by Donna Ball
“Wow, kid,” she murmured, “imagine what you could do if you had the right tools.”
She returned the sketchbook to its place and sat back on her heels thoughtfully, looking around the room with a new eye now. A fireplace for cooking, a floor swept clear of leaves, a cane chair. Something caught her eye from one of the far windows, and she went to check it out. It was a T-shirt, hung across the low limb of a tree to dry. And beyond it, in a sunny patch of tilled earth protected by a fence made from string and sticks stuck into the ground, were the remains of a summer garden. Dried corn stalks and bean vines, a few bright squash and red peppers, empty cucumber and zucchini vines. She shook her head in mild amazement, and couldn’t prevent a smile.
“Well I’ll be damned,” she said out loud. “The Ladybug Farm garden thief, caught red-handed.”
By the time Lindsay returned to the house, Cici and Bridget had, by turns, been into town twice—once for a hundred dollars’ worth of meat, and again for a new tank of propane for the grill—and Noah had shucked all the corn and had almost completed shelling the butter beans. When he saw Lindsay, he stomped out to work on cleaning out the dairy, muttering something about women’s work, before she could say anything more than hello to him. Within moments, she was caught up in the choreography of a century-old recipe in which, it turned out, there was very little room for error.
Cici heated the grill to three hundred degrees while Bridget prepared a spice rub for the meat and Lindsay plunged tomatoes into a stockpot of simmering water to loosen their skins. Corn and butterbeans were coming to a simmer in another huge pot.
“I don’t know why I always get this job,” Lindsay complained, fishing a steaming tomato out of the water with barbecue tongs. “I hate this job.” She plunged the tomato into a bucket of ice water in the sink, and went after another one.
“I think the heat should be higher,” Cici said, rubbing red peppers with olive oil. “Otherwise these peppers are never going to char.”
“I’m trying to lose weight,” Lindsay added, making a small slice in the skin of the iced-down tomato. The skin slipped off the fruit like a sweater off a baby, and she plopped the tomato into the pot with the corn and beans. “Whose idea was Brunswick stew anyway?”
“It says to slow roast the meat,” Bridget pointed out, slapping the spice rub onto the first of the two pork loin roasts. “You can’t roast anything above 325.”
“Maybe I’ll turn the heat up just a tad, just until the peppers are done.”
“Put them on the top rack and let them roast with the meat. They’ll char eventually.”
“I think I’ll turn up the heat.”
Then Lindsay said, “Listen, you won’t believe what I found on my walk this morning.”
Cici, cradling a bowl filled with oiled red peppers in one hand, opened the back door. Noah stood there, hands in pockets.
“What ya’ll want to do with all that crap in the loft?” he asked.
Cici said, “What loft?”
And Lindsay turned from the stove. “What crap?”
While Bridget, loading heavy, spice-rubbed roasts onto a tray, said, “I thought you were splitting wood.”
Noah, glowering, muttered, “Fool women. Wood, beans, dairy barn . . . Make up your minds, can’t you?”
“You know what we should do,” Bridget said with a sudden light of inspiration in her eyes, “is pick up some of those hickory chips from the yard and put them in the grill to smoke the meat.”
Lindsay repeated, “What crap?”
Cici said, “That’s a great idea. I’ll get them.”
Cici held the back door open as Bridget struggled through with the heavy tray of meat. Noah said, unaccountably, “Hickory spits.”
Lindsay plopped the last tomato into the pot of vegetables and dried her hands on a dish towel. “What crap?” she said.
Lindsay reached the top of the ladder first, followed closely by Bridget and then Cici. A trapdoor was pushed to the side of the opening that was large enough to drop a double bale of hay through. Lindsay looked around carefully before stepping off the ladder, but the floor was solid. She stood up and switched on the flashlight she had brought.
“Wow,” she said.
