Free Stolen Honey by Nancy Means Wright Page B

never ate breakfast.” And Brownie said, looking defensive, “Well, I lost it. I threw up, I told you.”
    Mert began to suspect something then. He began to suspect that Brownie’s being sick had something to do with the college boy who’d died in the patch of nightshade. “Somebody say somethin’ to you about that dead boy, did they?” he asked, still concentrating on his pack basket. It had sixteen uprights all tapered out; now he’d have to weave in the strips. He didn’t want to alarm Brownie, just let the boy speak it out.
    The boy did. He told how the whole busload of schoolkids that morning began hissing his name, calling him Brown Bear, the baptismal name he didn’t want people to know. How the driver, Mrs. Bump, stopped the bus and they finally quieted. “Then, when I was getting off, a kid yelled, ‘Your sister’s a murderer!’ and they started up again.”
    Brownie was crying now. He cried right into Mert’s uprights that had taken three days to dry. But it was all right. Mert laid down the work and put his arms around the boy. The body felt like a basket, all ribs and strips of flesh. Mert felt his shirt soak up the tears.
    “There, there,” he said. He told Brownie about when he was a boy growing up in the thirties. “If you had any Indian blood in you,” he said, “the other kids wouldn’t play with you. Most tried to hide it, like my wife, Estelle, who was your grandmother you never knew. She dropped dead one day, kneading dough, yes, she did. She was a hard worker. She wouldn’t admit she was Indian—all her life pretending to be somebody she wasn’t. Me, I had my own friends, French and Abenaki. I was almost a half-blood and proud of it.”
    He told the boy about how he wanted a certain brown ash tree and the ranger said, “Mert, you can’t cut a growing tree on government forest land. I said, ‘Yes I can, I’m Abenaki, you look it up.’ So the ranger looked into it and he come back and he says, ‘Mert, if you want that tree, it’s yours.’ You see, the government can’t take an Indian’s livelihood away from him. And if there’s two hundred maple trees in the forest up behind our place, I can hang fifty buckets and he can’t stop me.”
    Brownie looked skeptical. “The police would stop you. Mr. Ball would call them. They’d send over Uncle Olen.”
    Mert laughed again. “I’m not afraid of no police. Neither’s your dad.” He put both arms around his grandson, pulled him close. “And don’t worry about that dead boy. Olen’s a good man, he’s trying to help us find out what really happened.”
    “Shep Noble died from the nightshade!” Brownie cried hotly. “Mother says so.”
    “Sure. Now go lie down so I can tell your mother you wasn’t just playing hooky, she won’t like that. Don’t think about them mean kids. Don’t think about the nightshade.”
    * * * *
    Donna drove back to the farm with Emily after their sociology class. Her mother would pick her up after her bee rounds— Donna’s bicycle had a flat tire. Anyway, Donna didn’t want to go home. Home reminded her of Shep Noble. Home reminded her of Leroy, who might or might not have killed Shep. It reminded her of being a “squaw,” like the note said.
    “Penny for your thoughts,” Emily said as she parked the pickup in the farm driveway. Donna glanced out at the two round silos, the red barn, the cows browsing beyond in the pasture that was full of wildflowers. It was peaceful here, unlike the war zone of her own home, the yellow crime scene tape still strung across the path into the woods.
    “Oh, nothing much. I was just thinking how nice it is here. And worrying about the paper we have to write. Have you got a topic?”
    “Well, I thought I might do something on farming,” Emily said. “You know, all the attitude problems?”
    “What problems are those?” Donna needed to get into other people’s worlds, into their problems. She had to stop thinking about her own.
    “Oh, the way