Arcadia (7 page)

A vision rises before Bit, a celebration: a keg of Slap-Apple under the stars, one boy winging in spirals toward the moon, the girl golden and round as Hannah had been in the summer, the old Hannah, who had stood on a picnic bench and shouted about freedom, love, community. He imagines those babies who lived for so many years without their mother, what it would feel like to be hugged by her for the first time, her warmth at last against their bodies. How they would clutch her to them and never let her go. He imagines not talking for six years, until he is almost twelve, so many years, more than he has been alive. The days stretch out before him. He tries not to cry, but the world he can see from where he is hidden (the loft of the Pink Piper, the heap of hammocks where they’re stored during the day, a baby’s shoe on its side) goes wavery in his eyes.

Last, he thinks of Hannah, her face drawn to something he can’t recognize. This thought fills him with an electric pulse; it thrashes, fishlike, in his gut. He must do something. He must.

He concentrates. He pushes back the words that were already sickly until they die on the bitter part of his tongue. They send bad tendrils into his chest. They heap, a toad, in the cave of his throat. When he walks and eats and plays, he can imagine the slimy thing there, waiting angrily for a word to slip past, for a chance to curse them all.

Tonight, all is peaceful on the surface in the Bread Truck. Hannah has cooked dinner, and the three of them listen to some scratchy voice singing “Your Eyes Have Told Me What I Did Not Know” on a crank Victor that the Motor Pool picked up from a trash heap in Buffalo. Bit is on Abe’s lap, following along as his father reads the newspaper aloud. Bit once points to a caption that says “Goose bites baby” and does his new, silent laugh, and when he looks up at Abe, his father is studying Bit, his lips sucked in at the corners.

Hannah puts down her book and sniffs once, loudly.

Bit sniffs, too. Something somewhere is burning.

Abe flicks his paper down. Bit’s parents gaze at one another. They leap up and in their slippers and bathrobes run out the door.

The cold air roils with smoke. Shadows pour from the doorway; the gong bangs and bangs and bangs. Family Quonset One is on fire.

Abe is running with Bit to the Pink Piper, and he thrusts Bit inside, and the kids who live in the Family Quonsets are being shoved inside, too: Jincy and Sy and Franklin and Ali and Pooh and Molly and Fiona and Cole and Dyllie. The midwives have disappeared. The kids who already live in the Pink Piper run downstairs, and the Pregnant Ladies come over from the Henhouse, shaking muddy snow off their boots, shivering. Flannery and Eden and Saucy Sally pick up the littlest ones and comfort them. Someone thinks Bit is one of the littlest ones and presses him against her taut warmth, and Bit is grateful again for his smallness, to have these soft arms around him.

Where’s Felipe? whispers Flannery, and Imogene, who lives in Family Quonset One, makes big eyes.

Leif and Erik hold Bit up to the window so he can see, though there is not much there: the world across the Quad swirls with yellow and gray, the last of the snow on the ground reflects the fire, the shadows of people dart with buckets.

Dylan sidles over. He is younger than Bit but taller.

It went boom, he says softly. Back where Ricky and Felipe and Maria live. And then Maria had the fire wings.

Shut up, Dylan, says Coltrane, who pushes his little brother and runs up the spiral staircase to where the hammocks are strung.

Dylan’s eyes well up. He comes even closer to Bit.

She did too have the fire wings, he whispers, his voice full of sleep. Also she had hair of fire, Bit. And also a head full of fire, too.

Bit stares so long at the burning Quonset that the world blotches in his eyes. The other kids have gone to sleep. The Pregnant Ladies are at the kitchen table, trying to swallow their sobs with glasses of water or cups of chamomile tea.

Outside, he sees people going slowly back to where they live. Some of the people who lived in the burnt-up Quonset go into Hans and Fritz’s lean-to because those two men are away with Handy; the Pregnant Ladies go back to the Henhouse. Only a few Arcadians remain outside, watching the twisted metal and the embers within. In the dully gleaming dark, Bit recognizes his parents leaning into one another, tall Hannah, tall Abe, her braids on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. Bit shuts his eyes and blindly feels his way into Jincy’s sleeping bag, to keep his parents standing there together.

In the morning, Ricky and Maria and Felipe are gone.

Bit overhears Astrid telling the older kids that the baby had died. She cries, pursing her mouth up over her terrible yellow teeth, the way the horse the Amish bring for harvest draws his lips over a carrot.

