A Year on Ladybug Farm #1 (25 page)

“Well, how are we supposed to know that?” Lindsay demanded, shrinking back as the deer wandered closer.

“It don’t hardly even have teeth!”

“It has hooves!” Cici pointed out.

“It’s just a yearling.” Noah scooped up an apple and came to the bottom of the porch steps, making a smacking sound with his lips. The deer turned, spied the apple, and came delicately down the steps to Noah. To his evident delight, and the women’s amazement, the deer began to munch the apple from his hand.

“It’s tame,” Bridget said in amazement, coming out onto the porch to join Cici and Lindsay. “It’s adorable! Do you think it escaped from a zoo?”

Noah gave her a disparaging glance. “Ain’t no zoos around here.”

Bridget, with the love light already shining in her eyes, came down the steps as the deer finished the last of the apple and nuzzled Noah’s hand for more. “Oh, let me try!”

Before long, all three women were sitting on the steps, taking turns feeding the young deer apples and carrots and bits of lettuce from the kitchen. “Are you sure it doesn’t have rabies or anything?” Lindsay said, although she wasn’t nearly as uneasy as she had been before. “I never heard of a deer that wasn’t afraid of people.”

“Probably somebody found it as a fawn,” Noah said, “raised it, let it go when it got too big to be a pet. Happens all the time. The mama deers, they hide the young’uns in the tall grass when they sense danger, then some person comes by and thinks it was abandoned. Think they’re doing it a favor by taking it home and feedin’ it, but what they’re really doing is stealing it from its mama.”

Lindsay glanced up at him, a little surprised. She had never heard him speak so many sentences in a row before, nor had she ever seen him quite as relaxed as he was at that moment, squatting on the ground between Bridget and Cici, breaking off chunks of apple to feed to the deer. He looked almost like a regular teenaged boy.

Cici said, wiping her hands on her jeans, “Well he can’t live here.”

Bridget insisted, “Why not?”

“Come on, Bridge,” Cici said. “Sheep are one thing. The dog is another. But a wild deer is not a pet.”

“Remember Mrs. Livingston’s hostas?” prompted Lindsay.

Bridget looked torn.

Cici turned to Noah. “Do you think you could take him back to the woods and let him go?”

Noah stood and shoved his hands back into his pockets, his face growing shadowed again. He shrugged. “Ya’ll got any rope?”

Cici got to her feet. “In the workshop. I’ll get it.”

“ ’Course,” he added, his tone neutral, “huntin’ season starts this weekend. Critter like that, no fear of man . . .” He brought one hand out of his pocket, cocked an imaginary gun with his thumb and forefinger, and pointed it at the deer. “Bound to make good eatin’ though, young as it is.”

Bridget looked stricken, and even Lindsay drew in a breath, ready to protest. Cici looked at the deer. It looked back with its big brown eyes. Cici looked at Noah, scowling.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” she said. “Come help me get the stuff to build it a pen.”

 

 

As it turned out, the pen wasn’t necessary. Although they kept the deer inside the enclosure at night “for his own safety,” the yearling had clearly settled into his new home, and never wandered farther from the house than the blackberry hedge on the hill. Even the border collie—currently called Fly because Bridget had read somewhere that was a popular name for sheepdogs—grew tired of barking at the deer and learned to ignore it. The women told themselves that as soon as hunting season was over they would contact wildlife officials about the proper way to rehabilitate a tame deer to the wild, but in the meantime the population of Ladybug Farm was increased by one.

As far as Lindsay was concerned, the drama of the whole affair was almost worth it for the transformation she had seen in Noah. He arrived early every morning to let the deer out of its enclosure, his pockets stuffed with dried berries and fallen apples he had picked up on the way. He led the animal back to its pen before he left at night, lingering to hand-feed it carrots from the bucket Bridget left by the back door. Although he was his usual taciturn self when others were around, she often watched him from the kitchen window, grinning as he fed the deer, stroking it and talking to it as he might a dog or a horse.

