At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [33]
Then one night as Mama Madie was dishing up dried-pea stew made with an onion she’d found growing under the house and the last of the fatty bacon, the captain came knocking politely on the door of the little cabin. Madie went to the door with a formidable look on her face and her hand on the hilt of the sewing scissors she kept in her apron pocket, and he said a few quiet words to her which Pearl couldn’t hear. But she did hear Mama Madie scream at him, “May God Almighty above curse your black and murderous soul to the fires of hell!”
She slammed the door with a terrible look on her face and opened her arms wide to Pearl, crushing her to her bosom. “We got to pray, child, we got pray,” she said. “Your mama’s took the fever, and we got to pray.”
So they did. During the daylight Pearl sewed and prayed, and at night when she came back from tending Mother, Mama Madie got down on her knees and prayed, swaying with the rhythm of her prayers. But in the end it was to no avail. The captain came knocking one pink dawn with a face as long as the grave, and all he said was, “I’m sorry.”
Mama Madie started to wail, and Pearl clung to her skirts, wrapping herself in them as if she were a little girl again. And then the captain grabbed Mama Madie’s arm and held it sternly and said with a grim face, “Ma’am, you need to take that child and go. It’s the cholera, and it will kill us all if we don’t burn everything it’s touched.”
Mama Madie gave him a look of purest hatred, and she jerked her arm away and spat on his boots. She slammed the door shut, and started bundling up cook pots and dried beans and cornmeal in a blanket that she knotted at four corners and slung over her shoulder, and Pearl rolled up her threads and her needles and her sewing scissors in the quilt square with the flying horse in the center, and she tied it around her waist under her dress. Mama Madie grabbed hold of her hand and they left the cabin for a murky gray dawn that smelled thickly of smoke.
But it wasn’t until Pearl looked back and saw the only home she’d ever known collapsing to the ground in a shower of orange sparks and crackling flames that she began to cry.
7
Sheepshearing
Lori was right, of course, about the second alcove’s location on the opposite side of the fireplace from the first. It, too, contained a mural that depicted the sheep meadow, only this version was framed by bare winter branches rather than blossom-covered ones, and the rolling pastureland was covered in snow. A cardinal, rather than a blue bird, was perched on the fence post.
When the last of the dust was swept away and the buckets of dirty water were emptied, everyone gathered around to examine what had been uncovered.
“The technique itself isn’t bad,” Lindsay said, appraising both paintings, “but the approach is pretty generic.”
“Kind of like a greeting card,” supplied Lori helpfully, and Lindsay gave her an annoyed look.
“Some of the illustrative art used for greeting cards is quite good,” she pointed out. “And a lot of successful commercial artists sell to greeting card companies.” She struggled briefly to erase the scowl from her face. “The point I was trying to make,” she said, rather stiffly, “is that I don’t see anything here to make me think these were painted by an artist of note. The homeowner probably told him exactly what to paint and paid him by the hour.”
“Is there any way you can tell how old it is?” Cici asked.
Lindsay shook her head regretfully. “I can’t. Maybe an expert in antiques could, or an art restorer. The colors look custom mixed, but a lot of artists mix their own pigments, even today. If the paintings were less generic—if the