Stolen Honey (7 page)

“By the way,” Harvey said at the door, the three boys halting behind him, “ ’spect you won’t be going to the funeral this afternoon, right? I hear they stopped classes for it. The college, I mean, big man on campus he was, hey, Tilden?” Tilden shrugged. “You’d feel, well, a mite uncomfortable, right?” He tried to look sympathetic, but it came out a smirk.

“I never met the boy,” she said. “But of course I’m going. And so is Donna.”

Harvey just smiled.

Ralphie stuck out his hand in parting, a grin on his lopsided face. He was really quite sweet, in spite of being a Ball. “Shiny,” he said, “Ralph see a shiny,” and he pointed toward the woods.

“Is that right?” she said, looking for a dropped coin, but not seeing any. It was a buttercup he’d seen, perhaps. Simple pleasures.

Harvey pulled him along then, and the trio walked slowly back up the road. Just as they were at the curve, where her land touched the Balls’, and where she kept a half dozen hives, she saw one of the boys—it might have been Sidney—turn around and spit.

She clapped a hand to her cheek. It felt sticky, unclean, as though the spit had been intended for her.

Chapter Five

Professor Camille Wimmet hurried back to her office after sociology class. She didn’t have any students signed up for conference; this was her sacred hour. She had completed all the coursework for her doctorate; now there was only the real work, the paper she would turn into a published article and ultimately, she hoped, a book.

The subject was fascinating to her. It had all started when she learned from her mother that back in the early thirties a woman named Eleanor Perkey had lived for eight weeks in Camille’s hometown of Corning and interviewed the inhabitants to learn their reactions to a recent influx of French-Canadian farmers. Perkey had talked to Camille’s grandmother, who had moved down from Quebec with her husband and six children to take over an abandoned sheep farm. Camille was shocked to learn that the “old residents” had complained that their town was no longer “one big family” and predicted that soon all the farms owned by “old Yankee pioneer stock” (which, translated, meant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant—WASP!) would be sold to French-Canadians.

Eleanor Perkey, she found, was the wife of William Perkey, a university professor, who was conducting a eugenics survey in the state, hoping to edge out the “feebleminded” and other “degenerates,” with a narrowing eye on poor Franco-Americans, homosexuals, and so-called “gypsies,” some of whom turned out to be Abenaki Indians. It was Eleanor Perkey’s report on “degenerate women” who were sterilized in the Brookview Reformatory in Rutland that gave Camille the true focus of her paper.

Two families, in particular, were of interest. One from the present day, and the other from the past. The present-day family was the Woodleaf-LeBlanc family, whom she knew to be of mixed Abenaki and French-Canadian blood—her student Donna had interested her in that genealogy. The woman from the past, and her principal focus, was one Annette Godineaux. Annette had been put in the reformatory on a charge of “sexual promiscuity,” a “crime” of which many poor, uneducated, and abused women in that period were accused. She’d been recommitted for numerous petty crimes: larceny, breach of parole, thefts in the five-and-dime, bounced checks. And, according to a Stanford-Binet test administered to her, she scored a borderline seventy-five.

But then Camille had discovered in Mrs. Perkey’s report that Annette wrote poetry. There were only four poems extant, used largely by supervisors and local police as “evidence” of her promiscuity. How could a woman with an IQ of seventy-five write such lyrical verse? Unless in some way she had fudged the IQ test, deliberately written in false responses. It was Camille’s assumption that this had been the case and that Annette, whose grandfather had married an Abenaki woman from St. Francis, was as intelligent as Camille herself.

So Camille was out to prove that this woman, who had been in and out of prison no less than fourteen times, and who had ultimately submitted to the indignity of sterilization, had been horribly exploited. Annette was most likely dead, since she’d been born in 1900, but dead, Camille was out to prove, because of exploitation by the state of Vermont, which had aided and abetted the Perkeys in their eugenics project.

It was abuse, it was hate. And she meant to expose it for what it was.

