Harvest of Bones

by Nancy Means Wright

  Now there were a mere hundred acres, a single ragtag cow rented by that Fay creature, standing like a silhouette in the noon sun. Even her mother had kept a few cows after her father’s runaway horse dragged him over the ledges that time and cracked open his head. . . . They’d laid him out on the horsehair sofa—her white dress got splashed with blood. But it was horses Glenna loved. And then her nephew Homer went and put down her beloved Jenny Two. And drove Glenna down to the city. She’d hardly wanted to live after that.

  She had a stick, for the meadow was full of chuck holes. No one to keep it up the way her mother used to: out all day picking stone, mending fence, a tiny woman with muscles like small round rocks. Glenna had to admire her. Herself, Glenna used to ride through the meadow—bareback, too, no saddle for her! She was young and fit then, free as a wild finch; she and Jenny’d take any of those damn fences like a stallion. Should have been one—her parents disappointed she turned out a girl. Even so, they made a boy out of her. Kept her close to the farm: chores every day, turned away any boy came near, though not many did—that Flint nose! The tall, flat Flint body with its size-eleven feet. Till one day, when she was eighteen, the body blossomed. Boys came around then. She had to give two or three of them that big foot.

  One of them had it in for her after that, kept hanging around, stuck on himself—stuck on something else he wanted from her—couldn’t think now who, what it was. One day he—or someone else, some other man... Her mind blurred. Something that happened, that kept coming up, from somewhere in her past—trapped now in the bottom of the mind.

  But no local boy was ever her match. No one was, not even the college boys—to them, she was just the “local girl.” Though she did all right in college, hard as it was when she had to live at home. Won a writing prize once, swore she’d be a journalist—though nothing ever came of it. Other things took over her life. But those college boys! She didn’t hold with their foolishness anyway. Fraternity boys, acting like children.

  Till Mac MacInnis came along. She was working in that New York printers’ union, riding the train to work—missing the farm. She called home every weekend, worried about Mother. Mac was plug-ugly—she was a Venus by contrast. He was a good two inches shorter than she, fringe of rusty hair arranged around a bald spot, those bad teeth. But for all that, he had something. He could talk—never mind it was mostly lies. It was a power struggle from the start. Who could outwit whom. He could talk a streak all right! He’d made Mother laugh now and then.

  But he didn’t like the farm. When Glenna told him she was moving back, fed up with cities, Mother needing help— Parkinson’s bending her in half, the poor eyesight—he put his foot down. He wasn’t going. “All right, then,” she’d said, “don’t. Stay here with your damn proofreading. Let ’em pay you ten cents an inch, exploit the hell out of you. I’m going home.”

  But two weeks later, there he was, unannounced. He’d been fired by the Times. She found him squatting in the farmhouse kitchen, his dainty small feet up on the table; he was guzzling her best scotch. Mother smiling at some joke he’d told. “Hi, there,” he said, “got any vermouth? I’d really prefer a Manhattan.”

  And that’s how she remembered him best. Feet up, guzzling booze. Her booze. Lost his job, so he lived off her. She made him sleep alone, of course—who’d want a liquory-breathed man to sleep with? She never cared for that part of marriage anyway. Way he did it, he just stuck it in, no sweet words, no preamble, just bullish. And thought he was some Don Juan. Oh, sure. A whole six or seven years it was till she got fed up. Even Mother agreed. He wouldn’t throw a stick on the woodstove while she and Mother were out with the cows.

  And then one night they had it out. Hard to remember exactly—her mind did quirky things these days—but it was bad, she remembered that. It began with that open grave—the hole he said he’d dug for her horse; he wouldn’t fill it in. She had to step around it to get to the barn. Then they’d had a cow down with mastitis; she was giving it penicillin. Another cow freshening at the same time, in trouble. Tried to call the vet— he’d have to drag the calf out with a chain. But the vet busy somewhere else, so she begged Mac to help; he came, but just leaned against the stanchion and watched. Complained about the smell, the manure on his New York shoes. She was furious. The cow died. The calf lived, but Mac just shrugged, said how homely it was.

  “Better-looking than you,” she’d said, and he’d laughed. “Or you,” he said. “You look more like your mother every day.”

