Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  It was abuse, it was hate. And she meant to expose it for what it was.

  She opened the folder of ANNETTE papers she had so far copied: the police and social worker reports, the poems, the IQ tests, and most intriguing of all, a copy of Annette’s personal journal, written prior to her disappearance from the written records and left in her room at the reformatory. Annette had had four children before her first arrest for adultery, all sent to foster homes; there was reference in the diary to an older child’s offspring. Camille would have to track them down as well. There was so much work to do before she could write! First, though, she would put the reports, poems, and journal onto disk, and copy that disk so that she would have a double record. Camille was paranoid that way; she even kept important papers in her home freezer to be sure they weren’t burned by a chance fire.

  She took a long draft from the bottle of spring water on her desk and leaned eagerly into her task. She had to work quickly because of the four o’clock memorial service for Shep Noble. There were so many deterrents to her work! Her teaching, of course, student conferences, the interminable faculty meetings. And only yesterday Leroy’s mother, who was in an institution with cystic fibrosis, had called, with an aide’s help, to ask her to look up the boy. He hadn’t been to visit for six months, Aunt Denise said, and would Camille do her familial duty? She was, after all, Leroy’s only active relative.

  Although Camille wasn’t looking forward to the visit, it did have an added dividend: an introduction to Merton LeBlanc, whose sister, she’d discovered through her research, had been one of Eleanor Perkey’s victims. And then the real business would start: the search for Annette, and interviews with the Godineaux family—at least with whatever members of that extended family she could ferret out.

  She heard male voices out in the hall and got up to shut the door all the way. But not before she heard Frazer Manning, her department head, say to a colleague, “Tell that fruitcake to buzz off,” and then laugh. Frazer was a known homophobe, and she detested him. She’d like to run out and yell, Who do you think you are—God? Calling someone a name like that?

  But she had to be careful. Camille was lesbian. She couldn’t come out yet in public—not until she had tenure.

  * * * *

  Gwen felt awkward and sweaty where she stood at the back of the college chapel that was already jammed with mourning students. The fraternity had come en masse: The boys sat near the front in a dozen pews, a sea of bright heads, some of them still wearing baseball caps. Gwen craned her neck but couldn’t pick out Donna from the crowd of girls and a few boys who had swarmed up into the balcony or on the ground floor behind the fraternity. The first two pews were reserved for the Noble family. Should she speak to them? No, they would all meet in court eventually—though she mustn’t let them get her down, Russell had warned when he called again just before she left for the service. She hadn’t made the boy drink, he reminded her; she hadn’t given him an expensive motorcycle on which to drive her daughter and then try to rape her. For it had been attempted rape, she’d gotten that out of Donna. And now Russell was threatening to quit his job, to come home and “keep an eye on Donna.” The girl wouldn’t like that. He’d once “destroyed” a high school relationship, according to Donna, with his “unreasonable behavior.”

  The service was a series of testimonials to the boy. One by one, the fraternity brothers scuffed up in their dirty but costly Reeboks and told stories: how Shep had helped one brother make the baseball team by practicing with him each morning before breakfast; how he’d never missed a ski meet, even when he had the flu; how he’d held the fraternity championship in chugalugging—she wondered what the parents thought of that feat! Two of the boy’s coaches stood up to affirm his sportsmanship and athletic prowess, and then three girls wept out abstractions like love, beauty, and soul. One of them might have been the Alyce whom Donna disliked. She matched Donna’s description: blond hair swept up on top of her head, designer jeans, and silk shirt—something steely about her, the way she stood poised and dry-eyed, eliciting tears with her sentimental words. The girl who sat beside Gwen in the back pew was sobbing into a flowered hankie. Gwen wondered what she’d think if she knew who Gwen was—the instrument, the girl might say, of Shep Noble’s death.

  Don’t feel guilty. You’re not guilty. Still the tears sprang up in Gwen’s eyes. Shep Noble’s was a young life, unfulfilled. Who knew, after a few knocks in the world, what he might have become?

