My father had felt this way many times about the farm in Nebraska, but he had never heard someone who spoke quite like Marigold. He had poetic thoughts like this, too, and listening to Marigold made him think that he ought to have the courage to start saying some of them out loud.
“You like the shifts on the land more than the shifts in the city,” he said.
She thought about this. “I guess I do.” The bright way she looked at him made him glad he’d said it.
When they stepped off the streetcar, Marigold’s long hair whipped around her head. She lifted the blue scarf from her shoulders and tied it around the billowing brown and blond strands.
The ocean pulled at my father. If the sky here was smaller than he expected, the ocean was bigger. The waves rose and crashed with a roar; the water seemed both darker and more sparkling than it had in any movie or photograph. It was loud and powerful and riotous in a way that made his heart race. But the air did just what he’d always thought it would, filling up his chest like it belonged there, like it was returning home.
They took off their shoes. My father dug his toes into the sand and found it warm on top and cool below. He rolled up his dungarees. Marigold knotted her dress above her knees. They waded in. The water was bracingly cold, surprising him, but Marigold didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t believe he was finally here.
“That’s where our land is,” Marigold yelled through the wind. He shielded his eyes and followed the line of her finger north. In the distance, beneath a trace of fog, a stretch of golden cliffs stood tall despite the battering of the waves.
“On the cliff?” At that point, it was impossible for him to imagine a farm by the sea.
“On the cliff,” she said. Her hand found his and squeezed, and as he told me this, he always squeezed mine again, too, and I was right there with them, looking north toward the land by the sea.
FOR THREE YEARS,they lived and worked together at Freedom Farm. The farm had a disorderly beauty that spoke to my father. The soil required the kind of steadfast attention that reminded him, happily, of his home, but there were so many surprises, too: the bunkhouse with its cots that glowed in the dark, the colorful banners that fluttered from the trees, the spiky wildflowers that looked like they’d been dropped from outer space, the purple tractor with its crackling radio, the distant roar of the ocean, the thick and romantic fog, the bluff-top meadows of wind-stamped shrubs, the fancy hens with their pale blue eggs.
Marigold was unlike anyone he’d ever met. She believed wholeheartedly in the Free Movement, and thought that the path to world harmony would be found through binding person to person in a string of kindnesses and generosity, giving and receiving and passing on, a sharing of warmth (like stories,my father thought, remembering those ancient myths of the sea, passed on for generations, that had brought him such relief as a child). Marigold loved the ocean, and her skin seemed always speckled with salt, her blond hair just a little bit wet. She could hold her breath underwater longer than my father had known was humanly possible; just when he grew frantic, she would surface, calm and satiated as an animal after a meal. When he watched her swim, he thought of the merrows in the Irish folktales he used to read with his mother—mermaids whose true home would always be the sea.
When he missed his family, the big sky of Nebraska, his quiet childhood bedroom with its filmy white curtains that billowed at the slightest whisper of breeze, Marigold’s kindness buoyed him. In truth, he was not sure how he felt about the Freedom Collective—Louie and the others were welcoming in a boisterous, zealous way, but living among so many people felt unnatural to him. As much as he loved living on the coast, he missed the quiet thrum of family life as he’d known it. Freedom, he was learning, did not mean the same thing to everyone. In the early hours of morning before the rest of the group was awake, he helped a neighboring farmer with carpentry work. Someday, he thought, it would be time to move on from Freedom Farm, and when that day came, he wanted to have some cash saved. But he knew that he would stay with the group as long as Marigold was happy. He loved her.
After a few visits to San Francisco, my father traded his city shifts for farm shifts, content to stay up north. More often than not, Marigold stayed with him. She was not always animated and talkative. Sometimes the light behind her eyes flickered and dimmed. Her spirit grew heavy, each hard-won smile seeming to surface from a dwindling supply of joy. The color drained from her face. When my father saw the early signs of these mood shifts, he learned to take her by the hand and walk with her along the beach. His silent company seemed to help. The sea air dampened her skin, making it shine.
