Crowningshield was hanging his head, a gloomy Eeyore. Like an animal waiting for a rival to leave so he could get to his feed. But Colm wasn’t leaving, no sir. He was sticking it out until the other guy left. He rocked back in his chair. Ruth always shook a finger at the kids for that. Would she scold him in front of Crowningshield? Probably not, too intimate a scene.
If it wasn’t Mac in that grave, he thought (these non sequiturs in his head), then where was Mac? Maybe that was the next step. To find Mac. Before that crazy Glenna got herself in deep water. He’d heard about the Times reporter. The young Flint girl had called him—Ruth’s line was busy, she’d said. But he wasn’t about to tell Ruth in front of this guy.
“Want a trip to the city?” he asked Ruth.
“Burlington?” She glanced at him sideways, an amused smile on her face. Her skin was openly perspiring now. Why? Because of the woodstove? Or was it Crowningshield? .…
“New York,” he said. “The Big Apple. Our apples are small up here. Check in with the New York Times. Couple of dentists. In case they don’t have any luck with the Vermont torturers.” Fallon had authorized the trip.
“If we can take thirty cows with us,” Ruth said, glancing at Crowningshield.
The intruder snorted. Thought the remark so cute, Colm figured. Now Ruth was bringing out more doughnuts. She was offering the plate to the rival.
Colm decided he wouldn’t stay after all. Something about the atmosphere.
* * * *
They were here. Hartley saw. The turquoise Blazer, with the New York license and the pink stripe along its side, her stepmother’s precious stripe—she’d had it painted on specially. The girl’s first impulse was to run, hide in the barn, hide Aunty. The article had come out in the morning Times; Fay had brought home a copy. Hopefully, her parents hadn’t seen it yet. Aunty hadn’t, either; she was out walking the fields, the way she did more and more often these days, and now Fay was drinking wine again with that guy who made signs. But Fay was her only hope.
“She’s not here—Aunty’s not here. I’m not here,” she told Fay while Willard Boomer looked on, amused. “It’s my stepmother,” she pleaded. “With Dad. Steer them off!”
“But they’ll worry.” Fay stroked Gandalf and he slobbered her cheek with his long pink tongue. “I remember when my daughter, Patsy, disappeared one time. I was out of my mind. And all the time, she was with three girlfriends, camping out.”
“Oh, yes,” said Willard Boomer, who had no children of his own. “My mother worries. Even now. Oh, absolutely.”
Hartley dashed upstairs with the Times, stashed it under a pillow. She heard them entering the kitchen, her stepmother’s high-pitched voice: “A friend saw the Colt, heading north. Now it’s outside, in the mud. She’s here. Oh, yes, I thought so. Homer, Glenna’s kidnapped the girl!”
Hartley grimaced. She had forgotten about the Colt, parked outside where the police had trampled the early snow into mud. She was caught. She sank down on the top step, trying to think it out, what she’d say, what excuse. She saw her stepmother’s lower half, one shiny red shoe tapping. She always did that when she was angry, probably had been for the whole five-hour trip north. Fay was stuttering. “Who? What colt? No horses here, but we have a cow. This is a B and B you know, a farmhouse.”
“My aunt’s house,” said Homer Flint. “I assume you’re the one I rented it to.” He stood there solidly, in brown gabardine pants with a wide brown leather belt, scuffed brown shoes with worn-looking salesman soles. He was looking apologetic.
Hartley drew a shuddering breath and scuffed slowly down the stairs. She loved her father dearly, though he made her angry the way he gave in to his wife. She couldn’t rely on Fay. The woman would just make things worse.
“You were going to put her in a nursing home. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to come home. She’s happy here, Dad.” Standing in the kitchen now, Hartley appealed to her father, stroked his sleeve. He was a pushover really, if she worked it right.
“We called the police,” her stepmother said. “To find you. Can you imagine what you’ve put us through? And they told us about that—that thing you found. It was her husband—it was Mac. Homer knows. Oh Lord, oh God! We’ve been frantic, haven’t we, Homer? Where is she? We’ve made arrangements.”
Fay said, “I’m Fay Hubbard—your third or fourth cousin, and this is Willard Boomer. He made the sign out there. It was very reasonable; he’s the best sign maker around.”
“The only one,” said Willard, looking modest. No one was looking at him, though, so he got up, stuck out his hand to Homer, who took it absently.