She opened the folder of
ANNETTE
papers she had so far copied: the police and social worker reports, the poems, the IQ tests, and most intriguing of all, a copy of Annette’s personal journal, written prior to her disappearance from the written records and left in her room at the reformatory. Annette had had four children before her first arrest for adultery, all sent to foster homes; there was reference in the diary to an older child’s offspring. Camille would have to track them down as well. There was so much work to do before she could write! First, though, she would put the reports, poems, and journal onto disk, and copy that disk so that she would have a double record. Camille was paranoid that way; she even kept important papers in her home freezer to be sure they weren’t burned by a chance fire.

She took a long draft from the bottle of spring water on her desk and leaned eagerly into her task. She had to work quickly because of the four o’clock memorial service for Shep Noble. There were so many deterrents to her work! Her teaching, of course, student conferences, the interminable faculty meetings. And only yesterday Leroy’s mother, who was in an institution with cystic fibrosis, had called, with an aide’s help, to ask her to look up the boy. He hadn’t been to visit for six months, Aunt Denise said, and would Camille do her familial duty? She was, after all, Leroy’s only active relative.

Although Camille wasn’t looking forward to the visit, it did have an added dividend: an introduction to Merton LeBlanc, whose sister, she’d discovered through her research, had been one of Eleanor Perkey’s victims. And then the real business would start: the search for Annette, and interviews with the Godineaux family—at least with whatever members of that extended family she could ferret out.

She heard male voices out in the hall and got up to shut the door all the way. But not before she heard Frazer Manning, her department head, say to a colleague, “Tell that fruitcake to buzz off,” and then laugh. Frazer was a known homophobe, and she detested him. She’d like to run out and yell,
Who do you think you are—God? Calling someone a name like that?

But she had to be careful. Camille was lesbian. She couldn’t come out yet in public—not until she had tenure.

* * * *

Gwen felt awkward and sweaty where she stood at the back of the college chapel that was already jammed with mourning students. The fraternity had come en masse: The boys sat near the front in a dozen pews, a sea of bright heads, some of them still wearing baseball caps. Gwen craned her neck but couldn’t pick out Donna from the crowd of girls and a few boys who had swarmed up into the balcony or on the ground floor behind the fraternity. The first two pews were reserved for the Noble family. Should she speak to them? No, they would all meet in court eventually—though she mustn’t let them get her down, Russell had warned when he called again just before she left for the service.
She
hadn’t made the boy drink, he reminded her;
she
hadn’t given him an expensive motorcycle on which to drive her daughter and then try to rape her. For it had been attempted rape, she’d gotten that out of Donna. And now Russell was threatening to quit his job, to come home and “keep an eye on Donna.” The girl wouldn’t like that. He’d once “destroyed” a high school relationship, according to Donna, with his “unreasonable behavior.”

The service was a series of testimonials to the boy. One by one, the fraternity brothers scuffed up in their dirty but costly Reeboks and told stories: how Shep had helped one brother make the baseball team by practicing with him each morning before breakfast; how he’d never missed a ski meet, even when he had the flu; how he’d held the fraternity championship in chugalugging—she wondered what the parents thought of that feat! Two of the boy’s coaches stood up to affirm his sportsmanship and athletic prowess, and then three girls wept out abstractions like love, beauty, and soul. One of them might have been the Alyce whom Donna disliked. She matched Donna’s description: blond hair swept up on top of her head, designer jeans, and silk shirt—something steely about her, the way she stood poised and dry-eyed, eliciting tears with her sentimental words. The girl who sat beside Gwen in the back pew was sobbing into a flowered hankie. Gwen wondered what she’d think if she knew who Gwen was—the instrument, the girl might say, of Shep Noble’s death.

Don’t feel guilty. You’re not guilty. Still the tears sprang up in Gwen’s eyes. Shep Noble’s was a young life, unfulfilled. Who knew, after a few knocks in the world, what he might have become?

At the final burst of organ music Gwen slipped out; she couldn’t bear another moment of it. Just as she stood, gulping in the outside air, she saw a dark figure slip out a side door. It was Donna: The girl’s head was lowered, she was crying openly. Gwen called out, but Donna didn’t hear, or chose not to respond. The girl ran down the path to the road, jumped on her bicycle, and raced off toward town. She looked like a refugee fleeing a war, her hair in long black ropes from the wind, her legs pedaling faster than any human, it seemed, could go. Up a hill, around a corner she careened, and was gone.

