Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  Finally there was the sound of a scraping chair, words of farewell. He squinted at the woman through the door, then left the house. Backing out, he almost hit her red Honda. That would never do. Olen had a perfect driving record. He was proud of that.

  * * * *

  There was an apple tree in blossom by the fence when Gwen and Leroy got to the Willmarth farm. Gwen took it for a sign. Things would work out. She opened the window wide to breathe in the fragrance. It was almost May, Branbury’s orchards were bursting with apple blossoms. It was a time of promise. Nothing untoward had happened for several days now. Gwen was getting back her native optimism.

  Here was Ruth, driving up to the barn in the John Deere. She jumped out lightly, glanced at Gwen’s pickup. “You’re on fire, I think,” she said, and Gwen laughed and showed her the smoker.

  “But I do need a good fire,” Gwen said, and showed her an infected hive they’d brought back from old Glenna Flint’s place. “It might not be foulbrood at all, but I can’t take any chances. I know you’re like me, you burn your own. Olen made me remove my barrel. But I’ll put it back when all this is over. The prices they charge to haul the stuff! It’s unconscionable.”

  They loaded the hive full of dead brood onto the tractor, drove it deep into the pasture, to a damp area by a narrow stream. There, behind a grove of birch trees, Ruth kept a rusted barrel. With Leroy’s help, they rolled the hive into it. It wouldn’t fit and they had to break it up. Pieces kept falling, dead bees scattering, and they got to laughing. Even Leroy, trying to look bored with the women’s giggles, smirked now and then but finally made his way back to the truck. Ruth had three bags of trash ready for burning herself. It was a little windy, but it had rained overnight.

  “One for the governor,” she said, and tossed it in.

  “One for the local constable. One for Olen Ashley, and one for the garbage collector,” cried Gwen.

  “One .for my ex-husband Pete and his beloved town dump,” shouted Ruth.

  “One for Harvey Ball and his three little Balls,” yelled Gwen, and the women howled with laughter. It was silly, it was outrageous, but Gwen felt, somehow, renewed.

  Afterward, the ride back through the cow pasture was gorgeous. The landscape was green and white with pear and maple trees in bloom, the mountains purplish with new leaves. Yellow rocket and a few early white clover were popping up, full of glad and thirsty bees. It would be a good harvest this summer. Every cow they passed had her head deep down in the lush grass.

  Gwen told Ruth that bees saw the white clover as blue. “Whenever I see a white blossom, I try to imagine it blue. All the apple orchards in deep blue bloom.”

  “I love it,” said Ruth. “And what about red? Do they see red?”

  “Oh, no, they don’t see red at all. The red flowers are all bird-pollinated—mostly hummingbirds. So I plant white geraniums in my porch pots.”

  As they approached the house, they saw a reddish glow, a column of smoke. Ruth was alarmed; she put the tractor in high gear. It was Gwen’s truck. The back of it really was on fire. Leroy was already there, slapping at it with an old car blanket, his face red and sweaty.

  “I’ll grab some pails,” Ruth shouted. “There’s an outside faucet.”

  In twenty minutes they had the flames out. But the back of the pickup was badly charred. “It wasn’t the smoker,” Leroy said. “Smoker was almost out when we left to burn. And I found this.” He picked up the remains of a box of kitchen matches. Someone had lit one, he claimed, and tossed it in the back. Gwen wanted to think it was the smoker, though—she didn’t want to think that someone had deliberately set fire to her truck.

  But inside Ruth’s warm kitchen, where a pitcher of apple blossoms sat on the table, smelling like the most fragrant of incense, she mentally added this latest bit of malice to the growing list that had begun with the note to Donna in Emily’s dormitory room, and her mood darkened.

  She saw Ruth look out the window where Leroy was sitting in the truck, guzzling a Pepsi. He hadn’t wanted to come into the kitchen. Could he have set the fire himself?

  No, no, she scolded herself. Why would he set a fire and then try so valiantly to extinguish it? It made no sense. Yet the car Leroy had allegedly stolen haunted her mind. She had meant to question him about it on the way to Willmarths’, but his grim silence had stilled her tongue.

