Papa has always run the farm with a firm hand, selling blueberries and vegetables, milk and butter, chickens and eggs, cutting ice and managing the fishing weir for extra money. He’s always stressed the importance of saving. But now he seems willing to spend whatever this doctor tells him to in the hopes of getting well.
One Tuesday morning, about four months into the treatment, only an hour after Al and Papa have left for the weekly trip to Rockland, I hear a car door slam and look out the kitchen window. They’re back. Al has a grim look on his face as he helps Papa get out of the car. After taking him upstairs to his room, Al comes into the kitchen and sits down heavily. “Oh Lord,” he says.
“What happened?”
“It was all a ruse.” He rubs his hand through his hair. “When we got to Pole’s office, the whole building was shuttered. A few days ago, they told us, he was chased out of town by angry patients. A lot of people lost their shirts.”
Over the next few months, the severity of our situation becomes starkly clear. Papa’s two thousand dollars in savings are gone. We can’t pay our bills. More infirm than ever, Papa is listless and depressed and spends all his time upstairs. I try to be sympathetic, but it’s hard. Apples. The fruit that tempted Eve lured my poor gullible father, both seduced by a sweet-talking snake.
IT’S A CHILLY Thursday morning in October when Papa asks Al to carry his wheelchair down to the Shell Room. An hour later, a sleek four-door maroon Chrysler glides up to the house and a woman in a trim gray suit steps out of the back. The driver stays in the car.
Hearing a knock on the front door, I make a move to answer it, but Papa says gruffly, “I’ll handle it.”
From the back hallway I can hear some of their conversation: . . . generous offer . . . wealthy man . . . desirable shorefront . . . doesn’t come twice . . .
After the woman leaves—“I’ll let myself out,” she says and does; I watch out the window as she ducks into the backseat of the Chrysler and taps the driver on the shoulder—Papa sits in the Shell Room for a few minutes by himself. Then he wheels awkwardly into the kitchen. “Where’s Alvaro?”
“Milking, I think. What was that all about?”
“Fetch him. And your mother.”
When I’m back from the barn, Papa has wheeled himself into the dining room. Mother, who spends most of her time upstairs, sits at the head of the table, a shawl around her shoulders. Al troops in behind me and stands against the wall, grimy in his overalls.
“That lady brought with her an offer from an industrialist by the name of Synex,” Papa says abruptly. “Fifty thousand dollars for the house and land. Cash.”
I gape at him. “What?!”
Al leans forward. “Did you say fifty?”
“I did. Fifty thousand.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of money,” Al says.
Papa nods. “It’s a hell of a lot of money.” He pauses for a few moments, letting the news sink in. I look around—all three of us are openmouthed. Then he says, “I hate to say this, but I think it would be wise for us to accept this offer.”
“John, you can’t be serious,” Mother says.
“I am serious.”
“What an absurd idea.” She sits up straight, pulling the shawl tight around her shoulders.
Papa raises his hand. “Hold on, Katie. My savings have been spent. This could be a way out.” He shakes his head. “I hate to say it, but our options at this point are few. If we don’t take this now . . .”
“Where would you—we—go?” Al asks. I can tell as he stumbles over the words that he’s trying to assess Papa’s state of mind, wondering if he and I factor into it at all.
“I’d like a smaller house,” Papa says. “And with the money I could help you set up your own homes.”
We are all quiet for a moment, contemplating this. Except for the time with Walton—which seems to me now like a fever dream, hallucinatory and indistinct, unrelated to my life before or after—I have lived in this house like a mollusk in its shell, never imagining that I might be separated from it. I’ve taken for granted my existence here—the worn stairs, the whale-oil lamp in the hall, the view of the grass and the cove beyond from the front stoop.
Mother rises abruptly from her chair. “This house has been in my family since 1743. Generations of Hathorns have lived and died here. You don’t walk away from a house simply because someone offers to buy it.”
“Fifty thousand.” Papa raps his misshapen knuckles on the table. “We will not see an offer like this again, I can tell you.”
She tugs at her dress, her jaw clenched, the veins on her neck like rivulets of water. I have never seen the two of them in conflict like this. “This is my house, not yours,” she says fiercely. “We will stay on.”
Papa’s face is grim, but he doesn’t speak. Mother is a Hathorn; he is not. The conversation is over.
Papa will spend the next fifteen years confined to a wheelchair in a small room on the ground floor of the house he was so eager to sell, rarely venturing outside. Al and I, with the help of our brothers, will scrape and save, learn to live with even less. We’ll manage, just barely, to save the farm from bankruptcy. But sometimes I will wonder—all of us will wonder—whether it would have been better to let it go.
IN JULY OF 1921 Sam, laughing, gathers our family together in the Shell Room. Clasping the hand of his bespectacled choir-leader girlfriend, Mary, he announces that he has asked for her hand in marriage.
“Of course I said yes!” Mary beams, holding out her left hand to show us the modest engagement ring she inherited from her grandmother.
This news isn’t a complete surprise: the two of them met in Malden, where Mary grew up, when Sam stayed to work for Herbert Carle, and have been together for several years. I watch as he moves closer and whispers something, as she blushes and he brushes her hair behind her ear. “I’m so happy for you both,” I tell them, and though I feel a pang of sadness for myself witnessing their casual intimacy, I mean it. Dear kind Sam deserves to find love.
Sam and Mary’s wedding is held on the “lawn,” as Mary calls it, though we Olsons have never thought of it as anything but the field. Al and Fred build a pergola and set up two rows of twenty chairs borrowed from the Grange Hall. Over several days I bake rolls, blueberry and strawberry pies, and a wedding cake, Sam’s favorite: lemon with buttercream frosting. Mary wears a lacy dress and veil; Sam is dashing in a dark gray suit. A three-piece band from Rockland plays on the bluff above the shore, where Fred has organized a clambake at the water’s edge.