The dairy loft was vast and steeply raftered, covered in a plank floor that looked like hickory. The smell was warm and dusty, the slow-baked aroma of old wood in the sunshine. Lindsay’s flashlight beam picked out big, lumpy shapes covered with white sheets, boxes, and irregular metal objects stacked against the walls, before Bridget’s light joined hers, and then Cici’s.
“Who could have guessed this was even up here?” Bridget said. “I never knew this place had a loft.”
“They probably stored feed for the cows here,” Cici said when she joined them. “It’s nice and dry, and the trapdoor would have kept the rats and squirrels from eating up the profit.”
“Leave it to a teenage boy to go exploring and come up with a loft we didn’t even know was here,” Bridget said. “This place gets bigger every day.”
Cici made her way over to one of the sheet-covered lumps and lifted the fabric. “It’s furniture,” she said, and the note of excitement in her voice increased as she tossed back the sheet. “Good heavens, it’s a Queen Anne highboy!”
“It matches the table in the dining room,” Bridget said, and Lindsay threw back another sheet.
“Here are the chairs!” she called.
“Will you look at this game table?” Bridget cried, pushing back another dustcover. “Look at all the inset wood!”
“This chair is in pretty bad shape, but I bet it could be re-upholstered.”
“What is all of this junk against the wall here?”
Cici made her way over and joined her flashlight to Lindsay’s. “Bedsprings,” she decided. “Old fashioned, rusted-out bedsprings.”
“I wonder what’s in all these boxes?” Lindsay knelt down to open one but found nothing inside but stained and rotting fabric.
“Old draperies probably,” Cici said. “Not every old box is going to hide a treasure, you know.”
“Well, this is a treasure.” Bridget’s voice, soft with wonder, came from across the room. “Look at this bed frame—it’s burled walnut. And there’s a dresser to match. Did you see this gorgeous gilt mirror?”
“This is better than a department store!” Lindsay exclaimed.
“This is what happened to all the furniture nobody wanted when the family redecorated,” observed Cici.
“Nobody wanted this darling headboard with all the leaves and flowers carved into it?” Bridget said. “Wait, there’s a footboard, too. Lindsay, you should put this in your room. It’s perfect!”
“Where’s Noah?” Lindsay demanded. “We’ve got to start getting this stuff out of here. I can’t wait to see what we have! It’s like Christmas!”
Cici held up a hand. “Okay, hate to be a buzzkill here, but . . .”
The other two groaned.
“First of all, it’s going to take more than one teenage boy to get all this stuff down the ladder. In fact, I’m not even sure how they got it up here.”
“This is a big project,” agreed Lindsay reluctantly.
“But we could furnish the whole house out of this loft!” Bridget insisted.
“Some of it’s in pretty bad shape,” Cici pointed out. “It’s going to take some elbow grease before you bring it into the house.”
“Well,” Bridget admitted, deflated. “You’re right about that.”
“And do we really want to start bringing heavy furniture in before we finish the floors?”
The three women looked at each other in the reflected light of their combined flashlights, and their expressions were glum.
“I hate the thought of tackling those floors.”
“It wouldn’t take long if we could just get to it.”
“We got distracted by vegetables,” admitted Bridget.
“But,” said Lindsay, brightening, “that doesn’t mean we can’t
at least explore what’s here. Who knows, maybe there’s a lost Rembrandt or something!”
But they hadn’t pulled back more than two or three more sheets before Noah called from below, “Hey! You about finished up there?”
Lindsay went to the trapdoor and called down, “Not quite. Why?”
“Just thought you’d want to know,” he answered, “that whatever you’re cooking is on fire.”
“I would rather spend three days cutting miter joints,” Cici said, stifling a groan as she sank into her front porch rocker, “than three hours in the kitchen putting up stew. And you know how I hate cutting miter joints.” She leaned back heavily in the rocking chair and wine splashed over the rim of her glass onto the back of her hand. Unself-consciously, she licked it off.
“But you have to admit,” Bridget said, her smile a little lopsided with fatigue, “the stew was incredible.”
“The best I’ve ever tasted.”
