Lonely Souls

by Rosemary Fifield

  “Then he’ll get away with it.”

  “They still have Dawson’s testimony about what he saw.”

  Shelby pressed closer to Shane and let him envelope her with his protective strength. His touch had not repelled her, as she had feared it might, and being in his arms again actually felt good. She rested her head against his shoulder and took in his familiar smell. “That’s not enough. Blake can say he didn’t do any of it. That Dawson didn’t witness … enough.”

  She was trembling now and getting sick to her stomach again. Shane stepped back and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Hey. Look at it this way. You can’t see the guy who’s asking the questions. Just pretend he’s not there. He’s on the phone, and he can’t see you. That this isn’t about you, it’s about a story you read or something. Disassociate. Treat it like Confession. Tell the story, get it off your soul, and move on.”

  “I’m not sure I can do it with you there.”

  “I can stay out.”

  “But I’m not sure I can do it without you.”

  Shane laughed. “You tell me what you want, and that’s what I’ll do.”

  Shelby tightened her grip on his waist and pressed against him once more. “Take me back two years, when we were just getting to know each other in Maine. That’s what I want.”

  “I wish I could, Shel,” he said sadly. “I wish I could.”

  Miriam took one look at Shelby when Shane returned her to the farm, and she knew the afternoon had not gone well. He carried Shelby in the front door and directly to her room, setting her on the bed and sitting beside her in the chair. He refused Miriam’s offer of something hot to drink for either of them, and she kept her distance from then on. She went out to the barn where Dawson was milking and warned him about the situation. The two of them ate a quiet dinner together and were just cleaning up when Shane emerged from Shelby’s room.

  “She’s asleep.” His pale eyes were red-rimmed and his face looked worn.

  “Is she okay?” Miriam asked.

  “I think she’ll be okay,” Shane said wearily. “It didn’t do her any good to have to go through it all again.”

  “Would you like something to eat? You must be starving. I have some veal stew I just made this afternoon.”

  “I would love some,” Shane said. He pulled out a chair at the table and rested his head on his hands while Miriam pulled the bowl of stew from the refrigerator and returned it to the pot to warm up. Dawson leaned against the sink, silently watching Shane.

  After setting a steaming bowl and spoon before Shane, Miriam sat down beside him and rested her hand on his forearm. “What can I do for her?”

  Shane shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what anyone can do.”

  “She can stay here as long as she needs to. I don’t see how she could return to that house. Certainly not to that room.”

  “We’re thinking of going back to Portland,” Shane said, pressing his fingers to his eyes. “I don’t think she’s going to get any better unless she gets away from this whole place.”

  Dawson pushed himself away from the sink and left the room, disappearing into the living room. Miriam ignored him, concentrating on the profile of the young man in front of her. “She was getting better here. She can do it again. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take her away to Portland, but I’m not sure that would really be best. Things can happen to a young woman in Portland, too, and are you going to be with her all the time?”

  Shane picked up the spoon and poked at the stew in the bowl before him. “We’ll get a housekeeper. Or a nurse, or something.”

  “Will you marry her?”

  Shane turned his head to look at her, and she could see the muscles in his jaw tense.

  “Because my Sonny would marry her,” Miriam said, staring him in the eyes. “He loves her. He wants to take care of her.”

  “I love her too. But, no, I won’t marry her. She wouldn’t want me to marry her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m gay, Mrs. Penfield. I’m homosexual.” Shane kept his cold blue eyes on her. “I love her like a brother. Like a best friend. But not like a husband.”

  Miriam stared at him in astonishment.

  Shane turned to eat the stew without any further comment.

  “Then she definitely needs to stay here,” Miriam said finally. “One way or another, there is no reason for her to leave.”

  “That’s not up to me.” Shane set the spoon in the empty bowl. “Thank you. That was wonderful.” He wiped his mouth on the napkin she had provided, then turned to face her once more. “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for her. I apologize for any time when I was rude. You’ve done an extraordinary thing, taking her in like this. You certainly didn’t need to. And I want to make sure we pay for whatever it cost, plus your time.”

  “This isn’t about money, Mr. Freeman,” Miriam answered. “I won’t take any money.”

  “I know it’s not about money. But it costs money.”

  “She eats like a bird. No, Mr. Freeman, there will be no money exchanged here. Shelby is my guest.” Miriam rose from her chair and took the bowl and spoon from in front of him. “I will call you in the morning if she’s not better.”

  Shane rose to his feet. “Thank you again. For everything. Good night.”

