A Hiss Before Dying

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Harry, take that to a gunsmith. First, it’s valuable. Second, it’s probably serviceable,” MaryJo enthused.

  “I never thought of it. Kind of like my great-grandfather’s Army saber. It’s always been there.” She looked closely at the pistol, realizing it was beautiful.

  “Who did it belong to?” Liz wondered.

  Harry replaced the pistol and returned to the circle. “Mother’s family. They fought in the Revolutionary War. One of my great-greats was at Yorktown. Dad’s family, Johnny-come-latelies, didn’t get here until afterward. I used to tease Mom and tell her we’ve been here since the earth was cooling.”

  Susan sighed. “Both of our families go way, way back. My paternal grandmother had a few snotty moments about it. She’s gone now, but Harry’s mother nor mine ever took the grand and airy road.”

  BoomBoom laughed. “Oh, there’s nothing quite like a Virginia blood snob.”

  “Charleston, south of Broad, is pretty bad.” Susan’s mouth, closed, curled upward.

  “Charleston is so beautiful. If we lived there we’d all be snobs.” Liz Potter laughed.

  MaryJo returned to her flintlock subject. “Harry, do take that pistol to a gunsmith.” She put her hands on her knees. “Well, let me tell you the best part about Ed’s flintlock.

  “He took me away from where the animals are kept. He didn’t want noise to upset them, and he showed me how to fire the rifle.”

  Cooper smiled but said nothing. In his enthusiasm he’d had her fire a flintlock pistol. Animal control, wildlife preservation was not her territory, but Cooper met Ed years ago when he was testifying in court about pelt values, illegal trapping. They struck up a friendship, both finding common territory over firearms.

  “Cool!” Harry enthused.

  “Isn’t it complicated?” Jessica inquired.

  “Well, you have to ram the bullet, a ball, down; actually, first you have to put the powder in, or if it’s a rifle with a pan, you put the powder there,” MaryJo babbled on. “Anyway, I guess it is complicated. You have to do the steps in the exact order.”

  “And?” Cooper used a Glock in her line of work.

  “You pull back the trigger, which as you know is fancy and stands upright, and boom! Lots of smoke. I loved it.”

  “Keep your powder dry.” BoomBoom grinned.

  “It’s the truth. Anyway, Ed told me about an old firearms club; they have a firing range and I’m going to join. It’s like living history,” MaryJo enthused.

  “Now you’ve got me curious,” Harry admitted.

  “All we need. Her in the back pastures with a flintlock rifle,” Pewter grumbled.

  “You can be very accurate,” MaryJo continued. “But obviously the range isn’t terribly far. I mean, that’s why at the Battle of Bunker Hill the officer said, ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!’ about the advancing British.”

  “Those men had courage,” Cooper said admiringly.

  “Tell you what. I think whether you marched in a cohort or wore chain mail or stood in a square to repulse a cavalry charge, you had guts.” Harry paused. “I was reading last night about the Battle of Borodino in Russia, Napoleonic Wars, and it made me cry.” She paused for a moment. “I read military history. My husband reads novels. We’re a pair.”

  “A pair of what?” Susan teased her and they all laughed.

  BoomBoom rose to stand before the fire, next to Pewter, who was not going to move. “Hey, Cooper, did you ever find the driver of that rig? The one left on Afton Mountain yesterday?”

  “Funny you should ask. Rick called,” Cooper responded, referring to Sheriff Rick Shaw, her boss. “The search team found him about a half hour ago, wedged under a big boulder.”

  “Wedged?” BoomBoom voiced the question for everyone.

  “Like he crawled there?” Harry pressed.

  “I didn’t see him, but the boss said it appeared he either fell next to the boulder or tried to protect himself, using it as a shield. Half his face was shredded. One eye is missing.”

  “Shredded?” Susan exclaimed.

  “The sheriff’s exact word.” Cooper’s eyebrows were raised as she said it.

  The door flap sounded again. Tucker quietly walked into the room.

  Pewter announced, “Hey, they found a body, a one-eyed body.”

  “What are you talking about?” the dog wondered.

  “The eagle.” Pewter lifted her head up slightly.

