Pawing Through the Past (9 page)

16

The 1958 John Deere tractor, affectionately known as Johnny Pop,
pop-popped
over the western hay fields.

Bushhogging was one of Harry’s favorite chores. She would mow the edge of the road, all around the barn and then clear around the edges of her pastures and hay fields.

The hay needed to be cut next week. She’d arranged to rent a spider wheel tedder to fold the freshly cut hay into windrows. Then she’d go back over the flattened, sweet-smelling hay with an old twine square baler.

Hard work in the boiling sun, but Harry, born to it, thrived.

Today she chugged along in a middle gear, careful not to get too close to the strong-running creek.

The horses stayed in the barn during the day in the summers, a fan tilted into each stall to cool them and blow the flies off.

Mrs. Murphy and Pewter were hanging out at the spring house. The cool water running over the stones produced a delightful scent. The mice liked it, too.

Tucker, sprawled in the center aisle of the barn, breathed in and out—little no-see-ums rising and falling with each breath—like an insect parasol opening and closing.

Harry loved this patch of Virginia. She had great pride in her state, which boasted two ancient mountain ranges, a rich coastline fed by three great rivers, and a lushness unimaginable to a Westerner. But, then, the Westerner was freed from the myriad gossamer expectations and blood ties inherited by each Virginian. So much was expected of a Virginian that ofttimes one had to escape for a few days, weeks, or years to rejuvenate.

A poplar tree downed in an early-summer storm loomed ahead. Harry sighed. She had to cut up the big tree, then drag the sections and branches to those places in her fence line that needed repair. Poplar didn’t last as long as locust, but still, it was for free, not counting her labor.

She cut off Johnny Pop and dismounted. The spotted tree bark remained home to black ants and other crawlies. Although flat on its side, roots exposed, the crown of the poplar was covered in healthy green leaves.

“Life doesn’t give up easily,” she said aloud, admiring the tenacity of the desperately injured tree.

She bent over the creek, cupped her hands and washed her face. Then she let the tumbling cool water run over her hands.

It suddenly occurred to her that her feelings about Charlie Ashcraft as an individual were irrelevant. The swiftness of his end sobered her. Security was a myth. Knowing that intellectually and knowing it emotionally were two different things.

She shook her hands, enjoying the tingling sensation. The sensation of death’s randomness was far less pleasant.

“Given the chance, I’ll fight to the end. I’ll fight just like you.” She patted the thick tree trunk before climbing back onto the tractor.

17

“Smells okay.”
Tucker twitched her nose.

“You rely on your nose too much. You have to use your other senses.”
Pewter sat impassively on the sofa, watching Tracy Raz carry a duffel bag over his shoulder.

“Think this will work?”
Tucker, also on the sofa, asked.

“Yep.”
Mrs. Murphy, alertly poised on the big curving sofa arm announced, “
Tracy Raz will be a godsend.”

“’Cause of the money? Mom’s new truck payments don’t leave much at the end of the month.”
Tucker, conservative about money, fretted over every penny because she saw Harry fret. A rent check of five hundred dollars a month would help Harry considerably. Tucker was grateful to Mrs. Hogendobber for sitting down both Harry and Tracy Raz to work out a fair arrangement.

“That, too, but I think it’s going to be great for Mom to have someone around. She’s lived alone too long now and she’s getting set in her ways. Another year and it’d be—concrete.”

Pewter and Tucker laughed.

Harry led the athletically built man upstairs. She walked down a hall, the heart pine floor covered with an old Persian runner, deep russet and navy blue. At the end of the hall she opened the last door on the right to a huge bedroom with a full bath and sitting room. “I hope it suits. I turned on the air conditioner. It’s an old window unit and hums a lot but the nights are so cool you won’t need it. There’s always a breeze.”

Tracy noticed the big four-poster rice bed. “That’s a beauty.”

“Grandmother gave it to Mom as a wedding present. Grandma Hepworth was raised in Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Prettiest city in the country.” He walked across the room, turned off the air conditioner, and threw open the window. “The reason people are sick all the time is because of air-conditioning. The body never properly adjusts to the season.”

“Dad used to say that.” Harry smiled. “Oh, here are the keys although I never lock the house. Let’s see, I’m usually up by five-thirty so I can knock off the barn chores. If you like to ride you can help me work the horses. It’s a lot of fun.”

“Rode Western. Never got the hang of an English saddle.” He smiled.

“I can’t promise meals. . . .”

“Don’t expect any. Anyway, Miranda told me you eat like a bird.”

“Oh, if you don’t shut your door at night the animals will come in. They won’t be able to resist. Any magazines or papers you leave on the floor will be filed away—usually under the bed. If you take your watch off at night or a necklace of any sort put it in your bureau drawer because Mrs. Murphy can’t resist jewelry. She drags anything that glitters to the sofa, where she drops it behind a cushion.”

