The Good Daughters (14 page)

From where I lay in our bed, I heard comforting sounds coming from the kitchen—mugs clinking, the honey pot being set on the table, the plate of cookies that I’d baked the day before laid out. I fell asleep feeling happy at the picture of Ray and my mother getting along so well, and dreamed of our baby.

When I woke up the next morning, everything was different. Although it was early, my mother was already dressed, her bag still packed, as if she were about to leave.

“We’re going home,” she said when I stepped out of the bedroom, my stomach still churning with the morning nausea.

“What are you talking about? We are home. My home.”

“I’m taking you back to New Hampshire now,” she said. “There’s been a terrible mistake. Your father and I will take care of you now.”

What she was saying seemed so crazy, I just laughed. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in more than a year. Maybe some swift and devastating form of dementia had overtaken her though she was only in her early fifties.

“I live here now, Mom,” I said slowly. “I’m not going anywhere. I live with Ray. We love each other. We’re having a baby.”

“Ray agrees with me, you need to leave this place,” she said. “A car is coming to take us to the airport.”

Through the window, I could see the figure of my lover, but I’d never seen
him looking like this. Though it was cold that morning—freezing in fact—he was sitting in the yard. His back was hunched, and he held his head in his hands. He was not weeping, as I had seen him do on numerous occasions. This was worse. He seemed stunned and mute, as someone might look after undergoing electroshock therapy.

“Ray!” I called out the door. “You need to come in here. My mother’s saying crazy things.”

The room was spinning. I had been nauseated before. Now I threw up. My mother went to the sink for a cloth and some water from our pail. Her old standby: cleaning up.

I tried to call out again to Ray. I opened my mouth, but no sound came.

Slowly then, like a man in a horror movie—a zombie, a character in
Night of the Living Dead
—he made his way into the house. I tried to meet his eyes, finding nothing. On the floor at my feet, my mother was still washing up. His face, as familiar to me as my own hand, had gone flat and blank. But there was something else. His beautiful long hair that used to fall down past his shoulders was gone. Chopped off. What remained stood up in short, uneven patches on his fine-boned skull. I could see a thin blue vein running through his skin, blood pumping.

“What’s going on here?” I screamed. “Nobody’s making sense.”

“This never should have happened,” he said. The voice of a dead man, if dead men could speak. “It’s best for you to go.”

“What’s going on? Why isn’t anyone saying anything?” I realized something now. He had never come to bed that night. Wherever he’d slept it was not with me. Not then, or ever again.

“One day you’ll understand, this was for your own good,” my mother said, gathering a few pieces of my clothing. “For now, you just need to come with me.”

I reached for Ray. I pounded my fists on his chest, scraped his skin. I pulled at what was left of his hair.

“What did she do to you?” I screamed. “You’ve lost your mind.”

No answer. It was as if Ray’s soul had left his body, and all that was left was skin and bones and organs—all but the brain and the heart.

“I can’t talk about it,” he said, his voice flat and low. “You just need to go away now. We can’t have this baby.”

“What are you saying? This was what you wanted. A hundred times you told me so.”

“I made a mistake. I don’t want it anymore. I can’t talk about this. Get out.”

The world went dark.

SOMETIME EARLIER—BEFORE SHE MADE THE
trip to Canada, probably—my mother must have arranged for a taxi to pick us up. Now it was parked in the yard. I could hear my mother’s voice telling the driver, “You’ll have to excuse my daughter. She’s going through a lot at the moment.”

I have the dimmest memory of Ray as my mother was leading me out to the taxi. He was lying on the bed, curled up, with his newly shorn hair sticking up in clumps, his face turned to the wall—but when I called out to him that last time, he had looked up and our eyes met.

“This isn’t real,” I said. “Just say something to me. Come and get me.”

I can still see his ravaged face as he looked at me.

“What are you doing?” I was crying. “What did she say to you?”

He shook his head and turned again to face the wall.

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW
my mother got me into that car. I have no memory of the journey back across the Campbell River Narrows, or the drive to Nanaimo, the second ferry, the final stretch of highway. For the first twenty minutes, I screamed and wept. After that, in all the hours of our journey, I doubt any words were spoken.

I know all kinds of things must have happened—checking our bags, presenting our passports—but how she managed to take care of this I have no idea. Somehow, my mother had a ticket ready for me. One-way to Boston.

I DO NOT REMEMBER THE
flight, or my father meeting us at the airport, though he must have done so, or the long drive back to our farm (past midnight now, an early dusting of snow covering the field where a few leftover pumpkins lay unclaimed).

For all that first week back, I kept trying to reach Ray, but there was no phone number to call. No response to my telegrams. I even called my birthday sister, Dana, to see if she knew where he was.

“I have no clue,” she said. “I haven’t laid eyes on my brother in years.”

