Рита Браун - The Litter Of The Law

“It’s mine,” Brinkley piped up.

“I know what you mean,” Tazio quietly agreed.

“Where’d you put the key?”

“In my pants pocket. It’s deeper than my coat’s.”

“Don’t you lose that key. That’s the master.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

“Good girl to call me ma’am. You always call a lady older than yourself ma’am.”

Tazio laughed again. “Hester, we do that in St. Louis, too.”

“Miss it?”

“Not really. I go home to see Mom and Dad but I don’t think I could live in a big city anymore.”

“Millions upon millions do.” She pulled in to the parking lot, a flat dirt place, next to Tazio’s car. “That’s another thing that scares me: How can the newcomers appreciate these buildings? They move down here to escape the city, but they bring their ways and they want efficiency, services, bottom-line kind of thinking. Spending money on these historic buildings would seem stupid to them.”

“Maybe not,” said Tazio, taking the bait. “It’s part of our history. No matter where you come from.”

“Well.” Hester slowed her speech. “I hope you’re right. My true dream is that eventually we can buy these from the county. Ha!” She clapped her hands. “Won’t that be a fight! Will it help that you’re mixed race? Yes. Politically it will help. You have such wonderful gifts, gifts few people possess. You could bring these buildings back to life. Wouldn’t it be glorious to hear laughter inside them?”

“Yes, it would,” Tazio agreed.

Hester cut the motor, turned to face her. “I know people think I’m weird.”

Tazio didn’t quite know what to say. “You’re different from most Virginia ladies.”

“I speak my mind. I don’t have the time for the minuet of politeness. Bores me.”

“I certainly understand that.” Tazio smiled, remembering what a jolt it was to move from Missouri to Virginia.

“Maybe I am weird. I get worked up about things, history, getting books into childrens’ hands, bringing buildings back to life, righting old wrongs.” She inhaled deeply. “I get ideas like everyone worries about carbon emissions. What about the billions of people breathing out CO 2? That has to damage the environment. I blurt out this stuff and then people think I’m weird. They don’t want to think. That’s the problem.”

“It’s painful to think, Hester.”

Hester stared at her. “But you do.”

“Only after I’ve exhausted every other alternative.”

This made Hester giggle. “Sometimes I do that, too. Well, girl, I railroaded you into designing parts of the Crozet Library and now I’m railroading you again.”

“You are,” Tazio said honestly.

“Will you take this on?”

“You know I will. But you have to work with me.”

“I will, Taz, but things can happen. If something happens to me, you carry the ball, hear?”

“Don’t say that, Hester.” She breathed deeply. “But if anything happens to you, I will carry the ball and vice versa.”

“Deal,” Hester quickly answered.

When Tazio and Brinkley drove away, Hester returned to the middle schoolhouse. Inside, she sat down, took out her notebook, and started to write, then paused. She walked up to the teacher’s desk in the front of the room, pulled open a drawer, took out a yellowed square of paper, and wrote a name on it with her fountain pen. She’d just dropped a lot on Tazio. She knew that when the younger woman read this, her natural curiosity would do the rest. She returned it to the middle drawer, turned out the lights, and shut the door and locked it, for she had a backup key to the outside door. Hearing the satisfying click, she walked to her truck, then stopped a moment to study the stars. They’d been up there long before she was born and they’d be there long after she was gone. She found that comforting.

Tazio, driving home with Brinkley next to her, wrestled with emotion. Hester had touched her. She had a strong feeling that Hester must have a premonition of her death, and that the kind-hearted eccentric was passing the torch on to her.

Tucker, left behind, mournfully watched as Susan Tucker, Harry’s best friend, picked her up at six in the evening on Wednesday, October 16. Rushing from the house, Harry jumped into the Audi station wagon’s passenger seat. Joined at the hip, friends since cradle days, these two discussed everything and everybody with each other daily. Of course, Harry had already told Susan about the scarecrow down at Farmville.

And Susan, naturally, had commanded her friend to stay out of it.

“Thanks for picking me up,” said Harry, closing the door to the station wagon. They almost always rode together to the St. Luke’s vestry meeting.

“Gives us more time. Anyway, I’m not sure I trust you by yourself.” Susan smiled.

“You never make a mistake.”

“Finally you’ve realized that.” Susan reached the state road at the end of the long gravel drive, looking both ways. “Uh-oh, here comes Aunt Tally. Let’s give her a wide berth.”

The almost-101-year-old indomitable woman behind the wheel of her old Bronco beeped and waved, swerving slightly to the right but correcting herself, much to the gratitude, no doubt, of her passenger, her great-niece, Little Mim.

“Wonder where those two are going,” said Harry. “This has got to be the first time Little Mim has left the baby.”

“She’s a new mother. He’s only three months old. It’s good she’s left him with Blair.”

“He’s a good father. Bet Big Mim is there.”

“Harry, you got that right. The new grandmother—wait, the only grandmother in the world—doesn’t believe men can take care of babies. Well, in her defense, she said her husband never changed a diaper.”

“They didn’t back then.” Harry knew that prior generations led more gender-defined lives.

“Plenty don’t now, but in the main I think young men want to be involved. I remember my father at the end crying that he barely knew his children until he retired. Poor Dad. He did what men did. He worked his ass off and came home after we were asleep.”

“Your father did work hard. He ran that lumberyard, and when you own the business, it owns you.”

“You were lucky that you could farm with your father,” Susan said without envy.

“I was. Mom was the librarian, so she would come home a little after I got home from school. We didn’t have much money but we had a lot of love. My parents taught me a lot.” She looked at Mount Tabor Presbyterian Church as they passed. “They taught me not to be a Presbyterian.”

“Harry!”

Harry laughed. “Mom and Dad were generally open-minded people, but they did have their share of religious prejudice. If there had been a Church of England here, that’s where they would have worshipped.”

“Reminds me. You have your building-and-grounds notes for the vestry meeting?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because if there’s ever an outlay of expenses, that’s where it is,” Susan said as she, too, eyed the lovely white Mount Tabor Church.

There was a bit of traffic on the narrow two-lane highway. People were driving home from work. In the morning and the evening, going could be slow.

“I never noticed that,” Susan said, her voice rising.

“What? Mount Tabor is Mount Tabor. Really pretty.”

“No. There’s a Halloween scene on the grounds nearest the road.”

Twisting to look back, sure enough, Harry saw pumpkins, tied-up cornstalks, baskets of harvest, and a jolly-looking witch on a broomstick over a sickle moon. Actually, the broomstick used the midpoint of the moon for stability.