  Dawson had gone out the front door and was leaning on Shane’s car when the latter came out of the house. He rose to his full height as Shane approached and kept his eyes on Shane’s. “Why are you taking her to Portland?”

  Shane stood face to face with him. “It’s not my idea. It’s hers.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “She thinks if we go back to Portland, everything will go back to the way it was.”

  “Will it?”

  Shane shook his head. “No. It can’t. I think she will end up moving to Boston to live with her parents.”

  Dawson stared at him. “Then don’t do it.”

  Shane returned his unflinching gaze. “it’s not that simple, Penfield. She thinks it’s what I want, and I can’t seem to convince her otherwise.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to continue with the school. I think it’s going to work. I have three students lined up, which is exactly what I was hoping for.”

  “So you want to stay here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then refuse to go.”

  Shane brushed past him to open his car door, then turned back to train his pale blue eyes on Dawson one more time. “If you want her to stay, you need to make it happen. If she insists on leaving, I will take her.”

  Dawson woke at four-thirty a.m. as was his custom and descended the stairs to the narrow door that opened out into the kitchen. The house was quiet; his mother would sleep until five-thirty or six.

  The night before, when he had come into the house after speaking with Shane, Miriam was sitting beside Shelby’s bed where Shelby lay tightly curled into the fetal position. He worried that she had reverted to her former mental state, and so now he moved quietly to the door of her room and glanced in. She was lying on her side but was no longer curled protectively around herself, and he took that as a hopeful sign.

  He used the bathroom, then went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee before heading out to the barn to begin the day’s chores. The cloudless sky would be lightening in another hour and the weather radio was predicting an unseasonably warm day. Much of the snow had melted in the pastures facing south and west, but before he could turn out the cows, he needed to mend fences that had been neglected during the months preceding his father’s death. Today would be the perfect day.

  The continuous line of buildings comprising the ell allowed him to reach the barn from the house without having to go outdoors. Unlike Dayton’s where the outbuildings continued in a straight line off the gable end of the house, this ell ran at a right angle to the house, coming off the back corner closest to the driveway and traveling perpendicular to the ridgepole of
the house. The old one-and-a-half story English-style barn with its simple lines continued on the same axis, with all the ell and barn doors facing east while the length of the front of the house faced south.

  The barn currently housed sixteen milking cows plus four cows waiting to freshen and half a dozen that Dawson had dried off so they could be bred again. The majority were Jerseys, with a couple of Ayrshires mixed in. His dad had never wanted the big Holsteins, and so they had stayed with the smaller cows who had a lower yield but higher butterfat in their milk. He moved among them now as they stood in their stanchions, talking to them as he shoveled out their manure and tossed fresh sawdust in beneath them. They placidly watched him with their huge, heavily lashed brown eyes as he filled the feed troughs with corn silage he and Nate had chopped the summer before, then proceeded to set up his two portable milking machines. He attached the machines to the vacuum line that ran the length of the barn to carry the fresh milk to the refrigerated holding tank in the milk room; then, one by one, he cleaned and disinfected the teats on each cow, connected her to a machine, and turned on the vacuum. He milked every day, twice a day, at five-thirty a.m. and five-thirty p.m.

  When he returned to the house, his ma was cooking a breakfast of sausage and eggs. He washed up in the bathroom, then went into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with the morning newspaper he had retrieved from the box at the end of the driveway.

  “Shelby’s up,” his ma said quietly.

  Dawson flipped through the first section of the paper. “How’s she doing?”

  “Hard to say. She’s always quiet in the morning.” She carried the pan of sausages to the table and set it down before him. “Are you going to talk to her?”

  “About what?”

  “About staying.”

  Dawson kept his eyes on the article he was trying to read. “She’s not going to care what I say.”

  “If you don’t try, she’s going to leave.”

  He set down the paper and looked up at his mother’s worried face. “Ma, she’s going to leave no matter what.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to lose by trying.”

  Dawson sighed. “You’ve got a better chance than I do at getting her to stay.”

  Miriam went back to the stove and returned with the pan of scrambled eggs. “You know, that Shane is just going to get her a nurse or something. He’s not going to stay with her.”

  “He told me he thinks she’ll go back to her parents.”

  “And then she’ll become an invalid for sure.” Miriam sat down beside him and rested her hand on his as she looked into his face. “She needs someone to make her see she has something to live for. You’re the only one who can do that, Sonny.”

  “Ma, she doesn’t even want me near her!”

  “I watched her face when you were reading to us the other night. She was enjoying it.”

  “I could have been one of her audio books, Ma. It didn’t matter that it was me.”

