Bitter Harvest Read online

  “It’s not life-threatening, but I won’t promise it will last the winter.”

  “There’s no patch job you can do?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. It’s a cast metal heating chamber, and once it goes, it’s gone. From the look of it, it’s had a good long run, but it’s reached the end of its time. Sorry, Meg.”

  “I guess I knew it was coming. Tell me, is the furnace more or less important than the roof? If I have to prioritize?”

  “Can’t say without taking a look at your attic and seeing if it’s leaking, or maybe I should say, how badly it’s leaking. Have you been up there lately?”

  “No. I don’t like it up there—it’s dirty, and kind of creepy. I took one look at it when I moved in and I haven’t been back since.”

  “I can check it out for you.”

  “Seth, I appreciate the offer, but you can’t do everything. You aren’t a roofer!”

  “But I know some guys—”

  Meg interrupted him, “Yes, and I’m sure they’ll give me a good deal.” When Seth looked hurt at her comment, she went on, “Sorry, I’m being ungrateful. It’s just that all these things that absolutely, positively must be done keep landing on my head, and I have no idea how I’m going to pay for them. That’s why I need to know if I’ve made any kind of profit this past year.”

  Seth smiled. “I know. Houses—and businesses—will do that to you. You can plan all you want, but there’s always something that sneaks up on you. At least you don’t have to worry about floods. Or earthquakes—we don’t get a lot of those in New England.”

  “Granford will probably be the epicenter for the first one in two hundred years, with my luck.”

  Seth drained his coffee and stood up. “I’ve got some inventory to check, and I’ll let you get back to your paperwork. Let me look into options for a new furnace for you.”

  There was no stopping him, the ever-helpful Seth. “Fine. Thank you. And thanks for catching the goats.”

  “My pleasure. See you later.”

  He headed out the door, leaving Meg at the table with her coffee and a warm and purring cat on her lap. On reflection, she realized she wasn’t devastated by the news of her ailing—no, dying—furnace; at least, not as much as she would have been a few months earlier. She’d proven to herself that she could cope with all sorts of crises, and at least this one had an easy solution, even if it was an expensive one. Funny, she’d left a job managing six- and seven-figure amounts of money for municipalities, and now she was worrying about a couple of thousand here and there.

  She looked down at a very content Lolly. “Hey, cat, I’ve got work to do. Want to come along? The lap goes with me.”

  2

  Meg was enjoying breakfast the next morning when Bree stumbled down the back stairs that led from her room. Her slight frame was buried under layers; she had on a turtleneck under a heavy wool sweater, corduroy pants, thick socks, and even a hat jammed down over her long dark hair. “Morning,” Meg said. “Are you cold?”

  “Freezing. Is the coffee hot?”

  “It is. I’m sorry, apparently the furnace is on its last legs. Seth diagnosed it as terminal yesterday. Besides, I think your room”—Meg nodded her head toward the room over the kitchen—“was intended for the hired hands, and they didn’t need heat, right?”

  “Well, I do.” Bree sat down with a mug of coffee and wrapped both hands around it.

  “Then let’s hope it keeps going a little longer, because I can’t afford to do anything about it right now. Speaking of affording, how’re you coming with those figures?”

  “I’m working on it,” Bree said, avoiding Meg’s eyes.

  This was the part of being “management” that Meg really didn’t like. “Bree, it’s important. We’ve talked about this before. Working out our profit and loss statements may not be much fun, but it is necessary.”

  “I hear you!” Bree snapped. “Look, cut me some slack, will you? I’ve worked hard, and I need a little downtime. I want to spend time with Michael, ’cause he’s just as busy as I am during harvest season. You have a problem with that?”

  “No, not at all. Look, this is still all new to me, and it’s the first set of numbers I’ve run through, with nothing to go on from prior years. I’m anxious about getting all the details right, and I need to know how we came out. We’ve both worked hard this season, and I really want to believe it’s paid off. But I won’t know until I see all the numbers together, you know?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bree muttered. “What about that little surprise you and your mother found? You sell that, you’ve got a nice piece of change in the bank.”

