Arcadia (4 page)

Hannah has told him it’s not possible that he remembers the day they came to Arcadia. He was only three, she says; no three-year-old could remember
any
single day. But he does. The Caravan had been on the road for too long and had grown too large. Wherever they went, people joined them, bringing more trucks and buses. At last, all fifty of the Free People were weary. When they picked Titus Thrasher up in an army-navy store, he told them about his father, who had inherited six hundred acres in upstate New York from an uncle. Titus had been with them only a week when he walked out of a drugstore phone booth and said, simply, It’s done.

They drove all night into deep countryside, and arrived on a rainy spring morning. Barton Thrasher was a roly-poly man who came weeping out of the stone Gatehouse, extending his arms to his long-lost son. They went into the Pink Piper, and Harold, once a lawyer, checked the papers. The state needed a name on the deed, and they agreed it would be Handy’s, though it belonged to all, equally. Only when the papers were signed could Titus say to his father, Bad blood between us, Pop, but now I reckon everything is even. In response, Barton Thrasher leaned against his son’s broad chest, and Titus stood still, bearing the affection.

Then, someone let off a Roman candle and everyone cheered.

The leftover rain fell on them from the trees above as the Free People took their first quiet hike through the woods to see their land. The men beat down the overgrown trail with machetes and the women held the kids and picked over the path behind them. They came into the Sheep’s Meadow, and gasped. There were enormous structures on top of the hill, which nobody had expected: Barton Thrasher said he thought it had all been farmland and hadn’t known that the buildings existed. Arcadia House reared above them in a blush of brick, a tangle of briars overgrown upon it, the huge gray ship of the Octagonal Barn behind, the stone outbuildings swallowed in grass. Up the Terraces they went, their feet wearing through the mud and weeds to the hidden flagstone steps. The apple trees were stark and ancient, heaped goblins, and the raspberries were wild between the trunks. Last autumn’s windfall stuck, a too-sweet mud, on their soles. They came out onto the slate porch and gathered before the huge front door.

In Arcadia Ego,
someone said. They looked to the lintel, where the words were hastily chiseled.

Astrid said: Arcadia. It means,
Even in Arcadia am I
. Poussin made a painting. Quote comes from Virgil—

But Handy interrupted loudly, No egos in this Arcadia! and they shouted for joy. Astrid muttered, No, not ego, it’s not what that means, it’s . . . But she trailed off. Nobody heard her but Bit.

Arcadia, Hannah whispered into Bit’s hair, and he’d felt her smile in his scalp.

The entryway: a chandelier fallen, crystals underfoot mixed with filth, animal spoor, leaf litter; stairways that curved to sky, the roof ripped off. The Free People separated, searched, discovered. Hannah carried Bit through the mess, the tumbleweeds of dust, the antique graffiti, the doors unopened for a century. Arcadia House was an endless building shaped like a horseshoe, embracing a courtyard where a vast fifty-foot oak tree presided. The wings of the house were filthy, broken, went on forever. Out a window, Bit saw the glimmer of the Pond, and outbuildings like ships in a sea of weeds. There were holes everywhere: in roofs, in walls, in floors. He was frightened. At last, they all met up in the Proscenium, a grand hall with benches, a stage, ratted curtains faded the color of dirt, a deep red velvet in the hearts of their folds. The Free People were filthy and starved and craving a party. After the long years they’d debated their community, shared readings, talked about the kibbutzim and Drop Cities and ashrams that some among them had lived in, they had come home. They longed to celebrate with music and pot and maybe something stronger, but Handy wouldn’t let them. If we don’t do the work now, my beatniks, he said, when will we do it? And so they stayed in the Proscenium as the afternoon faded and became midnight, they argued it all out, the rules of their Homeplace.

There was a hole in the floor where the Entryway grew black beneath, until all that remained were a few gleams of the crystals in the dirt; there was a hole in the roof where the night turned inky and soon went up in a blaze of stars.

All things would be held in common, all possessions—bank accounts, trust funds—would go into the pot, everyone who joins must give everything they have. Bills and taxes would be paid with this money. When they made dough, it would be by midwifery or by hiring out Monkeypower to work in the fields, until in the end they ate only what they harvested themselves, and sold their surplus. Within Arcadia, filthy lucre would be forbidden.

