Рита Браун - Pawing Through The Past

"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."