Chapter TruthSilence
Truth or Silence
“Yes,” John Schoenfeld says to Dane, “muck is a scientific term.”
The heavy cardboard boxes are laid out in a ten-by-twenty grid on the barn floor, with space enough between rows to pull a giant dolly loaded with produce.
Dane shakes his head at the staggering harvest, realizing he has no complex relationship with food whatsoever.
He grew up with cooks in his father’s house, and every morsel of food he consumed was strictly regulated.
He never snacked in his life, not even secretly—one candy wrapper or empty bag of chips found in his room, one ounce off his mandated weight, and his father would beat him up.
Dane found it was easier to eat what was put in front of him when it was put there, and ignore hunger.
When he escaped his father and went to Maisie’s house, she declared her kitchen was his kitchen, but he didn’t trust the overture.
When he grew to trust it, he didn’t know the first thing about feeding himself.
All his life, food was procured and prepared out of his sight and brought to him.
Food appeared and he ate it. Lettuce was lettuce.
It went into a sandwich or on top of a burger.
It was served at restaurants and Dane ate it nicely with no thought past it being green, crunchy, and a course to get through. It was a task, not a meal.
Now he looks at the different mounds of lettuce heads and the rubber-banded bundles of greenery. He looks at the guide to what each CSA subscriber is allotted and he doesn’t know what anything on the list is.
He doesn’t know which bundles are spinach and which are dandelion. The latter is something he’d only see growing between cracks in the sidewalk. “Wait, you can eat dandelions?”
He knows what arugula is on a menu, but not when it’s staring him in the face.
He recognizes red globes as radishes, but doesn’t know the long, pink cylinders are also radishes.
He picks up a mass of leafy greens with astonishing, colored stems—yellow, orange, magenta and red—and looks at Nomi, helpless.
“Swiss chard,” she says, and Ethan half turns away, putting a finger down his throat. “Ignore him. Prepared correctly, it’s delicious.”
“I can’t make friends with chard,” Ethan says. “I’ve tried, but we have nothing in common. Kale, though. Kale is the shit.” He holds up a bundle of leaves, delicately ruffled at the edges.
“Kale is the new cocaine,” Nomi says.
Dane picks up a net bag of weird green coils. “What are these?”
“Garlic scapes,” Nomi says. “We’ll make pesto with them tonight. You’ll lose your mind.”
“Where do they come from?”
Ethan and Nomi stare. “From garlic.”
He stares back. “How do you grow garlic?”
“In the ground?”
Dane isn’t such an idiot that he can’t recognize garlic. It’s a dry, bulbous looking thing with white, papery layers of skin. Like an onion, but you can break it into cloves.
“So… Wait. The bulb part. The cloves. That goes in the ground?”
“Yes.”
“And these things, the scapes, they grow out of it?”
“Exactly,” Nomi says. “Like scallions.” She trawls the bins and holds up an amethyst onion bulb that elongates into a white stem and long green tubes. “See, you cut this part off and that’s your scallion. You can cut them when the bulb is still in the ground and it’ll just keep sending up more.”
“What’s the difference between scallions and chives?”
“Size.”
Ethan puts a hand on the back of Dane’s neck. “Dude, were you raised by wolves?”
“Sort of,” Dane says.
Ethan laughs and gives Dane a little shake. “Nomi, the kid needs help.”
He needs a lot of help. Dane knows what a carrot is but he’s never seen one pulled out of the earth an hour ago, dirt clinging to its roots and the feathery tops still attached.
“Don’t soak the carrots,” Nomi says one day when they are watering all the crops.
“Why not?”
“Keep the ground saturated at the surface and they’ll just hang around there. You want them to grow long, so you deprive them a little. Make them extend down to where the water is.”
Later, Dane realizes Nomi is treating him like a carrot: depriving him of things he takes for granted, things that keep him loitering around the surface where it’s easy. She makes him put down long, long roots in that ancient, magical black dirt of Birch Island.
John Schoenfeld, like Ethan and Nomi, is a foundling. As John Smith, he spent sixteen years bouncing around various foster homes in New Jersey. His family tree lopped off at the roots, he planted a new one in Mary’s soil and when they married, he took her name as his own.
Mary Schoenfeld is a quiet, reserved woman with frightening business savvy, and phenomenal instincts for raising crops, animals and troubled children.
At the time Ethan came to live permanently at the farm, Mary was in the middle of two projects: opening the spa, and renovating the three little cottages to host artists-in-residence.
She put her ambitions aside to care for this addicted baby.
To get him settled in the rich dirt. To tend and cultivate and nourish him.
As their Chinese guide said when touring them in the Mogao Caves: There’s no true faith without sacrifice.
Soon it became apparent Ethan was an extraordinarily intelligent and gifted child, whose instincts and ambitions outpaced even Mary’s.
Still, abandonment lingered in his soul.
His ego always feared the world didn’t think he was good enough to keep.
He had to prove he was good. Better. The best. His hyper-realistic painting style developed from a need to capture the beautiful moments of his life and make them stay.
Forever. He was always happiest in his own company, but whomever Ethan chose to love would be loved until he died.
A farm is the perfect place for such a child.
Or such a young man as Danelaw Strong, in whom Mary senses a vast, aching gulf of loneliness and a desperate need to be cherished.
