At Home on Ladybug Farm (6 page)

“With plenty of bathrooms,” Bridget pointed out.

“So here’s the thing.” Excitedly, Lori leaned forward so that they could see the drawing she had made in the light that spilled from the open door. “This whole front part of the house—the living room, dining room, the bedrooms, of course, and the upstairs sitting room—would be public space. That little room off the living room could be the office. The kitchen is already outfitted for preparing big meals, and, Aunt Bridget, you know you’ve always wanted to run a restaurant.”

Bridget gave a conciliatory nod of agreement.

“The back part of the house,” Lori went on, “would be our living space. We could turn the sunroom into our family room, and we eat in the kitchen, anyway.”

Cici inquired politely, “Where would we sleep?”

Lori turned a page. “This,” she declared, “is a sketch of the cellar—as it could be. All it would take is a little remodeling, putting in some windows, a few walls . . . it’ll be a snap.”

“A snap,” repeated Cici, careful to keep her expression neutral.

Lori went on, “A room in the average B&B rents for about $200 a night—more on weekends and in peak season. And with this location—the view, the homegrown food, the gardens—”

“The pools,” added Lindsay.

Lori ignored her. “You could keep this place filled just about year around! That’s twelve hundred dollars a day! That’s eight thousand dollars a week! Thirty-six thousand dollars a—”

“We can do the math,” Cici said.

And Bridget added gently, “Honey, running a B&B is hard work. And there are licenses and codes and permits and regulations . . .”

“And it may be a tad bit optimistic to count on keeping all the rooms rented,” Lindsay said. “In such a slow economy.”

“Bottom line,” Cici said simply, but firmly, “we are not pimping out our house. We’ve worked too hard and love it too much to have strangers tramping through it for money. And I am definitely not sleeping in the cellar.”

“Ida Mae does,” Lori pointed out defensively.

“Ida Mae has her own room with a bath and private entrance from the garden. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s how she likes it. I, on the other hand, like my big sunny upstairs bedroom with its claw-foot tub and heart pine floors. I like it so much that I left everything I knew and went into enormous debt for it. So I think I’ll just stay there, thanks.”

“Me, too,” said Bridget.

“Me, too,” agreed Lindsay.

Lori blew out a breath that ruffled her bangs, and her face settled into lines of disappointment. “Well,” she said, “I guess I had a feeling you might say that.” And then she cheered. “But it was a pretty good plan for a first try, wasn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” agreed Cici.

“Couldn’t ask for more.”

“Brilliant,” said Lindsay.

“Okay, then, it’s back to the drawing board.” She gave them a wave with her legal pad as she swung toward the door. “I’ll be back!”

Bridget laughed softly as the door closed behind her and the porch faded to dusk again. “Do you know what I love about having Lori here?”

Cici slid a glance toward her. “Name one thing. I dare you.”

“Every time I look at her I’m reminded that I never, ever have to be twenty years old again.”

“Amen,” said Lindsay.

And Cici agreed, “I’ll drink to that.”

They rocked forward in unison, clinked glasses, and drank.

Stillness fell as the sky was leached of the last of its color. The birds settled in their nests; the animals slept in their stalls. The mountains, framed by the stark silhouettes of knotty tree branches, swelled indigo against a neutral background. The earth, not yet accustomed to holding the sun’s warmth, gave up a damp chill that smelled of decaying mulch and sweet budding grass. The women lingered, ignoring the prickling flesh on their arms, sipping their wine in companionable silence, wrapped in the contentment of the night.

“Spring,” said Bridget softly, at last. “Welcome home.”

