The Devil's Cold Dish (8 page)

“Do you know what you've done?” Rees's voice rose in volume to a roar.

“Do you know what my life has been like?” Caroline shouted back. “Look at how I'm living, my children and me. I have to go ask Father Stephen for charity every Friday night. Every single week. Do you know how shaming that feels?”

“Sitting around in the kitchen doesn't help,” Rees said in a judgmental tone.

“What do you expect me to do?” She began to sob.

Rees stared at his sister, his emotions a tangle of anger, frustration, and regret. He wanted to shake her, make her see her responsibility in this. At the same time, he wondered if he should be doing more to help her, and that guilt aggravated him all over again. “I've known other women who managed,” he said. “Why, I knew a girl in Salem who ran her own shipping business.”

“Did she have three children?” Caroline asked. “And a husband with no more sense than a babe? Because of her cruel brother?”

“Did you tell everyone I murdered Zadoc Ward to punish me?” Rees's voice rose with frustration.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said with a sniff. “But that's you, blaming me for everything. Mother and Father would be horrified.”

Fearing his anger would drive him into saying something he would regret, Rees rose to his feet and stomped from the house. Then he paused in the yard. There were so many arguments he might have made. He half-turned, ready to go back inside, but reconsidered.

For two pins, he would go home and forget his promise to help with the haying. Of course, that would give his sister more ammunition to use in her pose as martyr. And he hadn't promised Caroline; he'd given his word to David. Rees looked over to the little group sitting under the tree. David, a chicken leg poised in front of his mouth, was staring at his father. Rees took in a deep breath. He had broken too many promises to his son through the last few years. He couldn't do that to David again.

Pasting a smile on his face, Rees joined the group and took something out of the basket to eat. His stomach was so twisted he could barely force a mouthful of cheese down.

“All right?” David asked.

“Of course,” Rees said. Although his hearty tone sounded forced to him, no one except David seemed to notice.

When they all returned to the fields, David gave his father a scythe and directed him to a strip at the very beginning. Rees knew he would not catch up to the boys; they were too far ahead. He began swinging the scythe. He'd only gone a few feet when he began feeling the strain in his arm and back muscles. His soft weaver's hands began to hurt and he feared he would see blisters before day's end. And this field was not as easy as the haying at Rees's own farm. His grandfather had planted different types of grasses and now the fields contained red clover and alfalfa. This meadow had none of that but there was a healthy crop of weeds, mainly thistles, something David kept cut down in his grass. Some of the purple flowers here stood on stalks over Rees's head. His right arm quickly developed a score of little cuts from the long spines on the leaves. These stalks would have to be removed from the haycocks. The thorns would irritate the mouth of an unwary cow that happened to grab one. Rees hoped he could be excused from that horrible chore.

The weight of his sister's angry melancholy cast a shadow over him and he welcomed the heat of the sun on his shoulders and sunburned neck. He ran his fingers over the cut vegetation, the spines of thistles stinging like needles. Should he take in Caroline and her family? He shuddered. How could he even entertain such a notion with the proof of his sister's malice so obvious? But he still felt guilty.

Straightening up and staring unseeingly into the distance, he recalled the slight smile with which she had greeted him, and the comment he'd ignored. Oh no. She thought he'd finally surrendered and was planning to offer her the weaver's cottage on his farm. Rees closed his eyes in a spasm of shame. She had greeted him with hope and he had killed it and then made things worse with his clumsy accusation. Rees straightened and stared blindly over the field. Of course he couldn't know what she'd been thinking, could he? But not knowing did not ease his terrible regret.

“Looks like the hay at this end is dry enough,” David said, coming up behind his father and making him jump.

“Yes, I see,” Rees said, turning around.

“Are you all right? You look strange.”

“Yes.” Rees hadn't intended to say anything more but the words burst from him. “I talked to Caroline regarding the rumors she was spreading about Lydia.”

“As nimbly as a cow in a cage, I daresay,” David said. Rees nodded miserably. He knew he had to try harder.