  “The eagle and the eye,” Mrs. Murphy chimed in.

  “Just because they found a defaced body doesn’t mean the eagle did it.” Tucker didn’t feel like giving Pewter any credit.

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t.” Mrs. Murphy stayed in Harry’s lap. “With talons like that I figure an eagle could tear off the side of a Volkswagen.”

  “You’ve got a point there.” The dog shuddered.

  Pewter loudly announced to the humans, “See! See! This wretch is terrified of me, shaking. I’m the top dog here.”

  “Pewter” was all Mrs. Murphy said.

  —

  A single lamp allowed “the boys,” as their wives called them, to play cards at what had been termed the “colored” schoolhouses, which their wives were now trying to save. Fair Haristeen, Ned Tucker, Bruce Cranston, and Andy Potter avidly studied their respective hands. While each husband esteemed his wife’s community involvement, he did not feel called upon to imitate it, at least where wildlife was concerned. The old schoolhouses elicited a bit more of their interest.

  Dr. Jessica Ligon and Cooper were not yet married, and BoomBoom had been married once, one too many times for her. So those “girls,” as the men called them, had no fellow at the table. Given one’s mood, depending on wins or losses, that may have been a blessing.

  Fair’s eyebrows lifted slightly. Not a great hand, but not a bad one, either. As they bid, put down cards, picked up others, they chatted. Sometimes escaping into nonessential activities minus the very essential wife proved restorative.

  “That damned skin has been hanging in her shop for a year,” Andy grumbled about one of Liz’s prized pieces of merchandise.

  “It’s expensive. It only takes the right person to walk through the door,” Bruce Cranston counseled.

  Bruce, a landscape architect, wed to MaryJo, stated the obvious, to himself anyway. Ned Tucker, Susan’s husband, was the district’s delegate to the Virginia House of Delegates. Fair was an equine vet, Andy Potter ran an insurance company founded by his grandfather, the first African American insurance company in central Virginia.

  “Selling is an art. You sell designs, service, really, just like as you need to prepare the ground, plant stuff. I sell security, peace of mind.” Andy folded his hand, not a good one. “Ben Franklin sold insurance. Fair, you sell your know-how, and Ned, it scares me to think what you sell.”

  The fellows laughed.

  Ned could take a ribbing. “Mock me if you must, but I sell good government.”

  “Ned, do you think anyone gives a damn anymore?” Bruce shook his head.

  “If it affects them, yes. But so few people think about the big picture now. That’s tearing us apart.”

  This set off a spirited discussion, which put the card game on hold for a while.

  “We sure don’t want to work with one another.” Fair laid down his cards.

  “Everyone needs to be right and who is? Politics is lots of hot air, give and take, now it’s just hot air and take.” Bruce sighed. “Ned, I don’t see how you stand it.”

  “You can inch a few things forward at the state level. Nationally, it’s a disaster. Look, take these two schoolhouses and the identical shed. Three buildings that represent our segregated past and the mess from 1912 of lumping what they called ‘colored’ and ‘Indian’ together. If this were a national project there would be layer and layer of supervision, school buildings. By the time we cleared all the hurdles the buildings would no longer be salvageable and we’d be dead.”

  “Racism, don�
�t you think?” Bruce looked at Andy.

  “What am I, the expert?” He half smiled, then did answer. “Our governor is focused on business, on bringing money into the state. Virginia relies on so much federal funding, partly due to all the military bases. That funding has been cut back. Our governor and the delegates haven’t the time for historic preservation unless it’s the Founding Fathers, and even then.” He shrugged. “But their lack of interest has given us a free hand, more or less.”

  “You’re right,” Fair replied. “We can do something about these buildings, and thanks to your wife, Andy, and to Tazio Chappers, I think we will save them, in time, in good time.”

  “I’m on it.” Ned tidied his cards.

  Tazio was a young mixed-race architect bursting with ability.

