s cape. Under the straw in one of the stalls, I found a bunch of loose boards, which I pried up, hoping for a hidden treasure: a chest of gold coins or bullion or bonds or anything to help get me out of this mess. Instead I found a black metal box and a rat trap with a dried-up rat in it. The box was filled with old photos: several sepia-toned wedding photos of a handsome, young, large-eared groom and his delicate-looking bride. They appear shy and hopeful. There was another photo of the groom but in this one he’s in an army uniform. He looks proud and scared at the same time. There was also one of a baby in a christening gown, a beautiful little girl with rosebud lips. The last photo in the stack was our farmhouse, newly painted with window boxes and a porch swing. A little girl in a smocked dress and white patent leather shoes is sitting on the porch steps. The oak tree barely touches the top of the eaves and there’s a rooster weather vane on the spine of the roof. I figured that this must be the first young family to own this place and I wondered what happened to them. I wondered if they were able to make a go of things here or if the husband even made it back from the war. In the box I also found a Saint Christopher medallion on a chain and an army medal, a bronze cross with an outstretched hawk or an eagle in the middle. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would leave these mementos behind. How could a person forget about them? I took the box into the house and put it in my dresser drawer.

My dad and I made a lot of trips into town for food and supplies. While my dad went over to the bank or the post office, I would go to the grocery store. People in town all seemed to know who I was: “the daughter of that fella who took over the Soameses’ place.” I guess the fact that we were driving his old truck gave us away. They all wanted to know what we had planned for the place and they wished us lots of luck. The grocer always threw something extra in my bag for me like a licorice whip or some bubble gum, like I was seven years old.

The other thing about farm life that they don’t tell you is that the work is never done. A person could go insane, running around fixing things and doing chores only to start all over again every morning. But after we got through a lot of my dad’s list, things didn’t seem quite so urgent. We were selling the produce, money was starting to trickle in, and most of the farm was in decent shape. Don’t get me wrong, if you wandered onto our property, the first thought that would come to you would be
wow, what a dump
, but to us it was a vast improvement.

I finally got to take a little time for myself and I walked out to the back pasture, which isn’t a pasture anymore because Farmer Bob never had any grazing animals and neither do we. Rufus was taking one of his famous naps on the rag rug under the kitchen table so I grabbed my camera and ventured out alone. The grasses were thigh high and I had to push them aside as I made my way toward a stand of trees in the middle of the pasture that I’d always been curious about. Why would a farmer clear a big field of trees and leave a stand of them like that? My first thought, of course, was that it was for sacrificing virgins at midnight. I could have sworn I’d heard moaning coming from that direction when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.

When I finally came upon the stand it was much larger than I’d imagined it, a mini forest surrounded by an entire field of grasses. The trees were old and gnarled and the air inside the stand was cool and moist and mushroomy. I half-expected a tribe of cannibals to rush out and remove my head with a large machete, but except for the birds talking to one another, it was completely still. There was a clearing in the middle and I sat on the mossy ground and looked around. I tilted my head way back to see the tops of the trees stirring in the breeze, contrasting with the impossibly blue sky. It seemed as though the trees were still and I was the one moving. It made me dizzy. Finally I just laid back and took in the whole thing lying on the ground with my arms and legs spread-eagled. It really was so beautiful. I snapped a bunch of pictures lying on the ground like that, looking up. It felt to me that a lot of people before me had called this their secret spot. I pictured stolen kisses and the reading of love letters and members-only forts and kids dressed as pirates, tasting beer and cigarettes for the first time. I knew that this now belonged to me. This would be my place to hide.

The last thing Javier fixed before he moved on to his next job was the porch swing, which I’d found in the barn in rough shape. He sanded it and painted it and reattached it in the same place it was in that old photo. I took a new photo of the house. It was hardly transformed but it looked a lot better. Maybe I would hide the photo in a box one day too. My dad and I put big terra-cotta pots on both sides of each porch step, six in all, and planted red geraniums in them. I pulled the rocker from the living room out to the porch too. So now we had a choice: swinging or rocking. They both seemed like good places to sit and watch absolutely nothing happen.

Chapter 7

E
ven though Storm says that it’s inevitable that I’ll run into Forest again and again, I like to believe there’s a certain serendipity to it. Case in point: On my way into town the other day, I saw Skeeter Dumb-ass (real name Dumas, but trust me, he’s earned his nickname) at the gas station, filling up his monster pickup with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth less than a foot from the tank he was filling with highly combustible gasoline. I hadn’t seen him in months and I probably won’t see him for months now either (in the unlikely event that he should live that long). Anyway, my point is, even in a place this small, people travel in certain circles.

So far I’ve seen Forest at the hospital, the swimming hole, the farmers’ market, and Millie’s, and now I’m standing one aisle away from him at the grocery store, contemplating my next move as he thumbs through this month’s
Rolling Stone
in the magazine section. In these situations, where you see a person of interest before they see you, it’s advisable to take a moment to compose yourself before you saunter over and make it look like a crazy coincidence. I lurk next to the peanut butter and Cheez Whiz; unfortunately, I don’t have much to work with here. I try to fluff my hair but it appears to be unfluffable and I can’t recall when I washed it last. Damn! Note to self: Stop leaving the house looking like an Amish woman. I apply ChapStick, the only quasi–beauty product on me, and rub my lips together. I walk over to his aisle and pretend to be focusing on the magazines while I let
him
notice
me
. Storm would be proud.

“Hey, hi!” he says, smiling.

“Oh, hi!” I chirp.
Wait, was that too much? Not enough?

“Whatcha doin’?” he asks.

I decide that he seems smart enough to know that I’m not shopping for a piano so he probably doesn’t need an answer to that question. I glance down at my basket, which holds a package of linguine, black tea, and a bag of organic brown sugar. I thank God that I haven’t hit the feminine products aisle yet. I decide not to tell him the primary reason I’m here and that is to buy a proper vase, not a canning jar like we usually use, to put flowers in the bunkhouse. Tomás arrives tomorrow afternoon to start work and I wanted to do something special. When I left the farm, Miguel was scrubbing the outdoor shower and Steve was working on the outhouse. I think we all want things to be nice for Tomás, although it’s hard to imagine that it would make any difference to him, considering what he’s been through. So far I haven’t found a vase and I’ve pretty much given up hope. I’m not even convinced that flowers are the way to go. They might seem a little funereal at this point.