At Home on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Lindsay was on her hands and knees at the open door to the porch, having just stroked golden stain on the last floorboard on her side of the room, when she heard the roar of barking and the thunder of hooves. She didn’t even have time to gasp as Bambi sailed over the canvas-covered sofa on the porch and careened through the doorway, followed closely by Rebel. The deer’s hooves splayed on the wet floor and he went skidding. Rebel’s claws, scrambling for traction, left long crooked lines in the newly applied stain.

  There was a voice: “Don’t worry, I got ’im!” And Noah scrambled over the sofa in hot pursuit.

  Lindsay cried, “Noah, don’t—”

  But too late. Noah’s feet hit the wet floor and went out from under him; he slid halfway across the room before righting himself and grabbing the rope that trailed from Bambi’s neck. He turned to Lindsay, covered in sticky brown stain, and grinned. “Told you I got him.”

  Rebel, hopping on first one foot and then the other, trying to shake off the floor stain that covered his paws, made his way to the door just as Bridget arrived. She gasped as she surveyed the scene of destruction, her hands going to her face.

  “Oh my goodness! What happened?”

  Cici, poised in a half crouch with her paintbrush in hand, mouth open, eyes stunned, looked slowly from Noah to Lindsay to Bridget. “I have no idea,” she said.

  Noah led the deer, slipping and sliding, out of the house and down the front steps, with Bridget following behind, frantically trying to wipe up the little crescents his hooves left on the painted porch floorboards. Lori ran toward them, breathlessly announcing, “We got the sheep back! Everything’s okay. What’s the matter with Rebel?” She stopped short, looking at Noah, looking at Bambi, looking at her mother and Lindsay standing on the front porch with their arms folded and their faces tight. What she could not see, her imagination supplied. “Oh,” she said.

  Zeb came up behind her, and addressed Bridget politely. “I’m ready to finish up, ma’am, whenever you are,” he said.

  Bridget looked around, flustered. “Well, yes, I suppose we’d better . . .”

  “There’s just one thing.”

  Zeb looked at Noah and the deer, then at the women on the cluttered front porch, and Lori and Bridget, flushed and sweaty and covered with wool, and he shook his head sadly. “I sure do hate to bring you trouble, when it’s plain to see you already got plenty. But the fact of the matter is”—he reached in his back pocket and took out a small leather case, of the kind used to hold identification—“in my other job, I’m the game warden around these parts, and it’s against the law to keep a wild animal without a permit. I’m afraid I’m going to have to write you a citation.”

  They all sat on the porch that evening, paper plates balanced on their laps as they sprawled across the disarranged furniture, picking at the tuna sandwiches Ida Mae had made them for supper. They were too tired to eat, and almost too tired to move. It had taken every available hand to repair the damage done to the floor before the stain dried, so Ida Mae had been recruited to handle the sheep. She had of course complained about it nonstop, but there was a touch of satisfaction on her face as she joined them on the porch with a glass of iced tea.

  “Something wrong with them sandwiches?” she demanded. “It’s a sin to waste food.”

  They all murmured protests, insisting the sandwiches were fine, and Lindsay even took a bite.

  “I had me a nice Irish stew planned,” Ida Mae went on, “with old-fashioned soda bread and apple pie. But that was before you decided to let wild animals run loose in the house while you was painting the floors.”

  “Sounds wonderful, Ida Mae,” Lindsay murmured, half asleep. “We’ll have it later.”

  Ida Mae snorted.

  “It was nice of Zeb to only charge us half price for the sheep,” Bridget said, rousing herself to speak.

  “That’s still half our profit,” Lori said morosely.

  Noah said, “He ain’t taking that deer.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’ll do that . . .” Bridget looked helplessly to Cici. “Do you?”

  Cici, too tired to even shrug, merely waggled her eyebrows.

  Lindsay said morosely, “For fifty years I’d never even seen the inside of a courtroom. Not so much as a traffic ticket. Now I’m standing before a judge twice in one year.”

