Nobody's Child (7 page)

“Yes?”

“Think about it. How many tobacco barns burned up in all the years we've lived here?” He raised that eyebrow again.

“I don't know. A few?”

“This is the only tobacco fire I can ever remember, Laura Ann. While you were sleeping, I called the state emergency ops center in Charleston. They have a few fires on record, but all those were in fire-cured burley barns. Nothing air-cured has ever burned up in this county — or in the five counties around us.” He bunched thin lips, looking up at the ceiling a moment, then added, “Until yours.”

She shrugged. “First time for everything?”

“Nope. I don't buy it. And as for the deputy's view that the transformer ‘just blew up,' that doesn't fit either. I called the power company to get the transformer replaced and they agree with me. There was no lightning or wind last night, and your place pulls almost no power load. Transformers don't spontaneously combust.” Ian munched on half a biscuit topped with the last two spoons of pear preserves. He scooped out the dregs of the sweets and licked his spoon clean. “Even the insurance adjusters I called said that kind of fire was unheard of.”

“So we're back to the footprints?” she asked, savoring her own last bite. Ian knew how to bake — another surprise.

“Someone set that fire, Laura Ann. Trouble is proving it. By the way, the fire department will be here late this afternoon
to conduct an investigation. I called them too.” He wiped his mouth and put the question on the table. “So—who'd do this?”

“It's a short list, Ian. About one person long.”

“Your uncle Jack? Maybe. He's the easy choice. But I think he's too smart — no, make that ‘cunning.' “ He looked out the window in the direction of the black remains of the barn. “He'd send someone else.” Ian took a deep breath, then added, “We'll have to hope the firemen find something.”

Ian got up and moved his chair to sit next to her. He took her hand, pulling her gently toward him, and rested his elbow on the table. “How will you pay the bills, Laura Ann? Now that you've lost the tobacco?”

“I'll find a way.” Her lip stiffened, her secret income source the first thing that came to mind when he asked. She hated that thought, battling to push it out of her mind.

“Put yourself in the banker's shoes. I need you to be specific. How do you pay?” He squeezed her hands.

“I don't know yet. But I won't let them take my farm. I promise you that.”

Ian took another of his deep breaths, a sign he was forming hard words. “I admire your drive, Laura Ann. You've got guts, and — “

“That's all?” she asked. “Guts?”

“Okay. So gutsy is good, but it doesn't answer the mail for the banker or the real estate offer.” He hesitated, then added, “I need hard numbers.”

“I have a plan,” she said with hesitation. “That's all I can say.”

Ian huffed, shaking his head. “That answer won't cut it, either.”

“So what do you want me to do?” she blurted out, her voice cracking. “I can't pull money out of thin air.” Her eyes felt wet, a betrayal of the battle that raged inside. Self-esteem waged war
with Daddy's memory. She hated herself for the moral compromise she'd already made to save this farm. Tears ran free down her cheek. She lowered her head, unable to let go of him, yet embarrassed to reveal her secret.

“I need you to listen, not act,” he replied in a slow voice. “Drop the optimism for a minute and let's be pragmatic.” He released her and lifted fingers to her cheek, wiping at the wet. “First of all, let me know who puts pressure on you. You call immediately, understand?” He pointed to the phone. “Memorize my number.”

“This is my battle, Ian.”

“No. It's not just about you, Laura Ann. I'm involved now, and this is
our
battle.” His eyes bored through her. “But if we're going to function as a team, you have to share the game plan. You can't keep it to yourself.” He paused a moment, his tone softer. “I know you pretty well and I get this sense there's something important you're not telling me.”

She shrugged, silent.

Ian took a napkin from the table, cradling her chin in one hand and wiping gently at the little rivers on her face. “We'll get through this, I promise. Remember what you told me when I worried if I'd finish my associate's degree? And what you said so many times in those long months when I was looking for a game warden job?” His smile punctuated the questions as he daubed at the last dampness. He put a finger to the corner of her mouth, dragging it up into a forced grin, her hot cheeks rising under the caress of a tender hand.

