At Home on Ladybug Farm (12 page)

She slammed the door with a terrible look on her face and opened her arms wide to Pearl, crushing her to her bosom. “We got to pray, child, we got pray,” she said. “Your mama’s took the fever, and we got to pray.”

So they did. During the daylight Pearl sewed and prayed, and at night when she came back from tending Mother, Mama Madie got down on her knees and prayed, swaying with the rhythm of her prayers. But in the end it was to no avail. The captain came knocking one pink dawn with a face as long as the grave, and all he said was, “I’m sorry.”

Mama Madie started to wail, and Pearl clung to her skirts, wrapping herself in them as if she were a little girl again. And then the captain grabbed Mama Madie’s arm and held it sternly and said with a grim face, “Ma’am, you need to take that child and go. It’s the cholera, and it will kill us all if we don’t burn everything it’s touched.”

Mama Madie gave him a look of purest hatred, and she jerked her arm away and spat on his boots. She slammed the door shut, and started bundling up cook pots and dried beans and cornmeal in a blanket that she knotted at four corners and slung over her shoulder, and Pearl rolled up her threads and her needles and her sewing scissors in the quilt square with the flying horse in the center, and she tied it around her waist under her dress. Mama Madie grabbed hold of her hand and they left the cabin for a murky gray dawn that smelled thickly of smoke.

But it wasn’t until Pearl looked back and saw the only home she’d ever known collapsing to the ground in a shower of orange sparks and crackling flames that she began to cry.

7

Sheepshearing

Lori was right, of course, about the second alcove’s location on the opposite side of the fireplace from the first. It, too, contained a mural that depicted the sheep meadow, only this version was framed by bare winter branches rather than blossom-covered ones, and the rolling pastureland was covered in snow. A cardinal, rather than a blue bird, was perched on the fence post.

When the last of the dust was swept away and the buckets of dirty water were emptied, everyone gathered around to examine what had been uncovered.

“The technique itself isn’t bad,” Lindsay said, appraising both paintings, “but the approach is pretty generic.”

“Kind of like a greeting card,” supplied Lori helpfully, and Lindsay gave her an annoyed look.

“Some of the illustrative art used for greeting cards is quite good,” she pointed out. “And a lot of successful commercial artists sell to greeting card companies.” She struggled briefly to erase the scowl from her face. “The point I was trying to make,” she said, rather stiffly, “is that I don’t see anything here to make me think these were painted by an artist of note. The homeowner probably told him exactly what to paint and paid him by the hour.”

“Is there any way you can tell how old it is?” Cici asked.

Lindsay shook her head regretfully. “I can’t. Maybe an expert in antiques could, or an art restorer. The colors look custom mixed, but a lot of artists mix their own pigments, even today. If the paintings were less generic—if the artist had included something we could date, like a car or a wagon or even a person—it would be different.”

“What about the barn?” Noah asked.

Lindsay looked at him. “There’s no barn in the paintings.”

“Right,” he said.

“Oh!” Bridget exclaimed suddenly. “But you can see the barn—or a part of it—in this view of the sheep pasture today!”

“Which means these must have been painted before the barn was built.” Cici turned to Ida Mae, who was wiping down the arched frame of the alcove with a damp cloth. “Ida Mae, do you know when—”

Ida Mae spoke before she could finish. “You’re gonna have to repaint this trim.”

Lindsay said, “The artist might have left it out for aesthetic purposes.”

“I’ll paint it back in for you,” Noah volunteered. “Wouldn’t charge you more than fifty dollars. For each one, of course.”

Cici said quickly, “Thank you, Noah, but I think we’d better leave it the way it is.”

And Lindsay added, “After all, you wouldn’t want someone else to come behind you and add something to one of your paintings, would you?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind. Especially if I was dead. Twenty-five,” he offered. “Apiece.”

“Thank you, Noah,” Bridget said firmly, “but no. Besides, you were going to finish planting the potato eyes this morning.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. But if the painting ain’t worth nothing, stands to reason I can’t mess it up.”

“Potatoes?” insisted Bridget.

Hands in pockets, he ambled off.

“And we’ve got sheep to shear,” Lori declared, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. “Today’s the day!”

Lori had determined, from all her reading, that the Ladybug Farm sheep were Irish in origin, and so declared there could be no more appropriate day to begin Project Sheep Shear than St. Patrick’s Day. And even though Bridget was not quite as excited to begin what she suspected would be a dirty and exhausting task, she had to admit that having the patron saint of their flock’s homeland on their side was not a bad idea.

“It’s too early to be shearin’ sheep,” Ida Mae warned dourly. “You might as well go ahead and use the mutton for your Irish stew, if that’s what you’ve a mind on.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to wait a few weeks.”

“Aunt Bridget,” Lori insisted, barely suppressing an eye roll. “The
market
.”

“Right,” Bridget said. “Apparently March is a hot market for wool around here,” she explained to the others. “April, not so much.”