“You haven’t finished your tea,” said Fay. Hartley noticed the tea was a suspiciously reddish color. Fay picked up the cup and followed Willard out on the porch with it.
“Arrangements,” Hartley repeated, the word sinking in.
“For Glenna, of course.” Her stepmother started to sit down, but then, spotting a pat of butter on the chair, straightened up. She gave a little shriek when she saw the dog, and Hartley patted the frightened animal. Matilda Flint turned back to her stepdaughter. “How else is she going to get off? How’s she going to explain—oh, Homer knows; he heard the fights. Glenna and Mac. He’d have to be a witness, wouldn’t you. Homer? Oh Lord. We’ve called the state mental hospital—Rockbury. We’ll take her up tomorrow. Of course they’ll find her crazy. Crazy as a loon. Don’t worry, we’ll see that she gets her scotch. They’ll make that concession, won’t they?” She drew a shuddering breath and sank down on the pat of butter.
“Dad?” Hartley took a step forward, held out her hands. But Homer let his fall to his sides.
“I don’t know what else we can do, babe,” he said. “It looks bad.”
There was a shriek from Matilda Flint. She was holding a New York Times in one trembling hand. It had lain on the table the whole time, folded over to page sixteen, and Hartley hadn’t seen it, hadn’t known Fay bought two copies.
“She’s already confessed. Confessed to everyone. Oh my God. To some reporter!” Matilda threw herself at her husband, and he patted her shoulder absently, then looked apologetically at Hartley. “We’ll have to take her this minute. We have to get her out of here. Up to Rockbury. Glenna, where are you?” she screeched. “Glen-naaaa?”
“Gandalf—he wants out,” Hartley said, and banged out the door in her SAVE THE GREYHOUND T-shirt, the dog dashing on ahead. It was raining, a warmish drizzle, but she hardly felt it, she was running so fast. Out into the fields, to warn Aunty.
Chapter Eight
Another flock of grackles—second this fall, swooping down out of the sky like a black cloud, crashing into Alwyn Bagshaw’s garden, crushing his empty cornstalks, the last lettuce he’d covered up so careful with old sheets. Now they was sucking up his sunflower seeds, squeezing through the broken window of the barn, where he stored his winter squash.
Thieves, he thought. Black thieves! A miserable bird they was with those long wedge-shaped tails, the mean yellow eyes, the bronzy backs. A dirty bird, pushing the bluebirds out of their holes. The female the worst. He’d seen her one time, after she left her nest, circling over the East Branbury brook, squatting on the log, tail up, wings spread. All quivery, like a woman wanting sex.
“Git, git!” he cried, running in circles, flailing his arms. But still they come, a hundred, two hundred maybe, blacking out his land. Come to torture him, force him out of his home—like those females next door. They wanted his land, his house, they did. It was them brought the onslaught of grackles, he told himself. Brought the Willmarth woman—for here she was now, green pickup squealing to a stop next door—coming to see him? What had the girl told her? She better not come round no more. Got nothing to say to her. Damn the woman anyways, looking over the hedge at me, waving, smiling, like she’s my good buddy. Looking at what I have in my wheelbarrow. Can she see what?
She’ll tell, oh she will. Like Denby, a little tattletale when we was growing up. Always putting the blame on
Alwyn, like the time Denby shot the frozen long johns down the road full of holes, then planted the .22 in my room. Ma locking me in the cellar a whole day and night without food.
He kicked the side of the wheelbarrow—it was in his way. Now he’d hurt his foot. He yelped with pain—and the pain spread to his chest.
“They’s killing me,” he cried aloud, “them busybodies!”
* * * *
When Ruth entered the Healing House, past the sign with the arrow aiming at the moon, she felt a cold draft on her neck. The windows were wide open, though there’d been a heavy frost this morning: You could see it outside on the grass, like a pale glaze on a smooth pot. A pale glaze on a smooth pot, she repeated the words to herself. There was a time back in college when she’d done pottery, thought she’d like to have a kiln, make things with her hands. Funny she should think of that now. But marriage used up the hands in other ways: cooking, cleaning, milking cows. At least Tim was back to work, doing the milking; he’d practically forced her to take a morning off. And here she was, in spite of Kevin Crowningshield’s advice not to come—he’d only needed her as a sounding board, he’d said. “She’ll see me—she’s got to see me,” he’d said of his wife, the sweat springing out on his brow like drops of fine rain.
