“No, he hasn’t. He has given you something to think about. You love cars.”
“Twenty-seven thousand dollars with a blown tractor to repair? Hell.” Harry looked confused, sad, a little angry all at once.
“There is the tractor.” Fair sighed. “That’s farming. One thing after another.”
“What would I ever do with a pocket rocket?” She looked up at him imploringly.
“For one, you’d enjoy yourself. You only go ’round once.”
Aunt Tally reposed in a comfortable chair under a tree. At one hundred she deserved that. Her friend Inez Carpenter, DVM, two years younger, sat next to her. Big Mim rushed and fluttered about, being her usual imperious self. Her daughter accepted all the happy hugs from those who now knew she was pregnant. Blair—no cigars this time—handed out Zippo lighters with the Stars and Stripes on the chrome casing.
“I want you prepared when the baby comes. You’ll need to light your cigar.” Blair gave Fair and Victor each a lighter, then gave one to Reverend Jones, and he joined them.
“Thanks, Blair,” Herb said. His flame flared up high. “But if I use this thing, I’ll burn my eyebrows off.”
Blair took the lighter back and showed the reverend how to adjust the flame.
After the food, everyone sat for a bit to let it settle.
Mark Catron had played the clarinet for the Charlotte Philharmonic Orchestra before moving to Albemarle County. Now he stood up and, using his bugle, he blew them to order. Mark could play anything.
Reverend Jones stood next to the trumpeter with the bright blue eyes. “All right. We’re ready to divide up for the capture-the-flag teams. If you all look at the ticket you were given when you got in the food line, it will have a number on it.”
There was a rustle as people searched for their tickets. Purses opened and shut. Men fished in their back pockets.
“Odd numbers are the blue team. Even numbers are the red team. You’ll have tails in your color, like in flag football. BoomBoom Craycroft will hand out the blues; Alicia Palmer, the reds. The timekeeper is Susan Tucker. She has the whistle. When the air horn blows once, play. Blows twice, stop. Our referees, Harry Haristeen and Craig Newby, will be wearing referee shirts and blowing the standard whistle.”
Harry and Craig appeared in shirts with vertical black-and-white stripes.
Is there an American who doesn’t love playing capture the flag on Flag Day? The whole crowd repaired to the area outside the inner quad, the cemetery anchoring its far side. This giant rectangle had been marked with lime to the dimensions of a football field.
At one end was a red flag the size of an American flag. At the other end, a blue flag, also large. Each team lined up opposite its colored flag.
Each team was given time to elect their captains. Aunt Tally kept the stopwatch after people moved her chair to the field’s edge. Susan held the air horn to signal quarter- and halftimes.
Both elected team captains were popular high school seniors at Western Albemarle High School.
“Is everybody ready?” Reverend Jones called out in his deep voice.
“Ready,” the captains responded.
Reverend Jones raised his hand, dropped it.
Harry blew the whistle at the exact moment. The chaos began. If a red ventured into blue territory and his or her flag was snatched, the person had to go behind the opposing team’s end line, in purgatory.
Pewter haughtily strolled to the cemetery wall, jumping up to observe the silly game. The three St. Luke’s cats joined her.
People yelled, screamed encouragement to teammates. Onlookers clapped and shouted.
Fifteen minutes into it, the air horn blew, signaling the end of the first quarter. The teams had two minutes to catch their breath and rethink strategy.
Already, half of each team was behind the opposing end line. One of the peculiar rules of capture the flag was that you were set free if someone from your team slapped your hand. Given that the liberator was in enemy territory with a small team flag stuffed in a waistband, the liberator risked becoming a prisoner, too. If one had speed, it was pretty easy to run up and grab the team colors, which hung out two feet from a four-inch-wide waistband. It was like a donkey tail.
The captured reds now lay down on the field. One had to lie down with feet touching the end line and reach out to hold the ankle of the person in front. In this way the captives formed a human chain. It was all within the rules. The closer the chain stretched to the fifty-yard line, the greater the chance that someone would be able to free the captives. They’d then rejoin the game, giving them an obvious advantage if the other team’s players were still held prisoner.
The whistle blew; play resumed. The faster players remained free. The intensity grew. The sidelines erupted.
“Humans invent some funny games, don’t they?” Cazenovia mused.
Mrs. Murphy sauntered down, jumped up on the stone wall at a distance from Pewter but within speaking range of the Lutheran cats.
“I’m not speaking to you,” Pewter huffed.
“Good. You’re a bloody bore.”
“I resent that,” Pewter snapped.
“Come on, you two. We want to enjoy the day,” Lucy Fur, with authority, spoke.
Pewter jumped down into the cemetery just as the reds were freed, their chain having grown longer so it was easier to have a free player touch a captured player without being captured herself. A huge roar went up. “I hate them all,” she grumbled. The gray cat walked to the far side of the cemetery, toward the large old stately tombstones.
Mrs. Murphy moved closer to Elocution, Cazenovia, and Lucy Fur to chat.
Pewter sat for a moment on the back side of the large Trumbull tombstone, a huge recumbent lamb on top of it. She sniffed. Sniffed again.
“Hmm.” She walked around the tombstone—and stopped cold.
Leaning against the carved family remembrance, bolt upright, was a young man, eyes staring into space. Dead as a doornail.
“Hey! Hey!” Pewter shouted.
Of course, the other cats paid no attention, so she tore through the graveyard and screeched to a halt at the bottom of the wall. “There’s a dead man in here.”
“They’re all dead.” Cazenovia laughed.
“But someone is leaned up against a tombstone!” Pewter panted.
Mrs. Murphy jumped down and ran to her friend, anger forgotten. The two cats hurried around the Trumbull monument.
Mrs. Murphy put a paw on the dead man’s leg, looked intently at what she could see of the corpse. “No wound. No blood. How did he die?”
Pewter also stared at the body. “Could he have been strangled?”
“His eyes would be bloodshot,” Mrs. Murphy replied.
Pewter wailed, “Why does everything happen to me?”
No point in arguing, so the tiger just nodded. The two cats raced across the well-tended graveyard.
As they sailed over the stone wall, Mrs. Murphy called over her shoulder to the three cats, “Dead body at the Trumbull monument.”
This was too good to be true. Cazenovia, Elocution, and Lucy Fur hopped down to run in the opposite direction.
Calling out before she reached Harry, Mrs. Murphy hollered, “Tucker. Tucker, I need you.”
All the commotion surrounding the game drowned out her voice.
The two cats reached the dog, and Mrs. Murphy rapidly filled her in on their discovery.
“I was the one who found the body,” Pewter corrected the tiger, who had said “we.”