Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  “And smell like a barn when I go to class every day?” Emily slammed down the can of soda she was guzzling.

  “I might remind you we put in a new shower. For you and Vic.”

  “And you? For Colm Hanna? I’ve seen how you jump in the shower before he comes to visit.” Emily gathered her books; she was headed for the college library, she told her mother before Ruth could respond to the latest innuendo. “And sometimes he needs a shower,” she shot back as she waltzed out the door with her soda and book bag.

  Ruth laughed. What else could she do? Then, feeling self-conscious, she headed for the shower. Colm was coming over, in fact. She hoped Emily would be gone before he arrived. For one thing, she wanted to talk to him about the belladonna crisis.

  * * * *

  Colm knew all about it, of course. Here he was in the usual outrageous garb: bright green corduroy pants he’d worn since St. Patrick’s Day, a cobalt-blue shirt, and mismatched socks: one higher than the other when he hiked up his pants to sit down at her kitchen table. He’d been showing land earlier in the day; he’d left his boots at the door. Was she supposed to thank him for that? Just now he’d come from his father’s mortuary, he said. The dead bodies wouldn’t care how he looked, but the real estate clients? She supposed they’d be amused by a down-to-earth Vermonter-Realtor-Cop.

  He told her the latest on what the police were calling the “deadly nightshade case.”

  “The boy’s parents are suing the college for a million bucks. They claim it was the college’s responsibility to look after him. Crazy, right? And Gwen Woodleaf may well be next. It may not be homicide—unless they can prove the kid was deliberately immersed in it—but the belladonna was on the Woodleaf property. Not just growing there, but cultivated, along with—wait’ll you hear this—a couple of marijuana plants. Of course, Gwen pleads she does it for the grandfather’s shakes. But jeez, it’s illegal, Ruth.” He reached for a doughnut while she sat back in her chair to weigh his words.

  “Well, I think it’s ignorant to show this whole world in black and white. I’ve seen the old man up at the bee farm. I went there once to buy honey—though she brings it for free now. He makes baskets, they’re really nice. Gwen says he got started when he had a heart attack and couldn’t do his autobody work. And he remembered how his own Abenaki grandparents used to make baskets—till galvanized pails came in in the thirties and they couldn’t sell baskets anymore. His hands do shake a little, but the marijuana helps. Gwen doesn’t grow it just to smoke it, for heaven sake!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, backing off. “What about the kids? Donna? What do you know about her habits?”

  “Oh, stop, Colm. You’re starting to moralize. It doesn’t become you.” Any more than that outfit he was wearing, she thought, and had to laugh. She could smell her own boots, for one thing. How hypocritical was she?

  He invited her outdoors for a walk then, through the pasture, where her cows were soaking up the sun. The mountains were crowned with white clouds; the sky was a sunny bath. She put her face up to it. Already she was getting lines in her skin; soon, the wrinkles would come. But who cared? She wasn’t going to carry around a parasol.

  She asked Colm what they could do to help Gwen and Donna. Herself, she was drawing a blank at this point. “I don’t for one minute believe that girl dragged the boy into the nightshade patch.”

  Colm shrugged. His hungry-looking face tilted up to hers. “Noble had a reputation for womanizing. He probably came on stronger than she wanted. But the girl had been drinking, too. Olen Ashley questioned the other guys at the fraternity, a couple of girls who went there. By all accounts. Donna was three sheets to the wind when she left with Noble.”

  “Olen Ashley told you that? He’s a friend of Gwen’s, you know. She told me.”

  “Then he might have to drop the case if Gwen—or the girl— gets charged. Or that hired guy, Leroy.”

  “You’d take over then, Colm. Promise me you would.”

  “I’m only a part-timer,” he said stubbornly, and changed the subject. They were walking past a patch of tall, coarse-looking plants. A white stick merely read the letter H. “That’s not hemp you’ve got growing there, Ruthie.” He pointed. “Tell me it’s not.”

  “It’s not,” she lied.