To build confidence, she assigns Dane tasks he can easily master.
To help curb his perfectionism and embrace good enough, she gives him jobs at which he’s mediocre.
Her nurturing doesn’t manifest as physical or verbal affection, rather she practices a stoic kindness that Dane, also by instinct, gravitates toward.
He’s becoming more comfortable in his skin, more amenable to being touched, but still cautious with words, living by Huff Jensen’s strict rule of truth or silence.
Parker, Ethan’s mixed mutt puppy, follows Dane everywhere.
Until now, Dane has only known the mean watchdogs of Malba, barking and baying at him from behind gates and walls.
To him, dogs are hired mercenaries, not companions.
He shies from Parker’s exuberance, but little by little, they make friends.
Then fall into cahoots. Soon, rare is the night Dane doesn’t fall asleep without Parker curled on the floor beside his bed.
Dane feels a little guilty commandeering Ethan’s pet, but he’ll soon learn Ethan Hasen has many flaws, but a lack of generosity isn’t one.
If something belongs to him, it belongs to everyone he loves.
Mary is well acquainted with Ethan’s manner of imprinting on creatures—human, animal and otherwise—and claiming them as his own.
Unabashedly adoring with his whole heart and soul and forgetting the imprintee might have reservations or just need some damn time to get used to his surroundings.
Dane is a new puppy and Ethan the enthusiastic Golden Retriever, dying to play and wrestle with little brother.
Mary wisely keeps her son crated, as it were, and keeps Dane with her for most of his day.
She assigns him simple tasks in the kitchen garden and teaches him basics of cooking.
Narrating in her capable, matter-of-fact way, she shows him how the household runs, how the farm operates.
Above all, she stresses that he is a guest here.
An intern of sorts. Obviously Ethan already adores Dane, and Nomi loves anyone who takes an interest in the things she does, but Mary regularly counsels Dane that he is here for educational healing.
He is, in the truest, noblest sense of the word, being fostered.
Mary is quiet. She’s kind. She’s consistent. “Truth or silence,” she says thoughtfully. “I rather like that myself.”
She theorizes, and is eventually proven correct, that Dane will take more interest in food he’s grown or harvested or prepared himself, and that he’ll come to enjoy eating by being in the company of those who do.
All that’s asked of him is to sit at the table.
Once seated, he is left in peace, with no pressure to start eating, finish eating, eat more, eat less, explain every mouthful.
No longer is he weighed, measured, examined, critiqued and scrutinized.
Nobody gives a good goddamn how he looks.
Soon Dane’s morning routine is whittled down to a pee, brushing teeth and picking a ball cap.
The clothes he brought with him to Schoenfeld’s are completely useless, so he wears Ethan’s clothes.
Getting dressed takes thirty seconds, the most of which is devoted to good socks so he doesn’t get blisters.
He barely glances at the mirror. There’s no need.
Little by little, he takes to the work and takes pride in his part. His roots start to dig into the soil. His body grows hungry and food becomes interesting. His palate begins to learn.
“I can taste the basil,” he’ll tentatively say over some homemade marinara sauce. And on another night, with a little more confidence, “You used more oregano this time.”
Oh yes, the family agrees, and then they talk about herbs for half an hour, John and Ethan expounding on herbal folklore and mythology, while Mary and Nomi debate companion planting and how it’s best to grow together whatever tasted good together.
The world of salad is Nomi’s domain. She plans and grows all the greens and packs the CSA boxes with her signature mesclun blends.
Don’t make boring salads, counsels a flyer in each box, with instructions to throw in some chopped kale, scallions, the leaves from those celery stalks, and don’t be shy about fresh herbs.
Chop up a bunch, throw them in. Come on, get in the game here, people!
Dane gets way into the game. Day by day, bite by bite, over that first growing season at Schoenfeld’s, he comes to love it.
He eats and works and does little else, often falling into bed by eight o’clock.
He sleeps in dreamless, ten hour stretches, wakes up sore and ravenous and drags himself up and out to do it all again.
Weeks pass before it occurs to him he’s eaten little to no meat since arriving at Schoenfeld’s.
Bacon in the mornings. Roast chicken once or twice.
The rest is eggs and plant protein and tons of it.
Mary taught herself to make homemade pasta, to a point.
She has the knack of the dough but lacks the patience and equipment to make it into traditional shapes.
She rolls the dough out, zips across it with a pizza cutter, and throws the oddball shapes into boiling water.
“Rags,” she says, setting down a huge bowl of them, doused with olive oil and herbs.
“Ragaroni,” Ethan elaborates.
“Raghetti,” Nomi says.
Dane doesn’t play along. He’s too busy eating.
The rags soak up sauce and salad dressing and are declared perfect.
Dane, totally at home now, shovels them in, along with the greens and vegetables he’s starting to identify by both sight and taste, and develop distinct preferences for.
He feels simultaneously wiped out, yet light and keen.
Holy shit, I’m happy.
“I’m really happy,” he says on the phone to Maisie, overcome and amazed.
She and Huff, now deeply in love, come to visit and Dane burns with pride and passion as he tours them around.
He makes the entire dinner, including a chocolate cake that collapses in the oven.
Everyone piles whipped cream on the slumped slices and praises every bite, because Dane did his best and it’s all Schoenfeld’s wants from him. His best and the truth.
Truth or silence.