The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

4


In many parts of the world, vultures have become very brave and comfortable in the presence of humans.

—The Turkey Vulture Society



Do you remember Anne?” Mrs. Lattimore asked him.

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t. I was what? Five? Six?” He smiled at Anne. “Sorry I missed you when you were here a couple of weeks ago, but I’m glad to see you now.”

There was a puzzled look on Anne’s face as she peered into his eyes. “Have we met before? I mean since that time in Washington when we were children? Your face seems familiar.”

“Family resemblance perhaps?”

Anne frowned and shook her head, staring at him more intently. “Did you always have the beard?”

“It comes and goes, depending on the weather. Without it, I pretty much look like everyone else, although there is a man in London that I run into once or twice a year and he’s convinced we were on the same rugby team in Colchester. I’ve never been to Colchester in my life and I’ve never played rugby.”

“Me either,” Anne said with a laugh. “Shall I still tell Martha to begin, Mother?”

“Please,” said Mrs. Lattimore. “Unless you’d like a drink first, Martin?”

He waved away the offer and looked expectantly at the rest of us.

“Martin is my late sister’s son,” Mrs. Lattimore told us as she completed the introductions. “Martin Crawford.”

“We met this afternoon,” I said.

His smile broadened. “So we did. I hope your nephew wasn’t offended by my abruptness. It’s been a difficult week for me. Did my aunt say you are a judge?”

He was all genial politeness now as Anne led the way into the dining room—more of the family charm? The long formal table could accommodate twelve, so there was plenty of room for the eight of us. Mrs. Lattimore took the chair at the head of the table with her nephew on her right and Dwight on her left. Kate was next to Martin and Sigrid next to Dwight, then Anne and I across from each other and Rob at the end.

Salads were already at our places, and as the silver boat of creamy dressing went around the table, conversation was general at first, despite the curiosity I was sure the others must share about this unfamiliar nephew.

I hadn’t known that Mrs. Lattimore had a sister and I gathered that Kate hadn’t known either. As a quasi-relative, though, Kate was free to ask all the questions I couldn’t.

“We were never particularly close as children,” Mrs. Lattimore explained. “As much my fault as hers, probably. And it didn’t help that she was engaged to my husband first.”

Again that graceful shrug, followed by the same wry smile we’d seen when she announced earlier that she had no secrets left. By the time the entrée was served, we had learned that after Mr. Lattimore broke off his engagement to Ferrabee Gilbert and proposed to her sister Jane, Ferrabee had gone to live with a college roommate in Washington. A month before the Lattimores married, she eloped with a young attaché assigned to the British embassy there. Soon afterwards, he was posted to North Africa, and she never came back to America.

“Father never forgave her and Ferrabee never forgave me.”

“Ferrabee?” I asked Martin Crawford. “Does that mean the old Ferrabee place belongs to you?”

“Not to me,” he replied. “To my aunt. She’s letting me camp out there.”

“My mother was a Ferrabee,” said Mrs. Lattimore, “and I inherited it.”

Turning back to Martin Crawford, she said, “I’ll be forever sorry that your mother and I never got a chance to mend fences.”

“And I’m sorry I waited so long to come looking for her people,” he said, lifting a forkful of warm poached salmon. “But in all honesty, I barely remember her myself. I had a good stepmother, though. She’s still living in London. In fact, I hope to be there for her eightieth birthday next month.”

“You’ll be finished with your research on turkey buzzards by then?” I asked.

“With a little luck,” he answered cheerfully.

“Research?” asked Sigrid.

“I’m not the photographer your mother is,” he said, raising his glass to Anne diagonally across from him, “but I’ve managed to cobble together a living as an ornithologist. I lead tours to exotic-sounding places for serious birders who want to add to their life lists, and I do a little teaching. I’ve also had a bit of luck getting a couple of books published. We lived all over when I was a boy, and my stepmother always bought me a guide to that country’s birds. What would you like to know about Neophron percnopterus, the Egyptian vulture also famously called Pharaoh’s Chicken?”

Diverted, Kate asked, “Chicken? How does a vulture get mistaken for a chicken?”

“It’s supposed to be a humorous comment on how often the vulture is depicted in ancient hieroglyphics,” he told her. “An archaeological joke. Archaeological humor can be as dry as the Sahara, I’m afraid.”

He smoothed his short beard and turned back to Sigrid. “But to answer your question, raptors are my specialty and I’m writing an illustrated piece for a North African nature magazine. My agent interested them in a comparison of African vultures with the vultures here in your American South.”

Mrs. Lattimore touched his hand. “Whatever your reason for coming, I’m glad you didn’t leave it until too late. I do wish you would stay here with us, though. We have plenty of bedrooms and that house out there is nothing but a shack. No electricity. No plumbing.”

“I’ve stayed in much worse,” he assured her. “Besides, I rather doubt your neighbors would like it if I fed dead animals to vultures in your back garden. Especially if they began roosting on the surrounding rooftops.”

Kate grimaced. “Aren’t they the ugliest, most disgusting birds around?”

“Not a bit of it,” he said and launched into an enthusiastic defense of what he called “nature’s dustmen,” reeling off facts and figures to bolster their importance in the circle of life. “In fact, their very name—Cathartes—means ‘purifier.’ The acid in their stomachs can kill cholera germs.”

