Stolen Honey (8 page)

“Like you were gettin’ laid,” he said hoarsely, running a nervous hand through his rusty hair. “That’s why I came out. You were yellin’, you don’t remember that? I’m supposed to sit by, let that son of a bee attack you? What else could I do but—but stop him?”

She felt her heart go slack. “Stop him—how?” she asked. “Did you drag him into the nightshade? Did you hit him with something?” She was awed at her own words. Horrified. Her breath came in ragged gasps.

He didn’t answer. Not right away. Finally, leaning his elbows on the table, the whites of his eyes brilliant, he said, “Maybe. Maybe I did. For you. Donna. Anything I did, it was for you.”

“Don’t come near me. Ever again,” she said, and kicked his leg, hard, as she left the table.

* * * *

Leroy stomped into the kitchen late that afternoon. He needed to borrow the truck, he told Gwen; he didn’t say why. “If I had my own car, I wouldn’t
have
to borrow yours.”

“Save up for one,” she said brightly.

“Save what? What you pay me? I need to make more money. I need a car to get around. I got a friend looking for a better job for me. He finds one, I’ll take it.”

“What? Why, this is our busiest season, Leroy, you can’t leave now! Maybe next year I can pay more, I’ll try. It’s been hard, with Donna in college.”

“I need my own car,” he repeated through stubborn lips, and turned on his heel. A minute later she heard the truck screeching off down the road. He’s punishing us, she thought. Punishing Donna for ignoring him, punishing me for not being able to pay a better wage.

She dropped to her knees to scrub the kitchen floor.

Chapter Six

Mert LeBlanc was surprised to see a taxi pull up in front of the house and his grandson climb out, dragging his green book bag. Then when Mert reached in his pocket for a few bucks the taxi drove off and Brownie said the school nurse had paid and he could bring her the money the next day. He was throwing up “all over the place,” he said, and she was afraid he had a bug. A couple of throw-up bugs, Brownie explained, were still going around, and he didn’t want to spread them.

“So you’re bringin’ ’em all home to us, thanks a lot,” said Mert, and laughed when his grandson frowned, taking him literally. “Better go right to bed, then, son.”

Mert went back to the pack basket he was making for the local craft center exhibition. He’d made egg baskets, apron baskets, thimble baskets, laundry and pack baskets, even a large cradle with a canopy over its woven bottom. He was pleased with those baskets. It beat putting auto parts together the way he’d done the first thirty-five years of his adult life.

He was part of five or more generations of basketmakers on Abenaki and French sides of the family. The baskets had kept both sides alive through depressions and oppressions, like the time a woman with a fancy WASP name had come knocking on the door to take his Aunt Maxine to the hospital for “a little procedure,” as she called it—
Sign here, please—
to keep her from having more babies. The woman had looked hard at
him,
too, but Mert managed to run out the door and only his father and aunt were visited by the simpering social worker. Aunt Maxine had blasphemed the woman to her dying day. It was something Mert would never forget.

He was tightening down the ash strips when his grandson walked back in with a peanut butter and honey sandwich. “You must be feeling better now,” he told the boy. “You’d think you never ate breakfast.” And Brownie said, looking defensive, “Well, I lost it. I threw up, I told you.”

Mert began to suspect something then. He began to suspect that Brownie’s being sick had something to do with the college boy who’d died in the patch of nightshade. “Somebody say somethin’ to you about that dead boy, did they?” he asked, still concentrating on his pack basket. It had sixteen uprights all tapered out; now he’d have to weave in the strips. He didn’t want to alarm Brownie, just let the boy speak it out.

The boy did. He told how the whole busload of schoolkids that morning began hissing his name, calling him Brown Bear, the baptismal name he didn’t want people to know. How the driver, Mrs. Bump, stopped the bus and they finally quieted. “Then, when I was getting off, a kid yelled, ‘Your sister’s a murderer!’ and they started up again.”

Brownie was crying now. He cried right into Mert’s uprights that had taken three days to dry. But it was all right. Mert laid down the work and put his arms around the boy. The body felt like a basket, all ribs and strips of flesh. Mert felt his shirt soak up the tears.

