for Elizabeth Lind

The college break stretches from May to September, seventeen weeks of no paychecks. My artist friend, Lisa, calls it a creative compromise. “I bought my freedom,” she says, but she's a high school teacher, and her summers off are paid. For adjuncts there are no such trade-offs. I can't buy my freedom. I inherited mine.

            “You never should have moved into that house,” Roxy chided. My sister would have sold the old Cape and its six wet acres immediately. She has no sentimental memories of living here with our grandmother. She remembers only the winter drafts, the dead TV, the fuses that blew when she plugged in her hair dryer. Grandma tried to bring her round to the country life, to Nature, she really did. But Roxy wanted none of it. The last time they saw each other, Roxy was trying to move Grandma into assisted living. You can imagine how that went over.

            The house has its drawbacks, I will admit. No central heating. No insulation. In the dug cellar where Grandma once brewed moonshine, black spiders scurry in corners. But the taxes are cheap, and I no longer have to worry about my rent going up or my home being sold. I may be at the mercy of my employer, but at least I'm not homeless.

            What Roxy doesn't know is that the septic system has failed. That bit of intelligence I keep between myself and my waste hauler, who comes every six weeks to pump it out. His name is Rodney. On his truck he's pasted poop emojis and over them decals of the president and vice president. The first time he showed up, I held my breath, not only against the septic smell, but the urge to comment. If you live in the country and you're the least bit liberal, you keep your politics to yourself.

            There are other accommodations you make, living out here. I know enough to keep the foodstuffs bagged up, the flour in the freezer; when an occasional black snake suns itself on the granite stoop, I step around him. But then last week a rat showed up.

            He was long, at least seven inches from nose to tail, with a body wobbling like a fat woodchuck's. Maybe he slithered up from the bog; he might have been hibernating under the woodpile. Wherever he came from, when I saw that brown tail streak across the kitchen linoleum, I admit it, I screamed. Ants, spiders, mealy bugs – those I can deal with. But I draw the line at rats.

            In class, I might have lectured my students about the web of life, about habitat, about the animal kingdom. Surely there was a metaphor of nature in all this. But I wanted no metaphors in my kitchen.

            When the pesticide man came, he crawled under the porch and braved the cellar, emerging with cobwebs in his salt-and-pepper hair. Writing out a check for $400, it occurred to me there is more money in killing animals than in talking about them.

            Money is always the problem. Every semester I have to bid on classes, and they let me teach no more than two. No benefits. I scrimp to afford a high-deductible health plan. I've watched others score lecture jobs, even tenure-track positions, but I could never make the finalist stage. I created my own specialty – writing about nature – but neither the English professors nor the botanists are impressed. The theorists have taken over the English Department, and the botanists only care about DNA. Naturalist has become a dirty word.

            Eventually, I gave up applying. I will remain an adjunct and live on less. Thoreau did it in a house much smaller than this. Maybe I should plant beans, or collect acorns, or buy a goat. Maybe I will finish my novel, and one of the Big Five publishing houses will buy it at auction.

            Years ago, I had written a novel, about a woman and her grandmother, but nothing much happened in it, and the boutique publisher quickly remaindered it. The credit had helped me get teaching jobs, albeit temporary ones. In that early effort, the young woman and the grandmother refused to do anything but talk; I couldn't make it a journey novel, and I couldn't bear to do them harm. For the past few years, I've been trying something new – a blend of literature and nonfiction – a way to combine my grandmother's story with her natural habitat. I keep chipping away at the pages, hoping this time will be different.

            Once a week I drive to the campus coffee shop. But before I can write, I log on to my college email. “Hi Vi!” I type. “Hope you're having a great summer!” Violet is the English Department secretary. “Just wondering when the fall classes will post.” I send an identical message to Olivia, the coordinator of Environmental Studies, with whom I had an embarrassing interview a few years back – “You're a fine as an adjunct,” she said, “but I'm not sure you could handle a full-time position.” She called my work-in-progress “your little project.” I would never speak to her again, but I have to eat.

            Olivia and Vi are having such great summers they shoot back automatic out-of-office replies. Everyone, it seems, is on vacation – and getting paid for it.

            Three days later, the man shows up to deliver wood. I ordered it months before, flush with April pay. Watching him stack the cord against the house, I wonder if he will take a post-dated check.

            “Gutter's hanging,” he says. He has backed his truck up to the porch. No poop emojis, just his name: Everett Alan Spicer, Lumber.

            The gutter is off the house. From his angle he probably can't see that some creature, probably a squirrel, has gnawed a hole in the eaves.

            “You want to get that fixed, 'fore winter comes.” He takes a cigarette from the pack in his front pocket.

            “Squirrels. They live in the attic.”

            “That's not good.”

            Better than rats, I want to say, but I just gaze past him toward the bog. Soon the frogs’ voices will wane until they disappear altogether.

            “You live here alone?”

            That's not a question a single woman should answer, but Spicer's tone is reassuringly paternal. “Since my grandmother died. Ruth Carpenter.”

            He nods. I suspect he already knew this. “Going to be a hard winter,” he continues. “Now take that.” He points his cigarette toward the black walnuts littering the ground. “You're going to need more than a cord.”

            I will freeze to death, then. They will find my body in January, when I fail to show up for the spring semester. Thoreau didn't have to pay for wood. The whole system conspires against me. “I'll take my chances.”

            He shakes his head and grounds the cigarette under his boot. “I'll be back,” he says, and before I can offer to pay, he is backing the truck out of the driveway.