Burnt up? says Molly, who cries and cries. Her sister, Fiona, begins to wail into her hands so that only her vast white forehead is visible.

A burnt baby. Bit pictures one of the marshmallows from before Astrid’s war against sugar, crumpled and black on the edge of the bonfire.

No, Astrid says. From smoke. In his sleep. Small blessings. Maria is burnt, but she will be home soon. Ricky is with her in the hospital.

Leif says, angrily, Handy should know about this. If Handy knows, he’ll come home and make it better. My dad can fix it.

Astrid does her funny in-breath that means a yes. Assent on the intake, Hannah calls it. I called Handy in Austin, Astrid says, kissing Leif. In Texas. He told me to tell you he loves us all and he is sending vibes into the ether. He wanted to come home, but Maria and Ricky said no, don’t return early, we need the cash from the concerts. Besides, they’re not ready yet to have the memorial. We’ll have a service for Felipe in the spring.

I want my dad, says Leif; and his big boy’s face crumples and he begins to cry.

Astrid pulls him to her, pulls all of her children, Erik and Leif, froggy Helle, hyper Ike, to her, and says into their matching white-blond hair, Well, that’s another story, indeed.

In the morning, Bit runs to the stream trickling in the woods. Yellow jags of ice edge the water. Bit kneels on the ice and puts his head in the stream, and the cold is enough to rip the breath from him, a relief.

Handy sends a letter, express. Astrid calls a meeting in the Octagonal Barn, and they gather in the late afternoon to hear Hiero read it aloud. Handy says greetings to all his beautiful beatniks. He is devastated by the news, and feels profoundly for the Free People keeping the faith at the Homeplace. He urges them to remember that suffering is what tempers the steel in the human soul, and when one suffers in community, the community grows stronger.

Hiero’s voice shakes when he reads:
Pain, when given its proper place in the human heart, can be a door that leads to a feeling of oneness with the Universe. This is a path to deeper empathy.

Soon enough, Handy tells them, they will all be together. Try to be strong and we will bear the impossible weight of our sorrow in communion. Namaste.

Namaste, they say, and the women cry, holding one another. The babies goggle at their mothers and pat their faces.

After one week, Maria returns from the hospital, her head and arms wrapped like gifts in white bandages. Ricky and she seem to be carrying one another wherever they walk.

Bit sits under the table as Marilyn and Hannah drink St.-John’s-wort tea. They talk about the oil embargo, about Marilyn’s webbed feet, about thalidomide babies, born with flippers. Bit thinks of a wee newborn flapping underwater, like the beaver that lived in the stream behind the Family Quonsets and gave them all giardia one spring.

He goes back to his book, the story of the fisherman and his wife. The women forget about him. They begin to murmur.

I don’t know how much longer I can handle it, Hannah says. This isn’t what I signed up for, this isn’t a better life, this isn’t anything but poverty and hard work and not enough money to buy the kids winter boots.

I know, says Marilyn.

Hannah’s voice goes muffled when she says, . . .
want . . . out
. She makes a sound that doesn’t seem human. Bit watches her legs worriedly, afraid she is sick.

Marilyn’s voice, softer than ever. Hang in there. We move into Arcadia House in less than a month. We’ll all live together, and everything will be better. You can make it.

I can’t, Hannah says. Fucking Handy . . .

You can, says Marilyn, and her voice sounds like a door closing, and Bit knows that there exist things even outspoken Hannah isn’t allowed to say.

A taste of Saucy Sally’s poppyseed cake, the way Leif can swing Bit by the legs so the world spins deliriously past, the feel of running on the last crust of snow when the others fall through, that softness at the end of a branch that is the whisper of a bud. He adds to the list in his head. Raspberry jam on just-baked bread. The smell of the pocket of Titus’s waxed coat, pipe tobacco and lint and cedar. The four blond heads of Handy’s kids around a letter. The feel of fresh plaster. He sits by his mother and comes up with these fragments and tries to beam them into her head. Once or twice, he is sure he succeeds. She sighs sweetly in her sleep when he remembers the smell of a newborn’s crown or the downy feel of her own soft cheek upon his.

The Kid Herd is at the stream. The footbridge is not safe: it wobbles, its ends dunked in the wild runoff. White suckers churn upstream, their many bluish bellies transformed into a single pulsing one. Bit stares down, the stick gone heavy in his hand. Toothwort bobs on the bank.

