Stolen Honey (22 page)

“I’d never do anything dumb like lying in a mess of nightshade,” said Vic, who was home from school with a spring cold. He blew his nose for emphasis.

“Maybe not, but you never know. We’ll have a little ceremony, Gwen says. Oh, dear. I suppose I should have apologized to these daisies before I cut them. Plants do feel, they say. Do you think so, Jack?”

“Of course,” Sharon said before Jack could open his mouth. “You have to thank the flowers. I always do. Plants not only feel, they communicate. Isn’t that right, Jack?”

Jack told them how he’d cut down an aging maple tree on his property, and the one still standing nearby began to shed its leaves. “It wasn’t till I planted a new one that the second tree revived. I mean, trees do communicate chemically. They’re connected through fungal strands to other trees.”

“See?” said Sharon, to whomever might disbelieve.

“Jeezum,” said Vic, “now who’s being ridiculous?”

Vic, Ruth observed, was going through a negative phase. He thought his sister Sharon “kooky.” He argued against his mother growing hemp, even Christmas trees. He helped with the calves, but otherwise wanted nothing to do with the farm. Obviously turned off by the whole conversation, he grabbed a plate of cheese and crackers and took it upstairs with him, where he could eat, read the O’Brian sea novels his father had sent him, and blow his nose in peace.

“What’s with him?” Sharon asked, and Ruth just raised an eyebrow. What he really needed, she knew, was a father. But she couldn’t do anything about that at the moment.

As if she’d read her mother’s mind, Sharon asked, “What do you hear from Dad? What’s going on with this farm deal? I thought he’d relent by now, come down on his price. I called him up, you know. I told him he was hurting all of us.”

“Oh? How so?” Ruth asked.

“Well, you’re our mother!” Sharon cried, her braid shaking loose with her indignation. “What happens to you affects us. If you go to the poorhouse we’ll have to bail you out.”

“For chrissake, Sharon,” said Jack, who always took his mother-in-law’s side, “your mother’s not going to any poor-house. Anyway, they don’t have them anymore, do they?”

“They call them shelters now,” said Sharon. “For the homeless.”

“So that’s it,” said Ruth. “You’re worried about my landing on your doorstep. Well, my dear, you don’t have to worry about that. I can always sell the house and live in the barn. Snuggle up between a couple of cows, and who needs a woodstove?”

“Not a bad idea,” Jack commented. “That’s what they did in the old days.”

Ruth shot her son-in-law a grateful look. “But seriously, Pete’s not relenting. He wants his money. He’s giving me more time, I can say that for him. I may get a bigger loan from my bank. They’re considering. If I can get it, I’ll have your father off my back.”

“They’re not getting along,” Sharon said with a little smile. “Dad and that phony actress. They’re still not married, you know. He pushed you into a divorce so he could marry and now he’s holding off. I wouldn’t get in a jam with too much bank interest.”

“Ho ho,” said Jack, nursing an O’Doul’s. “Listen to who’s talking. What’s our credit card bill now—up to twenty thousand? At lemme see, ninety percent monthly interest?”

“Well, it’s not all me!” cried Sharon, banging the table with her fists. “Two kids, and you work seasonally, and I work in the counseling service for peanuts.”

“If you’re going to argue,” said Ruth, “do it at home. Where are the kids, anyway?”

“At Martha’s Day Care. We’ve got to go get them. And Mother. It’s not true about the credit card. We only owe twelve thousand. The mortgage on the house you know, and the car payments. But we’re paying back. I mean, slowly.”

“Who’s going to bail
whom
out of debtor’s prison now?” Ruth asked, smiling, and waved the couple off.

Afterward, though, alone in the kitchen, she sank her chin in her hands. At this rate, they could all land in the shelter: mother, daughters, son, and grandkids. Pete sent a minimal check each month to help out with Emily’s college, but it didn’t stretch far beyond. She still had Vic to feed, and a hired man who was willing to work for minimal pay and free milk and beef, but might not forever. At least Joey came free, God bless him. She was fond of that boy—though investigating the Godineaux, made her, for some reason, worry about him.

“I’m thinking of changing the name of Willmarth Farm,” she told Colm when she’d rung him up at his real estate office. “I’m thinking of calling it Stone Broke Farm. It fits—both words. What do you think?”

Colm laughed. “Is it really that bad, Ruthie? Look, I can give you another loan. I just sold a house on your road. The guy has two kids in Branbury College and wants to have a place for them to come to.”

