Love Letters from Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Because Frank hardly ever volunteered information, Lindsay was surprised—and interested. So were the other ladies, who looked up from their work to listen. “Oh?” she said, wanting to encourage him.

  With infinite care, millimeter by millimeter, Frank traced a dark line beneath the roofline of his barn. “I met my wife in 1962,” he said. “She was a singer—I mean a real one, traveled all around. She was even on the road with Patsy Cline for a while.”

  Lindsay sat on the edge of the table, fascinated. “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “No reason you should.” Frank continued his meticulous work on the barn roof. “She was real talented, my wife. Who knows what she might have been if she hadn’t met me?”

  Frank took a sable brush and gently, ever so gently, blended the line he had drawn into a shadow. “There ain’t much call for singers in a little place like this, outside of church and all, and I worried that she’d be sorry to trade the life she’d had for raising a family. She never let on to me if she did, and over the years I just kind of let it go by.”

  He wiped his brush with a paper towel, dipped it in turpentine, and wiped it again, carefully cleaning each bristle. “She was always doing something with her hands, beautiful things, you know, embroidery and rug hooking and crochet. Her quilts won prizes at every county fair. She made all the kids’ clothes, and hers and mine, too, long after we could afford to buy them off the rack. Now and again one of the town women would come up to her and say wouldn’t she make a dress for them and she’d say no, her sewing was just for her pleasure.

  “Well, it shames me to say it, but as time went on, I started to wish maybe she’d spent a little less time making pretty work with a needle and a little more time with me, you know, doing the things I liked to do. I mean, I could see the value in making clothes, but all those little do-dads and framed pieces and fancy pillow slips and whatnot, I just didn’t have much use for them, to tell you the truth. So by and by, I just up and asked her why she spent so much time on that foolishness, anyhow, and you know what she said to me? She said, ‘Well, now, Frank, there’s all kinds of art. Singing is one kind of art, and painting is another kind, and that carpentry you like to do so much, that’s another. I guess I’m never going to be a famous singer like Patsy Cline,’ she says to me, ‘but sewing is how I keep my voice alive.”

  Not a paintbrush moved in the room. Frank inspected the brush he had just cleaned, found it satisfactory and carefully placed it in the felt liner of his wooden paintbox.

  “After she passed,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time watching the TV, especially late at night, you know, when a body has trouble sleeping. There was this painter on one time, you probably know him. The one that does all those stone cottages with yellow lights?”

  “Thomas Kinkade?” Lindsay supplied.

  “That’s the one. I heard him say he puts his wife’s initial into every painting, like a secret code only she would know about. And I thought that was nice. And I thought about all the different kinds of art, and about then is when I decided I’d learn how to paint. So now I put Wilma’s initial in everything I paint—sometimes in a tree trunk, or a blade of grass, or a shadow on the road-as kind of a secret code between her and me. To keep her voice alive.”

  “That’s beautiful, Frank,” Lindsay said softly. She touched his shoulder, smiled, and stood up.

  When the class was brought to a close, Lindsay instructed everyone to sign his or her work, and supervised the cleanup. Frank meticulously cleaned each brush until no trace of pigment remained, just as he always did, rubbed down his wooden palette with linseed oil, just as he always did, and said, “A man is only as good as his tools,” just as he always did. He did not say another word about birds or ladies.

  “Still waters run deep,” Miriam murmured to her at the door, watching Frank get into his pickup truck and crank the engine. “Whoever knew old Frank had anything to say?”

  “We all have something to say” Lindsay replied. She smiled at the other woman. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  She was straightening up the tables and putting away the supplies when she heard a light rapping against the frame of the open door. She turned and smiled to see Dominic standing there. “Hi, Dominic. What’s up?”

  “I hope I’m not bothering you. I couldn’t tell if you had any students or not.”

  “They just left. Come on in.”

  He looked down at his boots. “I don’t want to get the place dirty.”