Mrs. Murphy, curiosity aroused, followed them upstairs.
“I resent that. You leave stuff all over the house. With my system everything is in one place.”

“Where we can all sit on it,”
Pewter, also brimming with curiosity, said.

“Those two culprits?” Tracy nodded at the two cats now posing in the doorway.

“Murphy’s the tiger cat and the gray cannonball is Pewter. She used to belong to Market Shiflett but she spent so much time at the post office with my animals that he told me to just take her home. She also flicked meat out of the display case, which didn’t go down well with the customers.”

“They’re beautiful cats.”

“I knew I’d like this guy.”
Pewter beamed.

“He’s handsome for his age.”
Mrs. Murphy purred, deciding to bestow a rub on Tracy’s leg. She padded over, slid across his leg, then sat down. He stroked her head.

Pewter followed suit.

“I’ll leave you to get settled. You can use the kitchen, the living room. I figure if something upsets you you’ll tell me and vice versa. I’m going out to finish my barn chores.”

“I’ll go along. There’s not that much in the bag to worry about. I thought I’d do a little shopping this week.”

“You don’t have to help me.”

“Like to be useful.” He beamed.

And he was. He could toss a fifty-pound bale of hay over his shoulder as though it weighed one-tenth of that. Although not a horseman, he had enough sense to not make loud noises around them.

Tracy whistled as he worked. Harry liked hearing him. It suddenly hit her how stupid it was to retire people unless they decided to retire. The terms “twilight years” and “golden years” ought to be stricken from the language. We shove people out of work at the time when they have the most wisdom. It must be horrible to sit on the sidelines with nothing vital to do.

Simon, belly flat to the hayloft floor, peered over the side. A new human! One was bad enough.

Harry noticed him. “Patience, Simon.”

Tracy glanced up. “Simon?”

“Possum in the hayloft. He’s very shy. There’s also a huge owl up in the cupola and a blacksnake. She comes back to hibernate each fall. Right now she’s on the south side of the property. I’ve tracked her hunting circle. Pretty interesting.”

“That was the one thing I hated about my work. Kept me in cities most of the time. I worked out in gyms but nothing keeps you as healthy as farmwork. My father farmed. You wouldn’t remember him, he worked the old Black Twig apple orchard west of Crozet. Lived to be a hundred and one. The worst thing we ever did was talk Pop into selling the orchard and moving to Florida. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

“He’s forgiven you.”

Tracy stopped a moment to wipe the sweat from his face. The temperature hovered in the low eighties even though it was seven at night. “Thanks for that.”

“Possums are interesting, too.” Harry tactfully returned to the subject of Simon. “They’ll eat about anything. There’s a bug that infects birds and if the possums eat a bird with the bug they’ll shed it in their poop. If horses eat the poop they come down with EPM, an awful kind of sickness that gets them uncoordinated and weak. If you catch it in time it still takes a long time to heal. Anyway, I love my Simon. Can’t kill him but I don’t want my kids here to, by chance, munch some hay that Simon has—befouled. So each night I put out sweet feed and the occasional marshmallow. He’s so full he doesn’t roam very far and there’s no room for birds.”

“I can see you’re the kind of person who loves animals.”

“My best friends.” She slid the pitchfork between the two nails on the wall. “Mr. Raz—”

“Please call me Tracy.”

“Thank you. And call me Harry. I hope you don’t think I’m prying but I’ve just got to ask you. How did Mrs. Hogendobber come by the nickname ‘Cuddles’?”

As they watched the ground fog slither over the western meadow and the meadowlarks scurry to their nests, the bobwhites started to call to one another and the bats emerged from under the eaves of Harry’s house. Tracy recalled his high-school days with Miranda.

“Love bats.”
Mrs. Murphy fluffed her fur as a slight chill rolled up with the ground fog.

“Never catch one.”
Pewter liked the way bats zigged and zagged. Got her blood up.

“My mother caught one once,”
Murphy remembered.
“It was on its way out, though. Still, she did catch it.
You know they’re mice with wings, that’s how I think of them.”

“Maybe we’d better catch the mice in the barn first.”

Mrs. Murphy moved over to Pewter, leaning against her in the chill. “
I heard them singing in the tackroom this morning. I expect them to be saucy in the feedroom. But the tackroom. It was humiliating. Fortunately, Harry can’t hear them.”

“An original song?”

The tiger cat laughed. “
In those high-pitched voices everything sounds original but it was ‘Dixie.’”

“Well, at least they’re Southern mice.”

“Pewter, that’s a great comfort.”
Mrs. Murphy laughed so loudly she interrupted the humans.

