“I’m sure it’s more than that,” I demurred, feeling I didn’t really need to. She seemed confident, proud. Not at all unsure that what they were doing was impressive.
There were more hives near the largest of the vegetable gardens — where they grew squashes, beans, corn, amaranth, and hay. Beyond those, closer to the trees, were three cottages like the one we’d just left, separated by quarter-acre plots, weathered but tidy, with foxglove and echinacea still in full bloom, herb gardens between, along with large driftwood and flotsam sculptures — most taller than me — in the shapes of animals and people.
“My husband is the artist. His name is Tuck.”
“Your husband?” I felt my cheeks burn. It had never occurred to me that she would be married.
“Not legally. We had a ceremony here. My parents didn’t even come. I tried to write you, to tell you, but the letter came back to me.”
“When was this?”
“Four years ago.” She looked at me with concern. “I’m sorry.”
I tried to imagine the man she would marry — she had always said she didn’t believe in monogamy, let alone being someone’s wife. “I’ve missed a lot,” I said.
“You’ll meet him soon. I think you’ll like him — he’s a lot like some of the people you’ve written about. The activists.” She smiled, forgetting that I had never appreciated her taste in men.
Other colonists, men and women of varying ages, were here and there, silently working, backs bent, arms laden, pushing wheelbarrows, using hoes, baskets in hand, some of them bundled up against the morning air, others in shirtsleeves. No one spoke, but anyone we passed looked me in the eye and smiled.
“Tuck and I share a house with Elle and Jen. Elle is our herbalist. She runs the apothecary and assists Maggie, the midwife. Jen’s our compost and soil expert.”
“Everyone has a specialty?”
“Everyone has an assigned job, yes, but we all take part in the various jobs around the farm with our morning work prayer.”
“What’s your job?” I asked.
“I’m Sister’s assistant,” she said.
“What do you do for Sister, exactly?”
She paused and looked out at the fields.
“I keep track of the things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Physical things. What we buy, what we sell. Money. I communicate with the outside world.” She looked at me and shrugged. “It’s not very sexy, but someone has to do it. We’re not separatists, we’re still of this world, and I’m the one who deals with it.”
The path forked and we took a mossy hill toward the fenced pasture and the barn, up against a stand of firs. It was still shady in places and mist lingered. Behind the trees I could see the smokestacks of the refinery, like dead old growth, ancient stobs from giant petrified trees. Katie followed my gaze.
“Is it strange being here?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I don’t know. The smokestacks make me think of Stonehenge,” I said, “or Easter Island, you know? Places where manmade monuments outlived their time, their usefulness, their meaning. Hundreds of years from now, it’ll be mystical. If this place still exists, if humans are still here, they’ll think oil was our god.”
Katie was quiet for a moment, then she squeezed my arm, trailed her hand down to mine, and took it in hers.
“I’m glad you’re here. I wish you had come a long time ago.” There was a warmth in her voice I recognized. But something else, too. Something winnowing through her words, a charged current of feeling. Like she had a secret.
She let go of my hand and we walked on.
The towers disappeared from sight as we descended the path to the pasture. The damp chill clung to me, and I curled my fingers into my woolen palms in my pockets.
There were two others in the barn already — an older woman with curly silver hair and a man no older than thirty — occupied with feeding and milking the goats, raking the dirt floor of droppings.
“Usually, we don’t speak to each other during work prayer,” Katie said. “But we sometimes have visitors, so it’ll be okay. Just don’t be offended if no one talks to you.”
Katie led one of the goats toward a stool near the doors.
“This is Penelope,” Katie told me, dumping the contents of a cloth sack — some bread heels and apple cores — into a bucket hanging from the pen. Penelope sniffed out the food and shoved her nose in the bucket.
“Have you ever milked a goat?” she asked.
“No, but you know I’ll try anything.”
“Here,” Katie said, gesturing to the stool. I sat.
“Hold your hands like this,” she said, showing me the form, making a funnel of my right thumb and finger. “And squeeze like this, with your other fingers, careful to aim the milk at the pail.”
Katie squatted behind me, an arm alongside mine, helping to aim, squeezing my hand in hers so that I could feel the pressure. Occasionally Penelope looked back at us, chewing, flicking her tail, scuffing the dirt with a hoof.
“The idea of the work prayer,” Katie explained, her breath warm on my cheek and her curls bristling against my skin like wool, “is that we let our bodies move in the world before our minds get caught up in analyzing everything. I go from sleep to work easily now, but at first I had to stop thinking.”
“You have to stop thinking?”
“We don’t have to stop being intelligent or aware. I had to learn how to stop analyzing everything. We try to let thoughts come from our immediate actions. From being present and experiencing. So much of our thinking is involved with things we’ve already done and things we have yet to do. It’s almost impossible not to be thinking about some future moment or some past mistake or tragedy.”
I looked up at her, but she kept her eye on the milking.
At first I thought we’d never fill the metal pail. It seemed so big, and Penelope’s udder not especially large. It was strange, feeling the milk pass through, seeing it steam in the morning air. But the level rose steadily. Katie let me go and patted the goat with a gloved hand. I kept on, less sure of myself without her hands on me.
“First thing in the morning, we try to be truly present in one thing, in one action, and consider it a prayer. It’s the practice of being in our bodies, our bodies in the world, our awareness on what is in our hands. Penelope has a work prayer, too. All the animals do. They endure a lot every day, to help sustain us. They give so much in their short lives.”
She leaned down and whispered something to the goat, and I remembered again the woman who seemed to be talking to her hen earlier.
“What did you say to her?”
“What?”
“What did you say to the goat just now?”
“Oh.” She seemed startled. “I said, ‘I love you.’”
“Do you tell all the animals that you love them?”
She thought about this a moment, looked around the barn at the other goats. The silver-haired woman walked by with a pail of milk and smiled generously at me, my hands working awkwardly at Penelope’s teats. The tips of my fingers were warm again.
“Yes. I do,” Katie said.
We hauled our pails of milk out of the barnyard and up to the dairy house, Katie silent this time. I wanted to ask about her parents, about her husband, about what it was like being married, what other chores she did for work prayer, but wanting to observe the rituals, I was hesitant to break the silence for what amounted to chitchat. The dairy house was one of the newer cottages at the top of the hill. It was a squat, angular building with straw-bale walls and repurposed windows of varying shapes all along the south side. We walked round to the north side, where the roof slanted down and disappeared into the slope of a hill. The dairy was back there, cool, away from the sun. Katie helped me pour the milk into a stainless-steel vat inside the back door.