“Maybe we should take them in to live with us,” he said.

“No,” David said. “No. And it's not just that I'm staying in the cottage. She'll come with Sam. Maybe if he was gone and it was just Aunt Caroline and Charlie and the girls, I might consider it. Even then you know Aunt Caroline would treat Lydia like help. But there is Sam.”

Rees felt a new shaft of guilt pierce him. David had never confided all that had happened to him under his aunt and uncle's care, but he'd never forgiven them for it either. Not for the first time, Rees wondered how often and how cruelly Sam had beaten David. Remembering how Sam had treated his wife and children—why, Sam had broken Charlie's arm at least once—Rees shivered. “I'm sorry,” he said now.

David shrugged, brushing it away. “The point is, just because Sam is touched, doesn't mean he's any nicer. And he'd be more trouble anyway. He has to be watched all the time because he wanders off. Then he can't find his way home. Charlie spends a lot of time searching for him. Sam is nowhere to be found now.”

“He might be at the mill,” Rees said, relieved that he had one answer at least. “I saw him there just this morning.”

“I'll tell Charlie,” David said. “He'll be glad.” He looked down at the rows of cut vegetation. “I'll get you a rake. This stuff is ready for stacking.”

For the first time ever, Rees bent his back willingly to the haying. Although at first all he could think about was Caroline, and how badly he'd bungled his talk with her, he was soon too physically tired to think much of anything. And that was best of all.

*   *   *

By the time David called a halt a few hours later—evening chores still had to be done at home—Rees was dazed with fatigue. Haying was hard physical labor and he was unused to it. Besides, he thought, watching Charlie and David joke and mock jostle one another, he wasn't sixteen anymore. He didn't have that kind of energy.

He drove home slowly, his arms and shoulders aching. By the time he pulled up the drive David had already been home for over an hour and had begun the milking. Rees released Hannibal into the paddock and went inside the house.

The kitchen smelled like honey and several small crocks were lined up on the table. Lydia had put the basket of honeycombs out on the porch. Flies, yellow jackets, and other insects buzzed about them, attracted by the sugary nectar still clinging to the cells. Eventually, she would clean the combs and melt them down and the white sweet-smelling wax would be made into her distinctive candles.

“You look tired,” Lydia said, drawing a mug of ale from the barrel in the corner.

“I am.” Rees sat down heavily in a kitchen chair. He ached all over and his hands were so sore he knew he would do no weaving today. He had to pick up the mug of ale with two hands.

Lydia sat down next to him. “What did Caroline say?” Rees looked at his wife. Her mouth was drawn down and she looked as though she had not smiled all day.

“She admitted to spreading the rumors,” Rees said. He put down the mug, so clumsily he slopped ale across the table, and reached across to take her hand. “It's my fault. Caroline wanted to punish me through you. She thought the ladies in town would ostracize you.”

“And I suppose they would, if I had any social connection with them,” Lydia said. She turned her hand so that she could clasp Rees's freckled paw. “It's not your fault. I am shocked that Caroline would do something so cruel, but that must lie on her conscience, not on yours.”

Rees nodded although he did not entirely agree. “She still wants to move in here,” he said. Rising painfully to his feet, his back and legs protesting with every movement, he went to the sink and poured a jot of water from the jug into the basin. Although the water was warm from sitting in the sun, the liquid felt cool when he splashed it on his sunburnt cheeks. Every scratch on his hands stung and when he employed Lydia's strong yellow soap on his grubby fingers he had to keep himself from yelping in pain.

“I know,” Lydia said from behind him, “that we are supposed to turn the other cheek and love even our enemies. But right now I just can't consider allowing Caroline to reside under my roof.”

“David said something similar,” Rees said.

“What did I say?” David said from behind Rees.

“That Caroline and her family should not live here,” Rees said, turning. David carried two brimming pails of milk through the door. “But you should see how they are living. I just couldn't scold my sister for stealing the chickens.”

“Your kind heart does you credit,” Lydia said, rising to her feet. She began removing the crocks of honey to the pantry.

