At Home on Ladybug Farm (8 page)

“It has to be one of the Blackwell women,” Lindsay said.

“Maybe it’s her wedding picture,” suggested Cici. “After all, she is wearing white.”

“It’s possible,” agreed Lindsay. “Maybe it’s part of a set.”

“There are dozens of them in this box,” Cici said, pulling out another.

Lindsay eagerly took it from her, while Cici resumed her study of the first picture by holding it up to the light.

“Gosh, I wish this were clearer!” Cici said. “I’d love to see the detail on the house. How it must have looked when it was first built.”

“I wonder if there’s any way to develop these things? Or whatever you have to do to them to print them on paper.”

“There must be. This is the age of technology. You can do anything.”

“You can’t play a 45 record without a phonograph,” pointed out Lindsay.

“And you can’t play an eight-track on anything,” Cici admitted.

“Still,” Lindsay said, “what a piece of history this is! I’ll get Noah to wrap them so they don’t break, and carry them down for me. I can’t wait to see the rest of them.”

“One project at a time,” Cici said, carefully returning the last of the plates to the box as she stood. “Come on, let’s get this vanity out of here.”

Farley’s familiar blue truck creaked to a stop in the circular drive in front of the house just as Cici and Lindsay had finished trundling the vanity across the yard, up the wide curving steps, and across the columned porch to the front door. They carefully lowered the furniture to the painted floorboards of the porch and straightened up, grateful for the break, as Farley got out of the truck.

He was a big, slow-moving man with a propensity for dressing in camouflage and cracked steel-toed boots. He always sported a two-day growth of stubbly beard, and carried a soda can, into which he periodically spit a stream of tobacco juice. He was a man of few words but apparently endless skills. He had repaired their water heater, replaced the tiles on their roof, rewired their house, rebuilt their porch railing when it was destroyed by a flock of sheep, and performed numerous other emergency services for them around the house. It had been he, in fact, who had supplied them with the sheepdog, who was now barking and circling the truck madly, occasionally lunging in to take a nip at the tires.

Ignoring the barking dog, Farley politely tipped the bill of his camo cap to the two ladies on the porch. “Mornin’,” he said, and spat into the can.

“Good morning, Farley.” Cici raised her voice to be heard above the din.

Lindsay shouted, “Rebel, quiet!” to no avail, and then smiled at Farley. “Hi, Farley.”

“Doing deliveries for Jonesie,” he said, and nodded toward the back of the pickup truck. “Got your sander here.”

Jonesie and his wife—who was generally known as Mrs. Jonesie—were the proprietors of Family Hardware and Sundries, the biggest store in the tiny town of Blue Valley. From tea-spoons to masonry saws, from dish towels to windowpanes, if they didn’t have it, they could get it.

“Oh, good!” exclaimed Cici, coming down the steps.

“Great,” added Lindsay with slightly less enthusiasm.

“Hi, Farley!” Lori called from across the yard, waving as she skipped toward them. Doing the requisite little dance that was necessary to avoid being bitten by the dog, Lori drew up to the truck, breathless. “Aunt Bridget said for you not to leave until she wraps up a pie for you. She baked an extra one this morning.” She turned to her mother. “We finished hoeing the garden. It’s going to be ready to sow next week.”

Farley walked around to the back of the truck. “Your tiller broke?”

Lori turned an accusing gaze to her mother. “We have a tiller?”

“Oh . . . you mean that thing that attaches to the back of the lawn mower.” Lindsay tried to sound vague, and avoided Lori’s eyes.

“I’ll fix it for you,” volunteered Farley. “Ten dollar.”

“Um, no, thanks. It’s fine.” Cici, too, avoided Lori’s eyes. “Besides, Bridget is in charge of the garden. Let’s get this thing out of the truck.”

“Got to get your peas and taters in by St. Paddy’s Day,” observed Farley, and swung down the tailgate with a clatter. “Lot faster to use the tiller.”

Lori’s expression soured. “Why do I feel I’ve just been had?”

Bridget came out with a pie wrapped in aluminum foil as Cici and Farley reached the front porch with the sander. “It’s apple and currant,” she told him. “I’ll put it in your truck.”

Farley touched his cap brim. “Kind of you, ma’am.”

“Aunt Bridget,” Lori challenged darkly, “did you know we have a tiller?”

Bridget looked perfectly innocent. “Why no, dear. I don’t believe I did.”

Farley collected his soda can from the porch rail where he had left it, and spat again. “Supposed to make sure you know how to use it.”

Cici smiled patiently. “I’ve used a floor sander before, Farley.”

“Knew a man cut off his toe with one, once.”

“I’ll be sure to wear shoes.”

He looked skeptical. “You got a long cord?”

“One hundred feet.”

“Got to ground it.”

“Grounded.”

He gave a grunt that sounded neither convinced, nor happy. “Here’s an extra belt, and some replacement pads.” He handed them to her. “You know how to replace a belt?”

“I’ll bet I can figure it out.”

He grunted again, and then turned to Bridget as she came back up the steps from placing the pie in the front seat of his truck. “Supposed to tell you Burt Shaw is coming next month. You want to get on his list?”

“Who’s Burt Shaw?” Bridget asked.

“Sheepshearer.”

Lori, forsaking the matter of the tiller, exclaimed, “Are we going to shear the sheep?”

Bridget looked uncertain. “I suppose we have to. After all, it’s been two years.”

“Oughta have good fleece by now,” observed Farley, gazing out over the meadow where the sheep nibbled the new spring grass. “Lotta money in fleece.”

Lori was immediately interested. “Really? How much?”

“Heard about a girl out on Route Twelve that pays ten to fifteen dollar a pound.”

Cici said, “How much does it cost to shear a sheep?”

