Sour Puss (4 page)

The panel didn’t really break up as much as those who worried about the babysitters reluctantly left for home.

Not until ten-thirty was the auditorium cleared.

Driving home in her truck, Harry and Fair reviewed the evening.

“Aren’t you glad that horses aren’t on the list of terrorist targets?” Fair draped his arm around Harry’s broad shoulders.

“I’ll sleep better at night.”

“You sleep better at night because I’m next to you.” He laughed.

“You know, honey, that really is the truth. There’s nothing like falling asleep with your strong arms around me to make me feel safe.”

“Likewise, when you’re on the outside, I mean,” he said.

“Really? You feel safe in my arms?”

“Of course I do, sugar. Love isn’t just a way to open your heart, it’s armor against the world.” Fair squeezed her shoulder.

“I never thought of that. I am strong, though,” she bragged.

“Yes, you are.”

Aunt Tally’s taillights glowed up ahead. She was being driven in her car by Blair and Little Mim. As her farm was two miles down the road from Harry and Fair’s, they often passed or followed each other on the secondary state road.

“Bet she’s chewing their ears off.”

“The last thing to die on Aunt Tally will be her mouth,” Fair laconically said.

Harry laughed, adding, “Actually, I do feel reassured that horses aren’t a target.”

“Terrorists won’t bother using horses. Horses stay awake at night thinking of ways to hurt themselves.”

A moment passed, then Harry, who knew what he said was only too true, smiled. “Baby, you’ll never be out of work.”

5

. . .
disappointed.” Susan Tucker, Harry’s best friend, exhaled, as the cats and Tucker and Owen, Susan’s corgi, trotted after them as they walked down the steep path on the mountainside of the Bland Wade tract.

“What did Ned want?” Harry inquired as to Ned’s preferred committee appointments since he had been sworn in as the state senator for District 7.

“He wanted Ways and Means. Since the whole legislature is controlled by the Republicans, he feels he is being pushed into the backwaters.”

“He’ll make the most of it. Ned’s smart,” Harry continued. “Susan, agriculture is the third largest industry in the state of Virginia. It brings in 2.4 billion dollars, and guess what? One billion of that is thanks to the horse industry. And the profits from the horse industry would double if the damned legislature really fostered racing, in all its forms. We make that money despite Richmond. Ned ought to be happy he’s on such a committee.”

“That’s what I said. He says he knows nothing about agriculture, which is exactly why they stuck him on the committee.”

“I can be his practitioner expert.” Harry smiled broadly.

She was right. She’d been born on the farm on which she lived. She’d farmed all her life, with the exception of four years at Smith College, where she majored in art history. She figured it would be the only time in her life when she didn’t have to be ruthlessly practical. Her father appreciated her attitude. Her mother did not.

Eventually, Mrs. Minor accepted Harry’s “frivolity”—her view of Harry’s major. She thought one should study what might produce income.

What Mrs. Minor failed to comprehend was that Harry, for the first time in her life, was removed from the South, far from blood ties and the close-knit Crozet community, and thrown into a world of bright, competitive women. On the weekends she could spend time with bright, competitive men from Amherst, Yale, Dartmouth, Colgate, Cornell, and the odd Harvard man or two. She discovered, once everyone got over her soft Virginia accent, that she could hold her own. The four years in cold Massachusetts helped forge her belief in her own intellect, her powers of judgment. Figuring out emotions proved more difficult than mastering complex material. Perhaps that’s true for many people, not just Harry.

Susan, on the other hand, possessed formidable emotional radar. They joked with each other that together they made one genius.

The cold snap that had set in on Monday continued. The two friends, hands jammed in their pockets, hiked toward the tough little Jeep Wrangler that Ned had bought his wife to mollify her during his long absences. Susan needed something rugged to tend to the Bland Wade tract her great-uncle had willed to her, since there were only disused farm roads on the 1,500-acre property.

This extraordinary piece of land wrapped all the way from Tally Urquhart’s Rose Hill Farm to behind Harry’s farm. The two friends had gone almost to the top of the last ridge before the Blue Ridge Mountains to check a stand of black walnut, hickories, locusts, and pin oak. Scattered throughout the tract were Virginia pines.

“We should thin the pines. The old Virginia pine doesn’t live much longer than twenty-five or thirty years, and then it just falls down and rots.” Susan, though not a timber person, had been reading like mad on the subject of timber management.

“One bolt of lightning will take care of the pines,”
Pewter remarked as she tagged along, feeling the cold air’s sharpness.

