Hens and Chickens (33 page)

Both Rebecca and Lila were in the kitchen when Tom Kidd knocked on the shed door. Lila greeted him at the door amicably, if unenthusiastically. She had learned to tolerate the Organic Kidd during the organic certification process of
The Egg Ladies
. She invited Kidd into the shed, where he shook the rainwater off his dark green slicker and tossed it over a wooden peg. Kidd followed her into the kitchen, and took the proffered seat at the table.

“I’m going out to pick some rhubarb for sauce for supper,” announced Rebecca, untying her apron.

“Wear a raincoat,” Kidd suggested, pleasantly. “It’s pouring out.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of a little rain!” Rebecca said, and excused herself.

“What’s up?” said Lila, taking her customary chair at the head of the table. “Is there something else I need to do for my certification?”

Kidd put his elbows on the table and leaned closer, eyeing Lila familiarly. “I’m just checking on your new chicks,” he lied. “Making sure ya got ‘em by the time they were two days old.”

Lila recoiled from his nearness. She started to rise up from her seat in order to lead the Organic Kidd out to the hen pen and show him the 200 replacement chicks. He stopped her with a touch of a tapered hand. Lila instinctively jerked away from his moist, warm touch.

“I don’t need to see ‘em,” he said. “Your word is good enough for me,
Lila
.”

Lila sank back down. “The chicks were a day old when I got them,” she reported. “They’re about two weeks now. I haven’t lost any.”

“Hey, good for you! Death sucks; I know that from personal experience!”

Lila raised a dark eyebrow, but said nothing. She waited patiently for Kidd to say what he had to say, and leave.

Kidd flicked a strand of wet black hair back over his shoulder. “Yeah, it’s too bad about that white deer,” he added, mysteriously.

Lila stiffened. “Are you talking about our white deer, Tinkerbell?” she asked, coldly.

“Lila,
Lila
—that’s not very friendly.”

“What ABOUT Tinkerbell?”

Kidd smiled in satisfaction—the fish had taken the bait. “Hobart shot that poor thing. Killed it.”

“I don’t believe it,” Lila stated, flatly.

“I saw the deer myself in the bed of his blue pickup 15 minutes ago. Deader than the proverbial doornail!”

Lila felt her anxiety rising. “There must be some mistake.”

“Oh, there’s no mistake. Hobart needs money. Everybody knows he hasn’t had much carpentry work since the Recession started. Jesus, he’s so broke he even sells fiddleheads! The hide from that white deer ought a bring him about $5,000.”

Lila clenched her fists beneath the table. “I don’t believe you,” she repeated, in a fiercer tone.

“Hobart told me himself,
Lila
,” said Kidd, fire flashing from his dark eyes. “Plus he had Gilpin’s grandson with him; you can ask the kid.”

Rebecca returned to the kitchen at that moment, shaking herself off and laughing ruefully at her rain-drenched clothing. She placed a basket half-full of rosy-red and green rhubarb stalks on the counter next to the soapstone sink. “Phew, that was a bit wetter than I thought!” she exclaimed.

Lila turned to her friend. “Did you see Gray?” she said, tersely.

“Gray’s gone,” replied Rebecca. “His grandmother must have picked him up before it started to rain. I’m going upstairs to change out of these wet things!”

The blood drained from Lila’s face. She felt sick to her stomach. Her world seemed to be crashing in on her.
Mike killed Tinkerbell?! How COULD he?!

Rain pelted against the kitchen window. The lights dimmed. Thunder cracked overhead.

Kidd leaned closer to whisper in her ear. Lila smelled and felt his hot beer breath against her cheek. His thick lips brushed against her hair. She tried to pull back, but was frozen; transfixed!
Omigod! Not NOW!

“
Lila, Lila
,” Kidd taunted softly. “Ya can ask Hobart yourself. Ya know he never lies!”

When Rebecca returned from changing out of her wet clothes, Lila was alone at the kitchen table. Rebecca started to speak, but her young friend rose up with a strangled cry, startling her.

“Lila, dear, what’s the matter?” Rebecca asked. She was shocked by Lila’s changed appearance—her face was white, her hazel eyes abnormally large and her nostrils flared slightly. The motherly woman instinctively reached out to comfort Lila, but the younger woman pushed her away.