All people would be welcome to join, as long as they promised to work; those who were too damaged or weak or pregnant or old to work would be cared for. Nobody was beyond help. But no fugitives; they didn’t need the authorities on their heads.

They would live pure and truthful lives; no illegal activities. Well, they amended, when the familiar skunky smoke rose up, nothing that
should
be illegal.

Punishment would be unnecessary; all must subject themselves to Creative Critiques when they erred or didn’t pull their weight, where they had to undergo the community telling them off, a ritual cleansing.

Whoever you fuck, you’re married to, said Handy; and thus rose the four-, five-, six-, eight-part marriages of the beginning, most of which soon splintered apart into singles and couples.

They would treat all living creatures with respect; they’d be vegan, animal goods and pets forbidden.

Until the day came when they could renovate this great, strange ship called Arcadia House and live together in love and kindness, they would make an Ersatz Arcadia.

By the time their rules had been laid out, agreed upon, named, it was almost morning. Many had fallen asleep. The few who were awake saw Handy’s broad face kindling in the dawn through the filthy windows. He made a grand gesture toward the heap around them, saying, This land, these structures we found here today are gifts of love from the Universe.

Then the years of transience broke in him and Handy cried.

Three years passed full of hard work, some failed crops, some good. They borrowed oxen from their Amish neighbors to plow the fields. Later, the silent, hardworking Amish men came—a surprise—to help reap the sorghum, barley, soy. There was enough only to eat and none to sell. The midwives went into the towns beyond, into Ilium and Summerton to deliver babies for money. The Motor Pool was founded to drive trucks for pay, and to find abandoned vehicles to salvage for parts. Every autumn, they rented Monkeypower to the fields or apple orchards to make as much cash as possible. They made alcoholic Slap-Apple and sauce and pies from their own apples, they canned just enough wild strawberries and raspberries and goods from the garden to make it through the winter. But even the previous winter in Arcadia, there was a week of hunger that would have been worse had Hannah not succeeded in wrestling her trust fund from her parents’ lawyers. Together, they survived.

One night in December after the Solstice celebration, when Handy was in a Vision Quest in the sweat lodge they’d built off the Showerhouse, Abe called a secret meeting for the Arcadia House Renovation Project. He had chosen a few people to join him, the straw bosses of the work units: Fields, Gardens, Sanitation, Free Store, Bakery, Soy Dairy, Cannery, Midwifery, Biz Unit, Motor Pool, Kid Herd. Hannah had brought Bit along under her poncho, because she had been the straw boss of the Bakery then and didn’t want to leave him in the Bread Truck alone. They met between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn, in the tunnel that Ollie had reinforced against nuclear strike.

Listen, said Abe. I’ve been thinking, and we’ve reached a kind of turning point. We’ve got to move into Arcadia House soon, or we may stall out on putting all our big ideas into action. Just get comfortable in Ersatz Arcadia and let our dream of Arcadia House fritter off and
never
move in.

There was a protest, something about money, but Abe held up a hand. Give me a minute. It’s pretty clear we’re working too hard, too inefficiently, doing redundant stuff just to live. It’s all about division of labor. If we had centralized child care and cooking and didn’t have to worry about carting our own water up from the Pond or getting the stuff from the Free Store for our suppers or making sure we chopped plenty of wood to be warm this week, we could actually get enough work done to support ourselves and make money. I’ve done the math, he said and held up a paper covered in his tiny script. If we fix up Arcadia House and all live there together, we can do this. We can make it work. Maybe even make a profit this year.

Abe’s beard split, his smile so big Bit feared for his father’s cheeks.

There was a silence, the sound of someone in the Octagonal Barn above dragging something heavy across the floor. The straw bosses all began talking over one another, pacing up and down the tunnel as they dreamed aloud, building their vision detail by detail.

The deeper Bit pushes into Arcadia House, now, the more he is bitten by a wretched clammy cold. The men haven’t touched these rooms yet: they are moldy and dark. He pushes at a latch, and a door swings open with a foul exhalation. Between the darkness of the hall he is in and the light above the stairwell, he takes the light and goes up, though the dust is to his ankles. He finds himself on a catwalk that skirts a deep room, an intact couch, a grand brick fireplace, a sea of filth that moves ten feet below from the air he displaces. From this spot in the house, he can no longer hear the men on the roof, their music, or the women far away in the Children’s Wing as they sing and talk.