“It was the charred meat,” agreed Lindsay, closing the front door behind her as she joined them on the porch.
“Well, Noah did tell us hickory wood spits.”
“Who knew what that meant?”
“Combined with the fat from the pork—”
“And the fact that you had to turn the heat up for the peppers—”
“A few flames were inevitable.”
“But no harm done.”
“And I still think the hickory chips were a good idea. The smokey taste is what made the stew so good.”
The flames that shot from the back of the grill had been quickly extinguished with a garden hose, and the peppers were charred to perfection. Unfortunately, to their initial dismay, so was the meat. However, a closer examination revealed that only the outer crusts of the roasts and the skin of the chicken had been blackened, and most of the meat could be saved. Three hours of simmering in the stewpot with the vegetables had turned the charcoal lumps into a tender, savory mixture of perfectly seasoned stew that they could probably never replicate.
“I think,” mused Bridget, “that’s what the cookbook probably meant by roasting over an open flame. It’s the burned parts that give the stew its flavor.”
“Maybe,” Cici said. “But I’m never doing that again. We could have blown up the house.”
“Not the whole house,” Bridget said defensively.
“Just the back patio,” Lindsay grinned.
Bridget sighed and closed her eyes wearily. “Well, at least it’s done. Every last vegetable has been peeled, cooked, and preserved, and we have enough food put away to outlast the Apocalypse.”
“We still have the persimmons,” Cici reminded her.
Bridget groaned out loud.
“What is it with us, anyway?” Lindsay said. “Why can’t we let anything go to waste? It’s not like we’re in danger of starving or anything. Why can’t we just keep the tomatoes we can eat and toss the rest away? Why can’t we leave the apples for the squirrels and the cherries for the birds? We were never like this back in the suburbs.”
“True enough,” agreed Cici, although a little reluctantly. “I didn’t have a bit of trouble tossing out lettuce that started to wilt or carrots when they went soft. And I paid for those.”
“It’s definitely different when it comes from the supermarket,” Bridget said. “There’s something about seeing the produce come straight from the ground that makes it more valuable somehow. And when they’re your cherries, and your apples and your grapes and blackberries that you picked yourself—why, it would be a crime to let the birds have them.”
“I never knew what a huge responsibility it was,” Cici said with a sigh, “having free food.”
“Not exactly free,” Lindsay pointed out. “The way I figure it, the Brunswick stew only cost us about twelve dollars a serving.”
The other two turned a questioning gaze on her.
“One hundred twenty-five dollars for the meat,” Lindsay explained. “Fifteen dollars for the propane, twenty dollars for the containers, not to mention the electricity for the freezer, and don’t forget you paid Noah six dollars an hour to shell beans.”
“It was worth it,” said Cici, raising her glass.
“Definitely,” agreed Bridget. “I would have spent twice as much never to have to shell another bean or husk another ear of corn. I sent a quart of stew home with him,” she added, “as a thank-you.”
“Good,” said Lindsay, in a slightly subdued tone. “It’ll probably be all he gets to eat tonight.”
Quietly, she told the other two about the folly in the glade and the encampment she had found there, complete with the remnants of their erstwhile garden. When she had finished, they were all silent for a while.
Then Bridget said, “He could have stolen money, or tools, or valuables from the house. God knows, we never lock anything up. Instead he chose to steal . . . garden plants.”
“He must have been living there all summer,” Lindsay said, gazing into her wineglass as she rocked. “Maybe even before we moved in.”
“This is a serious situation.” Cici was frowning worriedly. “We can’t just let him camp out on our property. For one thing, he’s a minor, probably a runaway. We have to call social services.” She looked at the other two. “Don’t we?”
Lindsay hesitated, then cleared her throat. “Actually, that was Reverend Holland on the phone just now.”
Bridget’s brow knit. “Methodist or Baptist?”
“Baptist. I thought I’d call to thank his wife for the persimmons—”
“Good idea,” agreed Cici.
