by Donna Ball
“You can’t play a 45 record without a phonograph,” pointed out Lindsay.
“And you can’t play an eight-track on anything,” Cici admitted.
“Still,” Lindsay said, “what a piece of history this is! I’ll get Noah to wrap them so they don’t break, and carry them down for me. I can’t wait to see the rest of them.”
“One project at a time,” Cici said, carefully returning the last of the plates to the box as she stood. “Come on, let’s get this vanity out of here.”
Farley’s familiar blue truck creaked to a stop in the circular drive in front of the house just as Cici and Lindsay had finished trundling the vanity across the yard, up the wide curving steps, and across the columned porch to the front door. They carefully lowered the furniture to the painted floorboards of the porch and straightened up, grateful for the break, as Farley got out of the truck.
He was a big, slow-moving man with a propensity for dressing in camouflage and cracked steel-toed boots. He always sported a two-day growth of stubbly beard, and carried a soda can, into which he periodically spit a stream of tobacco juice. He was a man of few words but apparently endless skills. He had repaired their water heater, replaced the tiles on their roof, rewired their house, rebuilt their porch railing when it was destroyed by a flock of sheep, and performed numerous other emergency services for them around the house. It had been he, in fact, who had supplied them with the sheepdog, who was now barking and circling the truck madly, occasionally lunging in to take a nip at the tires.
Ignoring the barking dog, Farley politely tipped the bill of his camo cap to the two ladies on the porch. “Mornin’,” he said, and spat into the can.
“Good morning, Farley.” Cici raised her voice to be heard above the din.
Lindsay shouted, “Rebel, quiet!” to no avail, and then smiled at Farley. “Hi, Farley.”
“Doing deliveries for Jonesie,” he said, and nodded toward the back of the pickup truck. “Got your sander here.”
Jonesie and his wife—who was generally known as Mrs. Jonesie—were the proprietors of Family Hardware and Sundries, the biggest store in the tiny town of Blue Valley. From tea-spoons to masonry saws, from dish towels to windowpanes, if they didn’t have it, they could get it.
“Oh, good!” exclaimed Cici, coming down the steps.
“Great,” added Lindsay with slightly less enthusiasm.
“Hi, Farley!” Lori called from across the yard, waving as she skipped toward them. Doing the requisite little dance that was necessary to avoid being bitten by the dog, Lori drew up to the truck, breathless. “Aunt Bridget said for you not to leave until she wraps up a pie for you. She baked an extra one this morning.” She turned to her mother. “We finished hoeing the garden. It’s going to be ready to sow next week.”
Farley walked around to the back of the truck. “Your tiller broke?”
Lori turned an accusing gaze to her mother. “We have a tiller?”
“Oh . . . you mean that thing that attaches to the back of the lawn mower.” Lindsay tried to sound vague, and avoided Lori’s eyes.
“I’ll fix it for you,” volunteered Farley. “Ten dollar.”
“Um, no, thanks. It’s fine.” Cici, too, avoided Lori’s eyes. “Besides, Bridget is in charge of the garden. Let’s get this thing out of the truck.”
“Got to get your peas and taters in by St. Paddy’s Day,” observed Farley, and swung down the tailgate with a clatter. “Lot faster to use the tiller.”
Lori’s expression soured. “Why do I feel I’ve just been had?”
Bridget came out with a pie wrapped in aluminum foil as Cici and Farley reached the front porch with the sander. “It’s apple and currant,” she told him. “I’ll put it in your truck.”
Farley touched his cap brim. “Kind of you, ma’am.”
“Aunt Bridget,” Lori challenged darkly, “did you know we have a tiller?”
Bridget looked perfectly innocent. “Why no, dear. I don’t believe I did.”
Farley collected his soda can from the porch rail where he had left it, and spat again. “Supposed to make sure you know how to use it.”
Cici smiled patiently. “I’ve used a floor sander before, Farley.”
“Knew a man cut off his toe with one, once.”
“I’ll be sure to wear shoes.”