It was awhile before Noah’s loquacity transferred to humans, however. On a cool bright October afternoon, Lindsay was raking out the flower beds while Noah piled kindling wood into the wheelbarrow, and the fawn stepped delicately around the edge of the lawn, nibbling on the remnants of green grass that poked through the layer of orange and yellow leaves.

“Whatcha gonna do with it when it freezes?”

Noah’s voice was so unexpected that it took Lindsay a moment to realize he was speaking to her. She paused in the raking and turned around. “What?”

His scowl reflected impatience. “Deer huddle down together to keep warm in the cold. That’n’s gonna freeze out in that pen at night.”

Lindsay blinked. “Well . . . I guess we’ll put him in the barn then.”

He jerked his head toward the barn. “Roof’s got a hole in it. Deckin’s prob’ly rotted through.”

“Oh.” Lindsay was aware of the enormous significance of this moment. It was the first time Noah had ever initiated a conversation with her. But she didn’t know what to say.

Noah scooped up another double handful of poplar chips and tossed them into the wheelbarrow. “How come you don’t set him up in that dairy barn?”

“What?” She had never felt so inarticulate in her life.

“It’s warm. Fixed the hole in the wall from the snake. What you gonna use it for, anyway?”

She relaxed a little. “It’s going to be my studio.”

He looked at her. “Studio for what?”

“An art studio.” She smiled. “I’m an artist.”

He gave a little snort. “You ain’t no artist.” He dumped another armload of chips into the wheelbarrow.

She was immediately defensive. “What makes you say that?”

“An artist draws,” he answered simply. He picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed it toward the shed.

 

 

Half an hour later, Lindsay set up a lawn chair and a camp table for her pencil kit in the middle of the back lawn, a dozen or so feet away from where the deer grazed, and directly along the path that Noah had to take to empty the wheelbarrow at the woodshed. When he passed behind her, she could hear the wheels slow, and sense his eyes on her, watching her sketch. She did not look up, but made herself concentrate on the drawing. After a while, it was not so much of an effort as she lost herself in her work and the scene began to emerge from the nubby sketch paper: the blades of grass, bent just so, the shape and flutter of autumn leaves, the velvety nose, the luminous eye, the graceful arch of a neck. As amazing as it seemed, Lindsay had actually forgotten how much she loved this.

She was not certain how long Noah had been standing over her, watching. When he spoke, she was startled.

“How do you do that?”

She glanced up at him. “Do what?”

He jerked his head toward the pasture fence, where the deer was now plucking leaves off a scrubby vine. “You’re drawing him under the apple tree. He ain’t there anymore. But your picture looks just like he did when he was.”

“Oh.” It occurred to Lindsay that all of the sketches she had seen in Noah’s book had been of still objects—even the border collie, which had been drawn in profile on the hill overlooking the meadow. He drew what he saw, as most beginning artists did. His question showed insight and ambition, and she felt a smile of excitement start deep inside her—which she did not dare show, of course.

“When you’re drawing something that you can’t pose,” she explained without looking up from the careful shading she was working on around the deer’s eye, “something that you know is going to change or move, like an animal or a sunset or something like that, you make markers for positioning as quickly as you can. For the deer, I drew circles to indicate where his head was in relationship to his neck and where his eyes were on his head and where his hooves were and how long his body was before he moved. That way I made sure I had the proportions right. For everything else, you just kind of . . .” She shrugged. “Hold a picture of it in your head.”

He grunted. “Where’d you learn that?”

She replied very casually, and without looking up, “Art school.”

“You went to art school?”

Was that respect or skepticism she heard in his voice? She dared not turn around to find out. Instead, she picked up a stylus and carefully flicked several layers of charcoal from a point where iris met pupil on the deer’s eye, revealing a white spark of light underneath. “I did,” she replied.

“What’s that thing?”

She held the instrument up for him to examine, but he did not take it. “It’s called a stylus. You can use it to make marks or indentations in the paper for texture, or to remove color like I just did. See how that little spark of white makes his eyes look alive? Sometimes what you take away is more important than what you put in.” And when he gave nothing but a grunt in reply, she added, “Something else I learned in art school.”

He scooped up a handful of slivered wood kindling and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. “So how come I never seen you drawing before?”

