If we weren’t in the classrooms, we were on cooking, cleaning, or evangelical detail. The first two are obvious, and I got pretty good at casserole making for twenty plus. We did several versions with cans of soup and Tater Tots, onions, and hamburger, and also a few with cans of soup, rice, chicken, and peas. These mixtures came out of the oven bubbly and brown and so heavy that it took two of us in pot mitts to lift the jumbo-size baking dishes to the counter. We also did a lot of instant pudding for dessert, and that made me think about Grandma.
Evangelical detail is maybe less obvious. Two or three of us would be assigned to work in the main office copying and then addressing the Promise newsletter to donors, and also addressing donation request cards from these master lists of Christians from all over the country. Exodus International supplied us with those master lists, and also videos and worksheets and workbooks. They were the “largest information and referral ministry in the world addressing homosexual issues.” Occasionally, during evangelical detail, one or two of us even got to talk on the phone to major donors about the kinds of progress we were making, but for those first months I wasn’t asked to do that.
If we weren’t working a detail, we were in a workshop, a one-on-one, or a gender-appropriate activity. This meant lots of group sports for the guys, and fishing and hiking expeditions, or they’d take them to one of the neighboring ranches and let them help out for a few hours, really cowboy it up. For us girls it meant trips into Bozeman to various beauty parlors run by typically big-haired ladies sympathetic to our unique beauty needs, and also baking sessions and occasional visits from Mary Kay or Avon ladies. Once, a woman from the labor and delivery unit at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital did a presentation about pregnancy and infant care that featured dolls sort of similar to the Rescue Annie infant mannequins I had used in lifeguard training, and that made me think about Hazel. And Mona. And Scanlan. But not really all that much about the joys of motherhood, which seemed to be the point of the presentation.
If we weren’t in a one-on-one or work detail or doing a gender-appropriate activity, then there were of course study hours and journal/reflection hours and prayer/devotional hours, and every other Sunday we would load into one of the two Promise vans and head into Bozeman for worship services at the Assembly of God megachurch: Word of Life. We had our own pews and were semicelebrities among the congregants. On alternate Sundays, though, Reverend Rick just did the sermon in our own chapel, and some of the local ranchers and their families might join us. As much as I liked excursions away from the compound, I preferred the Sundays we stayed at Promise, the entire congregation mostly just us disciples. At Word of Life I felt like a big, shiny, obvious goldfish, a goldfish well known to have homosexual tendencies, so basically a big, gay goldfish in a tank with eighteen other such goldfish, wheeled in and parked in a pew for two hours, much to the delight of the crowd. At those services it seemed like everyone who looked at me, whether they smiled, or glanced away, or clasped my hand during the meet and greet, was thinking: Is this the service that’s going to do it for her? Is she already becoming just that much less gay, and is this the service that will tip the scales to the side of the Lord? Might it happen before our very eyes?
Despite all the routine, those of us who wanted to break the rules still managed to do so. We did have scheduled free-time hours on the weekends, and sometimes study hours could be manipulated, and depending on who you got stuck with for that week’s work detail, so could those hours.
Jane Fonda, Adam Red Eagle, and I were the potheads. Steve Cromps could be convinced; he just wasn’t a regular. Mark Turner, who happened to be Adam’s roommate, had recently caught Jane smoking up on the path to the lake, and though he’d not tattled, at least not yet (“because,” Jane said, “it just isn’t his way”), he certainly hadn’t accepted her offer to partake, either. Mark was the son of some big-deal preacher from Nebraska—a guy with two thousand–plus members in his congregation, and his billboards, complete with his picture, lined the interstate. I found out about all of this early, not because Mark bragged, or even spoke about it, really, but because he was basically an expert on the Bible, a child prodigy on the subject, and so he was often asked to recite passages during our Sunday services. What I’d noticed about him was his seriousness. But Jane thought there was more to him than that. He was, she said, “someone to be wary of.” I didn’t know quite what she meant by that, but this was typical of my understanding of Jane’s observations.
Adam and I helped her harvest the last of her marijuana plants in latish September. She had been complaining that the early frosts had already killed off a bunch of them and that she wouldn’t get what was left picked in time to save it. I offered to go with her and she gave me one of those unreadable looks of hers, but then she said, “Why not.”
When I met her outside the barn at the time she’d said to, carrying the beach towel she’d told me to bring, Adam was there with her, chewing on a tiny pink straw from the Capri Sun juice pack he’d purchased the last time we’d all gone to Walmart. Adam was almost always chewing on something, and so Lydia was almost always telling him to try harder to “curb his oral fixation.”
“He’s coming with us,” Jane said, Polaroiding Adam and me in that whip-fast way of hers.
“You might want to work on the part where you say cheese,” I said. Jane barely ever showed anyone her pictures, though she had to have hundreds and hundreds of them. She’d already taken dozens of just me, but I’d only seen maybe three of them.
“What would be the point if you were posed?” she asked, removing the Polaroid and putting it in the back pocket of her khaki pants before taking off toward the forest. Adam and I followed behind.
