The Darling

After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa. It happened on a late-August night here at the farm in Keene Valley, about as far from Africa as I have been able to situate myself. I couldn't recall the dream's story, although I knew that it was in Africa, the country of Liberia, and my home in Monrovia, and that somehow the chimps had played a role, for there were round, brown, masklike faces still afloat in my mind when I awoke, safe in my bed in this old house in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, and found myself overflowing with the knowledge that I would soon return there.

It wasn't a conscious decision to return. More a presentiment is all it was, a foreboding perhaps, advancing from the blackest part of my mind at the same rate as the images of Liberia drifted there and broke and dissolved in those dark waters where I've stored most of my memories of Africa. Memories of Africa and of the terrible years before. When you have kept as many secret as I have for as long as I have, you end up keeping them from yourself as well. So, yes, into my cache of forgotten memories of Liberia and the years that led me there — that's where the dream went. As if it were someone else's secret and were meant to be kept from me, especially.

And in this place was this knowledge that I would soon be going back — foreknowledge, really, because I didn't make the decision until later that day, when Anthea and I had finished killing the chickens and were wrapping them in paper and plastic bags for delivery and pick up.

It was the end of summer, the beginning of an early autumn, and though barely a year ago, it feels like a decade, so much was altered in that year. The decade here: now, that seems like a few days and nights is all, because nothing except the same thing has happened here day after day, season after season, year after year. No new or old returning lovers, no marriages or divorces, no births or deaths, at least among the humans. Just the farm and the worlds that nourishes and sustains it. Timeless, it has seemed.

'In the mix of wildness and control, they were beautiful. In their silence and indistinct, shape-changing fluidity, they frightened me'

The farm is a commercial operation, inasmuch as I sell most of what I grow, but in truth it's more like an old-fashioned family farm, and to run it I've had to give over my personal clock. I've had to abandon all my urban way of measuring time and replace them with the farm's clock, which is marked off by the needs and demands of livestock and crops, by the requirements of soil and the surge of flux of weather. It's no wonder that farmers in the old days were obsessed with the motions of planets and the waxing and waning of the moon, as if their farms were bodies of women. I sometimes think it's because I am a woman — or maybe it's merely because I lived all those years in Liberia, adapted to African time — that I was able to adapt so easily to the pace and patterns and rhythmic repetitions of nature's clock and calendar.

It was as usual, then, on that August morning, with the darkness just beginning to pull back from the broad river valley to the forests and the mountains looming behind the house, that I woke at five-thirty and came downstairs wearing my flannel nightgown and slippers against the pre-dawn chill, with the dogs clattering behind me, checked the temperature by the moon face thermometer outside the kitchen window (still no frost, which was good, because we'd neglected to cover the tomatoes), and put the dog out.

I made coffee for Anthea, who comes in at six and says she can't do a thing until her second cup, and the other girls, who come in at seven. I lingered for a few moments in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, enjoying the dark smell of it. I never drink coffee, having been raised on tea, a habit I took from my father as soon as he'd let me, but I do love the smell of it when it's brewing and buy organic Colombian beans from a mail-order catalogue and grind them freshly for each pot, just for aroma.

For a few moments, as I always do, I stood by the window and watched the dogs. They are Border collies, father and daughter, Baylor and Winnie, and when they have done their business, the first thing they do every morning is patrol the property, reclaiming their territory and make sure that during the night nothing untoward has happened. Usually I watch them work and think of them as working for me, as if during the night one of us, they or I, had changed allegiances. They looked like ghost dogs, moving swiftly across the side yard in the grey pre-dawn light, disappearing into shadows cast by the house and oak trees, darting low to the ground into the garage, then reappearing and moving on. Today they worked for no one but themselves; that's how I saw them. Their gait was halfway between a trot and a run — fast, effortless, smooth, and silent, their ears cocked forward, plumed tails straight back — and they seemed more like small wolves than carefully trained and utterly domesticated herding animals.

For a moment they scared me. I saw a primitive wildness in them, their radical independence and selfishness, the ferocity of their strictly canine needs. Perhaps it was the thin, silvery half-light and that I viewed them mostly in silhouette as they zigged and zagged across the yard, and when they'd checked the garage, an open shed, actually where I park the pickup truck and my Honda, they moved on to the barn and from there to the henhouse, where the rooster crowed And then loped all the way to the pond in the front field, where they woke the ducks and geese, never stopping, running in tandem, a pair of single-minded predators sifting their territory at peak efficiency.

In the mix of wildness and control, they were beautiful. In their silence and indistinct, shape-changing fluidity, they frightened me. Five minutes ago they had been under control, curled in my bed, crowding me to one side of it like a pair of human children. And now they were wild dogs, the kind of beasts the ancient people glimpsed slipping through the bush at dawn between the campsite and the forest.

They had not changed overnight of course. But maybe because of my dream of Africa and the chimps, I had, and the dogs were sensing it, as if I had somehow betrayed them. Then when Anthea drove in along the lane for the road, headlights bobbing like heavy fruit on a tree as her beat-up Jimmie pickup passed along the ruts, the dogs ran to the truck as they do every day, and when she stepped out they greeted her with their usual yipping commotion and followed her to the side porch. But when they entered the kitchen behind her, they slipped into the living room, then furtively circled through the dining room to the kitchen again and made for the door and scratched at it to be let back out. Anthea yanked off her cap and ruffled her auburn curls with one hand and watched the dogs. She screwed up her face and said, "What's with the doggies?"

"I don't know," I said, "Maybe something spooked them."

She opened the door, and the dogs bolted across the yard and out of sight. "Must be you that's spooking them, Hannah." She laughed and filled her mug with coffee, sighed heavily, and sat down at the table.

"Maybe it's the moon. I had strange dreams all night. You?"

"Nope. Slept like a hibernated bear. Full moon's not for another three days anyhow." Anthea is impish and winking, a large women, strong; if she were a man you'd call her burly. She had a broad, flat face the shape and colour of a raspberry, a peasant face, some might say and probably a lot of summer people have. But if you look, you can tell at once that she's good humoured and hard working and possesses an abundance of mother wit. Everything about her expresses intelligent energy.

'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'

She's a local, and I of course, am not. When I first bought this place from her aunt and uncle and learned at the closing that Anthea had run the farm by herself for years, I knew that is 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 after picking up her 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, and a house painted which 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 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 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 love 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 the 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 the mountains.

'The river continuously changes. It talks to me: I've heard voices coming from it. The voices of children, usually'

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 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 window closed — long conversations and sometimes song 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 intimidated, 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 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 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 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 for 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.

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