“You remembered?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper, convicted now by her own words.

He nodded and pushed back an errant bang from her eyes while he waited for her answer.

“A daddy lesson,” she said at last. Laura Ann's smile faded, her lips testifying to a terrible hypocrisy. “Trust God to provide.”

She dropped her gaze, staring in humiliation at her hands.

Laura Ann tucked a quilt around the back of Ian's shoulders. His head sank into the down of the pillow she'd brought him only minutes earlier. She knelt by the sofa, her face close to his, the breath of his light snoring a damp warmth on her cheek.

The stubble of a day's beard roughened a face she'd never seen unshaven in their years together. A stickler for a fresh haircut and a smooth face, Ian's sudden vulnerability, his day without a razor, sent a strange warmth coursing through her. He'd come here — and stayed—just for her. She fought the temptation to caress his jaw, desperate to draw her finger across his chin like she used to touch Daddy, in wonder at the daily forest that sprang out of his skin.

Straight brown hair lay askew on the pillow, but the line of his hair against his neck was perfect. A weekly trip to Curt's Barber Shop always preceded his Saturday visit to The Jug. Daddy once commented that Ian cut his hair for Laura Ann, his habit of arriving freshly groomed every weekend to “check in.” Perhaps Daddy saw more in Ian than she'd allowed herself to dream. Just a friend, dependable to the end, his Saturday visits meant fellowship and fun, a break in the predictable pattern of work at the farm. She saw the truth now — he'd come courting. After fifteen years of companionship, she'd been too preoccupied with him as a boy to notice the beau.

Laura Ann again fought the urge to touch him, then stood to adjust the quilt over his feet, and backed away. She lingered at the door to the living room, wishing she could crawl onto the sofa with him, curled at his side, and feel him breathe in his sleep. She wished he would wake and tell her just how to deal with her dilemma. Perhaps he could save her from the only
financial option she had at her disposal. Laura Ann prayed that he would rise now, and deliver her from herself.

She backed away from the door, staring down the hall to her bedroom. At the end of the short passage, the bathroom beckoned, the yawning mouth of its narrow door ready to swallow her. Laura Ann's destiny, and the farm's one salvation, rested in a silver foil package in the medicine cabinet.

Like one giant hand of fate pushing her from the kitchen down the length of the hall, and another bony hand dragging her into the bath, twin forces pulled her from Ian to her next task. While he slept, she would take the first step, preparing her body for cold hands that would steal life from her one moment, but pay cash the next.

Her steps to the bath forgotten, she found herself staring in the mirror at a woman she knew, but had no desire to be. A blister pack of pills in one hand, she fingered the foil, pressing its malleable silver down on the hard bump below. The pink magic beneath her fingertip would soon transform her body in remarkable ways that could save this home. A daily pill that enabled her womanhood to put crucial money on the table, if only for a time. A regular pill she must take every day to catalyze changes in her body and gain her advantage — a financial buffer and the time she needed to save the farm.

She stared at the mirror. Long brown hair, pulled back into a ponytail, draped over her left shoulder—hair that screamed to be washed. Hair unkempt from fighting fires and sleeping in too late. Brown curly hair that defied control.

She stripped off the foil from this day's dose and perched a pink pill on her tongue, the doctor's elixir to alter her body for profit — for family, and for land.

But at what price?

One green eye, and one blue, blinked back with no answer.

Laura Ann made her choice. She shut her eyes and swallowed, drowning out the voice and its wisdom — Ian's repetition of her own words — a wisdom that fought to rip the pill from her throat.

God will provide.

A
PRIL 16

The sweet aroma of fresh-plowed earth wrapped itself around her like a cool blanket. Thick furrows of new soil lay to her left, winter's humus warming under a bright spring sun. Laura Ann rode the rumbling Case tractor sidesaddle, her left hand gripping the cherry-red lip of the fender while her right hand steered the powerful machine. She guided the belching diesel with a sixth sense for the slice of shiny blades behind her, a four-bottom plow spilling out long ribbons of deep red soil that laid over the green of a winter rye cover crop. April's sun bore into dirt that had never seen the light of day, drying into a light brown crust on exposed ground. A ruddy spring palate of red, brown, and green spread out behind her, ready to embrace seed and to bear new life.

