Sour Puss Read online

  “Could terrorists harness H5N1?” Fair asked.

  “If it evolves into a more communicable disease, I think they could. The delivery would be easy. Send infected people into major cities before those people show signs of the disease. That gives them maybe a two-day window.” Professor Jenkins folded his hands together.

  “That’s monstrous!” Hy blurted out. “They would deliberately infect a man or woman and deliver them to Paris or London or New York?!”

  “Hy,” Professor Forland calmly replied, “they flew stolen commercial airliners into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. They’ve killed people in London’s subway and on a bus, as well. The terrorists considered themselves holy suicides. Why would human time bombs, if you will permit the description, be any different? They would willingly die of the Asian bird flu.”

  “So we’d better stockpile flu shots, too.” Jim thought of his responsibility to Crozet.

  “Remember the last flu-shot shortage in 2004?” Harry felt as uneasy as everyone else.

  “Yes,” Professor Forland grimly replied.

  Professor Jenkins shifted in his seat. “Let us remember that biological warfare has been with us since siege warfare. Besiegers would toss decayed corpses over the town walls in the hopes of spreading contagion or fouling the water supply.”

  “And let us not forget that Lord Amherst, for whom Amherst College is named, gave blankets to the Native Americans that carried the smallpox virus for which they had no resistance.” Professor Forland shook his head in resigned disgust. “Smallpox and anthrax are always a danger.”

  “You’re saying terrorists could break in to labs and use our own developments against us the same way they used commercial airplanes.” Harry cut right to it.

  “It is possible,” Professor Jenkins conceded, “but why break in to our labs when they can use their own? They have them.”

  Professor Forland quickly interjected, “Our labs currently investigating such possibilities enjoy security. The problem is if some doctor or technician goes off on their own, a Unabomber of agriculture. That person could cause considerable distress, because we don’t think of one of our own behaving in such a fashion.”

  “He’s right. Our attention, thanks to the media, is focused on Muslim terrorists, on bombs, radiation, anthrax. Those are immediately understandable and, I guess, exciting in a way. Agriculture is only exciting if you’re a farmer. Let’s face it, city dwellers wouldn’t know a boll weevil if they saw it, and most of them couldn’t tell the difference between tent caterpillars and a yellow swallowtail-butterfly caterpillar. We aren’t on their radar screen, but they all demand cheap food,” Pittman sarcastically said.

  “Which makes it more dangerous, because they aren’t prepared,” Aunt Tally piped up, her voice still strong and clear.

  “Well—yes,” Professor Jenkins agreed. “Many of you remember when Dutch Elm disease swept the East Coast. People in big cities saw the trees die but it didn’t register, in any way at all, that this would compromise oxygen. Think of it, that many trees dying in that short a time span means there is less photosynthesis. Less oxygen is being produced. Therefore pollution in the big cities becomes more pronounced. These basics do not occur to people who work in buildings where the windows don’t open.” He said this with a half smile, but it was obvious the ignorance distressed him. “Nor did they replenish their trees. While industry and cars cause pollution, removing trees exacerbates the problem.”

  “Do either of you think we are more in danger from an American crackpot than a true terrorist?” Tracy Raz, an ex-Army ex-CIA man, asked.

  “Who knows?” Professor Jenkins threw up his hands.

  “I’ll take that on.” Professor Forland became animated. “We are in far more danger from foreign terrorists than homegrown. Number one, they are highly trained, motivated by political and religious concerns, and well funded. An American may be highly trained, they may have some hideous motivation that makes perfect sense to them. To date we’ve suffered a few isolated crackpots. It’s not inconceivable that sometime in the future an extreme religious or political organization could fund such activity. Right now that appears unlikely. But I think it’s much harder to guard against a well-organized group with an expressed purpose.”

  The discussion rolled on. Jim Sanburne could add up the time spent in meetings, conferences, and lectures in years. He’d been mayor of Crozet since 1964. He leaned over and whispered to his daughter, “Never seen anything like this.”

  A glow of enthusiasm lit Little Mim’s face. “Isn’t it wonderful to see people so involved?”

  “Sooner or later even the laziest son of a bitch wakes up when the Yankee soldier tramps through his potato patch.” Jim chuckled low.

  “Daddy.” She pinched his arm.

  Blair Bainbridge, born and raised in the North, leaned past his fiancée, looked at his soon-to-be father-in-law, and whispered, “Who won the war?”

  “No one. The North thinks they won, but it was the worst thing that ever happened to this country.”

  “Killed the nascent wine industry in the South,” Hy Maudant, a keen student of wine history worldwide, turned and whispered from his seat in front of the Sanburne clan.

  “If you were an agriterrorist, what crop would you attack?” Jim shrewdly asked the Frenchman.

  “Wheat.”

  “Ah.” Jim nodded.

  “And you?” Hy asked.

  “Since you took wheat, I’ll take corn.” Jim smiled genially.

  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 th
e 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.