“Last time was when Glenna came up with her husband. A city fellow. He stayed maybe six or seven years. And then—” Ruth flung up her hands.
“Dead?” In the tiny spare room that was hardly more than a closet, Fay had found a man’s black overcoat, quite fancy-looking, with a white silk scarf in the pocket, faded to yellow—a B. Altman label. The husband’s?
“Died in some rooming house in New York City was the word. Left her, people say. Others say Glenna did him in, buried him here. You know, small-town rumors.” Ruth looked amused. “I liked her, though. She was her own person. Eccentric but tough.
Okay,” she said, getting down to business, “you take the teat between your thumb and forefinger, like this.” She gripped the long pinkish teat. “Relax the grip, and push up, see? Then start pulling down as you squeeze”— the milk squirted into the pail—”with the first finger, then the next, then the last two. You’ll force it from the teat through the streak canal.”
“Streak canal,” Fay repeated. She watched the milk squirt into the pail, then squealed when a stream hit her foot.
“Sorry. It’s been awhile.” A tiger cat appeared out of nowhere, and Ruth took one of the teats and squirted it into the cat’s mouth.
“I never knew that cat was here. Where’d it come from?”
“Barn cat. Must be several around.” Ruth whistled, and, sure enough, two more came running up, clones of the first.
“I have to feed them, too?”
Ruth laughed. “They eat mice. Except that one.” She pointed at a dead mouse, lying in rigor mortis, its short legs upright like a turned-over chair. “Could have poison in him or something. Cats know.” She patted the cat. “Now you do it.”
Fay sat down gingerly on the stool. The pink teats looked like stalactites on a cave she’d seen once, only warmer-looking. She’d nursed her own child, but briefly. At the time, she hadn’t fancied having long pink teats hanging down to her waist. Now the daughter, Patsy, who was divorced, with a ten-year-old boy, accused Fay of ignoring her, of never being around when she’d needed a parent. Was it true? Fay wondered. But who had changed her diapers, she wanted to know, read to her, cared for the child when she was sick? And where was Dan those times?
“Don’t be bashful,” said Ruth, sounding impatient.
Fay frowned at the cow. When she’d rented it, she hadn’t thought of having to milk it. She just wanted it as a kind of ornament for the B and B guests. Dandelion twisted her head, peered back suspiciously. She smelled warm, like sweaty flesh. Fay gingerly took a teat in her hand. Nothing came out. She was reminded of those newfangled faucets that never worked right in the ex-lover’s house.
“You have to squeeze. Like this.” Ruth grabbed a teat in each hand and pulled, hard, close.
Fay squeezed, and got a drop out. The cow sensed her frustration and urinated. Ruth snatched away the bucket just in time.
“Jesus.” Fay felt weak in the knees. “I’ll just have to practice. Twice a day, you say?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The farmer woman was glancing at the barn door. “Look, I’d like to stay, but I can’t. I have my own cows. Maybe my daughter Emily can come over and help when school’s out. I’ll give you a call. The older one, Sharon, she’s pregnant—due next month. In the awkward stage now.”
Fay remembered how happy she’d been when Patsy got pregnant. The thrill of the birth! The boy growing up, and then Fay went and left. How could she have done that?
Fay followed Ruth out, carrying the pail. It was half-full, although Ruth told her a cow had to be milked “clean— shouldn’t leave a drop in the udder.” And then what? She’d have to pasturize it or something? She didn’t want to think about it. She found Glenna Flint a more interesting subject, actually. After all, the woman was her relative. “Glenna never said anything—about what happened to the husband?”
“No, she was always closemouthed, Glenna. Even more so after Mac disappeared—like she’d been violated somehow. Psychologically, I mean. Well, it could even have been suicide. Vermont has a high suicide rate in winter, you know.”
“Oh,” said Fay, contemplating a winter without guests. And her daughter, Patsy, calling up every other night to tell her mother to come home, that little Ethan needed a grandmother. Each call, she felt the stabbing wounds.
“My theory, though”—Ruth smiled at Fay—”is he went back to the city and died there. Of old age.”
She started to leave, then swiveled to look at Fay—suspiciously, Fay thought. “You from the city yourself?”
“Oh, no,” Fay said. “I mean, once, yes, but not for a long time. I lived in the Northeast Kingdom, near Cabot. My ex-husband has an egg farm there. I came down here—alone.”
