Stolen Honey (11 page)

The living room was quiet now. Colm was standing in the doorway, his ears sticking out through his wild hair. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow about that paper,” Emily told her mother. “I have to have a proposal in by tomorrow. It’s about the impact of farming on the town, what’s happening to the family farm. I figure you have strong ideas about that.”

“You bet your boots I have. You want me to write the paper for you?”

Emily stood hesitantly at the foot of the stairs. Was her mother serious? When Ruth grinned, she said, “Okay. I didn’t expect you to do that. But I do need you for a source.”

“You got me,” said Ruth. Vic strolled in from the living room and she swatted his bottom. “Get that homework done, kid, and then take a shower.”

“And get all smelly again cleaning the calf pens in the morning? What’s the point?” He started up the stairs.

“Well, take the shower in the morning if there’s time.”

“There’s never time.”

“Then get up a half hour earlier. At least you get picked up later than some of the others. Brownie is picked up an hour before you, Gwen says.”

Vic came down a step. “He’s been skipping lately. And I think I know why. Something that happened on the bus.”

“What was that? Tell me.”

“The kids started hissing his name, ‘Brown Bear.’ Then when we were getting off the bus someone called his sister a murderer. Jeezum!”

“And what did the bus driver do to stop it? What did
you
do, Vic?”

“She—she tried. I guess I did, too.”

“You guess?”

Vic hung his head. “I could of tried harder. I was afraid they’d get after me, too.”

“And call
your
sister a murderer? Come on. Vic. You have to stand up and speak out. I’ve taught you that, haven’t I?”

Ruth was really worked up now. Mad at Vic, mad at the bus driver, mad at the frat boys, mad at whoever had vandalized the Woodleaf hives. “Shit, shit,” she said, and saw Vic scamper upstairs, knowing she was in one of her “injustice” moods. “I’d like to—”

“To what, Ruthie?” said Colm, coming up behind, kneading her tense shoulders. “Arrest them all? Bring them to justice? Reform the world in a day?”

“You’re so sanguine, Colm. So damned patient. I don’t want to wait. I want the world perfect in my lifetime.
My
lifetime, Colm.” He was holding her close, rubbing her back. Unable to come down off her high horse so soon, she said, “Did you look up Leroy Boulanger, like I asked?”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you. He’s got a record. Well, nothing big—just a stolen car, you know, that sort of thing.”

She grabbed his shoulders, made him look her in the eye. “What does that mean—‘that sort of thing’?”

“He jumped a guy once at Alibi. Knocked out his teeth. Got clobbered himself. Police had him in overnight. Aggravated assault, they called it. That’s all I know.”

“Aggravated assault,” she repeated, and thought of the bruises on Shep Noble’s face. She had to be diplomatic, though. Gwen seemed to favor the boy.

“Ask your colleague Ashley to tell Gwen about the police record, would you, Colm?” It was a cop-out and she knew it. But she didn’t want to be one to damage a friendship.

* * * *

Camille was fixing herself a cup of tea, ready to go back to the computer, when someone banged on her door. It was a tall, wiry woman in her sixties, plainly dressed in a denim skirt and blue cotton blouse, a necklace of pale pink shells around her neck; she gripped her black leather purse with strong tensile fingers. Her name was Godineaux, she said. She’d heard from a relative that Camille was poking her nose into the family’s privacy.

She spoke rapidly in a coarse voice. Camille imagined her throat full of frogs and salamanders—her threats, too. Camille was to halt this project at once, the woman cried. She had “no goddam business dragging old dirty linen back into the light— who you think you are, the Virgin Mary? What’s my family to you? Some things we don’t want hung up on the line for everybody to see, you understand?”

Camille was impressed by the laundry metaphor. She struggled to keep her cool. “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you related to Annette? Annette’s a wonderful woman. I only want the world to know she was wronged. Of course I’ll use a pseudonym!” She resisted an impulse to fling herself on her knees, clasp her hands together to show her good intent.

The woman was unconvinced. She stood inside the doorway of Camille’s apartment, swaying a little on scuffy black heels, her mouth a straight line. How had she known where Camille lived? She would have done some research herself. Or maybe Eugene Godineaux’s common-law wife had summoned her. Camille had asked about Nicole.

“Do you know Nicole? Is she your mother?” Camille was desperate now. She couldn’t give up her project, no. “I said I’d give fictitious names,” she shouted at the woman, and then softened her voice. “No one will know. Your lives will be the same as always. This will be an academic paper, it won’t reach the general public.”