Stabs of pain pulled her attention from the tractor, claws ripping at her insides from deep in her belly. “No. Not again,” Laura Ann moaned, pulling her hand from the fender and shoving her fingers between jean and shirt.

The pressure of her fingers beneath the belt line of her pants did nothing for the stabbing pain. She buckled at the waist, bending over the steering wheel. The tractor veered and her left
tire jammed into the soft soil of her last plow line. The Case lurched from its normal smooth roll in the track of the previous furrow. She hurried to shift the big machine into neutral.

Laura Ann pulled the throttle back to idle and slipped out of the seat, lowering herself gingerly to the ground. Behind her, straight lines of torn earth ended where she stood—earth ripped apart just like her insides. The hot stab of her latest attack stole her balance and she faltered, stumbling in fresh-turned soil.

Laura Ann steadied herself, leaning into the tractor's tire. Like waves crashing onshore, her cramps multiplied times over, swelling for their peak someplace deep inside her abdomen. She breathed deep, shutting her eyes and digging her hands into soft clods that stuck to the tires. Half a minute she clung to the big wheel, imagining a towering wave of torture that curled above, ready to smash her into oblivion.

“Some occasional mild cramping and nausea. Nothing more,” the doctor promised, his head hidden somewhere beneath a sheet that draped over her bare legs while he probed with a long ultrasound wand and cold instruments. He told her it might hurt, but never apologized when she winced at the bite of the long needle deep inside her. He reminded her of an angler shrugging off the bloody worm that broke in two when he pulled it from the soil of his bait bucket. Dr. Katinakis claimed to care for his clients, but she felt more like a commodity than an object of concern. Feet strapped in cold stirrups, her body bared in the most private way to a man, she'd handed herself over to a team of strangers who'd suctioned out precious life.

The wave crashed again, pummeling that place he'd violated just yesterday. A place she'd exposed for her own gain.

Laura Ann crumpled, curling on her side against the embrace of cool earth, her knees drawn up to her side. The rumble of the idling Case faded into the background as images dashed through her head, hot waves building for their third collision on her shore.
A doctor with foot-long hypodermics and cream-colored wands, nurses with gentle voices whose pleading eyes cried out “why are you here?” Bright lights and pink linens, suction devices and latex gloves. And a pat on the back from a patronizing physician who reminded her that, after all that pain, “Everything will be just fine.”

I'm not fine.

The wave crushed her. She moaned, her voice dying in the moist earth below her face, echoes drowned out by a rumbling diesel. She focused her attention on the dirt, the sweet cool smell of fresh soil. Dirt — her only sure solace and redemption. No more waves built within her. She sat up.

Laura Ann opened her eyes just a moment, glancing at her watch, an old Timex buffed to a satin patina from the scratches of hard work. Three contractions in the past ten minutes. She stood, pulling at handholds on the tire and tractor seat. Dizzy, she leaned back into the tire, then reached around the clay-caked wheel to fish out a small jug, her only refreshment. Lukewarm water wet her lips but her stomach revolted before she could swallow, a fourth wave of pain springing to life within her. The old quart milk container fell from her hands and she crumpled to her knees.

Her lunch came up.

Laura Ann wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her work shirt, then crawled a few feet away and lay down on unplowed earth, damp grass her bedding. The deep-throated rumble of the idling diesel thrummed inside her, the sound of new life vibrating through soft ground. She gritted her teeth again, shutting her eyes against yet another wave of cramps and nausea.

“No strenuous activity tomorrow. Just go shopping,” the counselor joked only yesterday in Morgantown.

Shopping?

