Furmidable Foes

by Rita Mae Brown

  Passing the ferocious angel who guarded Eden in the family graveyard, they pulled into the estate itself. Susan, her mother, and her grandmother, along with Owen, the corgi, came out to greet them.

  “Ned’s already in the back,” Susan informed Fair, which meant, “Get to it.”

  This he did as Harry walked into the house. Mrs. Holloway’s old dog slept impervious to the commotion.

  “A libation?” Grandmother Holloway asked.

  “Thank you, no. I’m going out to see if I can salvage anything from your old shed.”

  “Well, it’s not as old as the estate”—Susan’s mother smiled—“but it’s older than Mother and I.”

  At this, all three of the Holloway women laughed.

  Out the back door followed by Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, Pirate, and Owen, Harry walked the twenty yards to the crumbling clapboard structure. Susan followed in a few minutes after bringing her clippers to cut back some vines. Harry reached for a pair of gloves her husband handed to her.

  “Ned, you’ve been busy,” Harry noted, observing the crumbling shed before her.

  “Time has done a lot of it for me. The roof is shot. All I had to do was tap what was left and the tar paper covering fell.”

  “Beams held,” Fair observed. “Look at the size of them.”

  “Think any of this building can be salvaged?” Susan asked.

  The four of them looked up then down at the wooden floor, part of which also had fallen in.

  “Well, once we pull the old siding off, I’m willing to bet the sides of this storage building are also large beams. We could, you know.” Ned felt positive.

  “Well, let’s get to work. A four-man or, well, what can I call us? A four-person demolition derby.” Harry picked up a heavy hammer from her husband’s toolbox—he had everything—and started swinging at the siding.

  “Four-person, Harry?” Susan lifted an eyebrow.

  “I’m trying. So dearie”—she lifted her tone—“how are going to fill out your license? Do you want an X, meaning ‘no gender’?”

  “With two grown children, I don’t think I could get away with it.” Susan pulled out ancient nails—some looked hand forged. She placed the nails in a tin can in case they were hand forged.

  The friends bantered back and forth, casting aspersions on gender, the temper of the times, and anything else they could think to provoke one another. It wasn’t so much that they were politically correct more than that nothing was correct. They flung one silly jibe after another at each other, as only beloved old friends can do.

  The animals, outside, heard the laughter.

  “They’re in a good mood. Means treats,” Pewter predicted.

  “Greenies.” Tucker, like Owen and Pirate, loved greenies.

  “I am not eating a greenie,” Pewter announced.

  “Of course not, Pewter, you’ll eat mouse tartar.” Tucker put her nose to the ground to see who had been there and when.

  “Steak tartar”—the gray cat’s whiskers swept forward—“I’m not eating some tiny wormy mouse.”

  “Of course you aren’t. You’re too fat to catch one,” Tucker let fly.

  Fat she was, but even a fat cat is quicker than a corgi. Pewter raced over to the dog, who tried to move away, but Pewter, enraged, put on the afterburners.

  Howls filled the air.

  “Sounds like someone’s getting murdered.” Susan listened.

  “Damn those two. All they do is fight.” Harry knew exactly who was fussing with whom.

  Hurrying outside, issuing threats for they easily outpaced her, Harry heard a crash. One wall came down, pushed by the three inside. Dust and wood bits flew upward.

  As Ned thought, the beams were very thick. They’d stood for centuries.

  “One more squeak, one more growl, and you all are being marched to the house and shut in the porch room. I mean it.”

  “She started it.” Pewter glared at Tucker.

  “Oh la.” Tucker lifted her head.

  Pewter lashed out, smacking the side of Tucker’s face. “Vermin.”

  “Pewter. Enough.” Harry turned as they were calling her back to the now three-sided shed.

  “Look.” Ned proudly pointed to the beams, all of them hand shaped, the ax marks visible.

  “Wow.”