  * * * *

  When Camille Wimmet read Annette Godineaux’s diary entry for Friday, March 18, 1937, she understood why the young woman had faked her IQ test.

  Fooled em today. When they asked me who was the president of the United States I said uh, Jimmy Stewart? and they didn’t even smile, just scratched on their pads like cats in a litter box. Well, I won’t play their game. I tell em, oh yeah, I broke into old lady Flake’s house, stole her money sock, I tell em what they wanna hear. But why did you do that when you were on parole? You’ll end right back in here. Cause I want a soft bed, good food, I tell em, which is not altogether a lie. Not after Billy, the bastard, locked me out, said he had a new woman, wouldn’t pay alimony for my kids he claimed weren’t his. Where was I to go? I won’t live with Maman. Not with that asshole boyfriend wanting nothing more than to get in bed with me nights after he’s done with her. I’m sick when I think of waking up with him on top of me. My Andre, maybe Jeannine, maybe Cosette, could be his kid, Jesus. But not Nicole. Her father would of married me if he hadn’t been saddled with that bitch of a wife. And then got run over by that tractor—thought I’d die myself to hear it. Nicole must be 20 now. My God. One day when I’m outa here, when I get a job, make some money, I’ll round up my kids outa those foster homes. We’ll live on a farm somewhere. Some other state. Maine maybe. Or upstate New Hampshire.

  The eugenicist, Eleanor Perkey, was wrong, Camille discovered: There weren’t three children, but four: a boy, Andre, and three girls, Nicole, Jeannine, and Cosette. Was their surname Godineaux? And Billy—who was he? And that married farmer? Well, somewhere she’d find answers. She’d had more luck with Mert LeBlanc’s great-aunt Maxine; Camille had found her in Perkey’s report, first arraigned for vagrancy (selling her baskets, no doubt, up and down the state), and then released, then back in again and sterilized, according to Perkey (no records extant), before she was finally let go.

  She wouldn’t find the answers, though, with that arrogant man down at Brookview. He was a relative, she’d just bet he was. She’d look into that. She imagined his father sleeping with one of the female inmates—this ‘Godwin’ a bastard son. He wouldn’t want that little morsel coming to light!

  The horror for Camille was that they had sterilized Annette. Had she really consented? All they needed, according to the “voluntary sterilization” law passed in 1931, were two physicians to decide that the patient was feebleminded, insane, disabled, or whose welfare would otherwise “be improved” with sterilization: if male, a vasectomy; if female, a salpingectomy. Imagine the women tricked into that procedure! How else, if not tricked, would they have given their consent?

  It was a mystery, as so many things were still a mystery. Like where were those offspring today? Where were the grandchildren, if she had more than one? What kind of lives were they leading now, and where?

  Camille was determined to find out. This afternoon she would visit the Willmarth farm, where a foster boy named Joey Godineaux worked. After all, Annette’s offspring might well have taken the distaff name, since she’d never married. She copied the notes she’d been making on her computer and stuck the disk in her purse. She was feeling paranoid. When she’d come after class yesterday afternoon she’d found her papers shuffled about on her desk, as though someone had been in here, looking for something, had heard a noise, and run off. It was probably a student, she rationalized, looking for a paper; she’d left the office door unlocked, she’d only been gone the one class hour. She hadn’t been careful about locking up, the way she had to rush from class to class to conference to faculty meeting.

  The students, too, ate up her
time, like Tilden Ball, barging in here this morning, demanding a retake for a failed quiz. Well, she didn’t give retakes. He had to accept that. Though he obviously didn’t like it. She didn’t care for him, not a bit. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, either. He definitely knew something. Or suspected . . .

  But this paper would bring her tenure, respect. She would declare herself then, proudly, the way Esther had wanted, the way she herself should have done, risking the tenure. If she had, Esther might have stayed in Vermont, not driven west on a motorcycle, prey to that homophobic trucker. Now Esther was dead. And Camille had only Esther’s cat for comfort.

  Out in the hall a dark figure scurried around the corner. A colleague? A student? “Hello,” she called, but the person didn’t answer. She locked the door and ran out to her car.