“College kids will be living in it? Whooping it up all night?”

“Come, now, Ruthie, you were in college once.”

“On scholarship,” she reminded him. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you. Tomorrow at ten we’ve got an appointment with a man called Shortsleeves. I don’t know what he can tell us about Pauline Godineaux, but we’ll try. He knew her back when.”

“We, Ruthie? You and I?”

“What other ‘we’ would I have in mind?”

He chuckled. “Let me look at my calendar. If he’s anything like that Godineaux up on the mountain, you’ll need me. Four rifles in the rack and one pointed at me.”

“Exactly my reasoning. I can’t leave Vic without a mother.”

“There’s always Jane Eyre. Anyway, I’ve a real estate appointment, but I can change it. I’ll pick you up at nine. We can take my car.”

“Did you have the muffler fixed?”

“Not yet, but I’ve got an appointment for next week.”

“We’ll go in my truck.”

“The John Deere might be safer than that.”

She told him to shut up, and then laughed, in spite of herself.

* * * *

Marcel Shortsleeves wasn’t a gun-running man at all; on the contrary, he was as short as his name implied, a mild-mannered septuagenarian with a high-pitched tenor voice. He sang, he told her, in a men’s quartet. They sang French-Canadian songs while another fellow played the fiddle. ‘We’re trying to get better known,” he said, handing her a brochure. “We do dances and weddings.” He winked at Colm.

“I’ll let the Board of Realtors know,” Colm told him. “We have monthly meetings, they might like a little entertainment.”

They never had entertainment, Ruth knew, but Colm liked to please people. That was one of his good points, and at the same time a fault. He’d lead people on, get them to hoping he’d buy this, order that. “Maybe your father would like a little entertainment at his wakes,” she said, and smiled sweetly at him.

“Oh, yes, yes, indeed,” said Shortsleeves. “We sing at funerals. Oh, absolutely.” He handed Colm a pack of brochures.

Ruth explained why they’d come. “We heard you knew Joey’s mother, Pauline.”

Shortsleeves’s demeanor altered with the name Pauline. He shrank back as though Ruth held a gun to his chest. His nose was a red pepper. He cleared his throat, fiddled with his top button, hummed tunelessly. Finally he said, “Pauline Godineaux. Well, that name does ring a bell.”

“Your name was on her records,” Ruth reminded him. “You came to see her. Several times. Nothing incriminating,” she added as his face came to a boil.

“Oh, no, nothing incriminating, no,” he cried, wringing his hands. “I only—well, we dated a little, you see. I didn’t know she was shoplifting. I was horrified when I heard. I thought she’d been booked on false charges. She seemed a nice girl. Chain smoker, yes, but I wanted to help her.”

“Were you lovers?” Colm asked, blunt as usual.

The face boiled over. Ruth sat upright, ready to give CPR. “It’s all right,” she soothed. “It’s okay if you were, or weren’t, lovers. We just want to know whose child Joey is, that’s all. We’ll keep it confidential.”

Shortsleeves took several quick breaths. His skin cooled. He tried to smile, but it came out a smirk. Finally he said, “She already had a kid by another fellow. Whoever he was, he just up and left; poor girl, she had no support. I took her in, she lived in my house awhile. It was after my own wife died. Pauline was in her mid-forties then. She sang a nice contralto.” He smiled, remembering. “I mean, I offered to marry her when she got pregnant, but she said she’d had enough of live-in men.”

“By you?” Colm asked. “She was pregnant by you?”

The face heated up again. “Well, I never could be sure. I mean, she was seeing another fellow, you know, when she lived with me. I didn’t find out till later. I made her leave my house when I found she was seeing someone else. She went off with the other man, I guess, I don’t know.” He seemed upset, remembering; a little saliva dropped onto his shirt collar.

“So you might or might not be Joey’s father.”

“We-11, at first she said yes, but then she told about this other one. It could have been his. I tried to find out where she went, I did! I tried to find out about the child. I’m Catholic, I didn’t want her to get an abortion.”

Ruth asked about the grandmother. Marcel said he’d met Nicole a few times. “She was a nice person. She’d been through the mill, you know, that kind. She’d bring things when she came to visit—fruit, a bottle of sherry. We got along. We got along better than we did with Pauline. Pauline wasn’t always easy to live with. She had a quick temper.

