By John Warren
Judy Harper once told me she wanted to write a book titled “The Cat That Knew Fincastle.” The premise would be a stealthy cat— I imagined it would be black— that would insinuate itself, unseen, into the nooks and crannies of Fincastle’s brand of late 20th century Americana.
The cat almost certainly would have slunk through the thousands of tulips at Fincastle Presbyterian, and crept through Thomas Jefferson’s courthouse. It would have observed the goings-on at Dee’s Village, the dress-shop-turned-eatery where the circuit court judge ate lunch at the same table as the town plumber, and where a Polaroid on the wall rendered you Fincastle-famous. Judy would have had the cat visit her friend Floyd Thomas at his Old Clock Shop, to watch the gentle old master tinkerer tinker.
But with Judy as the author, that cat would have missed an important stop. At the elbow where Jefferson Street becomes Carper Street, sideways from Pax and Peggy Davis’s house, was a two-story, 18th century house as glorious as it was porous.
That’s the house where Judy lived. The house was Judy, and Judy was the house.
Judy was many things in her life – a world-renowned cytotechnologist; a developer of the HPV vaccine; a hemp researcher and a beekeeper. She was also, for a few golden years, a features writer at The Fincastle Herald who was ubiquitous throughout Botetourt County.
She came to her interview in the early ‘90s with an impressive resume that had nothing to do with writing. Herald Editor Ed McCoy came into my office that afternoon and said with an implied-if-not-actual shrug, “I’m going to hire that woman, Judy Harper.”
For the balance of our years at The Herald, Judy was my frequent companion, during work hours and after. She was in her mid-late 40s then, almost 25 years older than me, and taught me that real friendship doesn’t care how old you are.
Judy had been a pageant queen in her youth, one of 10 children growing up in Florida, where her father was a state attorney. And her deportment evinced her upbringing. Judy had balance-a-book-on-your-head posture. I never heard her yell, and if she cursed now and then, she was instantly embarrassed for having done so.
But she railed against pretense and embraced irreverence.
Judy’s hair was thick, red streaked with gray and always wet when she left the house. Her reading glasses rested perpetually atop her head. She favored hiking shoes and cargo pants, and a T-shirt layered under an open, rumpled, button-down men’s dress shirt. Her car was a Saab Turbo, humbled by absent hubcaps, torn seats and a lazy odometer.
When she moved into the house, Judy taught herself how to tame a walk-behind floor sander and removed layers of thick, dark varnish to reveal blonde-oak floors. She hung no curtains, and every corner seemed bathed in sun.
The house was sparsely but meticulously furnished, and in a constant state of reinvention. When the fever hit Judy to rejigger her living space, she might haul a full-sized couch up the stairs by herself, only to drag it back down two weeks later.
Her furniture was estate-sale finds and might be painted three different colors inside of a calendar year. The most Judy-like piece of reclaimed furniture was the long, pock-marked farm table, on which she laid out delicious, test-kitchen flatbreads mounded with disparate ingredients like bacon and shrimp. Jambalaya was my favorite. She loved big, pungent bricks of cheese, and made the flakiest biscuits– real butter only– and the strongest cup of coffee I’ve known. “Judy’s Bad Breath Blend,” I called it.
Judy would not be bound by desks nor clocks. She was glad for your company, but resisted appointments, which restricted movement. And when the tread ran smooth on her time in Fincastle, Judy did what she had done before. She packed what she could fit in the old Saab, and made off for a new life in Colorado, where – as far as I knew – there lived no person she knew, only possibilities.
In the many years since I have left Fincastle, I have had a recurring dream that seems to come during times of uncertainty. There is a curved road leading to an old house on a hill – the hill is more exaggerated, the turns more jagged, the driveway full of ruts. The house is so tall it disappears into the clouds. But the house is unmistakably Judy’s.
I’m not sure what will become of that dream. Word came recently that Judy has died. The sentence is absurd to me. It’s been 25 years since our shared time in Fincastle, but the canvas is still wet to the touch.
The house is still there, or so says GoogleMaps. If you should pass by, offer a thought to Judy. If she is as untethered now as she was in life, I’ve a feeling something of her is there.
John Warren was news editor of The Fincastle Herald from 1992-95, after which he worked for The Roanoke Times and The Virginian-Pilot. He is the news and information director for the University of California, Riverside.