She almost gave him the easy answer about how busy she was, how hard it was to keep up an old house like this, how few hours there were in the day, and how, after all, her studio wasn’t even ready to move into yet. Instead she put down her pencil and turned to look at him, squinting a little in the sun.

“I guess I was scared,” she said. And though he didn’t stop his work, he moved a little more slowly and made less clatter tossing the kindling into the wheelbarrow. There was about his shoulders an attitude of acute listening. “You see, all my life I’ve dreamed of being a working artist. One of the reasons we bought this house was so that I would have a place for a studio, and I could work at my art full-time. But . . . I don’t know, maybe this is something only an old person can understand, but sometimes you’re better off dreaming about something than actually doing it. What if no one wants to buy my paintings? What if nobody even wants to take art lessons from me? What if I’m not good enough?”

She shrugged, trying not to show the embarrassment she was beginning to feel. “It’s a lot easier not to try, than to try and fail, you know?”

He looked at her for a moment, eyes narrowed, and she thought that he
did
know, very well. He said, “This is the last load on your wood. You got my pay?”

“In the house.” She stood up, packing away the pencils and sketch pad, and he turned to push the wheelbarrow toward the shed. Then she had an idea.

“Hey,” she said.

He looked back.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” she said. “You finish raking the flower beds for me, and you can have this pencil set. I’ll throw in the sketch pad, too. It’s almost new.”

He looked from her to the two items in her hand, his eyes narrowed—though she couldn’t tell whether the expression was from avarice or contempt.

“Forty-six pencils,” she told him, “all colors. And a sharpener.”

He said, “Anybody ever make any money from drawing?”

“Some do,” she told him, and had to admit, honestly, “most don’t.”

He turned back to the wheelbarrow. “Then what’s the point?”

She shrugged and put the pencil box and sketch pad on her chair. “Suit yourself. I’ll get your money.”

But when she returned, he was raking the flower beds, and the pencil box and sketch pad—including her drawing of the deer—were gone.

 

 

“Mommmm . . .”

Cici could practically see Lori’s long distance eye roll. She closed her own eyes and drew in a silent calming breath in response.

“You really just don’t get how
different
college is today,” Lori went on. “I mean, it’s not like you only get one chance at it. So I bombed out on a few courses. I’ll take better ones next semester.”

Cici’s hand tightened around the paper in her hand. “Lori, this letter is from the Dean of Students, who is very concerned about how seriously you’re taking your academic obligations. I’m not sure how many more semesters there will be for you.”

“Oh, that,” Lori replied airily. “They send those out to everybody. It’s a form letter.”

Cici’s voice was tight. “I assume your father got one of these form letters, too?”

“I guess.”

“And what did he have to say about it?”

“Oh, you know Dad. He’s cool.”

“Lori, you can’t just—”

“Anyway, Mom, it’s
really
no big deal, because I switched my major and none of those stupid courses matter anyway.”

Cici blinked. “Switched your major? To what?” “Anthropology.”

“You switched from business to anthropology?” She tried not to sound incredulous. “How do you even do that?”

“I’m going to Italy in the spring,” she went on excitedly, “for six months! Jeff says I might even be able to go on a dig, if he can work it out with the archaeology prof who’s—”

“Jeff ? Who’s Jeff?”

“
The Culture of Man
,” she responded happily. “That’s the name of his book. Also the name of the course.”

“That he’s teaching in Italy,” Cici supplied, keeping her tone very carefully even. “In the spring.”

“Right.”

Cici started to say something, changed her mind, took another tack, changed her mind. Finally all she could say was, “We’ll talk about this at Christmas, okay? In the meantime—”

“Oh,” said Lori. “About Christmas . . .”

“You
are
coming home?” Now it was almost impossible to keep the distress out of her voice.

“It’s not that I don’t want to see you,” Lori said, and, to her credit, she sounded as though she meant it. “And your house, and Aunt Bridge and Aunt Lindsay, and I know we’ve always had Christmas together and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that’s just it, you see? We always have Christmas together, and Dad was—well, he was counting on me spending this Christmas with him.”