  “Ready for the next side?” Fair was already pulling nails, wedging a crowbar into a crevice.

  Harry picked up her hammer. “Hey.”

  “You all right?” Fair turned as his wife put one foot through the floor, which gave way.

  “Well, yes, but we might want to tear up the floor before more of us go through it.”

  Ned peered at the hole as he helped Harry out. “She’s right. Come on.”

  Working from the edges, they lifted the old oak boards, which would have been fine if the roof hadn’t fallen through on one spot, allowing the floor to rot over the decades.

  After a half hour, they had pulled it all up and stacked the wood outside with the removed siding.

  Susan, staring at the packed-dirt ground floor, stood with mouth agape. Harry, alongside her, also took a deep breath.

  “Let me get Mom and Gran.” Susan ran to the house.

  Fair, towering at six five over Ned, a mere six footer, saw Susan running, put down the wood he was carrying, and came to stand by Harry. The men, too, looked down.

  “Graves. Has to be.” Fair noted the sunken earth, side by side, each the size of a coffin.

  Walking quickly for a woman about to bust ninety, Gran, with her daughter at her one side and her granddaughter at the other, reached them. Her hand flew to her neck.

  “So, it’s true.”

  “What is, Gran?” Susan thought she knew everything about Big Rawly, but then one rarely did.

  “Most of the slaves are buried on the north side of the graveyard, as you know. There are small flat headstones. But the stories were that a small number were buried near the house, slaves who died in the house.”

  “House slaves?” Ned wondered.

  “Well, usually house slaves would be buried in the cemetery but it could be they were hastily interred due to sickness. People back then knew that some diseases transferred from person to person. The rumors always were that Maureen Selisse Holloway was cruel. It’s also possible some unfortunate slaves died from mistreatment.”

  Susan reached for her grandmother’s hand. “What should we do?”

  “Notify the county historical society,” Gran replied.

  Ned, brushing back his sandy hair, still thick in his early fifties, added, “Mrs. Holloway, the graves will need to be identified and the bones carbon-dated. As to DNA testing, well, I really don’t know but the remains might be able to be identified. Maybe these people have descendants. The county is full of Holloways and Selisses who are mixed race or African American. If these are their people, then they must decide what to do.”

  “Well, we know if they were white servants, they’d be in that small graveyard near the big oak,” Gran informed them.

  “Good God,” Harry blurted out.

  “Harry”—Susan’s mother spoke—“you and Tazio Chappars are close from working to save the old schools. Why don’t you start with her. Go through the old school records to track the names. We need to write down names from the main graveyard and cross-reference. Same with the graves of indentured servants,” she sensibly ordered.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Harry had been saying that to Susan’s mother since she was tiny.

  She remembered always how good Susan’s mother, grandmother, and grandfather had been to her when her parents were killed in the auto accident.

  “More old bones,” Pewter moaned, for she had heard quite enough about the nameless bones at St. Luke’s.

  “Our human said when they found the bones at
St. Luke’s that no good can come from disturbing the dead.” Mrs. Murphy remembered how upset Harry was at the time.

  “That may be so,” Tucker replied. “But in this case, I think it’s like finding the remains of a man who fought in World War II or Vietnam and returning them with honor to the family. So this might be the same kind of exception.”

  Owen, her brother, thought about that. “They’ve rested here for centuries maybe. I think they should stay home.”

  Pirate, encountering such things for the first time, asked, “Is that how humans think of their dead, as being home?”

  “They think home is with God,” Mrs. Murphy told him. “The ritual at the burial is very important to them. But I still think you shouldn’t disturb the dead.”

  “If they go to their descendants, it’s not being disturbed.” Pewter had been listening despite her flippancy.

  “True, but that doesn’t mean the humans won’t find out things they’d rather not know,” Mrs. Murphy prophesied.

  Later

  The afternoon sun was gliding to the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the soft slanting rays intensifying the spring colors. In an hour the sun would set, a magical time, for twilight had begun to linger once on the other side of the spring equinox.

