“I’ll let the Board of Realtors know,” Colm told him. “We have monthly meetings, they might like a little entertainment.”
They never had entertainment, Ruth knew, but Colm liked to please people. That was one of his good points, and at the same time a fault. He’d lead people on, get them to hoping he’d buy this, order that. “Maybe your father would like a little entertainment at his wakes,” she said, and smiled sweetly at him.
“Oh, yes, yes, indeed,” said Shortsleeves. “We sing at funerals. Oh, absolutely.” He handed Colm a pack of brochures.
Ruth explained why they’d come. “We heard you knew Joey’s mother, Pauline.”
Shortsleeves’s demeanor altered with the name Pauline. He shrank back as though Ruth held a gun to his chest. His nose was a red pepper. He cleared his throat, fiddled with his top button, hummed tunelessly. Finally he said, “Pauline Godineaux. Well, that name does ring a bell.”
“Your name was on her records,” Ruth reminded him. “You came to see her. Several times. Nothing incriminating,” she added as his face came to a boil.
“Oh, no, nothing incriminating, no,” he cried, wringing his hands. “I only—well, we dated a little, you see. I didn’t know she was shoplifting. I was horrified when I heard. I thought she’d been booked on false charges. She seemed a nice girl. Chain smoker, yes, but I wanted to help her.”
“Were you lovers?” Colm asked, blunt as usual.
The face boiled over. Ruth sat upright, ready to give CPR. “It’s all right,” she soothed. “It’s okay if you were, or weren’t, lovers. We just want to know whose child Joey is, that’s all. We’ll keep it confidential.”
Shortsleeves took several quick breaths. His skin cooled. He tried to smile, but it came out a smirk. Finally he said, “She already had a kid by another fellow. Whoever he was, he just up and left; poor girl, she had no support. I took her in, she lived in my house awhile. It was after my own wife died. Pauline was in her mid-forties then. She sang a nice contralto.” He smiled, remembering. “I mean, I offered to marry her when she got pregnant, but she said she’d had enough of live-in men.”
“By you?” Colm asked. “She was pregnant by you?”
The face heated up again. “Well, I never could be sure. I mean, she was seeing another fellow, you know, when she lived with me. I didn’t find out till later. I made her leave my house when I found she was seeing someone else. She went off with the other man, I guess, I don’t know.” He seemed upset, remembering; a little saliva dropped onto his shirt collar.
“So you might or might not be Joey’s father.”
“We-11, at first she said yes, but then she told about this other one. It could have been his. I tried to find out where she went, I did! I tried to find out about the child. I’m Catholic, I didn’t want her to get an abortion.”
Ruth asked about the grandmother. Marcel said he’d met Nicole a few times. “She was a nice person. She’d been through the mill, you know, that kind. She’d bring things when she came to visit—fruit, a bottle of sherry. We got along. We got along better than we did with Pauline. Pauline wasn’t always easy to live with. She had a quick temper.
“Personally,” he repeated, “I think that other guy was the father, not me. I mean, my wife and I never had kids, you know. I had mumps as a boy. I never . . . well, can we leave it at that?”
Shortsleeves seemed relieved to hear that Joey had a good foster parent, but he showed no inclination to meet him. He reminded Ruth that he was “living hand to mouth on Social Security. I was in construction, you don’t save up much.”
Nor could he tell them anything about Pauline’s father. “She never said much. He was a no-good, that’s all I can tell you. He left Pauline and her brother when they were small. But he kept coming back for money, sex, you know. A real bastard.”
“Have you any idea where we’d find Pauline?” Ruth asked.
Shortsleeves thought a minute. He sank his head in his coarse, scarred hands. “I had a postcard from her. Maybe three years ago. If I can think of where it came from . . .”
“Vermont?”
“No, not Vermont. Uh, New Hampshire, I think it was. That’s right, New Hampshire. Some town begun with an A. That’s all I can remember now. It begun with an A.”
“The old runaround,” said Ruth when they were back in her pickup.
Colm pulled out a wrinkled map of New England, spread it open to disclose the narrow state of New Hampshire. “Hell,” he said. “Can’t be more than thirty towns that begin with an A. You’ll find her.”
