Free Valley of the Moon by Melanie Gideon

people.
I was surprised how badly I wanted them all to like me.
    “What do you mill?” I asked.
    Magnusson walked away without a word, done with me and my ridiculous questions.
    “Grain,” answered Joseph. “Oats. Wheat and corn.”
    “Oh,” I said in a small voice. “I’m sorry. I live in San Francisco. I don’t know how you do things on a farm.”
    “That’s fine. I love talking about what we do.” He led me out of the workshop.
    “I’m afraid I made a bad impression on your friend.”
    “Magnusson is a Swede,” he said, as if that explained everything.
    We walked past pretty little cottages and two dormitories. On our way to the schoolhouse, Joseph told me they didn’t keep to a regular school year. When the children were needed to help with a harvest, school let out. When the community work was done, school was back in session again.
    The schoolhouse was empty today. Written on the chalkboard was a Walt Whitman quote.
Now I see the secret of making the best persons: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
    Sun streamed through the windows and birdsong filled the air. How I would love for Benno to go to school in a room like this. How I would have loved to have gone to a school like this. Against my better judgment, my spirits soared.
    “Whitman is Martha’s patron saint,” Joseph said.
    “Did you and Martha meet here on the farm?”
    “We met at a lecture on cross-pollination methods for corn.”
    Was he serious? He didn’t crack a smile. Yes, apparently he was serious.
    “Is she from California?”
    “She’s from Topeka, Kansas. A farmer’s daughter.”
    He told me how Martha had been raised by her Scottish grandmother, a feisty old woman who ate bacon sandwiches, befriended the Kiowa, rode bareback, and practiced herbal medicine, as had her mother, and her mother before her. It was this grandmother who made sure Martha knew her digitalis from her purple coneflower, this grandmother who transformed her into a gifted herbalist.
    “Martha’s a midwife as well,” he said.
    “Wow. So she takes care of everybody?” Two-hundred-something people? That was a lot of responsibility.
    “We have a physician here, too. Dr. Kilgallon, better known as Friar. They have an agreement. If it bleeds or is broken, it goes to Friar. Everything else goes to Martha.”
    “So she treats people with what—tinctures?” I’d seen the row of tinctures at the co-op. I’d always been intrigued, but I was doubtful they’d work as well as Tums or Tylenol.
    “Not just tinctures. She makes eye sponges and wine cordials, fever pastes, catarrh snuffs, blister treatments. But more often than not, her prescription is simple. Chop wood. Eat a beefsteak. Kiss your children,” he said.
    “That works?”
    “You’d be surprised. Never underestimate the power of having somebody pay attention to you.”
    I wanted a Martha in my life.
    —
    He took me to the wine cave. Past the hay shed and the chicken coop, the sheep barn and the horse barn. We climbed into the hills and he proudly showed me one of the four springhouses on the property. Then he proceeded to give me a long lecture on gravity-propelled irrigation systems while we gazed down upon the farm, which was set in the bowl of the valley, a verdant paradise.
    I was enchanted. My chest ached with longing. There was something here that was familiar, that I’d been missing but I hadn’t had any idea I’d been missing until this man had shown it to me.
    “Well, if you have to be trapped, this is the place you’d want to be,” I said.
    His face transformed into a mask of incredulity. “Good God.” He quickly walked away, leaving me to follow.

I t was exhausting, trying to act normal around her when what I really wanted to do was ply her with questions. Instead she plied me with questions—clearly she’d never spent time on a working farm. Still, she was not a prissy woman. She didn’t hold her breath in the pigsty, or shudder when she