Lyman was somewhat taken aback by this sermon delivered by so small a prophet. “What then is your idea for this place, Judy?”
“Judith. I have no ideas for it. Nothing grand, anyway. I came here because my parents did.”
“So why did they come here?”
The girl plucked a grass blade and placed it in her mouth before answering. “It was my father’s idea. My mother would join the Shakers if she could but my father is very much against it. You can imagine why. My mother’s sort of Shaker in spirit, which is why I’m an only child, or at least will be until the spring when I shall have a baby brother or sister. I suppose no woman is a fortress. It will be a sister, I hope. I would feel bad if it was a boy.”
“Ah. You want a little playmate.”
She looked at Lyman as if he was a dolt. “What good is it growing up a man here?” Her hand waved airily at the farm before them. “The only lesson taught at Bonaventure is how to sit around and dream. If a boy raised here ever left, he’d be in for a rude shock. He’d never be able to find work. He’d just wind up back here, or somewhere like here, or in some slum. This place is a land of lotus-eaters, at least for boys. My mother and the other women work as hard as they ever did on the outside.”
Lyman took some offense at this slur against his sex. “Men just perform their work faster so they have greater leisure. It’s a proven fact that men have stronger constitutions than women.”
“Tell that to Mr. Hollin.” When Lyman’s expression communicated ignorance, she asked, “They haven’t told you about Mr. Hollin?”
“No,” said Lyman. “Was he another farm member who left abruptly?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said the girl. “He was a young fellow, very idealistic and enthusiastic, one of the originals to join. Our first February here a bout of influenza tore through the farm. Everyone had it at some point. I should emphasize that included the women and me. Of all of us, Mr. Hollin was the only one who failed to recover.”
Lyman shrugged. “A boy dying of sickness doesn’t prove laziness on the part of the men.”
“You haven’t heard the story’s end. Mr. Hollin was the first to die at the farm, so the question arose of where to bury him. Mr. Grosvenor chose a spot on the edge of the woods and made a service of it. A couple of days later Minerva went back to the gravesite to lay some flowers on it only to discover it had collapsed into the earth. A sinkhole—they had buried him atop a sinkhole. So Mr. Grosvenor organized the men, thinking to pull poor Mr. Hollin free to inter him somewhere more peaceful, only they couldn’t find the body. They dug and dug until finally they gave it up for lost.”
“What does that prove besides bad luck?”
Judith sagely regarded the farmstead. “It proves little, but it suggests intent. I think the men buried Mr. Hollin there because they knew the earth would fall in and they were too lazy to spade down the whole six feet. Mr. Grosvenor is quite fascinated with the geology of this place. He knew what he was doing.”
Lyman’s ears burned with incredulity. He stood and brushed off his trousers. “I must say you’re a suspicious child, Judith. One wishes a little of Bonaventure’s idealism would wear off on you.”
In reply Judith lay back on the grass to stare at the bits of sunlight filtering down through the leaves. “Perhaps it will in time. I suppose I’m committed until the end.”
•••
If you know nothing about the geography of Connecticut, just know this: the soil there is terrible. The entire state is nothing but a pile of rocks both large and small, which for the most part have been covered with a layer of earth just thick enough to permit the growth of green things. Every inch of tillable space in Connecticut only achieved its status because some farmer and his sons painstakingly removed each cobble and stone from beneath the blade of their plow, thereby creating a narrow island of fertile field adrift in a rolling sea of stone and root. This meant that very little of the two-hundred acres of Bonaventure was developed into either field or structure, leaving the abundance as wild as when the Natives first trod their moccasins upon it.
Minerva, being her father’s daughter, knew a thing or two about the land. The early colonists, she informed Lyman, had established their farms in the intervales, which was their name for the spans of fertile soil between spines of trap rock—called such after the Swedish word trappa, which meant stairway. In their daily walks Lyman and Minerva rarely pursued the same route twice, resulting in the continual discovery of some new prospect. During a given jaunt their path might lead between red maples and eastern hemlocks, the slopes rising gently to shelves of stone wet with moss or hanging ferns or trickles of water; the next it could open into a broad flatland of grass and pokeweed, the sun shining upon a wall of talus in the distance; and then the track might darken and narrow, ascending to a ridge where they’d shimmy through a tight notch in the trap rock, their shoulders brushing the sides. They waited out rain showers beneath overhangs and tentatively peered over the edges of cliffs. Manmade walls, their gray stones splattered by pale green lichen, crisscrossed the woods, and sometimes they would encounter a mossy stump, cleanly sawed through and the trunk crusted with conks of bracket fungus lying beside it, and they wondered aloud who built the walls and who cut the trees. They picked their way through quaggy lowlands and hand-in-hand bridged streams along the backs of fallen