  She found the hired man and his teenaged ward, Joey, in the barn milking the cows. The Holsteins stood impatiently by, waiting their turn—it was obviously the highlight of their day. It was an average-sized farm as farms went these days: a red barn and two cement-block silos with WILLMARTH SONS in peeling paint. Where were the sons? Yet how good, Camille thought, that the farm had survived, when only the megafarms seemed to hold on these days. In this case, without a man, too— only the woman farmer, this cheerful-looking fellow, and the foster boy, Joey, who was thrusting a mud-caked hand at her.

  “This is my Joey, I’m Tim,” the man said. She took Joey’s hand. She wanted to put the boy at ease. Tim brought out a chair from some inner sanctum; he and Joey went on with the work. The boy appeared to be cleaning teats or something, the process was a mystery to Camille. Everything was shiny and steely: the milking gadgets, the pipes, the pails, the pans of food and water. The barn was ripe with smells: cow dung, the sweetish odor of new milk, hay that got her sneezing and then blowing her nose.

  She laughed at herself, said she was “fascinated by all this— look, I just spend my day in a dusty classroom. Anyway, Joey, I wanted to ask you about your parents, if you knew them. I’m trying to trace some relatives of a woman named Annette Godineaux. She had a daughter named Nicole, a granddaughter named Pauline. Ever hear those names mentioned?”

  “Nicole, Pauline. Thoth are good names,” said Joey, grinning through bad teeth. He had a slight lisp, she noticed. “But who they?”

  “He lived with foster parents early on,” Tim put in. “He doesn’t know much about his real parents, do you, Joey?”

  “Nope. Tim, here, he my parent now, right, Tim? My. . . surra—surra—”

  “Surrogate father,” said Tim, shooing out the four cows they’d been milking and ushering in a new batch. The cows were huge, Camille noted; she’d never seen them up close like this. They were terrifying, actually. One bellowed, practically in her ear, and she jumped. Tim laughed. “That’s Bathsheba. She’s a wild girl. She likes to spook you.” He slapped the cow on its rear end and it mewled again, turned a wild dark eye on Camille.

  She moved her chair back. She didn’t think she’d get very far with this interview. She would have to talk to the foster parents. “Do you have their address, Tim?”

  Tim stuck his tongue in his cheek, screwed some metal milkers onto Bathsheba’s teats; they hung down like pendulums in a grandmother’s clock. “Let’s see, now. The Petits moved—to Winooski, I think. But I did hear that Joey’s mother was once in Otter Training School. I don’t know about the father. About thirteen years ago they closed the school, let the residents out on their own. The mother couldn’t cope, she walked out on the kids—there were two of them, and Joey here was taken in by the Petits. They were kind enough as far as I can see, right, Joey? They treat you okay?”

  “Okay,” said Joey, rubbing on a cow’s teat, “but not so good as you, Tim. You the best.” Tim squirted a bit of milk at the boy, and Joey giggled.

  Camille knew about the training school. It had done its share of sterilizing, too. Joey’s mother—was it Pauline?—would have brought the two Tim mentioned with her. She’d bet the mother didn’t have any other kids after that, though. She thanked the pair, gulped in breaths of fresh air outside the barn. It was raining now. She had on heels that sank into the muddy earth. She’d parked her car out by the main road. There was a light on in the kitchen—perhaps Emily was in there, her student, she’d have a newspaper Camille could hold over her head; she didn’t want to get her leather jacket wet. She ran up on the porch and knocked.

  It wasn’t Emily, but the girl’s mother who greeted her, she’d just come in from the fields. She offered coffee and popovers with fresh butter, sat Camille down. She was curious about Camille’s work—”Something about the thirties?”

  Warmed by the coffee and Ruth’s enthusiasm, Camille told a little about Annette Godineaux. “I’m trying to trace her progeny, to find what happened to her and her offspring—Nicole, Pauline. Joey here is the first evidence I’ve seen myself of any so-called “degeneracy.”

  “Degeneracy!” Ruth cried. “Why, I’d trust him with my life! He’s a wonderful boy, a big help around the place. We all adore him.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean ‘degeneracy’ in that way. I was speaking, well, of brain power.” Camille didn’t quite know how to put it. “I should say ‘developmentally disabled.’ “ She spread her fingers, helpless to find the right words. Ruth could be touchy, she saw.