He seemed to have vaporized.

And so when my mother came to me a few days later to say she’d arranged an appointment at a clinic, I simply nodded.

My sister Winnie came with us to Boston that day and sat with me in the waiting room while our mother remained outside. By this point I thought I must be losing my mind. I no longer fought any of it. Just watched, with horrified wonder, as if this were an episode of
The Twilight Zone,
but more terrifying than any I’d ever seen. Not just watching
The Twilight Zone,
but in it.

With my own hand, I signed the papers for what they called “the procedure,” though it was my mother who filled them out.

My mother, a woman who believed that birth began at conception, had brought me to an abortion clinic. I, a woman who just seven weeks before had greeted word of pregnancy as the happiest news of my life, now slipped her feet into the stirrups.

I could only believe I had lost my mind. Then, for a while anyway, I did.

Stranger Things

A
FTER CLARICE AND
I bought Fletcher’s place—now named Smiling Hills—I started dropping by Plank Farm more often. At first this was just because we lived reasonably close now. I’d be passing through on the way to pick up Clarice after her classes—nights she worked late, and I didn’t like her to have to drive home alone—or it was strawberry season, or later, when the corn was coming in.

During the period of my animal husbandry studies at the university, I’d become fascinated with goats, and now we had established a small herd—a dozen, of a variety known as Adamellans, whose milk produced a particularly fine cheese. We kept just enough chickens to provide fresh eggs for the two of us, and because it had been a lifelong dream for Clarice, we bought her a horse, Jester.

We decided early on that our farm would specialize in only a few of the higher-end crops, and ones that didn’t take up so much land—since, unlike the Planks, we only had a few arable acres. Partly because Clarice loved them, but also because they made sense for our locale, strawberries were my chief focus other than the cheese, and because I had never tasted better strawberries than
those at Plank’s, I went to talk with Edwin about starting my own growing operation.

Many farmers wouldn’t want to share their expertise with a person who could be viewed as a competitor, but Edwin Plank had always been generous about sharing his knowledge with me. When I called him up to ask if I could stop by and discuss getting our beds started, he seemed not only willing to assist, but actually eager.

The basic concept of strawberry propagation was simple enough: as they grow, strawberry plants shoot out runners—little offshoots that live on after the original plant has petered out. These are called daughter plants. That’s where you got your new stock: from the daughters.

Any farmer can tell you it’s important to cut back the daughters. If you let them all develop, the bed will become too crowded, the plants will be stunted, and the berries will be sparse and small. To harvest a good crop of strawberries, Edwin Plank had told me, you must choose the five healthiest and best-looking daughter plants and let only those bloom and bear fruit the following season.

Most commercial growers rely on seed companies and nurseries to supply them with daughter plants every year, rather than going through the laborious process of selecting and propagating their own new generation of strawberry plants every year. But for our farm, I wanted to grow berries that were acclimated to our particular region—the New Hampshire and southern Maine coastal area, and to the soil conditions on the particular piece of land I was cultivating. It was for this reason—but also no doubt because I looked for any excuse to talk with Edwin Plank about our mutual passion for farming—that I’d set out to visit Plank’s Farm that day.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he said to me, when I showed up that afternoon. As he led me out to the greenhouse, there was a kind of excitement to his step. Or as much of that as a person like Edwin Plank ever revealed anyway.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ve got a little project going that might interest you. With that university diploma of yours and all, you could be just the girl for the job of taking it over.”

Although, unlike me, Edwin had never gone to school to study horticulture, he was an amateur plant scientist. Ever since he was a boy growing up on the farm, he told me, he was interested in the process of plant propagation.

Edwin had a natural understanding of how plants worked—the kind of education that didn’t come from books or classroom lectures. “I don’t believe I ever got over the kick of grafting a branch of one fruit onto another fruit tree,” he told me. “When other boys were out playing ball, I was doing experiments with different kinds of soil conditions and fertilizers, to improve the quality and yield of the produce.”

I’d been that kind of kid myself. I remembered a time my mother and brother and I had stopped by for strawberries—early July, as usual—when Edwin Plank had taken me out to the field where the corn was growing and explained how the ears are formed.

“The beautiful thing about corn, Dana,” he had told me, “is how every stalk is both male and female, all in one plant. The tassels are the male part—the father, you might say—that forms the pollen. The way nature works it, the pollen from the male tassel lands on the silk, which is the female part of the corn.

“Each strand of corn silk is actually a hollow tube connected to the undeveloped mother cob. The pollen travels down the silk to the cob, where it forms a single kernel. Each kernel has its own silk attached to it. Someone up there thought of everything, because they even made it so the silk is covered with a sticky substance that catches the pollen. To make sure it doesn’t just blow away.”