  At the final burst of organ music Gwen slipped out; she couldn’t bear another moment of it. Just as she stood, gulping in the outside air, she saw a dark figure slip out a side door. It was Donna: The girl’s head was lowered, she was crying openly. Gwen called out, but Donna didn’t hear, or chose not to respond. The girl ran down the path to the road, jumped on her bicycle, and raced off toward town. She looked like a refugee fleeing a war, her hair in long black ropes from the wind, her legs pedaling faster than any human, it seemed, could go. Up a hill, around a corner she careened, and was gone.

  Would she escape the war after all? The persecutors? Gwen prayed that she would. But knew in her heart it would be a long uphill battle.

  * * * *

  Coming out the rear door of the chapel, Professor Camille Wimmet saw Donna Woodleaf-LeBlanc ride up the road on her bicycle. Had the girl attended the service? She supposed it wouldn’t have been easy for her, under the circumstances. Camille herself had gone with mixed emotions. Shep Noble had been her student—an average student, usually prepared, if not brilliantly. Rather narrow-minded, though, she’d noted in class discussion—like his ancestor.

  And this was the question in Camille’s mind: Should she should tell the Woodleaf family about the Perkey connection? Was it relevant? For Shep, she had discovered, was a descendant of William and Eleanor Perkey, who had done such irreparable harm to the state’s poor that their project had turned into a veritable holocaust. Shep Perkey Noble, alive, might have helped her; he might have had letters, documents, family stories to offer. She might even have persuaded him to write his paper about the eugenics project.

  And yet, when she’d invited him to remain after class for the purpose of interrogating him, and he’d stood before her desk looking handsome, confident, arrogant, like his maternal grandparents, she’d felt such an anger fill her throat that she could only mumble something incoherent about his latest quiz and quickly dismiss him.

  But who else would know about this connection? And who would kill for it—if indeed, that had been the case? The poor “degenerates” whom the grandparents had abused? The babies they had, in effect, denied life to? But the poor had no clout. They were mostly absorbed now into the general population; in hiding, like the Abenaki, who, in order to survive, for decades had been trying to assimilate themselves into the white majority.

  Yet the Abenaki of late, she’d read, had been emerging, protesting, asserting their ancient rights. Was Shep Perkey Noble’s death part of this protest? The notion seemed far-fetched. She would have to consider carefully before putting the Woodleaf-LeBlanc family at risk. After all, Donna was her student.

  “Professor Wimmet—are you free? Can I talk to you about my paper?” It was Sue Coletti, a plump, sweet-faced girl—overly conscientious.

  “Why not?” she said as the girl trotted alongside her. She’d been thinking abusive thoughts about the dead. She wanted to push them out of mind. “So what is it you were planning to write? This afternoon has blotted everything out of my head.”

  “Oh, yes, sad, wasn’t it? I know he was in your other section.” The girl, a declared lesbian, put a hand on the teacher’s sleeve.

  “The paper,” Camille reminded her, and hearing voices behind her, she pulled away and walked on faster.

  * * * *

  Donna rode her bike to the local Ben & Jerry’s. She didn’t want to see any of those college kids, not even Emily, who had offered to go with her to the service, but at the last minute had to help with a freshening cow.

  Sh
e’d sat in the balcony, seen the parents when they came in, looking tall, well groomed, grieved. It had broken her heart to see the mother suddenly slump into the pew, a handkerchief clutched to her face, the father patting her shoulder. That one gesture, the patting of the shoulder, was what destroyed Donna. She was suddenly drowning in tears—not for Shep so much, whom she didn’t know, really, but for the parents. She hardly saw or heard the rest of the service. As she stumbled down the stairs after the final benediction, someone grabbed her wrist and twisted it. It was Alyce Worthington. “You’ll have to live with this,” the girl said, looking hard into Donna’s eyes. And then, with a little push, she let her go. And Donna raced downtown to console herself with ice cream.

  It was no consolation. Her tears kept dripping into the plastic dish. She was getting up to leave when a voice spoke up. She knew that voice, jammed both fists into her eyes.

