Harvest of Bones

by Nancy Means Wright

  And now there was this Crowningshield fellow, insinuating himself into her life, slurping up her cider. Why, the guy had a wife! Though Ruth still had a husband—he had to remember that. The split wasn’t official yet. He and Pete were on the same side for once: both hoping for a divorce.

  “All that, I guess,” his father was saying about Mac, motioning Colm to help lay out the body in the satin-lined coffin. “I only saw him once or twice. Your mother was alive then; we met them in the diner. Your mother just plunked herself down in their booth—she knew Glenna from some planning commission they were both on, liked the woman. But uninvited. Oh, she was always doing that, Roseanne— your mother. Impulsive-like. Not thinking of the reception we might get.”

  It was painful to look at the boy after they laid him there. Colm’s father had to be more inured to death than Colm was. The boy’s face was a rosy color from the pink embalming fluid; any minute, it seemed, he’d get up and hit a home run.

  “I guess! Walk in a restaurant, your mother’d know everybody’s business before we’d leave. Me, I’d cringe.” William draped a white sheet over the body. “He’ll hold for now, poor kid, till the makeup lady gets here. Get me a cuppa coffee, huh? These kids, they do me in.”

  “Decaf, Dad. You know what the doctor says. That high blood pressure—I saw your chart. And that disk problem, in your back. Doing anything about it?”

  “Hell, they dis-counted that,” his father said, and Colm laughed—though the pun was probably unintentional.

  “How many miles you walked this week?”

  “Hundred times around the house. Inside. When I’m dead, then I’ll worry about it.”

  “Sure, Dad.” Although not a churchgoer—he did catch the “early show” now and then at St. Mary’s—his father still believed in an afterlife. The priests got to them early; hard to break old habits, old beliefs. Colm would tell him it was this life that counted—the only sure thing—but the words floated past his father’s ear. Nice, really. He wished he could believe, too.

  In the kitchen, he put a spoonful of decaf into a flowered cup. It was thin bone china, cracked on the handle, probably the last of a set that had belonged to his grandmother. He stirred in a spoonful of sugar, though his dad liked two. He put two in his own cup, though—what the hell. He had thirty or more years yet to go. Knock on wood.

  “So, Dad, tell about that diner encounter. What did you talk about?”

  “Jeez, Colm, it was a quarter of a century ago. Well, I don’t know—his work mostly, I suppose. Mac was a talker. That New York accent, you know, like a certain rep we got up here in Vermont—though damn, I voted for the guy. It was thick Brooklyn. You’d think he wrote the whole New York Times. He had an opinion about everything.”

  “He was a proofreader, Ruth says.”

  “Never know it from him. Wanted something more, awful bad, I don’t know what. Not a contented type, you know? One of those questers? Hey, you really going down there, Colm? To that crazy city? They tell me the taxi drivers don’t speak English anymore. You got to point out where you’re going on a map. Look, kid, the guy’s nothin’ but bones now. What’s the use?”

  “It might not be Mac, those bones. For one thing, the forensics people thought the guy was a younger man than Mac. Well, anyway, I want to know Mac better. Anyone who’d marry Glenna, move back to Vermont with her, he must have some kind of guts. What do you suppose he saw in her?”

  “The farm? Land? A listening ear? I don’t know. Well, suit yourself. Just stay out of the subways, okay? They got kooks just waiting around to shove you down in the tracks.”

  “Dad, there are kooks everywhere. Up here, too.” He finished his coffee; he needed the caffeine. He’d take Amtrak, he guessed. Didn’t want to have to drive into the city. “You gonna wheel that boy into the showroom?”

  His father frowned; he didn’t always like Colm’s kidding around. Colm took the initiative anyway, pushed the coffin in on its gurney. They’d bought the gurney a year ago, along with a small elevator to get down to the cremation chamber, a kind of dumbwaiter (an ironic name, he thought). No more lifting for his father. It had cost a fortune, but Colm had helped out. His father was growing frail—osteoporosis, it looked like, the way the shoulders hunched forward, the back a humpy curve between.

  William heaved himself up out of a chair with a grunt and followed Colm into the parlor.