The place was as spotless as Emily had said; you could eat off the floor—if that’s what you wanted to do. It looked as though they’d even scrubbed the walls. There was an odor, though, about the place, beyond the incense—as if there was sickness here, a contagion, something they wanted to air out, exorcize. And no one seemingly about, though she heard a high hum in another room: like wind whistling, or a teapot coming to a boil. She followed the sound, peered in. She stood in the doorway, shocked.
A woman was lying on her back, on a low massage table, eyes tight shut—or was she dead? Her face was a mask under a tangle of brown curls. A dozen other women sat cross-legged on straw mats, their bodies wrapped in brown cotton robes. One of the watchers was wheezing even while she chanted something unintelligible. One woman at the side of the table—seemingly the leader—sat, tall in a wheelchair, her eyes shut, head flung back; you could see the purple veins taut in her neck. Her black hair was pulled tightly off her forehead; her scarred skin was the yellowy white of curd; her breasts bulged under the scarlet robe. There was a white drape over the supine woman’s body, except for one protruding foot that the wheelchair woman was slowly, deeply, blindly—it seemed—massaging.
Was it a house for the sick? Kevin had every right to worry; Ruth was glad she’d come. But she didn’t dare interrupt. There was some intensity, something deeply private, even solemn, about the ceremony; about the room itself, with its colorful Japanese lanterns, the soulful music, the incense. She decided to wait; she glanced through the brochures piled up in a rack on the kitchen wall. “Isis Blue Moon: R.N., M.Ed.: spiritual healings, holistic healings, soul therapy, psychotherapy. Chakra balancing, cranial-sacral work, chelation, foot reflexology, and therapeutic touch. Energy work.”
Whoa! Where was the dictionary for a poor farmer who did her healing with hot mustard pads or the old Vermont cure, whiskey with lemon and honey? Her daughter Sharon laughed at her, of course. Sharon was a vegetarian; each day she swallowed ten different vitamins and minerals. She and her husband slept with the baby between them—Robbie hardly a baby now, almost two years old. When had they had the privacy to make the new child? It could come any day now—along with a calf or two—and in her bed.
Calves and babies, babies and calves. Once she’d dreamed she was giving birth to a calf—and in the dream she became the calf, a bull calf. She woke, shrieking, could still see the ax, gleaming, above her head.
In the other room, the chanting had stopped. The group was circling the sick woman, touching her forehead, her cheek, her bare toes, which stuck out from under the drape. Suddenly, the woman opened her eyes and vomited a bloody froth. The onlookers gasped, one cried out, and another ran for a bucket. The leader, Isis, Ruth assumed, remained calm. She instructed two of the women to help the sick woman sit upright. They held a vial to the woman’s nose. But the face turned paler still, greenish yellow in the slant of morning light from the south window.
“That woman needs a doctor,” Ruth cried. “Call an ambulance!”
The sick woman opened her eyes then, pale blue eyes that seemed to swallow up the face. “No,” she said in a high, firm voice. “I won’t have a doctor.”
“Of course you won’t,” said Isis in a flat midwestern accent. “Of course not, dear.” Frowning at Ruth, she said, “Can’t you see this is a sick woman? She wants a spiritual healer, not a doctor. Now please go.”
“No doctor. Go. Please.” The sick woman’s eyes, intensely blue now, pleaded with Ruth. Isis carefully wiped her forehead, while a woman with a long black braid scrubbed the floor, on hands and knees, with what smelled like ammonia. Ruth could see the spinal vertebrae through the woman’s thin robe.
As Ruth ran out, feeling light-headed, she heard the chanting start up again, the sound mixed with a light rain; she smelled smoke in the air. Raindrops spattered the swinging sign, making it seem as though the arrows were moving, up into the sky, into whatever was waiting there. Surely the woman would die! She only hoped it wasn’t Kevin’s wife. He’d spoken of a clotting problem, his wife on blood thinners—the medicine she’d left behind in Chicago. One could hemorrhage, bleed to death, Kevin said, from a simple cut.
A thought entered her head as she climbed into the old green pickup: If the woman died, if this was his wife, who would inherit the house, the land? The woman in the red robe? Isis—who wouldn’t call a doctor?