  “ ‘S’not worth it,” Leroy was saying, “you shouldna gone. Look.” He snatched up her hand when she tried to pick up her bowl. “He was an SOB. You know he was, he wasn’t worth your little finger. You can’t go mooning over ’im.”

  “I’m not mooning over him. That’s not why I’m crying!” Leroy didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand it was the boy’s father comforting the mother that brought on the tears. And then that mean-spirited Alyce, telling her she’d have to live with the guilt. Leroy couldn’t understand all that.

  “You should have minded your own business, Leroy. You had no right to come out that night and peer at us. Like we were ...” She couldn’t find the right words.

  “Like you were gettin’ laid,” he said hoarsely, running a nervous hand through his rusty hair. “That’s why I came out. You were yellin’, you don’t remember that? I’m supposed to sit by, let that son of a bee attack you? What else could I do but—but stop him?”

  She felt her heart go slack. “Stop him—how?” she asked. “Did you drag him into the nightshade? Did you hit him with something?” She was awed at her own words. Horrified. Her breath came in ragged gasps.

  He didn’t answer. Not right away. Finally, leaning his elbows on the table, the whites of his eyes brilliant, he said, “Maybe. Maybe I did. For you. Donna. Anything I did, it was for you.”

  “Don’t come near me. Ever again,” she said, and kicked his leg, hard, as she left the table.

  * * * *

  Leroy stomped into the kitchen late that afternoon. He needed to borrow the truck, he told Gwen; he didn’t say why. “If I had my own car, I wouldn’t have to borrow yours.”

  “Save up for one,” she said brightly.

  “Save what? What you pay me? I need to make more money. I need a car to get around. I got a friend looking for a better job for me. He finds one, I’ll take it.”

  “What? Why, this is our busiest season, Leroy, you can’t leave now! Maybe next year I can pay more, I’ll try. It’s been hard, with Donna in college.”

  “I need my own car,” he repeated through stubborn lips, and turned on his heel. A minute later she heard the truck screeching off down the road. He’s punishing us, she thought. Punishing Donna for ignoring him, punishing me for not being able to pay a better wage.

  She dropped to her knees to scrub the kitchen floor.

  Chapter Six

  Mert LeBlanc was surprised to see a taxi pull up in front of the house and his grandson climb out, dragging his green book bag. Then when Mert reached in his pocket for a few bucks the taxi drove off and Brownie said the school nurse had paid and he could bring her the money the next day. He was throwing up “all over the place,” he said, and she was afraid he had a bug. A couple of throw-up bugs, Brownie explained, were still going around, and he didn’t want to spread them.

  “So you’re bringin’ ’em all home to us, thanks a lot,” said Mert, and laughed when his grandson frowned, taking him literally. “Better go right to bed, then, son.”

  Mert went back to the pack basket he was making for the local craft center exhibition. He’d made egg baskets, apron baskets, thimble baskets, laundry and pack baskets, even a large cradle with a canopy over its woven bottom. He was pleased with those baskets. It beat putting auto parts together the way he’d done the first thirty-five years of his adult life.

  He was part of five or more generations of basketmakers on Abenaki and French sides of the family. The baskets had kept both sides alive through depressions and oppressions, like the time a woman with a fancy WASP name had come knocking on the door to take his Aunt Maxine to the hospital for “a little procedure,” as she called it—Sign here, please—to keep her from having more babies. The woman had looked hard at him, too, but Mert managed to run out the door and only his father and aunt were visited by the simpering social worker. Aunt Maxine had blasphemed the woman to her dying day. It was something Mert would never forget.

  He was tightening down the ash strips when his grandson walked back in with a peanut butter and honey sandwich. “You must be feeling better now,” he told the boy. “You’d think you never ate breakfast.” And Brownie said, looking defensive, “Well, I lost it. I threw up, I told you.”

  Mert began to suspect something then. He began to suspect that Brownie’s being sick had something to do with the college boy who’d died in the patch of nightshade. “Somebody say somethin’ to you about that dead boy, did they?” he asked, still concentrating on his pack basket. It had sixteen uprights all tapered out; now he’d have to weave in the strips. He didn’t want to alarm Brownie, just let the boy speak it out.

