When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (2 page)

There was no mistaking the gleam of interest in those tiny eyes, which were almost lost in its huge fuzzy face. Weighed against its horns and massive head and shoulders, our new brick house seemed real flimsy. Why hadn’t we looked for a place with two-foot granite walls?

The buffalo stood in the grass and stared at me. I stood in the living room and stared at it. My brain was sending frantic signals to my feet and legs, but my lower body had shut off the phone.

Until then, it had been such a
normal
morning.

I’d gotten up around six, like I usually do, and padded into our new kitchen, thinking how much I liked its yellow walls even if Joe Riddley did ask if the paint came with sunglasses.

I found coffee and filters on my third try. We’d been in the new house nearly four weeks, but our cook, Clarinda, was still shifting things around, trying to find “where they feel themselves to home.” Apparently, only the toaster and coffeemaker had settled in so far, although Clarinda assured me the rest of our stuff was “beginning to get the feel of the place.” A friend who stays abreast of modern trends suggested Clarinda was practicing fêng shui. I figured she was just being Clarinda.

Around six fifteen, Joe Riddley padded in, scratching, unhappy at being up. He invariably is, that early. I took a mug of hot coffee to the dining room table, since our new kitchen was too little to eat in. He slumped into his preferred chair, facing the backyard, and sat there glaring at the coffee like he expected it to rise and meet him.

“You bring in the paper?” he muttered without looking up.

“Not yet, but I will.” I regarded him fondly from the kitchen door while I finished my own coffee. We’d been married over forty years, and I still thought him the hand somest husband in Hopemore. I even liked the touch of gray that was beginning to appear in his thick dark hair. He was generally real sweet, too, so long as you didn’t expect him to be charming before eight.

“Are you going for the paper,” he demanded, “or do I have to go get it?”

“You can’t go outside in white boxers and that tacky robe. I wish you’d let me rip it up for rags.”

“It’s got a little life left in it, just like me.” He shoved back his chair. “I guess I’d better feed Bo.” He left his coffee untasted and pushed past me.

While he opened and shut cabinet doors, I tried to insert a little culture into our morning. “You know that odd red-and-green bird I’ve been seeing over in the woods between us and the next house? I looked it up in Audubon, and it may be a male scarlet tanager, changing from summer to winter plumage.”

Joe Riddley peered into the pantry. “Where’s Clarinda hiding Bo’s food this week?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” He hadn’t heard a word I said. Still, I try to educate him whenever I can. You never can tell how much a husband will absorb unconsciously.

He found Bo’s cereal next to our own, carried it to Bo’s green plastic place mat on the dining room table, and dumped out a bit. Then he headed to retrieve Bo from what the real-estate agent enthusiastically described as “your screened back porch.” It was scarcely big enough for a large birdcage. We’d put Bo’s perch as far from the screen as it could get and still, on nights when rain blew in, we’d hear him shrieking something he’d picked up from our four-year-old grandson, Cricket: “I need help here. Did you hear what I said? I need help.” Still, he had to stay there. I wouldn’t let him in the new house except for the living and dining rooms, which had floors we could mop. Unless you have had a bird, you have no idea how filthy they can be.

I scowled at the doo-streaked green cement porch floor while Joe Riddley stroked Bo’s bright red breast to wake him up. Bo is even grumpier than Joe Riddley in the morning. He finally hopped onto Joe Riddley’s shoulder and perched there, muttering inaudible words I probably didn’t want to hear. We’d inherited Bo when his former owner, Hiram Blaine, had been killed down at our house,
¹
and Hiram had a colorful vocabulary.

As Joe Riddley set the macaw down on his green place mat and gently stroked its breast, I reminded myself for the umpteenth time that he loved that bird and it had been real good for him in recent months. I would not suggest that we give it away—yet.

Joe Riddley watched until Bo had started pecking away, then turned to me and announced, “Tanagers don’t generally get this far south. Must be migrating. We’re in a migration pattern.”

How did he know that? I was the one who read bird books. “I suppose you heard that from Audubon personally?”

“Just common knowledge.” He pulled out his chair, fell into it again, and lifted his mug. “Did you get the paper yet?”

