Tail Gait

by Rita Mae Brown

  “What do you mean?”

  “In 1807 congress finally agreed to no more slave importation after 1808. No more slave ships. I add that the North had slaves, too.”

  “That I knew, but let me back up here. His focus was on the average person?”

  Harry smiled. “Now, Coop, you know there are no average people, especially in Virginia, and especially on the day of Jefferson’s birth.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s obvious you think that Professor McConnell’s murder has something to do with his work.”

  Cooper sighed again. “We have to consider every possibility just as Ginger would. This was a historical issue. No obvious deep-seated family troubles. You can only cover them up so much. No heated jealousy among his colleagues, many of whom are also retired. Professor Brinsley Sims kept up a close working relationship with him. Sims has been helpful. Nothing that Professor McConnell worked on had any bearing on a corporation’s profits. It wasn’t like he was investigating something that could be tied to climate change.” She shrugged. “But you don’t kill someone on the golf course without a powerful motive.”

  “Could this have something to do with golf?”

  Cooper shook her head. “I know people get mad enough to kill, but still—”

  “It’s a game that’s good for business,” Harry shrewdly commented, “especially for older women, women who went to school before Title Nine, can’t pull together like Nelson Yarbrough and his football teammates, but if they play golf, they can go out and hit with their corporate bosses and coworkers. They’ll learn the rudiments of teamwork. Maybe I should say teamwork as defined by men.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that.” Cooper rested her hand on her chin. “Harry, would you make me another cup of tea? I am just dragging my ass. This one cup helped a little.”

  “Sure. I could use a second one too.”

  As Harry boiled water, Mrs. Murphy pushed through the animal doors, followed by Pewter.

  Pewter got straight to the point. “Are they eating anything? I don’t smell anything.”

  “No,” the dog replied.

  “Can’t you beg?” Pewter encouraged the dog.

  “No.” Tucker was in no mood to humor the cat, whom she considered a conceited pest.

  Mrs. Murphy leapt onto the kitchen counter to tap at a cabinet. “This will work.”

  As the steam spiraled out of the teapot snout, Harry opened the cabinet, tossed down some dried treats. “How about some cookies?” she asked Cooper.

  The police officer considered this. “What kind of cookies?”

  “Picky, picky. Shortbread cookies? The real kind.”

  “I would love a cookie.”

  With cookies on the plate and fresh cups of tea, they returned to discussing Professor McConnell.

  “Did he enjoy retirement?” Cooper asked.

  Harry immediately replied, “He never truly retired. The university, as a mark of esteem and gratitude, allowed him to keep his office, and he did have office hours. He didn’t teach anymore, but he would confer with students, help them with studies, and he would give a special lecture if asked. Trudy always said, ‘Thank God.’ He’d have driven her mad underfoot.”

  “Wives always say that, don’t they?”

  “Sure seems to be the case.” Harry smiled. “Ginger’s old students like Paul Huber, Nelson Yarbrough, and Marshall Reese would drop in on him, as well as other professors. He was constantly busy. No, Ginger really didn’t retire.”

  “I guess the worst thing you can do is to stop working, if you love your work, that is.” Cooper bit into a delicious thick shortbread cookie. “I love these things. Okay, do you know what he was working on when he died?”

  “At Reverend Jones’s dinner, Ginger mentioned renewing his study of The Albemarle Barracks, reviewing old church records, land acquisitions, and agricultural growth. He thought of it as a peek into everyday life. He also tried to find old family Bibles.”

  “Why family Bibles?”

  “We didn’t have a census in this country until 1790. Anything you want to know before that, you need family Bibles or maybe court records if someone had a suit brought against them or was arrested. That’s it.” She thought for a moment. “Church records, baptisms, burials, and marriages. Many a priest and pastor kept records, and, I almost forgot, enlistment records for militias. Remember, we didn’t have a standing army.”

