Chapter 11

Thursday, January 7, 1999

Just from the way the schedule worked, Emily didn't have to be in early on Friday morning, so she made a point of leaving for work earlier and stopping off at the Courier.

The Bradford Courier was over a hundred years old, the last survivor of a newspaper war that had gone on for close to forty years back around the turn of the century, with four newspapers involved. Just a little country weekly usually running eight full-size pages, sometimes more and sometimes less; it occupied a single-story block building toward the edge of downtown, a block or so up the street from the Spee-D-Mart. No longer printed on site -- it hadn't been since the early 1960s -- much of the building was little used anymore. The majority of the operation was concentrated in a front room, where there were several computers sitting on several extraordinarily messy desks. Over the years Emily had done the chamber of commerce reports, she'd learned just a little about the business. Way back when she was born, it had employed five full-time and two part-time employees; now it was reduced to Weber, a teacher at the school who did the sports reports on a per-story basis, and Weber's bookkeeper, ad saleswoman and whatnot, Hazel Perkins.

In the time that Weber had been involved with the paper, it had gone from old fashioned hot-type letterpress through several generations of cold-type typesetting equipment, with increasing degrees of computerization. Now, the paper was mostly made up right on a computer screen. He was working at a computer doing something or other when Emily walked in. "So, what happened at the meeting last night?" he asked.

"It was pretty interesting," Emily said. "You were right; Lynnette was all up in arms. From what I could see the board couldn't ignore her but couldn't quite brush her off, either. So, they had to politely listen to her rant for a while."

"About what I figured," Weber nodded. "Wouldn't be the first time it happened. What's this all about, anyway?"

"There's this guy, Bert Woodward, who bought a farm out on Henderson Road last year. I've seen him around the store a few times but never have really gotten to know him. He's got a thing about big guns, and while he leases the land out for farming, he also uses it to shoot them."

"Nothing wrong with that," Weber shrugged. "Some people like hunting and shooting, and other people want to not let them enjoy it."

"This is just a touch different," Emily grinned. "I mean, big guns. He's got a replica Civil War cannon out there, a twelve-pounder Napoleon, he called it. Some other stuff too, but he's real proud of this Napoleon thing; he said he spent fifteen thousand dollars on it, and bought the farm so he'd have a place to shoot it."

"Right," Weber smiled. "That is just a touch bigger than your typical deer rifle. Does he actually shoot things with it, or just make a heckuva racket?"

"It shoots cannonballs and all," she smiled. "Apparently there's this old gravel pit on the back of the property, he takes old junk cars out there and pops away at them from a couple hundred yards. I talked to a guy who's seen it, and he says that a four-inch cannonball will do a number on an old Ford. Anyway, Lynnette lives halfway across the township but as soon as she heard about it she called the sheriff. There was a deputy there who said it's all perfectly legal."

"Legal?" Weber frowned. "An artillery piece? I find that hard to believe!"

"The deputy said that the ATF doesn't regulate black powder weapons with unfixed ammunition. Fixed ammunition is like a rifle cartridge, where you have the bullet with a brass shell filled with powder. Unfixed ammunition is like a black powder rifle, where you have to load the powder and the bullet separately. Apparently he's not the only one of these loonies around; they have some sort of a club, like Civil War re-enactors or something. They're planning on having a meet or rally or whatever they call them. 'Encampment' is the word I wrote down in my notes."

"I will be damned," Weber shook his head. "So what do the neighbors think?"

"There's no real near neighbors," Emily explained. "The nearest house is about half a mile off, the guy who owns it was there, and he thinks it's pretty neat. I-67 is along one side of the property; it's on one of those stub ends, so there's just no one who lives close by. Woodward said that was part of why he bought the place. So, anyway, Lynnette was trying to get the township to pass an ordinance that bans people owning or shooting off cannons. The township attorney said the township might want to be real careful about that since it gets into second amendment country."

"The right to carry arms is one thing," Weber shook his head again. "Towing them is something else. On the other hand, there's a part of me that's still juvenile enough to imagine it could be fun to blow the hell out of an old car with a Civil War cannon."

"I have to admit, although I never thought about it until last night; I can see how it could be fun, too," Emily grinned. "I have had a couple cars that would have made me happy to light the fuse or however you fire one of those things."

"I've had one or two like that myself," Weber grinned. "So the township didn't do anything, right?"

Emily shrugged. "They told Lynnette that they'd have to look into what their options are, which I take to mean that they don't feel they can do anything and hope she'll get over it."

"Knowing Lynnette, I doubt that's going to happen," Weber shook his head. "So, did you write a story?"

"No, I didn't," she shook her head. "I mean, I could go into a fair amount of detail, or I could just keep it brief, saying there were arguments on both sides and touching on them. I wanted to know what you think about it."

"Did you let Lynnette know you were writing a story about it?"

"No, I never talked to her directly. I thought I heard enough of what she had to say when she was talking to the board, and all I'd get was more of the same. I didn't actually talk to Woodward, either, but I was in a group throwing questions at him after the meeting. The general attitude I got there was people were curious, and some could see how it could be fun."

"Then I'd say keep it brief," Weber advised. "There's no point in kicking over an anthill or I'll have Lynnette calling me up three times a day to bitch about it." He thought about it for a second. "What I'd really like to have real soon is a story about what he's doing out there, not grinding an axe but from a 'gee zow, this is interesting' approach, not even trying to touch on the opposition to it."

"It is interesting, once you stop and think about it," Emily grinned. "You know Dayna Berkshire and Sandy Beach, don't you?"

"It'd be hard to not know who they are in this town," Weber nodded. "Although I have to admit I don't know them well."

"I've been to some of the renaissance faires they go to," she replied. "You'd think seeing people jousting would be pretty far out, but the people doing it have fun and the spectators have even more fun. When you get right down to it, it sounds like the same kind of thing, just a little noisier."

"That's the attitude I'd like to see the story approached with," he smiled. "You think you might like to try and write it?"

{c}• • •

Emily was just a little giddy by the time she got down to the Spee-D-Mart. Woodward and his Civil War cannon had seemed a little, well, odd, but amusing. When you got down to it, no odder than some of the people she'd seen running around renaissance faires, something out of the ordinary, and it struck her as interesting that Weber had asked her to write the story. She'd pointed it out to him, but he said it was no big deal. She could write, she was open-minded, and if she wrote it, Lynnette Hershberger couldn't accuse him of grinding an axe on her fanny, which made sense in a skewed sort of way.

After she'd agreed, she'd sat down at one of the computers there in the Courier office and kicked out a brief story about the board meeting, keeping it pretty simple. Weber looked it over, made a couple minor changes, including fixing a spelling error, and thanked her for her efforts, handing her a twenty for her trouble. That was neat -- to actually get paid for writing! She knew it happened, but had never happened for her.