Russell Banks - The Darling

She’s a local, and I, of course, am not. When I first bought the place from her aunt and uncle and learned at the closing that Anthea had run the farm by herself for years, I knew that I would need her at least as much as her invalided uncle and bedridden aunt had, and I hired her on the spot to be my manager. Besides, I felt sorry for her and angry on her behalf. Her aunt and uncle, having elected to move to the village and live at the Neighborhood House, an assisted-living home for elderlies, had put the farm up for sale without consulting her. She told me that she drove home one afternoon from picking up their weekly groceries at the Stop & Shop in Lake Placid and saw a For Sale sign posted where the lane left the road, and another stuck in the middle of the front yard.

Anthea should have inherited the farm. Or her uncle should have somehow arranged for her to buy it from them. Her parents died when she was a child, and her uncle and aunt had raised her as their own. But she was an unmarried woman in love with a married woman from the next town, and the affair was widely known, probably known even by the woman’s alcoholic husband, a house painter who rarely worked but was liked and looked after in the town because of his sweet nature and their three small children.

Her aunt and uncle went straight from the closing at the realtor’s office to the Neighborhood House. When they are dead, whatever’s left, if anything, of the nearly one hundred thirty thousand dollars I gave them for the farm will likely go to Anthea. But it won’t let her buy the place. Not even if I were willing to sell it. The farm is worth three times now what it went for in 1991. I may feel sorry for Anthea and angry on her behalf, but I wouldn’t sell her the farm at a discount. The truth is, I’m not very generous and don’t mind saying so.

The other girls, Frieda, Nan, and Cat, arrived at their usual times, Frieda and Nan together at seven roaring up on Nan’s motorcycle, and Cat, drifting in ten minutes later like a petal falling from a daisy, strolling blithely down the lane as if wondering what to do with this lovely, end-of-summer day opening up ahead of her, when she knew very well that Anthea and I had her day all laid out for her. Cat’s a third-generation hippie, in her late teens, a dreamy throwback to the sixties, her grandparents’ era. My era. Catalonia’s her real name, given to her at birth by her parents, Raven and Rain, who got their names in adulthood from a Bengali guru on a New Mexico commune, Cat told me. Her woozy, laid-back affect and language are the same as her parents’ and grandparents’, but she’s replaced their form of soft, open-ended rebellion with a post-hippie, puritanical adherence to abstinence. She’s a drug-free, home-schooled, vegan virgin from Vermont, childlike and winsome on the surface, but inside tight as a fist. Cat’s the type of girl thirty years ago I would have tried to recruit for Weatherman. Cat is a girl you can picture nowadays becoming a born-again Christian fundamentalist, dark and judgmental. She’s the kind of girl I once was.

But Anthea and I and the other girls love Cat and can’t help protecting her — mostly from ourselves, as it turns out, and our rough edges and indulgences. None of us is drug free, virginal, or even a part-time vegetarian. We smoke, drink beer after work and stronger stuff often till bedtime, and eat meat whenever possible.

I hadn’t meant to hire an all-female workforce and don’t hold to it on principle. It evolved naturally, first with Anthea, who knew who in town was looking for work — which turned out to be pretty exclusively women and girls. It was early summer when I moved in, and all the men and boys who wanted to work already had jobs, most of them seasonal, and weren’t interested in organic gardening or raising free-range chickens or renovating long-neglected apple orchards — women’s work. And they certainly weren’t eager to take orders from two women, one of them a skinny, white-haired, rich bitch from away , as they say here, who didn’t know what she was doing anyhow, the other a tough-mouthed lesbian from town who knew all their dirty little secrets. So we hired local high-school girls, out-of-work nurses, college dropouts living temporarily with their parents, young mothers whose husbands had left them and weren’t paying child support, and sometimes off-season winter athletes, like Frieda and Nan, ski bums and ice climbers who spend the six snow-and-ice-free months up here in the mountains.

The place is called Shadowbrook Farm, a name I’d never have given it myself — a little too poetic or, if taken another way, morbid, almost gothic — but it came with the property. And since it was still known locally as Shadowbrook Farm and reflected the physical fact of the wide, year-round brook meandering through the fluttery shadows cast by the groves of birches and other hardwoods at the far end of the broad front meadow, I saw no reason to change the name. The brook — it’s really a river, the Ausable River — is the most picturesque aspect of the old farm, which is otherwise a simple, nineteenth-century colonial house with a wide front porch; the three tipped outbuildings we use for storing vehicles, farm machinery, hay, and feed; a tool shed; and the henhouse and sheepfold that Anthea and I built ourselves that first summer.

Strangely, more than anything else about the farm, more than the land or the buildings or the animals and crops, I feel the river is mine. My permanent, personal property. Yet, unlike everything else here, the river continuously changes. It talks to me: I’ve heard voices coming from it. The voices of children, usually. I hear them from the porch, from the kitchen, and from my bedroom upstairs at the front of the house, at all times of day and night in all seasons, even with the windows closed — long conversations and sometimes songs whose words I can almost make out, as if there were a playground out there on the far side of the field and the children were calling to one another or to me in a language other than English or were singing another country’s nursery rhymes and songs.

I don’t know if it’s because it’s all women, but over the years everyone I’ve hired has seemed to enjoy working here. It’s hard work, and I can be demanding, I know, and edgy, moody, and not all that communicative or personal, although I like to think I’m democratic and fair-minded and, when it comes to expectations, reasonable. But I’m not easily intimate, haven’t been for years. Maybe never. And while I think of Anthea, for instance, as a close friend, perhaps the closest friend I have in this town or anywhere, a woman who tells me everything she knows about herself, the truth is I don’t really return the confidence or offer her much information about myself, especially my past. I’ve given her only the bits and pieces that I’ve given everyone else in this town since the day I first arrived here eleven years ago, a suddenly wealthy woman who had inherited from her recently deceased mother, the widow of her famous father, an estate worth half a million dollars after taxes and the copyrights to the famous father’s five best-selling books. No one locally knows the details, of course, although it was obvious from the beginning to everyone that I was a woman of means.

Keene Valley is a small town, a village, and because I couldn’t really keep it a secret and didn’t want to anyhow, everyone knew or soon learned from my lawyer, from the realtor who handled my purchase of the farm, or from Anthea — to whom I had to confide a few things, after all, or I’d look like I had something dangerous to hide — that before coming here to the Northcountry I had lived for many years in West Africa, in a country called the Republic of Liberia.

Wherever that is. Someplace out there in the jungle was close enough.