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Voices

by Vic Jameson

A Summer Church Reunion

It was when the coyote escaped that the trouble really started.

Not that seeing a coyote is such big news. We see them right often out our way. But this one was loose in a crowd of folks who weren’t accustomed to having coyotes underfoot. The grownups had no idea what to do. The kids did, though. They did what any normal kids would do: they chased him. Chased him, whooping and yelling as he — if it was a he — began loping here and yonder amongst the picnic tables and chairs set up there in the willow grove for the Fourteenth Annual Picnic and Preaching Time of the Brotherly /and Sisterly Love Neighborhood Church.

I say if he was a he. Seems like we always call such animals “he” even when we don’t know what it is. But that is another story.

Whatever it was, that coyote was born to make trouble. It—or he, or she—could have just trotted on out on the prairie when it or he or she got loose from the tether rope the vocational agriculture students had tethered him on.

The coyote was a school mascot, you see, and the high school football boys liked to keep one — a coyote — in a pen down by the vocational ag building most of the school year so that the ag students could feed and water it and take good care of it in bad weather and such. Then they would take it out, on a leash of course, and show it off at the school pep rallies and ball games. To pep up our team, I suppose, which most seasons could use some pepping up but that wasn’t the coyote’s fault.

Well this time they got permission from Mr. Lewitt, the principal of the high school, to parade the critter around and so they were doing that except that they had tied him to a sycamore tree so that he — or she — would be out of the way when dinner was being served.

That’s how things were when the coyote finished chewing his rope in two. Did it sneaky like, the coyote did, and before you could say Brotherly/ Sisterly Rah Rah Rah the coyote was off and away.

But like I said earlier, he — or she — didn’t just trot out to the prairie. He or she trotted right up to the tables and to the ladies setting the tables, just as though he — or she — had been properly introduced to every one of them.

Which makes me think that coyote was a he, because no lady, even of the coyote family, would bust in on a conversation that way.

It frightened some of the ladies so much they dropped their Creamy Rich Peanut Butter pies and their Grandma Cuckleberry’s Recipe Sweet Potato Salads right on the table and the benches and some of course fell to the ground and caused the ladies and girls working there to be so upset they got the shakes. The boys weren’t scared, or if so they made sure not to show it but mostly they just rolled on the ground laughing at all the hullabaloo and got their good clothes all so grass stained you could be sure their mamas would give them something not to laugh about when they got home.

Like I say it was just about dinner time and the ladies and girls had put out the grandest picnic you could imagine. Ham and turkey and beef all roasted, and every single salad and vegetable and some ladies’ specialties like delicio in huge pans and beef stew, green chile stew and chicken stew. Breads of all sorts. And desserts that the menfolks were eyeing well before time for the blessing came and you could tell right there by looking that the preacher was going to have a hard time keeping folks’ attention for the last of the preaching and the invitations to soul-saving that afternoon.

And right there on the middle table was a washtub full of homemade ice cream. Well, I shouldn’t say a tubful. But it was an old-fashioned tub, and it had an old fashioned hand-crank ice cream freezer, filled with Mrs. Griffiths’ Fresh Strawberry Vanilla Homemade, with ice packed around it, in the tub. Eight quarts, somebody said. And the lid had just been taken off even there in the heat because all the kids had been doing what their daddies wanted to do which was to snitch a spoon of it before it was all gone.

And in the lip-smacking and the polite jockeying for places in the serving line, everybody forgot about the coyote. That didn’t last for long, though, because just as the Reverend was about to say grace over this feast, here came the coyote. Trotting at a pretty good pace. Well, more than that, really, because he was trying to get away from young Truman Turman, Jr. who was a right good runner and had a grip on the piece of the rope the coyote had chewed apart and — Truman, Jr., that is — running as fast as he could go, half running and half dragging and trying to stay up with the weighted-down coyote.

The preacher had just said “Good God,” to begin his prayer when the coyote dragging the boy swung around the end of the tables and right up to where the serving ladies and the dishes of food were. The preacher might have put a different accent on his prayer opening had he spoken a half a minute later. But instead of dinner starting, what started was the wildest parade I expect you ever saw, once it got underway.

The coyote was like a parade marshal or a bandmaster, dashing along, looking back now and then as if to see that all his troops were in line. Then came the boys yelling and laughing and scuffling and running as they did, trying to stay up with one smaller boy trying to rein in a coyote. Then came the girls whooping and screeching and the mothers trying to calm things down and the fathers trying to calm the mothers. And although he didn’t say so I expect the preacher was beginning to wonder if maybe God wouldn’t like to call him to some other line of work.

Like I say, the coyote was chasing around and under the chairs and tables just having a good time as coyotes will, a piece of his rope that he had chewed through dragging with him. He would run up to a table and get his front paws on the bench or chair and reach just high enough to grab off a drumstick or a piece of Mrs. Appleby’s double chocolate cake. Nobody was gaining any ground, which was hard to believe but when you think about it it’s easy to see why a healthy boy couldn’t catch a coyote when the boy is laughing until he can hardly breathe fast enough and barely able to stay on his feet, much less catch up with a wild critter that no doubt has had to run for his very life more than once.

There’s no telling what might have happened had not the police siren screamed just as the coyote was completing a run around the table, this time with a turkey drumstick in his jaws.

Funny, isn’t it, how the sound of a siren will shock people into stopping what they’re doing. That’s what happened. The kids stopped running as if they had hit a wall. The ladies quit sorting the food. The fathers mostly just put their hands on the their sons’ shoulders and kept them still. The police chief in his dress uniform appeared, looking as official as he could manage.

He blew his siren two more long, loud times then said he had a little speech to make. But before he could begin to make it the preacher walked over to meet him and they began to talk in low voices. Truman Turman Sr. and a couple of other men went over and listened. The crowd was getting a little restless when the pastor and the officer turned toward the tables where the people were and the food was.

We’ve had some complaints ’bout the noise from out here, Officer Ketchem said. Some of the citizens of our town have called about the racket. Said they’d been wakened from their Sunday naps or that they can’t concentrate on watching the TV ball games. Said you need to do something about it.

I hate to interfere with religious matters, he said, but folks have a right to rest on the Sabbath. So I thought maybe if you folks would just like to maybe sing a hymn or two and have your dinner and say a prayer, maybe we won’t have to be put any complaints on the record at all.

Then the preacher said, we’ve taken the liberty of inviting Officer Ketchem to stay and have dinner with us, and the people in the crowd clapped their hands politely. And maybe these fine young men, he said pointing to the boys, maybe these fine young men will want to help clean up the picnic area here when they’re done eating. The boys didn’t want to, but it was clear by looking at their fathers that they’d do as the officer had said.

So sure enough nothing ever appeared on the record or even in the paper about the picnic that got interrupted. The coyote was last seen trotting over the hill out by the oak trees all alone and unchased but he — or she, whichever it was — has an arrest warrant out against him or her to this day, for malicious disturbance of the peace and for theft of a turkey leg and assorted other edible foodstuff intended for human consumption.