“Personally,” he repeated, “I think that other guy was the father, not me. I mean, my wife and I never had kids, you know. I had mumps as a boy. I never . . . well, can we leave it at that?”

Shortsleeves seemed relieved to hear that Joey had a good foster parent, but he showed no inclination to meet him. He reminded Ruth that he was “living hand to mouth on Social Security. I was in construction, you don’t save up much.”

Nor could he tell them anything about Pauline’s father. “She never said much. He was a no-good, that’s all I can tell you. He left Pauline and her brother when they were small. But he kept coming back for money, sex, you know. A real bastard.”

“Have you any idea where we’d find Pauline?” Ruth asked.

Shortsleeves thought a minute. He sank his head in his coarse, scarred hands. “I had a postcard from her. Maybe three years ago. If I can think of where it came from . . .”

“Vermont?”

“No, not Vermont. Uh, New Hampshire, I think it was. That’s right, New Hampshire. Some town begun with an A. That’s all I can remember now. It begun with an A.”

“The old runaround,” said Ruth when they were back in her pickup.

Colm pulled out a wrinkled map of New England, spread it open to disclose the narrow state of New Hampshire. “Hell,” he said. “Can’t be more than thirty towns that begin with an A. You’ll find her.”

“I will? With no help from you?”

“I’m up to my ass in work, Ruthie. Real estate getting busier; the old man needs me in the death house, his arthritis worse;now the prostate acting up. And I do have a few hours to put in at the station.”

“You’re not coming to New Hampshire with me, then.”

“Did I say I wasn’t?”

“Don’t play games with me, Colm.”

“I mean, I’ll have to see how things go. Though I’m thinking now it might give us some time together. Alone, you know what I mean?”

She did know what he meant. That sly look. The hand on her knee. What could she do but slap it—and then grin?

* * * *

Gwen was waiting for Ruth at the bee farm in boots and slicker—it was raining lightly. She had a basket of tobacco leaves on her arm. Mert had made the basket out of sweetgrass. “Smell?” Gwen promised to give her a braid of it to hang for good luck in her kitchen. Oh, but Ruth could use a bit of good luck!

Gwen plodded ahead in her rubber boots, while Ruth walked carefully behind, examining the ground as she went—for a footprint, maybe, although Mert had smoothed over the one he found. And the police had tramped the area over and over, so what clues to the boy’s death could possibly remain? Still, Ruth couldn’t help but think that the death wasn’t accidental at all. And here she’d told Mert not to report his footprint, putting the responsibility squarely on her own shoulders.

The woods were lush with thistle, wild columbine, and pink trumpet honeysuckle. The bees were happily sucking up the nectar. Water was seeping into her socks, but it was worth it just to smell the woods, that thick leafy fragrance. This landscape was different from her open pasture; it was like something primordial, the fragrance that dinosaurs had smelled, the Abenaki who’d hunted here, the Willmarth forebears, settling into a unspoiled land.

“Voila,” Gwen said, pointing, and Ruth saw a group of long-stemmed, vinelike plants with simple pointed leaves on top and, at the base, larger leaves with small lobes. The flowers were only in bud, but one could already see they’d come out purple. Later, there would be plump black berries, as poisonous to the tongue, according to her son-in-law, as the purplish red flowers.

“That poinsettia plant I still have from Christmas is poisonous,” she told Gwen. “So really, why are we pulling this up?”

Gwen nodded. “The irony is, this plant does so much good.” She explained about the atropine, its medicinal use. “It’s a part of my income, too. But what’s money?”

“Screw money. Get rid of it!” Ruth picked up a pile of pebbles and tossed them in the air. They both laughed.

It was time now for the ceremony. Gwen got down on her knees, spread the tobacco leaves at the base of the plants. She said something in Abenaki language; Ruth supposed the words meant “thank you,” or expressed contrition of some kind.

“Kway
is Abenaki for ‘hello,’ or ‘greetings,’ “ Gwen said. “And
gici oli-wni
means ‘many thank you’s.’ It’s an expressive language, isn’t it? I wish I could speak it. But I’ve learned only these few words from Russell’s cousin Mali, who is studying the language, hoping to teach it to Abenaki children. You know, of course, that Indian children were forbidden by the nuns in school to speak their own language? So it got lost. And part of their identity with it.”

“A tragedy,” Ruth agreed, imagining how it would have been not to be allowed to speak English in school, to have to speak a foreign language after a takeover of some kind. It could have happened after World War II. It was unthinkable.