  The cats and dogs, glad to be home, chatted with the horses in the pasture.

  “We haven’t gone up into the walnut grove since last fall. Let’s go,” Tucker encouraged the others.

  “The way to get into the walnut grove is a hard climb. I’m not punishing my legs,” Pewter declared.

  “Fine.” Tucker had already turned her back on the gray cat.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Mrs. Murphy said to Pewter. “Haven’t caught up on the horse gossip in a while. They are always up to something.”

  The two dogs trotted through the back pastures, then along the edges where the sunflowers had been planted, finally reaching the edge of the woods. A dirt farm road went straight up the lower grades. As the incline increased once in the large walnuts, the road needed switchbacks with large turnarounds to be serviceable.

  Rock outcroppings became more numerous, with trickles of water spilling into streams that ultimately found their way down to the pastures to become a deep, swift running creek dividing Harry’s land from her neighbor Cynthia Cooper’s, currently on vacation. Coop rented from Reverend Jones, as this was the old Jones’s homestead.

  “What’s that?” Pirate noticed a small shed protected, somewhat hidden by trees.

  “Wasn’t here in the fall.” Tucker noted the last time she had been walked this way.

  The two dogs, one so big, one so low to the ground, pushed through the undergrowth.

  Tucker pushed open the knocked-together wooden door of a shed, with a slanted roof, wood with tar paper over it. The two dogs inhaled.

  “Whew,” Pirate exclaimed.

  Tucker, scrutinizing the glass apparatus and the wooden shelves, the strong odor of old fermented corn, said, “Still.”

  “Still what?” The Irish wolfhound did not step inside.

  “Humans make whiskey, rye, liquors. They do it in secret. The water here is so pure.”

  “Tucker, we pass those breweries on 151. Why is that okay but this is secret?”

  “That’s beer. This is strong stuff. Mom says the federal government hits them up with nasty taxes.”

  “What’s a tax?”

  “Pirate, let’s save that for another day. It’s just about impossible to understand. I think you need to be human to believe in it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s get out of here.” Tucker backed out. “Look up. See the farm road down? Not far from the crest but most people don’t know paths off the ridge. Also, they’re frightened of the bear, bobcat, and coyote. Especially at night. Whoever built this is a cool customer.”

  They moved a bit toward the south for their descent. There was less undergrowth there, which had obscured some of the farm road. Harry might clear these roads about every five years. Hard to do even with a Bobcat. A big bulldozer would lurch, possibly tip over, on this grade.

  Perhaps a quarter of a mile down, Tucker lifted her head. “Smell that?”

  Pirate sniffed. “What is it?”

  “Smells like a long dead animal but there’s something else.” She veered off the deer path to a shallow depression, large boulders looking over it. “Ah.”

  Pirate stared at bits of human remains. The rib cage, completely exposed, had been stripped clean of flesh. No arms or legs could be seen. Torn, shredded pieces of cloth lay under the rib cage. Part of a skull, hat intact, some hair under the brim, had been wedged against the rock.

  “What is that other smell?” the Irish wolfhound asked.

  “I don’t know. Smells like nuts, kind of. Pirate, a dead human means trouble. When we get home, don’t tell Pewter.”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll find a way to get Harry up here. That will be nine miles of bad road.”

  “Are we really nine miles away?”

  “No. It’s an old saying.” The corgi headed down.

  “The bones at Old Rawly didn’t smell awful.”

  “Those were old, old, old. These bones aren’t old.”

  “They talk about the bones at St. Luke’s,” Pirate remarked.

  “Again. Those are really old. Just don’t tell Pewter.”

  “I won’t.”

  Death be not proud, though some have called you so. Death may not be proud but it certainly seemed prevalent.

