Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Mrs. Velma Stepforth noticed that Mrs. Maggie Lee, at the house next door, seemed a bit agitated, and it had nothing to do with her little Ludlow cousins and non-grounded Trent friends playing between yard to yard in front of both of them.
“Mrs. Lee, have you had my take on mint julips without the alcohol?” the older woman said, and smiled as the younger woman took courage and started over.
“No, I haven't, and thanks,” Mrs. Lee said.
“Everything all right?” Mrs. Stepforth said.
“Probably,” she said. “It's just that a snake is calling the house in five minutes, and I don't know whether to be scared of or for the snake.”
“Yikes,” Mrs. Stepforth said, “but I get it. I know who the snake killer is in your home.”
“This is the thing about Harry,” Mrs. Lee said. “He has a heart of gold. He will go as far as he has to in order to make sure that everyone and everything in his responsibility is the way it is supposed to be – but the problem is, he will go as far as he has to, and the thing you never want to do is betray him or anyone he is concerned with.
“It's that Lee thing,” Mrs. Stepforth said. “They talked his Uncle Robert into believing his family would be endangered by my people being free and Northern white men colonizing the South, and he got up and got responsible for taking out 100,000 lives. Now, only one of those things was true, but the dead were already dead.”
“They never should have hired Harry for the Big Loft Police Department,” Mrs. Lee said. “I'm saying that knowing I might never have met him and gotten to know him, and thus missed the second love of my life – but when you are that corrupt, you just don't have any business bringing in Henry Fitzhugh Lee, because you are going to touch off a fuse that is going to burn out everything you have – and they still don't get it. These arrogant old heads are about to all be shut down by the incoming state superintendent under conservatorship, and they are busy combing Harry's record to try to cut down on his severance check!”
“Oh, that's going to be way more expensive than they think,” Mrs. Stepforth said, “because the way he and my husband think, once they realize what you are doing, they realize you've done it before and sart backtracking you. You have a better chance with a bear, trying to hide honey – .”
“Honey? Where?” said Mrs. Lee's baby cousin, five-year-old Lil' Robert Ludlow as he came running.
“Or trying to hide it from Lil' Robert here,” Mrs. Stepforth said as he bounced up onto her porch and ino her arms. “Would you like some mint tea with honey, Rob?”
“I would – please, Cousin Maggie?”
“Sure.”
“Tell the rest they can come on too – we'l have a tea party on the lawn,” Mrs. Stepforth said, and she and Mrs. Lee set it up, thereby keeping all the children from being anywhere in earshot when Capt. H.F. Lee took that call, and ended it, with every inch of his Uncle Robert's famous deadliness in his calm, cold voice.
“Sir, write it down for your successors before you write down what else you are going to write down – men with utter lack of credibility ought not comb the records of others for faults lest they draw attention to their own evil doings, especially when a man has embezzled from payroll to the extent you have such that the state of Virginia has called the FBI to come get him – and by him I mean you -- in about ten minutes. You are not a man in a glass house attempting to throw a stone: you are a man in a cardboard street shanty who has doused your whole excuse for a structure with gasoline before attempting to figure out just how to light a Molotov cocktail.
"If you are a strong man, you will go out and get on the ground spread-eagle and wait, and then start confessing the minute the FBI arrived so that your family might have a chance to get past this in a decade and you might meet your grandchildren. I will give you this, Capt. Crutcher: you are no coward! So, I give you time to do what you need to do!”
Historically, Capt. Crutcher had his additional reasons to want to take a Lee down a peg, but, as it was in the case of Col. Crutcher in the grip of Gen. R.E. Lee, that was not an even fight. The difference was, the Civil War-era family members had essentially a disagreement on what you do when outnumbered profoundly. Col. Crutcher had not intended to be in conflict with the general. His police captain nephew, however, had been itching for a fight with R.E. Lee's nephew and had at last provoked it, only to find out that the spirit and image of R.E. Lee was as close to as alive and well as it could be in that particular nephew, had read his mind, turned his entire plan around, and had him out on the ground spread-eagle and confessing, 8.5 minutes later.
How?
“If you are a strong man … you are no coward!”
The younger Lee, knowing about the old quarrel, had given Capt. Crutcher the familial vindication he had wanted … and thus had succeeded where his uncle had failed in getting said Crutcher convicted, locked up, and permanently taken out of public life … but in a decade, the little Crutcher grandchildren would indeed meet their grandfather as again a free man. The modern Lee more than justified his nickname as the Angel of Death … but, quite often, he leaned a bit more on the thoroughly dominating but compassionate angel side to move his enemies out of the way.