“Apparently you can’t interfere with art,” he said to me when we were a few yards down the trail. I didn’t know Adam well enough to tell how much of what he said was a joke, or if there was any joke to it at all.
“You think Jane’s an artist?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said, sort of smiling at me around that straw. “Jane thinks she’s an artist.”
Jane stopped and turned around to face us. “Hey, wackadoos—I am an artist. And amazingly I can hear you from all the way up here, these six feet in front of you.”
“Artists are sensitive,” Adam said, doing the hushed voice of some nature-documentary host who’s spotted something wild. “They must be treated with care and sometimes caution.”
“Indeed,” I said, trying on the voice for myself. “Observe how the artist appears skittish and out of control when confronted by insensitive nonartists.”
“Those who lack talent are understandably frightened and jealous when in its presence,” Jane said, and then she took another picture of us: snap, flash, spit.
“The artist reacts with hostility,” Adam said, “using her advanced image-capturing device to stun and immortalize her victims.”
“My aesthetic approach requires spontaneity,” Jane said, pocketing that picture and resuming her march forward. “You two feel free to look up aesthetic when we get back to the lodge.”
“Does it have something to do with homosexual attraction?” I asked, not as loudly as Jane but loud enough. “Because it sure sounds like it does, and if that’s the case then no thank you, sinner. I know your tricks.”
“We’d better look up spontaneity while we’re at it,” Adam said, definitely smiling now.
“For sure,” I said. “And approach. And requires. It’s weird that we’ve been able to understand anything the artist has said to us, what with her massive vocabulary.”
“I haven’t, actually,” Adam said. “I’m not even sure where we’re going right now. She tried to explain it to me, but too many big words, you know? I just nodded my head in the places where it seemed like I should.”
Right then I decided that Adam was my favorite person at Promise.
Farmer Jane’s pot patch wasn’t far from one of the main hiking trails, the one to the lake, but Jane knew
what she was doing, which plants to grow near, how to disguise her path. Even after following her out there and spending better than two hours tooling around among the smelly crop, I probably couldn’t have found it on my own without taking forever to do so. I guess that Jane knew this or she wouldn’t have brought us along.
The beach towels we each had draped over our shoulders served two purposes. The first was to make it appear, should we happen upon fellow disciples, that we were headed to one final, autumnal dip in the lake before the full brunt of fall and winter stopped our swimming. The second was for transport: to conceal the harvest. Jane also had a backpack with her for that purpose.
Lots of the leaves on the trees had already turned to shades of yellow, from canary to yield sign to lemon sherbet, and the fall sunlight was distilled through those leaves, the rays bouncing into the shadows around us in that chunk of forest. As we walked, Jane whistled songs I didn’t recognize. She was a good whistler and a fast walker, the squeak of her leg comforting, like the chug of a train or the whir of a fan, a piece of machinery doing its job. I liked following just behind her; she had such purpose to all of her moves.
Her patch was in a kind of clearing, at least enough of one for the plants to get their required daily amounts of sunlight. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but all these tallish, übergreen shrubs lined up in neat rows and bearing the actual, real-life leaves I’d seen immortalized on so many patches sewn to backpacks and black-light posters and CD cases were surprisingly impressive. And fragrant. Adam seemed impressed too, kind of smiling at the whole spread, the two of us shaking our heads at Jane’s industry.
“All this by yourself?” I asked.
“It’s best all by yourself,” Jane said. She moved in between the plants, carefully, delicately, trailing her fingers just against their leaves. Then she looked off into the thick cover of the woods, all purposefully, her head high, like a stage actress, and said, “‘And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.’”
“What is The Grapes of Wrath, Alex?” Adam said.
“No idea,” I said.
“We read it last year,” Adam said. “It’s good.”
“It’s more than that. It’s necessary,” Jane said. “Everybody should read it every year.” Then she let herself slip back into Jane from wherever she had just been. She stuck her hands on her hips and said, “And here are the two of you, thinking that it just showed up, somehow, in little plastic Baggies, all shredded and ready for your rolling papers.”
Adam began to sing, “There was a farmer grew some pot and Artist was her name-o.”
Jane and I both laughed.
“And Homo was her name-o,” I said. “It just sounds better.”
“Not to Lydia,” Jane said.
“What’s her deal?” I asked.
“She’s impersonating the mother from Carrie as a career choice,” Adam said.
“Hardly,” I said. “She’s not nearly dramatic enough, and I’ve never once heard her say ‘dirty pillows,’ either.”
“That’s only because you don’t flash your dirty pillows like you should,” he said. I laughed. We were standing at the edge of the pot patch, right where the forest floor of trampled leaves and undergrowth met the dark, churned-up soil that Jane had obviously worked and worked. I think neither of us was quite sure if we were officially welcome to enter the patch or not.
Jane had knelt next to a massive bush of a plant and was doing something to the stalk, but I couldn’t quite see what. “Lydia’s a complicated woman,” she said from behind that plant. “I think she’s actually sort of brilliant.”