            A week later an email comes from the English Department – not from Vi, but the chairman. The class I typically teach, on the Transcendentalists, is no longer being offered. It does not meet the college strategic plan's “key performance indicators,” he writes. What, I wonder, would be a key performance indicator for Thoreau and Emerson? Can we be strategically self-reliant? But there is no money in literature, or philosophy. “The English Department wishes you well in your future endeavors,” he concludes, signing off, “all the best.”

            I shoot back what I hope is a chipper email, offering to teach any entry-level course, including Composition. I have sometimes sneaked both bards of Concord onto that syllabus. Then I send a reminder email to Olivia in Environmental Studies.

            This time a reply comes immediately. Sorry, we aren't using adjuncts this semester. There is no further explanation. She does not bother to wish me all, or any, of her best.

             I sit there a moment, trying to collect myself. It's the first week of August, and I am officially unemployed. It is too late to begin applying for other jobs. I have $250 in the bank. Paying the exterminator and Rodney wiped out most of my savings. All I have is a roof over my head. How will I keep that house heated? Buy food? Pay the quarterly taxes? I can't even think about my 15-year-old car, with its bald tires, or my aching molar that needs a crown.

            Slowly, panic gives way to anger. After teaching at the college for a dozen years, I have been dismissed with a pair of curt emails. I have seen tweets with more courtesy. But there is nothing to be done. The college administration has become a sprawling, unfeeling leviathan that has sold its soul to the bean-counters. I am not a person; I am a PT, a percentage of an FTE. To me, losing two classes is a catastrophe. To the college, it is a pivot toward a sustainable budget environment, which will help the dean and the provost earn their bonuses next year.

            I return to my own habitat, where August has brought drought. Grandma's lilies fade in the heat. The bog retreats, looking more like Thoreau's Great Meadows than a swamp. But at least the drought takes the pressure off my septic system. As long as the rain holds off, I will not have to call Rodney. I can flush the toilet, shower and wash dishes with abandon – or I would, if I didn't worry about the well going dry.

            In the afternoons, I walk in the woods. Past the swamp maple and white pine that circle the bog, down and up the trail I trudge, stopping often to listen for the chickadees and wrens. Circling back, I sit against the towering black walnut. Its bark presses into my spine. Hold me up, I think. Together, we will get through this. The tree is at least 45 years old, maybe older. It seems to have been here always. Grandma must have planted it and its sisters long ago, shortly before Roxy and I arrived, unexpected, dumped there by our hapless mother. Grandma had doted on the trees as saplings, hand-watering them, which I could never understand; weren't their feet wet enough, so close to the bog? But she insisted: They needed a good start in life. As they grew, the black walnut trees provided homes for nuthatches and downy woodpeckers. They shaded our impromptu picnics, which Roxy hated but I loved – any excuse to be outdoors. Now, they tower 90 feet in the air. Their walnuts, encased in hard green coverings, make a black mess when you try to dig them out. Leave them to the squirrels, Grandma always said. Not everything is meant for us.

            Through the brush, sere from drought, I glimpse black bubbles in the bog. I will not leave this place, no matter what. I imagine what Roxy would say, finding out I am unemployed. And what of later, as I grow older? How tempting to get me in a nursing home, sell this land, skim some profit for herself. No one is safe from the world's interference. Not even here.

            I stand and take a tentative step toward the bog. The briers will scratch my legs, but the mud will suck me down. It won't take long, and I can rest easy. They won't find me. They won't be able to wrest me away from my home.

            “They're ready to harvest.” I whirl around to see Everett Spicer, cigarette hanging from his lip. I am almost into the brush.

            “The trees,” he adds. “Thin them out, make room for more. There's juveniles over yonder, need some space.”    

            “No,” I blurt. Surely my grandmother didn't plant these trees so that the local lumberman could chop them down. They are for the birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks.

            “Sawn, dried, they'd make twenty grand a piece. Give you forty percent, minus the cord.”

            My nonmath brain spins. Eight grand each, minus wood money? I take a step toward the tree. Maybe just one. But no. How could I?

            Spicer makes a clumsy gesture, as though to wave away my doubts. “She planted those for you, you know. Ruth knew she wouldn't live forever. She wanted to make sure you and your sister were provided for.”

            I crane my neck to the tree's crown. It is not elegant, like a maple, or sweeping, like a pine. Some of its branches have split in storms and, stuck, sway when the wind blows. Withered by drought, the walnut has shed most of its nuts prematurely – perhaps so the animals who need them can shore up supplies for a hard winter. But it, and its sisters, have endured. If I could save it from the woodsman's ax, that black walnut would make it through another winter, and another, providing food for the small mammals, homes for the tree-dwelling birds. But who will feed me, keep my house warm, shelter me from the gales?

            “You don't have to cut them all down, for heaven's sake,” Spicer says, but his tone is gentle. “Two or three, and the juveniles will grow taller. The woodsman always leaves something for tomorrow.”

            The bog and its black oblivion lie at my back. Ahead is one magnificent tree, and a second, and a third. I still feel the impression the bark made on my skin. “All right,” I say finally. “Three. That's all. But on one condition.”

            Again, the boot flattens the cigarette. The lumberman looks up.

            “Give me one more month with them. And then they will be yours.”

            Spicer remains true to his word. For the rest of August and into September, he and his chain saw stay away. Every day, I walk to the base of the first black walnut. I look out at the bog my grandmother had kept at bay, and lean against the tree she raised. I forget the toxic politics of higher education, my creative doubts, my worries for the future. This is my inheritance. I have paid dearly for it; I almost traded away my life. But I have bought my freedom.