  “Next thing you know, your mug shot will be on America’s Most Wanted,” Lori said, peeling the crust off her sandwich. “Of course, without a satellite dish, we’ll never see it.”

  “We only have to pay the fine if we don’t either release him into the wild or find a suitable facility to take him before the court date,” Cici pointed out.

  “How much do you think the fine will be?”

  Cici sighed. “More than we can afford.”

  “It ain’t right, coming in a man’s house, telling him what to do, threatening his property,” Noah said angrily. “Ain’t that against the Constitution?”

  Lindsay focused with difficulty through her fatigue. “Umm . . . illegal search and seizure. Yes. That sounds like a good research project.”

  “I ain’t writin’ no report,” Noah warned darkly. “And he ain’t takin’ that deer.”

  Bridget’s tone was troubled. “It’s my fault. I never should have asked Farley for help. But who knew he’d bring his cousin?”

  Lori said, “It’s okay, Aunt Bridget. You did right. We never would have gotten the job done by ourselves. I guess maybe sheep ranching is not as easy as I thought.”

  “Nothing ever is, sweetie,” Cici said tiredly, and put aside her plate. “But next time, please, I’m begging you, just think it through, okay?”

  Ida Mae said dourly, “You’re all crazy as March hares, if you ask me. Letting wild animals run loose in your front parlor, moving your parlor onto the porch . . . And I’m telling you, it’s too early to be shearing sheep.”

  “But at least we have the fleece,” Lori said, cheering a little. “And we know someone who’ll buy it. That’s something.”

  Bridget reached across and patted her knee. “That’s a lot, honey. You’ve worked hard and you did a good job.”

  “But,” Cici pointed out, “I don’t think there’s much point in your writing this idea up into a business plan.”

  “Yeah,” Lori agreed sadly. “Figured that one out.”

  They were quiet as the night settled in, bringing with it the clean sweet smell of new grass and turned earth. A night bird chirped and its mate answered. Something whirred in front of Lori’s face and she swatted at it.

  “Well, look at that,” she said. “A ladybug.”

  Lindsay smiled faintly. “That must mean spring is really here.”

  “By the way,” Noah said, “got your peas and taters in the ground.”

  “Now that means spring is here,” Bridget said. She barely suppressed a yawn. “Good day’s work, everyone.”

  Cici rose stiffly, muffling a groan. “And I, for one, am ready for it to be over.”

  A murmur of agreement went around the group and, one by one, they rose to follow her inside.

  April Showers

  A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

  —GEORGE A. MOORE

  8

  Blackberry Winter

  The floors finally dried, a post and wire fence was erected around the vegetable garden, and Lori and Bridget netted three hundred dollars for the fleece.

  “It’s not exactly what I expected,” Lori admitted, trying hard to hide her disappointment. “But there weren’t quite as many pounds of fleece as I had counted on, by the time we cut out all the damaged parts, and apparently the price-per-pound figure is for retail, not wholesale, and I guess our sheep aren’t the highest quality wool producers . . .”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Bridget tried to console her. “We had to shear the sheep, anyway, and three hundred dollars will go a long way toward paying for their hay this winter.”

  “Besides,�
�� Cici said, giving her daughter a bracing squeeze on her shoulder. “A determined entrepreneur doesn’t look at losses. She takes her profit—however small—and reinvests it, right?”

  “Right,” Lori said, her expression brightening. She hugged her mother quickly. “Thanks, Mom!”

  When she was gone, Cici shook her head and muttered, “I can’t believe I’m encouraging her.”

  “Well, she did work awfully hard. And”—Bridget folded the bills and tucked them into her back pocket—“three hundred dollars is three hundred dollars.”

  They moved the furniture back onto the gleaming golden heart pine floors, carefully arranging the piano over the blotch near the window. The newly cleaned draperies were rehung over sparkling, freshly washed windows. Cici carefully applied a coat of white gloss paint over the arched trim around each alcove, and then decided that what the alcoves really needed was portrait lighting to spotlight the paintings. While she went to the hardware store for the necessary supplies, Lindsay put the finishing touches on the guest room. Paul and Derrick were arriving the next day.

