4 Christmas on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  “Don’t be silly,” Cici said, “of course he is. When we first met him he was a drop out camping in our back yard. Now he’s got a scholarship to a private art school, he’s on his way to college, and he’s got you for a mother. Not to mention his own set of wheels. What’s not to be happy about?”

  Lindsay shook her head slowly. “I think he liked it better when I was just his teacher and he worked here. He knew where he stood then. I know legally adopting him was the best thing to do, for all sorts of reasons, but it changed everything. He doesn’t even know what to call me.”

  “Well,” Bridget reminded her, “he is seventeen years old, and that’s practically an adult in his eyes. Maybe he thinks he’s too old to have a mother. I know that’s what my Kevin thought when he was that age, and I gave birth to him.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Lindsay said unhappily. “Maybe he is too old to need a mother. And I’m too old to be one.”

  “Did you ever tell him what to call you?” Cici asked, practically.

  “No,” Lindsay admitted. “It never seemed appropriate. Besides, that’s not the point. I don’t care what he calls me. I just want him to feel comfortable here, like part of the family. To be happy.”

  “What do kids know about happy?” Cici shrugged.

  “It’s his first Christmas with a new mom,” Bridget added. “Give him a chance.”

  Lindsay sighed. “Why does everything have to be so complicated?” she said, and started up the stairs. “And hot?” Impatiently, she tugged her sweater over her head and unzipped her jeans.

  Lori, passing her on the stairs, lifted an eyebrow. “Laundry day?” she inquired when she reached her mother.

  Ida Mae came out of the kitchen in time to see Lindsay marching up the stairs in her bra, and gave a disapproving shake of her head. “That girl has got to get herself some hormones,” she said. She wiped her hands on her apron and turned to Lori. “Well, come on then, let’s get them fruitcakes loaded up if we’re gonna get them all delivered before Christmas.”

  “How long have you been taking fruitcakes to people for Christmas, Ida Mae?” Lori asked as she followed her back through the kitchen toward the cold pantry.

  “Too many years,” replied Ida Mae. “That’s the trouble with doing stuff for folks. They start expectin’ it.”

  “Why did you start doing it, then?”

  “I didn’t. Miss Emily did.”

  “The woman who used to own this house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s her cookbook that Aunt Bridget is always looking at, isn’t it? Is the recipe for the fruitcake in there?”

  “You don’t need a recipe for fruitcake. You just make it.”

  “Everything has a recipe,” Lori replied. “Cooking is all chemistry, you know.”

  Ida Mae gave her a disparaging look. “How many recipes have you followed, girl?”

  “Well… a lot,” she admitted.

  “And have you ever made anything worth eating?”

  Lori’s shoulders slumped. Despite both Bridget’s and Ida Mae’s diligent efforts, all concerned had finally been persuaded that the one thing Lori would never master was the art of cooking.

  “Grab a basket off the wall there,” Ida Mae advised as they moved down the short hall to the pantry. “That way we don’t have to—”

  She stopped in mid-sentence when she opened the pantry door, and stood stock still. Lori wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”

  The cold pantry had been built to store non-perishable food items in a time when supermarkets were not around every corner, and when a simple dinner party might mean a six course meal for thirty people. It was located on the north side of the house to remain cool in the summer, and lined with thick stone walls to keep the contents from freezing in the winter. There were bins to store things like potatoes and grains, and every wall was lined with shelves. Most of the shelves contained sparkling jars of jams and preserves that the women had put up during the summer, but from Thanksgiving until Christmas everything else was moved aside to make room for Ida Mae’s fruit cakes.

  “It smells like a distillery gone bad in here.” Lori took a cautious step inside, her face screwed up. “Rotten fruit and booze. Is it supposed to smell like that?”

  Ida Mae strode into the room and jerked the cord on the light bulb that was suspended from the ceiling. She took down one of the cheesecloth-wrapped packages that lined the shelves and stripped away the layers of brandy-soaked cloth until the delicacy inside was revealed. “Mold!” she exclaimed, and tossed the fruitcake onto the butcher block table in disgust. “My fruitcake’s got mold on it!”