He looked skeptical. “You got a long cord?”
“One hundred feet.”
“Got to ground it.”
“Grounded.”
He gave a grunt that sounded neither convinced, nor happy. “Here’s an extra belt, and some replacement pads.” He handed them to her. “You know how to replace a belt?”
“I’ll bet I can figure it out.”
He grunted again, and then turned to Bridget as she came back up the steps from placing the pie in the front seat of his truck. “Supposed to tell you Burt Shaw is coming next month. You want to get on his list?”
“Who’s Burt Shaw?” Bridget asked.
“Sheepshearer.”
Lori, forsaking the matter of the tiller, exclaimed, “Are we going to shear the sheep?”
Bridget looked uncertain. “I suppose we have to. After all, it’s been two years.”
“Oughta have good fleece by now,” observed Farley, gazing out over the meadow where the sheep nibbled the new spring grass. “Lotta money in fleece.”
Lori was immediately interested. “Really? How much?”
“Heard about a girl out on Route Twelve that pays ten to fifteen dollar a pound.”
Cici said, “How much does it cost to shear a sheep?”
He shrugged. “Fella charges by the head. Course if it was me, I’d do it myself.”
“I don’t know . . .” Bridget still sounded uneasy.
“Is it hard?” Lori wanted to know.
“Nah. Just like skinning a cat.”
All four women on the porch were silent at that, none of them wanting to ask just what, exactly, he knew about skinning a cat.
“Well,” Bridget said after a moment, “I guess I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks for bringing out the sander,” Cici said.
He spat politely into the can once again and held out his hand. “Ten dollar.”
Lindsay dug into the back pocket of her jeans and found a ten-dollar bill, which he carefully arranged in his billfold alongside several others. The ladies had learned to ask for multiple tens whenever they went to the bank, and to keep them about their persons at all times, just in case they needed help from Farley.
Lori walked Farley to his truck. “Say, Farley,” she inquired thoughtfully, “how many pounds of fleece would you say a sheep has?”
He lifted his hat, scratched his head, spat again into the can, and spent a moment gazing thoughtfully into the distance. “Dunno,” he admitted at last.
“Oh.”
Then she had another idea. “Do you know anything about cleaning out ponds?”
He followed her around the house, down a flagstone path now half obscured by brown leaves and dried mud, through a winter-ravaged flower garden, and to the largest of the two garden ponds. This one was a pool of about ten by ten feet and no more than two or three feet deep in its prime. Now, filled with uncounted years of rotted garden debris, leaves, broken branches, and who-knew-what-else, the oily black skim coat of fetid water was barely six inches deep. The pool was surrounded by a paving of smooth white stones—at least they might have once been white, and would have been smooth, had the mortar been restored—and a scar of ground where once there had been a statue. Lindsay and Cici had moved the statue to the center of the rose garden last year, where it would be more fully appreciated.
“Aunt Lindsay wants to bring the pools and fountains back into operating condition again,” Lori said. “I offered to help her.”
Farley grunted.
“The problem is,” prompted Lori, “that I don’t know where to start. I don’t suppose you . . . ?”
She left the sentence unfinished, hopi
ng he would volunteer for the job.
But she either overestimated her charm, or underestimated his good will. Because all he said was, “Need a pump.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You’re gonna need a pump,” he explained, “to get the water out.”
“Oh.”
“I got one I can let you have for a day or two. Cost you ten dollar.”
Lori smiled weakly. The one major disadvantage of leaving school, California, and—most importantly—her father’s household was that she was always cash poor. “I don’t suppose you take Am-Ex?”
Now it was his turn to stare.
“Never mind.” Lori sighed, then cheered as she turned him back toward the front of the house. “Let’s talk about sheep.”
5
History Lessons
On Day One of the floor refinishing project, everyone was recruited to move the furniture out of the living area and onto the front porch, where Ida Mae, barking instructions all the while, covered everything with canvas dustcloths. The grand piano, which was too big to fit through the front door without lifting and turning, had to be rolled on its squeaky wheels behind the staircase, down the wide corridor, and into the double-doored dining room. The only obstacle was the uneven threshold at the dining room, which kept catching the front wheel.
