thing, needing our help, then emerging after a hard winter a self-styled sourdough, flaunting her newfound skills to us, who’d always lived here. I could see Karen weighing the whole force of Helen against the possibility of providing for our family. Her bootheel rapped the floor. It could fail, of course it could. But what Karen liked best was a project likely to fail. My love never could resist difficulty, and I never could resist her.
Karen looked at me. “Well, Lily?” she asked. “What do you want to do?” But it wasn’t a matter of what I wanted to do. I’d already synchronized myself like a watch to her desire. Perley searched Karen’s thigh for a place to nurse, so she scooped him over to me with one hand because he was that small. I took his nothing weight and I held my left breast like feeding my boy a sandwich. Karen was ready, and I was ready to please her. I agreed to throw our lot in with Helen Conley.
* * *
Perley was three months old in April, when we moved to Helen’s land. Three months old, holding his head up, demanding to be held facing forward so that he wouldn’t miss a thing. We didn’t bring much with us because we didn’t have much to bring. All our clothes and all Perley’s diapers fit into two big garbage bags. Besides that, we brought Karen’s toolbox, brimming with chisels. Our rubber boots. A splitting axe and a hatchet. Two shovels, one flat-bottomed, one sharp. The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, by J. I. Rodale and Staff, 1970 edition. Karen’s stack of ElfQuest. Packed it all easily into one truckload and drove the five miles to Helen’s place and confronted the long driveway, and at the top was Helen, eager and trying to hide it.
There wasn’t much up there, not at first. You could see the freshwater spring seeping from beneath the roots of an elderberry, someone’s effort to catch it in a cast-iron kettle and a plastic bucket. Besides that, there was Helen’s tiny camper up in the woods, and the duck shed in a clearing below it. The firepit, where we’d slaughtered drakes the previous fall, had now become some kind of processing area for small game, the traffic cones we’d left there stacked neatly near a flat stone and a five-gallon bucket. The ducks met our truck, falling all over one another, beating their wings and cackling. “Laughing at us already,” Karen said. I unpacked Perley from his car seat and he swung his arms at the ducks, who quieted to pick for bugs in the gravel. Karen stuck out her hand to shake Helen’s, but Helen’s hands were full. She’d already unloaded both of our garbage bags and was lifting out Karen’s toolbox, the first volume of ElfQuest balanced on top.
“Didn’t take you for being into escapist literature,” Helen said to Karen.
“You should read them,” Karen said. “You’re so into living by your wits, survival skills, you might be inspired.”
That first night, Helen cooked for us at the firepit, dandelion greens and duck eggs mixed together in one pan. “To family!” she toasted, bypassing any mention of friendship, of basic compatibility. What followed were heady times, wine and gin. For a week straight, we stayed up late around the campfire each night, singing Perley to sleep with his raucous lullaby, the one about the shipwreck where everyone drowns. Karen sanded and polished her set of dice, and we gambled cheaply. We rolled and called out. Snake Eyes, we called. Dog Paws, the Necklace, Cut Moon. We set up target practice with the .22. Helen’s welcome was as single-minded as everything else about her. At dice, she bought us all in. Each night, she cooked dinner at the outdoor burner. She insisted we move into her camouflaged camper, with its graffiti from some forgotten feud. Meanwhile, she climbed past the camper up to the ridge, where she set up a wall tent to live in.
We hauled in truckloads of compost. Uphill from the firepit we cleared trees and stair-stepped the hillside with deep black garden beds. In the afternoons while Perley slept in the shade of a dogwood, I planted peas, onions, potatoes, carrots, and kale. My grandma had loved asparagus, and her patch still came back every year right where she’d planted it by the front steps of her trailer, long vacant. On Helen’s land that spring, I started an asparagus patch, knowing full well that when