  “How can anything get moldy with all that booze?” Lori asked, still wrinkling her nose, but Ida Mae ignored her, pulling down another cake and unwrapping it. That one, too was tossed onto the table.

  One after another the cakes were stripped and tossed onto the table, and the outraged disbelief in Ida Mae’s face grew. “They’re spoiled! Ever’ blamed one of them, spoiled!”

  She turned on Lori. “It’s your fault, all of you! Coming in here, messing with the way things are done, drinking up all my wine—”

  Lori looked indignant. “I didn’t drink your wine!”

  “And then saying, ‘Don’t you worry, brandy will do just fine’. Brandy! Whoever heard of brandy on my fruitcake!”

  Lori picked up a Mason jar half filled with a pale liquid and removed the lid, sniffing cautiously. She blinked and winced. “I think they meant real brandy,” she said. “Not homemade.” She sniffed again. “What is this, peach? It’s awfully fruity.”

  Ida Mae snatched the jar from her and screwed the lid back on.

  Lori glanced around. “How long has it been since you checked on them?”

  “You soak them once a week,” Ida Mae said, placing the jar on a high shelf. “That’s how you make sure the cakes don’t dry out. I was back here last Sunday.”

  “Well, that’s got to be it then. The heat wave didn’t start until this week. I think it just got too hot in here, and with all that fruit and sugar… well, those cakes were a Petri dish just waiting for a bacterium.”

  Ida Mae glared at her and Lori shrugged. “Chemistry.”

  Ida Mae turned back to the moldy fruitcakes that were discarded on the table, hands on hips. It was difficult to read the emotions behind the tightly compressed lips, but she was not a woman to waste time feeling sorry for herself. “Well don’t just stand there,” she told Lori. “Get me a trash bag from the kitchen and let’s get this mess cleaned up.”

  When Lori returned with an oversized plastic garbage bag, Ida Mae was in the process of unwrapping and examining each cake one more time, just to make sure. One by one, they each were dropped into the bag. “Sixty four years,” she muttered. “Sixty Four years and never once did I miss a Christmas. Not even when Miss Emily died. Preacher Winston, Doc Emory, that old coot Jake Hodges, toothless as a tadpole for twenty years but Law, does he look forward to his fruitcake… Ever’ last one of the Pritchet children, and their families too. They’ll think I up and died. Sixty four years, never missed a Christmas.”

  Lori said, “Well… couldn’t you make them something else?”

  Ida Mae gave her a look that could have melted stone, and tossed the next cake into the bag with a particular viciousness.

  Lori was undeterred. “I mean…” She looked around the pantry. “Look, we’ve got plenty of that candied fruit, and a whole bucket of walnuts and lots of flour and sugar… why don’t you make fresh fruitcakes? They just wouldn’t be as old, that’s all.”

  This time Ida Mae didn’t even bother to glare at her. “Child, if you had the sense God gave a goat you’d still come up lacking. Even if I didn’t have a thing else in this world to do on Christmas Eve, and even if I was inclined to ruin my reputation by giving out Christmas fruitcakes without a bit of seasoning on them, it takes a good three or four hours for each cake to bake, not to mention the measuring and the beating and the chop
ping and the pouring.”

  “Well…” Again Lori looked around the pantry, thinking. “What about cookies?”

  Another fruitcake hit the trash bag with a disheartening plop. “Folks is got more cookies than they can eat this time of year.”

  “Not fruitcake cookies,” Lori insisted. “We’ve got all of the stuff, and they’d only take about an hour to bake. I could help,” she volunteered eagerly.

  Ida Mae scowled and tossed away another cake. “Fruitcake cookies. I never heard such foolishness. I’d be laughed outta this county.”

  “What about the preacher, and Doc Emory, and the Pritchet children? Would you rather have them think you’re dead? Or worse, that you don’t care about them?”

  Ida Mae looked at her suspiciously, but Lori could tell the idea was beginning to take hold. “Where did you ever hear about such a thing as fruitcake cookies, anyhow?”

  “I read a recipe online,” Lori said. “I could go print it out for you.” She dropped the bag and started to turn for the door, but Ida Mae stopped her.