  “I knew about the standing army but not about the census. I can see that he’d need to visit people and places. Isn’t a lot of this on the Internet by now?”

  “The public record, not family Bibles or church records. And Virginia still carries the mark of 1865. Thousands and thousands of records, family or public, were burned all across the state after Appomattox.”

  “Why?”

  “People feared that after losing the war the men who fought for the Confederacy could be hanged as traitors. I don’t think we can ever truly appreciate the chaos experienced then, and it would be even more chaotic if one had been a slave. Now you are free. Free to do what? Run, stay? Where could a man or woman hope to make a life for themselves, a life free of threat? But most of the records earlier than that were saved. Too far back to cause harm in 1865, 1866.”

  “Weren’t soldiers also in fear of being branded traitors to the Crown during the Revolutionary War?”

  “Coop, sure. If we’d lost, the trees would have been filled with hanged men. As it was, if you were a Continental soldier caught carrying a message, you were hanged. We returned the favor. You know, Coop, we’ve become narcotized by violence. Two huge World Wars, endless violence on television and in films, we forget that the Revolutionary War was no sure thing and it could be brutal.”

  “War. Going on, as we speak, in other places.”

  “I’m beginning to think that to kill is to be human,” said Harry. “Not a happy thought,” she paused, “especially when I think of Ginger.”

  Cooper glanced at the large clock on the wall. “Well, I am awake. I don’t know if I’ve learned anything that can help me find who killed Ginger McConnell, but I’ve learned a lot.” The lean woman smiled at her neighbor and friend.

  “You’re just starting in this. Murder is usually easy, at least that’s what you’ve told me, because it generally signals someone losing their self-control. Drugs and drink may help there, or if they’re standing over the corpse with a gun, a knife, or a brickbat.”

  “That’s what worries me about this one,” said Cooper. “Premeditated murders are a lot harder to solve. This is premeditated.”

  Harry walked Cooper to the screened-in porch door.

  “Thought of one more thing,” said Harry. “It isn’t much, but Mother once told me that Ginger had to break up a romance between his daughter and a football player. Lots of emotion.”

  “Name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Thanks again for the tea.” Cooper made a mental note to ask some of the old football players if they remembered.

  As Cooper drove off, Harry said out loud, “Maybe it’s better to die a swift death than to linger with some horrible malady.” Then she caught herself. “How can I even think that about Ginger?”

  “Needless suffering is cruel,” Tucker remarked. “Think of those deer and bear who are wounded, and it takes them days or weeks to die. That’s cruel. You’ve got to finish off your game.”

  “I hardly think a professor emeritus of history is fair game,” Mrs. Murphy drily noted.

  November 12, 1779

  Each day at march’s end or when the prisoners were allowed a brief respite from marching, Lieutenant Charles West would pull out a notebook and draw a farmhouse, a meandering creek, rock outcroppings, the roll of a hill or the shape of a tree. These things interested him, but he also wanted to forever remember this march. Over the last year many captured soldiers had made this journey. Leaving a week ago, West’s group of veterans from the Battle of Saratoga was one of the last to leave Cambridge, Massachusetts. O
utranked in his group by a Captain Graves from the Royal Irish Artillery as well as by a Hessian dragoon captain, West thought Graves a prophetic name for a dragoon.

  Charles marched with his surviving four marksmen, and by the time they reached a large camp, a palisade thrown up west of the King’s Highway, he was grateful to stop. How far west? He guessed a day’s march. Merely a young lieutenant, and not of an elite unit, Charles was quiet and cooperative. The other captured officers outranked him, and quickly established their chain of command.

  As the second son of an impoverished baron, Charles had been lucky his father had prevailed upon old friends to push his career forward. His father had borrowed to scrape together £450 to purchase Charles’s lieutenancy. A good education and this army commission were his inheritance. His other paternal gift, the expensive flintlock pistol, remained in Captain John Schuyler’s belt. Whatever Charles got in this life he would have to get on his own after his paternal send-off. He would rise through competence and bravery—if he survived this ordeal.