  It was too much for her. She went at him with a stick. Took him by surprise—she was bigger, stronger than he was—he keeled right over backward. The cow kicked up a pile of sawdust then and she couldn’t see. A minute later, Mac was up. He was going in the house to pack; he was leaving, he yelled, then stomped off. She went back to the cow. Someone standing in the barn door then. Who was it? Someone she knew anyway, a man. She couldn’t think; this was where her mind blanked. Where the nightmares began. Time passed; things happened. She just remembered riding off on Jenny Two, and when she got back, Mac was gone. And then that anonymous letter, someone who saw, saying she’d killed Mac.

  But that hole. Who had filled it in? Herself? The letter said she had. She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t bring herself to dig it up and look. “Don’t go digging up trouble,” her mother had said. “Might not be anything at all in there. Mac just filled it in ’fore he left. Go, girl, make love to your horse.”

  Glenna missed Mac, though, after that. Funny, but she missed the old bastard.

  She’d reached the fence now; it divided her land from the Willmarths’. The other side was cleared pasture, not overgrown like hers with nettles, furze, goldenrod, black-eyed Susans. Smart, that Ruth Willmarth: she worked hard. But that daughter of hers, asking personal questions, Glenna didn’t like that. Meant well, she supposed. Glenna recalled how she’d had school projects, had to do them or flunk out. Well, she’d talk to the girl again sometime. Couldn’t let Alwyn Bagshaw have the upper hand, do all the talking. He’d better not talk about her, better not! You couldn’t trust a Bagshaw. Aw, the girl would come back. Glenna would see what she’d written. She liked that girl, to tell the truth. Seemed honest, practical—not so flighty as her nephew Homer’s girl, Hartley.

  There was a lot of hollering back by the barn and trailer— Hartley again, she supposed, running after that fool dog. They said Glenna couldn’t see for the cataracts, ought to have them removed: No way! She saw enough. She supposed she’d have to go back and put a stop to the noise. Though she needed a nap—she was getting old. Didn’t like to think how old. But they weren’t putting her away like they tried with that greyhound. No ma’am. She’d fight. She’d die before she went to any Lands’ End.

  “Call the police,” Ruth shouted over the barn phone, and Emily said, “I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me.”

  “Who wouldn’t let you?”

  “That woman Fay, for one. She said the publicity would scare away her new boarder. And Glenna, too. It has nothing to do with her, she says; she doesn’t know how it got there. That girl, Hartley, dug the whole thing up—it was mostly covered with dirt when I saw it. But it’s too big for her husband, Glenna says. ‘It’s not Mac,’ she said. But she’s scared stiff of any police. Says they’ll come and put her away. Mom, everyone’s in hysterics here. Please come. Now.”

  So Ruth left in the middle of cleaning stalls—droppings everywhere, Zelda’s calf mewing, needing to be bottle-fed, with Jane Eyre out in the fields now—she might have to call the vet, God forbid. She ran back to the barn and phoned Colm Hanna, just in case. She might need his help to calm that mad crew.

  Colm would meet her there, he said. She’d caught him in the process of laying out a corpse for his father. “Don’t panic. Don’t let them upset you. I know Glenna. She had a to-do with Dad once, over her mother’s demise. Wouldn’t let him cremate, but wouldn’t bury her in one piece, either. ‘What’ll we do, keep her on ice till you make up your mind?’ Dad said. Glenna didn
’t think that was funny.”

  Colm obviously did; he even got Ruth laughing over the phone. He was good for her, Colm was, lightened her up; she tended to be overly serious, her dour Scottish genes. Sometimes, though, Colm’s joking around was too much. He didn’t always know when to stop. She flung an arm into a plaid jacket and ran out again.

  She found the situation even worse than Emily had said.

  “It’s not mine,” Glenna was squealing, her hair a storm cloud around her face, “got nothing to do with me or Mother. Get that thing out of here!” Then Fay Hubbard shouting, “I can’t have a skeleton lying around a respectable B and B! Bury it up in that field. Mr. Crowningshield’ll be back any minute. He’ll tell the chamber of commerce. Then what?”