  “Tell that girl to hold her head up,” Russell was ranting on the phone from Buffalo, “never mind those fra-ter-ni-ty boys. He drew out the word to show his scorn. “I told you she should go to a state college like you did. She’d learn just as much there as in this hoi-ty-toi-ty school in Branbury.”

  Gwen could visualize Russell as he pushed his nose up with a finger and said “hoity-toity” in a mock British accent. Russell had never forgiven the British for defeating the French and Indians back in the eighteenth century. They wanted to own the aboriginal soul, Russell claimed.

  “Russ,” she said, not wanting to worry him away from home or tell him about the message Donna had found, “it will all work out. Donna’s working harder than ever at the books. She has an ally in the Willmarth girl. The only problem now is, well, the police have found the plants I’ve been growing for your dad. It was that Sergeant Hammer. She and another officer came back today with a dog.”

  “Tell the police to bug off. So what’ll they do to you? Throw you in the jug? If they do, I’ll come down, tell ‘em it’s my pot. It’s for my dad, after all. Stupid they don’t legitimize it, damn government.”

  Gwen laughed. “Just a fine, I think. Olen will help. He’ll be coming over to question Leroy.”

  She was sorry then that she’d said it. Russell was muttering something about Leroy being a fool after Donna; he didn’t like it. “He’s not right for the girl, he’s not good enough. Donna’s going to graduate college.”

  “Of course she is. She’ll do us proud. So tell me how it’s going out there in Buffalo. They have you running around in war paint?”

  Gwen let her husband wax on about how little they paid him for a long day’s work of dodging and running and shooting, about how fat the role-playing British general was, how little the other reenactors knew about Native Americans—other than the stereotypes: Indians drink, Indians steal. “Hey, they drop their mouths open when they hear me speak regular English. They think I should sound like Tonto. Ug, me go-um soon, um, Paddy’s Bar.” He laughed hugely at his imitation.

  It was the way Russell laughed aloud at the world that had drawn her to him: his Rabelaisian belly laugh that shook the room, shook the worries out of her own head.

  “I’m sure they’re astonished at how good-looking you are.” And he was good-looking: his coal black hair in a sleek ponytail, tied with bright feathers. She pictured him in his native regalia, in that British redcoat he told spectators he’d “stolen” from a dead officer. Russell was the one the tourists photographed over and over again.

  “When’re you coming home for a decent stay?” she asked.

  “After Saratoga.” His assignments read like a map of revolutionary battles.

  “Donna would like to see you. So would Brownie. Especially Brownie.”

  “I’ll be home for a bit next week. You tell them to keep the faith. Love ya, babe,” and he signed off before she could answer back.

  “Love you,” she whispered to the dead phone. She didn’t know why—she and Russell were as different as apples and oranges. But down inside she knew it was love.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a knock on the door. She went to it, thinking it was Olen, and she wanted to hear about the marijuana verdict. But she was surprised to see Harvey Ball with his three sons. Harvey now owned the land on both sides of the bee farm. He’d made money on investments, and he seemed to be quietly gobbling up land. She hadn’t even realized he’d bought the sixty-acre place to the south of her until she saw the truck arrive and the furniture being carted out of the house.

  “Harvey,” she said, “can I give you a cup of coffee? I have things to do this afternoon, but I’ve a few minutes now. Apple or grape juice?”
she offered the boys, who stood behind him in the doorway. She wondered why Tilden was home at mid-morning—no classes? The older one, Sidney, taller than his father but slighter than Tilden, was working the farm with his father. Ralphie, the Down’s syndrome boy, plodded right over to the refrigerator and poured himself a mug of apple juice.

  Harvey realized she was busy, he said, but he had something he wanted to run by her, a bit of business, a proposition. She didn’t like the sound of that word, “proposition”; she busied herself with coffee, slapped a cup into its flowered saucer. Sidney preferred coffee, too, he said, looking unhappy to be here with his father when he was obviously, his attitude said, perfectly capable of being on his own in adult company. Tilden refused anything at all. He sat on a kitchen chair looking uncomfortable. She smiled at him, but he glanced away, as though they had no relationship at all. She supposed Harvey had heard about the dead boy. A new issue of the local paper had come out yesterday afternoon, though she hadn’t read it yet. She didn’t want to, to tell the truth.

