Keepsake for Eagle Cove

by M. L. Buchman

  “What in the world is a flameagle? A flaming eagle, like Burning Man in Nevada?”

  “Nope. You’ll see. Go help Peggy. And I’ll expect you and Tiffany to be at the festival, not hiding up in your woods.” Gina pushed off the truck and headed back to the B&B. “It’s only Tuesday and we’re already full. That Jessica is a marketing wizard.”

  Devin sat there a while longer, watching the sun climb up through the branches.

  You and Tiffany.

  Your woods.

  He didn’t know which was stranger. Hearing it stated as simple fact or that it was true. A month ago, the woods had been a strange and creepy place. It now seemed perfectly normal to wander up into the trees after work rather than head down to the B&B. Sometimes Tiffany would walk down to meet him and they’d walk together, holding hands where the trail was wide enough.

  They’d greet Tall Guy, check the goats, shower together, cook, and make love. She had no television, so they often talked, read aloud to each other, or sometimes just wrapped up under a comforter on the porch and watched the sun set and the stars come out. He’d brought his guitar up from the B&B and they would often spend the evening serenading Tall Guy and the goats. Occasionally Jake would perch in the nearest fir and look down at them like they were insane, which was a point he wasn’t going to argue. Insanely happy.

  Devin no longer went out and hit the bar with his crew. No formal dinners at his house or Rebecca’s, no social events that, in retrospect, had simply been what he was supposed to do. He’d never thought before about what he wanted to do. DR Builders was his, but after-hours his lifestyle had been dictated by default, not preference.

  The image of strolling through some small-town fair with Tiffany at his side…that wouldn’t be default. That would be his and hers.

  Your woods.

  You and Tiffany.

  He knew they were a couple. “An item.” He just wasn’t sure when it had happened because it had been the most natural thing in the world since that first moment. He’d arrived at a wedding and a nameless woman with amazing hair and an incredible smile had taken his hand to lead him through the crowd.

  Devin was smiling himself as he climbed back into his truck and headed for the airport. He didn’t know where the future lay, but the present was truly amazing.

  “Your mother is looking for you,” Tiffany’s lawyer said on the satellite phone.

  “Tell her no!” She felt sick to her stomach and was glad that Devin wasn’t here to see how weak she really was.

  “I already did.” But there was something in Joel Masterson’s voice that told her there was more.

  “Why is she looking for me?”

  “You recall that she does this every few years.”

  “Yes,” Tiffany did, now that she was getting through the initial panic. “Is there something different about this time?”

  “I don’t think so…” again that hesitation. Joel was a cutthroat legal shark, one of the reasons she had hired him. It wasn’t like him to avoid an issue.

  “Joel?”

  He sighed. “Ms. Mills. You and I go back well over a decade.”

  Joel had made his reputation in putting her prominent stepfather behind bars for abusing his teenage stepchild. That one case had led him to be a leading champion of individual women’s rights—a very successful one.

  “It isn’t my place, but have you considered speaking with your mother?”

  Tiffany could only manage a strangled sound.

  “Hear me out on this. You have escaped her. Run far, and by the sound of it, made good your choices.”

  Tiffany could only give him silence, but she was listening and he eventually continued.

  “I will support whatever decision you make, Ms. Mills. But even your reaction now tells me that you are still running from her. That is not a life, Ms. Mills.”

  After another stretch of silence, he read off a cell phone number, which she dutifully wrote down.

  “I apologize if I have crossed some line, Ms. Mills.”

  “No,” she managed. “I don’t think so. I just don’t know if I’m brave enough to do this.”

  “If I may say, Tiffany?” It was the first time she could recall that he’d used her first name in all the years. “Your bravery is not in question here. Neither in confronting your stepfather in court, nor in choosing your own life, nor in building and running a farm yourself. None of those are the actions of the meek. I can only hope that someday you meet a man your age rather than mine who can see and appreciate that.”

  She thought about that a long time. “Maybe I already have, Joel.”

  “That, Ms. Mills, is the best news you have ever given me. As always, please call if I may be of any assistance.” And he was gone.

  “You want me to bale hay?” Devin tried not to feel too surprised. “I’ve never run a baler before.”

  “You’ll learn,” Peggy led him over the mown fields filled with the cut, dried hay neatly piled in long rows. One whole side of the airport had been in hay. They then crossed over a fence heading toward Becky’s big, hip roof barn-turned-brewery. It glared blindingly white in the well-risen sun.

  “Isn’t it early?” Though the cut hay on the ground looked dry and rustled when he stepped on it.

  “Wet winter, warm spring, and a drier than normal April. It’s mature enough,” she kicked at a windrow as they stepped over it. “I’d like to have let it grow another few weeks, but I don’t trust Jessica.”

  “You don’t trust her…to do what?” Devin couldn’t imagine how not trusting a pregnant woman led to an early haying season.

  “Her festival,” Peggy raised a big bar on the front of the barn’s massive main door.

  “Flameagle Days. Gina mentioned that. What about it? What is a flameagle anyway?”

  “My part of the festival is a fly-in. Pilots of small planes are always looking for a place to meet up. An event.”