  “Family coming this afternoon for the wake. That’s the hard part. I need you here, son, not in any damn city. But if you gotta go, don’t stay long. They’re talking about freezing rain again tomorrow. You never know who’ll crack up, way they speed around here. I can’t do it alone, Colm.”

  “I’ve told you that, Dad. You need to hire someone.”

  “Well, I’m telling you, Colm,” William replied, a non sequitur.

  There was no use pursuing that subject again. Anyway, his beeper was sounding off. And he was on duty. Jeez. He hoped it wasn’t another crazy kid.

  * * * *

  Kevin Crowningshield called Ruth at her barn. He said he’d been seeing a lawyer, was sorry he’d missed her when she stopped by. When she blurted out her story—what she’d seen at the Healing House—he panicked, said “Angie,” told her to wait out front, that he was calling Branbury Rescue. He told her she had to come. Would it bring Colm Hanna? Ruth wondered.

  She felt swept away; she was, literally. Yanked into Kevin’s car after he whirled up to her barn. In seconds, it seemed, they were speeding up the mountain road. Kevin pulled over momentarily to let the ambulance scream past, then shoved his foot all the way down on the accelerator. He didn’t speak; his mouth was an inverted U. Desperate—that was the word. Ruth felt a wave of nausea welling up in her throat. What kind of reception would an ambulance find? She kept hearing that woman’s voice: “No doctors.... Please.” Now Ruth was interfering, in the worst way.

  Colm was already inside when they arrived. He glanced at her, then at Kevin. Why did she feel guilty for being here? A second medic, in overalls and boots, was jumping out the back of the ambulance: Tom LeDuc, a farmer. When did he have time for this? Ruth wanted to shrink into the woodwork, but Kevin motioned her onward; she was committed.

  But it seemed the residents had been waiting for outside help; the house was in pandemonium, ten women talking, all at once: They weren’t wearing robes now, just ordinary clothing: T-shirts, jeans, sneakers.

  “She was only paring apples.... For lunch... to make us a strudel—she was always doing extra for people....”

  “Why did she do that?... Mother told her not to....”

  “Cut herself. Such a tiny cut and then ...”

  “Oh, look, is she dying? Please help!... It’s Angie... In there….”

  It was a fight between Kevin and the medics to carry Angie out and into the ambulance. She was alive. Ruth saw the blue eyes open, unfocused, the vomit coming again and again, blood streaming from the finger cut. “Internal bleeding, as well,” Colm said, though Ruth didn’t know how he’d know. It seemed a sea of blood; even the walls had a bloody tint from the late sun, though it was still raining a little. Would there be a rainbow? Incongruous thought. Ruth could smell, taste the blood.

  They wrestled Angie onto a stretcher, the medics elbowing Kevin away. He cried out her name, over and over: “Angie, Angie, it’s me, Kevin—Angie ...” Angie’s lips appeared to struggle with words, but failed; her eyes closed, she gave herself to the medics. The last Ruth saw other was a blur of white being shoved into the rear of the ambulance.

  Colm was all business; it was a side of him she’d never really seen. He leapt into the back, Kevin behind him, and the ambulance shrieked off and down the mountain road.

  It seemed they would drown in the silence. Three of the women were weeping. Isis was slumped in her wheelchair; she kept running a hand through her uncombed hair. “I can’t understand it,” she moaned. “She’s been taking the blood thinner. Oh, yes, I made her do it. I got the prescription myself. Why should that tiny cut
—a mere slip of the paring knife...” She held her head in her hands like a fallen fruit; her belly ballooned. Around her, the women were starting to clean up, banging about with pails and scrub brushes, working frenetically, as if it would help them to comprehend all this. Isis’s denim work shirt was stained with blood; she looked like a distraught housewife with a child who’d had a bad accident.

  “Take Marna to the hospital, would you?” she begged Ruth. “I have to know—about Angie. Her stepmother will want to...” She was too exhausted to finish the sentence. One of the women—Marna, Ruth assumed—ran up, pushing her thin arms into a blue wool jacket. She followed Ruth out to Kevin’s rented car. He’d left the keys in it; it was an automatic, easy to drive. Ruth felt small in this big car, not quite in control, like a child on a merry-go-round horse. But no parent to hold on to her, keep her from falling off.

