Bitter Business

the dog goes out to flush game it gets killed by a snake, it’s a terrible waste.” From the bedroom we heard Jack’s booming voice. “Okay Tom, on the count of three!”
    Safe in the kitchen, Peaches and I sat perfectly still, listening like stowaways. After a minute we heard a crash and then a bump followed by a shout of triumph. Jack led the procession, carrying the pail through the house. We could hear the angry rattle of the snake’s tail through the blue plastic.
    “Don’t you ladies worry now,” Tom advised shyly. “We’ve got this feller where he won’t be doin’ nobody any harm.”
    “You’re not going to be letting that thing loose near the house, are you?” Peaches asked anxiously.
    “No, ma’am. I’m going to take it back down to the kennel. It’ll come in handy with those new pups. Just today J.T. caught a rattler up by Snake Crick, but he mustn’t have put the lid on real good because it got away before he got around to killin’ it. You just be careful about leavin’ those doors open, you hear? These rascals are on the move on account of it bein’ so wet, and there’s more rain in the forecast.”
    I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as he took his gruesome prize out into the night.
     
    Dagny’s funeral was small and sad. As a light rain fell, Father O’Donnell, who had, as a parish priest, offered Dagny Cavanaugh her first communion, spoke movingly about eternity while the mourners huddled tearfully underneath their umbrellas. Besides the family there was a cluster of local residents, people who worked at Tall Pines, like Darlene, and had also known Dagny since she was a little girl. People who’d stood in much the same place and watched them lower her brother Jimmy into the ground.
    Claire stood bravely between her grandfather and the aunt who had helped raise her. Before them, the fresh-turned red of the Georgia soil stood out like a wound against the damp green of the grass. Behind her, Eugene wept openly, and even Philip could not contain his grief. Lydia, dressed like a cross between Morticia Addams and Coco Chanel, wore a heavy mantilla of black lace and hovered over an old, frail black woman whose rheumy eyes never strayed from the casket. The twins had blessedly been left at home.
    After the final prayers were said, an elegantly athletic man of forty with a shock of black hair and a dark Armani suit walked with Claire back to the house. When I asked who he was, Peaches explained that he was Dagny’s rock-climbing friend from Belgium. I remembered the night we spent talking before the fire in her living room and the chocolates we had eaten the night before she died.
    Here, under the graceful awning of willow trees, it might seem easy to imagine that it was some gentle hand that had laid claim to Dagny Cavanaugh. But for me, nothing would ever obscure the final agony of her death or my anger at seeing her taken from her family.
    Back at the house I did not join the others for pie and coffee, but instead went back to my room to pack and organize my papers. Earlier that morning, as we prepared to leave the house for the funeral, Jack Cavanaugh had surprised me by announcing that he’d called a family meeting for one o’clock.
    He refused to answer any of my questions about what he intended to discuss, and under the circumstances I’d felt uncomfortable pressing him. But all morning long I’d felt a sense of impotence mingled with foreboding. Try as I might, I could think of no good that could possibly come of a face-to-face meeting of all the Cavanaughs.
     
    I will never forget the strain and pretense in the room that afternoon after Dagny’s funeral. My experience in corporate work had not prepared me for what emotions, laid raw by the death of one daughter and the dark heart of another, could whipsaw through a family bound together by blood and business. I’d seen CEOs plead with directors for their jobs and corporate officers beg bankers for mercy. I’d been bullied and screamed at, and had listened to whispered threats. None of it compared with Jack Cavanaugh pleading for his children’s love under the thin guise of corporate unity.
    I knew that words did not come easily for Jack Cavanaugh. He doled them out carefully, as if each one exacted a price. Yet he managed to speak movingly about his dream of having his children work together in the business he’d labored his entire life to build. He begged them to put aside their differences and work