“There, there,” he said. He told Brownie about when he was a boy growing up in the thirties. “If you had any Indian blood in you,” he said, “the other kids wouldn’t play with you. Most tried to hide it, like my wife, Estelle, who was your grandmother you never knew. She dropped dead one day, kneading dough, yes, she did. She was a hard worker. She wouldn’t admit she was Indian—all her life pretending to be somebody she wasn’t. Me, I had my own friends, French and Abenaki. I was almost a half-blood and proud of it.”

He told the boy about how he wanted a certain brown ash tree and the ranger said, “Mert, you can’t cut a growing tree on government forest land. I said, ‘Yes I can, I’m Abenaki, you look it up.’ So the ranger looked into it and he come back and he says, ‘Mert, if you want that tree, it’s yours.’ You see, the government can’t take an Indian’s livelihood away from him. And if there’s two hundred maple trees in the forest up behind our place, I can hang fifty buckets and he can’t stop me.”

Brownie looked skeptical. “The police would stop you. Mr. Ball would call them. They’d send over Uncle Olen.”

Mert laughed again. “I’m not afraid of no police. Neither’s your dad.” He put both arms around his grandson, pulled him close. “And don’t worry about that dead boy. Olen’s a good man, he’s trying to help us find out what really happened.”

“Shep Noble died from the nightshade!” Brownie cried hotly. “Mother says so.”

“Sure. Now go lie down so I can tell your mother you wasn’t just playing hooky, she won’t like that. Don’t think about them mean kids. Don’t think about the nightshade.”

* * * *

Donna drove back to the farm with Emily after their sociology class. Her mother would pick her up after her bee rounds— Donna’s bicycle had a flat tire. Anyway, Donna didn’t want to go home. Home reminded her of Shep Noble. Home reminded her of Leroy, who might or might not have killed Shep. It reminded her of being a “squaw,” like the note said.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Emily said as she parked the pickup in the farm driveway. Donna glanced out at the two round silos, the red barn, the cows browsing beyond in the pasture that was full of wildflowers. It was peaceful here, unlike the war zone of her own home, the yellow crime scene tape still strung across the path into the woods.

“Oh, nothing much. I was just thinking how nice it is here. And worrying about the paper we have to write. Have you got a topic?”

“Well, I thought I might do something on farming,” Emily said. “You know, all the attitude problems?”

“What problems are those?” Donna needed to get into other people’s worlds, into
their
problems. She had to stop thinking about her own.

“Oh, the way people feel about farming. That it’s the kind of job you don’t need an education for, just to milk cows. When that’s not true at all.” Emily was warming to the subject. “You have to know about nutrition, and milking machines, and artificial insemination. My mother works all day at it. And we’re still living on the edge!”

“I know,” murmured Donna, feeling she should make a noise of some kind after that impassioned speech. And she
did
know what living on the edge was. Her family was a good example of it. Milk and honey, she thought. It sounded romantic, but you couldn’t make a real living off it. Herself, she’d
do
something one day. She’d be a professional, like Ms. Wimmet.

She got out of the pickup and slammed the tinny door behind her. It popped open again.

“Damn the thing,” Emily said. “I mean, this is what I’m talking about. We can’t afford a new pickup because my mother is trying to buy my father out—and so she keeps patching together the old machinery. Frankly, I’d be just as happy if she’d let him buy
her
out. Move us to town. Then I wouldn’t have to share this old truck. Alyce has her own Volvo, you know; she looks at me like I’m just a local hick—an outsider.”

“Somebody painted
Squaw
on my bicycle,” Donna said, suddenly blurting it out, then reddening with the confession. “It was one of those ZKE boys, I’m sure, I saw them afterward, laughing.” Emily looked at her.

“It was worse than that. It was horrible. It said,
Squaws Fuck. Squaws Kill.
Like they really think I killed that boy!” The tears were crowding her eyes again.

“Hey,” Emily said, “the ones that count know you didn’t hurt that guy. The frat boys are just looking for a scapegoat. Not to mention a good lay. That dumb Bozo thinks I’m a lay ’cause I’m a town girl. Well, you can’t give in to them or they’ll take advantage.”

“I know,” Donna said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “That’s what Mother says. I mean, that’s what she’d say if she knew what I’ve been going through. But I don’t tell her everything. She’s in trouble enough with the police for planting marijuana.”

Emily laughed. “My mother plants hemp illegally. They’re a pair, your mother and mine. Mom’s getting to be a living example of civil disobedience. Now she’s burning her trash out in the pasture, and that’s against the town ordinance.”