“So let’s go!” Lori said, heading for the door.

Cici caught Bridget’s arm as she turned to go, a hint of alarm in her eyes. “You’re not really going to let Lori near those sheep with a pair of shears, are you?”

“Of course not,” she assured her, with a small smile. ”Farley’s coming to help.”

Lori had seen a program on the Discovery Channel in which a sheepdog lined up an entire flock of sheep outside a dipping shed, then herded the queue into the shed, up a ramp, and into an automated harness device, which clamped each sheep between its jaws and dipped it in a vat of insecticide. The sheep then scampered up another ramp and down the other side, out into the freedom of the sunny pasture to dry off.

Bridget assured her that Ladybug Farm was very far removed from the Discovery Channel, and while Rebel was in fact a competent sheepdog who had no trouble moving the sheep from pasture to pasture, he was unlikely to be able to persuade twenty-five sheep to climb single file up a ramp and into a vat of sheep dip.

They had spent a good deal of time discussing the pros and cons of the sheep-dipping process, and finally decided upon a more organic approach. Chemicals were dangerous, and smelly, and would cling to the wool for days, even weeks. They couldn’t sell wool that reeked of pesticides. Besides, what was better for cleaning
and
disinfecting than good old-fashioned soap and water?

To obtain the optimal softness and fluffiness from the wool, they decided on baby shampoo. Bridget bought a half dozen bottles of it at the Dollar Store.

The plan was simple. They spread out a ten-by-ten tarp on the ground outside the barn door, where each sheep would be shampooed and then turned loose in the barn to await shearing. They hooked up the garden hose to the outside faucet and Bridget went to collect the first animal.

Rebel had been eyeing them suspiciously all morning, and when Bridget opened the gate to the meadow, he went into action. He streaked across the grass like an optical illusion, so swift and silent that the peacefully grazing sheep didn’t even see him coming until he nipped one of them on the ankle. The flock bleated and trotted restlessly in a dozen different directions and the dog dropped to his belly, his mesmeric gaze stopping the animals in their tracks. He began to circle and the sheep began to bunch. As though contained inside an invisible circle, the herd trotted toward the opposite fence line.

Bridget had learned quickly that all she had to do to get Rebel to herd the sheep toward the west was to
pretend
she wanted them herded toward the east. So when she started waving a towel at the flock, urging it on in the direction it was going, Rebel immediately turned the flock around and moved it the opposite way. Bridget kept screaming at him and waving the towel, and Rebel kept ignoring her, trotting the flock toward the open gate of the sheep pen just outside the barn. There Lori stood, ready to close the gate as soon as the last sheep was herded inside.

“Good job!” she called as Bridget came jogging up a few dozen yards behind the sheep. “Not a single straggler!”

“All it takes is a little reverse psychology,” Bridget called back with a grin.

Rebel, his job complete, streaked off to do whatever it was he did when he was not circling the sheep or trying to attack members of the household.

Lori planted her hands on her blue-jeaned hips and looked over with satisfaction at the shuffling mob of securely contained sheep. “And you thought it was going to be hard,” she chided Bridget. “I told you we could do this. And think of the money we’re saving.”

“We haven’t even started the hard part yet,” Bridget reminded her.

“Still . . .” Lori raised her palm for a high five. “Not too bad for a couple of city girls.”

Her optimism was contagious. Bridget laughed and slapped her palm in agreement.

Fortunately the sheep were a relatively docile bunch, and Bridget had no trouble getting a loop around the neck of a ewe and leading her out of the pen to the tarp, where Lori stood ready with the garden hose and the baby shampoo.

“Okay, you just hold him there—”

“Her,” corrected Bridget.

“Right. You hold her and I’ll do the shampooing.”

“She’s a sweet girl,” Bridget cooed, stroking the sheep’s woolly head. “She’s going to like her bath. She’s not going to be any trouble at all.”

And so, for a time, it seemed she wouldn’t be. Lori soaked the woolly sheep with water from the garden hose—which was surprisingly cold on her hands—and poured on a generous amount of shampoo. She added more water to work up a lather, and more shampoo, scrubbing up to her elbows. Rivers of brown suds were sluiced away with the final rinse from the garden hose, and with Bridget tugging and Lori chasing, they finally maneuvered the ewe into the barn.

Two blow-dryers had been attached to long extension cords that were plugged into the barn’s single outlet. They used old towels to rub away the worst of the water and, with Lori on one side and Bridget on the other, began to blow-dry the sheep.

Half an hour later, Lori stepped back to survey the fluffy, white, and rather annoyed-looking result of their efforts. “Well,” she said, though with slightly less enthusiasm than before. “One down, twenty-four to go.”

Bridget groaned out loud. “There has
got
to be a better way.”

Lindsay carefully spread newspapers out on the newly sanded floor and pried the lid off the gallon of wood stain with a screwdriver. “I’ll start in this corner and you start in that one,” she suggested, “and we’ll meet at the staircase.”