Tail Gait

May 13, 2015

As Cooper pored over deeds of title Wednesday morning at the county offices, Harry drove to St. Luke’s.

The Very Reverend Herbert Jones’s reading glasses slipped down near the tip of his nose as he reviewed a national church publication while sitting at his cluttered desk. On the left side, his cat Elocution held down papers. On the right side, Cazenovia pinned correspondence. On the floor, Lucy Fur, on her back, front and hind legs extended, slept soundly.

A knock on the door woke up Lucy Fur. Elocution and Cazenovia were alert but remained in place.

Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker preceded Harry into the Reverend’s spacious, light-filled office.

“Let’s get some Communion wafers,” Pewter encouraged the Lutheran cats.

“Locked,” Elocution mournfully informed them. “The closet with all the Communion things except vestments is locked.”

“I know that, but we opened it once before. Come on. The humans will just sit here and blab.” Pewter incited them.

“That’s a fact.” Cazenovia leapt off the desk, papers flying.

Harry walked over, picked them up, handing them to the Reverend.

Mrs. Murphy followed the cats out of the room with the observation, “No crunch in the Communion wafers. Let’s see if we can open a cabinet door in the kitchen instead.”

“No.” Pewter gleefully skidded down the hallway. “Communion wafers. Drives the humans crazy.”

Tucker stayed with Harry.

“I don’t know what gets into them,” said the Reverend. “Asleep one minute and zooming out of here the next.” He pushed his readers up onto the bridge of his nose. “What’s cooking? Don’t tell me there’s a rebellion on the vestry board?”

Harry laughed. “No. We’re all getting on quite well.” Looking out the window, she blinked. “How beautiful this view is over the first quad, then out to the big one and the graveyard beyond. I bet you never tire of it.”

“I don’t. If I get stuck on a sermon, I take a walk outside or I stare at the vista. Always figure out the problem. What can I do for you?” He stood up, leading her to the comfortable sitting area. “Would you like a drink?”

“Oh, no, thank you.” She settled into the club chair, its leather thin on the edges. “Reverend, remember that last night of wonderful conversation at the dinner table with Ginger, Trudy, everyone?”

He made a steeple out of his hands, sighed. “I do. How quickly life changes.”

“It sure does. I think of Ginger and Trudy every day, and I know you do.”

“Harry, as a pastor I can offer what comfort the scriptures give us. As a friend, I can offer my time and love, but you know there’s no shortcut for those grieving for Ginger. It takes time.”

“I’ve been rummaging around Ginger’s last research project. He’d talked about it with us, the prisoner-of-war camp, the confusion once the war ended. I’ve thought about everything, and Cooper, bless her, hears me out. Nothing in Ginger’s past suggests his murder as an act of revenge. Even Frank Cresey’s meltdown didn’t go that far, and in a way, Frank continued his studies.” Harry then told the pastor all they had discovered about Frank from the library and from Snoop.

“You know, we must do something about those homeless people,” said Reverend Jones. “We pastors, priests, rabbis need to put our heads together. The city can only do but so much, and same goes for the Salvation Army.”

She filled him in on Snoop’s memories, how he found the letter opener that murdered Frank and how he was in, for lack of a better word, protective custody. “I like him,” she said.

The Reverend smiled. “That’s a start. Just because someone has succumbed to drink or other substances doesn’t mean they can’t be saved. Christ offers us all redemption.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Their condition takes more than prayer. It’s medical. Well, I got off the track here. I can understand your interest in Ginger, in solving this terrible murder, but Harry, you do blunder into things.”

“You have no idea,” Tucker seconded that thought.

“Lie down, sweetie.” Harry smiled at the dog. Tucker did lie down, even though she could hear, the humans couldn’t, some illicit activity at the end of the hall.

“Was there something said at the dinner party that brought you here? Not that I don’t adore your presence. After all, I’ve ministered to you since you wore colored Band-Aids on your knee.”

She blushed. “Ginger said he visited graveyards at old churches, he checked out birth rolls and death rolls, as the churches often had better records than the courthouses.”

The Reverend flared out his fingers from the steeple, then reconnected them. “True. For the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, churches sometimes kept the only records.”