Cici crawled underneath the piano to survey the situation. “We’re going to have to lift it,” she called up.
Lindsay pushed her hair back from her face. “Who’s got the forklift?”
Noah said, “Does anybody play this thing?”
“I used to,” Bridget replied, stretching out a kink in her back. “But I haven’t for a long time.”
“Seriously, Aunt Bridget,” Lori pitched, “there could be some real money in those sheep. I think we need to look into it. Farley says there might be ten or twelve pounds of fleece on each sheep by now—maybe more!”
Lindsay huffed, “I do believe Farley puts more words together for you in a single visit than he has for us in the entire time we’ve known him.”
“That’s because she’s young and cute,” replied Bridget with a grin, “and we’re old and bitter.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Cici, pulling herself out from under the piano and dusting off her hands. “I’m not at all bitter . . . yet.”
Noah grumbled, “What’s the point in having one, then?”
Bridget looked at him curiously. “Having what, dear?”
He turned his gaze meaningfully toward the object between them in something that was very close to an eye roll. “A piano.”
Cici said, “Okay, we’ve got to do this one leg at a time. Noah and Lori, you’re the least likely to end up in traction, so you take the front. Everybody else, push.”
Inch by inch, leg by leg, they rocked and eased the baby grand across the threshold and into the dining room. Lori scrambled ahead, moving chairs out of the way as they wedged the piano between the table and the buffet. Finally, they all straightened up, breathing hard and flexing their fingers.
Lindsay looked around. “Well, this is convenient.”
“We can eat in the kitchen for a while,” Cici offered.
“How’re you gonna get there?” Noah asked.
They looked around. The piano occupied the aisle between the table and the buffet that led to the kitchen, and it blocked the double door through which they had pushed it. In turning and positioning the huge piece, everyone except Noah had ended up on the wrong side of that door.
Lori rolled her eyes. Cici shook her head in disbelief. Lindsay said, “Does anyone have a cell phone?”
Lori growled, “What difference does it make? It wouldn’t work.”
Bridget said, “I am not pushing this thing out again.”
“If we pushed it a little farther, we could stand on top and reach the window,” Cici offered.
Lori deftly grabbed the keyboard, swung herself underneath the piano, and crawled beneath it to join Noah on the other side of the door.
The three older women stared after her. “Or,” said Cici, deadpan, “we could crawl under.”
And so they did.
“You see, Aunt Bridget,” Lori said earnestly as they walked back to the living room, “that’s between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars per sheep. You’ve got twenty-five sheep, not counting the lambs! That’s twenty-five thousand—”
“Hundred,” corrected all three women at once.
“Right, twenty-five hundred dollars! That’s nothing to be sneezed at.”
“No,” agreed Bridget, “it’s certainly not. But that’s not all profit, either. You have to pay the sheepshearer, for one thing. There’s a lot of research to be done before we start counting that money.”
“Maybe one of the things you could research is how a girl who spent a whole year and a half at UCLA doesn’t know the difference between twenty-five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars,” Cici said.
“What I’m trying to say,” insisted Lori, deliberately ignoring her mother, “is that this could be the start of a real business. You already have the setup, and a small flock. If you expanded . . .”
“Well now, we’d really have to research that,” Bridget said.
“We should get started right away. To get a good price, you want to be the first to the market.”
“Well, I don’t know about that . . .”
Lindsay said, “Cici, are you sure you can handle that thing by yourself? It looks awfully big to me. We’ll be glad to help.”
“It’s fully automated,” Cici assured her. “Couldn’t be simpler. I don’t need any help.” She leaned the big boxy machine back on its rollers and positioned it for action. It made a sound like a train clattering across a trestle in the empty room, even before it was turned on. “It’s even got three speeds.”
“But won’t your arms get tired?” Bridget said. “Shouldn’t we trade off turns?”