Sometimes he took her for long drives in one of the slowlyrusting cars that were always parked along the side of the tractor barn. He’d pack her favorite sandwiches, hummus and cucumber on Free Bread. She liked listening to the Byrds as the car’s wheels stuttered over the crumbling roads. They drove past small, shaggy farms and stopped for lunch on hidden beach coves. In Osha, my father traded Freedom Farm eggs for fresh blueberry muffins from the café. In front of the co-op, he found a soft, knitted shawl in the bin of clothes labeledFREE. He draped it around Marigold’s beautiful neck and kissed her. They walked the dirt road that ended at the beach, passing cottages with surfboards on their porches and clotheslines bowed by beach towels and the violet-colored schoolhouse with the sign, stuck in the dirt out front, that readLITTLE EARTH. He could not imagine this part of the country ever not seeming remarkable to him. Nebraska no longer claimed him in the way this land by the sea did. He felt as enchanted as one of the characters in the myths he so loved.
“Look,” my mother said one day as they drove. My father turned to her, relieved. It was the first time she’d spoken in hours. She pointed through the window and he pulled the car onto a patch of weedy dirt on the side of the road. Even before the car had completely stopped, she’d opened the door.
My father stepped out and circled the car to join her at a split-rail fence. A field rose gently away from them. On it, a handful of cows grazed on the sort of scrubby brown grass that would have made Nebraska stock turn up their noses. At the end of the field there was a red barn painted with a huge white peace sign.
There was yearning in the deep breath that Marigold took then. “This looks like a happy home,” she said.
My father felt his heartbeat quicken. He had been waiting for her to give him some sign that she was ready to leave the Freedom Collective and start a different sort of life with him. After three years of carpentry jobs and living for free at Freedom Farm, he had saved eight thousand dollars.
He managed to take his eyes off her face long enough to look at the farm before looking back at her. “Is this the sort of placeyou’dlike to call home?” he asked.
Her brow wrinkled. For a moment my father felt disappointment looming. But then she put her arm around his waist and drew him closer to her. “Wouldn’t it be perfect,” she said, “if we lived in a place like this with a view of the sea?”
THE NIGHT BEFOREthe bank’s auction, after he’d walked Horseshoe Cliff, my father lay awake thinking of stories his grandfather had told him. The bank believed Horseshoe Cliff was like a fruit that was flecked with rot, that only the most desperate would seek juice below its puckered skin. After walking the land, my father didn’t feel desperate, but he knew that the water from the well would not be enough to farm the land at Horseshoe Cliff. In the morning, hours before the auction, he called his grandfather.
Dry farming, his grandfather told him, involved tilling and pressing the soil during the rainy season so it formed a crust that held in the moisture accumulated during the wettest months. It was risky business to be at the mercy of nature, most successfulwhen farming low-water crops that could survive on the moisture provided by the coast’s summer fog when the land below was driest.
“Potatoes,” his grandfather recommended. “Tomatoes. Onions. Garlic. Sunchokes. Most greens. Pumpkins. Watermelons, believe it or not. Oh, and apples, sure. They won’t be big or pretty, but see if they’re not twice as flavorful as any irrigated orchard pickings. The water deficiency stresses the fruit, concentrating the sugars and nutrients. Small but mighty fruit is what you’ll grow. ‘Good for pies,’ your grandmother is saying in my other ear.”
By the time my father hung up the phone, he was already pacing out the orchard in his mind, mentally tilling the sandy soil until it became a sponge that pulled water from secret depths and the fog above. He envisioned the neat rows of an ambitious garden, the first green sprouts striving toward the sun. Barrels that could store the winter rain. A farm stand by the road where anything more than they needed could be given away for free to those less fortunate.
My father was young and full of hope for the future. With the clouds of my mother’s latest dark mood parting, he would not allow himself to see anything but happiness ahead.