Ruth looked more sympathetic now. Fay had heard she was a single parent; obviously, she’d struck a note. “My son keeps chickens. Vic would like a whole barnful. We need to diversify, you see. We grow Christmas trees; I rent a pasture out for a friend’s sheep. These are hard times for farmers. Well, look, Fay, I’ll send Emily over; you needn’t call.”
Ruth started out through the stubbly field, stepped across the narrow stream that snaked between the barn and the hired man’s trailer. She pointed, turned. “He lived there, they say, the husband. Rumor has it Glenna wouldn’t allow him in the house.” She laughed aloud. It was a nice laugh, generous, deeply amused. She disappeared back across the rocky pasture, where scarlet sumac, Queen Anne’s lace, and goldenrod still held on. Beyond, the mountains rose up, deep lavender and then the color of blood where the sun was trying to push out of the darkish clouds.
Fay peered into the trailer but could see nothing, because the windows were boarded up. The whole place seemed to slant to the rear—like if you sat on a chair on the front porch, it would soon slide down and out the back door. What was she doing here, anyway? What had she been thinking of, renting this derelict ghost of a place where a man had disappeared?
Chapter Three
Tim, the hired man, was taking down the diseased elm Ruth had marked. She hated to see it go; it had been there for the twenty years she’d lived on this farm, probably more than a hundred years before that. But they needed the wood for winter—used as many as eight cords for the old farmhouse with its poor insulation, which Pete had never gotten around to replacing. Tim had the Bush Hog splitter hitched up to the secondhand Harvester he’d persuaded her to buy, though it had put her in debt, and she hadn’t paid off the last loan. The Bush Hog maneuvered nicely in the woods, Tim argued, had an efficient hydraulic system to power the splitter. He was struggling with the limb logs: They were dry, gray, and split off like popcorn. But full of bark-beetle tunnels—beetles partly responsible for killing the tree.
Beetles, she mused, were like people: big, bumbling, tunneling into the heart of things and festering there. Like her God-fearing sister-in-law, Bertha, who a year and a half ago had stirred up a brew of mischief in the name of God. But that was done with. They’d gone through more than a year without mishap. And her second grandchild due in a month’s time. She’d feel better when Sharon delivered safely; Ruth wasn’t sure about Sharon’s determination to have a midwife, a home birth in Ruth’s own bed, because the town apartment had thin walls. When Branbury had a perfectly good hospital. She’d had three safe deliveries there. Though she’d hated those stirrups they’d imprisoned her legs in. They reminded her of the eighteenth-century stocks. And just as much a punishment!
“You think this will do it for the season?” she called out. “We probably have another six cords stacked up already.”
“Got my eye on another tree up in the woods, an elm.
Farmer’s Almanac
predicting a tough winter. Pays to be safe.”
“You’re the boss,” she said, and Tim smiled, put two fingers in salute to the brim of the cowboy hat he wore as an act of independence—most hired men wore the traditional feed cap. He was a fiftyish ex-hippie, had been through the sixties rebellion, dropped out of the establishment, “found himself.” Pete had hired him in the late seventies, and he’d stayed on when Pete left. He seemed happy enough now as a hired hand, helping foster kids like Joey. She couldn’t do without him. Nor could Vic, her eleven-year-old. Tim was something of a father figure to him now that Pete was gone. Though she knew the boy missed his own father.
“Think the kid could run the Deere, pull the manure spreader out to the woods, pick up a load for me? He knows how; I showed him.”
“No way. Too young. I’ll do it.”
“Oh, come on. He’s grown a foot since spring.”
“You sound like Pete. The answer is no. A boy older than Vic lost an arm falling off a tractor down in Shoreham. Like I said, I’ll do it. When? Today? Tomorrow?”
“Morning. After milking.” Tim swung his sledgehammer against a log end, struggling to drive the log free of the wedge. They didn’t really split, these logs, she observed, just wrenched apart, shrieking, like a bulldozed building. Like a mismatched husband and wife, she thought.
An ancient blue Horizon was sitting in the driveway. She recognized it when she got to the house. “Why didn’t you just walk in?” she shouted at Colm Hanna. He was getting to be a familiar figure around the farm now—maybe too familiar. She wasn’t a free woman; she had to remember that. Pete wanted more than a sold farm. He wanted a divorce, and for some reason, she was having a hard time giving in. Not for herself—it was over with Pete, wasn’t it? Though after two years, she was still hurting, didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. . . .