“Nature’s clear-cutting,”
Tucker agreed.

“Hasn’t happened for a long time around here. We’ve had so much rain these last years,”
remarked Owen, who, like all the animals, registered the weather’s every nuance.

“Hey.”
Tucker stopped, putting her nose to the ground.

The other three walked over to her and also put their noses to the earth.

“Bear,”
Owen simply said.
“Maybe an hour ago.”

“All kinds of big fuzzies up here.”
Pewter fluffed out her fur.

“We may be little fuzzies, but we can take care of ourselves.”
Mrs. Murphy puffed out her tail.

“How many times have I bailed you out?”
Pewter remarked.

“You? I pry you out of jams more than you do me.”
Mrs. Murphy couldn’t believe Pewter’s ego.

“Ha!”
Pewter dashed in front of the humans, energized by her own opinion of her powers.

Susan noticed. “I don’t recall ever seeing Pewter this lively.”

Harry watched as Pewter followed up her burst of speed with a two-foot climb up a tree trunk, then a drop down. “She has her moods.” She returned to the subject at hand. “Finding a timber company that will take on a job this small won’t be easy. You’re talking about sixty acres, which is nothing to the big boys. And we want someone who is responsible. Right now, prices for pulp timber, which is what this pine is, are low.”

“If we wait it will just fall down.”

“Maybe yes and maybe no. We’ve got a year or two.” Harry climbed in and gladly closed the door to the lime-green Wrangler. Tucker sat on her lap and Owen, Tucker’s brother, sat on Susan’s lap. She picked him up, placing him in the back with Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, who were already curled up in Owen’s little sheepskin bed.

“I’ve got all G-Uncle Thomas’s notes.” She called him G-Uncle for great-uncle. “Those pines were planted in 1981. A long period of rain, some high winds, and they’re crashing down.”

“It’s those bitty root systems. You wouldn’t think such tall trees would have such small roots.” Harry turned on the heater. “Okay?”

“Yeah, I’m chilled to the bone. Let’s go into town for a big hot chocolate. I need to pick up mail anyway.”

“Okay.”

They bounced through the old rutted roads. Harry got out at the gate to her back pasture and opened it. Susan drove through and then Harry locked the gate, hopped back in. They cruised past the barn, down the long lane out to the paved state road.

“Any more thoughts?” Susan asked.

“Yes, actually. If we sign a contract with a good timbering company—not a management contract, mind you, just a timbering contract—for say, five years, we’ll be able to attract a better grade of operator. The last thing we want is someone to go up there, take out the timber, leave slash all over the place.”

“You want them to dig pits and burn it?”

“No. I want the leftovers pushed along into long piles of debris maybe five or six feet high. Let it decay. It will provide homes for lots of critters. I know why people burn the stuff, but it’s wasteful. Slash provides habitat, and the cycle of renewal begins again for animals and plants.”

“How much do you think we can make from the pine?”

“Well, I’d love to think we could pull out at least a thousand dollars an acre, but the market is so erratic. The black walnut’s market has been really good. High prices.”

“We’ve got two acres of black walnut up there.”

“That’s another thing that worries me. Let the wrong people in there and some of that enormous profit will just disappear. They’ll steal the walnut.”

“We’d know.”

“I’d like to think we would, but it’d still be a great big mess.”

“Hot chocolate first. I really need it.” Susan pulled into the parking lot of what used to be the old bank building, now owned by Tracy Raz.

The bottom of the building housed a clean, simple restaurant.

As they plopped into a booth, the proprietor, Kyle Davidson, greeted them and took their order.

“Susan, one of the things I’ve been thinking about, especially since we did the soil tests, is why don’t we, on the lower acres where the soil is more fertile, plant sugar maples, red maples, locusts, Southern hawthorne, trees that we can sell to nurseries once they are three or four years old? We can continually renew our stock from our own cuttings and we’ll be efficiently using the land. Nursery stock has a much faster turnover than timber. We won’t see much of a return for three years, but that’s the beauty of taking out the Virginia pine and the old loblolly pine. The soil might be acidic, but most of those pine stands are a little higher up. We can use the money from the pine on the lower acres to start up the nursery stock. The sticking point is irrigation. If we suffer a drought we’ve got to get water to the saplings.” Harry had talked out loud to her animals about this, since she often thought better out loud. However, she hadn’t said anything to Susan until now.

Susan, cup in hand, drained it, brightened. “A water buffalo.”