Although she hoped it would, didn’t she? She dreamed of a book?

The woman saw her hesitancy. She narrowed her black eyes; the wrinkles fanned out into her cheeks. “Sure,” she said, “sure, and somebody gets ahold of it, and does his own dirty work, and digs up our lives. And people know. And the cops find us and say they been looking for us and we ...”

She stopped; she’d gone too far. Her face was chalk-white. She looked clownish with those two small red spots in the center of each cheek where she’d dabbed on rouge. “I said you can’t do this. I said it’s gotta stop.” She was nearing hysteria, clutching at her necklace as though it were Camille’s throat. “You’ll be sorry if it don’t. You’ll be sorry!”

“Pauline?” Camille threw out the name—Nicole’s daughter would be about this woman’s age now. She would have kept her own name. It was a ploy. But it worked. The woman jerked at her necklace; it broke, the shells scattering on the floor. Her face was tomato-red; her fingers tightened into fists. She rushed at the computer where it sat whirring on its stand, the exam Camille had typed into it still on the screen.

Camille gripped her shoulders. “Leave that alone. It’s my work. Don’t you dare! That doesn’t concern you—it’s for my class. Get away now!”

Pauline was strong. She shoved Camille down into a chair, spun back to examine the screen. She stood panting in front of it, then wheeled about, placed two hands on the edge of the chair where Camille was struggling to get up, shoved her back down. “I said leave us alone. You hear?”

She turned and ran out of the apartment. When Camille looked out the side window, she saw the woman fling herself into a beat-up black car. The license plate read
LIVE FREE OR DIE,
a New Hampshire plate. Camille jotted down the first three digits of the license—CP3—but then the car sped away in a storm of exhaust.

Camille sank back down in her armchair, spent, and angry. She couldn’t let some Godineaux relative browbeat her. The woman, Pauline, didn’t understand. Camille was trying to help the family, not hurt it. Why couldn’t the woman understand that?

“I won’t give up the project,” she told her black Persian cat, who’d come whining into the room, wanting food. “I won’t!”

Chapter Eight

Saturday was the day for visitors, it seemed. In a moment of hiatus, Gwen was rushing about, cleaning up the kitchen. No one understood that bees didn’t take days off, that spring was a busy time for beekeepers. Gwen’s goal each spring was to have all hives in place at least a week before the daffodils came in bloom, and then the clover that gave the first major nectar flow and sent the bees back to the hives so loaded with golden pollen they could hardly remain airborne. With April nearing an end, she had only a short time to accomplish this.

Oh, but the house was a mess! Dirty clothes piled up by the washing machine and schoolbooks and papers sprawled everywhere. Brownie was skipping school every two days, it seemed, claiming a stomach bug, or a bone spur in his heel that the doctor couldn’t find; and today Donna was shut in her room with Emily Willmarth to work on the sociology paper—too busy to do dishes. Mert, as usual, was squatting in a heap of brown ash, working furiously to create baskets for the craft center exhibit.
He
had no time for dishes. He’d only damage them anyway, poor man, with his shaky hands. She suspected Parkinson’s—she’d have to get him to a specialist.

The morning had started with two “patients” wanting bees for stinging. Gwen did a little “bee therapy,” though not for pay. She believed in the use of bee venom to treat autoimmune diseases like arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Young Chuck Minor had just left with a jar full of bees to sting his arthritic grandmother with. Then the phone had rung off the hook with only an ominous silence on the other end. She let it ring five more times, then picked it up, only to hear an oath from an irate Russell. “Can’t you answer the fuckin’ phone?” he’d hollered. “Jeezum, Gwen, I been calling and calling.”

Russell wanted to come home, he said, he wanted to see what was going on, how everyone was, what Donna was up to. “Keep an eye on her, Gwen! But, damn it all, I got three more gigs this month and it just won’t pay to come back to Vermont first.” She told him about the Ball family’s visit, but not about the offer to buy land. When he signed off, he reminded her to keep Harvey Ball “off the property. Don’t let him put a foot on it, Gwen. He’ll turn the grass brown.” And they both hung up, as usual, laughing.

Now, just as she was knocking on Brownie’s door to remind Vic to take a jar of honey back to his mother, there was a knock on the kitchen door.

