Рита Браун - Rest In Pieces

As Harry mixed bran with hot water and measured out sweet feed, Mrs. Murphy prowled the hayloft. Since everyone had made so much noise getting into the barn, the mice were forewarned. The big old barn owl perched in the rafters. Mrs. Murphy disliked the owl and this was mutual, since they competed for the mice. However, harsh words were rarely spoken. They had adopted a live-and-let-live policy.

A little pink nose, whiskers bristling, stuck out from behind a bale of timothy. “Mrs. Murphy.”

“Simon, what are you doing here?” Mrs. Murphy’s tail went to the vertical.

“Storm came up fast. You know, I’ve been thinking, this would be a good place to spend the winter. I don’t think your human would mind, do you?”

“As long as you stay out of the grain I doubt she’ll care. Watch out for the blacksnake.”

“She’s already hibernating . . . or she’s playing possum.” Simon’s whiskers twitched devilishly.

“Where?”

Simon indicated that the formidable four-foot-long blacksnake was curled up under the hay on the south side of the loft, the warmest place.

“God, I hope Harry doesn’t pick up the bale and see her. Give her heart failure.” Mrs. Murphy walked over. She could see the tip of a tail—that was it.

She came back and sat beside Simon.

“The owl really hates the blacksnake,” Simon observed.

“Oh, she’s cranky about everything.”

“Who?”

“You,” Mrs. Murphy called up.

“I am not cranky but you’re always climbing up here and shooting off your big mouth. Scares the mice.”

“It’s too early for you to hunt.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that you have a big mouth.” The owl ruffed her feathers, then simply turned her head away. She could swivel her gorgeous head around nearly 360 degrees, and that fascinated the other animals. Four-legged creatures had a narrow point of view as far as the owl was concerned.

Mrs. Murphy and Simon giggled and then the cat climbed back down the ladder.

By the time Harry was finished, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker eagerly scampered to the house.

Next door, Blair, cold and soaked to the skin, also ran into his house. He’d been caught by the rain a good half-mile away from shelter.

By the time he dried off, the sky was obsidian with flashes of pinkish-yellow lightning, an unusual fall thunderstorm. As he went into the kitchen to heat some soup, a deafening crack and blinding pink light knocked him back a foot. When he recovered he saw smoke coming out of the transformer box on the pole next to his house. The bolt had squarely hit the transformer. Electric crackles continued for a few moments and then died away.

Blair kept rubbing his eyes. They burned. The house was now black and he hadn’t any candles. There was so much to do to settle in that he hadn’t gotten around to buying candles or a lantern yet, much less furniture.

He thought about going over to Harry’s but decided against it, because he was afraid he’d look like a wuss.

As he stared out his kitchen window another terrifying bolt of lightning hurtled toward the ground and struck a tree halfway between his house and the graveyard. For a brief moment he thought he saw a lone figure standing in the cemetery. Then the darkness again enshrouded everything and the wind howled like Satan.

Blair shivered, then laughed at himself. His stinging eyes were playing tricks on him. What was a thunderstorm but part of Nature’s brass and percussion?

7

Tree limbs lay on the meadows like arms and legs torn from their sockets. As Harry prowled her fence lines she could smell the sap mixed in with the soggy earth odor. She hadn’t time to inspect the fifty acres in hardwoods. She figured whole trees might have been uprooted, for as she had lain awake last night, mesmerized by the violence of the storm, she could hear, off in the distance like a moaning, the searing cracks and crashes of trees falling to their deaths. The good news was that no trees around the house had been uprooted and the barn and outbuildings remained intact.

“I hate getting wet,” Mrs. Murphy complained, pulling her paws high up in the air and shaking them every few steps.

“Go back to the house then, fussbudget.” This exaggerated fastidiousness of Mrs. Murphy’s amused and irritated Tucker. There was nothing like a joyous splash in the creek, a romp in the mud, or if she was really lucky, a roll in something quite dead, to lift Tucker’s corgi spirits. And as she was low to the ground, she felt justified in getting dirty. It would be different if she were a Great Dane. Many things would be different if she were a Great Dane. For one thing, she could just ignore Mrs. Murphy with magisterial dignity. As it was, trying to ignore Mrs. Murphy meant the cat would tiptoe around and whack her on the ears. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Mrs. Murphy try that if she were a Great Dane?

“What if something important happens? I can’t leave.” Mrs. Murphy shook mud off her paw and onto Harry’s pants leg. “Anyway, three sets of eyes are better than one.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a raft.”

The dog and cat stopped and looked in the direction of Harry’s gaze. The creek between her farm and Foxden had jumped its banks, sweeping everything before it. Mud, grass, tree limbs, and an old tire that must have washed down from Yellow Mountain had crashed into the trees lining the banks. Some debris had become entangled; the rest was shooting downstream at a frightening rate of speed. Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened. The roar of the water scared her.

As Harry started toward the creek she sank up to her ankle in trappy ground. Thinking the better of it, she backed off.

The leaden sky overhead offered no hope of relief. Cursing, her foot cold and wet, Harry squished back to the barn. She thought of her mother, who used to say that we all live in a perpetual state of renewal. “You must realize there is renewal in destruction, too, Harry,” she would say.

As a child Harry couldn’t figure out what her mother was talking about. Grace Hepworth Minor was the town librarian, so Harry used to chalk it up to Mom’s reading too many touchy-feely books. As the years wore on, her mother’s wisdom often came back to her. A sight such as this, so dispiriting at first, gave one the opportunity to rebuild, to prune, to fortify.

How she regretted her mother’s passing, for she would have liked to discuss emotional renewal in destruction. Her divorce was teaching her that.

Tucker, noticing the silence of her mother, the pensive air, said, “Human beings think too much.”

“Or not at all” was the saucy feline reply.

8

The rain picked up again midmorning. Steady rather than torrential, it did little to lighten anyone’s spirits. Mrs. Hogendobber’s beautiful red silk umbrella was the bright spot of the day. That and her conversation. She felt it incumbent upon her to call up everyone in Crozet who had a phone still working and inquire as to their well-being. She learned of Blair’s transformer’s being blown apart. The windows of the Allied National Bank were smashed. The shingles of Herbie Jones’s church littered the downtown street. Susan Tucker’s car endured a tree branch on its roof, and horror of horrors, Mim’s pontoon boat, her pride and joy, had been cast on its side. Worst of all, her personal lake was a muddy mess.