  The young man’s talents lay in drawing, possibly in architecture, but the army it was, and he did as he was told. Charles had found he liked the non-officers. He also liked a few of the junior officers, young men like himself or older men who had made a name for themselves in the Colonies in the recent French and Indian Wars. Men who had proven themselves in battle were worth more to him than a rich scion colonel. He wound up in Fraser’s regiment with the marksmen because of his good, artistic eye. Charles could read terrain, and terrain in this New World proved demanding.

  On a good day, the marching prisoners might cover fifteen miles. Usually it was ten, slowed by wagons and pack animals and those who, from fatigue or wounds, needed to be left in whatever care could be found. Piglet tacked along besides Charles, an indefatigable companion. He noted that they were moving southwest. Sometimes directly south, sometimes west, but ultimately southwest. Since the British, as far as he knew, still held New York Port, this made sense.

  The Continentals followed streams and wagon roads moving away from the coast. To the west lay greater security. Conditions improved inland. Once they were even able to bathe in a deep creek while being guarded. The cold and clear water invigorated the well-built lieutenant. Other prisoners and even the guards laughed when Piglet took a flying leap into the creek to be with Charles, who then bathed him too.

  As the prisoners pieced together their experiences at Bemis Heights, a few facts asserted themselves. The colonial Loyalist population did not rise up to help them, nor did they sabotage the Continentals. And they fought blind. For whatever reason, the British invading force had lost its eyes, their Indian allies. None of the British on the march knew how many of their countrymen had died, but their losses were heavy enough. Those in the infantry on the field and on the rises said when they withdrew, the dead had covered the ground. Splashes of Redcoats and blood, blood everywhere.

  Those captured on the day following Charles’s capture, October 8, verified that General Burgoyne had retreated east of Saratoga, but they did not know where he’d gone. Some assumed he had kept going, others that he had returned to camp, others that he awaited reinforcements to again give battle.

  Captain Graves growled that the general should have retreated to Albany, where the lines to Canada would be better. From that direction help might yet arrive. The Irishman made it no secret that he thought good men had been badly led. Higher ranking men ignored Graves. He was Irish, and they held that against him too.

  Charles thought to himself that if the Canadian commander had wished to send troops, he would have done so before Saratoga, but he kept his mouth shut. That was a lesson he had learned early. Better to wait to be asked. And who would ask a nineteen-year-old lieutenant?

  The sun was setting. Dappled light shone in meadows, and long slanting rays shafted through the endless forests bordering the rutted wagon trail. The frosts seemed to arrive the instant the sun set. If not in a camp, they slept on the ground without blankets. No man there had been able to retrieve gear, and the Continentals didn’t have enough for themselves. Many of the marchers actually looked forward to being in a prison camp, for they would finally have a roof over their heads or at least some cover, and probably better food than they had on the march. Still, they were treated decently.

  Hoofbeats alerted them. Calls came from behind. A messenger rode alongside and then surged forward to Captain Schuyler. The column stopped, men dropped to sit by the side of the road, glad for a breather. Charles noted that the messenger was a major and wore a full Continental uniform. He was on his way to becoming a ranking officer; deportment mattered. After a few words with Schuyler, the major trotted off. Charles noted that the horse was fit. Forage in this land was easy to find and good for the rebels.

  Back on the road, the silver evening star rose large and luminous. With relief, they marched into a fort. Temporary but not badly built huts would provide shelter from the frost. As the prisoners were directed into the dwellings, each exhausted man dropped onto a bed, ropes sagging underneath straw mattresses.

  Fresh bread and cheese appeared. The farmers and carters were eager for money. The prisoners as well as the men normally assigned to this small makeshift camp pumped a bit of money into local pockets.