3

In Another Time

When Pearl stood beside her Papa’s grave with her hand wrapped in Mother’s cold, cold one, she did not cry. She was only six, and she understood that Papa had been kicked in the head by Caesar, their big red stallion, and had gone to live with Jesus and wasn’t coming back, but she didn’t understand why Mother wept so, if Papa was with Jesus, except that maybe she missed him. Later that day Mother put a rifle in the hands of Ebenezer, the big black man who helped Papa take care of the horses, and then they buried Caesar in a big hole that took half a dozen field hands almost a day to dig. Pearl wanted to cry for Caesar, who Mother said with a mean look in her eye was not with Jesus, but in the end she did not.

She was eight when the soldiers in the gray coats came and drove away all their horses, and even though Mother stood screaming in the yard after them and when they were gone she fell to her knees and wept in the dirt, Pearl did not cry. It seemed to her that eight years old was too old to cry over horses, because Mama Madie said she was almost a young lady now, and because it scared her to see her own mama carrying on so.

When all the field hands ran off, and even Ebenezer and Lula in the kitchen and Old Luke, who was nearly blind but still carried in the firewood every morning, ran off, too, everyone except Mama Madie, who was a free black woman and owed no man in this world, Pearl wanted to cry for missing them. And when she had to carry water in a bucket that was almost too heavy to lift and dig potatoes and sometimes there was nothing but grits for supper, she wanted to cry because she was tired and hungry and cold. But then at night she could hear her mama weeping softly in the room next to hers, and Pearl would get up and slip into bed with Mother and hug her tight, and she figured it was probably best if both of them didn’t cry at once.

When the soldiers in the blue coats came, Pearl wanted to cry, because she was so afraid remembering how the gray-coated soldiers had stolen their horses. But Mother had fetched up her rifle and walked right out on the veranda to meet those soldiers with a real hard look in her eye, and Mama Madie came out the door and stood right up close beside her with her head high and her shoulders back. Pearl felt it was her place to stand tall, too. So she came between her mama and Mama Madie and stood up straight, and Mama Madie put her big bony hands on Pearl’s shoulders and squeezed so hard that she really
did
want to cry.

The soldiers’ horses tore up their yard and their wagons rolled over the kitchen garden, and they kicked up dust and noise something terrible. One of them rode up to the veranda and got off his horse and started up the steps until Mother raised the rifle at him. Likely he did not know Old Luke had used up the last of the ammunition shooting at a fox that was after their last laying hen. He’d missed him, too, probably because he was nearly blind.

So the man just stood at the bottom of the porch and took off his hat and said his name was Captain Somebody, and that his men would be camping here for a time, and Mother had said this was a peaceful house with no man soldiering on either side, and they wanted no part of their war. He answered that that was good to hear, because he was a man of peace himself, a doctor and not a soldier, and he had with him a bunch of folks just trying to get home, but some of them were wounded and bad sickening, and he was in need of the house and the beds, thank you kindly. Then he looked at Mama Madie like the color of her skin made him wonder if Mother had lied about this being a peaceful house, and her fingers tightened so that Pearl thought the bones in her shoulders would break, and she said, real cool like, “I, sir, am a free woman and I owe no man in this world.” And he said just the same would she mind pouring him a cool draft of water, and she told him where the well was and to get it himself. That made him smile, tiredly, but he did.

The soldiers started carrying their sick and their bleeding into the house, and Mother said to Pearl, “Be quick and gather up the valuables and take them to Mama Madie.” There weren’t too many valuables left, but Mama Madie stuffed a bag of coffee down her blouse and Mother gathered up her medicines and her Holy Bible, but it was Pearl who thought to rescue Mother’s treasure box from its place on the table near her sewing chair. She hugged it to her chest and was hurrying across the yard when a big soldier with small ugly eyes and tobacco juice in his beard stepped in front of her and said, poking at the treasure box with a dirt-nailed finger, “Whatcha got there, tadpole?”

She hugged the box closer and took a step backward, but her heart was beating hard.

The man made to snatch the box from her and she ducked past him, head low, the box wrapped tightly in both arms. She thought she would run free but he caught her hair, which was braided in a pigtail, and jerked it hard, and she screamed out loud because it hurt, and also because she was so scared he would steal Mother’s treasure box.