  Meg sighed: she’d thought of that, too, more than once. “I don’t feel right, doing that. I’m still thinking about it. But we can’t run a business here if we depend on windfalls to drop on our heads. We need to make this work. How about you get all the pieces together for me by midmonth? And by that, I mean all the invoices and statements and whatever other pieces of paper you’ve got, in some sort of order. Deal?”

  “Whatever,” Bree said, sounding like a sulky teenager, and Meg had to remind herself that Bree at twenty-two wasn’t far past that age. “Listen, you need me for anything else? I thought I’d go over to Amherst to see Michael, maybe spend a night or two.”

  “You tell me. We don’t have to think about pruning or anything until January or February, right?”

  “You were paying attention!” Bree smiled. “Yes, you’re right. Right now, as you keep reminding me over and over, is the time to catch up on record keeping and make some assessments about how we did. We also need to review the trees we’ve got, and what you might want to put in, thinking ahead. Assuming there will be an ‘ahead’?”

  Meg smiled. “Depends on those numbers you give me. Go play with Michael, and have fun. I can keep busy here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Good humor restored, Bree bounced out of her chair and snagged a banana from the counter. “I’m going to leave before you change your mind.”

  Ten minutes later she came down the stairs with a bag slung over her shoulder. “Hey, before I forget—they’re talking about a big storm coming. Keep an eye on the news, will you?”

  “Is there something I need to do with the trees?” Meg asked.

  “No, they either make it or they don’t. But a bad storm can really mess things up—like power, and driving anywhere.”

  “Okay, I hear you. But I really think you’re just looking for an excuse to stay over in Amherst a bit longer.”

  Bree gave her a grin. “Maybe. Bye now!” And she slammed out the back door. Meg heard her car start up, and watched from the kitchen window as Bree pulled away. So did Dorcas and Isabel, from their now reinforced pen.

  Meg turned away from the window, feeling lost. She’d been working her tail off since she’d arrived almost a year earlier, first trying to make the house livable—sealing up the worst of the cracks, and even refinishing the kitchen floor. And then she’d been caught up in the demands of the orchard, and her parents’ unexpected visit, and by the time she caught her breath it was December. She still had numbers to crunch, but she’d just given Bree a reprieve. She refilled her coffee mug and sat down, trying to decide what she should do.

  She attempted to picture herself out shopping for some decent furniture, at least for the most visible front rooms, since what she had at the moment had been handed down—and should have been thrown out—by decades of transient tenants. But buying furniture would take money, so scratch that. The home improvement wish list included the roof, storm windows, and somewhere in the mix, a second bathroom. Again, none of those was going to happen until she had figured out her financial situation. And she had to factor in the dying furnace, which was pretty close to the top of the list. More money. Funny—up until last year, when she’d lost her banking job, she had always had more than enough money. She hadn’t been rich, but her salary had exceeded her needs and even her wants, and she’d been content. Now she had to look at every p
enny she spent. She wasn’t used to it, and she wasn’t happy about it.

  At least working online doing genealogy, her latest interest, was free. When her mother had visited recently she had begun to piece together the family tree, with some surprising results. In the thick of the harvest Meg hadn’t had time to digest what her mother had found; maybe this was a good opportunity to do that. And she could make a list of questions to ask Gail Selden at the Historical Society in town. Of course, she’d have to smooth the way with Gail by showing her some progress in the Historical Society records that she had agreed to catalogue—very slowly. The material was often fascinating, especially when she stumbled upon a document that shed light on farm life in the nineteenth century, and even her own house—the Warren house. She had a skeletal outline of her Warren ancestors, thanks to her mother, and maybe this was the opportunity to flesh them out a bit, so to speak.

  But she’d blanketed her workspace, otherwise known as the dining room table, with business records, and she didn’t want to disturb them. So, where to go? It would have to be another room altogether. The kitchen was too busy, and she needed the table space to eat there. The two rooms across the central hall were freezing: she wasn’t using them and kept their doors shut most of the time to conserve heat. But the front parlor was the only place she and Bree had to sit or do anything, so she would have to brave the cold and set up across the hall. With a sense of purpose Meg crossed the hall and pushed open the door.

