The Big Cat Nap

You never know.” His tools as neatly laid out as a surgeon organizes scalpels, tweezers, and probes on a tray, Dabney Farnese was talking about death.

“No, you don’t.” Harry sat on an upturned Winchester ammunition wooden crate in the equipment shed while Dabney stood on a small stepladder next to the John Deere.

In his mid-seventies, Dabney Farnese couldn’t keep up with the volume of his work. Making it to Harry’s within two and a half weeks was fast for him. So few people repaired older-model tractors that Dabney could have worked twenty-four hours a day if humanly possible.

Before her, Harry’s parents had used Dabney’s business and were good customers. He always enjoyed seeing Harry, remembering the little girl from long ago who wanted to repair tractors with him, grease smeared on her nose, hands, and clothing.

Farnese, an Italian name, was easy for people to recall, plus Farneses had lived in Virginia since the Revolutionary War. Dabney, no interest in history or genealogy, never brought up how long his people had lived in the Old Dominion, but others found it fascinating. His children dabbled in their family history, finding what everyone finds: brave people, some bright, some dumb as a sack of hammers, most honest, a few not.

“You just make sure, Missy,” he told Harry, “that you aren’t found. Let the Sheriff do his job and you steer clear of the business.” He carefully lifted out the entire hydraulic pump. “Would you like to provide a funeral for this hard-used hydraulic pump?”

She laughed. “I could hang a wreath on it.”

“Very respectful. Do you remember when your father fried eggs on Johnny Pop?” Dabney recalled the old tractor from the fifties, which had an exhaust pipe on the left side of the engine, with a lid on top of it. When you drove the tractor, the lid would pop, pop as the exhaust escaped. That particular tractor would have run into the twenty-first century, except that Harry’s dad started it up one spring day without noticing a bird’s nest filled with eggs scrunched in the exhaust pipe, the lid slightly ajar. By the time he figured it out, not only was there a mess, he’d driven into a ditch, making yet another mess. He finally traded the tractor in for a newer model less inviting to birds.

“Never heard my father cuss so much.” Harry laughed. “Actually, Mom fired off a few choice words herself when he drove into that ditch. At first we didn’t know what had happened. All we heard was our collie barking, barking, and more barking. By the time we got outside, Dad had crawled out from under the overturned tractor. Lucky he wasn’t hurt. It was pretty funny—those things are, after enough time passes. I suppose, in a way, it will be funny someday that we found that young man Bobby Foltz in the cemetery. Convenient. All they’d have to do would be to dig a grave right there.”

“Know him?”

Harry shook her head. “Not really. I saw him race at the drag strip. Passed him at ReNu.”

Dabney removed the hoses. “Did you like him?”

“He seemed nice enough. Now that’s three men dead who worked at ReNu.”

“Read in the papers where the guy who owns the shop has offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to a conviction.” Dabney wiped his hands on a red cloth, unpacked new hoses, set them on his big tray.

“A lot of money.” Harry whistled.

“Also said this fellow is establishing scholarships in honor of the dead men, for kids who want to be mechanics.”

“What a good thing to do.” Harry listened to the bluebirds who’d made a nest outside the shed in the back.

“Wish somebody would create scholarships for tractor repair,” Dabney said.

“John Deere should be naming scholarships after you. You can repair anything.” She thought a moment. “But I suppose you’re taking business away from the dealers. They charge an arm and a leg for repairs.”

“I don’t have their overhead,” the shrewd Dabney announced. “Don’t want it, either.”

“Thank you for driving out on a Sunday. You’re saving my bacon, ’cause I’ve got to cut my hay.”

“You’re lucky it hasn’t gone to seed—nor have you.” He winked.

“Elevation. I’m sometimes two weeks behind farms at lower elevations, and I’m almost three weeks behind the farms near Richmond. Most times that’s a help. In the dead of winter, maybe not.”

“You mentioned over the phone that Fair was going to take out a loan.”

“I talked him out of it. He was worried we’d lose our hay crop. It’s such a good one this year, but I said, hang on, honey. He leaves the farming to me. We each have our spheres, as he calls them. But I raised the money by selling my sunflower crop—futures, sort of—to Yancy Hampton.”

“I don’t believe that organic-farming crap.” Dabney carefully inspected the new hoses on his tray, then removed the new pump, meticulously checking it.

“I do and I don’t. Farming without some form of pesticide is hideously expensive. Birds, bugs, little viruses, can ruin a high percentage of your crop. Plus, Dabney, the produce doesn’t look as pretty as the agribusiness produce.”

“That’s true. Real apples are a lot smaller, might have a little blemish on them. Might have a worm, too.” He lifted his shoulders slightly. “How does anyone expect the world’s bursting population to be fed without genetic engineering?”

“Don’t know.” Harry kept to the old ways, so she truly didn’t.

“I bet I’ve been to half the farms in Virginia in my long life, repairing John Deere tractors. The changes I’ve seen.” He shook his head. “The worst was in the eighties, when the government pretty much turned on the small farmer. God bless anyone who managed to hang on. Your family did.”

“Sometimes I think it killed Mom and Dad. They worked so hard to save this place. It took its toll. I have a husband whose income doesn’t derive from farming, so I can keep the old home place going. Still, sometimes I get overwhelmed. Maybe that’s why I get caught up with mysteries, wanting answers. Takes my mind off these huge economic forces. Nature, the government, a crop across the ocean, can affect my crop prices. I mean, there’s just little me.”

“Yep.” He breathed in the fresh morning air, for a cold front had swept through during the night. “Mystery is one thing. Murder is another. You read too many books when you were a kid.”