  “The key was raising the twelve thousand for the three heat pumps, then another five to repair the standing-seam tin roofs, which, considering all, have held up, but they did need help. No pipes froze, so we could turn the water back on—which hadn’t been on for about thirty years—and damned if it didn’t do just fine. The well is good, we replaced the old pump just to be sure, but these buildings really were built to last.” Ned ran down the list of what they had accomplished already. “And Governor Holloway, may he rest in peace, helped us with the kickoff. Tazio and Liz were smart enough to let him speak about segregation.” Andy was quite proud of his wife’s acumen, it was just the damned Sioux regalia for sale at her store, the stunning deerskin long dress covered in dyed quills, some beads, that he questioned. The late Governor Holloway was Susan Tucker’s grandfather, a vital man in Virginia history.

  “I’m supposed to meet with the girls November ninth.” Ned got up to throw another log into the potbellied stove. “I do what I can, same as I do what I can for the wildlife group.”

  “Bears and eagles are everywhere,” Fair noted, making already successful preservation efforts. “The Center for Conservation Biology at William and Mary have counted one thousand seventy bald eagle nests.”

  “How about that?” Bruce whistled.

  “There are many factors. I think the biggest one is banning certain pesticides.” Ned took his seat. “This whole struggle over chemicals like Roundup, the weed killer, is one of the toughest things we’re facing down in Richmond. What it comes down to—and this doesn’t really impact America’s symbolism—is, I think, now everyone understands the danger of DDT, but realistically how much do you want to pay for a tomato? Really.” The others looked at him, so he continued. “Without some chemical help, farmers will lose, in some cases, eighty percent of their crop. Some crops are fragile by nature. Think of all the bugs that can ruin apples, or deer eating them? We’ve got to find some sort of balance to protect our wildlife and our plant life, as well as provide affordable food for our people.”

  “A balancing act. I guess all business comes down to that. Mine certainly does,” Andy said.

  “MaryJo has to assure people she’s not investing in companies that use cheap labor in foreign countries. She even has a client who won’t invest in any company doing business with China. Half of what she does is hold hands.”

  “Is MaryJo still working with Panto Noyes?”

  Panto Noyes, a lawyer from one of Virginia’s unrecognized tribes, oversaw investments from people who considered themselves Native Americans. The Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs deemed otherwise. Virginia suffered for more than a century because the federal government refused to recognize any tribes. Given that Virginia began in 1607 and subsequent Caucasians and African Americans married Native peoples, proof was far more difficult than for someone from Montana.

  “Ned,” Andy asked, “still working on getting Virginia tribes recognized? After a century-plus we did get, what?, eight recognized by the federal government? I know that’s a big deal for Panto.”

  “I am.” Ned sighed as he looked at his cards. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do for those unrecognized tribes or individuals. It’s complicated, and places like this schoolhouse created the complications.”

  “How?” Fair finally held a good hand.

  “Well, when Walter Pletcher got his damnable legislation passed for the state records in 1912 which said any blood not ‘white’ blood is ‘colored’ blood. I mean, that’s really it in a nutshell. What could anyone do back then? And kids who went to schools like this, who maybe didn’t live with their tribe, lived and worked outside those boundaries, they married each other. It can’t be untangled, truthfully. Doesn’t mean I and others won’t keep trying to provide some kind of benefits, to hold the federal government’s feet to the fire. The paperwork a person must fill out to prove tribal affiliation is just about impossible for most Virginians. And, of course, DNA proof is inadmissible. Pletcher muddied the waters by calling, legislating, everyone colored.”

  “And it’s an issue way on the back burner,” Andy noted.

  “Right now, anything that doesn’t involve the presidential election is on the back burner. These elections literally paralyze government every time around, and it seems in between now, too. Nothing gets done.” Ned hated it.

  “That’s a good thing.” Fair laughed. “Remember what Ben Franklin said: ‘No man’s life or property is safe when Congress is in session.’ ”

  They all laughed.

  October 21, 2016 Friday

  A shiny, fit pack of beagles stood, tails wagging, ready to rumble. The Master and huntsman, Dr. Arie M. Rijke, finished thanking Mary and David Kalergis for allowing the beagles to hunt Sugarday, their farm. The Blue Ridge Mountains occasionally peeked out from the ever-lowering clouds. The temperature hovered at fifty-two degrees but would surely drop, as it was already 3:00 P.M.