Alarmed, she headed down the mountain toward Branbury. She usually loved the drive; the road followed the curve of the river. At each bend, rocky cliffs and waterfalls, bordered with scarlet swamp maples—though they’d lost most of their color now. The tree limbs looked black and sterile in the cold drizzle; the fallen leaves had been raked into crumpled damp piles. There were no children playing in front of the houses. She should have phoned Colm at once, from the country store—he might be on volunteer duty today with Branbury Rescue. She would have, except for the sick woman herself, her own words. “No doctor... Please.” Didn’t Ruth herself get angry with doctors who interfered with living wills, with the desires of sick patients? A woman had the last say over her body, didn’t she? Choice! For life—or death.
Still.. . Was it suicide this woman was committing? Or was it something else? The word homicide came to mind. And Ruth felt the rain enter her bones.
She kept on going, too fast, down the mountain, veering north at the main road, toward home. She felt somehow bereft, half a person away from the farm, as though the farm were an island, a self-sufficient yet vulnerable island, at the mercy of the weather, the market—forces beyond her control.
Well, Tim was in control today, although there was enough to do for ten people: hay to mound up into bales, mower in need of repair, tractor with a broken gear shaft. That was the frustration: She could envision where she could take the farm—the new genetics, new machinery, advances in nutrition. But there wasn’t money for it, too little help from the state, and so it seemed she was moving backward into the future.
“Backward into the future,” she said aloud, almost smiling at the oxymoron as she drove right past her own farm, as though the pickup, like a stubborn horse, refused to enter. Spacey Ruth. Well then, she’d go on to the Flint farm. It was probably an unconscious wish. She’d see Kevin. Something had to be done for that woman, something short of a doctor... If, that is, the sick woman was his wife....
Or even if she wasn’t!
* * * *
“You knew him, Dad? Glenna’s husband, Mac? You knew Glenna, too, you said?” Colm Hanna stood in the doorway of the embalming room, where his father was bent over a corpse, aspirating the body—an open-coffin procedure. He was inserting a trocar into the heart’s right atrium. The body was that of an adolescent boy; he’d been in an auto accident
, a drunken buddy driving, careening into the wrong lane, showing off. The girlfriend still in the hospital. “The driver was unhurt, of course,” William Hanna said, sounding bitter. “They always seem to get off.”
“But he’ll have to live with the guilt,” Colm said, thinking of the myriad horror scenes he’d witnessed as a volunteer with Branbury Rescue. He grimly watched the trocar plunge in and out of the body, like a knitting needle into wool—breaking up organs and intestines, vacuuming out the blood, replacing it with a preservative. When Colm went, he wanted his body burned.
His father said, “Guilt, huh. You bet he will.”
Glenna, too, Colm thought, if she really was guilty, as people said. What mental hell, he wondered, had she gone through? Or had she simply blocked it out? He’d heard of people doing that: blocking out what happened to them— abuse; what they did to others—murder? That rumor about the hole Mac had dug for the horse. How true was it? Was it motive for killing the man?
“Painted tin,” his father said, the aspiration complete. He removed a silver ring from the boy’s finger, held it up to the window glass, squinting, the horn-rimmed glasses down on his nose, the skin white and puffy under his Irish eyes. In spite of the work he did, there was a humorous glint in his eyes. Like he’d rather be at the local pub with the boys than aspirating a cadaver. “Five-and-dime. The girlfriend gave it to him, I suppose.”
“And he cherished it.” Colm pictured the ring Ruth had given him in high school. It, too, was a five-and-dime ring. Impulsively, she’d stuck it on his finger one night, after they embraced. He didn’t take a shower for days, afraid the gold would wash off. The thrill of it.
But here he was, in a room of death. “What was he like, Dad—Mac? Crotchety, like Glenna says? Mean-spirited? Sharp-tongued?” He didn’t know why he had to know— except that Ruth was concerned. Glenna was a neighbor; Mac had been. Colm had never married himself, not after Ruth gave him the final no sophomore year in college; he could only know relationships secondhand. It made him feel inferior, as if he were anomalous, because he lived alone. Though he knew what they said: “When his dad goes, all that responsibility, then he’ll marry.” And maybe he would. When Pete left with that actress, he’d silently celebrated—a shot of his favorite Guckenheimer whiskey. Then kicked himself, knowing the hurt for Ruth. Christ but we’re self-centered animals, he thought.
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