“I’m
going.
” Grumpiness is a contagious disease. “Just let me get some windows open first. This place gets stale, all closed up at night.”

I shoved up the windows in the kitchen and dining room and the side ones in the living room, thinking again how fortunate we’d been to find a house with windows on all four sides. So many builders put up houses with no more circulation than apartments. It was when I shoved up the front window that I noticed the buffalo.

Which was still staring at me.

I gave a little wave.

It nodded its big head and took a step in my direction.

I took a step back.

It took another step.

I froze again.

We stood there for a hundred years.

I wished my beagle, Lulu, wasn’t down in the barn at our old house, recovering from having a litter of pups. She wouldn’t hesitate to take on a buffalo she thought was threatening me. On the other hand, I hadn’t met all our new neighbors yet. I’d hate for them to label me “that woman who ran after the three-legged beagle chasing a buffalo down the block.”

Finally the buffalo got bored or hungry and lowered its head to graze. I stepped out of its line of vision and headed for the kitchen. Let Joe Riddley be the first to face the “dog” if it decided to pay a house call. He’s a foot taller than I am, with longer legs.

At the kitchen door, I muttered, “I’ll call Tad to say we’ve found an ecologically sounder lawn mower. He won’t complain.” Tad was the son of our younger son, Walker, and had begun, reluctantly, to cut our grass each week.

I could have saved my wit. Joe Riddley was feeding Bo from one forefinger, not paying me a speck of attention.

With a disgusted sigh, I dialed the number for Ridd, our older son. Ridd and his wife, Martha, were keeping Tad that week while Walker and Cindy were up in New York City attending an insurance convention and seeing plays. Part of the deal was that Tad was to feed, groom, and exercise his mother’s new hunter, Starfire, which Cindy was boarding in Ridd’s barn.

With a buffalo on my lawn and my husband in denial, however, it wasn’t really Tad I wanted to talk to—it was Martha. An emergency-room supervisor, she is Queen of Unflappable. She deals daily with situations that would sizzle my gizzard, and that fall she was not only raising her own two children but had agreed to let her daughter Bethany’s best friend, Hollis, live with them for her senior year of high school.
²
If anybody would know what to do with a buffalo in the yard, Martha would.

When she answered, though, she didn’t even wait to find out what I wanted before she started right in. “I’m glad you called, Mac. We’ve got a problem, and I need some advice.”

Martha asking
me
for advice? I was so astounded, I sat down and forgot my own problem for a second. “What’s the matter?”

“Tad. He’s smoking.”

The ice maker rumbled and dumped its load while I thought that over. “He’s ten years old,” I reminded her.

“I know. But Bethany and Hollis caught him smoking down in the woods after school yesterday.”

“Where could Tad get cigarettes?” I was thinking aloud, but Martha answered anyway.

“He said a friend swiped them from his parents’ stash while they were at work. Tad swears this is the first time he’s tried it, but Bethany says he looked pretty experienced. I don’t know whether to tell Walker and Cindy, or hope his little chat with Ridd will do the trick. Why do these things always happen when a kid’s parents are away?”

“It’s a law of the universe, honey, just like the law that says toilets will overflow and furnaces break when your husband leaves town. It was part of Eve’s curse in the Garden of Eden. Somebody just omitted it from the text.”

As I had hoped, a gurgle of laughter rolled over the line. I love Martha’s laugh. It reminds me of a stream running over rocks. “Oh, well, I guess we’ll get through this. It’s just one more of life’s little stretching experiences. Are you still planning on walking with me tonight?”

Martha and I both tend to be a little rounder than we’d like to be, so we’d decided to begin walking around the high-school track each evening.

“Yeah, I’ll be there. But I called to ask you a question. What would you do if you had a buffalo in your yard?”

“Call a cowboy?” From the tentative way she said it, I knew she was waiting for a punch line. After all, she did live with a four-year-old who loved silly riddles. Before I could say anything else, she returned to her own problem. “I guess I’ll have to tell Cindy and Walker, but do you think I ought to call them in New York, or just wait until they get home?”