What a person could do, if he wanted to have a little fun—“he or she,” Edwin clarified, seeming to recognize even then, in my nine-year-old self, the potential of a future farmer—would be to gather the pollen off one variety of corn plant and sprinkle it over the silk of a different variety.

“You never know,” he said. “You could come up with your own whole new strain of corn. Could be the best there ever was.

“Why, just last year I read about a plant breeder who came up with a seedless cucumber,” he went on. “Son of a gun, if that wasn’t a good idea I don’t know what is.”

Even as a child, I loved the idea of inventing a new vegetable or fruit. The funny thing was that all my life, George had been going on about his big ideas that were going to make us rich—new products that never existed before, or songs he’d write that would turn into hits, or amazing inventions. None of them ever felt real.

But as the two of us stood in the field that day—Edwin in his brown overalls, me in my shorts and Keds, munching on a bag of peas Edwin had picked for me along the way—I couldn’t imagine anything I’d rather spend my time doing than collecting and redistributing corn pollen to see if I could actually succeed in doing what he talked about, starting a new breed of plant.

I was halfway through my twenties—and Edwin closing in on sixty probably—when he took me into the controlled environment of the greenhouse to show me his strawberry breeding project—undertaken in the greenhouse, he explained, to provide a controlled environment where the blossoms would not be cross-pollinated by the bees, as they would be out in the open. When a plant breeder was working on something like this, he told me, it was important to eliminate any variables that might affect the purity of the experiment.

“I don’t show these plants to many people,” he said. “You could say this is my secret laboratory.”

For more than a dozen years, he told me, he’d been trying to develop a new strain of strawberry—sweeter and more flavorful than all the rest. The way he did this was to identify the best berries of every given growing season. First he’d mark the plant that had produced the tastiest, juiciest berries of the season. Then he would carefully dig it up, along with its daughter plants, and transplant them into a marked bed in his unheated greenhouse. The next spring, when blossoms began to develop, he’d carefully snip the stamens—the pollen-producing parts of the flower—off the blossoms he wanted to hand-pollinate, and discard them.

Then he’d pick several blossoms from the plants he wanted to use as fathers—the plants that had displayed desirable traits like large, attractive fruit or resistance to disease, and twirl them over the pistils, or the sticky female parts of the mother plants. His goal was to combine the best traits of the mother plants
with the best traits of the father plant to develop a new genetic cross, a whole new variety of berry.

When the new strawberries formed and ripened from this cross-breeding experiment, he would select the largest and sweetest ones, then mash them and strain them to remove the seeds. He’d plant these seeds in flats in his greenhouse, and when they were large enough, transplant them to his special beds outside, separate from his other strawberry beds.

He would mark those plants, watch the fruit, test for sweetness, and if they were unusually good—which by and large they were—he’d do the whole thing all over again the following year, improving on the quality of his plants with every generation.

You could dig up the daughters and transplant them into a nearby bed, or one a thousand miles away. But each daughter plant was an exact genetic duplicate of the parent plant.

“What I’ve ended up with here,” he said, indicating a patch of plants about the size of the bedroom Clarice and I shared, meaning not very big at all—“are probably the best berries you’ve ever tasted.”

He didn’t sell the berries from those plants. The plants and what they produced were strictly for propagation purposes. “But one day,” he said, “I’d like to think the variety will be perfected to the point we can take some samples down to the university and show them to the experts.”

I had spent four years with the university types who studied plant science, of course. They did their work in controlled conditions, handling the plants with gloves on, measuring things like sugar-to-acid ratios with highly technical equipment. But they weren’t farmers like Edwin, born with the instinct for growing things.

“You know what I hope?” he said. “I’d like to believe that one of these days, you’ll open up your Ernie’s A-1 seed catalog and there’ll be a full-page spread about this great new strain of strawberry plant they’re offering, bred on a small family farm in the state of New Hampshire.”

He was getting closer, he told me. But he wasn’t as young as he used to be,
and this was a job that needed some youthful energy and spirit. It might turn out that perfecting this new variety of berry would take more growing seasons than Edwin had left in him, he told me. So he wanted to know—would I be willing to take over the job of propagating the plants?

“You never know what could happen,” Edwin said. “You could find yourself owning the patent on a brand-new variety of strawberry plant. Stranger things have happened.”

Hearing this, I might have been reminded of George, perpetually waiting for his ship to come in. Except Edwin was nothing like George.

I said I’d love to work on his project, of course—moved by Edwin’s willingness to trust me with his precious plants, the breed he’d spent so many years developing.

I thanked him for his faith in me.

“I’m not worried,” he said. “I can tell what kind of girl you are.”

So I drove off that day with precious cargo in the back of my truck: three flats of Edwin Plank’s lovingly tended daughter plants—“my good daughters,” he called them—headed for Smiling Hills Farm.