There is a black spill beneath the first door, an evil that spreads from the crack. He skips it, creeps on. From behind the second he hears a sound, a sigh, a whisper, and feels a cold in the metal of the knob, so he skips it, too. The third opens when he pushes hard, and he enters.

The room is furred with dust, inches deep. It grows off the walls, over the floor, spreads itself across lumps that are furniture, Bit discovers, when he inserts his hand and feels wood beneath. He touches a filminess under one, cloth, and finds it a bed.

In the middle of the floor, a delicious lump, and Bit plunges in both hands. There are hard things deep down. He brings out his fist and peers at a series of tiny bones, a mouse’s skull and skeleton. Then, a handful of buttons in a strange, dense material, creamy white and shimmering. At last, an object, hard and soft at the same time. He blows on it until the book reveals itself.

On the leather cover, there are embossed flowers, a boy who peers from behind a tree, and letters in gold. Bit traces four—G-R-I-M—then grows impatient and opens the pages.

At first he sees an illustration. It is the most vivid thing in all of Arcadia House; it sucks the daylight into it. A girl with a squinched face seems to be using her cut-off finger for a key. On another page, there is a tiny man who splits himself in two while blood spills in gouts from his wounds. On another, a girl in a long dress walks beside lions, her mouth open, her hair up in a furry acorn hat.

He finds the smallest story. His finger runs under each word as he puzzles it out. It is about a mother with many children in a time of famine, something Bit knows: the terror in the belly, winterberry and soybeans all they have left in the mason jars. The mother wants to eat her children. They are angelic and choose to die for her. But she is so ashamed with their sacrifice that she doesn’t eat them. Instead, she runs away.

Horror is heaped within horror: the mother eating her children, the children dying, the mother disappearing forever into the dark behind the story.

He drops the book back in its heap of dust, clamps his hands over his eyes. The world moves in tight and squeezes him. He holds his face until the terror scuttles off and he can breathe again.

From afar, Hannah’s voice, high, frantic: Bit! Come here, right now! Before he leaves, he snatches the book, shoves it down his pants, and runs down over his own treadmarks in the dust, runs and runs, turns the wrong way, loses Hannah’s voice, bursts into a familiar hall, hears her voice closer now, goes down the stairs, leaping the gaps in the treads, stumbles into the Entryway, goes down a corridor, loses her voice, goes another way and at last finds himself in a glassy room with half-collapsed long tables, where Hannah’s back is turned to him, where she is shouting for him. She is so happy to see Bit she snatches him up under the arms and hugs him to her so tightly he can’t breathe, and puts him down, and wipes her wet face on her shoulder and says, Don’t
ever
wander off here, Bit. You can get hurt. This place is very, very dangerous.

She holds him away by the arms. God, she says. You’re black with filth.

Then her mouth shifts as she feels the book in his pants. She looks at him, and Bit watches her, and is almost disappointed when she lets the book go. She has been letting everything go, these days.

Midge comes from a back room. Since her father turned to ice during the February Morning Meeting, Midge’s face has gone sour, as if she is constantly sucking a gooseberry. She snaps, This is no place for a kid, Hannah. Take him home.

Midge has no neck, Bit notices. Her head swivels on her shoulders like a ratchet.

Away they go again, rattling down over the hill in the Red Wagon. Bit leaves the book under his shoes and pants when he and his mother go into the cement-block Showerhouse together, though their day to bathe isn’t until Sunday. Most days, they do what Hannah calls a KACA Bath: dip a washcloth in hot water, soap it up, hit the Kisser-Armpit-Crotch-Ass. Today the Showerhouse echoes, empty. Everyone else is working. There’s a dangerous luxury to the steam, the rosy softnesses of his mother under the hot water, the faces of sleeping babies that live in Hannah’s knees, in his own layers of darkness that fall as she rubs at him with her chapped hands until she has scrubbed him raw and red as an infant again.