At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [19]
Noah turned around, leaning on the hoe, and stared at her. Sweat dripped from his lank dark hair and left rivulets in the dust on his face. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were twisted with contempt and disbelief. He demanded, “Something wrong with your head, girl?”
“Don’t tell me you never heard the story of the little red hen!”
“There ain’t no such thing.”
“Come on, didn’t your mother ever read it to you when you were a kid?”
He turned back to the hoeing. “Ain’t got no mother.”
He said it with such casualness, such an utter lack of interest, that Lori was compelled to pursue the subject a wiser—and perhaps more sensitive—person would have dropped. She took a step to follow him. “Everyone’s got a mother!”
“Not me. Ain’t got no father, either.”
“Well, I know they’re dead,” Lori said with a touch of impatience. “But that doesn’t mean you were hatched. You have a mother and a father, and you need to claim them.”
“What for?” He kept working. “They never did nothin’ for me.”
“Well . . .” Lori was momentarily taken aback. “Because they’re part of who you are.”
He gave a short harsh laugh, and didn’t turn around. “My pa was a no-account drunk and my ma—who the hell knows what she was? That’s what’s part of me, all right.”
Lori did not have the first idea how to respond to that.
Noah’s hoe hit something with a clink, and Lori, feeling a little awkward, went forward to dig up another rock. But all her shovel turned over was a small, dirt-encrusted glass bottle. “Hey, look at this.” She sat back on her haunches and rubbed some of the dirt away, revealing the pale celadon color of the glass.
Noah cast a glance over his shoulder. “Just an old piece of glass.”
“Wait, there’s writing here.” She began to scrape off the dirt with her gloved thumb, revealing the raised letters imprinted in the glass. “R... m... e... d... i... s... Remedies!” She looked up at him, excited. “This is a medicine bottle!”
“So?”
“So, Ida Mae said this place was a hospital during the Civil War. This could be an antique!”
“So?” he repeated.
“So people pay a lot of money for antiques! This could be worth something.”
He dropped the hoe and came over to her, his expression guarded. “Let me see that.”
She handed him the bottle, and watched as he rubbed more dirt away with his T-shirt. “When was the Civil War?” he asked.
Lori rolled her eyes. “And Aunt Lindsay thinks you’re smart.” She thought a moment. “Eighteen sixty to eighteen sixty-five.” A pause. “Or something like that.”
He returned the bottle to her. “Well, if it wasn’t 1896, this ain’t from the Civil War.”
She looked at the bottle, the raised writing now fully exposed to read: Dawson’s Reliable Remedies, Richmond, Virginia, 1896. “Well,” she said, her tone only slightly disappointed, “it’s still old. It might be worth something.”
“Nobody’s gonna pay for an old empty bottle.”
“People will pay for anything,” Lori assured him, and stuffed the bottle into her back pocket. “Besides, Aunt Lindsay likes to display the things that show the history of the place, so it’s worth keeping.”
He grunted and picked up the hoe again. “Not worth as much as that ole hen of yours.”
She frowned. “What hen?”
“That red ’un. I knew a fella over in Boulder Creek that made a fortune raising red chickens.”
“Do you mean he had a chicken farm?”
“Nah. Not like eggs and chicken houses and such. These here was show chickens. Cost a couple of grand a piece.”
Lori stared at him. “They have shows for chickens?”
“You gonna dig up this rock, or what?”
Lori came forward and dug up the rock without complaint, her expression skeptical. “I never heard of chicken shows.”
“Guess there’s a lot you never heard of.”
“I guess.” She carried the rock to the wheelbarrow.
When she