  “Like a gathering of the Scottish clans. The Highland Games of flying?”

  “Right. And Jessica is too good at her job. I expect the airport to get parked out and I’ll have to overflow into this field. But I’m not willing to sacrifice the hay to her festival, so we have to take it in early.”

  Together they dragged the big doors aside and revealed a whole collection of strange machinery.

  The barn itself had been partly converted to Becky’s immaculate brewery, cordoned off behind wood-and-glass walls on this side just as it had been between her living area and the tasting room on the other side of the building. But part of it was still pure barn, with straw scattered on the packed-dirt floor and some elaborate examples of the steel fabricator’s art into forms he couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  “Hay mower,” Peggy rapped one as they passed by. “Hay rake for turning the drying hay and then gathering it into windrows,” she pointed to another.

  “Uh-huh,” he did his best to make it sound as if he knew how these things worked, rather than wondering what medieval dungeon these torture devices had been stolen from.

  “Blueberry picker.”

  That stopped him. “Blueberry picker?”

  At a window, she pointed across the airfield that stretched alongside Becky’s hay fields. On the far side of the airstrip was a vast field of white blossoms.

  “Those are blueberry bushes?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And this machine picks them?” It looked more as if it was designed to eat unwary cows, or maybe small elephants.

  “Whatever the U-pickers don’t harvest.”

  “Uh-huh.” He tried to puzzle out how it could possibly do that when he was distracted by the last machine in the barn. It was bizarre enough for him to stop wondering why Gina had sent him to Peggy, who in turn was having Devin drive Becky’s equipment to bale hay. Maybe that was just how small towns worked.

  “Here it is.”

  He’d never driven a farm tractor, but that looked enough like other construction machinery that it didn’t worry him
.

  The John Deere tractor was bright green. He supposed it was a little one, especially compared to the giants he’d seen at work out on the Great Plains as he drove through, but it was still a big machine.

  But the contraption attached to the back of the tractor in Becky’s barn was alarming. It was a strange, off-center device on two wheels. It had about a thousand, foot-long tines sticking out of a central drum. They must sweep the hay up and then do mysterious things with it inside the rest of the blocky machine.

  Peggy led him back, pointing out how to restock bailing twine and where the bales were ejected. Ejected was the right word. The last item in the Rube Goldberg train of equipment was a big cart with wood slat sides. It had definitely been used hard.

  “The baler will loft the finished bale into the cart, so don’t turn too sharply at the end of the row or it may loft it over the side.”

  “Don’t you have a floor I can sweep instead?”

  “I was going to do this myself,” Peggy grinned at him. “But Jessica is relentless. She may be as big as a hay bale herself, but she knows her marketing. I have a half-dozen flights booked already today and the festival is still four days off. I need this field clear by then.” She clapped him hard on the shoulder. “Good luck!”

  And she left him. He could tell by her saunter on her way back over the fields to the airport that she was really enjoying leaving him to figure this all out himself. Well, he wasn’t scared by the challenge. He was going to take it head-on. After all, he was a Grader Master.

  Then he turned to look at the controls and felt much less comfortable with that decision.

  “I don’t even know how to…” And he stopped himself.

  Some forever time ago he’d said those same words to Tiffany back before he earned his Grader Mastership. He’d hated that machine at first, but now it would always have a soft place in his heart. It was the first place he’d ever kissed her—an event that might not be changing his life, but it had certainly changed his summer.

  Actually. His life was changing too, he just wasn’t sure how.

  “Okay,” he told the tractor. “You don’t scare me,” which was only half a lie. On both counts: tractor and mysteriously changing life.

  I think, he could almost imagine Tiffany standing beside him, you should teach me how to use this.

  He’d pretend that she was talking about the tractor and not the life.

  And so he did. He went over each control and explained it aloud until he was sure that he understood it. When he was done, he started the tractor and put on his sunglasses before pulling out of the barn.

  Then he let out the clutch.

  The tractor jolted backward, which shoved against the baler, turning it cockeyed as it jammed against the catcher cart. Then he stalled the engine in his attempt to recover.

  He was glad that Tiffany wasn’t there to see him; she’d be laughing herself to death in that merry way of hers.

  Then Devin turned and saw that someone else was. Inside the brewery, Becky was standing at the window as if she’d been watching him a long time. Though he couldn’t hear her, it was easy to see that she was howling with laughter.

  Devin turned away, restarted the tractor, and eased forward out of the barn.

  Tiffany stood at the edge of the field and watched Devin baling hay. He looked as if he’d done it forever. He sat just slightly sideways in the seat, often casting an eye back to make sure everything was in order. Every twenty seconds, the baler lofted a fifty-pound cube of hay high into the air where it tumbled into the cart being towed behind. Everything was as it should be, except the madness in her head.

  Three years ago she had learned to enjoy the long walks to town as a time of peace and quiet in her day. For the first time, she had been in such a hurry to find Devin that she had come down the back logging road from her property, cutting the four-mile walk to two, and still she was a little breathless from how fast she’d traveled.

  But watching Devin, suddenly her world was at peace again. Everything was where it should be.