  She edged out into the road, glanced back through the rearview mirror. Alwyn Bagshaw was in his yard, watching, unabashed. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was waving. The acrid smell of smoke pushed through her passenger window. Bagshaw, burning his trash again, she supposed. It seemed the town just closed their eyes to his civil disobedience.

  Ahead, as she rounded a curve—Marna silent and tense in the seat beside her—she glimpsed the rainbow, a double rainbow, slanting down into the rocky mountain brook, one color bleeding into the next: lilac, red, orange.... It was strangely beautiful.

  Nature was full of ironies these days.

  Chapter Nine

  Emily had an important message for her mother. And she wanted to deliver it alone. So she waited until Vic left the barn that evening with his two chickens. Personally, Emily despised chickens. They were such silly creatures, running around in circles on those wrinkly feet. She preferred ducks—ducks had personality. But her pet Quack had got run over by a tractor, and her mother had never allowed another. Ducks got in the way, her mother said, unreasonably. And it was her mother who had been driving the tractor that ran over Quack. Even now, the tears shoved into Emily’s eyes. She remembered how Quack would waddle out to meet the school bus. Which was more than her mother ever did. Emily wasn’t feeling at all good about her mother. Not today.

  Here was Vic now, a chicken clutched, squawking, in either hand, a frown on his bony brow. “Why can’t they stay in the barn?” he accused Emily, as though she’d made the rule.

  “Because the inspector said no. They contaminate.” Emily heard her voice grow weary; they’d had this conversation before.

  “How, tell me how!” the boy argued, and without waiting for an answer, he launched into a diatribe about his poisoned hawk. “Mother won’t take me there. I want to see it.” He moved closer on his bowed legs and Emily backed off; she didn’t want those chickens pecking at her new pink mohair sweater. She was going over to see Hartley Flint. The girl had some “mission” in mind; she needed Emily’s “immediate” help—something to do with Glenna Flint, up in Rockbury, where Hartley’s parents had stuck her, poor thing. Ambushed was the word Hartley had used. Emily wanted to help out, she really did! She was quite fond of the stubborn old lady. And Glenna had known her dad; he’d fixed a fence at the Flint farm once, and Glenna was grateful.

  “If it were Dad, he’d take you to that vet,” she said softly. She had her own personal mission—it involved her parents. She might need Vic on her side.

  But, as usual, Vic was no help. “He would not. You know he would not,” he said. “He never took me anyplace except to the feed stores, where he had to go anyway. Then he called it my outing.”

  She gave up on Vic. “Put the dumb things in the chicken pen,” she snapped, “right now.” And she pushed past him into the barn.

  “Dad called,” she shouted at the shadowy blue-jeaned figure at the rear of the barn. “He’s coming up Halloween weekend. He wants to see me and Vic. He wants to see you, Mother.”

  She moved deeper into the barn. The stench of manure and urine shocked her nose; the bellowing calves jarred her ears. What was she doing here anyway? Why did her mother have to keep running this farm? Her father had gotten away. The farm wasn’t going anywhere, he’d told Emily once. It was like running and running in place and not moving beyond the next fence, he’d said. It was wasting his life. And who cared? People thought their food came from the grocery store. They never thought of the farmer.

  “Mother,” she said to the shape bent over in the rear of the dimly lit barn, “are you listening? Can you hear me? I said, Dad is coming. He’s coming soon. Can you answer me, Mother?”

  But when she shuffled through the sawdust and the blown hay and the manure patties, which hadn’t been swept up yet—it was Vic’s job to sweep, and he was goofing off with his silly chickens—her mother still wouldn’t answer. She was bent over Zelda’s calf.

  “I think it has mastitis,” she said, as if Emily had never spoken at all; like the only thing her mother cared about in the whole wide world—more than her younger daughter, obviously—was that foolish calf of crazy Zelda’s.

  “Mother, we have to talk. Talk to me, Mother!” she said, and rubbed her face where the tears were drizzling down either side of her nose.

  Her mother turned then and stood up. She looked at Emily as if she were seeing a stranger. And then, unaccountably, she lunged at the girl, threw her arms around her, squeezed.

  But Emily couldn’t hug back. She couldn’t. Because of what her mother was saying.