Every dollar she touched went into a Mason jar stashed at
the back of the refrigerator, its clear glass a window to her financial reality. There could be no stores, no expensive fun. And no relaxing. Tomorrow it would rain, perhaps the first of several days of storms. Today was her one chance to get the fields ready for planting. Cramps or not, strenuous or not, she had to plow and disc. Without fields, without planting, there could be no crops — and no mortgage payments. Far down the hill, in a cold container tucked behind mayonnaise, her next payment waited. A wad of lifeless bills counted into her hand by a man with no smiles, doling out thirty pieces of silver — her body traded for the farm's salvation.

But not thirty pieces. Not even one.

Seven hundred dollars. Not the twenty-five thousand she'd read about in the magazine. Not the ten thousand she read about on the website. Not even the four thousand dollars she'd brought home three times already. Just seven hundred dollars, barely enough for one week of mortgage, shelled out by the doctor like he'd parted with the last of his life savings.

“For your trouble,” Dr. Katinakis said with a shrug, his fingers holding tight to that last bill lest Laura Ann snatch it from him. “This is the best I can do. You had what we call a ‘dropped cycle.' I need you to try again.”

She shuddered, recalling his prolonged wink and grin, that creepy informality when he laid his fingers on her forearm, lingering just a moment with the parting words, “I hope you'll come back.”

Laura Ann gritted her teeth against the crescendo of suffering, all her attention focused on the sweet scent of grass and dandelion. Delicate yellow flowers tickled her cheek where she lay in a fertile green pasture.

Green.

Seven green bills joined others, saved like Daddy taught her, barely enough to make the next payment, and not a dollar
to spare. As though the woman counselor who'd greeted her at the clinic knew just how much she'd need to survive. “You're tall, attractive, and physically fit,” the woman said, looking her over like a cattle auctioneer. “Take all the medication as we prescribed. I'm sure you'll do better next time.”

Dropped cycle. Medications as prescribed. Better next time.

Promises made. Promises broken.

Laura Ann snapped a dandelion free, the white milk of its sap sticky where it bled on her finger. She held the soft blossom to her cheek and closed her eyes, resting her head on cool grass and gritting against the next wave of pain.

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.”

Womb.

Pastor Culpeper's recitation of the Psalm in Sunday service pierced her, a dagger thrust into her bosom of guilt. “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.” He read on, preaching to the little Baptist church in Pursley where she'd worshipped since Daddy's passing. “Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.”

Quiver. Shame.

“We always pay our bills, Peppermint,” Daddy said many times, the memory of another lesson tumbling into the midst of her recollection of the pastor's sermon. Daddy's words and the Psalm tore at tender scabs deep inside her, godly wisdom picking in tandem at raw wounds.

She'd sold arrows from her quiver to escape the shame of debt.

Have I lost the blessing?

“Laura Ann?” a voice asked. She felt a hand beneath her head, warmth that spoke “Ian.” She opened her eyes, squinting against the sun.

“Are you okay?”

She smiled, moving her hand from under her head, sliding her other hand beneath the belt line of her jeans to palm the pain that gripped her moments ago. Nothing. Only memories of hot pitchforks driving themselves deep into her belly. She smiled.

“Ian? I — I'm fine.” She tried to push up off the ground, but he lifted her, arms under her back and legs, gathering her into his chest. Laura Ann gasped and threw an arm about his neck, sure she'd fall. Ian carried her a few steps to the tailgate of his pickup.

“What happened?” he asked, setting her gently on the truck. “I've been down at the house waving at you, looking for the tractor to move. Got tired of waiting and drove up to see if you were alright.” He laughed, thumbing in the direction of the idling Case. “Taking a nap?”

Laura Ann shook her head in silence, running her fingers through her hair to knock out bits of weed. “I didn't plan it that way.”

“Are you sick?”

She nodded. “Female stuff. You wouldn't understand.”

“I might. Remember, I have two sisters. You sure you aren't sick?” he asked again, motioning toward a yellow pile of half-digested food.