Would she escape the war after all? The persecutors? Gwen prayed that she would. But knew in her heart it would be a long uphill battle.

* * * *

Coming out the rear door of the chapel, Professor Camille Wimmet saw Donna Woodleaf-LeBlanc ride up the road on her bicycle. Had the girl attended the service? She supposed it wouldn’t have been easy for her, under the circumstances. Camille herself had gone with mixed emotions. Shep Noble had been her student—an average student, usually prepared, if not brilliantly. Rather narrow-minded, though, she’d noted in class discussion—like his ancestor.

And this was the question in Camille’s mind: Should she should tell the Woodleaf family about the Perkey connection? Was it relevant? For Shep, she had discovered, was a descendant of William and Eleanor Perkey, who had done such irreparable harm to the state’s poor that their project had turned into a veritable holocaust. Shep Perkey Noble, alive, might have helped her; he might have had letters, documents, family stories to offer. She might even have persuaded him to write his paper about the eugenics project.

And yet, when she’d invited him to remain after class for the purpose of interrogating him, and he’d stood before her desk looking handsome, confident, arrogant, like his maternal grandparents, she’d felt such an anger fill her throat that she could only mumble something incoherent about his latest quiz and quickly dismiss him.

But who else would know about this connection? And who would kill for it—if indeed, that had been the case? The poor “degenerates” whom the grandparents had abused? The babies they had, in effect, denied life to? But the poor had no clout. They were mostly absorbed now into the general population; in hiding, like the Abenaki, who, in order to survive, for decades had been trying to assimilate themselves into the white majority.

Yet the Abenaki of late, she’d read, had been emerging, protesting, asserting their ancient rights. Was Shep Perkey Noble’s death part of this protest? The notion seemed far-fetched. She would have to consider carefully before putting the Woodleaf-LeBlanc family at risk. After all, Donna was her student.

“Professor Wimmet—are you free? Can I talk to you about my paper?” It was Sue Coletti, a plump, sweet-faced girl—overly conscientious.

“Why not?” she said as the girl trotted alongside her. She’d been thinking abusive thoughts about the dead. She wanted to push them out of mind. “So what is it you were planning to write? This afternoon has blotted everything out of my head.”

“Oh, yes, sad, wasn’t it? I know he was in your other section.” The girl, a declared lesbian, put a hand on the teacher’s sleeve.

“The paper,” Camille reminded her, and hearing voices behind her, she pulled away and walked on faster.

* * * *

Donna rode her bike to the local Ben & Jerry’s. She didn’t want to see any of those college kids, not even Emily, who had offered to go with her to the service, but at the last minute had to help with a freshening cow.

She’d sat in the balcony, seen the parents when they came in, looking tall, well groomed, grieved. It had broken her heart to see the mother suddenly slump into the pew, a handkerchief clutched to her face, the father patting her shoulder. That one gesture, the patting of the shoulder, was what destroyed Donna. She was suddenly drowning in tears—not for Shep so much, whom she didn’t know, really, but for the parents. She hardly saw or heard the rest of the service. As she stumbled down the stairs after the final benediction, someone grabbed her wrist and twisted it. It was Alyce Worthington. “You’ll have to live with this,” the girl said, looking hard into Donna’s eyes. And then, with a little push, she let her go. And Donna raced downtown to console herself with ice cream.

It was no consolation. Her tears kept dripping into the plastic dish. She was getting up to leave when a voice spoke up. She knew that voice, jammed both fists into her eyes.

“ ‘S’not worth it,” Leroy was saying, “you shouldna gone. Look.” He snatched up her hand when she tried to pick up her bowl. “He was an SOB.
You
know he was, he wasn’t worth your little finger. You can’t go mooning over ’im.”

“I’m not mooning over him. That’s not why I’m crying!” Leroy didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand it was the boy’s father comforting the mother that brought on the tears. And then that mean-spirited Alyce, telling her she’d have to live with the guilt. Leroy couldn’t understand all that.

“You should have minded your own business, Leroy. You had no right to come out that night and peer at us. Like we were ...” She couldn’t find the right words.