Harvest of Bones (26 page)

The garden had been planted in the spring; it looked tended, neatly put to bed for the fall. The old tomato plants had been pulled up, the earth patted down in their wake. Gardening would be part of the healing process for these women. She remembered how she’d worked her own kitchen garden after Pete left, hoed and raked furiously, planting peas, beans, radishes, corn. As if planting would make him come back, bring her spirit to life again! The next fall, though, he was still gone. And she’d pulled up the dead roots, the yellowed lettuce, raked it over, as though it had never been planted at all. As though Pete had never been. It was like a harvest of... bones.

“A harvest of bones,” she whispered aloud, thinking of that dead garden, thinking of this autumn, too, and the yield from that horse hole next door. She felt suddenly chilled.

“Pull yourself together, Ruth,” she said fiercely, and straightened her shoulders.

The greens, she saw, hadn’t come from this garden; there was no evidence of beets, of okra, parsnips, any late root vegetables that would yield greens. Where then? She moved farther back—was this still Angie’s land? She turned toward Bagshaw’s property, though there were no posts to note where one property ended and another began.

Then behind a clump of bittersweet, where the yellow-and-orange berries still clung to the dry stems, she found a second garden. If you could call it a garden. This one had been largely untended, but there were beet greens—someone had planted them. The ground was higher here, surrounded by a scraggle of bushes; the frost hadn’t penetrated as deeply. And there was evidence of digging. More digging, oddly enough, than pulling up greens would warrant. That is, you simply pulled and the greens flew up. She was rewarded with a handful, a small beetroot on each end. Yet the earth was uneven, not flat the way you’d rake a garden before planting, but, rather, in the form of erratic hillocks, as though if she dug, she’d find more than just beetroots.

She should have brought a spade with her; she hadn’t thought ahead, hadn’t meant even to come back here. She’d intended merely to encounter Bagshaw. It was seeing those greens on the kitchen table that gave her the thought.

She snatched up a stick and dug a little with it: It yielded a black feather, iridescent in the cloudy sun. She stuck it in her shoulder bag, along with the handful of greens. She’d have a dirty bag now; at least her checkbook had a hard cover—but her hairbrush? Oh well, she’d wash it at home. She scratched deeper, and found, oddly, a pair of bird claws, brownish purple and wrinkled. What on earth, she wondered, would a dead bird be doing buried here? And how could its feet become separated from the body? She shrugged. Some animal, she supposed, a cat maybe, dissecting the bird, burying it. Did cats bury their prey? The inedible parts? Above, in a birch tree, a starling scolded her, gazing intently with a sharp yellow eye.

A moment later, it flew off and the male, a handsome fellow, iridescent bronze and purple in a sudden shaft of sun, came to a perch on the branch and remained there, as if guarding till she returned. A perfect mating, she thought. Was this what Colm had had in mind, wanting to accompany her here? She suddenly wished he had come.

Well, he hadn’t, and here she was. She moved on to the Bagshaw place—that is, she assumed she was now on Bagshaw property. It seemed so sneaky to come this way, but she’d explain she’d gone to the garden, give some excuse, approach his side door. “I was next door,” she’d explain. “I went to the garden; they told me about those beet greens, invited me to pick for myself. And then I came over to your back door, that’s how come....”

She imagined his sour expression, his suspicion. And she almost laughed aloud. She thought of her father-in-law, who’d run the farm single-handed before Pete, and then drafted a reluctant son into the business. But when Pete wanted to try new ideas, new methods, his father balked, stood his ancient ground, suspicious of tractors, balers, milking machines. “It won’t work. You’ll see. I say no.” That was Pete’s father all right.

She knocked on the back door. And waited. When there was no answer—surely she’d seen his truck out front—she peered through a window, then moved around the house to the front door. Knocked. Again no answer, and now she was worried: He might have fallen, been hurt in some way. After all, he was an old man; anything could have happened. She tried the knob. It was unlocked. She twisted it.

Suddenly, he was there, a .22 in his quivering hands. “Outta my house,” he said, but she stood her ground. He wheezed, and the rifle went off. A bullet zinged past her ear and through the top glass of the door. The glass splintered into her hair. She jumped back. The man was crazy; he’d lived too long alone. And to think Emily had been here.