“And while I had him on the phone, I thought I’d see if he had any advice on the, well, situation.”
“Oh.” Cici sounded a little surprised. “That’s a good idea, I guess. He would know who to call.”
Lindsay nodded. “That’s what I thought. It turns out, Noah is a chronic runaway, and it sounds like he has good reason. The father sometimes doesn’t show up for weeks at a time, and when he does he apparently can get pretty violent.”
Cici and Bridget made soft signs of sympathy and concern, and focused their attention on Lindsay.
“He dropped out of school, just like I suspected, but he’s never been in any real trouble . . . no drugs or anything.”
“That anyone knows about,” Cici had to say.
Bridget waved a hand. “How many drugs could you buy on six dollars an hour?”
Cici thought about that, and shrugged.
“Anyway, he’s never been in trouble with the police,” Lindsay went on, “and he works when someone will give him a job, and he stays wherever he can find a place. People from the church—both churches, I guess—have tried to help him out, but whenever social services gets involved, he just runs away again.”
Cici sighed. “Great.”
Bridget said, “But there’s got to be something someone can do.”
Lindsay said glumly, “I don’t know what. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
“And even if there was something to be done, we’re not the ones to do it,” Cici said. “We don’t even know the kid.”
Bridget gave her an incredulous look. “Cecile Burke, you’re the one who spearheaded a campaign to save an entire village in Africa! What do you mean, ‘we’re not the ones to do it’?”
Cici frowned uncomfortably into her wine. “African villages are a lot different than teenage boys camping out in your woods.”
“Well at least he has some place to camp,” Lindsay pointed out. “And he’s getting regular meals, thanks to Bridget, and a little cash for whatever. If we turn him in, who knows where he’ll end up?”
They thought about that for a while, and none of them liked the picture. Finally Cici said, “And what do you think is going to happen when winter comes? He’ll freeze out there in the woods.”
“We’ll have to talk to him before then,” Lindsay admitted. “But until then . . . couldn’t we just pretend we don’t know?”
The ladies were silent for a while, watching th
e shadows lengthen on the mountains while a fading sun speared streaks of orange through the naked, severed branches of the poplar tree. Already the lawn, which barely two weeks ago had been littered with debris, was cleared of brush and fallen leaves, and piles of hickory and poplar wood, neatly cut into two-foot lengths, awaited splitting and stacking. But the flower beds showed the neglect of the women’s late-summer preoccupation with preserving food, and the roses were badly in need of trimming. There were still pecans to be harvested, grapevines to be pruned and tied, and black walnuts littered the ground on either side of the drive—all of which would have been lost had not Noah mowed back the weeds that once hid them.
Bridget said, “He’s been an awful lot of help.”
And Cici added, “He certainly has been more reliable than I ever thought he’d be.”
“Of course his manners could use some improvement,” Bridget added.
“Not to mention his attitude,” said Cici. And she fixed a pointed look on Bridget. “Neither one of which are our responsibility.”
“He likes to draw,” Lindsay said, and when the other two looked at her she gave an embarrassed little shrug. “He had a sketchbook. I peeked. He’s really not bad. In fact, he’s pretty good. Okay, I know it doesn’t mean anything, and I know he’s a dropout and a runaway and a garden thief, and more than likely on his way to state prison by the time he’s twenty but . . . he likes to draw. That’s something, isn’t it?”
Bridget and Cici smiled, and leaned back in their chairs. The orange streaks in the sky grew purple, and finally gray. The shadows on the porch turned deep blue, and the air had a crisp, cool undertaste to it. The crickets and the tree frogs had retired to wherever it is such creatures go for the winter, and no birds sang after dark. The only sound was the creak of their rocking chairs, and from somewhere beyond the tree line, the warble of an owl.
Bridget said after a time, “I don’t think it’s just us. I think if everyone in America could watch their fruit grow from a flower and spend hours fighting the wasps for their berries there would be a lot fewer apples tossed out after just one bite, and everyone would make jelly.”
