Lauren Groff: Arcadia

When Bit turns, everyone is looking at his father.

Abe grins at them, the ones who can’t play music, the four dozen left behind. They seem so few. Abe calls loudly, All righty, everybody. Are you ready to work your bones to sawdust and shards?

Yes, they shout. Bit wanders back to Hannah, and rests his head against her hip. She blocks the wind and warms his face with her heat.

Motor Pool, you ready to go out into the wilds of New York and salvage and steal and sell your sperm and blood to buy what we need to do this?

Hells, yes! shouts Peanut, and behind him, Wonder Bill and Tarzan pump their fists.

Womenfolk, are you ready to clean and polish and varnish and scrape and sand and take care of the kidlets and operate the Bakery and Soy Dairy and Laundry and cook and clean and chop wood and do the everyday stuff we need done to keep we Free People going strong while all this work’s happening?

The women cheer, and way above Bit’s head, Astrid mutters to Hannah in her strange lilt, As if it is not what we already do, already. Bit looks away. When Astrid speaks, she shows her teeth, and they are so yellow and crooked he feels he’s looking at something private.

All you Pregnant Ladies from the Henhouse, you ready to sew those curtains and braid those rugs and make the rooms all cozy and homey? Scattered yeses, the Hens surprised into acquiescence. A baby begins to squall.

Abe shouts: All you men, ready to work in the cold and stink of that old house to get her up and ready, with plumbing and a roof and everything? The men yell and yodel.

Abe’s face goes solemn; he raises a hand. One thing, my cats and chicks. I know we’re a nonhierarchical society and all, but since I’ve got my degree in engineering and Hiero has all those years under his belt as a construction foreman, we were thinking we’d be the ones to report to, yeah? We’re just the straw bosses here, so if you got a better idea to do something, just let us know. But run things by us before you go off on your own initiative to do new stuff and we have to waste our time and dough to undo it. Anyways, serious talk over. We got about four more good hours of daylight today and only three months to totally refinish a fallen-apart nineteenth-century mansion. Or orphanage or whatever it was. So let’s get our beautiful beatnik asses cracking.

A shout, a rush, and the group steams forward, up the mile-long drive scabbed with ice. They laugh, they are warm, they are ready. The last time Bit was in Arcadia House, he saw a sapling growing in a clawfoot tub and the roof caved in to show the clouds and sun. How wonderful it will be to have the house finished, tight and warm. If sleeping in a nest with two parents is happiness, imagine sleeping with eighty! Children dart around the legs of the adults until Sweetie Fox rounds them up and takes them down the shortcut to the Pink Piper to play.

Bit falls behind, feeling something gone wrong. He turns back.

Hannah stands alone at the gate. The ground is muddy around her. Bit hears a bird’s low call. He begins to walk back toward his mother. When he is almost the whole way to her and she still seems small, he runs. She is hunched in an old sweater of Abe’s, shivering. Her face is folded in on itself, and though he knows she is twenty-four, she seems younger than Erik, younger than Jincy, as young as Bit himself. He takes off his mitten to put his hand in hers. Her fingers are ice.

When she feels his hand, she smiles down from so high, and he can see his mother again within this shrunken woman. She says, All right, Bit. All right.

A snowstorm blows in. Bit dreams of hulking, hungry wolves with red eyes circling the Bread Truck. They howl, scrabble at the door. He startles awake. He wants his mother, but it is Abe who rises and shows Bit, through the window, the clean white sheets blowing down, the trackless heaps of snow. Abe heats up soymilk, and burritos Bit in the softest blanket. In the hope of lulling him to sleep, Abe tells him the story of his birth, which Bit knows the innards of. The legend of Bit Stone, the first Arcadian ever, is another story so retold that everyone owns it. The bigger girls play it in the Pink Piper, substituting the newest babies for the role of Bit.

You were born on the Caravan, Abe says softly, when we were a bunch of groupies, following Handy around for spiritual food. Two dozen, max. Going to the concerts, staying for the meetings after. Everywhere we went, we saw communes, some that worked, others that didn’t. Yurts and geodesic domes and sweat lodges and squatted-in mansions in the inner cities, and we started having an idea that even though everybody else was doing something along these lines, what we wanted to do was unusual. Pure. Live with the land, not on it. Live outside the evil of commerce and make our own lives from scratch. Let our love be a beacon to light up the world.

Anyways, those days, Handy was the only one with any medical training from being a medic in Korea, and he thought Hannah was five months along, because she wasn’t huge. So here we are, driving through the mountains, trying to get from Oregon to Boulder, when a sudden snowstorm comes up, flakes huge as plates on the windshield, and wouldn’t you know it, Hannah chooses this time to pop. We were in that little Volkswagen Camper the Motor Pool uses for trips into town. I’d fitted it out with a stove and all, pretty nifty, but we were in one of the smaller vehicles, so we were stuck at the back of the line, in these narrow mountain passes. I knew I had to get up to where Handy was because I sure as hell didn’t know how to deliver any baby, undercooked or not. So up we go, fartleking past everyone in the left lane, and we’d all be dead if anyone came the opposite direction. Finally we pass the Pink Piper, and I slow the whole zoo down. Turn at a sign that says Ridley WY, pop. five thousand something, and I think there’s got to be a hospital there, but there’s snow on the sign, and of course, I turn the wrong way. On and on and on, mile after mile, and it’s black out and finally we see lights and stop, and the Caravan folds itself around us and the Pink Piper to keep out the wind, and the door opens and some snowy person bursts in. I was expecting Handy, but who was it? Astrid.

Handy is seeing faces in the bus ceiling, she said (Abe says this in Astrid’s Norwegian lilt; Bit giggles). He just ate three tabs of mescaline. But I have a Ph.D. in Victorian literature and I have three babies myself. I am well used to parturition.

She may have been thinking leeches as far as I know, but I know less than her, so I say, Okay, sure. So we all get naked because that is natural, and Astrid orders me around, Boil this water! Boil these knives! Get clean towels! But as soon as I have the hot water on, Hannah faints, and just like that, out you come, all bloody, with a plop. Well, I had no hope. You were so little, an apple, and barely moving. You couldn’t even cry. Your poor lungs were too tiny. But Astrid cleaned you up and put you on your mother’s boob and you had this ferocity for life, little man, you just started sucking her nipple like this huge sugartit as big as your own tiny mouth. Astrid gave out a cry and moved back down to Hannah’s yoni because, guess what, there was another thing coming out, an afterbirth.

Abe pauses, strokes Bit’s head absently.

Astrid wraps it all up in a batik and sends me out with a shovel and I struggle on through the snow to the black lake and dig through the frozen pebbles and into the ground and finally get it all covered and say a few words of gratitude and trudge my way back.

Then it was morning, and the sun came up, and I’ll tell you, it was beautiful. It lit up that frozen lake so it was shining from within and the ice looked like hot lead at the base of these gorgeous purple mountains, and the churchbell rang up in town to celebrate you, our miracle baby. Then the townspeople came out, all shy, with food and bread, and deposited it on the hood of our Camper. That morning Astrid knew she’d found her calling. Her hands were meant to coax babies into the world. You were a gift, she said. She wrapped you around and around with a thick wool scarf and went to the grocer’s and weighed you. You were three pounds, exactly. The size of an itty-bitty butternut squash.