Mad Cow Nightmare (18 page)

Still, Ruth couldn’t shake off the fear of bad times ahead. The cows were ruminating in the pasture, heads down in the grass that was already yellowing in places where they’d cropped it. With no rain now for two weeks and the corn coming up short, drought was a major concern. When she looked up she saw only bright sun, beating down on her head, scalding the tops of the calf pens. Dust was settling on the clover by the side of the road, on the old green pickup, on Ruth’s barn boots, on her eyelashes—she rubbed her eyes with a fist. It was as though she were going blind, not knowing what to do, where to turn.

Except to work. Yes. She went back to the barn to work. There was always sweeping, mopping, scouring equipment after the morning’s milking. She tossed clean hay in the stalls, scooped up a huge pile of manure into the old wheelbarrow. The work felt good; it was a way of coping, if not a cure. Her muscles ached but her back was strong; she had energy enough for two women. She would get through this crisis. She would go to that apple orchard on the lakeshore, speak to the person who had sighted Nola—it seemed the place to start. Though where it would lead, she had no idea. She had never felt so vulnerable, so superfluous.

“Superfluous,” she hollered at Zelda, stomping in her stanchion, “I’m just plain superfluous!” At its root, she recalled, the word meant flowing all over the place but never settling, never knowing. It figured.

Outside the barn a truck pulled up, its brakes grinding. There was something ominous about the sound. The Agri-Mark truck had come and gone to pick up milk, but with the quarantine, there was none to pick up—she couldn’t sell the milk, it had to be dumped. Dumped! She was crazy with the thought. She stood up tall, the broom in her hands, ready to swing if needed. Don Quixote, she thought: flailing at windmills. The truck doors slammed. Two doors, two people getting out. She waited, feeling a moment of paralysis, the broom stuck to her palms. She heard voices: a man’s, then a woman’s. They were outside by the calf pens. She heard the woman’s voice low and sympathetic; heard Boadie’s answering screech: “No, no! Can’t! Won’t!” A torrent of Cant, the travellers’ language. And then a man’s oaths, chilling the air.

The broom clattered to the floor, and Ruth ran out. The agents were there: hands outstretched, gesturing, appealing, while Boadie held them at bay with her shotgun. “Can’t have them, not my babies!” she hollered. She lunged forward and shot into the air. The feds stepped back. She ran at them, howling, shooting to one side and then the other, knocking a clipboard out of a hand. “Not my babies,” she yelled, “not them! Not them!” until the pair scurried back into the truck. She gave off one more volley that peppered the back of the truck, shattering the rearview window.

“The woman’s crazy,” the male agent cried out the window. “This is a felony! You can’t keep us from taking those calves. We’ll be back!” The truck roared off down the road, its big tires wheeling up a screen of dirt and gravel.

Boadie stood there, holding the shotgun in her shaking hands, then lowered it slowly. Ruth ran to her, gave her a bear hug. She couldn’t speak, she found herself weeping. The calves were bawling in their pens but there were still eight of them, eight healthy calves, including the Friesians. They gazed up with big frightened eyes—the shooting would put them off their feed. The pig cowered, squealing, in front of the pens.

“Thank you,” Ruth whispered to the old lady, then turned to face Darren and Maggie, who had heard the shots and come running. Franny was galloping back on her mare, throwing up dust and gravel in Ruth’s face. “What happened? Is anyone hurt?”

“God love us,” Maggie said, and grabbed the shotgun out of her grandmother’s arms. “You want to kill yourself, do you, huh, Boadie?”

The uncle stomped up behind them, blustering on about what the feds had done to him—”Ain’t nothing, nothing, compared to what they done to
me.”
As if this were some kind of contest, Ruth thought—who deserves the most pity? “But you can’t fool ‘em with that,” Tormey said, pointing at the shotgun. “They’ll just bring in the big guns, you wait and see.” He turned to Franny, gushed out his woes to her—Ruth heard the word “Ritchie,” and Franny’s eyes widened.

Carol came dashing up from the rented pasture to throw her arms around Ruth. “I heard the shots. I saw the truck when I was coming up from the field. I figured it was you keeping them out. You’re crazy enough to do that! But I want to tell you, Ruth, I’m not moving my sheep. The llama stays, too. We’ll face this together.”