  He cleared his throat. He was a short stocky man, with a fringe of graying hair combed carefully forward over the balding head and a complexion ruddy and pocked from hours in the sun. Like some short men she knew, Harvey seemed to feel that he had to make himself highly visible; he had to take the initiative. He leaned toward her on sharp elbows. His gray-striped sleeves were rolled up tightly on his muscled upper arms. He got right to the point. “I read the papers,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear of your troubles. I’m sure it was just an ... accident?”

  She wasn’t going to answer that. He could think what he wanted. The question mark in his voice showed that he didn’t think it an accident. After all, the nightshade had been cultivated—by her. She gripped her coffee cup, shrugged, to show that she was concerned, yes, but not worried. Not worried about her own family being implicated.

  “Must be hard for that girl of yours.”

  This wasn’t a question. She nodded. “Hard, yes. She hardly knew that boy. But she’s coping. She has her studies at the college.”

  Harvey glanced at Tilden, who was staring into his hands. Harvey hadn’t gone to college. He’d been known to be highly vocal at town meetings about rising school taxes, the college not paying its share, what he considered “town takeover” by the college, et cetera, et cetera. Now, it seemed, he would live through his younger son—for the moment, Gwen thought. Only an hour ago Tilden had roared down the road past the beeyard with a noise that would outshriek ten lawn mowers. It scattered the bees.

  “Now Sidney wants to take over the farm and I’m glad of that. Too many kids wanting out of farming. It’s a damn shame. The old man works his nuts off—pardon my French—the kids quit on him.”

  She kept her eyes on him, sipped her coffee. She heard Sidney clear his throat, Tilden’s chair creak. Ralphie slurped his apple juice and wandered in to look at Mert’s baskets. “Pretty, pretty,” she heard him say.

  She hoped she could get the Balls out of the house in ten minutes—Leroy was waiting in the barn. Leroy had nothing good to say about the family, with whom he’d had a few run-ins. When Tilden came down to do chores or plead with Donna for help—and she had helped him in high school but had no time for it now, in college—Leroy went out of his way to antagonize.

  “I want the best for Sidney,” Harvey said, twisting slightly in the chair to nod at the boy. “He took a course at the university summer school, you know, he learned how to deal with a big farm, a megafarm, he calls it. Maybe a thousand cows, right, Sid?” Sid shrugged. “None of this twenty, thirty cows, like some barely hanging on down in the valley.”

  “Uh-huh.” She waited for him to make his point.

  “Now, I’m keeping the herd down to sixty so long’s I’m in charge. But when the kid takes over with his new methods—I mean, I’m phasing out, wanna spend some R and R time in Florida, you know, take Ralphie here with me—Sid’ll want to change things a little. He’ll want—well, I might’s well say it. More land. We got a hundred fifty acres to your west here, another sixty to the south. You’re right in the middle. To be frank, we need your land.”

  He leaned forward, stuck his fat-nosed face close to hers, and she drew back. “And when I read the papers,” he went on, “I thought, well, this might be the time to act. Deadly nightshade growing on this property?” He chuckled. “It might be to your advantage to move down into town. I mean, you only keep a couple hives here, right? What difference to live up here or down there? Right, Sid?” He appealed to his older son, who was drinking his coffee with a dull expressionless face.

  The blood was up in Harvey’s cheeks; the long speech had cost him his equanimity. And hers. She set down her coffee cup. “I’m sorry, I’ve run out of time.”

  He got up, too. His face was mottled pink, his forehead shone with sweat. He was trying to remain civil. “I understand, I just threw this at you. I didn’t really expect an answer right off. Just wanted to broach the subject, you know. You’ll want to talk with your. . . husband.” Harvey had seen Russell once in his full regalia, complete with tomahawk—he’d looked stunned.

  But of course she wouldn’t sell! For one thing, this was sacred land. There was a grave here: a female child from the late Woodland period, buried sideways in a flexed position, along with a copper awl, a notched point of jasper, a copper bead necklace, a few shell beads. The land could never be sold, Russell said, and she agreed. She imagined Sidney plowing up that grave, tossing the bones into the woods. It would be sacrilege, yes. She wouldn’t tell Russell what Harvey had proposed; he would be too angry. Russell did have a temper—slow, but potentially explosive.