He shrugged. “Fella charges by the head. Course if it was me, I’d do it myself.”

“I don’t know . . .” Bridget still sounded uneasy.

“Is it hard?” Lori wanted to know.

“Nah. Just like skinning a cat.”

All four women on the porch were silent at that, none of them wanting to ask just what, exactly, he knew about skinning a cat.

“Well,” Bridget said after a moment, “I guess I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks for bringing out the sander,” Cici said.

He spat politely into the can once again and held out his hand. “Ten dollar.”

Lindsay dug into the back pocket of her jeans and found a ten-dollar bill, which he carefully arranged in his billfold alongside several others. The ladies had learned to ask for multiple tens whenever they went to the bank, and to keep them about their persons at all times, just in case they needed help from Farley.

Lori walked Farley to his truck. “Say, Farley,” she inquired thoughtfully, “how many pounds of fleece would you say a sheep has?”

He lifted his hat, scratched his head, spat again into the can, and spent a moment gazing thoughtfully into the distance. “Dunno,” he admitted at last.

“Oh.”

Then she had another idea. “Do you know anything about cleaning out ponds?”

He followed her around the house, down a flagstone path now half obscured by brown leaves and dried mud, through a winter-ravaged flower garden, and to the largest of the two garden ponds. This one was a pool of about ten by ten feet and no more than two or three feet deep in its prime. Now, filled with uncounted years of rotted garden debris, leaves, broken branches, and who-knew-what-else, the oily black skim coat of fetid water was barely six inches deep. The pool was surrounded by a paving of smooth white stones—at least they might have once been white, and would have been smooth, had the mortar been restored—and a scar of ground where once there had been a statue. Lindsay and Cici had moved the statue to the center of the rose garden last year, where it would be more fully appreciated.

“Aunt Lindsay wants to bring the pools and fountains back into operating condition again,” Lori said. “I offered to help her.”

Farley grunted.

“The problem is,” prompted Lori, “that I don’t know where to start. I don’t suppose you . . . ?”

She left the sentence unfinished, hoping he would volunteer for the job.

But she either overestimated her charm, or underestimated his good will. Because all he said was, “Need a pump.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re gonna need a pump,” he explained, “to get the water out.”

“Oh.”

“I got one I can let you have for a day or two. Cost you ten dollar.”

Lori smiled weakly. The one major disadvantage of leaving school, California, and—most importantly—her father’s household was that she was always cash poor. “I don’t suppose you take Am-Ex?”

Now it was his turn to stare.

“Never mind.” Lori sighed, then cheered as she turned him back toward the front of the house. “Let’s talk about sheep.”

5

History Lessons

On Day One of the floor refinishing project, everyone was recruited to move the furniture out of the living area and onto the front porch, where Ida Mae, barking instructions all the while, covered everything with canvas dustcloths. The grand piano, which was too big to fit through the front door without lifting and turning, had to be rolled on its squeaky wheels behind the staircase, down the wide corridor, and into the double-doored dining room. The only obstacle was the uneven threshold at the dining room, which kept catching the front wheel.

Cici crawled underneath the piano to survey the situation. “We’re going to have to lift it,” she called up.

Lindsay pushed her hair back from her face. “Who’s got the forklift?”

Noah said, “Does anybody play this thing?”

“I used to,” Bridget replied, stretching out a kink in her back. “But I haven’t for a long time.”

“Seriously, Aunt Bridget,” Lori pitched, “there could be some real money in those sheep. I think we need to look into it. Farley says there might be ten or twelve pounds of fleece on each sheep by now—maybe more!”

Lindsay huffed, “I do believe Farley puts more words together for you in a single visit than he has for us in the entire time we’ve known him.”

“That’s because she’s young and cute,” replied Bridget with a grin, “and we’re old and bitter.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Cici, pulling herself out from under the piano and dusting off her hands. “I’m not at all bitter . . . yet.”

Noah grumbled, “What’s the point in having one, then?”

Bridget looked at him curiously. “Having what, dear?”

He turned his gaze meaningfully toward the object between them in something that was very close to an eye roll. “A
piano
.”

Cici said, “Okay, we’ve got to do this one leg at a time. Noah and Lori, you’re the least likely to end up in traction, so you take the front. Everybody else, push.”

Inch by inch, leg by leg, they rocked and eased the baby grand across the threshold and into the dining room. Lori scrambled ahead, moving chairs out of the way as they wedged the piano between the table and the buffet. Finally, they all straightened up, breathing hard and flexing their fingers.

Lindsay looked around. “Well, this is convenient.”

“We can eat in the kitchen for a while,” Cici offered.

“How’re you gonna get there?” Noah asked.

They looked around. The piano occupied the aisle between the table and the buffet that led to the kitchen, and it blocked the double door through which they had pushed it. In turning and positioning the huge piece, everyone except Noah had ended up on the wrong side of that door.

Lori rolled her eyes. Cici shook her head in disbelief. Lindsay said, “Does anyone have a cell phone?”

Lori growled, “What difference does it make? It wouldn’t work.”

Bridget said, “I am
not
pushing this thing out again.”

“If we pushed it a little farther, we could stand on top and reach the window,” Cici offered.

Lori deftly grabbed the keyboard, swung herself underneath the piano, and crawled beneath it to join Noah on the other side of the door.

The three older women stared after her. “Or,” said Cici, deadpan, “we could crawl under.”

And so they did.

“You see, Aunt Bridget,” Lori said earnestly as they walked back to the living room, “that’s between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars per sheep. You’ve got twenty-five sheep, not counting the lambs! That’s twenty-five thousand—”

“
Hundred
,” corrected all three women at once.

“Right, twenty-five hundred dollars! That’s nothing to be sneezed at.”