Tall Tail

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Gathered at Penny Holloway’s were Susan; Ned; Susan’s mother, Millicent Grimstead; Harry; Fair; Cooper; and the cats and dogs. They sat in the sunroom.

Eddie was hospitalized with a cracked skull and was expected to live. It would take time to know if he would regain normal functions like the power of speech. He had suffered brain damage. There was already a movement to remove him from his state Senate seat.

His wife neither defended nor criticized him. She said nothing because she knew nothing except that his ambition had become ever-consuming. Chris felt that she and the two children had become mere props. She did confirm that Charlene, their daughter, had the sickle-cell-anemia trait. As Charlene was six, she was screened at birth for sickle-cell anemia and the gene. Chris had herself screened so she knew she did not transmit it. Eddie refused to be tested. As both were over thirty, they had never been screened. Anyone under thirty was tested as part of a state mandate. Governor Holloway got his facts right, as he usually did.

Chris told Penny that when Charlene was of age she would tell her, although Penny vehemently protested even thinking about it. To her way of thinking, what good would it do?

“G-Mom, you’ve been through a terrible time. I wish I could make it better,” Susan addressed her grandmother, sitting in her favorite chair, as Penny had recounted Chris’s conversation.

“Honey, you take what the Good Lord gives you,” Penny quietly replied. “I wish Sam had confided in me, but he probably wanted to sort it out for himself.”

“Cooper and I viewed the outtakes for Eddie’s website,” Harry began.

Penny smiled. “My, that was a day.”

“Eddie clearly infuriated his grandfather. I wonder if the governor had been tested for the sickle-cell trait. But whatever was going on between them, Eddie felt threatened.”

“I suppose he was. Think what a revelation sickle cell would be. It would undermine Eddie’s appeal to his right-wing base.”

“As for Sam, he considered his opposition to integration the worst thing he’d ever done. But you all are young, you don’t know how we grew up, what we were told. Segregation was a way of life. Most of us questioned it as we matured, then put those questions aside. White people were simply not ready, and it was Sam’s fate to be governor when everything exploded. Some people forgave him; others did not. He never forgave himself.” Sorrow filled Penny’s voice.

Millicent Grimstead quoted a line from the Bible. “ ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ ”

Feet on a hassock, Ned said, “The Bible is like the Constitution. People pick out what serves their purposes. My dolorous experience in the statehouse is that some elected officials and their constituents live to sit in judgment upon others.”

“Hasn’t gotten us very far, has it?” Harry remarked.

“What else can they do?” Pewter laughed. “They can’t run fast, they have no fangs or claws, they can’t see in the dark. How else can they feel powerful except by judging others to be even weaker and more stupid than themselves?”

None of the other four-legged souls could answer that, so they didn’t.

“Do you think Eddie killed Barbara?” Penny asked.

“I do,” Susan resolutely answered. “Somehow he got her to take that drug from the hospital. Eddie must have learned about these things when he worked on drug issues in the House of Delegates. Given that no marks showed up in her autopsy, he found a way to get her to eat it, drink it, or take it as a vitamin. She probably had no idea.”

“Such was the medical examiner’s conclusion. Our hope is that if Eddie regains clarity, he will confess. But Barbara, who administered the governor’s drugs, had to have a good idea what his true condition was,” Cooper said.

“Eddie will never confess,” Susan spat. “He’ll lie to his dying day. I wouldn’t even be surprised if once he becomes operational again he won’t go out and present himself as some sort of a conservative martyr.”

“Then you and I will be charged with attempted murder.” Harry tossed that off nonchalantly. “And we’ll have to prove he’s a murderer.”

“Possible,” Susan answered. “But wouldn’t it be funny to tell people from the witness stand how he was brought down by two cats, two dogs, two women? The media would have a ball with that.”

“And therefore, we all keep our mouths shut.” Millicent Grimstead pointed to the two friends. “I trust your report, Officer Cooper, since you were first on the scene, offered no conclusions as to Eddie’s attackers.”

“Since no one has confessed, all I saw was a man with a split skull, a chewed-up left calf, claw marks on his back. No wild animals were in sight and the call was made by his cousin, who also did not view any intruders.” She paused. “But I can now tell you since our computer whiz in the department went through the thumb drive, your husband did know he had sickle-cell anemia. The section of his autobiography, I think that’s the correct term, concerning his health traces the symptoms. He uses this as an ironic comment on his former racism. So Mignon also knew. She was lucky Edward suspected her but didn’t know for sure.”

“This is such a terrible, terrible thing.” Millicent’s eyes misted.

“Do you think Daddy knew Eddie had killed, Mother?” Millicent Grimstead asked.

Penny replied, “Possibly. The red crosses that Susan and Harry showed us on Sam’s diagram, how long he had worked on that. Sam was piecing it together. He must have been researching his own family, as well as the nature of the disease, for months. But yes, I think he knew that Eddie would do anything to cover up that he had the trait. Sam was probably moving toward having Eddie arrested as Barbara’s murderer. But he wouldn’t do this until he felt the case was airtight. That’s the way Sam worked.”

“I wonder if that’s why he crawled to the graveyard?” Susan would forever remember that sight. “He was telling us the answers lay under the ground, among our forebearers.”

“And so they do,” Harry said.

Wendell Holmes, next to Penny, said, “If I’d known, I would have bitten Eddie’s throat.”

“We tried,” Tucker and Owen remarked.

“My fangs sunk deeper than yours.” Pewter puffed up.

“I really thought he was going to kill our human,” Mrs. Murphy said.

“It was nip and tuck,” Tucker agreed. “But we prevailed.”

“They’d be dead without us,” Pewter boasted.

“Humans are doing the best they can,” Mrs. Murphy replied.

“Wouldn’t they be better off if we ran the show?” Owen asked.

“They would, we wouldn’t.” Tucker laughed and the others laughed with her.