Bitter Harvest Read online

  She went down the hall to the lone bathroom, where she brushed and washed. Emerging from the bathroom, she checked Bree’s room at the back: as she had suspected, Bree hadn’t come home last night, and with this weather she probably wouldn’t be back for a while.

  Downstairs it was, if anything, colder. Meg put the kettle on to boil and went to check the thermostat. It read fiftytwo degrees. She rotated it back and forth, but there was no reassuring click indicating that the furnace had started. Maybe the thermostat had gone bad, spontaneously? She heard the kettle whistle in the kitchen, and went back and made coffee, strong. She scrabbled through the provisions she’d bought yesterday—yes, she had milk, so she could make oatmeal. That sounded warm and comforting, and she wanted both at the moment.

  As she was putting her oatmeal into the microwave to heat, Lolly finally stalked in, looking unhappy. Hunger had apparently won out over warmth. Meg opened a can of cat food and dished it up, then laid the food at Lolly’s feet. “There you go.” Lolly sniffed at it, then wolfed down half. Then she retreated to her favorite place in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator, which, Meg realized, was warm. Smart cat.

  Fortified with coffee and oatmeal, Meg felt ready to brave the cellar. She was growing increasingly fond of the house the longer she lived in it, but she still disliked the cellar. It was old: half the joists holding up the first floor were actually logs, some with bark still on them. Part of the floor was still dirt, although someone had added a thin and now-crumbling layer of concrete to the area around the furnace. And it boasted a vigorous spider population. Meg didn’t even want to think about mice. She wondered briefly whether any mouse with the gall to venture upstairs would inspire Lolly’s primitive hunting instincts. Not likely. Meg wasn’t even sure Lolly knew what a mouse looked like—although, she had to admit, Lolly had survived on her own for a few weeks when her former owners had abandoned her and moved to another state. Still, she’d rather not find out how Lolly handled mice.

  Quit stalling! Meg squared her shoulders and marched to the door in the dining room that led to the cellar, and pulled it open. Turning the light on, she made her way carefully down the rickety wooden stairs and crossed the floor to confront the furnace. It was still and silent, and Meg felt helpless. Wasn’t there a button to push, a switch to flip, a prayer to say? All she could tell was that it wasn’t doing anything at the moment.

  Was the oil tank full? She checked the massive tank a few feet away. The gauge looked ancient, but it did show a line at the halfway mark. She tapped the gauge, but it didn’t shift. She knocked on the metal side of the tank, and it didn’t sound hollow.

  She had exhausted her options. Time to call Seth.

  Upstairs, she poured herself another cup of coffee and retrieved the phone. She hated depending on Seth to fix anything and everything. Not that he wasn’t willing to do it. If anything, he was too willing. He was Mr. Fix-it, not only for her but for the whole town, as a selectman, and even beyond if she counted his sister Rachel in Amherst. And the price was right: nothing. He honestly liked to help people. Still, even he couldn’t fabricate a furnace out of thin air, and she had no idea how long it would take to obtain and install a new one. Or how much it would cost. With a sigh, she hit Seth’s speed dial button.

  He answered on the second ring. “Hey, Meg, you’re up early. What’s up?”

  “I think my furnace is dead.”

  “Sorry to hear that, but I did warn you. I’ll come by and take a look at it again, but I don’t think I have any magic fixes up my sleeve. Lousy timing, with this storm.”

  Meg hadn’t even thought about that. If it kept snowing for long, suppliers probably wouldn’t be delivering large equipment anytime soon. “I know. Have the forecasters changed their minds?”

  “Nope. They’re having a wonderful time making dire pronouncements, and the snowfall estimates keep going up.”

  “Where are you? Home? Were you planning to come over to the office today?”

  “Yeah, I’m at home, but I can be there in half an hour or so.”

  “Seth, you don’t have to do that. I can keep warm for a bit.”

  “Look, why don’t you come over here and stay until this is over? Where’s Bree?”

  “With Michael in Amherst. What about your mother?”

  “She went over to Rachel’s yesterday. You could join them there, if you don’t want to stay at my place.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Well, we’d better check that the rest of the house and barn are ready anyway. And maybe get the goats into the barn—they’d be better off there than in the shed.”

  “Thanks, Seth.” Again. “See you soon.” She hung up the phone.

  Seth arrived twenty-five minutes later, coming overland with Max frisking through the snow. “No change in our patient?”

  “None,” Meg said. “You didn’t drive?”

  “I took a look at the roads and decided it wasn’t worth it. Even if I made it, there are always idiots who decide they have to go out, and they usually end up in a ditch or stuck in the middle of the road. You’d think anybody who’d lived around here for a while would figure out how to drive in snow—or to stay home. Anyway, I pulled out my trusty snowshoes.”

  “You have snowshoes?”

  “I do, and I know how to use them. I hate to say it, but it’s bad out there, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Let’s go down and take a look at the furnace. Hi, Lolly.” Seth rubbed the cat’s head in passing. Meg followed him down the stairs.

  In the cellar, Seth poked and prodded the furnace, removing cover plates, testing wires, pushing a few buttons, all with no results. He straightened up and turned to her. “It’s hopeless. Sorry, but you’re going to have to replace it.”