Emily got Donna blowing her nose, laughing about their unruly mothers. Donna told how her mother burned her trash, too, because she couldn’t afford to pay thirty dollars a week to have it carted away. “Now Uncle Olen’s found out about it, but he doesn’t say anything because he’s in love with her.”

“Really?” Emily sat down on the porch steps and Donna sank down beside her, shrugged her book bag off her back. It felt good to do that; her shoulders straightened and she felt lighter.

“Sure, he is. Of course, he’s ages older than she is. I mean, like fifteen years. He’s ready to retire, practically. Mother’s forty-six.”

“She’s younger than my mother. Mom just turned fifty and she doesn’t like it.”

“Who would? Anyway, Uncle Olen’s a bug about obeying the law, but because of Mother he has to make compromises. He’s having a struggle.”

“Does your mom like him? I mean, you have a father, right?”

Donna glanced at her friend. She knew that Emily’s father had left the family for another woman. But Emily’s face was expressionless.

“As a family friend, that’s all. Mother knows how he feels. She just ignores it. But he’s helping now to clear our names. So I want him to keep coming around. I want to get this behind us. I want to go on with my life.”

“Yeah, I know.”

The girls sat in silence a few minutes. Donna heard a tractor grinding up from the pasture. It was pleasant here, with the pear trees in delicate white bloom, the mountains rising lavender-blue across die road. At home Donna lived
in
the mountains, she could hardly see them for the trees.

The tractor struggled up the drive and quit, and Ruth Willmarth climbed down. She didn’t look fifty at all, Donna thought. She was, well, young-looking, with gray-brown hair pushed haphazardly on top of her head, a blue denim shirt open to her sweaty neck. But when she turned to face them, Donna saw that she was upset about something.

“Is your mother coming by?” she asked Donna. “Something’s happened to the hives. The upper ones have been knocked off and some of the bees are dead. Another bunch have swarmed up in a maple tree. It could have been an animal, I suppose, a bear looking for honey. I only hope it wasn’t one of my heifers— Zelda, maybe. That beast!”

“Mother’s coming to pick me up,” Donna said. “I don’t know why the bees should be dead.” She looked up at Ruth Willmarth’s flushed face.

She did know, though. She knew. And it wasn’t Ruth Willmarth who was under attack. It was herself—and her mother. Someone was blaming them. Someone wanted to destroy their lives, the way the nightshade had destroyed Shep Noble.

She dug her hands deep into her pockets, felt the lining rip.

* * * *

It was nothing Ruth had done, Gwen assured her when she pulled in an hour later to pick up her daughter; it might well have been a bear. “Last spring an old black fellow knocked over one of my hives searching for honey.” Gwen sent Leroy to tend to the damaged hives while she undid the swarm. Already part of it was on the ground from the weight of the few thousand bees that had dragged down the maple branch. She placed a new hive body on the grass with the entrance near the bees and spread a sheet in front. The bees would have to walk over the sheet to get into the hive and the white sheet would make the queen easier to spot.

“It’s possible that somebody did this to get back at me,” she told Ruth while they were waiting for the bees to catch on. She didn’t want to worry Ruth, but she had to tell someone. “There was a letter to the editor in the paper, a woman deploring my conduct. Meaning more than the nightshade—meaning, oh, yes, my ‘mixed’ marriage. The backwoods bigot!” Gwen felt confused, wanting to disbelieve; wanting to accuse. She felt better, though, for having shared her thoughts.

“Seems to me you’re a backwoods liberal,” Ruth said, and Gwen had to smile then.

“The longer I live, the more oddball I get,” Gwen said. “Honestly, I’m sick of conforming to someone else’s norm.”

“You got it,” Ruth murmured. The queen bee was moving across the white sheet now, a golden yellow with three black stripes that marked her as Italian. Gwen preferred the Italian to the Caucasian bees. They were more sunny, colorful. Gwen hoped she wouldn’t have to kill this queen, she was such a beauty. She’d have to see first what kind of egg-laying pattern the queen had made.

Now the rest of the bees followed into the hive, and the two women walked back toward the barn, where Donna was helping Emily to grain the cows. Or trying to help, Gwen thought, smiling. Donna was all thumbs when it came to manual labor, be it dishes or vacuuming. Not that she couldn’t do it, it just wasn’t a priority with her.