  The front room was absolutely freezing, its windows partially frosted over, and she hurried to open the heating vents. There was little furniture, but Meg had found a folding card table and a couple of matching chairs, and they would do. She needed a light, and a plug for her laptop and printer, and she’d be set. And maybe if she left the doors open to the rest of the house, the temperature in the room would rise above what she estimated was about fifty degrees. Could she keyboard wearing gloves?

  At least moving furniture around and setting up her new workspace kept her warm for a while. She had placed the table so she had a view out the window (although not too near it, because she could feel cold eddies of air sneaking in around the sash), from which she could see the barest edge of the orchard up the hill. Funny—for the first few weeks she’d lived in the house, she hadn’t even known she had an orchard. How much things had changed!

  Meg booted up her laptop and pulled out a folder of notes her mother had left for her. It seemed like a lifetime ago now, even though it had been only a month, but the harvest had taken all her energy and attention. She used to think that genealogy was for retired grandmothers with too much time on their hands, but that was before she’d found herself living in a house that her ancestors had built—by hand—over two hundred years earlier; ancestors who had farmed the land, raised families in the house. Who had, in some obscure way, made her who she was today—or who at the very least had contributed a fragment of DNA, without which she would have been someone else. So she felt she owed them something. Besides, once she had gotten into it, she had discovered that the process was kind of fun. She opened the folder and started reading.

  Four hours later Meg sat back and realized she had forgotten to eat lunch. Her pile of papers had increased twofold, and she’d managed to work her way back to the mid-1700s, when the paper trail, or at least what was available online, became sparse. She knew that Stephen Warren had built her house, probably in the 1760s, although there was no handy document saying “built house today,” so she’d had to make some inferences from land records. He’d been too old to fight in the Revolution, although both of his sons had fought. One of whose direct descendants had stayed in this house until some twenty years ago—that record might be hard to beat, in the modern world. What’s more, one of Stephen Warren’s grandsons had ended up living in the house next door, and handing it down to his descendants as well, although that house had passed out of the family much earlier in the twentieth century. So much history, and here she was living in the middle of it.

  She was about to shut down her computer when she remembered Bree’s warning about the weather. She clicked onto a weather site and read with a mixture of anxiety and skepticism about a burgeoning storm that seemed to be headed right in her direction. Of course, it was still at least a day away, but already comparisons were being made to prior memorable storms: the blizzards of 1996, 1978, and even, for heaven’s sake, 1888. None of them meant anything to Meg. Still, she thought, it couldn’t hurt to stock up on the usual supplies—basics like bread and milk and batteries. And cat food. No doubt everyone in the Connecticut Valley would have the same idea, but she wasn’t in a hurry and wouldn’t mind waiting in line. And she should make sure the goats were battened down, or whatever one was supposed to do with goats, before the storm hit.

  She turned off her computer and headed for the back door. Outside, wrapped in her warm coat, she looked up at the sky: pale, wispy clouds moved slowly across it. Apparently they didn’t know about the storm. There was a slight wind, but all in all, everything looked very ordinary. As she walked to her car she noticed a glint at the end of the driveway, and she headed toward it to explore. Someone had thrown a glass bottle, which had shattered, scattering shards across the drive. Kids? She couldn’t recall hearing anything breaking, but from the back of the house she might not have noticed. It was a good thing she had seen the glass, though, because if she had driven over one of the larger pieces she could have lost a tire, and that was another expense she didn’t need right how. Meg carefully gathered up the pieces and deposited them on her back step to be disposed of later. Not thrown out, she reminded herself, recycled, as Seth kept telling her.

  Meg got into her car and headed for the nearest supermarket, the next town over. Granford had no market of its own, unless you counted the one-room general store in the middle of town, which doubled as the local pharmacy and sold souvenirs and T-shirts as well. As she had predicted, the parking lot was jammed, even at this time in the afternoon, and she ended up parking at the far end of the lot, snagging a cart from someone who had just finished loading her own car. “Looks like a bad one,” the woman said as she slammed the trunk shut.

