A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [73]
The crate, turned on its side, formed three shelves. The top shelf held a razor, a six-pack of Coke from which one can was missing, two Snickers bars, and a bag of freeze-dried beef jerky. On the next shelf was a plastic fork and knife of the kind that came with take-out food, two cans of tuna, a blackened aluminum pan with chunks of charred food melded to the bottom, and a one-liter foam drinking cup with the Burger Shack logo on it. Next to it was a pack of cigarettes and a notebook topped by a curious-looking collection of what looked like flat stones on a leather thong. She almost picked it up until she realized what it was and jerked her hand back. Not stones. Rattles. From a rattlesnake.
Trying not to grimace, she eased the notebook away from the rattlesnake necklace and flipped it open. It was a sketchbook. Inside were random studies—a stream with rocks, a country road, various views of the mountains, a split rail fence with scrub cedar growing through it that reminded her of the one on the highway that ran alongside their house, a scruffy-looking border collie, a rattlesnake. It was not the quality of the sketches that impressed her—though they definitely showed talent—so much as the fact that they appeared to have been done with nothing more than a #2 pencil.
“Wow, kid,” she murmured, “imagine what you could do if you had the right tools.”
She returned the sketchbook to its place and sat back on her heels thoughtfully, looking around the room with a new eye now. A fireplace for cooking, a floor swept clear of leaves, a cane chair. Something caught her eye from one of the far windows, and she went to check it out. It was a T-shirt, hung across the low limb of a tree to dry. And beyond it, in a sunny patch of tilled earth protected by a fence made from string and sticks stuck into the ground, were the remains of a summer garden. Dried corn stalks and bean vines, a few bright squash and red peppers, empty cucumber and zucchini vines. She shook her head in mild amazement, and couldn’t prevent a smile.
“Well I’ll be damned,” she said out loud. “The Ladybug Farm garden thief, caught red-handed.”
By the time Lindsay returned to the house, Cici and Bridget had, by turns, been into town twice—once for a hundred dollars’ worth of meat, and again for a new tank of propane for the grill—and Noah had shucked all the corn and had almost completed shelling the butter beans. When he saw Lindsay, he stomped out to work on cleaning out the dairy, muttering something about women’s work, before she could say anything more than hello to him. Within moments, she was caught up in the choreography of a century-old recipe in which, it turned out, there was very little room for error.
Cici heated the grill to three hundred degrees while Bridget prepared a spice rub for the meat and Lindsay plunged tomatoes into a stockpot of simmering water to loosen their skins. Corn and butterbeans were coming to a simmer in another huge pot.
“I don’t know why I always get this job,” Lindsay complained, fishing a steaming tomato out of the water with barbecue tongs. “I hate this job.” She plunged the tomato into a bucket of ice water in the sink, and went after another one.
“I think the heat should be higher,” Cici said, rubbing red peppers with olive oil. “Otherwise these peppers are never going to char.”
“I’m trying to lose weight,” Lindsay added, making a small slice in the skin of the iced-down tomato. The skin slipped off the fruit like a sweater off a baby, and she plopped the tomato into the pot with the corn and beans. “Whose idea was Brunswick stew anyway?”
“It says to slow roast the meat,” Bridget pointed out, slapping the spice rub onto the first of the two pork loin roasts. “You can’t roast anything above 325.”
“Maybe I’ll turn the heat up just a tad, just until the peppers are done.”
“Put them on the top rack and let them roast