  Lindsay laughed. “Take a look around. You can’t do much more damage than I have already.”

  Dominic was a nice-looking man with golden tan skin and sun-weathered gray eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was worn long, grazing his collar, his hairline just high enough to make his face interesting. He was only an inch or so taller than Lindsay, and slightly built, but when he rolled up his sleeves, as today, the ropy muscles of his arms told a story about a life of physical labor.

  “I stopped by the house,” he said, “but it looked like they were pretty busy up there.”

  Lindsay shrugged. “We’re pretty busy everywhere.” And she explained, “We’re having a wedding here.”

  “Oh?” He looked surprised and, oddly a little anxious. “One of you ladies getting married?”

  Again Lindsay chuckled, dumping her paintbrushes into a cup of mineral spirits in the utility sink. “Hardly. We’re thinking about going into the wedding business, and this is our first one.”

  He shook his head in slow admiration. “You ladies sure do keep yourselves busy.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  He gazed around the room, smiling at the four identical paintings of red water pumps—some more identical than others—but mostly interested in the larger canvases that were drying on the long walls. Noah’s paintings hung intermixed with Lindsay’s—studies of hands, which were difficult for any artist and which he clearly had not yet quite mastered, some wild impressionistic renderings of animal eyes in the dark, some architectural studies, and a whole series of monarch butterfly wings. Dominic studied them for a time.

  “Are these Noah’s?” Lindsay nodded. “He’s a talented kid.” He turned. “Did I hear someone say that his grandmother was Emmy Hodge? I knew her, you know.” And he gave a slightly self-deprecating grin. “Had a huge crush on her when I was Noah’s age, the whole glamorous older woman thing and all. She was only here for a summer, but that was long enough to set me to dreaming about going to Paris and becoming a famous artist so that she would fall madly in love with me.”

  Lindsay gave a wide, delighted smile. “Is that right?”

  “Of course, by the next summer I was in love with Kathy Willis and wouldn’t have recognized Emmy Hodge on the street. Good thing, too, because I still can’t paint the side of a barn.”

  Lindsay chuckled again. “Me either, to tell the truth. Which is why I don’t teach barn-painting.”

  “I’m not clear how Noah ended up here. Did one of you know his folks?”

  “Actually no.” Lindsay swished each brush back and forth in the mineral spirits, cleaned off the excess liquid with a paper towel, and set the brush, bristle side up, in a stand to dry. “We thought his parents were dead—so did he. His mother left him to be raised by his grandmother, and when she died his father took him and moved out of state, which is how she lost track of him. I had actually looked into adopting him last year, and that’s how his mother finally found out where he was. Apparently she’d had a pretty rough time of it during the early years, but she’s back on track now, working as a counselor for troubled teens in Richmond. The tragedy is that not long before she found Noah, she discovered she has terminal cancer. When she realized how well Noah was doing with us, she decided it wouldn’t be fair to burden him with her last few months of life. She asked us, actually, not to even tell Noah she was alive, but Ida Mae knew his grandmother, too.” She gave a small, resigned smile.

  “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? At least
he got a chance to know his mother before she died.”

  Lindsay shook her head sadly. “She made us promise not to tell him she was sick. And once he found out she was alive ... he didn’t want to see her. We’ve done everything we could to encourage him, without breaking our word. And she still thinks the kindest thing she can do is to stay away from him. So our hands are really tied.”

  He shook his head sadly. “That’s a difficult situation. I have to admire you all for taking it on.”

  She finished with the brushes and turned, wiping her hands. “He’s one of the family” she replied simply.

  She liked the way he smiled at her, and when he turned back to look at the paintings she was flattered, and a little nervous, to notice that it was her work he seemed to focus on. And he studied the canvases as though he were in a museum.

  “This is great,” he said, without turning from his appraisal of a large oil painting of a cardinal in the snow. “The way the bird takes up the whole canvas, and the trees are so small in the distance ... it makes you think about perspective, doesn’t it?”