He had his hands on the box and would have twisted it away from her but at that moment the captain, who had come from nowhere, shouted, “Sergeant, attention!”

The man with the beard stepped back and stood straight as an arrow, but he took the treasure box with him. The captain strode forward and took the box from him, and as much as Pearl wanted to, even though her chest was heaving with the effort, she did not cry. The captain opened the box, and plucked casually through the contents. Then he closed the box and said to the big man, in an odd, bitter voice, “Try to remember, Sergeant, that we fight on the side of God. And we don’t, as a general rule, steal sewing notions from children.”

Then he returned the treasure box to Pearl with a tender look, but she did not linger to thank him. She ran away as fast as she could to Mama Madie’s cabin, and she thought that God must be in bad trouble indeed if He needed the likes of the bearded man to fight His battles for Him.

That night, Pearl and Mother moved into Mama Madie’s cabin, which was small but warm, and smelled like the dried plants and flowers that hung from the ceiling. Mother was real pleased to have her treasure box safe, and she hugged Pearl hard when she learned of it. Then Mother said she thought it wouldn’t be so bad, having the soldiers camped here, because there wasn’t anything left to steal and at least they would keep the gray-coated soldiers away. But Mama Madie said she didn’t trust nobody in a uniform, and good thing they’d buried the silver in the stream bed and turned the hogs and cows loose months ago.

They sat piecing together a quilt top and talking like that in tight, nervous voices, and Pearl, whose stitches were fine and even, helped a good bit. Mother said she felt bad for all the sick soldiers and maybe she’d take some willow bark and blackberry tea up to the house in the morning, and Mama Madie said angrily that it wasn’t her place to go ministering to white trash that drove her out of her own house like that, and then Mother’s eyes began to flash as she said that the captain seemed a decent Christian man and it was her boundin’ duty to help the sick. Then Mama Madie said that no Christian man would wear the coat of a soldier and, because Pearl didn’t like to hear them arguing, she said, “Tell me the story of this quilt, Mama Madie.”

All of Mama Madie’s quilts had stories hidden in their patterns. Some were stories of the Far Country, where the sun shone on dry rivers and the hunters carried spears and eyes hid in the tall grass, that her grandmother’s mother had told to her. Others were stories of nearer times, and slaves that hid beneath the bridge at Four Corners on a night when the moon was full, awaiting rescue by something called the Underground Railroad, which did not run underground and which was not a railroad at all. Mama Madie said the only way her people had to tell their stories was through songs and women’s work, because the white Master didn’t pay attention to either one of them.

Mama Madie had been a slave once, and the man she loved who fathered her twin baby girls had been sold to Georgia, then the twin babies died and Mama Madie had come to raise Pearl’s mother, whose papa had made her a free woman. Pearl knew all the stories of all the quilts. But when Pearl asked her the story of the newest quilt, Mama Madie got a strange, kind of sad look on her face and said, “Why, child, I don’t rightly know just yet.”

Pearl looked at her mama. “Maybe this quilt could be our story, Mother.”

Mother smiled, but in a way that said she was thinking of something else, and agreed that maybe it could.

Pearl dragged Mother’s treasure box out from under Mama Madie’s low rope bed, and put it in Mother’s lap. A soft look came over Mother’s face as she opened up the lid. It smelled of cedar and dust and old, dear things. Inside were scraps and pieces of lives that had gone before—a snippet of lace from a wedding dress, a knitted baby sock, brass buttons off one of Papa’s coats, a spool of delicately spun thread too fine to use for everyday work, a cluster of pressed dried violets pinned to a square of lavender silk, and, finally, the greatest treasure of them all: a square of strong dark wool, tattered now and a little frayed at the edges, embroidered with brightly colored silken threads in the shape of a flying horse against a red and gold shield, and over it a banner with words written in a language even Mother couldn’t read.