Page 31 of Upstate

Wren gets to his feet and steps inside. I picture what he’s seeing. Without carpets or curtains or papered walls, the living room is barren but beautiful.

“This is perfect,” he calls back. “Do you want to sell that secretary desk?”

“No,” I say, picturing it tied to Evelyn’s Jeep on her way upstate. “I’ll move it to the dining room.”

“Clear the books off the shelves, too, so I can start with a clean slate,” Wren says, stepping outside. “I might bring a few of them back in as props, and maybe we can display some prints as well?”

“I’ve got plenty of those,” I say. “Maps, illustrations, botanicals.”

“Botanical prints would be perfect. Do you happen to have a bunch of old books that aren’t worth anything? There’s a trend of tearing off covers to show the sewn bindings. It’d be a fabulous look in those barrister bookcases. There are some boxes of books in the barn loft that might be beyond saving, but I ran out of there pretty fast once I got stung.”

“I’m really sorry about that,” I say.

“It may have been my fault. I was turning over a side table to see if it had a Stickley label when I stumbled into the wall. Next thing I knew . . .” He touches the welt on his forehead.

“Do you really think you can turn the living room into an antique shop?”

Wren nods. “With a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint, it’ll be gorgeous. I’ll come back tomorrow with rollers and brushes. A mop, too, if you don’t have one. Murphy’s oil soap will get these floors shining.”

After Wren drives off in his mother’s car, I gather up the water glass and bowl and bring them into the kitchen. Through the window by the sink, I watch the bees buzzing around the oak, their thousands of tiny bodies clumped like a strange pendulous fruit. I can’t help but see the swarm as some kind of omen, but of good fortune or bad, I do not know.

Chapter 15

“A Woman’s Place” by Evelyn Cabot

Mademoiselle, October 1960

“Don’t open that!”

If only I’d heeded the farmer’s frantic shout! But my hand was already on the latch of the repurposed horse trailer he’d carefully backed up my drive, the bleating complaints of its irritated occupants echoing within. I was so eager to meet my new charges that I’d opened the doors before his words reached my ears.

The farmer raced from the cab of his pickup to the back of the trailer and pressed the flat of his brown hand to the door. It wasn’t enough to hold back two thousand pounds of agitated livestock.

“Get out of the way!” The farmer transferred his hand from the trailer’s door to my elbow and tugged, saving me from a trampling. We stood by, helpless, as the animals tumbled from the trailer, bounding past us in a torrent of bleating fleece. A moment later, the trailer was empty save for the clods of dung-caked straw the farmer had packed in to soften their journey.

“I meant to set the fence panels before letting them loose.” As powerful a man as Willie Mays but with the philosophical demeanor of an African Methodist Episcopal deacon, Marcus Green regarded me with the baffled expression of a parent whose clueless child has tried to pet a porcupine. “What were you thinking, Miss Cabot?”

What I thought was that the sheep would calmly regard me as a savior, their slitted eyes dewy with gratitude. I hadn’t considered how a dozen pent-up ewes and their sprightly lambs might react to a sudden glimpse of freedom after three hours of confinement.

“I don’t rightly know, Mr. Green.”

“I imagine that’s a sentiment you’re not overly familiar with, Miss Cabot,” said Lucinda Green, the farmer’s wife, having joined us now at the rear of the trailer.

It was the kind of cutting comment that could raise a woman’s hackles, but I was humbled by the moment into meek acceptance of the truth.

“You’re right, Mrs. Green,” I said. “An overabundance of confidence has gotten me far in life, but I’m not above admitting my mistakes.”

The sheep, meanwhile, had scattered like blown dandelion seeds. Some had bolted into the road. Others had dashed away in the direction of the pond, where I worried their enthusiasm for freedom might lead them in too deep. A few had found the vegetable garden and were gleefully pulling up the carrots meant to feed me through the winter.

Chastened, I turned to the farmer. “What now, Mr. Green?”

With the long-suffering sigh of a man whose family had managed to eke out a living from the inhospitable Adirondacks for over a century, Marcus Green said, “I’ll unhitch the trailer and drive the panels down to the lower barn. Lucinda will help you catch the sheep while I set up a funnel from the fencing.” He looked around as if hoping to spot someone with better sense than me. “You haven’t got a dog, have you, Miss Cabot?”

“My tenant’s brother does,” I said. “A collie named Charlie.”

“If Charlie might be persuaded to join our endeavors, we might finish the job before nightfall.”

I dashed into the house to telephone my young neighbor Billy, who ran the uphill mile from his parents’ place in ten minutes flat. Charlie the dog streaked past, barking wildly, as he caught the scent of sheep. For the better part of an hour, Billy and his sister, too, encouraged fleet-footed Charlie to herd the truant ewes and lambs toward the funnel Mr. Green created from the fence panels. By late afternoon, all the living skeins of yarn were huddled together in my lower barn, munching on hay with the languor of sated revelers after a feast.