  “I’ll get his room,” Hartley said. “Mice, I don’t mind. But I’m not sleeping with a dead man outside the door.”

  “Do we know it’s a man?” said Ruth, trying to bring logic to the scene, placing a firm hand on Glenna’s trembly shoulder.

  “It’s Mac. We know it’s Mac, right, Aunty?” said Hartley, grinning into her great-aunt’s face. “Admit it, it’s Mac. So he had a heart attack and you buried him. Saved a lot of money, right. Aunty? None of that funeral home stuff for you?”

  “No, it’s not right,” yelled Glenna. “That’s not Mac. It’s too—too—it doesn’t even look like him, not one bit. He was smaller than that. He had rusty-colored hair.”

  “The mice got it,” said Hartley.

  There were fringes of dirty ashy hair on the crest and sides of the skull. The teeth looked equine; the bones were brownish and spongy-looking; a thin vine had wound itself about the anklebone, where the weathered boots had fallen loose. The fingernails were long and thick and yellow—they gave Ruth the shivers. Yet the bones appeared to be separate, disconnected. And something that looked like a pointed rock—an arrowhead?—was stuck into the sternum. Was it an Indian, as the girls were shouting? Was the skeleton really that old? What was left of the clothing had been nibbled at by something—though still recognizable as dungarees and a plaid shirt—the standard uniform around town. It was no Stone Age Indian. And a mildewed cap on the skull, like a plaid Scots bonnet, half-chewed, or merely worn away. When Hartley picked it up—ignoring Ruth’s warning—Glenna screamed and said, “Bum it!”

  Still, one thing was obvious, as Colm Hanna pointed out when he arrived, breathless, in baggy brown cords and a green tweed Irish cap—one of a hundred hats he owned—and stopped to examine the pile of bones: “It’s missing a finger bone. The rest of the limbs are accounted for.” Ruth looked back at him, feeling her face get hot.

  “A finger with a gold ring,” Emily whispered, and Hartley made a hissing sound; her face flushed bright pink with wind and intrigue, and her chestnut hair danced in the wind: “What? What ring? What ring, Emily? Whose ring? Whoa, tell me.”

  “That’s what we have to find out, right, Mother?” said Emily, ignoring the other girl, and Ruth nodded, while Colm wheeled about and ran up to the house, shirttail climbing out of his pants and flapping loose in the October breeze.

  “What’s he doing?” shouted Fay. “He’s not calling the police! He can’t do that. I’m running a business here.”

  Aunty joined in the protest then, her hoarse voice riding low under the others. While in the barn Dandelion bellowed, and the greyhound lifted its nose and wailed.

  “It’s him,” Hartley whispered to Ruth. “I know it is. It’s him. It’s old Mac. She did him in.”

  Fay clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Shut up, girl. You want our aunt to fry?”

  “ ‘Our’ aunt?” said Hartley. “You’re owning up now?” And then she said, “ ‘Fry’? You mean—oh no, oh no. Aunty, no!” She lunged at Glenna, threw a possessive arm around her shoulders.

  Glenna stood frozen in her niece’s embrace. “It’s not Mac—is it?” she whispered, and dropped her head onto her grand-niece’s quivering shoulder.

  Chapter Six

  Ruth was carrying wood down the basement steps when her load was suddenly lightened. She looked up, to see Kevin Crowningshield, the B and B guest from next door. She’d met him briefly the night before. “Oh, hello,” she said. She was tired—she’d had an unscheduled barn inspection that morning from Agri-Mark. The fellow had a list of complaints, was “put-out” by Vic’s chickens in the barn. “I’ll see that they stay out,” she’d said, knowing it was impossible, what with people and animals in and out all day.

  “A woman shouldn’t carry that load,” Kevin Crowningshield said. The voice was quite thrilling actually, deep; the man could be a baritone soloist. “My—well, my wife used to say that,” he apologized when she glanced up at him. “It crushes the organs or something.”

  Ruth had to smile. “I’ve been carrying wood for twenty years, and my organs are still intact—far as I know.” Actually, she was two years overdue for a physical—Pap smear, mammogram, all that female business. She had no health insurance, for one thing: it was a rip-off, Pete always said, and she had to agree for once. Of course, health insurance probably came with his new sales job. But she and the children wouldn’t benefit—only that would-be actress “friend,” if he married her, as he evidently wanted to do. She swallowed, hard.