  “Well, you did warn me,” Meg said glumly. They turned their backs on the moribund furnace, and Meg led the way upstairs. In the kitchen she said, “Maybe that’ll be my Christmas present to myself—a new furnace. How much?”

  “Depends. You want to switch to gas?”

  “That’ll cost more, right?”

  “You’d have to run a gas line. The unit would be about the same in cost, and it’s anybody’s guess what the long-term operating costs would be, compared to oil. Your call.”

  “How much?” she asked again.

  “Six, seven thou, maybe. But it’s not like you have a choice—you need a furnace, and there’s no used furnace store. Wish I could give you better news.”

  She sighed again. “So what do we do now?”

  “I make some calls, see who’s got what in stock. That is, if I can find anybody at work. If they’re smart, they stayed home today. This isn’t going to happen today, or probably even tomorrow. From what I’m hearing, nobody’s going to be going anywhere for the next couple of days.”

  “So you’re saying I’m going to freeze my buns off here?”

  “Hey, I said you could stay at my place. Lolly, too. I’m not sure we’d make it over the mountain to Rachel’s in Amherst, even with four-wheel drive.”

  Meg thought about that for a moment. She’d never been past the first floor in Seth’s house just over the hill, maybe a mile away, although he’d spent plenty of time in her house, both downstairs and upstairs. But somehow it felt wrong; it felt like she was abandoning her house. “Is this storm really going to be that bad?”

  “Maybe. Probably. They’re saying this could be one for the record books.”

  “I feel I should be here in case something happens. Look, this house has been here since the seventeen hundreds, and they didn’t have furnaces then, right? So how did they manage?”

  “Fireplaces. Yes, you’ve got a couple, but the chimneys aren’t in the best of shape.”

  “But would they work, at least for a little while?”

  “I’d have to check to see if either one is clear. You don’t want to find out the hard way that birds or raccoons have been nesting there for decades—you don’t want to risk a chimney fire. Are
you serious about this, Meg?”

  She realized belatedly that she had probably hurt his feelings. “I’m just exploring my options. It’s not that I don’t want to bunk with you, but I feel kind of proprietary about this house. Can you at least take a look, please?”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “I guess so. Got a flashlight?”

  She pulled one from a drawer and handed it to him, then followed him out of the kitchen into the front parlor. Seth knelt on the hearth and jiggled a handle she hadn’t noticed. It resisted for a time, then with a screech it shifted, and a shower of black soot fell onto the bottom of the fireplace. He backed away quickly and stumbled into Max, who had been watching with great interest. Seth looked disgusted. “Good thing I wore work clothes,” he said, sticking his head into the opening and peering up. “I can see daylight, so no nests. But the mortar’s pretty much gone, and there are some bricks missing.”

  “But will it work, for now?”

  “I think so.” He backed out of the fireplace and slapped his hands on his now-blackened jeans. “You have any wood?”

  “If I have any firewood, it’s been there for a while,” Meg said. “I do know there’s some construction rubble out in the shed.”

  “You don’t want to burn that—you don’t know what the stuff has been treated with. Let me go check.”

  He went out through the back door. Meg followed as far as the kitchen, wondering at her own reluctance to take the easy route and stay with Seth. At least his house had heat. It wasn’t like they hadn’t spent the night together before. But the idea of “roughing it” the way her ancestors had—not that they had had a choice—was kind of appealing. It could be an adventure.

  Seth came back, stomping his boots on the back steps. “It’s really coming down—I think there must be a couple more inches since I got here. The short answer is, yes, you’ve got some firewood out there, although it looks ancient, and some of the scrap wood would be okay. That covers your heating. Look, Meg, if you’re set on this idea, why don’t I stay here?”

  She smiled at him. “I like that idea. It’s not that I don’t want to spend time with you, it’s just that I don’t feel right leaving the house.”

  “Meg, the house has survived quite a few years without you in it.”

  “I know. But I haven’t spent a full winter here yet, and I want to keep an eye on things. Is that strange?”

  “Kind of, but the worst that can happen is that you’ll spend a very cold and miserable couple of days.”

  “With you.”

  “There is that.” Seth laughed. “Well, one good reason to stay, I guess, is that if it gets really cold, we should keep an eye on the water pipes. Some of them aren’t insulated, and you don’t want them to freeze and burst.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “How cold? How fast?”

  “Twenties, maybe? As I say, you don’t have much insulation, so the pipes aren’t protected. We could rig up some lightbulbs on extension cords—that’s usually enough to keep them from freezing.”

  “I knew there was a reason I kept you around. So, what first?”

  “Let’s get the goats into the barn, and maybe we can find some more wood out there while we’re at it. You’d better bundle up.”

  Meg pulled on most of the outerwear she owned, as well as her boots, then followed Seth out the back door, shutting it in the face of a disappointed Max, who Seth had decided should stay inside. It was like entering another universe. She could no longer see the steps outside the door because they had disappeared under snow. Gusts blew snow in every direction, including into her face. If she hadn’t known where the barn was, she would have been lost: it wasn’t until they were within a couple of feet of it that its dark bulk emerged from the swirling whiteness. Seth reached it first and pulled open a door. They stepped inside to relative silence. As her eyes adjusted Meg could see where snow drifted in through some of the many cracks between the old boards.