“I will? With no help from you?”
“I’m up to my ass in work, Ruthie. Real estate getting busier; the old man needs me in the death house, his arthritis worse;now the prostate acting up. And I do have a few hours to put in at the station.”
“You’re not coming to New Hampshire with me, then.”
“Did I say I wasn’t?”
“Don’t play games with me, Colm.”
“I mean, I’ll have to see how things go. Though I’m thinking now it might give us some time together. Alone, you know what I mean?”
She did know what he meant. That sly look. The hand on her knee. What could she do but slap it—and then grin?
* * * *
Gwen was waiting for Ruth at the bee farm in boots and slicker—it was raining lightly. She had a basket of tobacco leaves on her arm. Mert had made the basket out of sweetgrass. “Smell?” Gwen promised to give her a braid of it to hang for good luck in her kitchen. Oh, but Ruth could use a bit of good luck!
Gwen plodded ahead in her rubber boots, while Ruth walked carefully behind, examining the ground as she went—for a footprint, maybe, although Mert had smoothed over the one he found. And the police had tramped the area over and over, so what clues to the boy’s death could possibly remain? Still, Ruth couldn’t help but think that the death wasn’t accidental at all. And here she’d told Mert not to report his footprint, putting the responsibility squarely on her own shoulders.
The woods were lush with thistle, wild columbine, and pink trumpet honeysuckle. The bees were happily sucking up the nectar. Water was seeping into her socks, but it was worth it just to smell the woods, that thick leafy fragrance. This landscape was different from her open pasture; it was like something primordial, the fragrance that dinosaurs had smelled, the Abenaki who’d hunted here, the Willmarth forebears, settling into a unspoiled land.
“Voila,” Gwen said, pointing, and Ruth saw a group of long-stemmed, vinelike plants with simple pointed leaves on top and, at the base, larger leaves with small lobes. The flowers were only in bud, but one could already see they’d come out purple. Later, there would be plump black berries, as poisonous to the tongue, according to her son-in-law, as the purplish red flowers.
“That poinsettia plant I still have from Christmas is poisonous,” she told Gwen. “So really, why are we pulling this up?”
Gwen nodded. “The irony is, this plant does so much good.” She explained about the atropine, its medicinal use. “It’s a part of my income, too. But what’s money?”
“Screw money. Get rid of it!” Ruth picked up a pile of pebbles and tossed them in the air. They both laughed.
It was time now for the ceremony. Gwen got down on her knees, spread the tobacco leaves at the base of the plants. She said something in Abenaki language; Ruth supposed the words meant “thank you,” or expressed contrition of some kind.
“Kway is Abenaki for ‘hello,’ or ‘greetings,’ “ Gwen said. “And gici oli-wni means ‘many thank you’s.’ It’s an expressive language, isn’t it? I wish I could speak it. But I’ve learned only these few words from Russell’s cousin Mali, who is studying the language, hoping to teach it to Abenaki children. You know, of course, that Indian children were forbidden by the nuns in school to speak their own language? So it got lost. And part of their identity with it.”
“A tragedy,” Ruth agreed, imagining how it would have been not to be allowed to speak English in school, to ha
ve to speak a foreign language after a takeover of some kind. It could have happened after World War II. It was unthinkable.
The roots squealed as they pulled up the nightshade. “I’m sorry, sorry,” Gwen kept saying, and still the roots complained. Who could blame them?
“We’re all like the nightshade,” Ruth said. “We do harm to others, and then we do good. We’re so ambivalent.”
“You’ve got it,” said Gwen, scooping up the roots and leaves and stuffing them into a plastic bag. She would use the roots one last time for the atropine.
Afterward the two women walked through the woods looking for healing plants. Ruth had brought along a camera; she photographed a dozen she wanted to learn to recognize on her own land. Gwen showed her lady’s slipper, with its variegated leaves and crimson “lip”—picked so often, she said, that it was virtually extinct. She pointed out feverfew—or corn marigold—it had daisylike flower heads with yellow centers. They were helpful, she explained, in curing headaches. “And over there, that woolly plant with the fernlike leaves: it’s yarrow. I use it to help stop bleeding.”