Adam made a face. “But completely deluded.”
“Sure she’s deluded, but you can be both,” Jane said. “I’ll tell you what: She’s not one to be trifled with.”
“God, I love you, Jane,” Adam said. “Who uses the word trifled but you?”
“I bet Lydia would,” I said.
“Of course she would,” Jane said. “It’s a good word; it’s very specific in its meaning and it sounds nice on the tongue.”
“I can think of something else that sounds nice on the tongue,” Adam said, doing a goofy double elbow jab at me, and then adding, “bu-dum-chhh.”
“So we can just take this as our confirmation that you’re every bit the man half today,” Jane said, and Adam laughed, but I wasn’t really sure what she meant by that.
“Lydia’s hard work must finally be paying off,” he said in this Paul Bunyan kind of man voice.
“Where did Lydia even come from?” I asked.
Adam switched to a really bad English accent and said, “From a magical land called England. It’s far, far across the sea—a place where nannies travel by flying umbrella and chocolate factories employ tiny, green-haired men.”
“Right,” I said. “But why’s she here at Promise?”
“She’s the bankroll,” he said. “She’s majority stakeholder in Saving Our Fucked-up Souls Enterprises.”
“Plus she’s Rick’s aunt,” Jane said, standing and walking toward us, a couple of acorn-size buds in her hand.
“No way,” I said, exactly at the same time Adam said, “No shit?”
“She is,” Jane said. “Rick talked about it once during my one-on-one, or it came up somehow, I don’t remember; it’s one of those things that’s not specifically a secret but they’re specifically secretive about it.”
“God,” Adam said, “Aunt Lydia the ice queen. I bet she gives things like wool socks as Christmas gifts.”
“Wool socks are completely useful,” Jane said. “I’d be happy with a big box of wool socks beneath the tree.”
Adam laughed. “That’s possibly the dykiest thing you’ve ever said.”
“Which is saying something,” we both said in unison.
Jane shook her head. “Practicality has nothing to do with sexuality.”
“That would be nice on a T-shirt,” I said. “What with the rhyming and all.”
“Yeah, you mention that to Lydia when we get back,” Adam said. “I’m sure she’ll have a batch printed in no time.”
“Where’d she get her money?” I asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Adam said. “But my personal theory is that she was a big porn star back in England and came here to escape her past and use her hard-earned devil money to do God’s work.”
I nodded. “Sounds reasonable.”
“I’m ever so slightly enamored of her,” Jane said, digging for something else in her backpack, eventually producing a small stack of lunch-size paper bags.
“Of course you are,” Adam said, overdoing his laugh. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
Jane stopped rummaging, looked at him. “She went to school at Cambridge, you know? Hello: the University of Cambridge. Have you heard of it?”
“Yeah I have,” he said. “That’s in Cambridge, Florida, right?”
I laughed at both of them.
“Who cares where she went to school?” Adam said. “All kinds of crazies go to good schools.”
“I think she’s mysterious,” Jane said, resuming her digging. “That’s all.”
“Come on,” Adam said, bending all the way over at the waist as if entirely exhausted by Jane’s reasoning. “The solar system is mysterious. The CIA is mysterious. The way they record music onto records and tapes is fucking mysterious as all get-out. Lydia’s a psycho.”
“Recording sound isn’t really that mysterious,” Jane said, walking back over toward us, so, so careful of her plants. “It’s a fairly straightforward process.”
“Of course it is,” Adam said. “And of course you know all about it.”
“I do,” Jane said, taking us each by the elbow and leading us into the patch. “But I won’t tell you now because now is
not the time. We came here to harvest.”
For the next hour or so she showed us how to pluck the heavy green buds, carefully, and how she wanted them wrapped in pieces of the brown paper bags she’d taken from the kitchen. She scrutinized things like the textures and colors on those buds, the little fibers, which Jamie had told me were called simply “red hairs” but which Jane referred to more accurately as the pistils.
She spoke like a botanist about using them to determine peak THC-to-CBD potency and thereby recognizing maximal harvest time, but then she added, “It doesn’t matter a whole heap because we’re picking anything and everything that might even give us half a buzz while we’re all snowed in during a blizzard come February.”
“Hear, hear,” I said to that.
“Hear, hear,” Adam said.
“Hear, hear is right,” Jane said back. “It’s a boon for you all that my nature is to be a provider.”
“It’s the Christian thing to do,” I said.
“Indubitably,” Jane said. She stretched her neck and squinted at the sun, using the back of her forearm to wipe her brow, her face determined and proud, just like a sepia-tinged portrait of an Old West pioneer missionary woman come to convert the natives and settle the land, only this time the crop wasn’t corn or wheat, and this time it was Jane who was in for conversion.
Adam waved a hairy, nearly golf-ball-size cluster of buds in front of Jane’s face. “Are we allowed to sample the harvest, O wise Earth Mother?”
She grabbed the cluster from him. “Not what we’re picking,” she said. “We have to dry it first. But I came prepared, as usual, because my nature is to be a provider.”