“Hey,” she yelled, “I only wanted to ask you a question—about that sign, that logo. It’s interesting, and I just wanted to know the story behind it. I heard the design came originally from your family. I’m not trying to—”

A second bullet thudded into the floor at her feet.

“All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” she said, her nerves shattering like the glass, and she spun out the door; she raced, crazy-legged, across the lawn to her car. Already the women were dashing out on the porch, panicked; they’d heard the shots. Marna was screaming at her. She heard someone say “Police”; they would phone the station. She ran back to the Healing House, tried to calm them. “It was just that old man; he’s lived too long alone. He saw me coming the back way. I was prying. I can understand. Of course he wouldn’t shoot me; he only meant to scare ... Now calm down, Marna, calm down. I’ll explain to the police. They’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

But Marna had flung herself into a sofa, was sobbing. Another woman dropped down beside her, cradled her in her arms. “It’s all right, Ma’am, we’ll get to the bottom of this....”

But it wasn’t, was it? Angie had been poisoned, maybe Rena. Glenna was still missing. And there was an unknown skeleton in the hole in Glenna’s backyard. It wasn’t all right at all.

* * * *

Back home, Ruth skipped her errands; she’d send Emily to the food co-op. She switched off the engine, ran straight for the barn. She just wanted to be with the cows, wanted to do the evening milking. “Go home,” Tim said. “I’ve got it under control.” But he didn’t understand. She needed the work; she wanted to smell the cows, breathe them in, clean the manure off the floor, fork the hay into the troughs. She knelt down by Jane Eyre’s calf. It burrowed into her, mooing softly. She put her arms around it, smelled it; its body was warm and full of throbbing blood. “I love you, baby, I love you,” she told it, and it stood absolutely still then in her arms. If it were a cat, it might purr. Purring, mooing—that was giving back, returning love. That’s what she needed. Love. Work.

She sat there until a shadow fell over her outstretched feet. It was Tim. When had his beard gotten so gray?

“Well, make up your mind, lady, you gonna milk or not? ’Cause if you are, I got other things I can do. I’m still hurting from that root canal. This farm …”

She stood up, gazed out the barn window. “I know. This farm. But we’ll make it work. We will, Tim. We will.”

“Sure, we will,” he said, his whiskery face softening. “So go do the milking, will ya? The fences are holding—so far. Good luck!” And he shook his head as she smiled. “Women,” he said, for the hundredth time. “No man’s never gonna understand ’em.”

This time, she laughed out loud. She didn’t understand herself—so how could any man?

* * * *

When Fay asked the hitchhiker to tell about himself—she loved to hear other people’s stories—she could feel him shrink back into his spine. “It’s okay,” she said, “you don’t have to tell. We don’t have to talk. It’s just that—well, I’ve been to visit my daughter and grandson, you see. I left them, you know, and I felt bad about it. I mean, I left my husband, and that meant leaving them, too. Though she’s not young. Patsy. I’d never have left her as a child, you know. I wouldn’t—couldn’t!— have. Though there were times I was tempted. Because of Dan, I mean.”

“Dan’s your husband?” She felt him coming back out of his shell, interested in what she had to say. What she felt compelled to say, like some ancient mariner, back from the murky deeps.

“Uh-huh. He’s a good guy, really—everyone says so. It just didn’t work out, that’s all. I felt kind of, you know, squeezed in that relationship.”

“Yeah,” the old man said in his funny gruff voice. “I know that feeling. Had it myself. I suppose there was—pardon me—somebody else? Another woman? For—what’s his name?”

“Dan? Now, oh yes. But not then. I mean, he adored women, and they adored him. Especially the elderly ones. He was always on call for coffee, bridge—I don’t play bridge—he’d fix their furnaces.”

“Their plumbing?”

She caught the joke, laughed. “Really, not that I know of, but he liked to be away, you see, out of the house—anyplace but in it, with me—even though he had all those chickens. We had an egg farm.”

“Farm? Any horses?” the man said.

“No horses. But how’d you like to live with a thousand chickens? Roosters crowing every dawn, so you can never sleep in late when you want to. Dan loves those chickens, those hens, those roosters.”

“No horses, though.”

“No. You had horses?”

“The wife did. A horse. God, she loved that horse.”

“More than you, you mean,” Fay said, thinking of Dan’s chickens, how he’d crow over them, their colors, their shapes, the size of their eggs.