  “I ain’t cooking nothing from no recipe, young lady,” she said sharply, “in particular one that you pulled out of that computer of yours.” She thrust the trash bag back into Lori’s hands and ordered, “Now take this out back and put it in the bin. Make sure the lid’s on tight so the ‘coons don’t get it.”

  Lori’s face fell and she trudged toward the door, dragging the bag. “I was just trying to help.”

  “You can help by bringing in that candied fruit when you’re done, and then get yourself busy chopping walnuts,” Ida Mae said, pushing past her. “I’ll go preheat the oven.”

  Lori broke into a grin and she hurried out the door, lugging the bagful of discarded fruitcakes behind her.

  When she returned to the kitchen with her arms full of candied fruit and a zippered plastic bag of walnuts, Ida Mae had already cleared off the big center work island and set up the stand mixer. There was a pile of sifted flour on a sheet of parchment paper next to the mixer, to which Ida Mae was adding generous hand-measures of aromatic ground spices—ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. Lori pulled up a stool on the opposite side of the island, knowing better than to get in Ida Mae’s way while she was working, and she started chopping walnuts.

  “How did you decide who to give the fruitcakes to?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. Miss Emily did.” She opened a stick of butter into the mixing bowl, thought about it, and added another.

  “Miss Emily is dead, Ida Mae,” Lori reminded her gently.

  Ida Mae shot her a dark look. “You think I don’t know that? And mind you check for shells before you put them nuts in the bowl.” She cracked four eggs, fresh from their own hen house that morning, over the butter.

  “What I mean is,” Lori explained, “most of the people she used to give fruitcakes to have got to be dead too. So how do you decide?”

  “Lord, child, can’t you sit for one minute without talking a body’s head off?” She added brown sugar straight from the bag to the butter and eggs.

  “Well, I’ve just been trying to figure it out. Doc Emory and the preacher I can understand, but who are the Pritchets? And that toothless person? You had over twenty fruitcakes there. Who did all the rest go to?”

  “God bless America,” Ida Mae muttered, “I never did know a girl that could ask more questions. Every time you come home from that fancy school of yours I spend half my time explaining stuff to you that either ain’t none of your business or you ought to be able to figure out for yourself.”

  Lori shrugged good naturedly. “I’m curious.”

  Ida Mae looked at her, lips pursed in disapproval. “If I tell you, will you let me have some peace? And watch out for them shells.”

  Lori grinned. “I knew there was a story.”

  Chapter Four

  Ghosts of Christmas Past: Ida Mae

  That first Christmas after the War was kind of a sad time around here. Miss Emily had lost her oldest son in the Pacific, and her youngest, that would be the judge only he wasn’t the judge then, was still stationed overseas till his tour was up. My own Jackson, that’s my husband may God rest his weary soul, was holed up in the VA in Norfolk with a shot up leg, and I couldn’t stay up there with him because I didn’t have the money, though I tried to get up there on weekends when I could. Miss Emily let me stay on here as long as I helped out with the house and cooking and such, though there wasn’t that much to do with just the two of us.

  So many of our boys didn’t come home at all, and them that did were all broke up on the outside or all changed on the inside—kind of sad and empty and quiet like. Oh, I don’t mean to say there wasn’t a share of weddings and welcome-homes and church suppers when those troops came marching home, but there was an awful lot of empty places at the dinner table too.

  Back during the war, Miss Emily ran a boarding house for soldiers’ wives, you know, but now all the wives were gone back to their families, and this would be the first Christmas she’d be spending all alone. Miss Emily was one of them women that don’t let on as to how she is inside, but I could tell it was breaking her up to think about that big old empty table come Christmas time. But like I said, she wasn’t one to just sit back and let life beat her up, so she came up with the idea that we was to have a big old Christmas party, and invite everybody in the county. Why not? she figured. The war was over. It was time to celebrate.

