The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (15 page)

Nobody spoke of what we’d left behind. My parents were brokenhearted, but they were military. They were also busy with a new baby: scarcely two weeks after Gail’s death, my brother Philip had been born, a robust baby who weighed over eight pounds. The nurses had to physically break my mother’s water during childbirth because she had a double membrane.

“You weren’t ever going to lose that baby, darling,” one nurse told her, “no matter what you did.”

I had turned fourteen just two weeks before packing up
my room in Kansas to leave. Donald was eleven years old and still needed more action than he got. On our cross-country drive, he’d reach across Philip to give me an Indian burn on the arm or punch the top of my leg whenever he was bored, which was most of the time, and I’d punch him back. By the end of our first full day of driving, bruises bloomed along our thighs. We couldn’t escape each other or do much else because we were wedged into place. Dad’s combination of military efficiency and pack rat mentality meant that we were prepared for every possible emergency; at the last minute, he’d even insisted on stocking up at the Fort Leavenworth commissary.

“You never know when we’ll need food,” he told my mother.

Mom rolled her eyes. “We’ve got enough canned goods in this car to survive a nuclear war,” she said.

We had also packed our pets. Dad had sold his basement stock of gerbils to a pet store in Kansas City, but we had brought Samantha, a Siamese cat, and Beau, a black miniature poodle. The cat howled continuously from her travel crate tucked among the boxes in the back of the station wagon, and the poodle kept trying to scrabble over the rear seat like a drowning passenger from the
Titanic
after the last departing lifeboat. Beau was a strong case for pet Prozac; he was so anxious that he chewed on the dashboard of the car anytime we left him unattended. By the time we reached Massachusetts, the metal bones of the dashboard were emerging from the last tattered bits of plastic skin.

More than once on that trip, Mom referred to us as the “Fort Leavenworth hillbillies.” “The only thing we don’t have in this car is a banjo,” she said. But Dad drove silently and
steadily forward, a cigarette tucked into one corner of his mouth, only occasionally swerving as he reached behind the seat to swat Donald at sixty miles per hour.

M
Y FATHER
had flown to Massachusetts a few months before our departure from Kansas and bought our new home without any of us seeing it first. His new orders were to head up the Naval Science Department at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, Long Island, but Mom wouldn’t let him move us to New York State. She used me as an excuse. At fourteen, I was “getting to be quite the handful,” she pronounced. “Just the right age to get into Trouble with those merchant Marines.” (Whenever Mom said “trouble” as if it were capitalized, I knew she meant “pregnant.”)

Dad agreed to commute, spending only weekends with us while completing his final two years in the Navy to earn his twenty-year pension. He’d had it with military life, he told us. He couldn’t support the war in Vietnam and didn’t want to travel his entire life. He was disappointed that his last assignment was a teaching post rather than something more active. On the bright side, this would give him a chance to buy a farm and start his gerbil empire. His plan to make it as a gerbil farmer was still largely in his own mind, perhaps because if he had tried to describe it to us, there would have been mutiny. All we knew was that Mom was finally getting her farm.

Dad had considered buying property close to Victor Schwentker’s in Brant Lake, New York. But my mother, with raw memories of living in rural Maine as a child, nixed this idea when she discovered that the wind chill factor in Brant
Lake could send temperatures plummeting to fifty degrees below zero. Dad sought another location within a reasonable drive of an international airport—an important feature, given that his plan involved shipping gerbils all over the world. Mom had relatives in Massachusetts, so he finally settled on Bradley International Airport outside of Hartford, Connecticut, as his gerbil epicenter. He searched for an affordable farm in a steadily expanding radius from there, and at last found what he wanted in West Brookfield, Massachusetts.

We exited the Massachusetts Turnpike in Sturbridge and took a back road off a back road off a back road. It was midafternoon, two weeks before Christmas, and snow was falling in lazy, moth-sized flakes.

“Isn’t this great?” Dad asked, maneuvering the Station Wagon of Death around another slick, hairpin turn. “This place isn’t even on the way to anywhere.”

“You sure know how to pick ’em,” Mom said, lighting another cigarette.

West Brookfield looked like a storybook village, with a classic town common complete with a bandstand and brightly lit Christmas tree. Dad had already studied up on local history; now he launched into tour guide mode to drum up enthusiasm among his flagging troops.

“This is one of the oldest towns in New England,” he said. “That Congregational church traces its history back to the Quaboag Plantation in 1717. What do you think of that, kids?”

We troops were silent. As we coasted through the center of town, Dad pointed out
Ye
Olde Tavern, a rambling white house with black shutters, and said it was the second-oldest tavern in Massachusetts, with wood buildings dating back to
1760. “Town taverns were the center of Colonial life,” he marveled. “George Washington stayed right here at this one, during the very first year of his presidency in 1789. President John Adams stayed here, too. I can’t believe this tavern is still serving meals, can you?”

Gloomily, I stared through the windshield, shoulders hunched and arms folded tightly against my body to ward off any unexpected attacks from Donald, who at the moment was busy unraveling threads from Philip’s favorite blanket while Philip watched, silent and wide-eyed.

We circled around town to view a tiny stone library, a big white town hall, a diner, a drugstore, and several more churches as Dad continued his schoolboy report. The lone sour note was a state marker on Route 9 commemorating the deaths of the first settlers “On Indian Lands Called Quabaug. Attacked by Indians in 1675.” This monument, Dad told us somberly, was erected in memory of settlers slaughtered during King Philip’s War.

“The Indians attacked every one of Massachusetts’s eight towns along the Connecticut River,” he said. “Many of the settlers who survived fled the area entirely.”

I wanted to follow them. My father was right: West Brookfield wasn’t even on the way to anywhere! Not a movie theater or swimming pool or cute Army soldier in sight. Resentment sat in my throat, thick and hot.

