Harmony (7 page)

The next morning, Scott gives us a talk after breakfast. We're sitting in the dining hall, with our empty plates still in front of us. The grown-ups have moved the picnic tables around, so they're set up like three sides of a square. Scott's at the top table, right in the middle.

“So,” he says. “Listen up.” He stops to take a sip of his coffee, while we all scrape our chairs so we're facing him. He waits for it to get quiet, then he puts his cup down and sits up a little straighter.

“Okay,” he says. “We've got five more days until our first batch of Guest Campers arrives, and we've got a lot to do in that time. It's not all going to be fun, and it's not all going to be easy, but we're in it together, and that counts for something. You, me, all of us . . .” He makes a circular motion with his finger. “The thirteen people in this room, we're the Core Family of Camp Harmony. The CF, that's us. And not one of us ended up here by accident. I chose you guys because I saw something special in each of you. And you were the people I wanted by my side on this journey.”

I look down at my plate. It's always kind of embarrassing when grown-ups get all sincere and touchy-feely.

“So,” Scott says, after a pause. “Let's get started. What we're trying to do here, we're basically trying to build our own little city. We've already got the houses, and the paths that lead from one place to another. What else do you think our city might need?”

“Cars,” says Ryan. He's wearing a shirt with
The
Simpsons'
Duff Beer logo on it.

“Yeah, okay, good,” says Scott. “But we've already got cars, and it's not going to be
that
big a city.”

“A castle,” says Charlotte. Still wearing the tutu from yesterday.

Scott nods and pretends like he's considering it. “Interesting,” he says. “Good idea.” And then he looks straight at me and gives a tiny nod. “Anyone else?”

He's smiling a little, like there's a joke that nobody else is in on, like we both know these are stupid answers and he knows that I have it in me to say something smart. “Food,” I call out. “Like a grocery store, or you know, not a
store
exactly . . .”

“Bingo!” he says, pointing at me. “We've got to be able to eat, right? Most important thing.” My mom turns and smiles at me, and some of the other grown-ups are looking my way, too. “So if we want to be our
own
city and not always relying on other cities for our food, what are some things we can do?”

I wait, but it doesn't seem like anyone else is going to answer, so I speak up again. “Plant a garden,” I say.

“Absolutely,” says Scott. “First order of business, plant a garden.”

He stands up and goes to get an old art easel that's folded up in the corner. He sets it up where everyone can see it and puts a big pad of paper on it. “Candy,” he says. “Come on up and be our note-taker.”

Candy walks up to the front of the room, and Scott hands her a thick black marker. Candy runs her hands across the top and side of the pad of paper, with a big flourish, like she's one of those girls on
The Price Is Right
.

“Garden,” Scott tells her. “Write that at the top. And underneath, we'll list the smaller tasks we need to do to get our garden going.”

“Hey,” Tilly says suddenly. “I know.”

Everyone turns to look at her, and I get that nervous feeling in my stomach, because this isn't group-conversation time, and anyway, who knows what she's going to say? I doubt she has any helpful gardening tips. She might start talking about statues or make a joke about how Scott's name rhymes with “snot” or something.

“Yes, Tilly?” Scott says. He looks kind of amused, not all annoyed that she interrupted him in the middle of his speech. And down the table, my mom and dad seem totally fine. They're not like sitting up extra-straight, getting ready to grab her arm if she says something embarrassing. And I realize: it's okay for Tilly to be
Tilly
here. No one's going to care; no one's going to think we're weird for having her in our family.

“We can call it Beantown,” Tilly says. “Our little city. Either that or Scottsdale.”

Some of the grown-ups laugh, but it's not mean or anything. My mom's even smiling at her.

“I like the way you think, Tilly,” says Scott. “Always looking at the big picture. But the problem with those names is that they're all about me, and that's not really right, I don't think. What do you guys think about calling it Harmony?”

“Harmony, New Hampshire,” Tilly says. I can tell she likes it, because she gets up out of her chair and does this thing she does when she's excited where she taps all of her fingers on her cheeks, in order (pinky to pointer), a couple of times really fast. “That can be our address. Camp Harmony, Harmony, New Hampshire.”