  Well, I was all for that, but I worried about my poor Jackson, and how I was going to get up to see him with all the extra work to do, and whether I’d be paid enough for a bus ticket to Norfolk for Christmas. I was knitting him a sweater, and I’d counted on giving it to him in person on Christmas day. But I didn’t say anything to Miss Emily about that. It was so good to see her smiling again, and I didn’t want to spoil it for her.

  We started fixing and planning and cleaning and decorating right after Thanksgiving. First was the fruitcakes. We used up a whole summer’s worth of dried apples and raisins and figs and brandied cherries, and then she’d boil down lemon and orange rinds in sugar until they were just like candy—that’s what we did, you know, before we had all this fancy stuff in plastic boxes, and I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know but what the old way wasn’t better.

  We piled up the whole table with flour and spices, and my, didn’t this kitchen smell like heaven in a bowl! It took a whole jug of molasses and a pitcher of buttermilk fresh from the dairy. We shelled walnuts and pecans for days. We mixed up the batter with a big wooden spoon and baked the cakes in tube pans. We were doing nothing but fruitcakes from Monday to Wednesday, and I declare I’d never seen Miss Emily as happy as she was bustling back and forth in that kitchen, baking up a storm.

  Now Miss Emily wasn’t much of a drinker, but her son the judge, even though he wasn’t a judge back then, he had brought back a case of wine from France when he was home on leave, and she figured that would be good enough to keep the cakes moist, so every week we’d go in the cold pantry and pour a little more wine on the cakes to keep them soaking. By the time the judge got home there wasn’t a bottle left in that case, but that’s a different story.

  She sent out invitations to every family in town, from the mayor on down, on this thick cream colored paper with her initials engraved in the corner and stamped in gold on the envelope. We started sweeping out, and airing out, and washing down the windows with vinegar and polishing up the floors with turpentine and the furniture with beeswax, and we took down that big old chandelier and soaked every one of those crystals in soapy water. And let me tell you, I wasn’t doing it all by myself, neither. Miss Emily tied up her hair in a rag and put on a dustcoat and was down on her knees scrubbing away just as pleased as she could be. We got some of the boys to cut down one of the big cedars out on the back lot, and we put it in the front parlor there by the big window, and decorated it up nine ways to Sunday. We sat in the conservatory there on the stone floor for days on end and twisted spruce branches into wreaths for every window
in this house, fancying them up with dried flowers from the summer and oranges and apples from the root cellar, and while we worked, we talked. We got to be right good friends. I’ll tell you the truth, though it shames me to say it, I started thinking it might not be such a bad thing to miss seeing the look on Jackson’s face when I gave him his sweater, after all, if I could stay and see Miss Emily’s party through.

  It was the Friday before Christmas when we heard the civil defense siren go off. Now, you wouldn’t know anything about that I reckon, but if you’d just lived through six years of a war, you better believe that sound could turn your bowels to water before you could take a breath. We used to have drills once a week before VE day, but it had been months since anybody’d heard that sound, and this weren’t no drill. I recollect I was polishing up Miss Emily’s fine Havilland soup tureen and I dropped it smack on the floor. It broke into fifteen separate pieces but she didn’t say a word to me, she didn’t even notice. She just looked at me with a face like parchment and eyes as big as moons, and I don’t think she took a breath until that sound died down. I know I didn’t. And I’ll tell you the truth, seeing her that scared was almost worse than the thing that had scared us in the first place.

  It was only a minute or two, but it was the longest minute of my life. That’s how long it took Miss Emily to remember that the commissioners had decided that, since the war was over and they had this nice new siren with nothing to use it for, that they’d conscript the civil defense plan into a county defense plan, and use the siren in case there was to ever be a big emergency to call in the volunteer fire fighters and whatnot. So she went right to the phone and called the sheriff’s department, and when she hung up the look in her eyes was almost more terrible than the one that had been there when we first heard that siren go off. But her shoulders were squared off and her mind was busy, dealing with what she had to deal with, like she always did.

  “Ida Mae,” she said, because she always called me by my rightful name, “I want you to go upstairs and get every blanket you can find and put them in the boot of the Pontiac. Then fill some jugs with water and pack a basket full of that ham you made and the biscuits from breakfast. The boiler at the school just blew up. There were children inside.”