Do it! shouts Leif, who has turned into a dancing goblin. He is hysterical with violence.

Bit, calls Jincy over the roar, and Bit looks up at her. Her curls are wilder than usual. There has been a charcoal smear on her cheek for a week. It’s wrong to kill, she shouts, close to tears.

The others stand, a mass, uncertain, waiting to see what he will do. Helle has begun to wail, though her eyes bulge with anticipation. Bit looks at his friends. Cole and Dylan, side by side, make the same face Sweetie makes when one of the kids hurts another. Jincy covers her mouth with a hand.

He thinks of a fish body wriggling on the stick, of a mass of blood.

Bit grips the stick that Leif whittled with Abe’s pearl-handled blade. He pulls it behind his head and hurls it into the stream. It bounces back at him and smacks him above the eye. The pain is terrible, like swallowing a brick of ice. Leif and Erik and Ike and Fiona shriek and dance, Helle wails, Jincy says, No, no, no, no, no. Molly, who thinks she’s a horse, who has made them call her Secretariat since last summer, even though Secretariat is a boy, whinnies and throws her mane and stomps her foot. In fury, Bit grabs the stick and chucks it as hard as he can toward the bank, where it grazes Muffin’s knee.

Muffin’s face goes red behind her glasses, and she screams. She claws up the muddy bank and runs off through the forest, over the fields.

Now
you’re in trouble, says Fiona, her voice humid with excitement. Her bangs are slicked with sweat and her forehead gleams. She runs off. The others follow, the boys whooping like Indians through the afternoon dapple. Helle stays for a second to scream IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouBitStone, then she, too, scurries off. Her round little body falls behind her brothers’, and she ruins a patch of early spring beauty flowers as she goes. She pumps her arms and tiny corncob legs to catch them but they move off without her, as ever.

Alone, Bit is seized with grief. He comes down tentatively to the edge of the brook and tries to leap to the shore, but his boot fills with water. His shocked foot inside the boot feels the way his stomach feels inside his body.

He crouches for a while on the side of the brook, watching the frantic push of fish. He sends out mute apologies, waits for the great King Fish to surface, its stern face leathery and terrible, to open its vast mouth and curse him. Or eat him. Or maybe, he thinks with a pulse, to send him off on his search to find the thing that will save his mother. He holds his breath until he feels faint and, when nothing happens, moves up the bank to sit among the fiddleheads, their bald skulls rearing shyly from the dirt. The wind blows cold from the top of the trees, brushing down, and the parched leaves chatter under it. In the hollows to the north of some trunks, he dips his fist into small pockets of snow.

He sits long enough for a squirrel to emerge and almost run over his foot. A hawk swoops over the stream and snatches at something and rises again as if riding a pendulum.

For a few breaths he forgets himself in the swim of nature around him. Its rhythm is so different from Bit’s human own, both more nervous and more patient. He sees a bug that is smaller than a period on a page. He sees the sky, bigger than all that’s in his head. An overwhelm from two directions, vast and tiny, together.

From behind him, footsteps. He hears them when they are still far away. They thunder the ground. He knows from his Grimm that it is probably a giant come to eat him, but he can’t find the energy to fight. Bit bends his head and waits for the great hand, the teeth. Instead, he smells something fleshy and feminine, blood and pus and sweat and rose soap. Astrid. She sits beside him and he waits for her to yell.

She doesn’t. She just sits. When he dares, he lifts his head to look at her. She studies her feet, unshod and luxuriating in the cold mud. She smiles down at him. I love spring mud in the toes, she says. Makes me think of home. Norway, you know.

He takes off his own shoes and wallows his toes in the mud.

After some time, Astrid claps him on a thigh and stands. She scoops him up. So light, little Bit, she says. You are maybe twenty pounds? I’m sure I have delivered a new baby almost as heavy as you. You are a marvel.

They come out of the forest onto the Sugarbush path, then up into the Sheep’s Meadow. Already, flowers spread on the ground like small open mouths, purple bells, white stars with golden hearts.

He rests his head on her shoulder, and she says, Not to worry. You will grow. And one day things will not be so confusing. This I can promise you.

When they come into Ersatz Arcadia, she says one last thing into his ear. She says, Don’t think that nobody knows you are not talking, that nobody worries about the words that are stuck in you. But you take your time. When you can, you will tell me the story of everything you feel and I will do everything to make it better. This I also promise you, she says, and Astrid’s face is kind as a field of dandelions.