Even I know it's not as simple as that; you can't just decide to call yourself a town and expect it to be all official, like with the post office or whatever. But as Scott moves the conversation back to gardening, I reach over and put my arm around her and give her a hug
from the side. She's my sister, and she drives me crazy, but I love her more than anything. And sometimes—not always but sometimes—I like the way she thinks, too.

 • • • 

We spend most of the morning brainstorming our “city-building tasks” (which is a phrase that Tilly came up with, in case you couldn't tell). There are four main categories of things we have to do to get everything up and running:

– Food cultivation (which includes gardening, and a whole bunch of other related stuff, like composting and collecting rainwater for irrigation);

– Animal keeping (we're getting a chicken and we're going to hatch baby chicks! And we might eventually get bees for honey, but I don't want anything to do with that);

– Daily maintenance (boring stuff like cooking and cleaning, laundry, shopping for anything we can't make ourselves);

– And “camp growing,” which is a bunch of random but sort of fun things, like building a play structure and making a new sign that says “Camp Harmony,” so we can finally take down the “Kozy Kabins” one.

I'm kind of hoping that I can help with that one, maybe even come up with the design. I'm really good at art, and I don't think I'm bragging by saying it, just “identifying my strengths,” as Scott says. But that's the last thing on the list. The first project I'm working on is setting up an irrigation system for the garden. I'm on a team with Scott and Ryan, and right after lunch, Scott takes us over to the planting area, which is a big flat rectangle of land by the edge of the woods. I thought we were going to have to start totally from scratch, which I was kind of excited about, because I already know
how to do that a little bit. At my school in DC, there was a garden in one corner of the playground, and all the classes helped out with it. But this already looks like an actual garden: the dirt's all in rows, with green leaves starting to poke up here and there, and in some places there are poles stuck in the ground (for beans, I bet) and little signs saying what's planted where.

“Are those all weeds?” asks Ryan, pointing to the plants. I sigh, but quietly, so he won't hear me. But I mean, duh. Even if you're a city kid (which, by the way, so am I) or someone who's never planted anything before, do you really think that weeds would be spread out in perfectly spaced intervals? Or, for that matter, that they'd be marked with signs?

“Nope,” says Scott, and I have to give him credit, he doesn't sound like he thinks Ryan's an idiot for asking, or even nervous like he's afraid Ryan's going to pull up all his good plants. I'm kind of comparing Scott to my parents, in the way they deal with Tilly when she says things like this. They're pretty good at not sounding like she's an idiot, but the nervous part is usually there, especially with my mom.

“These are actual vegetables,” Scott says. “Or at least, they're going to be. See, you guys just got here, but I've been here for a month already. And actually, I started working on this even earlier than that. I came up in March, right after the snow melted, and I laid out a bunch of newspapers and mulch to get rid of the grass. Then when I came back up last month, I was able to get started pretty quickly on planting.”

“That makes sense,” I say. I'm showing off maybe, but I want Scott to know that I'm not a total idiot about this stuff. “Because if you want any of them to be ready to pick over the summer, you have to get the seeds down early.”

“Exactly,” he says. “Sounds like you know a little bit about growing plants.”

So I start telling him about the school garden at my old school in DC, and we're having this whole conversation, while Ryan just kind
of meanders around the edges of the plots with his head down. Then all of a sudden, he comes back over to us and interrupts me right in the middle of a sentence. “Webster's dictionary,” he says, “describes a wedding as ‘the process of removing weeds from one's garden.'” And then he wanders away again.

I raise my eyebrows and try to throw Scott a look like
that was odd
, but Scott's grinning like it was a great joke and totally fit the context of the discussion.

“Hey, Ryan,” he calls out. “Get back here.”

It takes him a minute, but Ryan eventually weaves his way back to us.

“
Simpsons
quote, I'm guessing?” asks Scott.

Ryan looks up like
huh?
, like he's already forgotten the whole thing and he's on to something else entirely. “She's always so deep in her own head,” my mom says about Tilly.

