Did he ever stop and look around him and just appreciate the place? I don’t know. After all, it’s a beautiful piece of land, our farm, with its stately white clapboard farmhouse, and two ponds and a little stream that meanders along around the back. There are gigantic oak trees that shade the house and also hand out acorns like they’re generous benefactors inviting the squirrels to a feast. And there are two barns, one of which my dad turned into a home for his mother, Bunny, after he married Maggie and needed the main house for our little family. The Bunny Barn sits next to the sunflower field, behind the main house, so for most of the year, a person can stand on tiptoes in our kitchen and see Bunny’s windows and the little trellis that runs up the side of her barn, dotted with morning glories.
But life was never easy. As everyone kept explaining to me and Hendrix, this family enterprise was both our duty and our privilege. Not everyone had land. We were People of the Land. The lucky ones. Maggie, who was a teacher during the school year, spent her evenings doing the books and paying the bills, and her summers were devoted to selling sunflowers and corn and eggs at the farm stand. Hendrix and I worked there, too, from the time we were old enough to toddle out to people’s cars with their bags of produce. Maggie and I made little dream catchers in the summer and we baked pies and fried up apple cider doughnuts in the fall. There was a field of Fraser firs that we sold at Christmas.
Hendrix and I were responsible for feeding chickens, collecting eggs, bringing cows in and out of the barn, taking care of the baby goats, and picking the flowers. Maggie cooked dinner every night, helped us with our homework, and invited our friends to come over for parties. There were hayrides and ice-skating parties, swimming in the pond, and sleeping out at night under the stars. Sort of your basic, idyllic, hardworking childhood home situation.
Or would have been—except that through it all, my father strode through our lives with a pained expression on his face, like there was some horrible secret wound festering in the center of him, something that was wrestling his soul to the ground. There was no joy in his face when he looked out at the farm, no moments when I’d be outside with him and simply feel he was taking it all in, basking in his love of the land.
He wasn’t happy. My theory is that he never really wanted the farm life in the first place. Here he was, a cherished only child, a hardworking, innocent, chores-doing kid who won prizes in 4-H for the best goats, and so it was simply a given that he would take over the farm someday. No one ever asked him if that was what he wanted. Because if he didn’t take it, who else would keep it going? But then, just as that transfer was about to happen—right after he’d graduated from high school and was ready to take over a lot of the farm operations—he decided to just take a little tiny weekend off. A no-big-deal road trip with his buddy.
The two of them headed to a farmer’s field outside of Woodstock, New York, for that little weekend concert, having no idea that his whole life was about to turn upside down.
He hadn’t even arrived at the concert yet when—BAM!—he discovered Tenaj, followed by days of free love and freedom and music. And then, so quickly after that—another BAM! And another! Babies! Two of us!
I can just picture it. He must have been reeling from the shock of it all. Falling in love, veering off course from his intended life, and then coping with the shock of having Hendrix and me, born when he was just nineteen years old. It must have felt like he’d driven over a cliff. The country wedding, the baffled fury of his parents. All of it had to have roiled inside his good-boy soul, his stern New Hampshire upbringing.
It’s tempting to believe the family myth that he spent the next few years trying to get back to the stability that had been the hallmark of his childhood. That he regretted what had happened.
But I’m the writer in the family, and I think differently.
I think he was madly in love with Tenaj. Sure, he had a girlfriend back home, but I think he loved my mom in a whole new heart-stopping way, and I think he embraced his new freedom-loving life as a hippie, playing the guitar and painting houses for a living. I can picture him coming home each day to his mystical little wife and his two conceived-in-love infants and thinking this was the way life should be. Free and easy, filled with music and sunshiny magic—nothing like the farm life with its demands and disappointments, its headaches and its hard work.
I’ll bet he never wanted to go back.
But then, when Hendrix and I were nearly two, our grandfather died, and that’s when my dad’s dream world came crashing down. My grandmother needed him to come back home. Somebody had to run the farm. She wasn’t one for letting it all go, selling it off to strangers, was she? No, she needed him back, and she made him return. And, just like that, it turned out the whole Woodstock thing had been a little detour after all. Like an extended vacation, the kind where you acquire a wife and a couple of kids without even meaning to.
He brought us back with him, all three of us, and according to stories I’ve heard, my mom lived with him and Bunny in the farmhouse and worked alongside them at the little farm stand. Among the pies and the ears of corn, she offered her hippie-type artwork for sale: tie-dyed shirts, macramé, and the jewelry she made from objects she found.
Bunny has told me that Tenaj, bless her heart, tried hard to be accepted in town—but nobody was having it. Nobody liked her or made her feel welcome. She was a sweet little thing, my mama, and talented and creative, Bunny said, but they didn’t want to buy her little found-object art. They didn’t want to invite her to their coffee klatches. They were on the Maggie Team.
Bunny might have secretly been on the Maggie Team, too. Surely Tenaj wasn’t what she had in mind for her son. Maggie was much more aligned with the values Bunny would have held. But Bunny told me once that her only concern was that her son be happy. If he had a wife and children, then she was determined to accept his choice, and look for the good in the situation. She was not going to risk losing her son and her grandchildren simply because he’d fallen in love with somebody who was different.
But the upstanding folks of Pemberton, New Hampshire, weren’t quite as generous. The way they saw it, Maggie, as the beloved townie girlfriend, had the prior claim to Robert Linnelle—and there was no way they were going to accept this hippie girl as Robert’s wife. Anyway, after looking this interloper over carefully, they figured that Tenaj had clearly been a mistake. And too bad about us babies . . . such unfortunate carelessness. A nice hometown boy getting taken advantage of that way. He’d have to come to his senses, they said.
And so he capitulated, I think. It’s a very old story: if I were writing the story of his life—and someday I just might—I’d say he gave up the woman he really loved as well as the dream of being free and living a life with art and music and tie-dye. Became the farmer everyone expected him to be.
No surprise, I suppose, that after a while my parents split up, and my mom took Hendrix and me back to Woodstock with her. Later, there was a big battle for him to get us back, but that’s a whole other story.
Things went bad for my dad as the years went on. He developed an ulcer. A farmhand embezzled some money. Four calves mysteriously died. A flood made it impossible to plant one summer on the largest field, followed by two years of drought. The government subsidies stopped.