The Good Daughters (26 page)

Life on Earth

I
DROVE OVER
to Plank Farm. Though no contract had ever existed for our strawberry propagation project, I had never questioned that half of the money for the licensing of our new strain belonged to Edwin Plank, but I had other reasons for going to see Ruth. It seemed about time the two of us talked about what had happened all those years back, when for no fault of ours, we got each other’s families instead of our own.

It was October, hurricane season, and as I pulled up the drive I saw her sitting on the old front porch, looking out over the fields. She poured me a glass of wine, as if she’d been expecting me. Less explanation was necessary than I’d anticipated. I’d figured it all out by now.

When she told me that despite her resistance, the remaining Planks had decided to sell the farm, it seemed like a particularly good moment to let her know I had a check for a hundred thousand dollars in my pocket. It turned out Ruth had recently come into some cash unexpectedly, too. That, combined with the money from Clarice’s life insurance policy, allowed us to counter Victor Patucci’s offer with a better one of our own. The family accepted.

We ended up renting out our sisters’ houses, after they got their cash and moved away. (For St. Pete, Florida. Las Vegas, Nevada. And in Winnie’s case, for a succession of RV campgrounds and Walmart parking lots across North America.)

Not without sadness, I sold Fletcher Simpson’s place and moved with my goats to Plank Farm. It turned out that years before, when Edwin had carved out those one-acre plots on his land, he had designated a sixth for me. That’s where I built the cabin where I make my home now, just up the hill from Ruth.

I run the farm now. Victor has moved on. Our brother, Ray, lives in the group home, where one small good sign of a little progress is his having recently started playing the harmonica again.

Ruth and he did eventually get a chance to talk about what happened so long before. He had always remembered the fireman who rescued him and his mother the night of the storm but it wasn’t until years later, when Connie came to Quadra Island, that Connie had revealed to him the part of the story that broke his heart. He’d always been different and mercurial. I suppose the loss of Ruth, in many ways his touchstone to reality, did him in.

Sometimes, now, when I go to visit Ray, I’ll hear the strains of some old tune coming from the back step and there he is, oblivious to whatever weather the state of New Hampshire may be offering us that day—including snow. Often the song is “Shenandoah.”

Ruth makes her paintings, and does her art therapy, and sometimes her kids and grandchildren come to visit and during busy times like strawberry season and pumpkin time they all pitch in at the farm stand. Ruth’s the one in charge of that operation, of course, same as always. There is a good man with whom she keeps company now, though she has no need to move in with him, she tells me.

Our father lives out his life at the Birch Glen Home, where we visit him—sometimes alone, sometimes together—a few times a week, and sometimes we sneak him away for the afternoon or the weekend, and bring him to the farm again to walk the rows with us. Summer evenings, in corn season, we boil a big pot on the stove and drop a baker’s dozen of ears in the water, and afterward,
when we eat them, we roll the cob on the stick of butter. It was the Plank family custom to butter corn this way, Ruth tells me, and now it’s my custom too.

It was on one of our father’s visits home to the farm—a night the Silver Queen had just come in—that an extraordinary thing happened.

He had been sitting in his old place as he always did evidently, at the head of the table, with a steaming cob of corn in front of him. He didn’t pick it up, just looked at the plate. He started to shake his head, and I realized there were tears in his eyes.

“It’s OK, Dad,” Ruth told him.

“You were a good father,” I said. “You were the one person who saw us both the way we really were. Not how everyone else wanted us to be.”

“Daughters,” he said. “What can a man have, better than good daughters?” Then he picked up his corn.

LATER WE DROVE HIM BACK
to Birch Glen. Then the two of us, Ruth and I, sat on the porch, looking out over the farm. Neither of us said anything or needed to. Nights like these, I know I am part of a family, though not the one I started out with, precisely, or the one I’d expected. I love this piece of land and the people with whom I share it, though in general I prefer plants and goats, dogs and chickens, to people.

Concerning the rest: the Clarice strawberry has gone on to become one of the most popular varieties ever sold at Ernie’s A-1 Seeds, a perpetual favorite. Not long ago, I was interviewed by a graduate student from the university where Clarice once taught. This woman was working on a thesis with some catchy title along the lines of “Effective Use of Daughter Plants in the Evolution of Superior Hybrid Strawberry Species.”

It was her hope, the young botanist admitted, that this particular work of scholarly research would support her upcoming application for a teaching position at the university. I might have said some things to her then about faculty politics and factors other than those of an academic nature which could have
bearing on her professional future. But I hope that times have changed, that things are better now.

Regarding her field of specialty, I told this young woman how, like my father, I had always loved the study of plant propagation. There is a perfect symmetry to nature and natural selection, I said, brutal though it may be. Survival of the fittest. Some very beautiful examples of life on earth—my brother comes to mind here, as does Clarice—do not endure, for reasons that may be utterly beyond their control. Others—and I am one, and so is the woman I now name as my sister, who is as dear to me as any living being—survive against all odds. Sturdier stock perhaps, or simply luckier, if you can call us that.

MUCH OF THIS NOVEL WAS WRITTEN
in a log cabin on a ranch in the state of Wyoming, with the support of the UCross Foundation and its staff, to whom I owe enormous gratitude. Though my story is set in the granite state of New Hampshire, I was filled with newfound love of Wyoming as I wrote, which is why I decided to send Dana and Clarice on a road trip through the Bighorn Mountains to Yellowstone—a trip I made and loved during my time at UCross.

My thanks to my early readers—Andrea Askowitz and Gail Venable. Wonderful friends, wonderful editors.

Though my story is an invention, inspired only very loosely by a couple of news stories from recent years, the farm and farm stand operation that I used as my model for Plank’s does in fact exist. It is Tuttle’s Red Barn in Dover Point, New Hampshire—America’s oldest family farm, and a favorite destination of my own childhood on the New Hampshire seacoast, in the days when home-grown organic produce was not yet in fashion and there was no other place like Tuttle’s.

Throughout the writing of this book, I drew on the knowledge and experience of Rebecca Tuttle Schultze—an eleventh-generation Tuttle. My friend
Becky—who used to drive the tractor for her father, Hugh, and count out the bakers’ dozens of corn, and haul irrigation pipe, and renovate strawberry beds, and set out the bouquets of zinnias, when she and I were girls in neighboring towns—oversaw every page of this manuscript to make sure I got the farming part right, along with the history of her beloved Red Sox. I have yet to ask Becky a question about growing vegetables or doing farm chores that she was unable to answer, though I treasure her friendship most of all for what she knows about the human species.

I am indebted to my agent, David Kuhn, for wise and farsighted representation and guidance, assisted by Jessi Cimafonte and Billy Kingsland at Kuhn Projects. Likewise, my thanks to Judi Farkas, who weighs in with rare insight from the other coast. Warm appreciation as well to Emily Krump, Tavia Kowalchuk, and the wonderfully supportive team at William Morrow.

My editor, Jennifer Brehl, did something with this manuscript that went beyond anything I had known before in the editing of a work of fiction. There is evidence of her red pen on every page here—occasionally more red ink than black—and always her work makes me a better writer. To Jennifer goes deepest gratitude, deepest respect, as well as deep affection.

Finally, for four years now, a quiet voice of loving support has remained a constant in my ear, even when I failed to hear or listen well. To David Schiff, my love always.