  “Could be,” Meg agreed amiably, although she wasn’t at all sure about it. Inside the store people milled around looking mildly frantic. The bread was long gone, but Meg collected eggs, cheese, pasta, flour, and an assortment of other staples, not forgetting the cat food. She added some fresh vegetables—imported from some other hemisphere, which annoyed her—and declared herself finished, then joined the long line at the cash register. At least all the cash registers were staffed today, which was unusual.

  Twenty minutes later she reached the head of the line. “Think it’ll be a bad one?” she asked the teenaged girl in front of the cash register.

  The girl looked blankly at her and shrugged. “Paper or plastic?”

  Apparently the panic hadn’t trickled down to the high school yet. And students would probably be thrilled at the prospect of a snow day. “I brought my own,” Meg said.

  Back outside, Meg checked the sky again: no change. Maybe this monster storm was all media hype, or a vast conspiracy designed to sell bread and milk, or just to ramp up the anxiety level among the general population. At least she’d be ready—just in case.

  She spent a quiet evening at home, watching television—a rare treat. She even managed to stay awake long enough to check the eleven o’clock news, where the approaching storm was the lead headline. The talking heads looked serious and concerned. When she flipped through the channels, she found the same thing on every station, although their time estimates varied a bit. Okay, she’d done her duty: she’d stocked up. There was nowhere she had to be the next day, and nothing she could do to prepare her trees for whatever was coming. She was willing to bet they had survived earlier storms, and losing limbs was a fact of tree life. Meg figured she was as ready as she was going to be.

  3

  Meg allowed herself the luxury of sleeping in the next morning
, which currently meant staying in bed until the dark sky shaded into gray. She lay nestled in her blankets and quilts, and listened for a moment. She could hear snow spitting against her windows—that wasn’t good. No howling winds yet, but when a lone vehicle passed along the road in front of the house, the sound was curiously muffled. The snow had clearly begun.

  She checked her clock: almost seven, later than she had expected. The clouds must have darkened the day. And then she realized what she wasn’t hearing: the furnace, which her aged thermostat was supposed to goad into action at six thirty. She listened harder. No, no ticking of the heating ducts, expanding and contracting as warm air and cold did battle within her mostly uninsulated walls. Maybe, she thought optimistically, the house was already at her normal daytime temperature of sixty-eight degrees? She stuck an arm out from under the covers, and could tell immediately that the temperature in the room was nowhere near sixty-eight. She wasn’t even sure it was near sixty.

  What next? Well, obviously, get out of bed, put on lots of warm clothing, and go down to the cellar to see if she could prod the slumbering beast to life. Although, she admitted to herself, her expertise amounted to fiddling with the thermostat and cursing a lot. At least if she went down and looked at the furnace—and spoke kindly to it?—she would know whether it was sulking or just plain dead. For a moment she thought nostalgically about her former apartment in Boston, where there had always been ample heat and hot water, and someone to complain to when things didn’t work. Well, she had Seth. Who would most likely tell her that the furnace’s time had come and she needed a new one, which would definitely cost more money than she had.

  When Meg gathered herself to climb out of bed, she realized that Lolly had crawled under the quilt and was glued to her legs. It must be really cold. Meg extricated herself from the sleeping cat and dashed for her closet, pulling out heavy jeans, a flannel shirt she didn’t remember she owned, and a fisherman’s knit sweater someone had brought back for her from Ireland. And socks. She thought wistfully about long underwear, but she’d never had any reason to buy any—until now. She made a mental note to order some online. Meg managed to dress in record time, then brushed her hair. Hairbrush in hand, she drifted over to the window on the west side, from which she could usually see the orchard. Not today: the orchard had disappeared behind a wall of white flakes, swirling erratically. Small, dry flakes that looked serious and determined. By her best guess there was already several inches of snow on the ground.