“Thanks,” Cici said, and her smile tried to soften the hint of condescension in her voice, “but you can really do some damage if you don’t know how to operate one of these things. Really, I don’t need any help.”
Ida Mae stood in the open doorway, her hair in a scarf, her hands on her hips, and a sour look on her face. “She don’t have the first notion how to work that thing,” she observed, as much to herself as to anyone.
Cici looked at her sternly. “There is really nothing to it,” she assured her.
She pulled a sporty baseball cap over her own hair to protect it from the dust, arranged a paper respirator mask across her mouth and nose, and, taking a firm grip on the handle, flipped the power switch. Everyone backed away.
Nothing happened.
Frowning, Cici lowered her mask and toggled the switch off, then on again. “That’s funny.”
“Is it plugged in?” offered Bridget helpfully.
Cici checked the plug in the wall outlet, then came back and toggled the switch again.
“Maybe you have to put it in gear or something,” suggested Lori.
“Or hold a button down,” Lindsay said, “like with a weed whacker.”
“Is there an instruction book?” Bridget wanted to know.
“Maybe it’s broken,” said Lori.
Cici bent down and played with the switch some more.
Then Noah crossed the room, found the end of the extension cord that was not plugged into the wall, and connected it to the cord from the sander. The big machine roared to life.
Cici sprang back just as the machine lurched forward, screeching across the floor with the fury of a turbocharged demon, leaving a ten-inch-wide gouge in its path. The sounds of their horrified cries were drowned out as it crashed into the opposite wall and fell sideways amidst a shower of plaster dust and broken lathing.
Noah rushed forward and pulled the plug. The silence resounded. Cici stood still in the middle of the room, her hands clasped to the side of her head, looking from the scar across the floor to the hole in the wall.
No
one spoke for a very long time. Then Lindsay said, timidly, “I guess you don’t want us to help, huh?”
Without turning, Cici shook her head.
“Maybe you’d like us to just get out of your way.”
Again without turning, Cici nodded.
Lindsay beckoned to Noah with an expression that clearly indicated they should go while the going was good, and they hurried away
Bridget lifted a finger as though the idea had just occurred to her, and said, “Lori, how would you like to go to the library with me and do some research on sheep ranching?”
They left so quickly that Bridget had to return to the house by the back door to get her car keys.
The stone dairy barn was one of the property’s most charming features. With skylights, clerestory windows, a loft for storage, and easy-maintenance stone floors, Lindsay had quickly seen it as the perfect place for her art studio. There was room for twenty or thirty students, when she got her classes going, as well as space for her own work, an office, and even a gallery if she chose.
Like most of the women’s ambitions for the place, Lindsay’s plans had diminished in scope since they’d actually moved in. Noah had spent most of the autumn last year dragging out rotten timbers, squirrels’ nests, and other accumulated debris, and Cici had patched windows and holes through which various forms of wildlife had been making their way in over the years. Eventually Lindsay had been able to scrub down the floors and windows, slap a coat of paint over the plank walls, and call it good. There were still randomly placed half walls throughout the building that indicated where stalls once had been.
The downside of having such an enormous space was that it was virtually impossible to heat, which made it unusable in the winter. Lindsay’s grand plans for having a bathroom installed had fizzled when she discovered that the main water line that led to the building was broken, and instead of the twenty or thirty easels she had envisioned, accompanied by eager art students, there were two worktables: one for her, and one for Noah.
She believed in keeping regular classroom hours and a regular classroom space, even though Noah was only in school three hours a day. She had chosen the art studio because it was neutral territory, the place in which they were both comfortable. It smelled of linseed oil and pastel dust, and on its walls were drying paintings and charcoal sketches. Cici had made a moveable partition out of two-by-fours and plywood to enclose their classroom—and also to conserve heat during the winter—and that was covered with thumbtacked photographs and pages torn from magazines that represented potential subject matter for future art lessons. There was also a whiteboard, which Lindsay used instead of a blackboard, and a bookshelf that held texts. But no one walking into the space would suspect that its main function was as anything other than an art studio.