“Getting a little nippy, Miss Puss?” Harry scooped her up in one arm while lifting Pewter with the other. “Pewts, light and lively for you.”

A cat on each shoulder, Harry walked back to the house as Tucker trailed at Tracy’s heels.

Tracy picked up where he’d left off when Murphy let out what sounded to him like a yowl. “—one of the prettiest girls in the class. Natural. Fresh.”

“Was she plump?”

“Uh . . . full-figured. You girls are too skinny these days. Miranda sparkled. Anyway, we’d go on hay rides and trips to other high schools for football games. I played on the team. Afterwards we’d all ride back to school in our old jalopies. Fun. I think I was too young to know how much fun I was having. And World War Two ended five years before our graduation so everyone felt safe and wonderful. It was an incredible time.” He chuckled as he opened the porch door for Harry. “Every chance I had I got close to Miranda and I nicknamed her ‘Cuddles.’”

The kitchen door, open to catch the breeze, was shut behind them as the night air, drenched in moisture and coolness, was drawing through the house.

Harry put the cats on the kitchen counter. “Must be a cold front coming through. The wind is picking up. This has been an unusual summer. Usually it’s brutally hot, like the last few days have been.”

“Nothing like a Virginia summer unless it’s a Delta summer. One year in the service I was stationed in Louisiana and thought I would melt. Heat and hookworm, the history of the South.”

“Cured the latter. Did I interrupt you? If I did I apologize. You were telling me about Miranda.”

“In my day we were all friends. It wasn’t quite as much sex stuff. I had a crush on Miranda and we did a lot of things together but as a group. I took her to the senior prom. You know, I loved her but I didn’t know that either. It wasn’t until years later that I figured it all out but by then I was halfway around the world, fighting in Korea. I wish you could have known Miranda as a youngster.”

“I’m glad to know her now.”

“More subdued now. She said you thought she was a religious nut.”

“I give her a hard time. She needs someone to give her hell,” Harry half-giggled. “She’s more religious than I am but I don’t know as she’s a nut. You know, Tracy, I’ve known Miranda from the time I was a child but what do children know? She was bright and chirpy. George died and she took a nosedive. That’s when she turned more to religion, although she was a strong churchgoer before. But I’ve noticed this last year she’s happier. It’s taken her a long time.”

“Does. Lost my wife two years ago and I’m just pulling out of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. You live with a woman for half of your life and she’s the air you breathe. You don’t think about it. You simply breathe.”

“Poor fellow.”
Tucker whimpered softly.

“He’s on the mend and he’s sure good with chores so I hope he hangs around.”
Mrs. Murphy, ever practical, batted water drops as they slowly collected under the water tap.

The phone rang. Harry picked it up. Tracy noticed Mrs. Murphy and walked over to the faucet. He unscrewed the tap with his fingers, so strong was his grasp. The washer was shot. He put it back and grabbed a notepad by the phone and made a note to himself which he stuck in his pocket.

“All right, Susan, all right.”

Susan, on the other end of the line, said, “Now the hysteria is, should BoomBoom use the picture with Charlie or not?”

“She should look at the proofs first.”

“One of them is bound to turn out.”

“Susan, what does she intend to do with the superlatives that Aurora and Ron are in? They’re dead, too.”

“She can’t make up her mind whether to use their old photographs either.”

“I’ll make it up for her. Tell her we all suffered in the heat for that photograph of her and Charlie, so use it.”

“You know, Harry, that’s a good idea. Hang up and call her before she emotes anymore. It
is
tiresome.” Susan paused. “Go on, Harry.
You
call her.”

Harry, grumbling, did just that and BoomBoom blurted out three or four sentences of inner thoughts before Harry cut her off and told her to just use the new photo. The whole idea was to see the passage of time!

Harry finally got off the phone. “This reunion is becoming a full-time job.”

“Ours is going to be real simple,” Tracy said. “We’ll gather in the cafeteria, swap tales, eat and dance. I don’t even know if there will be decorations.”

“With Miranda as the chair? She can’t have changed that much in fifty years, I promise you.” Harry smiled.

“That’s something about one of your classmates getting shot.” Tracy noticed the weather stripping on the door was ragged. “Everyone seems calm about it.”

“Because everyone thinks they know the reason why. They just have to find out which husband pulled the trigger. What has upset people, though, is the mailing that went out to our classmates before Charlie was killed. ‘You’ll never get old!’ it said.”

“Ever hear the expression, ‘Expect a trap where the ground is smoothest’?”
Mrs. Murphy commented as she wiped her whiskers.

“What made you think of that?”
Tucker, now rolled over on her back, inquired.

“People have jumped to a conclusion. Charlie Ashcraft could have been killed for another reason. What if he was involved in fraud or theft or selling fake bonds?”