  Captain John Schuyler walked into Charles’s hut, and Charles noted that his captor always wore the flintlock he’d taken from him. While it might be the fortune of war to Schuyler, Charles wanted it back. “You learned while imprisoned at Cambridge that General Burgoyne surrendered his army to General Gates October seventeenth, shortly after the Battle of Saratoga,” Schuyler informed the British soldiers. “The terms of the surrender were that troops will be sent back to Europe after parole if each man promises not to again fight here.”

  A silence greeted this announcement until a Hessian corporal, Karl Ix, asked, “Us too, right?”

  “Those of you from Hesse will be exchanged for our men. I think, gentlemen, those are favorable terms. However, the major just told me your king is dragging his feet. He doesn’t want to negotiate with those he considers traitors. It’s all still dragging on.” With that, Schuyler left. The twelve men in the hut waited until they no longer heard Schuyler’s footfalls, then all spoke at once. Though the Battle of Saratoga was nearly two years before, the prisoners were still putting together the pieces as more information became known.

  Karl’s English was good, although he spoke with a pronounced accent. He boomed, “The whole army! The king can’t ignore the loss of one of his armies.”

  “Burgoyne couldn’t surrender it piecemeal,” declared Samuel MacLeish, one of Charles’s men. “Six thousand men.”

  “Not after the battle,” Edward Thimble remarked. “The rebels gave Burgoyne good terms. The king and his counselors sit in luxury in London. The people may be rebels, but they whipped us. Honor the deal.”

  “Aye,” a few others agreed.

  Another chimed in. “The rebel bastards can fight.”

  “If Clinton had reinforced us, we’d have won,” said Thomas Parsons, another Ranger and the oldest man among this group at thirty-five. His voice stuttered with conviction and regret.

  “I expect there is abundant blame to be apportioned,” Charles wryly said as the men laughed.

  Too tired to talk more, they soon fell asleep. Piglet snuggled next to his human, each appreciating the other’s warmth. As Charles drifted off, he felt this war would go on. The Colonials were organized, fighting for a belief.

  He believed in king and country. How could these people dream of political success without a king or queen? But then, how could they dream of ultimate military victory with raggle-taggle militias? Yet those same militias had defeated an army.

  These provocative thoughts floated through his mind as he closed his eyes. He promised himself he would record as much as he could.

  April 14, 2015

  Marshall Reese’s business was located on Pantops Mountain and was filled with six of his former teammat
es. The UVA alumni had gathered in short order to discuss a proper memorial to the professor they loved.

  Pantops Mountain, on the eastern edge of Charlottesville, was once home to just one large, pleasant home, then a private school, and was now filled with modern buildings. The upscale location of his office was as important for Marshall, a real estate developer, as it was for some doctors, lawyers, or investment firms. Part of success is appearing successful.

  Marshall’s personal office easily accommodated the assembled alumni, which, given the time during which they had matriculated at the University of Virginia, were all white and male. Behind the partner’s desk, specially imported from England, a Fry-Jefferson map hung on the wall. Showing the roads in 1755, the facsimile gave the viewer a good idea of roads still in use. Back then, coach travel was uncomfortable but had to be endured. Rivers offered better transport, but usually heading only toward the Atlantic Ocean. In order to move up and down the coast, or due west, one had to go by coach, on horseback, or on foot.

  “Would anyone care for a drink?” offered Marshall, still plenty fit despite the passing years.

  “I know where it is. I’ll tend bar.” Lionel Gardner took a few drink orders. He was class of 1961 and had flown in from Los Angeles after hearing the horrible news about Professor McConnell’s death.

  A large leather couch and leather club chairs bore testimony to Marshall’s success, just in case you’d missed his name on signs in front of numerous high-end developments, all with a historical theme. Finally settled, Nelson Yarbrough’s distinctive gravelly voice opened the gathering. Once a quarterback, always a quarterback. “Marshall, thank you for allowing us to use your office, and Lionel, thank you for flying in from the coast.” The two men nodded to the acknowledgment. “I’ll get right to the point: What can we do to honor a good man and a great professor?”