“Do you have St. Luke’s records?”

“I do. Some are even on parchment. Others on heavy paper, but not as permanent as parchment. All this is stored in the big safe downstairs.”

“I’d like to look at them.” She hastily added, “Not this minute. But sometime.”

He glanced out the window. “Tell you what. I’ve been stuck in this office all morning. I need to stretch my legs. Let’s walk down to the graveyard. Maybe that will help you in your quest.”

“Really?”

He pushed up with both hands on the armrest. “You’ll see.”

They walked down the hall. Tucker knew the cats were hiding in the landing on the stairs, one flight up. The Reverend Jones opened the closet, pulled out a light jacket, closing it, but he didn’t tightly shut the door. He kept sweaters and jackets all over the office part of the church, the front vestibule of the church itself, closets upstairs. He often felt a chill. He also slept with two blankets and a down comforter. He hated the cold.

They walked out into the interior quad.

“Aren’t you needing a jacket? It’s a bit brisk.”

“No, thanks,” said Harry. “Feels great to me.”

The mercury hovered at sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit and she wore a sweater over her Under Armour, jeans, kneesocks, and cowboy boots.

The new grass felt soft and giving underfoot as they traversed the large outer quad. Reaching the cemetery, beautiful stone walls encasing it, a wrought-iron gate at both ends, the Reverend reached down, flipped up the latch. They walked in.

Obelisks, large square monuments, and regular-sized tombstones greeted them. The wealthy paid for lustrous white marble statues behind their heads. Angels, lambs, crosses, the entwined Alpha and Omega bid one consider one’s spiritual journey. Much of the statuary boasted fine work.

“Let’s walk along these first rows.” He paused and read out names “Jacob Yost, 1721 to 1778; Macabee Reed, 1759 to 1822; Lavina Reed, 1765 to 1840; Karl Ix, 1761 to 1850. Now, there’s a long life, and look here, two wives. The first predeceased him and the second outlived him by nearly thirty years. And here are two little tiny stone markers for two of their children.” He swept out his arm as they entered the second row. “You can see most of these early names are German or English. Ginger, having some of the prisoners’ names from The Barracks, matched them up to these names. Some of these sleeping souls were either escaped prisoners of war or men who decided not to go home. Over here, a few Italian names. You would think they would be in a Catholic graveyard, but Catholic churches were few and far between back then. Somehow they wound up here. Ginger said Italians did fight for King George, so these people resting here were also, shall we say, impressed citizens.”

“If they escaped, why weren’t they brought back?” She paused. “Ginger, when he gave us our high school tour, did say The Barracks was overcrowded.”

“Here are Irish names, more English ones, too. Yes, The Barracks was jam-packed, even after a thousand men were sent up to York, Pennsylvania, to ease the crowding. Ginger spent time up there himself. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, more prisoners were sent here.”

“It must have been awful.”

“Better than losing a limb. Still better than that. Sometimes I’d go with Ginger to visit another old church. I could pass time with the priest or pastor while he would sift through records. I learned a great deal about our country’s early days.”

She smiled. “I envy you those trips. I bet Ginger never stopped talking.”

The Reverend smiled, too. “Well, I could talk pretty good myself.” He leaned down for a moment to rub Tucker’s ears. “Tucker, best we don’t know what you say.”

“You got that right.”

The Reverend and Harry laughed at the dog’s light bark.

“Anything stand out in your mind, about what you learned, I mean?” asked Harry.

They continued to walk through the peaceful graveyard, statues shining in the spring light.

“People need God, just as they did back then. Especially then! The distances between people, the difficulties of travel, the church was a welcome place to come together, pray, sing, share joys and troubles. So many worshipped at a church that was close, one where friends gathered. Others, fired up by intellectual considerations, would start a tiny church with maybe three families. The people lying here might have started life as Catholics, Anglicans, I guess I should say, Church of England, but many were true Lutherans. Born Lutheran. Most all the Germans were, except for those few from Bavaria. Bavarians are Catholic, usually.”

“Did any of the early parishioners admit to having been prisoners of war?”