  The four-poster mahogany bed had been found in the dairy loft before Christmas, along with the ivory velvet-upholstered scroll bench at its foot. The velvet—originally an ugly wine color—had been moth-eaten and worn, but was easily replaced. The bed was dressed in a fluffy feather mattress and an ivory and sage brocade duvet cover that reflected, but did not match, the pale sage curtains that were drawn back from the sunny windows. The cherry vanity Cici had helped her get down from the loft looked perfect in the corner, particularly when topped with a lace doily and an overflowing vase of yellow daffodils. Two tapestry wing chairs, which Lindsay had spent the winter reupholstering, were drawn up before the dainty marble fireplace, and between them was a fluted pie table that held a china tea service, a selection of teas, and a basket, which, as soon as Bridget finished baking them, would be filled with blueberry scones.

  Lindsay stood back and surveyed her efforts with satisfaction. “We really could run a B&B,” she murmured to herself, and went forward to run her dustcloth, one last time, over the marble mantelpiece. That was when she noticed the crack in the wall.

  Most of the bedrooms were covered with wallpaper; some of it, Lindsay imagined, as old as the house. But this room had apparently been redecorated within living memory, because the plank walls had been painted an inoffensive off-white, and the framed paneled wainscoting below it a glossier version of the same color.

  The crack she noticed was really more like a seam that had been painted over, and when she applied gentle pressure with her hand, she felt the panel sway inward. “Good heavens,” she exclaimed softly. “How many secret rooms does this house have, anyway?”

  But it was not a secret room, or even another painted alcove. It was, as Ida Mae explained when she came up with a stack of freshly laundered towels for the guests, merely a covered wood storage bin.

  “This was Miss Emily’s room,” she explained, “and when she got the notion to paint it all white, she thought the wood stacked up by the fireplace in the winter ruint the look of the room, and it did, too. Not to mention all the dirt it spread around on her white carpets. So she had them build a door to hide the firewood.”

  Ida Mae set the folded towels on the bed and gave the dust ruffle a critical little adjustment. “Miss Emily,” she pointed out, “used to roll up the guest towels in a basket and put the basket at the foot of the tub. You want me to do that?”

  “Sounds great,” Lindsay said, her voice partially muffled by her explorations of the bin. “Oh, look! There’s a pair of old andirons in here!”

  She dragged one of the heavy, blackened objects out and examined it closely. “Is this brass?” She pulled out the other one. “I think it is! They’ll have to be cleaned up, but wouldn’t they look great in the fireplace?”

  “They’ll only get all sooted up again.”

  “Then we’ll polish them again. Say, look at this.” Using her fingertips she prized up what turned out to be a filthy piece of scrap carpeting, obviously put there to protect the wood floor beneath from the damaging effects of the firewood. As she pulled the carpet out of the cubby most of the detritus it had been placed there to hold spilled onto the floor.

  “Broom’s in the pantry,” Ida Mae told her with a humorless look, and left to arrange the towels artfully in a basket for the bathroom.

  Lindsay swept up two dustpans filled with shredded bark, dried leaves, and just plain dirt, before she noticed several sheets of newspaper, which apparently once had been used as fire starter, lodged at the back of the bin. She pulled them out, but they weren’t very interesting—classifieds from 1962—and she tossed them in the trash bag. The last piece of paper was smaller, and half caught between the floor and the baseboard molding. She almost tore it tugging it out, but she could tell immediately it was not newsprint.

  The paper itself was heavy, like stationery or even sketch paper, and it was yellowed at the corners with age. At first she thought it was blank, but when she turned it over she saw a crudely executed sketch—some kind of four-legged animal with wings in the center, a banner on top, and the whole surrounded by a pointed oval with one half shaded and what appeared to be feathers springing from the top. As she looked closer, Lindsay realized the animal was a horse. Lindsay smiled in puzzlement and started to crumple the paper into the trash, then hesitated.

