by Donis Casey
Charlie and Gee Dub accompanied their father in order to receive their work assignments, so Alafair wasn’t even able to pump the boys for background information. She spent the afternoon quilting with the girls until the natural light in the house became too dim to stitch without eyestrain. Early in the evening, she sent Sophronia and Blanche to milk the cows and feed chickens while she and Grace picked squash from what was left of the vegetable garden and cut back the frost-nipped vines. There were a few pumpkins left on the vine. Alafair sliced them off for temporary storage on the screened-in back porch. Later they would go up in the attic for the winter, along with the rest of the pumpkin harvest.
The older daughters returned from town as the sun neared the horizon; first, freckle-faced Ruth, her long auburn braid swinging behind her, walked the two miles from town following her day of music and practice with her piano teacher. A little later Martha and Mary drove in together in the buggy.
Her two eldest were both nearing their mid-twenties and recently engaged to be married. Martha was a dark, slender, serious, young woman who had something of a career as secretary to Mr. Bushyhead, President of the First National Bank of Boynton. She had never expressed the slightest interest in finding a husband until two months earlier, when one Streeter McCoy had finally worn down her resistance by offering her true and eternal love and an executive position in the McCoy Land and Title Company.
Mary, on the other hand, was a plump, blue-eyed, blonde who loved to laugh, loved to eat, loved children, and loved Kurt Lukenbach. They had been planning to marry for some months, but Mary wanted to finish her year of teaching the third and fourth grade class at Boynton Grammar School.
The older girls had lately developed the habit of taking over the household chores when they came home from work and school. Mary usually made supper, since she enjoyed cooking. Ruth liked to play with the children, so Alafair was thus relieved of babysitting chores. Martha instructed her mother to sit down and directed everyone else in whatever task was at hand, since that’s what Martha did best.
Shaw and the boys, Kurt included, showed up for supper as soon as it grew too dark to work. But there was no opportunity for private conversation. The men were engaged in cleaning themselves up and the women in readying the table and dishing up the meal. Grace decided that her father’s lap was the best place to eat supper that evening. Alafair made a move to bodily return the tot to her own chair since Shaw looked as though he barely had enough energy to feed himself, much less deal with a messy three year old. But Shaw assured her that he didn’t mind. After all, he’d gone for almost two whole days without a little girl to love on.
Their light supper of potato soup and cornbread proceeded, full of news and chatter from the children. Martha had spent the day at Streeter’s office, learning how to go about a title search. Mary had cleaned her classroom, laid in a supply of coal for the potbellied stove in the middle of the room, and written out her lesson plans for the entire upcoming week: one set for the third graders, one for the fourth graders, and a few special notations for the two or three students who needed a little extra attention. Ruth was learning to transpose piano music and had whiled away her entire Saturday on Mozart.
The rest of the mealtime talk was dominated by the discovery of the body in the woods. Alafair listened with interest as Charlie and Gee Dub went over the entire story again, even more thrilling with a second telling. She also noticed that Shaw didn’t contribute much. He sat quietly with Grace on his lap, trying to avoid dribbling hot soup on himself while heading off Grace’s drips and drops. He seemed interested in the conversation and occasionally smiled at a particularly egregious embellishment of the facts. But unless he was asked directly he didn’t engage. And that was not like Shaw Tucker at all.
She finally cornered him after supper as the older girls were cleaning up and the rest of the children had adjourned to the parlor for games and music before bedtime.
He was standing in the yard, just outside the door that led to the screened-in back porch, staring up at the sky. It was already fully night, the moonless sky a velvety black, the stars brilliant points in the clear autumn air.
He looked over at her as she stepped out, alerted by the creak of the screen door. She moved up beside him and drew her shawl close around her shoulders.
“Mercy, it’s finally turned downright cold. Winter’s on the way.”
Shaw resumed his celestial observation. “I expect I’d better plan on some butchering next week. I’ll talk to John Lee, see if he’ll lend a hand.”
“I figured you’d be thinking of that directly. There was frost on the pumpkins for the first time this morning.” A momentary silence fell before Alafair launched into the real reason she had followed him outside. “What’s bothering you? You’ve been looking peaked ever since you got back.”
He slid her an ironic glance which she couldn’t see in the dark. “I was enjoying that hunting trip. Now that Gee Dub is off at college I like it when we can get off together. I wasn’t best pleased to have to cut it short.”
“There’s more to it than that, I think.”
Shaw put his arm around her shoulders. He was a tall man and she was not so tall, but they fit together perfectly. The warmth of her body felt good in the chill air. “Oh, you do, do you?”
“I do. The boys all act like finding that body is just a great adventure, but there’s something about it that particularly eats at you.”
Shaw didn’t answer right away. He didn’t know what to say. “I just wish we hadn’t disturbed that burial. It’s not good to stir up things from the past that ought to stay buried. Let the dead rest.” He slipped his free hand into his coat pocket, his fingertips resting on the jagged points of vertebrae in the snake bone necklace.
His response gave her pause. Alafair and Shaw had both been raised in the deep woods of the Ozarks. They both knew that the dead weren’t necessarily gone. Especially if there was unfinished business to attend to. But she had never known Shaw to concern himself overmuch about these things.
Shaw continued. “We never mentioned it at dinner but our skinny friend didn’t just up and die on his own. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.”
“Murder!”
He shrugged off the suggestion. “Like I said before, maybe he’s left over from a skirmish during the Rebellion or some Creek tribal dust-up. Even so, I don’t like it that maybe we found a murdered man in a hidden grave on land that belongs to Papa.”
