The Litter Of The Law

That same evening, glittering stars pierced the night. Looking out the tall, high windows of the old schoolhouse, Hester Martin could vaguely make out the obelisk in the cemetery a mile down the tertiary state road. Occasionally a truck would pass. She thought she heard a coyote.

Sitting down at one of the small school desks, she took out her Moleskine notebook, flipped it open, pulled out a pen. Before she could write down her thoughts, a car pulled up outside, its headlights illuminating the windows, then both the motor and the lights turned off.

Within seconds, Tazio entered the lovely room accompanied by her yellow Labrador retriever, the popular Brinkley.

“Good to see you,” said Hester. “I know you’re busy, what with your job and various committees.”

“Hester, I always have time for you and it’s important we run through the Halloween Hayride.” Tazio sat in the desk across the aisle from Hester’s.

The desks remained in rows just as they were in 1965, when the school was abandoned.

“Gets dark so early now,” Hester remarked. “Somehow it always affects me. Makes me sleepy.” She laughed at herself.

“Makes me fat.” Tazio ruefully smiled. “I always put on weight in the winter. This year I am determined not to do it.”

“Natural. It’s a natural cycle.”

“You never gain weight. Neither does Harry,” Tazio said.

“With me it’s high metabolism. That or worry. As to Harry, both her mother and father stayed slim. They worked hard, those people. So does Harry and so do you.”

“Hard enough, but most of the time I’m sitting on my butt. If I go to a building site or walk through construction, that’s about it. I need to join a gym.”

“You look just fine. I wanted you to see these buildings from the inside. This one, the middle one, was literally the middle school. Has some lab equipment, not much. Everything these students got was already used, passed down. The books especially were worn.” She thought a moment. “Your outstanding work for the library is almost done. We still have to raise money but your architectural work is complete and so practical. That’s why I wanted you to see this.”

“Funny, I’ve driven by these schoolhouses from time to time but never stopped. I always wanted to.”

“They’re built to last.” She pointed to the windows. “So much natural light saved lighting money. When my mother was small, each of these buildings had a wood-burning stove smack in the middle. You can’t see the hole for the flue, as when the stoves were removed the workmen patched the ceiling. Put in oil-fired heat. And since the county still pays the electric bill and fills up those old tanks, there is low heat here throughout the cold weather. The pipes don’t freeze.”

Tazio rose, walked to the back of the room, with Brinkley following her, and opened a door. “Well, they put a bathroom in, too.”

“Right around the time of World War One. That’s what my mother said.” Hester smiled, pulling an old-fashioned long key from her coat pocket, a grosgrain ribbon attached. “Come here.”

Tazio and Brinkley walked back. “Wow, that’s really old.”

“Hold out your hand,” Hester ordered, dropping the key into the young woman’s outstretched palm. “This key opens all the doors. It’s the master key. I’ve had it for years.” She held up her hand. “Long story made short: I took it back in the eighties. Didn’t trust the county commissioners or anyone else, really. Tazio, consider bringing these buildings back to life. Oh, it will take time, money, and lots of political organizing, but you of all people can imagine the possibilities if we saved the buildings’ best features. No lowered ceilings.”

Tazio looked around. “For what purpose? It won’t be used as a school again.”

“I don’t know about that. It’s possible it could be the basis for a small private school or a museum. You’ll have to fight for it.”

“And you are assigning me this task?” Tazio asked, eyebrows raised. “Aren’t you going to help?”

“Yes, but”—she smiled weakly—“my brother died six years ago. Sometimes I think I’m not long for this world.”

“Hester, I hope not.” Tazio’s voice registered concern.

Hester waved her hand. “No one knows, do they? I could live to one hundred or be gone tomorrow. Now come along with me. Bring the doggy.”

“Thank you,” Brinkley replied.

The three of them piled into Hester’s SUV. “Let me just review with you, briefly, the Halloween Hayride. I’ll be in wagon one. You’re the ringmaster. You’ve got to make sure our actors are in costume, go to their proper places. If anything is amiss, you fix it. I’m going to sit in hay and enjoy the show.” She grinned.

Driving slowly, Hester headed north on the winding road, Buddy’s cornfields on her left behind and around the schoolhouses.

She turned to Tazio in the passenger seat and said, “Okay, Frankenstein and Dr. Frankenstein will be in the schoolhouse. Goblins and ghosts that fly around will be in the dried-out cornfields. That ought to be scary, hearing the rustle.”

“And it will be dark, too,” said Tazio. “I checked my calendar. It’s a couple of days after the new moon.”

“As you know, the ghosts and goblins will be lit from within. Oh, this ought to scare the devil out of people.” Hester stopped between two huge trees on each side of the road. “Jeepers Creepers will fly between the trees.”

“Right.” Tazio knew the order of events, but riding with Hester through the outdoor fright stations amplified how dramatic this year’s hayride would be.

“We’ve got a cable to run between the trees. For the Headless Horseman—but you know him. Your boyfriend.”

“Well, yes,” Tazio laughed.