  This playful product of a child’s imagination might have been drawn twenty years ago, or fifty. Perhaps it was even older. As she smoothed out the wrinkles in the paper, Lindsay could not help imagining some long-ago budding artist, rushing to show his mother his latest masterpiece, his mother faithfully tacking it up among the dozens of other similar works of art she couldn’t throw away. This drawing, like the long-forgotten ribbon in the alcove, was a part of the history of the house, and it deserved a place of honor.

  Lindsay found a dime-store frame in her studio, and was hanging the drawing on the tall narrow wall in the entry hall that was dedicated to personal art when Cici came in. On the same wall was a charcoal sketch Noah had done of the house, and a framed invitation to a party held at the house in 1920, which a neighbor had given them for Christmas. There was also a collage of newspaper scraps and receipts from the turn of the century that Lindsay had found while taking down the wallpaper in her own room.

  “Look,” she said as Cici came in with a bag from the hardware store. “I found another treasure.” She stepped back to admire the drawing.

  Cici tried to look appreciative. “What is it?”

  Lindsay shrugged. “But it’s old. It was in the cubby behind the wall in the guest room where they used to store firewood. I also found a cool pair of brass andirons.”

  “Good.” Cici dropped the package on the sofa. “Because we’re going to need them. I heard on the radio coming back that the temperature is really going to drop tonight. It’s going to stay cold all weekend, too. Wouldn’t you know? Just when we promised Paul and Derrick a lovely spring weekend in the mountains. I’m going to start bringing in some firewood.”

  Lindsay followed her through the house to the kitchen. “How cold is it going to get?”

  “In the twenties tonight, the teens tomorrow.”

  Bridget was just taking the scones out of the oven and the kitchen was filled with the aroma of creamy vanilla and blueberries. She turned when Cici spoke, holding the baking sheet in her mittened hands. “What did you say?”

  Lindsay went straight to the refrigerator and took out the butter dish. Cici filled the kettle and put it on to boil. “A cold front is moving in this afternoon. It’s not going to get above freezing all weekend.”

  Bridget’s eyes went in disbelief to the window, where an emerald meadow, unfurling green leaves, and snowy blossoms testified to the fact that this was definitely spring. “But . . . everything is in bloom! The fruit trees, the berries, the flowers . . . they’ll all freeze!”

  Lindsay, who was impatiently plucking the hot scones from Bridget
’s baking sheet into a napkin-lined basket, paused. “Oh-oh,” she said. “I didn’t think about that. My roses are starting to bud, too. I’ll have to cover them.”

  “We can cover the blueberries and the hydrangea bushes,” Bridget said. “But we’ll have to cut all the flowers and bring them inside.”

  “You don’t cover blueberries,” Ida Mae said, coming into the kitchen from the pantry. “They need the cold to make. Same with blackberries and raspberries. You just leave ’em alone. Mother Nature has a plan.”

  “What about the cherry trees and the pears?” Cici said. “They’re just starting to bloom. Does Mother Nature have a plan for them, too?”

  Ida Mae shrugged. “They’ll either live, or die. I told you it was too dang early to be shearing sheep.”

  The kettle started to shriek and Cici lifted it from the stove, pouring hot water over the tea bags in three cups. Lindsay put the basket of scones on the table and Bridget put away the baking pan, and for a moment the significance of Ida Mae’s last words were lost on them. It was as one that the three of them turned again toward the window, and the view of twenty-five naked sheep peacefully scattered over the meadow.

  “Oh, my,” moaned Lindsay.

  “The sheep,” gasped Bridget.

  “What about the sheep?” Lori, who could be counted upon to respond to the scent of baked goods from anywhere on the property, came in from the back porch and helped herself to a scone.

  “Those are for company,” Cici said. She took one for herself and sat down, reaching for the butter knife.

  Bridget looked worried as she told Lori, “It’s going to get cold tonight.”

  Lori said, “We’ll bring the sheep into the barn. It’s a mess to clean up in the morning, but we’ve done it before. “

  “But,” Bridget said, “that was when they had wool.” She sat down and pulled her cup of tea toward her, her forehead furrowed as she absently dunked the tea bag.