I am in the leaves, gasping in pain, and then Old Caleb is carrying me back to the house, my body thrown over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and then I am in the kitchen by the fire, Mary dabbing ointment along the jagged river canyons of my skin while I shout and twitch in agony. Even through the pain and the fear and the shock, I can’t help but notice that the ointment smells like bacon grease.
“I need stitches! A doctor! Call an ambulance, right now!”
The two boys are sitting at the kitchen table, looking at their hands. Maeve is down the hallway, sobbing behind a closed door.Mama, Mama, Mama.Like she feels the pain herself.
And then there is Mary, pulling something out of a folded leather pouch. A needle, yes, and a thread so thick it almost looks like twine.
“Hold her still,” she tells Old Caleb. “This is going to hurt.”
8
The night I met Caleb Mills,he was sitting in a folding chair for our church group. He held a flimsy paper plate steady with one hand and was picking at a mound of soft cheese with the other. He glanced up at me. He was cute. The kind of guy who looked like a farmer’s son even while he was sitting in a church basement in Cambridge, wearing a button-down shirt and khaki pants. We made eye contact, then I sat down and we didn’t look at each other again.
The next meeting, he asked for my name.
The meeting after that, he asked where I was from.
The fourth meeting: Did I want to get coffee sometime?
That’s how slowly our relationship moved at the beginning. Dating in my religion works that way: it feels like you’re rolling very slowly down a very long runway—then right as you think you’re going to die for lack of momentum, you find yourself lifting up, up, up, spinning wildly toward the sun in a sudden aerial ascent.
On our first date, Caleb bought me a scone. He told me about his family, his fancy political father and his soon-to-be-fancy-political brothers, all of them senators-in-waiting, like a little line of princes.Jack, John, George, Henry, Caleb. Such a perfectly American list that I would later wonder if their father had allowed one of his political consultants to advise on names with highest rates of electability. His mother had always wanted a daughter, Caleb told me, but instead she got five boys. He smiled ruefully at that, and I thought:I would take five of those.
In exchange, I told him about my dead father, my three-legged family. He learned about Abigail and her fiancé. He winced when I saidBryce,and that inspired a rare gift from me: a genuine laugh. Then I told him about the mountain range that circled my town, how rarefied the air felt at such high elevation. You can’t help but feel like you’re living closer to heaven.
“So you don’t want to stay on the East Coast after graduation, then.” Caleb was from the dust bowls of California. Like me, he thought the lifestyle inherent to living in a city was unnatural. A world meant for gerbils, not people. “Where do you want to go, then?”
I paused. Where did I want to go?
“I want a farm. With chickens. I want to live near my mother. I want a view of the mountains from my bedroom window, and I’d like to study theology. Part-time, of course, and only after the children are grown.”
This was pretty much exactly what every good Christian girl back home claimed to want, except for the theology bit. I’d added that part for myself.
Caleb didn’t say anything. Just cocked his head and gave me a strangely wistful smile, like he was already feeling nostalgic for the moment we currently found ourselves in.
“How about you?” I said, suddenly anxious. “What do you want?”
He looked shyly into his cappuccino cup. “I don’t know.” He shrugged, stared thoughtfully past me. “What you said sounds nice.”
On our second date, Caleb took me to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the North End, and I realized he was capital-Rrich. Over eighty-dollar plates of truffle pasta and cold glasses of lemon water, he said, “I’ve been thinking about that farm nonstop since we met.” It was an innocuous statement, yet his face was suddenly bright red.
I reached for my water. I couldn’t decide if I loved the taste of truffle or hated it. “What farm?”
“The one you want. With the chickens. And the mountains?”
“Oh,” I said, fingers paused around the cool glass. “Of course. What about it?”
Now that I’d learned more about Caleb, the idea of a farm seemed like amateur hour for dreaming big. And anyways, the girls back home talked about farms only because it was distasteful for them to say what they really wanted: to be like Caleb. Wealthy.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “You could teach me everything you know, and I—well. I’m a quick learner.”
He was blushing so furiously that I might have worried he was having an allergic reaction, if I wasn’t so preoccupied with the present issue at hand.
Teach. What did Caleb mean by teach? I never said I knew how to farm, yet here we were, talking about living in the middle of nowhere, teaching each other how to—what? Rake dirt? Milk a cow? Cut a chicken’s head off? The way Caleb was staring at me with that intense, pained look in his face—he clearly needed an answer, but an answer to what?
Relax,I told myself.This is just a moment. It doesn’t really matter.
Here is what did matter: he was young and handsome and wealthy. Most important of all: he liked me. Really liked me. He said I was fascinating and funny and beautiful. No one had ever thought I was any of those things. I’d spent my whole life alone, floating like a specter at the far edges of elementary school friendships, then glaring at the huddled cliques I walked past in middle school, then openly denouncing them in high school. And here, suddenly, was a fundamentally likable person, somehow liking me.