“What she means,” David said, “is that you would be crazy to bring Aunt Caroline here. It would be like taking a viper into your bed. You would have to expect to be bitten.”

“But I don't know what to do,” Rees said.

“Write your sister Phoebe,” Lydia said, reappearing in the pantry door. “Although Caroline left Phoebe's farm, we don't know whether Caroline chose to do so or whether Phoebe asked her, once Sam reappeared. But she knows your sister as well, if not better, than you do, so she may be able to propose a solution.”

“That is a wonderful idea,” Rees said, planting a kiss upon his wife's forehead.

“Go, do it now, while you are thinking of it,” she said, giving him a little push toward the parlor. “I'll put dinner on the table.”

Rees went into the parlor and took a sheet of paper and a pencil from his mother's lap desk. He carefully sharpened the pencil with his knife. He wrote,
Dear Phoebe.
He was still staring at the paper, blank except for the salutation, when Lydia brought in a bowl of hot stew and a chunk of bread. She looked over his shoulder.

“All this time for two words?” she said.

“I can't think how much I should say,” Rees said. “Should I tell her about the rumors? Or mention that Caroline wants to move in with us? Or just say I need her help?”

Lydia squeezed his shoulder and quietly left the room. Rees licked the pencil tip.

He ate all the stew and the bread and still could not think what he wanted to say. Gradually the golden rays of sun that were pouring through the windows shifted position and soon Rees sat in shadow. He could barely see the paper. Finally he wrote:
Caroline is having trouble. I need help with her. Can you come?

It did not even begin to address the situation but it was the best Rees could do. He folded it and, with a sigh of relief, left the parlor. When he entered the kitchen he handed it to Lydia. “Will you bring this to Borden's store tomorrow, when you go into town for market?” She nodded and put it inside the basket of honey crocks.

“Where is everyone?” Rees glanced around the empty kitchen.

“David and Simon are collecting eggs. Jerusha is putting the little ones to bed.”

Rees sniffed. “What's burning?” He realized that he had been aware of the odor for a little while but had not paid attention. The acrid smell was much stronger in the kitchen, but he saw nothing amiss. The fire had been banked and only a few embers remained. He sniffed again and walked to the door. Although the sky was still streaked with light, the ground beneath lay in shadow. A reddish glow tinted the horizon. Lydia came up behind him.

“I smell smoke too,” she said.

“Something's on fire.” Rees said, descending the steps.

The stink of burning was much stronger outside and now he could see sparks flying in the air. He turned to tell Lydia to stay inside but found she was right behind him, a lighted lantern in her hand. “It's the bees,” she said and lunged past him. Rees did not argue. He followed Lydia over the crest of the hill and down the slope.

 

Chapter Seven

A yellow-and-orange blaze illuminated the hollow with a hellish light. Fire had consumed at least one hive and flames were leaping from a second. As Rees watched from the crest of the ridge he saw a spark jump to a third bee skep and the glow as fire took hold in the straw.

“It looks as though the fire is mostly at the southern end,” Rees said, trying to reassure Lydia. “The other hives must be all right.”

Lydia said nothing. She waddled down the slope toward the hives as fast as she could. Rees put on a burst of speed and quickly outpaced her. He joined David and Simon in the valley.

Simon was already by the hives, trying to douse the flames with buckets of water drawn from the pond. “David,” Rees said, “get some more buckets from the barn.” He took the one from Simon and began running back and forth to the pond, filling it with water and emptying it upon the skeps. David returned with two more buckets, and with the three of them dousing the hives with water, the fire was soon extinguished. The air smelled pungently of wet ash and charred straw.

Panting and sweaty, Rees dropped the bucket at his feet and surveyed the damage. Two of the hives were completely gone, burned to a few bits of black. Another was scorched upon one side; no telling if the bees inside had survived or escaped. Several others had been knocked to the ground. The buzz of frightened and angry bees filled the hollow with sound. Of the fifteen hives, only four remained standing and intact. Rees wondered if the smoke had affected them as well.