“You’ve certainly made a believer out of my nephew,” I said and amused the others by telling how Reese had stopped to pick up a dead squirrel to drop off for Crawford’s buzzards.

“Not mine, actually.” He held out his glass for Dwight to top off his wine from the bottle between them. “It’s against the law for private individuals to keep vultures in captivity. I merely feed them so that I can get close enough for some good pictures. They can be quite friendly once they trust you. And of course, it doesn’t hurt to provide them with a steady diet of fresh kill.”

He turned to me with a rueful smile. “That’s why I asked your nephew not to feed them there himself. I quite selfishly want to encourage them to think of me as their one dependable food source in this area.”

“You keep calling them vultures,” Rob said. “Aren’t buzzards the same birds?”

“Technically no, idiomatically yes,” he said. “Here in the States, what you call buzzards actually are vultures. There weren’t any vultures in the British Isles, so the early English settlers lumped them under the common name for buteos, and the name gradually transferred over to your vultures to differentiate them from hawks, the way your American thrush got called a robin simply because it has a red breast similar to the English bird’s.”

“But why turkey vultures?” asked Kate, whose city roots sometimes betray her. “They don’t eat turkeys, do they?”

Dwight, Rob, and I smiled at that.

“Red head, no feathers on it,” Rob told her. “Just like a wild turkey.”

“I’m not sure why the turkey’s bald,” said Crawford, “but for vultures, it’s a cleanliness thing. Not to get gross here while we dine, but when you consider how and what vultures eat, fluffy head feathers would be a serious handicap.”

Anne’s fork clattered onto her plate. “Changing the subject,” she said firmly, “what magazine is the article for?”

His reply was unintelligible, and at our blank looks he said, “Sorry. In English, I suppose you could call it Modern Nature or Wildlife Today.”

“Was that Arabic?” Anne asked.

He nodded.

As the import of his nod sank in, I was impressed. “You’re writing it in Arabic?”

He looked embarrassed. “It’s actually easier than trying to translate it back from English.”

“How many languages do you speak?” Sigrid asked.

He shrugged, but Sigrid persisted.

“Fluently? Only five or six.”

With an amused lift of her eyebrow, Anne said, “But you can read—?”

“Eight,” Martin admitted. “No credit to me, I’m afraid. A child’s brain is like a sponge. It can soak up anything, and we didn’t stay behind the embassy walls. My stepmother always did her own shopping in the marketplaces wherever my father was posted, and they sent me to the local schools. And, of course, she was Pakistani, so I had a leg up there.”

“He was being modest before,” Anne told us. “That book you brought Mother? There are some wonderful pictures of birds flying over the pyramids and seen from above. How on earth did you get that angle? And what sort of camera did you use?”

Mrs. Lattimore sent Sigrid up to her bedroom for the book in question, and while it went around the table, Crawford and Anne went back and forth on the merits of different cameras and lenses. The book was coffee-table quality, beautifully printed on heavy glossy paper, and the plates were in full color. Unfortunately, except for the Latin names of the birds beneath each picture, the text was in Arabic.



By the time dessert was served—warm peach cobbler swimming in heavy cream—Mrs. Lattimore was clearly starting to fade. She left her spoon on the plate and shook her head at the offer of coffee. I could see that it was an effort for her to maintain her ramrod posture, and when her shoulders slumped of their own volition, she pushed back from the table.

Chloe Adams appeared as if by magic until I realized there was probably an old-fashioned foot bell within reach of Mrs. Lattimore’s shoe under the table. They had likely worked out a signal. One ring for Martha, two for Chloe.

“Please don’t get up,” she said to the men, who had begun to rise. “So tiresome of me, but you’ll hurt Martha’s feelings if you don’t stay and finish her wonderful cobbler. No, Anne, you really don’t need to come with us. Chloe will take care of me.”

Anne ignored her mother’s protests. “I’ll say good night, too,” she told us, “but I’m sure I’ll see you all again. Martin, I’ll drive out one day if I might. I’d love to see those birds up close and I still think our paths might have crossed somewhere. You weren’t in Peru five or six years ago, were you?”

Martin Crawford’s face brightened. “Actually, I was!” he said. “I led a tour group to the Andes to watch the condors. What a coincidence if we wound up in the same hotel or airport lounge. We’ll have to compare notes.”



After Anne left, we finished our dessert, and when there was a lull in the conversation, Sigrid invited us back to the living room for more coffee and brandies, but Kate reminded us that tomorrow was a school day. I remembered that I had an early appointment with an attorney from Wilmington, while Dwight pleaded the need to check up on the search for that missing woman.

“If you have some free time and want to see how a county sheriff’s department works, I’d be glad to show you around,” he told Sigrid and gave her his card.

Rain was still sluicing down heavily when we reached the porch, so Martin Crawford did not linger on the steps. “Quite glad to have met you,” he said and splashed off to that dilapidated truck.

“Nice man,” I said as Dwight slid into the backseat of Rob’s car with me. “Interesting, too. How long you think it’ll take your mother to rope him into talking to one of the science classes?”

Miss Emily was the principal at West Colleton High and never missed a chance to provide enrichment for her students.

“About buzzards?” Kate asked, shaking her head. “Yuck!”

“Teenage boys usually like yuck,” Rob said. “Right, Dwight?”

All the same, when we saw a dead rabbit lying by the roadside, Rob did not stop and pick it up.