  “So I see,” said Kevin, with an admiring glance that should have annoyed her but somehow didn’t. How long since a handsome man had looked at her in that way? There was Colm Hanna, yes—but who could call that pepper-haired, sunken-cheeked, bony Irishman handsome? Colm was, well, Colm. Comfortable. A savior, really, since Pete’s defection. “Back off,” she’d tell him on occasion, and he would. She was grateful for that.

  Kevin had come over to talk—if she had a free minute, he said. He’d finish the stacking job with her to create that minute. There was something familiar about him. Had she seen him before? But, of course, he’d lived here once, he said, in town, years ago, worked for a company up in Vergennes. She and Kevin had probably encountered one another in the post office or the local hardware store. She would have been in her twenties then, not looking at anyone but Pete. Oh but Pete was gorgeous then: tall and lanky, that dark brown hair curling all over his head....

  Pete was growing bald now, the hair receding above his temples. She was glad, wasn’t she?

  Kevin had a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. A self-deprecating smile, crooked—a relief really; she was suspicious of “perfect” men: They were usually stuck on themselves. Too many people in the Flint kitchen—that’s why he’d come over, he explained: to use the phone. His eyebrow questioned, and of course she nodded. “All shouting at the top of their lungs over there,” he said, smiling. “How could I make a phone call?”

  They made short work of the wood stacking with his help, heaving the logs up in tiers in her dank basement. He didn’t seem afraid to soil his clothes, though he wore a clean blue shirt, dark pressed pants, nice shoes. In short, he dressed “city.” So why wasn’t she suspicious of him? Was she sex-starved? Well, she’d better make it clear she wasn’t.

  “I just need someone, uh, rational to talk to,” he said, the brief phone call over. He settled into a kitchen chair, hands cupping the apple cider she offered. He didn’t drink coffee, he said—he had high blood pressure, took something for it. Already she sensed his vulnerability.

  “I’m not much on advice. But I’ll listen. I mean, until the cows—you know. Tim, the hired man, he’s had flu. I made him go home early. My daughter Emily’s bogged down with homework—she claims. And my son, Vic—well, he’s upstairs. Worn-out from building a pen for his chickens. So they’ll stay out of the barn—Mother’s orders. And then, he’s worried about a hawk he found in the pasture. He calls the vet every day.”

  “A hawk?”

  “Red-tailed hawk, yes. Poisoned—we don’t know how. Pesticides, the vet seems to think. But not from here. Already we have another victim, a crow. Vic found it; we took it to the vet’s. She’s understandably upset about it.”

  Kevin nodded in sympathy.
“I promise not to overstay.”

  At least, she thought, he was still staying next door. Hadn’t been put off by that skeleton. He’d encountered it yesterday, just as the police came to remove it, to send it on to the forensics lab up in Burlington. Along with the separated hand, of course—though the bones in general looked pretty well deteriorated. But she’d kept the ring. What would the forensics people know about a ring? Of course, the police would want to know about the ring now. But that Indian arrowhead in the breastbone. Someone had jammed it in there. Was it Glenna?

  Outside, it was raining, a cold October rain. At least it was melting the ice left over from an earlier freezing rain. She’d have to bring the cows in soon, for the night anyway. She hated doing that. So much extra work, feeding and hoeing out the manure.

  But it was warm in the kitchen—she dropped another log into the woodstove; the cider she shared was comforting. She could spare another ten or fifteen minutes, couldn’t she? His eyes begged. He was talking about his wife.

  “And so she left with another woman, to join this group, this healing center or whatever it is. Just left me a note. ‘You’ll make out,’ it said. Or something like that. I couldn’t reread it; I tore it up in a fit of frenzy. I couldn’t imagine her leaving like that. She’d always been so ... easy to get along with, so loving. I was devastated. You know.”

  Ruth nodded. She knew. Though at least Pete had had the courage to confront her before he left. But then, he had three children. “Children?” she asked Kevin, but he shook his head.