Ruth was starting late with this knowledge, but she’d learn a little and pass it on to her children. Although Sharon was already something of a healer. She was always bringing castor oil or peanut oil to Ruth to “make the warts disappear” or “cure the muscles” where Ruth had injured herself sprawling headlong on the ice outside the barn this past winter. After that tumble, Ruth ruined an upholstered chair with the castor oil Sharon had lathered on her aching knee.
Gwen sent Ruth off with a half dozen plastic baggies of dried herbs and a cutting of aloe plant—”for healing cuts.” She offered a marijuana cutting from her jar, but Ruth reminded her that she had her hemp.
“Enough is enough,” she said, and impulsively hugged Gwen as she left. She looked back at the woods one more time as she left. It looked so serene, so bucolic. Who would think a young man had died there?
* * * *
Donna had left a message on Emily Willmarth’s voice mail to meet her at the high school at three o’clock. She had a mission, she said. She might need help. “Try to borrow your mother’s pickup. It’s a matter of life and death,” she’d added. And it literally was: her family’s life and then the girl skeleton.
“I don’t know where she lives,” Donna said, explaining the mission when Emily arrived. “I don’t even know her last name. That’s why we’re here, you see, so we can find out where she got those beads.”
Emily was psyched. “I didn’t have anything better to do— except work in the barn. I’m meeting a guy tonight for a movie. I don’t want to smell like a cow.”
“Did your mother give you a hassle about the truck?”
“Nah. I made a bargain with her. She’s getting a whole morning out of me tomorrow. Though if it’s a late night, it won’t be any fun getting up.”
Donna knew about making bargains with parents. She’d had her fill of bees in high school. In college, though, she’d wanted to make her own kind of honey. But since Shep Noble’s death the guy situation hadn’t worked out. Even with the death declared an accident, she felt herself under suspicion. Though everyone suspected everyone else, it seemed. Classes were quiet, no one wanted to speak up except for the usual swaggering males. With two college-related deaths, students and faculty alike were anxious, on edge; the campus was a ghost town after dark.
Donna just wanted to lead a normal life. For one thing, she wanted to get the “princess” back for her father. Get him back to work, out of the house. Out of her hair! Every minute he wanted to know where she was going, who she was seeing. He was obsessed with that skeleton. He was drinking too much, swearing, and then laughing like a crazy man, like he was some kind of manic-depressive.
“This guy I’m seeing tonight will probably turn out to be one more jerk,” Emily said. “I can’t seem to win this year. I’ve had it with Boze. All he wants now is to get inside my pants. I’m not ready for that. Not with Boze.”
Donna put a warning hand on Emily’s sleeve. The students were swarming out of the school now, climbing into buses and cars, milling about with friends. “Look for frizzy green hair— orange lipstick. You can’t miss her. You look to the right, I’ll take the left.”
The strategy was to follow the girl, or the bus she rode on, or the car she drove home in. It wouldn’t be easy, Donna knew, but she had to nail her down.
“Over there, a girl with greenish hair,” Emily cried, pointing. But it was the wrong shade of green, Donna informed her, and the girl was skinny and flat-breasted.
“Jill has big boobs. Falsies, maybe.” Donna had small breasts, but she rather liked them that way. They didn’t attract the wrong guys.
One by one the buses pulled out until there was only one left. Donna slumped back in her seat. Jill had probably stayed home that day. Tomorrow Donna had an afternoon class; she couldn’t afford to wait outside the high school. She groaned softly and Emily put a hand on her arm. “I know it’s been hard for you. But there’s some good news. We’ve got a new professor for soc class. She’s coming down from the university to teach it. She’s reading our papers.”
“But she doesn’t know us! She doesn’t know the story behind our papers. She won’t be able to judge.”
“She’ll judge just as well. She’ll judge the paper on its own merits and not on us as students. Besides, she’s nice. I saw her office door open and went in. She was interested in farming, she said, her grandfather farmed. She said she was looking forward to our papers. To getting to know us, even though it’s practically the end of the year.”