“Really bad cramps, Ian. I threw up. Must have curled up in the grass for a minute.”

“Not just for a minute. I thought you'd left the tractor in the field. Took me a while to figure out you weren't at the house but up here lying on the ground.” He handed her his Thermos. “Something cold? Looks like you could use it.”

Laura Ann nodded in silence and took a long draught of ice
water. She capped the Thermos and then slid toward the edge of the tailgate. “Thanks. I'm glad you're here.”

Ian laughed again, shaking his head. “You forgot, didn't you?”

“What?” she asked, sliding off the truck. She brushed more weeds from her shirt and pants, headed for the tractor.

“Tonight?” he asked, pointing at the low sun. “Dinner and a movie, remember?”

Laura Ann stopped in her tracks, mentally rerunning the day, her one desperate opportunity to get the fields ready for planting. After yesterday's trip to Morgantown, and today's unbearable pain, she'd lost track.

Date night.

“Oh, no! Ian, I'm sorry. I — “

He put a finger to his lips, a big smile lighting up his bony face. Ian stepped forward and took her hand. “Gonna rain tomorrow, girl. We'd better be plowing.” He tarried, as though searching in her eyes for some news she wouldn't share. “We'll catch a movie Saturday after I get off.”

She started to protest, but Ian shook his head, dropping her hand to move past. With a foot on the bed of the tractor and a hand on the wheel, he launched himself into the seat. Moments later, before she could pull him back, he'd lifted the gang of four plows, put the big diesel in reverse, and backed out of the jam she'd created minutes ago.

“Take my truck and go get the other tractor,” he yelled over the acceleration of the engine. “I already hooked up the disc. I'll finish this off and get the other disc when I'm done.” And with that, he drove away, his blades spilling out four new ribbons of soil.

Ten minutes later, Laura Ann sat on the old blue Ford, a disc harrow hooked up behind her. With both of them working
the field, the job could be finished by dark. He'd given up his favorite evening to plow. To be with her.

Laura Ann eased the tractor into the plowed field, setting her disc into soft rows of fresh dirt. Sharp silver wheels sliced through curled furrows, chopping soil into crumbles. Robins and boat-tailed grackles swooped in on the worm pie that spread out behind Laura Ann's tractor, a seedbed filled with a feast of night crawlers. The sun dipped into the tops of the poplars, now adorned in a brilliant life-green of new leaves. Pass after pass, working her way across the new field, she pummeled fresh plowing into new planting soil. The first cool of evening gripped her when Ian shifted from plow to harrow. His tractor worked the far half of the field, the two of them growing twelve feet closer each pass they made, closing the gap from opposite sides of the seedbed. The place deep inside that seared her minutes ago now glowed warm for him, their paths slowly winding across fresh dirt toward an eventual intersection.

The damp of the Middle Island Creek crept up from the valley, a misty fog in the moist April evening. Early night air blanketed the farm. Acres of freshly turned earth filled the air with the perfume of farming, faintly musty, faintly sweet. This was the aroma of life, like the fields after a rain.

Laura Ann raised her head high, capturing the musky fragrance of tilled earth, her mouth open as though she could drink it in and make it hers to remember every day. Something powerful about the smell of plowed soil made it amorous, even sensual. Acres of fertile dirt spread out before her, prepared by loving hands, ready to accept seed and spring forth with new life.

Romantic.

That was the word. God had inclined her nose—surely her entire body — to adore this bouquet.

Laura Ann finished her pass down the length of the field
and spun the tractor for her last line of disc work, one that would put her on an intersecting path with Ian. She determined to meet him midfield, then cook him a late dinner and wrap him in her arms to thank him — in a special way—for this sacrifice.

“I came over to the farm yesterday,” Ian said after a long silence. They sat together on a porch swing watching the night fog roll over the valley and its acres of new fields. Laura Ann curled her head into his shoulder, her arms wrapped tight about his chest. The bony protrusions of his ribs were distinct washboards below his khaki shirt. “You didn't answer the house phone and I was worried.”