The Memory of Lemon by Judith Fertig Read Free Book Online

stepmother walked through the front door of the tiny house, she would know Lucy for a fool, and it could only be a matter of time before the Audubons moved back east to be a millstone around the family’s neck at the Bakewells’ farm, Fatland Ford.
    In the front parlor, the room with the best light, a tableau sat temporarily forgotten on the rough wooden table. The dead Carolina parroquets, with their glittery green plumage, vivid yellow neck and breast, and brilliant orange on either side of the beak, were strung like puppets with wire to the dowel rods attached to a wooden base that her husband used to simulate their natural, living postures. Clumps of straw-colored cocklebur, the soil still damp at the weedy roots, made the scene ever more lifelike. The little burs that the parroquets loved to eat stuck to everything in the room and were the bane of farmers and sheep and horses—and women who tried to keep a clean house. But Lucy knew better than to attempt tidying up. Her husband could change his mind about the day’s outing, come back inspired, and work by candlelight long into the night, drawing and painting.
    The charcoal sketch of the parroquets, on paper they couldn’t afford, lay crumpled in a corner of the room. It was only good for sketching, not nearly fine enough for John James to wet his brush for watercolor or waste confident smudges of oil pastel crayon.
I am slowly desponding,
he kept telling her.
    She was glad he had taken his gun with him that day. Shehoped he would find refuge in the woods. And perhaps he would bring back a wild turkey or plump little quail that she could wrap with fatback and roast on the coals.
    Restless, she put on her bonnet and gathered her market basket. She had learned to cook on their hearth without the help of a servant, but baking bread was still a mystery. There was no point in wasting good flour and the yeast from the brewery when she could just buy a large loaf for a comparable price.
    In the open-air market a few blocks away, Lucy paid the baker and put the loaf in her basket.
    â€œMissus.”
    Lucy walked away, but the voice got louder. “Missus.”
    Lucy turned toward the next stall and the older woman in a calico dress and linen apron, with a straw bonnet tied under her chin. She was sitting on a three-legged stool behind a table filled with bunches of herbs, bottles of potions, and liniments.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI have something for you.”
    Lucy frowned. Was this some kind of trick?
    â€œI do not think I’ve had the pleasure of your acquaintance, ma’am.”
    â€œAbigail Newcomb, at your service.” She did a sort of curtsy, as a workingwoman was still expected to do to a woman of a class above. Abigail also extended her work-worn hand, a gardener’s hand, to Lucy.
    Lucy sensed a feminine strength that passed from the older woman’s hand to her young one, and she held on a second or two longer than she intended.
    â€œI come up from Augusta on the flatboat every fortnight or so,” said Abigail, matter-of-factly. “Visit my daughter, Sarah, and grandbaby, Little Abigail, and do a little business here.” She gestured at the table. “I’ve seen you and your boys. And your husband so keen on the birds. I’ve been wanting to give you this.”
    The herb woman handed Lucy a thick bundle of short, slender sticks tied together with a strip of homespun, just big enough to fit into a tankard.
    â€œSpicebush,” the woman explained. “You brew a tea with a few sticks. Let them steep in boiled water. Tastes like allspice, if you know it. Helps you remember the ones who are gone, but you don’t feel the melancholy.”
    Lucy looked at her sharply. How did she know?
    â€œI bring Sean, here, the dried spicebush leaves. Sean misses his old life in Ireland, and he says that the sour tea tastes like what the cook used to make for him.” The herb woman pointed to a young man