Was she interested in Native Americans? Donna wondered. Was the woman’s grandmother an Abenaki? Most likely not. Indians made up only one percent of the country’s population. And Abenaki, less than one percent in Vermont. What would this teacher care about some long-ago English girl who’d opted to stay with the natives? She balled her fists, squeezed her eyes shut.
She opened them wide again when Emily cried, “Is that her?”
Donna saw a green-haired girl burst through the door with two other girls, one of them in a blue and white cheerleading outfit. They were running to catch the last bus, which was already starting to pull out. “Hey, wait!” the girls cried, and, giggling, caught up with it. The driver swung open the door and they climbed in.
“Follow the bus,” Donna cried, and Emily moved out behind it. “But not too close,” she warned. “It’ll make a lot of stops. I don’t want Jill to see us. Maybe I won’t even talk to her this trip—I mean, if there’s a lot of people around her house.”
The bus made eleven stops before it turned onto a side road and flashed its red lights in front of a gray trailer set back in a small woods. There was a pot of geraniums on a wooden step and a huge TV aerial poking out through the roof. There was no car in front, no sign of life inside. The girls watched from a turnout a few yards down the road as Jill climbed off the bus, a maroon book pack on her back. She was wearing the beads; they looked incongruous with her green T-shirt and white shorts. Shorts, and it couldn’t be more than fifty-five degrees outside.
“Wait here,” Donna said.
“Don’t you want me to come with you?”
“I want you at the wheel so we can make a quick getaway if we have to. But if I need you, I’ll whistle. I don’t think anyone’s home, but you never know.”
“Could be an old grandmother.”
Emily was right. Donna marched boldly up to the door and, before Jill, with a shocked face, could shut it on her, pushed her way in. An elderly woman was asleep and snoring in a tattered armchair, a Good Housekeeping magazine upside down in her spread lap. A TV actress cried, “I can’t go on like this any longer!”
“What are you doing here? You’ve got nerve! Now go away.” Jill pushed Donna to the door and Donna shoved back. Jill staggered a little, and then regained her ground. “Don’t you push me,” she cried. “Nobody does that. Nobody pushes me around.” She grabbed a metal ashtray from a table
and flourished it.
“I’ll go if you tell me who gave you those beads. You stole them off a dead girl. She was buried up in our land.”
Jill was obdurate. “I never stole nothing. Somebody gave them to me, I told you. We made a bargain.” She still had the ashtray in her right hand. The TV actress was screaming at a hairy man in a red T-shirt. Donna felt a little dizzy. But she wasn’t going to leave without the beads, without knowing who gave them to Jill. She lunged at the girl, knocked the ashtray out of her hand, shoved her back against a chair. She felt the sharp nails on her neck. “Now you tell me who gave you those beads or I’ll call the police. You’re wearing stolen goods. The cops could put you in jail for that.”
“Don’t you call no cops! Don’t you tell about these beads. Here. Take ’em. I don’t like ’em nohow. They’re old. They don’t do nothing for me.” She yanked them off her neck and the thin strap broke, the beads clattering on the floor. “So pick ’em up. Go on. Pick ’m up you want ’em so bad.” She dove head first into the chair and curled up in a ball. Donna crawled about the room to collect them.
“They’s one under that table,” the grandmother said, awake now. “I don’t want ’em stuck in the vacuum. I told her them beads was secondhand. Cheap. I didn’t like the looks of that boy nohow. He wanted too much for ’em.”
“Like what?” asked Donna, reaching an arm under the TV stand, retrieving a small copper bead.
“Like her. He wanted her. She’d sell herself for a cheap set of beads! She’s a bad ’un, that ’un. Her mother was alive, she’d keep an eye on her. I can’t do nothing with her. Too old. Too sick. It ain’t right, I brought up five of my own, don’t need a sleep-around grandgirl.”
“Oh, shut up, Gran,” Jill said, unfolding herself from the chair. “I know about all your boyfriends till you got too old. You’re just jealous. No one wants you no more.”
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