  Lindsay was pleased. “That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do! Well, that, and make you smile.”

  He turned, smiling. “It does that, too.”

  Lindsay began gathering up the plastic trash bags that were attached to each easel. Because the paint and turpentine-soaked paper towels that the students used in every class were highly odiferous—not to mention flammable—she knotted each bag before stuffing it into the larger one she carried. Dominic fell easily into step beside her, knotting and handing her the bags from each easel.

  “These aren’t bad,” he said. “You must be a good teacher.”

  “You need to take a class,” she invited him. “As it happens, I have an opening or two.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’ve got a few talents, but, like I said, painting is not one of them.”

  She smiled. “You might be surprised. The things we do in class are more like paint by number than fine art, and, frankly, talent is far down the list of course requirements.”

  “It must be hard for you,” he said, with unexpected perception, “to go from those”—he nodded to the painting of the cardinal—“to paint by number.”

  She chuckled and took her trash bag to the door. “Some people would say there’s not that much difference.”

  “I wouldn’t be one of them.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.” She smiled at him for a moment, then looked away, a little embarrassed.

  She took an oversized bottle of baby oil from a shelf over the sink and poured a measure into her paint-smeared hands. “It breaks down the pigment,” she explained to Dominic as she worked the oil into her hands, “and it’s a lot easier on skin than mineral spirits. Smells better, too.”

  He smiled at her. “I’ll have to remember that.” Then, “What’s first on the list?”

  “Of what?”

  “Class requirements.”

  Lindsay wiped her hands with a paper towel, cleaning the paint from around her nails as she thought about that. “Oh, I don’t know. A willingness to try, I suppose. A sense of fun. Yes,” she decided, “that’s it. The people who come to my class don’t want to be artists,” she explained. “They already are whatever it is they want to be. For them, painting is a way to pass the time, to learn something new, and, maybe, to explore a different kind of self-expression. I promise them they’ll go home with a painting and a sense of pride in what they’ve done, and all I ask from them is that they have fun.”

  “Well, in that case,” he said, with a small considering tilt of his head, “maybe I will sign up.”

  Lindsay smiled and tossed the paper towel into the trash bag. “Well, you’re welcome any time—although exactly when you have time to do anything other than eat and sleep I can’t imagine. Between your full-time job and working over here for free every spare minute you have, when do you have time for a life?”

  He gestured easily toward the vineyard beyond the open door. “This isn’t work. This is like coming home. This is my life.”

  A breeze from the open door tugged a strand of hair across Lindsay’s cheek and she brushed it away with the back of her hand. “That’s right. I forget sometimes that you probably know more about this place than we do. I’d love to hear more about what it was like when you were a boy here.”

  He smiled. “I’d love to tell you.”

  And then he startled her by stepping close to her, and lifting his thumb to her cheek, wiping it gently. Surprise must have flared in her eyes, because he looked embarrassed as he explained with a small gesture, “You had a little paint...”

  “Oh.” Lindsay touched her cheek, and laughed. “Can’t imagine how that happened.” She turned to take a paper towel from the work counter and wiped her hands, then, for good measure, her face again. “We should have you over one night for dinner. I know everyone would love to hear your stories.” And then she added, with a cautionary lift of her finger. “After the wedding, of course.”

  He smiled. “After the wedding,” he assured her. He hesitated, and then seemed to come to some decision. “Actually,” he began, “I was thinking—”

  “Lindsay are you there?”

  Cici caught the doorframe with her hand as she swung by. The look of disappointment on Dominic’s face was gone in an instant, and his customary easy smile was back in place as he turned to greet Cici.

  “Oh, hi, Dominic,” Cici said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I stopped at the back door but you were on the phone,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you the ground is dry enough to work so we should probably get the vines fertilized by the weekend.”

  “Not this weekend!” Cici and Lindsay said together, and Cici explained, “We’ve got some people coming out Saturday.”