“Well, they’re safe for now,” Ruth said, hugging her slender five-foot-three friend, who had probably never handled a weapon, except to wrap a toy gun as a birthday gift for a son. Herself, Ruth felt like a Civil War general, standing, unscathed, at the rear of the action, pronouncing victory.

But knowing it a false victory, knowing the enemy would be back. Knowing she had little or no chance at all against a foe a hundred times her size.

Chapter Fourteen

Ruth and Colm had had an argument, so Tuesday morning Ruth was on her way alone to the orchard. It was useful, Ruth thought, having Colm around, but it was divisive as well. The problem was that he had double loyalties: first to her as an individual, and then to the police. She came first in his loyalties, he always said that; but he was paid by the Branbury police—and could he betray them? “Not really,” he argued. In this instance the police, aided by the FBI, were hotly pursuing Enola Donahue and wanted no interference by a female farmer who was herself harboring suspect animals and a group of equally suspect Irish travellers. Since Monday morning’s shoot-out (so-called by police), she was even more out of sync, and she must—according to Colm, “play it cool, Ruthie. So stay home, please? Let them have the calves. They’ll compensate you, for chrissake.”

She’d howled at that. What was a few dollars for a pair of innocent calves she’d fallen in love with? And what of the old traveller woman who’d moved her pallet up beside the pens, along with pig, shotgun, pail, and nursing bottles? Already Ruth owed
something
to Boadie. One couldn’t desert one’s allies, few as they seemed to be—but growing, she had to admit. The phone calls were coming in faster now: Carol, of course, vowing to keep her sheep on the farm “come what may,” and Franny and Henrietta ready to come and fight “at a moment’s notice, Ruth, call us, damn it!”

And yesterday evening her local orchard friend, Moira Earthrowl, had called the Champlain Orchard to ensure a hospitable welcome and a lineup of apple workers for interviewing. “You helped us out of a hole, Ruth, we want to give back.”

What more could a besieged woman ask for than help from old friends? “Go back to work, Colm,” she’d told him in an early morning phone call. “Ignore me. I’ll do what my heart tells me to do.”

“I know you will, Ruthie,” was the answer. “Holy God but don’t I know you will. Your heart’s too damn big.” She’d imagined her lover making the sign of the cross. Though he wasn’t a practicing Catholic, he liked that dramatic gesture.

The lake was coming into view as she rounded the last bend. A sign read Bridge to New York State, and her heart gave a lurch. She imagined Nola moving stealthily across at nightfall. For now, though, she needed clues to the woman’s dress, her state of health, her direction—for she might have run anywhere, up country or down country, attempting to elude the authorities. Surely by now she knew they were on her trail.

But there was no telling what the rigid authorities would say or do when they apprehended her. Ruth wanted—needed—to find Nola first.

The orchard owners were there to greet her: a plump, plain-spoken, middle-aged woman in jeans and plaid shirt; a stoop-shouldered man in overalls, tall as an apple tree—both smiling creases into their apple cheeks. It’s funny, Ruth thought, how one grows to resemble one’s trade. There was something horsy about Franny, for example. Did Ruth herself resemble a cow? Oh my.

“They’re here in the barn, ready for questions,” the woman said. “Though I have to tell you the Vermont police have already been here. And it’s only the one worker who had a glimpse of her, I’m afraid. But maybe someone else will remember something. I do hope so. I can only imagine what you’re going through.” She gave Ruth an impulsive hug and for a moment Ruth felt light-headed, a child struck dumb.

There were at least a dozen workers standing about in the apple barn, looking awkward, a couple of them giggling. One surly fellow looked as though he didn’t see why
he
should be interrogated; another was jiggling a leg and making odd facial contortions. It was that girl’s nervousness that made Ruth ask if she could interview each worker individually. “It will only take a few minutes,” she promised the owners, “especially if most have nothing to add. I know you have work for them to do.”

The woman owner spread her hands and smiled, as if to say “Anything for a fellow farmer,” and gave the orders. The workers would wait outside the apple barn, and the surly fellow, who was evidently the overseer, would send them in one by one. The orders squeezed his face into a lemon.

For Ruth it was like her school days when she’d been asked to get up in front of the class and ask the questions but couldn’t think what questions to ask. What could she ask, except Did you spot this woman? Can you tell me anything about her? But then the questions came in a flood. What was she wearing? Did she come into the barn? Might she have listened to the radio? (It was on, low, over by the cider press.) Did she appear ill? Frightened? And what about the mare? Did it seem to have been ridden hard? Was it sweating? Limping? And so on.

