Nola, Guy, and Ralph had not walked on water. Each could be foolish and, as Nola and Guy were so young when they died, they had never had the chance to learn wisdom. They never outgrew the behavior that must have infuriated their killer. It’s possible both Nola and Guy would have remained wild, but unlikely. The duties and pains of this life fundamentally change all but the most dedicated to immaturity. And those duties are actually wonderful. It’s duty that makes you who you are. Duty and honor.
Sister never thought of this as bending to the yoke; for her, it was rising to the occasion. Nola and Guy never had the time to recognize their duties, much less fulfill them. At least Ralph did. He made something of himself, proved a good husband and father.
The stupidity of these deaths, the casual evil of them, overwhelmed her.
She sat there, boiling, knowing the killer had to be in the church.
“Whoever he or she is, they’re a consummate actor,” she thought to herself.
As the service ended, the pallbearers, Ken, Ronnie, Xavier, Bobby, Roger, and Kevin McKenna, Ralph’s college roommate, took their places around the polished mahogany casket. In one practiced motion they lifted Ralph on their shoulders and, in step, arms swinging in unison, carried him down the center aisle, then out into the glowing late-September light.
The congregation followed the family at a respectful distance and filed into the cemetery, home to three centuries of the departed.
The service ended with Shaker, standing at the head of the casket as it was lowered into the ground, blowing “Going Home.” This mournful cry, the traditional signal of the end of the hunt, brought everyone to tears.
Afterward, Sybil walked alongside Sister. “Are you going to cancel Tuesday’s hunt?” she asked.
“No. Ralph would be appalled if I did such a thing.”
Shaker, on Sister’s other side, added, “If the fox runs across his grave it will be a good omen.”
“We sure need one,” Sybil said, her eyes doleful.
CHAPTER 34
Tuesday and Thursday’s hunts, sparsely attended, did little to lift Sister’s spirits. Although hounds worked well together, two young ones rioted on deer. Betty pushed the two back, but the miniriot upset Sister even though she knew the youngsters might stray on a deer during cubbing. Diana was settling in as anchor hound with Asa’s help, and that made up for the miniriot.
Saturday’s hunt, on September twenty-eighth, started at seven-thirty in the morning from Mill Ruins, Peter Wheeler’s old place. Walter lived there under a long lease arrangement of the sort usually seen in England. In essence, he owned the property even though Peter had willed it to the hunt club.
During the year he’d lived there, Walter had already made significant improvements. He’d fertilized all the pastures and replaced the collapsed fences with white three-board fencing. White paint, now lead-free, lasted two years if you were lucky. Walter said he didn’t care, he’d paint the damn boards every two years. He loved white fences. Most folks switched to black, since that paint lasted five to seven years depending on the brand. Board fencing itself lasted fifteen years, give or take.
The horrendous expense of stone fencing was actually practical if you considered its life span. A stone fence might need a tap or two of repair over sixty or seventy years, but if properly built by a master stonesmason, stone fences ought to last for centuries.
One of Walter’s secret dreams was, some fine day, to have the drive to the house lined with two-and-a-half-foot stone fences.
Today, Walter was living another of his dreams. This was the first hunt from Mill Ruins since Peter had lived there. It turned into a crackerjack.
Shaker cast down by the old mill, which was redolent of scent. So many generations of foxes had lived near or under the mill, great blocks of natural stone, wheel still intact, that the address among foxes had a certain cachet, say like Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., or East Sixty-eighth Street in New York.
Considered too tony for grays, the place was inhabited by reds.
Naturally, the hounds found scent at the mill, but they didn’t get far with it since that particular fox had no desire for aerobic exercise.
The day, crystal clear, temperature in the middle fifties and climbing, wasn’t the best day for scent. No frost had been on the ground, and the rains of last week were soaking in, although a deep puddle glistened here or there. The high-pressure system that produced those electric blue skies also sucked away moisture, hence scent.
Had Shaker been a lesser huntsman he might have returned to the mill to find another line. Shaker and Sister thought once you drew a cover, move on, don’t dawdle. Occasionally they could blow over a fox clever enough to lie low as hounds moved through perhaps a trifle too quickly. But more often than not, moving along, especially if your pack had good noses, flushed more foxes than inching through every twig, holly bush, and scrap of moss.
He sat on Gunpowder and thought for a moment as hounds moved along the millrace and back to the strong running stream that fed it.
Gunpowder, wise in the ways of the sport, snorted, “Draw an S. Move up higher and snake down. If you catch him high, he’ll probably come back low. If you catch him low, unless he belongs on the other side of this fixture, I bet you he stays low.”
An English huntsman from the Shires will often draw a triangle just like Tom Firr, the great huntsman who perfected this maneuver back in the nineteenth century. And such a cast or draw worked beautifully if your country was neatly divided into squares and rectangles.
America, having been cultivated according to European methods only since the early seventeenth century, wasn’t that neat, that geometric. Plus, the sheer boastful size of the country forced American foxhunters to devise their own methods for seducing foxes out to play.
Whole European nations could fit into one midsized state like Missouri. American foxes took full advantage of their land’s scale as well as the rich woodlands blanketing the East Coast.
Virginia, enriched by the alluvial deposits of the Potomac, the Rappahannock, and the James, as well as their many feeders and tributaries, offered wondrous means of escape. A fox could dash over Davis loam, a kind of rich, sandy soil, scramble up on hard rock, a real scent killer, plunge into a forest carpeted with pine needles and pinecones, more scent killer, and then clop down a baked red clay farm road.
Huntsmen and hounds needed to be quick, to be problem solvers, and to respect those venerable English texts while finding their own way. The American way, like Americans themselves, was a little wilder.
Shaker was going to need that wildness.
Sister patiently waited forty yards behind him. Keepsake, very proud to be used instead of Lafayette, Sister’s usual choice for Saturday, pranced. He desperately wanted to show how perfectly he jumped.
Sister liked a horse that knew how to use his or her body. Good conformation, good early training usually gave a horse confidence. A horse in this way is no different from a professional golfer. The golfer perfects the various strokes; the horse perfects the various gaits and also learns to jump with a human on his back. Any horse can jump without a human up there, but the two-legged riders shift their weight, fall up on one’s ears, flop back behind the saddle, slip to the side, jerk the reins, and, worst of all, they yelp and blame the horse.
The horse needs more patience than the human.
Horses liked Sister. She rode lightly. She might make mistakes, but she always apologized. Mostly she stayed out of the horse’s way, for which it was grateful.
And proud as Keepsake was of his form over fences, Sister mostly liked that he didn’t hang a jump. He gathered himself back on his haunches and sailed over, forelegs tucked up under his chin, neat as a pin.