She cited a holding tank usually pulled by a pickup truck or tractor. Smaller ones could be placed on the bed of the pickup, but that was hell on the shocks.

“That’s a lot of man-hours.” Harry leaned back on the booth seat. “Still, it’s a beginning. There’s no way we can afford an irrigation system now. Leaky pipe is even more expensive, so a water buffalo makes a lot of sense.”

“What about your sunflowers? Aren’t you going to irrigate?”

“Actually, I’m going to irrigate everything—the alfalfa, the orchard-grass pastures, the sunflowers, and my one-quarter acre row of Petit Manseng grapes. I’ll use the tractor to pull a boom sprayer. We’ve got that big tractor that Fair and I bought from Blair. Eighty horsepower. Perfect! I say we use the same system for the nursery stock.”

“You’ll rent it?”

“No. Susan, we’re partners, remember?”

“Yes, but that’s wear and tear on your equipment. I have to come up with something.”

“You came up with 1,500 acres.”

“I guess I did, didn’t I?” She laughed.

Loud voices at the counter diverted their attention.

“That’s a damned irresponsible statement.” Toby Pittman loomed over Hy Maudant, who sat on a stool at the counter.

“No, it’s not. What I’m saying is not a criticism of Professor Forland. You think the government is always the enemy. Go on, show me how morally superior you are. Then you can sit on your butt and do nothing.”

“I ought to knock your fat ass right off that stool.”

Kyle quickly came around from behind the counter. “Take it outside.”

“Forget it. I’ll go. I don’t want to be in the same room with this French fascist anyhow.” Toby glared at Hy, then left, thoughtfully not slamming the door.

Hy spun around on the stool, noticed Harry and Susan. “Entertainment?”

His light French accent made every sentence sound musical. This was also true of Paul de Silva, Big Mim’s young equine manager, who spoke with a beautiful high-class Spanish accent.

“What’s Toby bitching about?” Harry forthrightly asked as Hy picked up his cup and walked over to them.

“Sit down, Hy.” Susan moved further inland, as there was quite a lot of Hy.

His light-blue eyes merrily danced from one pretty lady to the other. “Oh, you know how extremely sensitive he is. Why, when he was pruning the vines at Rockland Vineyards this March, I mentioned, I hinted, I barely breathed the suggestion that perhaps he might be a bit more aggressive to encourage growth. He threw me off the place! I swore that would be the last time I’d try to help him. No one can work with him.” Hy held up his hand, the palm outward. “I remain dedicated to the revitalization of the Virginia wine industry, thanks to the brilliant effort started thirty some years ago by Felicia Rogan at Oakencroft Vinery, but I will not lift one finger, not even my pinky, to help that insufferable malcontent. If his grapes were infected with an anthracnose and I had the last ton of lime sulfur in the county, I wouldn’t sell it to him.”

“Runs in the family. All the Pittmans are difficult people.” Harry accepted Toby but avoided him.

“What’s an anthracnose?” Susan asked.

“Bird’s eye,” Hy replied. “It’s a fungus on the leaves that looks like a bird’s eye. Tricky. The grapes seem okay, but the leaves wilt. Two or three years pass, everything seems okay. Eventually, though, the infection reaches the fruit and one gets misshapen grapes.”

“Sure are a lot of things that attack grapes.”

“There’s no foolproof crop.” He shrugged.

“Weeds.” Susan cupped her head in her hand.

Harry laughed. “When people talk about a natural garden, I figure they mean weeds.” She turned her attention back to Hy. “By the time I apply every remedy to my little vines, I won’t have a penny of profit.”

He smiled. “You’re too smart for that.” Tapping his thick cup, he continued. “You only apply fertilizer or spray when it is needed or at the right time as a preventive. We’re lucky here, so far. We’ve managed to keep grapes healthy.”

“Persistence.” She paused, then smiled slowly. “And ego.”

“You need ego to do anything well.” He agreed. “Gargantuan ego. Pantagruel. Yes, the Pantagruel of ego. That’s Toby. I have an ego. Felicia has an ego. Patricia has an ego, but we also have sense. Toby has none.” He assumed both ladies knew their Rabelais, and being well educated, they did know the work of France’s greatest comic writer, who worked in the first half of the sixteenth century.

“Can anyone be a vintner without a huge ego?” Susan marveled at the complexity of the task. One had to select the correct grape for the soil, nurture it, harvest it, then sell it or actually make the wine oneself.