  “By the way,” Harvey said at the door, the three boys halting behind him, “ ’spect you won’t be going to the funeral this afternoon, right? I hear they stopped classes for it. The college, I mean, big man on campus he was, hey, Tilden?” Tilden shrugged. “You’d feel, well, a mite uncomfortable, right?” He tried to look sympathetic, but it came out a smirk.

  “I never met the boy,” she said. “But of course I’m going. And so is Donna.”

  Harvey just smiled.

  Ralphie stuck out his hand in parting, a grin on his lopsided face. He was really quite sweet, in spite of being a Ball. “Shiny,” he said, “Ralph see a shiny,” and he pointed toward the woods.

  “Is that right?” she said, looking for a dropped coin, but not seeing any. It was a buttercup he’d seen, perhaps. Simple pleasures.

  Harvey pulled him along then, and the trio walked slowly back up the road. Just as they were at the curve, where her land touched the Balls’, and where she kept a half dozen hives, she saw one of the boys—it might have been Sidney—turn around and spit.

  She clapped a hand to her cheek. It felt sticky, unclean, as though the spit had been intended for her.

  Chapter Five

  Professor Camille Wimmet hurried back to her office after sociology class. She didn’t have any students signed up for conference; this was her sacred hour. She had completed all the coursework for her doctorate; now there was only the real work, the paper she would turn into a published article and ultimately, she hoped, a book.

  The subject was fascinating to her. It had all started when she learned from her mother that back in the early thirties a woman named Eleanor Perkey had lived for eight weeks in Camille’s hometown of Corning and interviewed the inhabitants to learn their reactions to a recent influx of French-Canadian farmers. Perkey had talked to Camille’s grandmother, who had moved down from Quebec with her husband and six children to take over an abandoned sheep farm. Camille was shocked to learn that the “old residents” had complained that their town was no longer “one big family” and predicted that soon all the farms owned by “old Yankee pioneer stock” (which, translated, meant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant—WASP!) would be sold to French-Canadians.

  Eleanor Perkey, she found, was the wife of William Perkey, a university professor, who was conducting a eugenics survey in the state, hoping to edge out
the “feebleminded” and other “degenerates,” with a narrowing eye on poor Franco-Americans, homosexuals, and so-called “gypsies,” some of whom turned out to be Abenaki Indians. It was Eleanor Perkey’s report on “degenerate women” who were sterilized in the Brookview Reformatory in Rutland that gave Camille the true focus of her paper.

  Two families, in particular, were of interest. One from the present day, and the other from the past. The present-day family was the Woodleaf-LeBlanc family, whom she knew to be of mixed Abenaki and French-Canadian blood—her student Donna had interested her in that genealogy. The woman from the past, and her principal focus, was one Annette Godineaux. Annette had been put in the reformatory on a charge of “sexual promiscuity,” a “crime” of which many poor, uneducated, and abused women in that period were accused. She’d been recommitted for numerous petty crimes: larceny, breach of parole, thefts in the five-and-dime, bounced checks. And, according to a Stanford-Binet test administered to her, she scored a borderline seventy-five.

  But then Camille had discovered in Mrs. Perkey’s report that Annette wrote poetry. There were only four poems extant, used largely by supervisors and local police as “evidence” of her promiscuity. How could a woman with an IQ of seventy-five write such lyrical verse? Unless in some way she had fudged the IQ test, deliberately written in false responses. It was Camille’s assumption that this had been the case and that Annette, whose grandfather had married an Abenaki woman from St. Francis, was as intelligent as Camille herself.

  So Camille was out to prove that this woman, who had been in and out of prison no less than fourteen times, and who had ultimately submitted to the indignity of sterilization, had been horribly exploited. Annette was most likely dead, since she’d been born in 1900, but dead, Camille was out to prove, because of exploitation by the state of Vermont, which had aided and abetted the Perkeys in their eugenics project.