  Sugarday rested on what was the old footpath that ran east and west even before the Europeans arrived in Virginia. At one time, this had been the Wild West. Just a few miles west was the site of the Revolutionary War–era prisoner-of-war barracks, a complex that once encompassed two hundred acres, with more added over time. All that was left of the active, overcrowded camp was a stone marker. A few of the old estates from that time like Big Rawly, or remnants of Cloverfields, Ewing Garth’s vast holdings, still stood.

  The beagles cared little about the eighteenth century in Albemarle County. What the beagles cared about was flushing and running rabbits. Anyone who called a rabbit a “dumb bunny” had obviously never hunted one.

  The little guys, patient as possible, eagerly waited while Dr. Rijke mentioned that the pack, founded in 1885, was the oldest continuously hunting beagle pack in America. Finally, touching his horn to his lips, he blew a few opening notes. Humans then walked over a rolling swell, hounds cast, set to work.

  Harry, Fair, Susan, Ned, BoomBoom, and Alicia Palmer, BoomBoom’s partner, walked briskly with the thirty other foot followers. Their dear friend Miranda Hogendobber, in her late seventies and fit, chose to help set up the breakfast in the house. Mary and David generously opened their doors to the beaglers, many of whom, in truth, were muffin hounds. They walked and ran along just to get to the breakfast afterward. Hunters on foot with a pack or those on horseback, for whatever reason, have always called the repast afterward to restore energy and spirits a breakfast. Often the emphasis rested on spirits.

  The four whippers-in positioned themselves with two forward and two behind. Wearing formal coats of a hunter-green thorn-repelling twill; white riding breeches and knee socks, also of green; sturdy shoes and baseball caps, black, with a white circle, an embroidered WB in the center, they were extra-alert. Some of the foot followers also wore Waldingfield Beagles caps.

  Hounds worked a bit of covert, tails swishing faster, but no one spoke. Nor did the people in the field. Harry’s mother and father loved following the beagles. She had tagged along as a child and always felt close to them when hunting, even now. She liked to think, in spirit, her parents followed.

  A chirp. Other hounds rushed to the spot. More furious sniffing. Bob Johnson, silver-haired, tall and lean, a whipper-
in, deftly took a step back, as it seemed they might reverse. They did, and on full throttle, too. Then just as quickly they cut a corner, shot off to the right, flew over a still green pasture to dip toward the west in the direction of the strong-running Ivy Creek. They paused, lost, cast themselves. Amy Burke, a forward whipper-in, was on the right side. Her brother, Alan Webb, mirrored her on the left. Foot speed, highly desirable, took second place to experience. The wrong move by a young whipper-in might turn your quarry. It takes years to make a good whipper-in. Arie was fortunate to have that experience in most of his people. His youngest, fastest whipper-in, Jacque Franco, was absorbing as much as she could.

  The Huntsman stood still, waiting. The field, led by Colonel Shelton, a powerfully built retired Army officer, staff in hand, waited close enough to see everything but not close enough to interfere.

  A mature hound, a bit stocky, Empress, let out a bugle call. Cyber, much younger, ran to her. He opened and now the entire pack flew over the meadow. The rabbit could be seen up ahead at a distance using all his speed. The little white tail bobbled, then disappeared in a narrow wood. Hounds bulled through the brush. The cry intensified but changed in its tenor. Nor, strangely, did the beagles emerge from the thicket when the rabbit did. As Amy tallyhoed, the field also saw the rabbit. Hounds continued speaking, but no one quite knew what was going on. Was there a second rabbit? The staff didn’t want to spoil the sport, to turn the rabbit or confuse the hounds. After a suitable wait of about four minutes, Arie slowly walked to the edge of the thicket, beating back the bushes with his knob-ended crop. The whippers-in wisely stayed closer to the edge in case the pack should emerge.

  “Bob,” Arie yelled.

  The field patiently watched, wondering what really was going on in there, while Bob used his whip to also push through the brambles.

  “There’s something wrong,” Suzanne Bischoff, Arie’s wife, murmured.

  Colonel Shelton, now next to her, replied, “I hope no one is injured in there. Hounds caught up in wire or something.”