He thought a minute. “More than me, yeah. Always pampering it, talking to it, riding off on it. Wanting me to ride. Calling me a sissy ’cause I didn’t.” He banged a fist on his knee. “Fuck,” he said softly.

“You didn’t talk to her about it? Make her understand the horse was coming between you?”

He chuckled. “Oh, I did. I... I, um, dug a hole, you see.”

She braked quickly for a dog running across the road. The car swerved. “Sorry,” she said, suddenly nervous. “You dug a hole for the horse. You meant to ... bury it there?”

“I did,” he said, pleased with himself.

“But one horse,” she said, thinking of the thousand chickens back in Cabot. “Surely you weren’t jealous of one horse?”

Now he was angry. She felt him rise up out of his backbone. “One horse. She slept with the damn thing. Oh yes, two or three times I woke up, and she wasn’t in bed. She was in the barn, lying in a pile of hay—next to that goddamn horse.” He stole a look at Fay. “Made me wonder what she did with it. You know about shepherds and their sheep, do you?”

Fay would have laughed if she hadn’t been so nervous. She thought she knew who this man was. They were driving into Shoreham now. Soon the turn would come up for Branbury, where she’d planned to let him out. So he could hitchhike over to the thruway. Albany, he’d said. He had money enough for a bus to the city.

“And that wasn’t all she slept with,” he cried. “I could have swallowed that horse thing, I could have. But not those others!”

“Oh?”

“So I up and left.”

“You left her? Your wife? Without saying anything?”

“I meant to. I think. But... things happened. I never got around to it. I just left. I didn’t come back till—”

Fay felt the tiny hairs quiver on the back of her neck. It had to be old Mac, Glenna’s husband, who they’d thought was in that hole, but who’d been found down in New York, brought back, and then disappeared. Someone must have done in the bones that were in that hole, and put Mac’s hat on him. Her hands quivered on the wheel. She didn’t want to alarm him. But she had to get him back to the farm. Or to Ruth’s.

No, either way he’d be suspicious; he’d get out, run
off.
There had to be another way.

There was a small convenience store outside of Shoreham. There was a phone, a bathroom. She remembered her Philadelphia lover, his weak kidneys. She’d make a phone call.

“You mind if we stop?” she said, trying to steady her voice. “I’m dying for a soda. I’ve had this thirst since I left Cabot. They’ve got a bathroom, too.”

“No soda,” he said. “But you can buy me a Hershey bar. With almonds. I don’t like the plain chocolate. Reminds me of Ex-Lax. My mother made me eat that crap.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said, squealing to a stop in front of the store. She dropped the keys in her pocket, just in case. “Give me a few minutes. Sure you don’t want to come in?”

He was slumped down in his seat. He looked exhausted; his eyes were filming over. “Take your time,” he murmured.

And she did. She had to. No one answered at Ruth’s or Colm’s, so she left messages. It could be fifteen, twenty minutes before Hartley and Willard Boomer got here. Lucky Willard had dropped by the farm. But already Mac was snoring, little gusts of noisy breaths coming out of his mouth, like steam.

Chapter Seventeen

Alwyn poured a trickle of fenthion in the cocoa he was making. Oh no, wouldn’t hurt a human, not a bit, said so, he recalled, on the label. Just keep her quiet down there when the police come. He was expecting them, sure. That Willmarth woman, she’d go straight home and call, yes, she would. He chuckled to think of the scare he’d given her. Wouldn’t’ve hurt her, no, just a little scare so she’d learn to mind her own business. He added a spot of milk, stirred in the fenthion. Or was it that? He remembered now he’d used up the fenthion. When the second flock come along, he bought the other stuff—fellow he knew sold it. Put it in the same box, had he? But it was all the same. For rodents, birds, sure. He didn’t want to kill her now, did he? Just wanted to make her realize. She couldn’t laugh at him. She couldn’t push him in the creek like that. Lock
him
in the cellar with no food!

Was it Glenna or Annie down there? He couldn’t think. Comes down to the same in the end, sure, he thought. Women. They’s all alike.

He descended the broken stone steps into the basement, opened the door to the underground room. She was lying there, quiet, Ma’s pill still working, that white hair (for a panicky moment, he thought it
was
Ma) sprawled across the torn sofa pillow he’d gotten her when she complained.