I peered around the door as I thought that over.
My
problem had abandoned the grass and was now moseying across the yard toward Joe Riddley’s new silver Town Car. “Wait until they get home. I gotta go. Call you later.”

I announced loudly from the safety of the kitchen door, “That two-ton horned dog is about to test-drive your new car.”

That got Joe Riddley’s attention. He’d bought the car in August to celebrate the anniversary of the day he’d gotten shot and survived to tell the story.
³
He would scarcely let me ride in it, he was so scared I’d leave a scratch on the finish.

Joe Riddley heaved the sigh men reserve for times when they think a woman who expects equality in other areas ought to be able to cope with the present situation—a dead rat in the pantry, a flat tire in the rain, a buffalo on the front lawn. He shoved back his chair, strode to the front door, threw it wide open, and stopped dead. “By golly, it
is
a buffalo.
Hi-ya!
Get away from that car!” Waving his arms, he dashed into the yard.

The animal had been ambling peacefully across the grass, but he stopped, turned, and lowered his head. I could see the headline in next week’s
Hopemore Statesman
: “Former Judge Trampled to Death.”

I might get mad at the old coot from time to time, but I didn’t want him flattened by a buffalo. I ran after him in my red-striped coffee coat and red slippers. “Get back in here!” I grabbed his arm and tugged.

The buffalo headed toward the excitement.

Do you know how fast a buffalo can run?

I never found out. Joe Riddley grabbed me around the waist, lifted me from the ground, and hightailed it to the porch. “That red must be making him mad,” he gasped as he slammed the front door behind us.

Trust him to blame me. I’d have pointed out that he was the fool who went outside in the first place, but I was too busy trying to breathe. Besides, some of the best advice Mama ever gave me was, “Honey, you’ll stay married a lot longer if you don’t make a war out of every arrow aimed in your direction.”

We leaned against the door panting for breath, our two hearts thundering as one. I didn’t hear a thundering buffalo on the front stoop, though, so I dared to look out the front window. The buffalo had stopped about ten feet from our front step and was looking at the door with an expression that said “If
that
was the morning’s entertainment, I want my money back.”

Joe Riddley was still pressed against the door. How long did he think he could hold it against a determined buffalo?

“Call animal control,” he ordered. “I’ll keep an eye on him.” He locked the dead bolt—did he expect the animal to try the knob?—and moved to the front window. “Hurry. He’s looking at my car again.”

Animal control wasn’t open, so I called the police. After all, as a county magistrate, I regularly get up and drive down to the sheriff’s detention center in the middle of the night to save deputies the trouble of coming to me. I figured it was time somebody paid back the favor.

Royce Wharton, a deputy who regularly had the night shift and had roused me four times in the past month, answered. “Hey, Royce. This is Judge Yarbrough. Can you send somebody over here to remove a buffalo from our front lawn?”

I had to hold the receiver six inches from my ear to keep from being deafened by his laugh. “Our cowhands haven’t arrived yet, Judge, but as soon as one gallops in, I’ll send him over.”

“This isn’t a joke,” I informed him. “We have a buffalo in our yard, and if you don’t help me deal with it, you’d better call somebody else next time you need a judge to sign a warrant.”

“What’s it doing?”

“What does it matter what it’s doing? It’s
there
. What do you suggest we do? And I don’t want to hear a smart aleck answer, either.”

“No, ma’am, but I don’t know what to suggest. We don’t do buffalo.”

I was about to suggest that he didn’t do much of anything when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the blasted animal was wandering happily across the yard in a new direction.

“My roses!” I slammed down the receiver and grabbed the broom. The way Joe Riddley tells it, I mounted the broom, flew out the front door, and zoomed over the yard. I didn’t, of course, but I was determined to save those roses. I’d transplanted them from our old yard, and had grown them originally from Mama’s cuttings. I wasn’t going to lose them to any varmint, even if he had strayed fifteen hundred miles and a hundred and fifty years off course.

“Get out of here! Out! You hear me?”

I yelled at the top of my lungs and waved my broom. I was just about to bring it down on the creature’s hump when I heard a shout.