  The boy did. He told how the whole busload of schoolkids that morning began hissing his name, calling him Brown Bear, the baptismal name he didn’t want people to know. How the driver, Mrs. Bump, stopped the bus and they finally quieted. “Then, when I was getting off, a kid yelled, ‘Your sister’s a murderer!’ and they started up again.”

  Brownie was crying now. He cried right into Mert’s uprights that had taken three days to dry. But it was all right. Mert laid down the work and put his arms around the boy. The body felt like a basket, all ribs and strips of flesh. Mert felt his shirt soak up the tears.

  “There, there,” he said. He told Brownie about when he was a boy growing up in the thirties. “If you had any Indian blood in you,” he said, “the other kids wouldn’t play with you. Most tried to hide it, like my wife, Estelle, who was your grandmother you never knew. She dropped dead one day, kneading dough, yes, she did. She was a hard worker. She wouldn’t admit she was Indian—all her life pretending to be somebody she wasn’t. Me, I had my own friends, French and Abenaki. I was almost a half-blood and proud of it.”

  He told the boy about how he wanted a certain brown ash tree and the ranger said, “Mert, you can’t cut a growing tree on government forest land. I said, ‘Yes I can, I’m Abenaki, you look it up.’ So the ranger looked into it and he come back and he says, ‘Mert, if you want that tree, it’s yours.’ You see, the government can’t take an Indian’s livelihood away from him. And if there’s two hundred maple trees in the forest up behind our place, I can hang fifty buckets and he can’t stop me.”

  Brownie looked skeptical. “The police would stop you. Mr. Ball would call them. They’d send over Uncle Olen.”

  Mert laughed again. “I’m not afraid of no police. Neither’s your dad.” He put both arms around his grandson, pulled him close. “And don’t worry about that dead boy. Olen’s a good man, he’s trying to help us find out what really happened.”

  “Shep Noble died from the nightshade!” Brownie cried hotly. “Mother says so.”

  “Sure. Now go lie down so I can tell your mother you wasn’t just playing hooky, she won’t like that. Don’t think about them mean kids. Don’t think about the nightshade.”

  * * * *

  Donna drove back to the farm with Emily after their sociology class. Her mother would pick her up after her bee rounds— Donna’s bicycle had a flat tire. Anyway, Donna didn’t want to go home. Home reminded her of Shep Noble. Home reminded her of Leroy, who might or might not h
ave killed Shep. It reminded her of being a “squaw,” like the note said.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Emily said as she parked the pickup in the farm driveway. Donna glanced out at the two round silos, the red barn, the cows browsing beyond in the pasture that was full of wildflowers. It was peaceful here, unlike the war zone of her own home, the yellow crime scene tape still strung across the path into the woods.

  “Oh, nothing much. I was just thinking how nice it is here. And worrying about the paper we have to write. Have you got a topic?”

  “Well, I thought I might do something on farming,” Emily said. “You know, all the attitude problems?”

  “What problems are those?” Donna needed to get into other people’s worlds, into their problems. She had to stop thinking about her own.

  “Oh, the way people feel about farming. That it’s the kind of job you don’t need an education for, just to milk cows. When that’s not true at all.” Emily was warming to the subject. “You have to know about nutrition, and milking machines, and artificial insemination. My mother works all day at it. And we’re still living on the edge!”

  “I know,” murmured Donna, feeling she should make a noise of some kind after that impassioned speech. And she did know what living on the edge was. Her family was a good example of it. Milk and honey, she thought. It sounded romantic, but you couldn’t make a real living off it. Herself, she’d do something one day. She’d be a professional, like Ms. Wimmet.

  She got out of the pickup and slammed the tinny door behind her. It popped open again.

  “Damn the thing,” Emily said. “I mean, this is what I’m talking about. We can’t afford a new pickup because my mother is trying to buy my father out—and so she keeps patching together the old machinery. Frankly, I’d be just as happy if she’d let him buy her out. Move us to town. Then I wouldn’t have to share this old truck. Alyce has her own Volvo, you know; she looks at me like I’m just a local hick—an outsider.”