  “Well, then, like I said, if things are that bad anyway, what have you got to lose by trying?”

  Dawson pressed his lips together in irritation and reached for the pan of sausages.

  Shelby entered the kitchen from the living room door on the opposite end of the room and worked her way along the countertops on the periphery of the large room until she reached the end closest to the kitchen table. She was completely dressed and her hair was still wet from the shower. “Good morning,” she said quietly.

  “Good morning,” Miriam smiled at her, even though the girl could not see. “We’re having sausage and scrambled eggs. Would you like to join us?”

  “Just eggs, please.”

  Miriam pulled out the chair on the end of the table and Shelby followed the sound, reaching out to find it and settling at the table across from Dawson.

  “Good morning,” he said, keeping a close watch on her face.

  Shelby managed a small smile as she said, “Good morning, Dawson.”

  Miriam slid a cup of coffee into Shelby’s hands. “The weatherman says it’s going to be in the fifties today. That’s unusual for March.”

  “Will that be good for sugaring or bad?” Shelby asked.

  Miriam’s eyes met Dawson’s, and she raised her eyebrows as she smiled at him. Neither of them had expected Shelby to be even remotely interactive today, and she was surprising them both.

  “For today, it will be good,” Dawson answered. “The sap should run like crazy. But if it doesn’t get cold enough tonight, or if the warm lasts too many days, it could be bad. The buds could start to come out.”

  Shelby nodded as Miriam slid a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of her and handed her a spoon. Shelby used the toast to push the eggs onto the spoon and the three of them ate in silence. When Dawson finished, he rose from the table to get the coffee pot and poured refills all around, then settled back into his chair.

  “I’m going to be working outside today,” he said, keeping his eyes on her. “Mending fences. I could use some help. Does that interest you, Shelby?”

  Her head came up and a frown formed on her face. “How could I be any help? I can’t see what needs to be done.”

  “I need someone to pull the fencing tight around the post while I hammer in the staples. You’re plenty strong.”

  Shelby’s frown increased. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? I could use the help.”

  “I don’t think I’d be much help.”`

  “Well, we won’t know unless you’re willing to give it a try.”

  Miriam pushed out her chair and proceeded to remove the frying pans from the table and put them into the sink, then went into the bathroom at the far end of the room and closed the door. Dawson and Shelby were alone in the kitchen.

  “Are you afraid to be out there with me?” Dawson asked quietly.

  “No.”

  “I would never hurt you, you know.”

  Shelby drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I know.”

  “Then please come out and help me. Plus I need your advice about something that I can’t talk about here.”

  A look of skepticism crossed Shelby’s face, and she leaned away from him ever so slightly as she said, “Why not?”

  Dawson glanced toward the closed bathroom door, then said softly, “Because she doesn’t know.”

  The tension in Shelby’s body relaxed a little, and her facial expression went from defensiveness to concern. “Cassie’s baby?”

  “Yes. Look, if you don’t want to try working on the fence, at least come outside for a few minutes. I’ll say I’m giving you a tour of the barn.”

  Shelby nodded resolutely. “Okay. Let me get my jacket.”

  She carried her plate, silverware, and coffee cup to the sink and then disappeared into her room. When she returned, she was wearing a warm sweater, knit gloves, and her Bean boots. Dawson smiled to himself as he fetched a down vest from a hook near the door and handed it to her. “It’s my sister’s, but I think it will fit you.”

  Shelby slipped it on. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “I have three sisters. They’re all older than me and married.”

  “That’s right, now I remember. Your mom said she had five kids. But she never mentioned them again. Do they live around here?”

  “Yeah, but they don’t come around much. Especially lately. Ready?”

  Shelby reached out her gloved hand, and Dawson offered her his arm to hold onto. She followed him out the door and into the summer kitchen. “Why not lately?”

  “They’re a little mad right now. About not getting more of the farm. Watch your step. The floor here slopes down a little.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My folks gave the farm to me. My sisters each got ten acres.”

  “What about … your brother?”

  “The same.”

  “So the whole farm is yours? The house and the barn and the cows?”

 
“And eighty acres.”

  “So … that must change everything for you. You’re going to farm it, right?”

  “Dairy. But it’s not going to support me for a while. I’ll still have to work off-farm until I can build the herd and modernize things.”

  Shelby nodded. “So where are we now?”

  “This is the summer kitchen. It’s not nice like the one at your house. This one has been used for storage for years. I just cleaned out most of the junk a few weeks ago, and there’s a lot of work to be done to bring it back. Stop here. We’re going to go outside through this door.”