  “I’m quick to argue these days,” Ruth allowed. “All these double whammies from the Department of Agriculture. They’re telling me I should milk three times a day when I can barely do it twice. I won’t do it, I tell you! I won’t doctor my corn, either, to make it ‘bigger and better.’ I won’t use BST on my cows.” She let out a breath, grabbed her coffee mug in two hands—the knucklebones stood out, bluish white. Then she laughed. “Never mind me. I have to sound off now and then. Everyone’s after me with advice.”

  Camille could only nod. She felt a sneeze coming on, there was an odor of barn in here, too—Ruth’s rubber boots, maybe. The boots were standing by the door as though they had a life of their own. She sneezed twice; reached in her pocket for a Kleenex. A disk came out with it. She looked at it, surprised, then laid it on the table.

  “You know, I feel—oh it’s crazy, but as though someone’s after me, too. Not with advice or warning—I don’t know what they want, actually. You see, I found some papers had been gone through on my desk. Then I saw someone disappear around a corner when I came out. When I called, he—she—didn’t answer.” She held out the disk. “Look. You’ll think I’m crazy, but would you keep this for me? Of course, there’s more work to do, I’ll keep updating. I’ve a copy at home.”

  She stopped, embarrassed at her words, her cheeks hot. She groped for the disk. But Ruth already had her hand on it.

  “Of course I’ll keep it,” Ruth said. “And, hey, I keep the deed to my land in the basement freezer. That’s my safekeeping.”

  “Thanks, but a desk drawer will do.”

  Camille refused the loan of an umbrella after all and ran out into the rain; it felt good on her face, fresh, clean. Her research on the eugenics project had been getting to her. The project was only one step below the Holocaust, wasn’t it? Why, it was 1943 when Annette was sterilized, along with her daughter and grandchild! Camille wondered if Binet tests had been given to the Godineaux children. Probably not. Probably in his infinite wisdom the administrator had decided that the children were miniature Annettes with her “subnormal” IQ score.

  She would find out. She was on a roll now; she didn’t want to eat, sleep, or go out to a bar. She just wanted to do her research, write her paper, get tenure. Then she’d let the world know who she really was. What a relief it would be.

  She opened her office door—and gasped. “Oh, no!” Papers and notebooks were scattered on the floor, books pulled off the shelves, scraps from the wastebasket swirling about in the breeze from a half-open window. Who? Why? Someone wanting to steal her notes, maybe, get ahead other on this eugenics project? Another faculty member? She’d mentioned the project to a f
ew colleagues, wished now she’d kept mum. Was it Frazer Manning, aware of rumors, wanting her out of the department? Breathing shallowly, she booted up her computer, put the mouse on ANNETTE. Clicked.

  It was gone. “No!” The screen was blank. Her months of research, erased. “No-oo-ooo . ..”

  Oh, God, why? Had someone copied the work? Someone wanting to discourage her from going on with the project? And, oh—where was her briefcase with the copies she’d made from the university archives?

  “Hail Mary full of Grace,” she moaned, the way she used to as a child when something bad happened. She spun down into her desk chair; her head reeled. But she had to calm herself. She had to think.

  Yes, the briefcase was in the car, yes. But had she locked the car? She couldn’t recall. She must phone the police—campus security, town police. She dialed, gasped out her message. Then she ran to the car.

  Ah. It was there, the briefcase. She drove back to Willmarths’—thank God she’d left her disk there. She would take it back, enter it into her home machine. She would stay up all night if she had to—at least to finish copying Annette’s diary.

  Ruth would think her crazy. Maybe she was. Oh, yes, she was.

  Chapter Nine

  Donna was at the family computer working on her sociology paper when her grandfather shuffled into the kitchen. She wasn’t happy about the interruption: He liked to talk, she needed quiet. She wanted to get a good grade on the paper, finish the year with a B average at least, then transfer to the university. Or quit college altogether, she hadn’t made up her mind. She only knew she didn’t want to stay at Branbury College.

  When Grandpop pushed a dish of chocolate ice cream under her nose, she gave up. She’d visit for a few minutes, then explain to him that she had to have quiet. Perversely, she told him about the Indian raid on Deerfield back in 1704, the enforced march.