“Yes, they did. As generations grew and prospered, it became a matter of pride in the early nineteenth century and really up to mid-century. According to Ginger, who read more diaries than anyone, I swear he did, this was cited as proof that their forebears from the old country, as it was and still is called, saw a New World and much preferred it to the old. Given that most everyone buried here was not on charity, they prospered.”

Harry stopped, eyes reading name after name. “Makes you proud, doesn’t it? These brave souls.”

“It does. They endured so much. They had so much hope and energy. Here they rest some two hundred years later and we remember them. The surnames on these tombstones are still part of central Virginia.”

They walked out of the cemetery, back across the lawns.

“It’s true we are all standing on someone else’s shoulders.” Harry drew closer to the beloved pastor. He was a man whose very presence calmed and consoled.

“You think, somehow, this is connected to Ginger’s murder?” he asked.

“I do. I’ve thought of everything, academic revenge, but everyone loved him and he never wrote monographs attacking someone else’s work. Even the uproar over Sally Hemings was resolved and he was even tempered about it all.”

“He was that. But you think his murder was connected to these prisoners of war?”

“I do. The path keeps bringing me back to The Barracks, Colonel Harvey’s lands, Ewing Garth’s, and the Loyalist, Peter Ashcombe. And then, poof, dead end.”

“Well, you know St. Luke’s was designed by a prisoner of war after the war’s end, in 1781, really. The treaty, I think, was 1783.”

“I sort of knew that, but didn’t pay much attention in school.”

“Well, let me show you.” They walked into the church vestibule, high-ceilinged, a floor of black and white marble squares, lovely touches of woodwork where the ceiling met the walls, with a recessed alcove holding a statue of Christ as the Redeemer. Their footfalls echoed softly on the marble.

“How many times have you walked past this?” The Reverend pointed to a black, high-gloss marble rectangle set into the wall. “Charles West, Architect and Benefactor. This was set in when the church was completed.”

“I read the name, but I didn’t know he was a prisoner of war.”

“Ginger often remarked on fate. Anyway, West was young, nineteen, I think, captured at Saratoga and marched here with hordes of others, all the way from Boston. Here he discovered his talent for architecture, and at war’s end he learned this trade. He did a beautiful job.”

“He certainly did.”

“He married the younger daughter of Ewing Garth, and that was a leg up. Ewing introduced him to everyone. Commissions dribbled in and then flooded in.”

“Garth. Yes, his lands backed up on the camp.”

“Rachel and her older sister were great beauties, so I expect at some point the young fellow lost his heart to her. Well, I’m always a sucker for a love story, but they’re buried out in the graveyard. The large mausoleum with the winged angel, hands outstretched to heaven. They had eight children. Eight, and five survived into old age. We all are standing on someone else’s shoulders, as you said.”

As they left the church and walked through the arcade and back to the office part of the complex, a soft breeze lifted Tucker’s fur.

“When you get the time, maybe Ginger has papers on West,” said Reverend Jones. “I know he researched anyone involved with the camp and it’s a good story. I doubt it has any bearing on his demise, but still, it is a good story. And West was so artistic, many of his pen-and-ink drawings are scattered throughout the county. He made drawings of estates for a little money.”

“I’m sure I’ve seen them and never known.”

Once inside, walking down the hall to his closet, the Reverend noted, “I didn’t leave the door open.”

Tucker noticed light paw prints all over the place but not a cat in sight.

“Those devils!” He knelt down to pick up a box of consecrated wafers.

Harry, now on her hands and knees, handed box after box up to him. “Some are torn open. Others just have teeth marks.”

“I will swat them. I will smite them. Damn those cats!” He swore, then caught himself. “Sorry.”

She laughed. “I’d have said worse.”

“Elo, Cazzie, Lucy, where are you?” he shouted.

“Mrs. Murphy, Pewter,” Harry called out.

“They aren’t that stupid,” Tucker opined.

“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” the Reverend Jones’s deep voice sang out.

Silence.

Harry, standing now, looked at the Reverend. “They had their first Communion.”

“Won’t do them a bit of good. They weren’t confirmed, so they’re still going to Hell,” he shot back, and then they both laughed until they ached.

“So let’s hope they really do have nine lives,” added Harry.