The responses were mostly negative. Until the anorexic-looking young woman with the trembly face and hands diving in and out of her jeans pockets inched her way in and allowed that uh-huh, she had seen a woman tethering a mare to a maple tree outside the barn.

“I tole the officers that, I don’t have nothing to add. I was coming out of the barn when I seen her. She was looking all scared to see me and she run off. I didn’t know what to say to her, why should I speak to her? I didn’t know she’d of killed somebody.”

“We have no reason to believe she killed anyone,” Ruth said. “She was running from an abusive man—at least, that’s our thinking. And there was no reason for you to speak to her. You did nothing wrong. We’re just glad you spotted her, that’s all.”

The girl gave a tight-lipped smile, leaned back against the barn wall, and went on with her justification. “I been cleaning the apple barn, that’s what my job is. I been swabbing it down, though it’s hard work, all that juice from the cider press, smelling something tumble. Stinking really. How was I to know some killer woman’s out there with a stolen horse?”

“Of course you didn’t,” Ruth soothed. “Now can you tell me what she looked like, what she was wearing? That’s where you can really help us.”

“They already axed that, the cops. I tole them she was wearing something white on top. And blue on the bottom, that’s all I ‘member. It was blue. Kind of stripy-blue.”

“Pants? Dress?”

“Don’t know, I was in a hurry, it was quitting time, I had to get home. I take care of my dad, he’s got Parkinson’s. Shakes up a storm. Drops everything. Breaks it, too.”

“I’m sorry. But think hard. Striped- blue—might’ve been a skirt?”

The girl cocked her head and thought. “Might’ve. Yeah, I guess. But she was in one hell of a hurry.”

“She ran off?”

“Limped off, yeah, like she’d had a fall. Yeah, I ‘member that. She were wearing a skirt, yeah, I ‘member now, ‘cause I wondered how in hell she’d rode that horse in a skirt without a saddle. Must’ve been all she had to wear.”

“She was sick,” Ruth explained, “she’d had brain surgery. Her male companion took her out of the hospital too soon. Did she look ill to you? Bruised maybe, scarred? I really appreciate your thinking about this, you’ve been such a help so far.”

The girl gave a weak smile, stuck a tongue in her pale cheeks, appeared to be thinking. “Yeah, she had a bruise on her face. I mean, I ‘member thinking she looked like an apple—a drop, you know, the way they bruise, kind of yellow. Come to think of it, bruises all over her face like somebody hit her. Lumpy, you know. Creeps, I remember thinking that. Funny how it just come to me. Lumpy.”

“Fresh bruises.”

“Well, bruised apples isn’t fresh long. They rot fast.”

“Yes. Well, I am grateful.” Ruth smiled at the girl. “I’ve just one more question because I know you have to get back to work.”

“Yeah, I don’t get this barn cleaned by ten o’clock he’ll clock me.” She waved at the barn door, where Ruth could see the overseer standing, arms folded, looking, well, sullen.

“Where did she run? What direction? Do you think she might’ve gone over the bridge?”

“Not then,” the girl said, bolder now, her cheeks calm, hands more at ease where they hung loose. “Not till later. Not till it got dark. Then I saw her again.”

“Oh?” Ruth held her breath. This was new. Something, evidently, the girl had not told the police.

The girl stood taller, lifted her chin, her eyes were electric with what she had to say. “I was taking a walk with my boyfriend—it was Saturday night, down near the bridge. I didn’t want to tell the cops—my boyfriend got in a little trouble—I mean nothing serious, just a break-in—he won’t do it again, he promises.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I seen her. ‘It’s her,’ I tole my boyfriend. ‘The one what left the horse, the one they say killed somebody.’ He got all excited then, wanted to go stop her, thought there might be a reward, you know? So I says, ‘You want to talk to cops, do you?’ and he says he guesses not.”

“I can imagine. And then?”

“And then we just watched her look all round and when she thought no one saw, she went over the bridge.”

“Limp over?”

“Limp, yeah. She had a little limp. Left leg. Don’t know how she rode that mare. ‘Less she’d walked it all that way.”

“You couldn’t see where she went when she got to the other side?”

“How could I? Least a mile long, that bridge. It were night. Only reason I seen her at all was there was a light near the start of the bridge. She just limped over, that’s all I can tell you.”