“Ever tell you about the first time I coon hunted with Mim?” Jim cast his eyes around the room. “Guess not. Well, I'd come back from Korea in one piece and I hadn't been home three days when I spied Mim coming out of Crozet National Bank arguing with Aunt Tally. I stopped my truck, hopped out, took off my hat to the ladies, and asked Mim out then and there. Heard her family broke off the romance with another fellow because he wasn't high-class enough. Hell, he was more suitable than I but faint heart ne'er won fair lady and to hell with suitability. Aunt Tally looked me over like I was a horse to buy. Well, Mim said yes. So Tally says, ‘Where you taking her?'
“‘Coon hunting,' says I. ‘See that's what you hunt, young man.'” He laughed, imitating Tally's voice. “A fine night. Crisp, you could smell the leaves turning. Marcus's father, Lucius, had a good pack of hounds, turned 'em loose, and what a hunt.
“Mim was a speedy little slip of a girl. She kept right up and the next thing we heard was screaming and cussing. Lord o'mighty. The hounds ran right up on Arnold Berryman, covering Ellie McIntire.
“She was screaming. He held up his coat over her. Scared the hell out of the hounds. I thought that would be my last date with Mim.
“She enjoyed herself so much she asked when we could do it again.” He slapped his thigh and laughed, the others laughing with him.
“Ellie McIntire.” BoomBoom shook her head, remembering the spinster librarian who had struck terror in their hearts when they were children.
“Thank you,” Thomas said as he received the jug from Fair. After a long draft he handed it to BoomBoom.
“Thomas, how do you like our country water?” Jack, who didn't drink, asked.
“Potent and smooth,” the older man replied.
“Thomas, tell them how your grandfather brought the telephone to Montevideo.” BoomBoom slipped her arm through his, leaning into him.
“Oh . . .”
“Tell,” the others chimed in.
“My grandfather saw the telephone in London. He was our ambassador there before World War One. He formed a company and started the first telephone service in our country. Then my father, not to be outdone, founded the first television station. I remember when I was a boy being very disappointed to find out that Jojo, the clown on the children's show, emitted the distinct aroma of gin.” They all laughed.
“Tell them what you did.”
“My dear,” he demurred.
“Thomas brought satellite technology to their communications company.”
“BoomBoom, it was the logical progression. That didn't take the intelligence or courage of Grandfather or Father. Or the determination of my mother, who took over the television business. She's slowed down a bit by heart trouble but really, she's smarter than I am.”
“The Steinmetzes are quick to see the future and profit,” Diego said admiringly. “The Aybars are running cattle instead of satellites.” He laughed.
“Nothing wrong with running cattle,” Jim said. “You come on over and look at my Herefords.”
“Hunting down your way?” Jack politely asked.
“Yes, and fishing. If you like deep-sea fishing, you must come down,” Thomas said, a hint of pride in his voice.
“Sounds like machine-gun fire.” Joyce looked up at the tin roof as the rain intensified.
The four hounds thought so, too, as they edged closer to their humans.
“You know, I'd like to come on down and go fishing.” Jim smiled at Thomas. “Mim and I have never been to Uruguay. Is there something we could bring . . . like jeans? When you visit Russia you bring jeans. At least we used to in the seventies. People would pay a lot of money for jeans from the United States.”
“Not a thing,” Thomas replied. “We'll take care of everything.”
“Some things cost three times as much and some things are extremely inexpensive,” Diego added. “Now, we don't have foxhounds or coonhounds. Those would fetch a high price.”
“They're my babies.” Joyce laughed.
“Almost forgot.” Harry pulled out the Mercedes star.
“Where's the car?” BoomBoom laughed.
“That's the only part I could afford.” She laughed, too. “Actually, I found this on the path back a ways. When Tracy brought Wesley Partlow back to the house at Mim's party, he wore a star like this around his neck.”
“Anyone report one missing?” Fair logically asked.
“Not that I know of,” Jim answered, “but many of our guests were feeling no pain.”
They all laughed.
“It can cost two hundred and ninety dollars to replace that star,” Thomas said. “Hang on to it.” He stopped a moment. “Had to replace one once.”
Harry didn't get home until one in the morning. She headed straight for bed, missing the shredded needlepoint pillow in the living room, compliments of Mrs. Murphy.
18
A series of thunderstorms crackled across Crozet for twenty-four hours. A few minutes of calm would ensue, and occasionally the skies lightened, but within a half hour clouds darkened again, the rains came down, and the roar of deep thunder reverberated throughout the mountains and valleys.
Harry sorted mail amid peals of thunder. Tucker crouched under the small table in the back of the post office. Mrs. Murphy sat on the dividing counter between the public side of the room and the working side. The broad and smooth old wooden counter with a flip-up section so the postmistress could walk in and out had seen generations of Crozetians call for their mail.
The advent of the railroad, built by the engineering genius of the New World, Claudius Crozet, brought the mail and news faster to the hamlet named for him. Residents no longer waited for the stage. They could stand at the station to watch the mail sacks being tossed off the train. The mail from Crozet would be picked up as it hung from a yardarm, the sack hooked so it could be grabbed from the moving train. Trains had cars outfitted as post stations and often money would be in the post station car, the postal employee taking the precaution of wearing a pistol.
The town had built its latest post office at the turn of the nineteenth century, altering it only to make more room for parking, since cars take up more room than horses. The pleasant structure had been rewired three more times in one hundred years, the last rewiring occurring in 1998. Small though the station was, it was hooked into the national postal computer system. Miranda resisted using the computer. Harry, much younger, mastered it rapidly. Wisely, she never instructed Miranda in its use. She waited for Miranda to ask—which, finally, she did.
Technology, so beguiling in its promises, often only delivers a new set of problems. The postal computers coughed, sputtered, and took to bed quite often with virus infections. While they could weigh packages, give an instant answer on postage at home and abroad, anyone handy with a scale, an instrument thousands of years old, could give the information in about the same amount of time. And wonderful though the blinking screen may have been, letters still needed to be hand-canceled at times, postage-due markings in maroon ink required human hands, and the process of sorting the mail once it arrived at the local postal offices was done the way it had always been done—one letter at a time.
In short, the tasks of the postal worker had changed little over the last century. And the advent of the twenty-first century still hadn't altered those tasks.
Harry owned a computer from which she sent e-mail or occasionally logged on to the Internet to look up something. She spent an evening once reading about Hereford cattle on the Internet. Then she switched to the Angus site and compared notes. But mostly she thought the information revolution was more hype than reality.
And nothing could substitute for a love letter. The sensuality of the paper, the color, the ink, the contents, the privacy of it, were inviolate and perfect.
As she sorted that Monday's mail she thought about writing Diego a letter. Maybe she'd mention their kiss in the rain or how wonderful it was to dance with him on a cool spring night. Then again she could talk about grass crops. She hummed to herself as Miranda carefully pulled the striped dish towel off the orange-glazed cinnamon buns she brought to work. The fragrance of Miranda's best creation mingled with the pot of coffee brewing in the back.