“I’ve got to go; I’VE GOT TO GO!” Lila cried.

“Where, dear? What happened! What did that organic man
say
to you?!”

But Lila appeared to be in a frantic daze. She raced to the shed, pulled on her Muck™ boots and rain jacket, and slammed out the door. The next thing Rebecca knew her friend was speeding out the driveway in Miss Hastings’ old ’64 Pontiac LeMans, without one further word of explanation!

An hour later, Mike Hobart was sitting in the same spot from which Tom Kidd had spewed his lies to Lila. Hobart, soaked from the thunderstorm, was drying his wet, grimy face with a cotton hand towel that Rebecca had given him. His jeans were muddy from helping Gray bury the deer and his boots were not only muddy, but bloodstained. Instead of going home to change per usual, he had elected to drive straight to the old Russell homestead. He suspected that his former college classmate might attempt some type of nefarious retaliation, and Hobart wanted to see Lila as soon as possible, so that he could tell her himself of Tinkerbell’s demise.

“Sorry about the floor,” he apologized to Rebecca, handing the dirty towel back to her. “I was in such a hurry to see Lila, I forgot to take off my boots. Is she in the hen pen?”

“Nooo—she just left. You missed her by about 10 minutes.”

“Where’d she go? Up to Miss Hastings’?”

Rebecca hesitated, unsure what would be the best way of breaking the unsettling news to Lila’s lover. “I’m not sure
where
she went. She was acting very strange.”

A sick feeling washed over Hobart. “What do you mean
strange
?” he demanded, gruffly.

“She looked like she’d seen a ghost,” Rebecca replied. “I don’t know what that organic man said to her, but it must have been something
awful
.”

Hobart’s handsome face turned ashen beneath his tan. “Tom Kidd was here? Already!” 

Rebecca nodded. “Sitting with Lila, right where you are now. I went upstairs to change my clothes – I got wet picking rhubarb in the rain – and when I came back down, he was gone and Lila was, well, almost wild.”

“Did you hear
anything
Kidd said? Anything at all?!”

“Not a word.”

Hobart put his head in his hands. “He told her! Of course he told her!
What must she think of me?!
”

Concerned, Rebecca sank down into Lila’s chair at the head of the table. She didn’t know what was going on, but her caretaker instincts recognized a soul in need. “Lila loves you, Mike,” she said, touching him reassuringly on the shoulder. “You
know
that.
I
know that. Some
lie
that man told her isn’t going to change the fact that Lila loves you!”

He groaned. “It wasn’t a lie. I killed Tinkerbell!” And then in between shaky breaths Hobart related to Rebecca the events of the afternoon as they had unfolded.

Tears came to Rebecca’s eyes as she listened to his tale. “Oh, no! Not Tinkerbell!”

“I had no choice!” he sobbed.

“Oh, I know; I know! Gray could have been injured or killed!” Rebecca shuddered at the thought.

“But you can bet that’s not how Tom Kidd told the story to Lila!” Hobart exclaimed. He groaned again.
“What must she think of me?!”

“Oh, Mike! Surely you’ve got more faith in Lila’s love than
that
?”

“Faith? What is faith?!” Hobart cried. “God knows I’ve tried to help Lila, but she can’t seem to break free from something in her past! And now … THIS?!”

Rebecca, who knew every detail of Lila’s past, was silent for a moment. “She’s getting better,” she said, finally.

“I thought so, too. But this –
this
might set her back! Who knows what terrible spin Kidd put on Tinkerbell’s death!” He buried his face in his arms and burst into tears.

Rebecca bit her lip. She agonized in her mind whether or not she should tell Hobart anything. Perhaps Lila had gone down to see her new confidante, the minister of the Sovereign Union Church? Perhaps this unusual behavior even had something to do with what the minister had promised Lila: that she would see her deceased father again? Rebecca didn’t understand it all herself, but, bizarre and unsettling as the suggestion was, Lila obviously had faith that seeing and talking to her real father would help her put her past behind her.

