“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.