“Hello, hello,” a female voice rang out, and when Gwen dashed down the steps she found a small, tidy woman standing tentatively in her doorway, glancing about. “I’m Camille Wimmet from the college—Donna’s teacher,” the woman said. She thrust out a hand.

“Why, hello.” Gwen snatched up the hand, which might have belonged to a child, it was so unblemished. Her own hands were scarred from a thousand bee stings. The rest of the woman looked as pristine as her hands: She wore a longish black skirt with a lavender cotton sweater and a crisp white blouse. She wasn’t exactly pretty; she had a plumpish nose and jet-black eyebrows that gave her an earnest look, round eyeglasses that dimmed her violet eyes. She looked more like a schoolgirl than a college professor.

“I’m so interested in Donna’s paper,” Camille went on, “I can’t thank you enough for letting her—and by extension, myself—have the use of your ancestor’s document.”

Document? Gwen hadn’t thought of the journal as a “document,” but she supposed that was the way sociologists saw it. For a moment Gwen couldn’t think who it was the woman wanted to see. She stared blankly at the young woman.

The teacher saw her confusion. “Donna told me about her grandfather. You see, I’m working on a paper myself, and the LeBlanc name came up in my research. I thought your father-in-law might not mind talking to me about his family. I mentioned it to him. I was here last week to see Leroy—he’s my cousin—did Donna tell you?”

Here was a disparate match! Yes, Donna had told her about the relationship. She was glad, actually, to know that Leroy had a relative nearby. “Mert doesn’t go out much,” Gwen said. “He doesn’t drive anymore. His hands aren’t always steady on the wheel.”

“I understand. I heard about. . . your helping him with the, um, marijuana.”

Gwen flushed, but the teacher was smiling. Gwen smiled, too. She spread her hands in a gesture of peace. “Well, go on in. He works in there. Coffee?”

The teacher shook her head, and Gwen led the way to Mert’s workplace. “You have a visitor, Mert.” Her father-in-law grunted but didn’t look up from where he was concentrating on the star bottom of a new basket. Gwen followed the teacher’s eyes. One wall held a gun rack, another a photograph of Mert dissecting an old car. Shelves held twists and curls of split wood and, rising up out of them, framed photographs of the family. The largest photo was a ten-by-fourteen color shot of Russell, taken at one of the reenactments, looking virile even in his forties (actually, he was two years younger than Gwen) with his hard lean bronze body, a tomahawk stuck into the sash that held together his striped loincloth. Oh, but he was a handsome devil! She wanted to reach right into the photo and embrace him, feel his sinewy arms around her back. Smell that fragrant mix of sage and tobacco.

Mert was making a basket with a Demijohn bottom. “It’s a better basket than the Abenaki Star,” he told the women’s feet. “I mean, the Star is made the same, but you got eight straight uprights and you got eight tapered. It was my Aunt Sylvie on the LeBlanc side made the Demijohn bottom—the old way’s lost now. So I only make the Demijohn on special order.” He looked up. “You’re the one wanted to see me?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Camille said. “About your family. Your Aunt Sylvie,
her
sister Maxine.”

Mert cocked his head, stared up at the visitor; he put down his work. “What you want to know about her for? That Maxine, she got in trouble. Not all her fault, though.”

Camille sat down on an overturned box. “I’m here because I’m writing a paper about the French-Canadian impact on this state. I’m a Franco-American myself, you see. I came across Maxine’s name in the university archives. Some of those women were unfairly committed. Your aunt may have been one of them.”

Camille’s voice softened toward the end of the speech. Mert nodded and went back to his Demijohn bottom. Gwen liked the professor. She felt that the young woman wouldn’t come on too strong with Mert, that he could take care of himself. She tiptoed out of the room, shut the door on the pair.

The phone rang just as she got to the sink to wash up a few dishes. It was Harvey Ball. He had an offer, he said: “You won’t get another like it. I can go a hundred thirty thousand on your place. That’s twice as much as it’s worth—we’d have to tear down the house. I’m just doing it for my son. For you. You can move into town like I said, out of town if you want. I’d think you’d want to, with all this trouble. What people are saying about you. Saying—”

She slammed down the phone. She didn’t want to hear any more. Couldn’t. Her legs were buckling, her face was on fire. The nerve of the man! She banged her fists against the wall, leaned her body into it, felt the tears well up in her eyes. Maybe she should sell. Maybe she should.