“Wedding and weeding,” prompts Scott. Still not annoyed, not bothered that our conversation got interrupted or that we still haven't started whatever this irrigation project is. Just interested in what's going on in Ryan's mind.

Ryan smiles. “Yeah. Isn't that hilarious? It's when Homer's teaching a class about how to have a successful marriage.”

Scott turns to me. “Ryan is a walking
Simpsons
encyclopedia,” he says. “It's pretty impressive. Now listen up, both of you. In that shed . . .” He points at a little white building with a slanted roof on the far side of the garden. “I've got a whole bunch of plastic milk cartons that need to have holes poked in them. Any idea why they need to have holes poked in them?”

I start to say something, but Scott holds up a finger to stop me. He smiles at me the same way he did in the dining hall this morning: like he knows I know the answer. He wants to hear what Ryan says.

“Ryan?” he says. “Any idea why we'd be poking holes in milk cartons? For a reason that has something to do with our garden?”

I can see in Ryan's face that it's hard for him to drag himself back
from wherever he is in his mind. But then there's a moment when I think he plays back Scott's question in his mind, and everything clicks into place.

“To water the plants,” he says. “So the water will drip in there a little at a time.” Which is even more than I'd figured out, actually. I knew we'd put water in the jugs, but I hadn't really thought about why.

“High five,” says Scott, and he holds a hand up to each of us. “And here's how we're going to make this fun. While we work, Iris is going to tell us things about her life in DC—little stories, random facts—and Ryan is going to see if he can come up with a
Simpsons
quote that fits the situation. Got it?”

And the thing is, I
know
this is one of those things where grown-ups think they can fool kids into getting along or doing chores by making it into a game—but it actually does sound fun. And once we get going, it becomes a kind of friendly contest; I try to come up with stories that will stump Ryan, and every single time, he manages to find a
Simpsons
quote to match. And it's not like I've never watched
The Simpsons
. Sometimes I throw him an easy one, or surprise him by coming up with a quote of my own. By the time we're done with the milk cartons, we've gotten into songs. Like I tell them about this really cute white fake-fur vest that my grandma bought me, and Ryan sings “See My Vest.” As we're putting everything back in the shed, I talk about my favorite Mexican restaurant, and how I really liked their gazpacho, and I say along with him, “It's tomato soup, served ice cold!” And the two of us walk back along the path with Scott, singing, “You don't win friends with salad,” and doing our own goofy little conga line all the way to the cabins.

There's a sculpture that stands in an imaginary square, a memorial to those whose lives were changed by the events of July 14, 2012. This is where the Hammond Living History Society holds its meetings.

The society was formed in 2017, with the goal of uniting several different existing groups of Hammond history reenactors; the society aims to provide a common network for interested hobbyists, regardless of their level of commitment to authenticity of historical detail.

Every year, the society sponsors the Hammond Days festival in Laconia, New Hampshire, on a plot of privately owned land about a mile from the former site of Scott Bean's Camp Harmony. Concession stands sell items from a list of family member favorites published by the American Hammond Association: cucumber spears served with a cup of ranch dressing;
Dora the Explorer
Popsicles in any color except green; slices of chicken cordon bleu from the recipe in
The
Joy of Cooking
, which Alexandra made on request for birthdays and other special occasions. Popcorn sprinkled with garlic salt. Fresh plums. Chocolate chip cookies baked from rolls of refrigerated dough.

While more serious reenactors give meticulous consideration to each element of their attire (taking care, for example, to know which patterns of Hanna Andersson pajamas Tilly and Iris wore in the winter of 2007 and which patterns the company did not introduce until 2008), plenty of festival attendees take a more casual approach. Most visitors make an effort to reproduce the general style of the family's clothes within a given period, without worrying too much about whether Tilly wore the fuchsia-and-teal-striped long johns that Christmas, or the lavender-and-ocean-blue ones.

The climax of the weekend-long festival is a show entitled “The Other Hammonds,” presented at the bonfire on Saturday night. One by one, festivalgoers stand up, against the backdrop of night hush and fire crackle, and present a story of how things might have gone a different way for the family. How one different decision or divergent circumstance might have changed everything. Picking apart the seams of the story and finding a new way to stitch it back together.