  Almost everything.

  He spotted her, though she had stayed in the shade of the trees at the far end of the field. With a wave, he called her to him and her feet were in motion before she had a chance to decide. The tractor was moving so slowly that it was easy to time her steps. She arrived at the end of a windrow at the same moment as the tractor, grabbed a handrail, and stepped up the short ladder without Devin having to even slow the machine.

  “Hi!” He kissed her quickly, then turned to check on his progress. “Aren’t you early for knitting?”

  Tuesday. She’d completely forgotten it was Tuesday. A glance skyward showed that it was still morning, but it would be a long day by the time she walked home to fetch her knitting and walk all the way back.

  Then he turned from his baling to look at her once more. His smile faded as he squinted at her face a moment. Without saying anything else, he stopped the tractor and cycled down the machinery. She could hear him talking to himself as he did it. “Once we stop, we shift into neutral. Ease the engine down to idle. Now, disconnect the PTO to stop the baler…”

  Just like the road grader. It was charming to think that in a way she had been with him all morning even though they had been in separate places. But it didn’t make her feel any better about the phone call.

  When finally everything was shut off and the only sounds were soft birdcall and the distant roar of Peggy’s Stearman 4 biplane soaring high above, Devin pulled her into his lap.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Did I—” No. With Devin she didn’t need to say when something was wrong. He would simply know. “I—” but she wasn’t having any better luck without the “did.”

  Jake swooped close by the tractor and landed fast in the field less than a dozen feet away. A moment later he was back aloft with a vole or something in his claws. At least she was fairly sure it was Jake, but he’d finished his molt and now looked like any other bald eagle—huge and dangerous.

  “Way to go, Jake,” Devin whispered. He’d come a long way from diving out of the road grader in panic when an eagle flew by.

  “Do you love me?” She blurted it out. “Sorry, that’s not at all the question I rehearsed all the way here. That was unfair of me to—”

  “Yes.”

  She stopped and looked at him. “Yes? Just yes?”

  “Just yes,” he nodded. “Like you just said, not the answer I expected to give at all. But it’s the one that came out.”

  Then he grimaced and she feared he was regretting it already.

  “Not exactly the most romantic way to say it. Sorry. I’ll have to work on that before we get anywhere near to a proposal,” he grimaced again. “And I did not just say that either. I—”

  She kissed him and then burst into giggles that were really unbecoming on a woman who had just been told she was loved by someone who meant it.

  Once they had both calmed down, she tried again.

  “I have to do something awful.”

  “Why doesn’t this sound good?”

  “Because I just told you it will be awful.”

  “Okay,” Devin kept his hands tight about her waist. “Would you care to define ‘it’ or should I start guessing? You have to cut your hair—which I should warn you would make me weep. You have amazing hair.” He began toying with an end of it.

  She shook her head and then had to dig a handful of it aside so that she could see him. Before she could speak, he continued.

  “You have decided to give up the harp in favor of the harpsichord and you will make me follow you about the world carrying it on my back from one concert to the next.”

  Tiffany laid a hand over his mouth to stop him, but could feel his smile against her palm.

  “I think I have to call my mother.”

  And she could feel the smile go away.

  Devin felt as if he’d just stepped onto hot coals. One false move and the Tiffany-who-ran just might reemerge
. Then he took some hope in that she’d come to him.

  “You’ve been very careful to never mention her.”

  “You told me not to think about my past, so I haven’t. Or very little.”

  He decided it wasn’t simplicity that made her speak this way sometimes, nor was it some complex set of defense mechanisms. Devin thought back to a few nights before when they had been lying together in bed, watching the light of the moon that shone through the yurt’s clear dome slowly sweep across the room.

  “It’s like a celestial searchlight,” Tiffany had whispered in awe.

  It had reminded him of the searchlights at the party for CMC’s latest skyscraper. They had lit up the sky in celebration. Reds, blues, and golds of the CMC logo sweeping over the eighty stories of modernist glass and steel. The DR Builders’ colors would not translate so well, a pale blue and a—

  “Pudding!” Tiffany had exclaimed from beside him.

  “What?”

  “I just remembered that we have some chocolate pudding. Do you want some?” And already she was up and walking naked through the patch of moonlight, lit up like a magical elf.

  “What were you thinking about?” He’d been trying to understand how she got from moon to pudding.

  “When?” She opened the refrigerator and the white glow turned her skin from shadowed bronze to blinding alabaster.

  “Before the pudding.”

  “I was thinking about the moonlight.”

  “What about it?”

  “Nothing. I was just watching the light.”

  And now, sitting on the tractor with Tiffany in his lap, he finally understood. Her mind wasn’t simple, it was just a much more peaceful place than his. She had been thinking about the moonlight and then she had thought of pudding.

  He’d told her not to think about the past, and he’d wager that, for the most part, she hadn’t.

  Whereas he was still replaying Rebecca’s phone call in his mind. Which in turn made him wonder how long she’d kept talking after the phone sank. Also how deep the phone had sunk before it shorted out. Or had some component been crushed first by the increasing pressure as it went deeper. And—

  “Pudding,” he said to her.