  “We should clear out a stall for the goats,” Seth said. “You’ll have to put out some hay, and some food. And if you find anything that looks burnable and isn’t holding something up, leave it in the center here.”

  “Gotcha. Which stall looks best?”

  Seth looked around him. “They all look pathetic. But how about the one that backs against the apple storage chambers? At least there’s one solid wall to block the drafts, and the rest looks okay.”

  Together they hauled random pieces of ancient farm equipment and a roll of wire fencing out of the stall. Luckily Meg had been keeping the goats’ hay inside the barn already, since there wasn’t room in their shed outside, so they spread some on the wooden floor of the stall and stacked the remaining bales around the perimeter. Meg added feed to a trough that had been part of the stall for as long as it had been there, and filled a bucket with water from the rusty tap inside the barn. Now all they needed were the goats.

  “You want me to get the girls?” Seth asked.

  “Will they come to you?”

  “Sure. They love me. They came over to my place yesterday, didn’t they?”

  “I thought it was Max they had a thing for.”

  “Love my dog, love me. I’ll go round them up.”

  How did Seth stay so cheerful? Meg wondered. Throw a major storm at him, and he just goes down his checklist of things to do: make sure mother is secured. Check in on poor Meg, who is clueless. Herd goats. Build a fire. What couldn’t he do?

  He was back a minute or so later with Dorcas and Isabel trotting behind him, on the same rope leashes he had used before. “Listen, didn’t you replace the locks on the doors, after that pesticide incident?”

  “Uh, yes. Plus to protect the equipment I keep in here. Why?”

  “Looks like someone tried to jimmy the back one again—there’s a bunch of new gouges.”

  “Do you think they got in?”

  “Hard to say. Is anything missing?”

  “Honestly, I never come out here, or at least, not past the holding chambers. The tractor is still here, obviously, but I don’t think anyone would be tempted to steal it. As for the rest, I have no idea what I’ve got. You think someone was looking for something, or just wanted a place to hang out? Like teenagers?”

  “Maybe. No harm done, apparently. Let’s get these two settled.” He led the goats into their new temporary home, and they explored it thoroughly before trying out the feed. Seth latched the gate behind them.

  “Will they be warm enough?” Meg asked.

  “Sure. They’ve got shelter, and they’ve got each other. How do you think animals survived in the wild all these years?”

  “I didn’t think about it. Are we done here? My fingers are getting numb.”

  “And they aren’t going to get a lot warmer in the house. Remember, I offered you a nice warm place.”

  “And I thank you, but I’m staying.”

  “Then so am I.”

  When they emerged into the blinding snow, Meg realized there was someone else in the driveway, or at least another truck.

  “Seth?” someone called out.

  “John?” Seth replied. Meg giggled: this was like a game of Marco Polo, with the three of them trying to find each other in the snow.

  A shadowy figure came into focus, bundled to the eyeballs. “Hey, Seth, I wanted to check if you’d need me for plowing? Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you, ma’am.”

  Seth looked back and forth at Meg and John. “You haven’t met? Meg, this is John Taylor—he lives down the street from you, toward Ludlow. John, meet Meg Corey.”

  John stuck out a gloved hand. “Nice to meet you. Sorry I haven’t been by to introduce myself before now.”

  “Hey, I’ve been so busy with the orchard that I haven’t been around much, so I probably would have missed you anyway.”

  “Looks like you had a good harvest this year.”

  “I did.”

  “Just came over to talk to Seth. So, Seth, can you use me for plowing?”

  “Sure. I’ll c
all you as soon as I have the details. Once the snow stops.”

  “Right. Thanks. Good to meet you, Meg.” He climbed into an ageing pickup truck and pulled out onto the road.

  “I haven’t seen him around before,” Meg said as the truck disappeared. “Which is surprising, since it’s not like there are a lot of people living on this road.”

  “John doesn’t socialize much. He’s having a rough time—he’s got a sick kid, and he just lost his job a few months ago and had to move back in with his mother. I plan to hire him when I need another pair of hands, so you’ll be seeing him here, on and off. And I’ve been throwing what municipal work I can his way, like snowplowing. His wife can’t work because someone’s got to stay home with their child full-time.”

  “Sad,” Meg said.

  “It is. Come on, let’s get out of the weather!”

  “Right behind you.”

  4

  Meg followed Seth into the house, and they stripped off their outer clothing, shaking the snow from each piece; it melted quickly on the floor, making puddles. Max was eager to help, and excited about being inside with some of his favorite people. He kept bouncing around their legs, and Meg had to remind herself that Max wasn’t even a year old yet—still a puppy, albeit a large and boisterous one. Lolly watched the scene from atop the refrigerator, keeping out of the fray.

  “So, now what?” Meg asked. “Are you hungry?” She was surprised to see that it was lunchtime already. “I did stock up on staples, so we won’t starve. Oh, except I didn’t think of dog food. Will Max eat cat food?”