But … Rebecca recalled her own promise to herself not to interfere. In addition, Lila had certainly not authorized Rebecca to share her personal story with anyone, not even Mike Hobart. In fact, Lila herself should be the one to make the disclosures to him. No, Rebecca could tell him nothing. She could only wait – patiently – and hope that whatever was occurring for her young friend, the end result would be positive for Lila
and
for this very deserving young man who was now weeping at her kitchen table!

“There, there dear,” said Rebecca, soothingly. “Try not to jump to conclusions. Let me just call Lila on her cell phone and we’ll find out where she is.”

She stood up, went to the kitchen wall phone and dialed Lila’s cell number. A few moments later, a musical sound was heard from the dining room. Lila – normally attached at the hip to her phone – had left the electronic device behind on the table, next to her laptop!

At that point, I think, Rebecca herself began to wonder herself if Lila WAS coming back.

Chapter 31

Hens and Chickens

We’ve reached the
denouement
of our story, where Good triumphs over Evil and where we discover that – once again – the Devil’s attempt at a toehold in Sovereign, Maine is not successful. This is the point at which (before I conclude our little tale) I clamber up onto my soap box, er, into my pulpit, and deliver a defining pastoral message, which is necessarily one and the same as the moral of our story. For by now you know that your storyteller is none other than the itinerant Quaker minister who leads the Sovereign Union Church every other week, the “odd duck” who runs bare-assed naked through the goldenrod in August.

If I were you, I’d flip ahead at this point, and skip the sermon. However, knowing that human tendency to want to skip the medicine, I’ve deliberately inserted into this chapter a very important clue as to how Lila is liberated forever from the clutches of the Devil and the nightmares of her childhood. Alas, the clue will be revealed
only in this chapter!

If you do choose to stay with me here, my pips, I promise my preaching will be brief…

I was born in the 1950s on a dairy farm in Winslow, Maine, when such farms were a dime a dozen (I could count seven dairy farms on our road alone) and the Grange, the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, was still a thriving affair. We lived in an extended nest; my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, three generations of dairy farmers in a neat row on the Garland Road—
boom, boom, boom
. If you can find a more perfect place to grow up and a more wonderful situation into which to be born, I’ll eat my precious, ratty, 1,044-page, New Revised Version of the Bible given to me when I was seven by the pastor of a Congregational church.

My favorite person was my grandfather. He was kind, gentle, loving – much like Lila Woodsum’s father – and he doted on me. I tagged along when he called the Jersey cows home to the barn to milk in the afternoon: “Here cows, c’mon cows. Come, come!” And I hung out with him in the barn, which was my favorite place to be in the whole world. I loved the smells of sweet hay and sour milk, and was mesmerized by the hot
splash
of cow urine and smelly
splat
of cow manure that erupted during feeding time. I loved being anywhere with Grandfather, but especially in the barn with the cows, because just
being
there with him was so satisfying an experience!

When I was six, my father decided to improve his own family situation. Dad had seen the writing on the wall for Maine’s small dairy farms (in the ‘50s there were 51,000 herds of dairy farms in Maine; today in the Pine Tree State there are 304), and elected to pursue higher education as a vocation by which he could feed his growing family. So we split from the extended family, sold our farm and moved away from the nest. Friends, I never recovered from that loss.

My grandfather died less than a year after our departure from Winslow.  I never saw him again. I wrote letters and colored pictures for him almost every day. But I was seven and a half. I didn’t even know what death was. I didn’t know that one day you could be holding hands with someone you love – or calling the cows in to milk with him – and that the next day he would be gone; never to rise or smile or love me again.

The system really needs work. But I haven’t thought of a better one to replace it yet—and believe me, I’ve tried.

After that the old folks in our extended family (and there were a lot of them) started dropping like flies: my great-grandfather, two great-grandmothers, grandmother etc. etc. Finally, I was left with one living grandparent—my mother’s mother. Now, this particular grandmother – let us call her “Gram” for short – had nine grandchildren, of which I was her least favorite. The six boys, of course, ranked highest, followed by my girl cousin, my older sister and then—me.

I was 21-years-old when it came to me like a vision, high on a hilltop in California, that if I wanted to return to Maine and re-experience living in the family nest amongst the hay fields and the balsams and the white pines – if this was my heart’s longing, passion and delight (and it was) – then I had better hurry home to the Pine Tree State because only Gram remained; and she wasn’t getting any younger.