“I’m bored,” I announced.

“Bored? How can you be bored?” Dad chided. “There’s so much to see! And it’s all new! This is our new home! It’s exciting!”

“You’re just tired,” Mom said. “We’re all tired.” She gave my father a look, and he stopped talking.

We crossed the broad, half-frozen Quaboag River on a two-lane bridge that rattled beneath the car. From there we made a steep ascent along the aptly named Long Hill Road. At the crest of the hill, overlooking a sloping field across the street that seemed to plunge straight into the silver ribbon of the Quaboag River far below, sat our new home, a Gothic Revival farmhouse with a military-green paint job that emphasized its stern, square shoulders.

“This house looks like a prison,” I said.

“It’s a classic,” Dad protested. “An antique.”

“What are those things on the doors?” Donald asked.

“Hex signs,” Mom answered immediately. She knew about things like witches and psychics and astrology and aliens. I noticed that she was sitting up straighter in her seat, staring at the house.

“Are hex signs good or bad if they’re on a house?” Donald asked. He was kicking my mother’s seat, which ordinarily would have made her yell.

“They’re meant to protect your house from evil spirits,” Mom said.

“It doesn’t look like they’re working,” I said. “This place is a dump.”

Dad slowed the car to let us take a good long look at our future. Set above the road on a small rise, the huge house towered above the car, its tiny windows squinting down at us. Across the river, I could make out a row of crooked wooden buildings that once had been shoe and box factories, derelict
remains of an industrial age that had relied on railroads and boats to move goods from here along the Quaboag River to Boston.

“The good thing,” Mom said at last, “is that this place has to be better on the inside than it looks from out here.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“Maybe it’s haunted,” Donald said.

“Maybe you’re stupid,” I said.

Dad pulled into the driveway, where a hearse was parked in front of the carport. “Well,” he said, stubbing his cigarette out into the ashtray, “that’s something.”

“There has to be an explanation,” Mom said.

We all sat there looking at the hearse and trying to think of one. There was a small symphony of sounds in the car: Philip sucking on his pacifier, Donald kicking at the seat, the anxious panting of the poodle, and the occasional pitiful howl from the Siamese. Dad and Mom each smoked another cigarette as we continued to stare at the hearse. It was painted a grayish purple color not yet named by man, and it had hex signs and flowers all over it.

“Okay,” Dad declared at last with a smart, military tap on the steering wheel. “I’m going in. You stay here and guard the car. There’s probably some damn flower children camped in our house.”

“Hippies,” Mom agreed. The low opinion of dirty hippies held by both of my parents was one of the most enduring bonds of their marriage.

I pressed my face closer to the window, watching Dad approach the house full tilt in true Navy officer style, knees high,
arms pumping to propel himself through the deep snow around the house to a door I couldn’t see.

Hippies! This was the most thrilling possibility that had been presented to me in two thousand miles. On Fort Leavenworth, there weren’t any hippies—they probably would have been shot on sight—but I knew all about them. I was only fourteen, but I would have hitchhiked to Woodstock that August if my mother hadn’t threatened to sell my horse if I hit the road. For weeks after that, though, I had walked around the house bursting into frequent throaty, heartfelt renditions of “We Shall Overcome.”

At one point before leaving Kansas, I had also announced to my parents that I was a pacifist and ready to lie down in front of tanks to stop the war in Vietnam.

“Did you know,” I accused, “that Vietnam has claimed thirty-three thousand and six hundred fifty lives? That’s more deaths than your war in Korea, Dad!”

“I don’t mind if you’re a pacifist,” Mom told me. “Just be a cheerful pacifist, that’s all I ask. Nobody likes a whiner. And for God’s sake sing something else. Even Pete Seeger must get tired of that song.”

Surprisingly, Dad had come to my defense. “I don’t blame Holly for not supporting the war,” he said. “There’s no justification for it. What are we going to accomplish besides killing a lot of people and dropping a lot of expensive bombs?”

“So why don’t you protest, Dad?” I’d asked. “It would mean a lot more if you stood up against the war than a million college students.”

Dad had considered me for a moment, his face impassive,
masked. “It’s my duty to serve,” he said. “I’m not going to tell the men I teach, men who are trying to do their best by this country, that I think what they’re doing is wrong.”

Now Dad was coming back toward the car. Sadly, there were no hippies in the house. “Somebody must’ve abandoned that vehicle,” he announced. “Everything’s fine inside. You can unpack the car, kids.”

We saluted him, because it always made him so mad, and went inside.

The movers had delivered our furniture and boxes. The dining room chairs were lined along the walls as if for a dance in a church basement. The couch floated in the middle of the living room, and the tables and lamps stood about as randomly as if someone had dropped them from the sky. It had snowed inside the family room through holes in the farmhouse walls, and the boxes and furniture were powdered white. Soft drifts of snow edged the walls like rolled-up bed-sheets.

“I guess one thing we need to do is get that snow out of the house,” Mom said, then closed the family room door so she wouldn’t have to think about that yet.

That night, we made dinner by opening cans from the dozens of boxes we’d carried in from the car. “Isn’t it great that we have something to eat right here on hand?” asked Dad, a fervent aficionado of Dinty Moore’s canned beef stew. “We don’t have to go anywhere! Think of the money we’re saving. Why, it wouldn’t even matter if this little snow turned into a blizzard. We’d be fine here for days. Maybe weeks.”

“Months,” Mom said, spooning a jar of applesauce into little Philip.

We were just finishing our various cans of dinner when the poodle started barking in a newly deranged way. We all got up and ran into the front hall. Beau was poised at the bottom of the staircase, trembling, his head cocked at a lump moving under the stair runner. A small trail of pee showed which way he’d run into the hall.