  7

  November 19, 1787

  Monday

  A light dusting covered the ground, making Ewing hungry for a sugar cookie. Walking with him for a bit of exercise, Yancy Grant swung his cane out then back. While it lent him a jaunty air, it also helped his stability, for his knee had been shattered in a duel with Jeffrey Holloway. Pieced together as best as could be, he could move around but not quickly. He needed help mounting a horse, but he could ride.

  “The King left them high and dry,” Ewing announced.

  “Why would anyone trust the French right now? The Prussians shelled Amsterdam with howitzers. The defenders had but two hundred and fifty men, but they acquitted themselves with honor, without French troops for relief.”

  Ewing nodded. “From time to time I receive a letter from my friend, Baron Necker. He confirms your report. Does it not occur to you, Yancy, that pieces are being moved on the checkerboard of Europe? Alliances ignored or broken. New ones begun. I thank God every day that there is an ocean between ourselves and our supposed betters.”

  “Just so.” Yancy nodded. “Well, this is the end of the Dutch as a free people.”

  “It’s the end of the Dutch Patriots. Not for all time, I think, but given the squalor we are seeing in France, the shameful abandonment, it seems to be the curious way of the world.”

  “Perhaps.” Yancy stopped to look at a horse he once owned frolicking with Reynaldo and Crown Prince, two of Catherine’s finest stallions. “Black Knight looks full of beans.” He laughed.

  “Catherine dotes on him.”

  Yancy smiled. “A gift, your daughter has a gift. Ah, don’t tell me.”

  A brief burst of wind sent tiny flakes swirling in their faces. The two old friends turned their backs to the west, headed east toward the main house. Given Yancy’s pace, they wouldn’t reach it for another fifteen minutes.

  “The weather mystifies me.” Ewing pulled his scarf tighter. “I think it will be sunny, the clouds roll in. I think the flurries have passed and after a respite a bit more.”

  Yancy tapped the farm road to test a spot that might be slick. “Firm. Well, look at it this way: The weather is the salvation of many a conversation speeding toward boredom.”

  Laughing, the two finally reached the back door of Cloverfields. Roger, kee
ping his eye on the back window, opened the door, quickly helping Yancy up the steps.

  * * *

  —

  As the two men repaired to warmth, Jeffrey Holloway tested a thick corner pole, heavy wood, that had been set in the ground. Big Rawly needed another woodshed closer to the house. Maureen also had extended the roof over the kitchen door as well as newly constructed wooden siding to stockpile wood there. Everyone felt this would be a deep, hard winter.

  DoRe, powerfully built, strong hands from handling leather as he drove the horses, held the large, thick pole that had been squared.

  “We’re lucky the ground isn’t frozen hard.” Jeffrey picked up a shovel to fill in the dirt.

  “Master, I can do that,” a growing young slave offered.

  “I, well, yes you can.” Jeffrey stepped away.

  If Maureen heard he worked at a slave’s task, she’d hit the roof. Jeffrey enjoyed physical labor. However, his wife enjoyed exalted status. Best he not push it.

  “Ground is level here.” DoRe motioned to two other young fellows to test the three already settled corners. Those big timbers held firm.

  “Level because Sheba’s mother’s buried here,” Pete, a bit older, said as he moved shovels outside the large square.

  “Her mother and two brothers,” Norton, the young man who took over for Jeffrey, added. “That’s what my momma told me and she told me that the Missus was so angry when Sheba ran off with her pearls and diamonds and what else that she knocked down the markers, leveled the ground. I thought she was just planning a new building.”

  “Caribbean. They were all Caribbean like the Missus. They came up with her when Francisco moved to Virginia,” Pete growled.

  “The brothers couldn’t have been old.” Jeffrey was curious.

  Pete offered, “ ’Bout the same age as Sheba, high prime, I guess. Damn fools, well Momma said they were damn fools. Wanted the same woman. Got in a knife fight, killed each other.”

  “The woman was Sulli’s mother. Beauty runs in the line”—DoRe coughed—“as does no sense.”