“Nancy Drew.” She smiled. “Mother would get after me to read serious fiction. Bored me stiff, which set her right off. Can’t help it.” She held up her hands in supplication.

“Here. This isn’t a mystery, but let me show you something.” He held out the hydraulic pump. “This is a genuine John Deere pump for your 2750. It hasn’t been cheaply produced in India or somewhere else in Asia.” He lifted an eyebrow. “For one thing, your tractor is twenty-four years old, which means it’s too old to get fake aftermarket parts for it. Don’t part with this tractor. Those countries have a real incentive to produce cheap aftermarket parts.”

“Are the fake parts defective?”

“Not necessarily, but they aren’t as good. The steel’s never as good, and moving parts are often not packed in thick-enough grease, or there’s a rub years later because the calibration isn’t perfect. Often, when you pick up a motor part not made by the original manufacturer, it’s a hair lighter. Another clue is the fitting holes. If you removed an engine element or, say, this hydraulic pump and saw that the bolt holes were maybe a little elliptical, that would mean aftermarket. They had to fuss with the original hole to make it fit.”

“I did try to look at the hydraulic pump. Chipped my tooth,” Harry joked.

Dabney laughed, then returned to the subject. “Buy the specs. If a model goes out of production, the manufacturer often doesn’t want the bother of producing the old parts. So they sell the specs for old models. It’s easier to use the tooling equipment to produce newer parts, I guess. Now, John Deere doesn’t do that, but—and it’s a big ‘but’—some of these overseas people are smart enough to hack into computers and just plain steal the specs. Anything on a computer is not safe. Hell, even the FBI’s been hacked into.”

“I never thought about that—industrial theft, I mean.”

“Billions. No stopping it, either. If I order a part from John Deere, I talk to the same guy I’ve been working with out there in Illinois for decades. I’ve got the real thing. Same with Ford. I call Ford, not a dealer here.”

“You’re not branching out and fixing old trucks, are you?”

“No, but I’m sure fixing my own. Well, I’ve just nattered on here, haven’t I? But it frosts me, frosts me good, because American businesses are being screwed. If they don’t want to make the old parts anymore, that’s their damned dumb choice, but foreign companies stealing our new stuff?” He bit his lower lip for a minute, then stood back on the small ladder to recheck the site for the new pump. “If you take care—and I know you do—you’ll get twenty, maybe thirty years out of this pump. Those hoses, you might have to change those earlier. Your old ones lasted eighteen years. A small piece of one hose is missing. Wonder what happened to that? No matter. I’m putting in all new hoses. No point in a new pump and worn-out hoses.”

Harry watched as Mrs. Murphy and Pewter left the barn, heading in the direction of the shed.

Tucker slept on the concrete floor of the shed. That concrete floor had cost Harry’s dad plenty, but it, too, held up. She questioned Dabney some more.

“Yep. Indians are building decent tractors, a lot more horsepower for the money. A heck of a lot better machine than those Russian tractors that hit the market ten years ago, but John Deere is the Rolls-Royce of tractors. Spend the money. Buy the best.”

“I’m with you there. You were telling me about models where the manufacturer no longer makes the parts. I see these magazines for old Ford parts, old Chevys. Looks like a big business. How is that different?”

“In some cases those are parts that a businessman bought from a local dealer. The car dealer no longer had the space to store mirrors, alternators, you name it, for cars from the forties, fifties, et cetera. In other cases, someone with skill can reproduce those parts.”

“Why is that different?”

“Well, for one thing, the original manufacturer has a warranty on the parts. If you buy a 1950 Chevy block, a John Deere block, a Harvester, it still is under warranty. But let’s say I have an aftermarket tractor part made in China. The manufacturer gives you a warranty, right?” He looked at her. “The part is defective. Are you going to go to China to sue? I don’t have to tell you where I bought the part, nor does any repair shop. I’ll save money using cheap aftermarket parts. Like I said, you have a model that’s old enough, you’re okay, plus I would never do that. I only use genuine parts.”

“I had no idea.”

“No one does, really.” He paused. “Someone remodeling an old car loves it. It’s irrational. Someone repairing a tractor needs it. Someone repairing a new car or a new tractor needs it, and usually pronto. A man spends more on his young mistress than on his middle-aged wife.” He glanced down at her. “Maybe that wasn’t the best comparison.”

“I get it. No apology needed. Men are doing it all over the world.”

“One woman is expensive enough. Why two?”

“Dabney, you’re awful.”

“That’s what Doris tells me.” He laughed.

“You couldn’t live without her.”

“That’s the truth. Hand me that ice pick.”

She held it up for him as he gingerly cleaned out a hole. “That’s how they think Bobby Foltz was killed,” she said. “Ice pick or something thin, they think.”

“I wouldn’t have looked.”

“Nothing to see.” Harry shrugged. “Not like Walt Richardson, whom Reverend Jones, Susan, and I found at ReNu.”

“I don’t even want to look at dead animals on the road.”

Three hours later, everything replaced, Dabney ran the tractor, declared it fixed, and Harry handed him a check for $5,319. She said a little prayer of thanks for her sunflowers. This prayer didn’t include Yancy Hampton.

The organic grocer could have used her good wishes, for his middle daughter was very expensively married that Sunday. The reception was at the Randolph Inn, and the caterer misplaced the chicken. After that debacle, Yancy wanted to replace his hysterical wife, who dissolved in a discombobulated fit of anger and raw nerves.

Yancy remembered what his mother used to say about his father: “Divorce, never. Murder, yes.” Gave him a shiver. There’d been enough murders.