Acre Under a Green Sky

It was around this time that my father's routine changed. He would come home for supper, then lie down for a couple of hours before going off to the office to work until well after midnight. Sometimes, my mother would lie down with him and they would make love before falling asleep and I would wake them with two cups of piping hot black coffee at eight o'clock. If I had heard them making love earlier, I would smile in a certain way in spite of myself, and I swear I saw a hint of coyness in their thanking me for the coffee. It was fun.

I brought them cups and saucers after their naps, and one night I had a misstep and found myself juggling those steaming cups on the saucers until one of them spilled down the front of my blue jeans and the shock of the burn made me drop the other cup down my front as well. The blue jeans were tight against my legs, and I stood there screaming and trying to pinch the scalding jeans away from my legs until my mother and father appeared and stripped the jeans off me. They threw me into the tub and bathed my legs in cold water; then balmed me with butter. It wasn't a major burn, but those cups and saucers went up to the top shelf of the cupboard, and the next day we bought a box load of coffee mugs. At the time, this change of routine seemed a minor adjustment in our lives, but it established patterns that would go on until the end. During the day, my father was spending more and more time at the Courthouse in Lincoln. He was also conducting interviews outside the office as part of the murder investigation. But he had to cultivate and maintain other business as well, so he saw clients in the evenings and continued to work alone into the night. When he was at home, the phone rang incessantly. He was, in effect, trying to do two full-time jobs. As a result, his business and family suffered in favor of Luka. But the unexpected happened as well. He succumbed to the drug of work, to the narcotic isolation of being alone in the office at one in the morning, to the seemingly acceptable distraction of work over life. He had found a place to hide. He had found his own acre under a green sky.

Acre under a green sky was my secret place at the farm. It was a cave of green in the bushes and branches of trees. Above me, the low branches of trees embraced and were welded together with vines making the sky appear green. And all around me bushes reached up to and interlocked with the branches of my sky. The entrance to my acre was a small rabbit hole close to the ground between two bushes, and I sat on soft, brown sod; the compost of decades of falling leaves. The light in there was as cool as the color green itself. And, of course, there was the stillness of all hidden places. From the outside, it appeared to be a bramble in a copse; an overgrown thicket crying out for a scything. No one could have suspected that there was a hollow core as serene as a chapel. And it was mine. I knew my grandfather's farm was measured in acres, and so I claimed my acre under a green sky; the only acre of their twenty-eight with a green sky, and it was mine. I offered to pay my grandfather for it, but he wouldn't take a thing. He said I could have it. He didn't even insist on knowing where it was. And no one besides myself ever went there. Not Danny. Not even Garry. It was my place to hide.

And so my father's office became his acre under a green sky –– a tranquil place to be alone and at peace and eminently safe in an ever more terrifying world. Sadly, my mother found her acre under a green sky around the same time my father did.

Her routine changed a little more gradually than my father's. For a long time, she went to bed as usual; except that she was alone. Their "alone time" in bed shifted from night to those after-supper naps I mentioned. But she missed the talk, and so she tried to stay up until he came home. And she did so for a very long time. But these late nights had a cost. She was sleeping through breakfast and moping through the day.

Some nights, she appeared by my bed like a woeful apparition:

"Wake up. I can't be alone tonight. C'mon, let's play cards or something."

We kept those visits secret.

Then, more and more often, she was falling asleep waiting in her chair, and he was having to wake her and put her to bed. Often, arguments erupted in the wee small hours of the morning. My mother was growing desperately lonely for her husband and best friend; her only adult friend now that Gwen was gone. Then her loneliness turned to bitterness. There were more arguments, and the beds went unmade throughout the day, and then I was carrying only one mug of hot black coffee to their room at eight o'clock in the evening.

To her credit, my mother tried to find other distractions from her bitter solitude. She took on what she called, "projects". Each night, after tucking us into bed, she began cleaning the kitchen walls with a strange dough-like product that actually worked. She used fistfuls of the stuff and made clearly defined, ever-expanding blocks of clean. Her precision was remarkable and a little frightening. The lines between clean and greasy drab were straight and true. She never finished that particular project. Few of her projects were ever finished.

My mother always prided herself on her boundless energy. It soon became obvious to us that it was not energy at all –– but hysteria.