  “That woman is dead,” her mother said. “The one at the Healing House. Angie. Colm called. She died an hour after they got her to the hospital. Then Kevin called. He says they murdered her. Did they, you think?”

  Well, Emily couldn’t answer that. She remembered those pasty-faced women; she couldn’t pick out an individual face. She pulled away, looked down on her mother’s brown head, threaded with gray, with hay wisps. Ruth had sunk back on her heels. Her mother didn’t know that woman, either. What was all this sudden grief? Or was it that man, that Kevin? He’d been to the house three times already. Trying to pull her mother away from her father. Her father, who was coming this very month. Maybe to stay.

  “I want you to see him, Mother. I want you to think of us. Vic and me and Sharon. I want my father back.”

  She did, too! She didn’t care what her mother wanted. She was beyond reason now. People worked things out. Wilder’s mother had. Wilder’s father had left just a year ago, after his older son got in all that drug-related trouble, and then he came back. And Wilder’s mother let him. Because of Wilder and the youngest boy, Garth. She had a big heart. She understood.

  But Emily’s mother only said, “Angie was younger than me, too. She made the most unusual jewelry. Kevin showed me a piece. All that talent, wasted. Who says there’s a caring God!”

  On that note, Emily gave up. She left the barn, holding her breath, then gasped for air when she got outside. She ran, stumbling, through the south pasture toward the Flint farm to see about this “immediate” mission for Hartley. Her mother had let the cows out again after milking, and off in the twilit field she saw Zelda, grazing under a crescent moon, apart from the herd.

  “That’s Mother all right,” she said aloud, and jammed her knuckles together in frustration.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t freezing rain that brought the next victim to the mortuary. William Hanna couldn’t believe this one. And his son out of touch, and his own arthritis kicking in. Sciatic nerve bothering, too, the way the pain traveled from the hip down into his stiff toes. It was definitely getting time to retire. If only he had a son willing to take over the business. But it seemed there was nothing for it but to carry on.

  This one was female: not young, but not old, either—mid-to late forties maybe. Cut her finger with a knife, paring an apple, and bled to death, the woman who called told him. Stoic-voiced, she said they’d broken a rule, sent the stricken woman off in an ambulance; the voice faltered as she spoke. What rule she’d broken was beyond William. If you need help, call the ambulanc
e—that was his “dictum.” The Branbury Rescue number was taped to his phone. Though he knew it by heart, Colm being a volunteer himself. If he could get to the phone when he needed it, that is. The stubborn joints! Doctors didn’t know from zilch. He’d go see a chiropractor.

  Pale as ice, this body was, except for a slight skin rash. Early rigor mortis in the jaw and neck by the time he got her; that stiffness depressed him every time—it happened so fast. Like the soul couldn’t wait to get rid of the body, to break loose. He wanted to open all the windows, restore the rose to her cheeks. And him in this business forty years now. He had to get out soon, had to .…

  What made it worse: husband charging in a couple of hours later, weeping, keening like a woman. William Hanna didn’t hold with men crying; he didn’t care what his son said; it wasn’t for men to give in like that. Hell, his job was to cremate her, that’s all, and the husband wanted it done at once, fast. Couldn’t bear to look at her all rigid like that, he’d told William. Well, “fast” wasn’t William’s way of doing things these days. “You want to assist me?” he’d asked the husband—Crowningshield his name. “You know anything about this business?”

  The guy got out of there “fast” then, wiping his eyes, didn’t want any part of the nitty-gritty. Aw, they were all like that. Most of them wanting the faces dolled up, death disguised or denied altogether. As if anything could wipe it out.

  Himself, basically, he’d gotten used to it, hadn’t he? The old ones he put through the paces without a quiver. It was the young ones who got to him, ones who died before their time, like that boy yesterday; this one today. This one had been quite lovely: good bone structure, strong cheekbones. He peered closer at her neck and breast. Something about the tint of the skin, though, more than just the blue-gray of the average corpse. There was something greenish yellow showing up, a kind of jaundice. As if it had been more than hemorrhage—hemorrhage of the larynx and lungs, too, they said. Like something had helped her along. Doctor might not have noticed it right off—whatever it was. If it was. But he’d done enough corpses to know when something wasn’t right. No, something wasn’t right.