  “The wedding thing,” Lindsay added, tossing the paper towel into the trash.

  He scratched his head thoughtfully. “We shouldn’t put it off much longer. If you don’t mind working Sunday, I could come out after church and help you out.”

  “That would be terrific,” Lindsay said gratefully.

  “Thanks, Dominic,” Cici added. “And plan to stay for supper, okay?”

  Dominic glanced at Lindsay. “That would be real nice. Thank you.”

  He lifted a friendly hand to Cici, and then paused to nod to Lindsay before resuming his stride toward his pickup.

  Cici watched him go with an appreciative smile. “Now there,” she declared, “is one of the good ones.”

  “No doubt about it,” Lindsay agreed, but her expression was a little distracted. “Do you think he ... ?”

  She broke off, and Cici turned to her curiously. “What?”

  Lindsay gave an impatient shake of her head. “Nothing. I probably imagined it, that’s all. What do you need?”

  “Oh.” Cici straightened up, the customary harried and unhappy expression of the past week returning to her face. “Photographs,” she said. “You know, for Catherine’s brochure?”

  Lindsay rolled her eyes.

  “Now she’s decided to hire a graphic designer, and she wants me to e-mail her pictures of the house and garden, along with a list of nearby hotels with prices and directions...”

  Lindsay choked on a laugh. “Hotels?” she repeated. “Plural? And nearby?”

  Cici shrugged, even as she tried not to grin. “I said I’d do my best,” she said. “Anyway she wants us to send the photos, the hotel info, and a brief history and description of the house and gardens...”

  Lindsay gave a long-suffering sigh and hoisted the trash bag. “I don’t suppose she gave you any idea of what, exactly, she wanted photographed.”

  “As a matter of fact I have a list.” Cici dug into her back pocket.

  And that was when they heard Bridget scream.

  What the Misses North-Dere did not understand was that Ladybug Farm was a working farm, with at least a hundred tasks that demanded the attention of its proprietresse
s every day. Those tasks were far more urgent than whether or not sugared almonds or monogrammed chocolates were served with the coffee. And furthermore, with every e-mail, every phone call, and every menu change, the “heavy hors d‘oeuvres” that were initially discussed were morphing into something very closely resembling a sit-down dinner. Who cared what kind of candy was served with the coffee when all you were offering was hors d’oeuvres?

  Those were the kind of fuming thoughts that were occupying Bridget’s mind as she came down the back steps with a laundry basket filled with damp sheets and tablecloths to be hung on the line. One of the few points on which she had finally come to agree with Ida Mae was that the sun was far superior to electricity when it came to drying and freshening whites, and laundry was only one of those hundreds of things that, right now, were more important to Bridget than the menu crisis at someone else’s wedding.

  She eased the screen door closed with her hip, came down the brick steps with the plastic basket of laundry balanced before her, and noticed in dismay that something had made a shambles of the pretty little pansy bed at the bottom of the steps. Then she noticed the rest.

  The white sheets and lace tablecloths that she had hung earlier were strewn on the ground or hanging by one pin on the line. Dirty paw prints and grass stains smeared the fabric, and one of the tablecloths was torn right down the middle. For a moment she was too shocked to do anything but stare, but her breath came back to her in a rush and she exclaimed furiously, “Rebel! You bad dog! You bad, bad dog!”

  Rebel was, of course, nowhere to be seen.

  She marched over to the scene of the disaster, plopped the basket of clean laundry onto the ground, and started snatching up the ruined linens.

  It was then that she noticed that the dirty smears on the fabric weren’t exactly paw prints. They were more like ... hoofprints. Bambi? She started to straighten up, squinting in the sun, looking around for the deer, and then she felt something brush the back of her knees. She whirled around, full of invectives for the deer, and found herself staring, not into a pair of big brown eyes as she had expected, but into a pair of narrow yellow ones. She gasped and stumbled backward. The creature lunged at her. That was when she screamed.