Free Promise Not to Tell: A Novel by Jennifer McMahon Page A

calling me Katydid. Sometimes I helped him make his jewelry, piecing together necklaces from twigs, stones, and bits of glass and wire. I’d go with him on collecting missions where we’d come back with our pockets full of pretty stones, pop tops from beer cans, and old shotgun shells.
    “Stuuupid!” exclaimed Del when I told her this. “Who the hell wants to wear jewelry made from junk?”
    I told her about the feather in his hat. How he called it a talisman.
    “And I thought my daddy was crazy,” she said.
    “He isn’t my daddy. He’s just Mark. He’s okay. Just kinda goofy.”
    The truth was, Lazy Elk was the closest thing to a father I’d ever had. I never knew my own dad, and none of my mother’s other boyfriends had stuck around very long. All my life, I’d secretly hoped for someone to come along and fill that daddy void, and if that someone happened to wear a floppy hat, make jewelry out of junk, and dance like a bird, so be it.
    “What is it he calls himself? Droopy Moose?”
    I started to laugh. “Lazy Elk,” I said. “Come on now, we have to be quiet, we’re getting close.”
    I could see the top of the tepee through the trees up ahead where the path ended and smell the smoke from the outdoor mud oven beside the big barn. I heard voices and struggled to make out who they belonged to as Del and I crept closer.
    I knew the other residents of New Hope pretty well by that time and liked them all despite their various oddities. Gabriel was a smart man with a lot of patience. He was the one to go to for help with complicated homework or any sort of moral dilemma. His wife, Mimi, was a good ten years younger than he but her love for him was clear. It seemed to border on worship. He was her life and whatever visions he had for New Hope became hers by default.
    Bryan and Lizzy were the only others who’d been there since the beginning. They were in their forties and made pottery, which they sold at craft fairs. They lived in a little shack next to the goat barn. The goats had been Lizzy’s idea. She thought New Hope could make some money selling their milk, making cheese, maybe even goat’s milk soap. Then, after the goats arrived, she discovered their milk dries up unless they keep getting pregnant—and the offspring are somehow disposed of. That seemed cruel to Lizzy, so the goats served little purpose except for the excitement they caused each time they found their way through the fence and into the garden or through some open doorway. Once, they’d eaten a hole through our tepee’s canvas.
    Shawn and Doe were a young couple who lived in a log hogan behind the greenhouse. Shawn was the resident mechanic and tinkerer. He kept the cars and tractor running. If something was broken, he was the guy who could fix it. Doe spent most of her time with Raven, a fussy baby who didn’t like to be ignored.
    Zack had been a freshman at Dartmouth when he read an article Gabriel had written for a socialist newspaper on the nature of community. Zack had hitchhiked to meet Gabriel and spend a weekend at New Hope—and just never left. When he wasn’t reading battered paperback copies of Siddhartha and The Communist Manifesto , he was playing Bob Dylan songs on his beat-up six string. Zack was enamored of Gabriel and would spend hours in quiet but animated discussions with him about what a truly democratic society would look like.
     
     
     
    A S THE TREES THINNED OUT to scrubby pine saplings and the ground leveled off, I recognized the voices of Doe and Mimi coming from the clearing. Del and I hid behind a huge boulder beside the entrance to the path. The tepee was just to our left, so close we could smell the damp canvas. To our right was the big barn. Between the two structures was the dome-shaped mud oven where we baked all our bread. Beyond the smoking, clay-covered mound, we could make out one end of the vegetable garden and the stuffed scarecrow my mother and I had made.
    Doe and Mimi were standing at the