And there were the children, Vic and Emily— especially Emily, who blamed her in some way, she felt, for Pete’s leaving. She knew Emily still told her school friends that Pete would be back. The older one, Sharon, of course, even in her ninth month of pregnancy, could fend for herself; Sharon was a stubborn one, full of New Age ideas. If Ruth heard one more word about eating torn . . . Though it was true, she couldn’t eat beef anymore, not when she was thinking it might have been one other own bull calves.
Here was Colm, his gray-black hair rumpled from the wind, grinning at her, waving a bone. “I checked Larocque’s after you called. Nothing dug up there. I’ll try Flint’s, but there’s no cemetery on that place.”
She’d forgotten about the finger, too many other things on her mind: getting in the wood, cutting the last corn, mending tools and machines bought back in the seventies because she couldn’t afford new ones. Work never done, and late fall was supposed to be the more lax time in a farmer’s year. “How old you think that bone is? “she asked as she ran into the house ahead of him, and swept a pile of crumbs off the table. Emily’s house job was the kitchen, but lately she’d been wrapped up in her quarrel about this city girlfriend of Wilder’s.
“You should see my place.” Colm settled into a high-backed kitchen chair and examined the bone, glasses down on his nose. It looked like any minute they’d slide into his lap. “Dad thinks it’s been in the ground for a while—twenty, thirty years. But we’d have to get an expert. You know any guys got bumped off back then?”
“People are always dying. You should know that. You and your dad.” She’d never related to the idea of Colm being a part-time mortician—or assistant to one—though what could he do when it was his dad’s business? She set a cup of coffee in front of him, sank into a chair with hers, and then leapt up to throw a log into the woodstove. Tonight, she’d have a talk with Emily about keeping up with chores. “What makes you think it’s male?”
“The size, I guess. Could be wrong. Dad thinks so, though.”
“A man with a delicate ring like that?”
“Ring?”
“Oh, sorry.” She’d forgotten to mention the ring. She rummaged in a drawer. Where had she put it? But the drawer held only napkin rings that she never used, and in the back a paper cigar ring left over from Pete. She crumpled it, tossed it in the trash can.
“Emily must have it. We pulled it off the finger—the knucklebone looked frail. It has some bone-and-arrow symbol on it, like a hex sign, she says. Didn’t people use those a lot in the old days?”
“On doors maybe, yes—but on fingers? But hey, where did I see an arrow recently?” He shoved the glasses back up on his nose. They magnified his intense blue eyes. “Yeah, I know—that meditation group up the mountain, in East Branbury. I was up there yesterday, showing land.”
“What group is that?” College kids, she supposed, or graduates returning to the area, starting up communes of sorts—usually didn’t do much harm, though there could be drugs involved. Something to kick off the retreat into the inner psyche. Emily had told her the actress woman had Pete meditating. Imagine, pragmatic Pete! One would do anything for sex, she guessed.
“You’re not listening again,” Colm accused, his eyes probing hers. He looked thinner than ever, cadaverous. Those hunger lines around his mouth! Real estate, like farming, was depressed in these parts. “Why don’t you join up with them?”he teased. “Might do you good. This is an older group, seems like. Some of them look forty years old, maybe fifty.”
And when she gave him her “How do you know?” look, he said, “They called me, wanting to buy up a couple extra acres of land. I tried, but no way old conservative Bagshaw next door was selling. I mean, he wanted an acre of
their
land. ‘I ain’t selling to no cult members,’ he said. He remembers that Northeast Kingdom group, supposed to have been abusing their kids.”
“And the state took away the children. I thought it abominable. They had no proof of abuse.”
“Well, they thought they did. Anyway, I didn’t see a single kid at the Healing House. That’s what they call the place,” he explained, and this time she had to laugh. He was wolfing down her doughnuts. His chin was a furry mask.
“Pig,” she said. And suddenly she remembered what he’d said. “What were you saying about the arrow?”
“On the sign. A bone crossed with an arrow—about to penetrate a moon, or what looks like a moon.”
“But that’s it!” she cried. “That’s the ring. I mean, almost, except that this one didn’t have a moon.” And she smiled, noticing a moon of sugar around Colm’s lips. He caught her glance, and smiling himself, he licked it off with a pink tongue.