“Now, here’s a good one.” The middle-aged lady stopped on the road, the stone retaining wall of the graveyard standing out against the night sky. “Jason with his chain saw battles Count Dracula. Don’t forget to make a convincing arm to come out of a grave.”

“Already have it. We aren’t using a real grave. I imagine the family would be upset.”

“Mmm.” Hester cast her eyes toward the obelisk and a few other tall statues. “The big monuments—families had big money back then, and you know, every one of them came to wrack and ruin. The names still fill the county voting registers but not much else. Ever notice how sometimes money makes people stupid?”

Tazio laughed again. “Among other things. But if things are too easy, I guess people lose their ambition.”

“Oh, the Villions, the Huntleys, the Yosts, they either gambled it away, drank it away, or made really bad business decisions.”

“Wine, women, and song?” Tazio raised one eyebrow.

“I will give those families some credit. The women were beautiful, all married well. It was the men who went to hell in a handbasket. Well, anyway, on the other side of the graveyard you repel Dracula with a cross, and then just past you, Reverend Jones will be a monk with an electric torch guiding people to Mount Carmel Church. You can just see the little spire. Mount Carmel only has but so much money.” She stopped. “We are paying them well for the use of the rec hall. Always a good idea to keep on the sunny side of any church.” She stopped talking, turned the truck down the farm road on the north side of the graveyard, backed out to return to the schoolhouses.

“Aren’t there something like twenty-two thousand Christian sects, each with different ideas?” Tazio asked.

“I don’t know. I’m Catholic myself. Sometimes I believe it. Sometimes I don’t. Mostly I love mass. But out here looking at the stars, that’s my true church,” Hester replied with great feeling.

“It’s mine,” Brinkley piped up.

“I know what you mean,” Tazio quietly agreed.

“Where’d you put the key?”

“In my pants pocket. It’s deeper than my coat’s.”

“Don’t you lose that key. That’s the master.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

“Good girl to call me ma’am. You always call a lady older than yourself ma’am.”

Tazio laughed again. “Hester, we do that in St. Louis, too.”

“Miss it?”

“Not really. I go home to see Mom and Dad but I don’t think I could live in a big city anymore.”

“Millions upon millions do.” She pulled in to the parking lot, a flat dirt place, next to Tazio’s car. “That’s another thing that scares me: How can the newcomers appreciate these buildings? They move down here to escape the city, but they bring their ways and they want efficiency, services, bottom-line kind of thinking. Spending money on these historic buildings would seem stupid to them.”

“Maybe not,” said Tazio, taking the bait. “It’s part of our history. No matter where you come from.”

“Well.” Hester slowed her speech. “I hope you’re right. My true dream is that eventually we can buy these from the county. Ha!” She clapped her hands. “Won’t that be a fight! Will it help that you’re mixed race? Yes. Politically it will help. You have such wonderful gifts, gifts few people possess. You could bring these buildings back to life. Wouldn’t it be glorious to hear laughter inside them?”

“Yes, it would,” Tazio agreed.

Hester cut the motor, turned to face her. “I know people think I’m weird.”

Tazio didn’t quite know what to say. “You’re different from most Virginia ladies.”

“I speak my mind. I don’t have the time for the minuet of politeness. Bores me.”

“I certainly understand that.” Tazio smiled, remembering what a jolt it was to move from Missouri to Virginia.

“Maybe I am weird. I get worked up about things, history, getting books into childrens’ hands, bringing buildings back to life, righting old wrongs.” She inhaled deeply. “I get ideas like everyone worries about carbon emissions. What about the billions of people breathing out CO₂? That has to damage the environment. I blurt out this stuff and then people think I’m weird. They don’t want to think. That’s the problem.”

“It’s painful to think, Hester.”

Hester stared at her. “But you do.”

“Only after I’ve exhausted every other alternative.”

This made Hester giggle. “Sometimes I do that, too. Well, girl, I railroaded you into designing parts of the Crozet Library and now I’m railroading you again.”

“You are,” Tazio said honestly.

“Will you take this on?”

“You know I will. But you have to work with me.”

“I will, Taz, but things can happen. If something happens to me, you carry the ball, hear?”

“Don’t say that, Hester.” She breathed deeply. “But if anything happens to you, I will carry the ball and vice versa.”

“Deal,” Hester quickly answered.

When Tazio and Brinkley drove away, Hester returned to the middle schoolhouse. Inside, she sat down, took out her notebook, and started to write, then paused. She walked up to the teacher’s desk in the front of the room, pulled open a drawer, took out a yellowed square of paper, and wrote a name on it with her fountain pen. She’d just dropped a lot on Tazio. She knew that when the younger woman read this, her natural curiosity would do the rest. She returned it to the middle drawer, turned out the lights, and shut the door and locked it, for she had a backup key to the outside door. Hearing the satisfying click, she walked to her truck, then stopped a moment to study the stars. They’d been up there long before she was born and they’d be there long after she was gone. She found that comforting.

Tazio, driving home with Brinkley next to her, wrestled with emotion. Hester had touched her. She had a strong feeling that Hester must have a premonition of her death, and that the kind-hearted eccentric was passing the torch on to her.