Alafair slipped an arm around his waist and gave him a shake. “Well, you can be sure Papa McBride don’t know anything about it. He’s tough as an old game rooster and I don’t doubt he’d plug somebody between the eyes if he had to. But he wouldn’t do it in secret. Besides, it’s none of your affair anymore. Now it’s up to the county sheriff to figure out what happened and dispense any justice that needs to be done. We’ll be at your folks’ for dinner after church tomorrow anyway, so just go ahead and ask your papa if he’s got any ideas. Put your mind to rest.”
Shaw agreed that he would talk to his stepfather in the morning. Though until he discovered what it was he’d seen in the woods, he suspected that nothing was going to put his mind to rest.
Chapter Nine
Alafair loved November. Much of the hard work of harvest was done and the weather was usually mild. Mornings were crisp and cold. But by noon it was often warm enough to do without a wrap, especially if one were engaged in heavy labor, which Alafair always was.
Not much was left in the garden. There were still a few winter squashes on the vines. The apples had been picked and stored in pits, or dried, or preserved for the winter. Her mother-in-law’s native pecan orchard had already been harvested twice. Late-maturing nuts continued to fall, though, and the children were always bringing home baskets, aprons, and pockets-full of pecans they had picked up off the ground as they passed through their grandparents’ orchard on their way home from school.
The hardest tasks of November, in Alafair’s o
pinion, came with butchering time. For every one of the twenty-six years they had been married Shaw butchered a hog after the first frost. They would be butchering soon.
For the past couple of years, since two of their daughters had married and set up their own households, Shaw and his helpers had butchered and dressed two two-hundred-pound hogs, which provided enough meat for the entire extended family.
Alafair figured she had cured and smoked enough hams, bacon slabs, and shoulders, cleaned out enough stomachs and bladders and intestines, ground enough sausage, made enough blood sausage and head cheese and jellied enough pig’s feet in her life to feed everybody in the Great State of Oklahoma for a year. And it wasn’t just the hog-killing she had to deal with every fall. The menfolks’ hunting trips provided her with plenty of quail, doves, turkeys, squirrels, and rabbits to cook, and even a rare deer or possum.
Alafair loved animals of all sorts and very much subscribed to the philosophy of kindness and respect for all of God’s creatures. But she was a mother with ten children. She wasn’t sentimental about what she had to do to feed them. The panther mother who lived in the hills yonder did the same. That was the way of things.
Since their grisly discovery had cut short the men’s hunting trip, they had only bagged a dozen or so bobwhite quail between them. Shaw’s cut of six quail would not make a big enough meal for Alafair to invite the married offspring over for a feast, but she thought she could make a couple of quail pies that would make a nice contribution to take to Sunday dinner at the in-laws’ house. Besides, Shaw was particularly partial to her quail pie.
As it turned out, the wet spring and the long summer had produced some mighty fat birds. Alafair was able to make three large pies full of meat and enhanced with vegetables and herbs from her own garden.
***
Grandpapa Peter McBride, Shaw’s stepfather, removed the napkin from around his neck and pushed himself back from the table with a contented sigh. “Well, Alafair, that quail pie was a wonder.”
“I would say so, honey.” Shaw’s mother Sally offered her congratulations as well.
Alafair felt her cheeks grow warm. She was used to plaudits for her cooking, but praise from Sally McBride really meant something. “Good ingredients make good cooking.”
Charlie had temporarily staunched his hunger and had other things on his mind. “Grandpapa, Buttercup dug up a skeleton when we were out hunting!”
“I’ll swan!” Sally exclaimed. “A skeleton!”
“Mama,” Grace protested.
Alafair gestured to Ruth. “Honey, take the girls outside and get some sun for a spell while the weather is still nice.” Ruth gathered up the children and left before Alafair turned back to her son. “The table is not the place to talk about things like that, Charlie. Let your dinner settle before you start talking about bones and such.”
Grandpapa undermined Alafair’s scolding with a chuckle. “James told me at church this morning that y’all had some excitement on your hunting trip, but he didn’t have time to give me the details. What happened, lad?”
“Well, sir, we found a whole skeleton with his boots on who got buried in a shallow grave in the woods!”
Peter was amused at Charlie’s macabre excitement, His eyes crinkled. “You don’t say? And where was this?”
“I need to ask you about that, Papa.” Shaw intervened before Charlie could answer. “We took the boys out to that section you own over by Oktaha.”
Peter was a man who had no trouble mastering his emotions, but his eyes widened and his gaze skittered away. When he looked back at Shaw his expression was carefully neutral. “Son, I’d rather you boys didn’t go out there. There’s an evil hand over that place.”
All chatter at the table stopped abruptly and every head turned toward Peter.
Shaw was taken aback at his stepfather’s tone. “I’m sorry, sir. Me and James figured you wouldn’t care since you’ve let the place run to ruin. But it’s done, now. What do you mean by an ‘evil hand’?”
Peter answered the question with another question. “You found a skeleton, you say? Do you have a notion how long he’d been there?”
“No. Long enough to thin out.”
“Where exactly was it that you found him?”
While Shaw repeated the story of Buttercup’s discovery, Alafair studied her parents-in-law’s reactions. Sally listened intently, bright and interested. Peter’s normally open and mobile face was still.
Shaw finished his tale and paused before he asked, “Papa, I don’t suppose you know anything about this, do you?”
Peter managed a ghost of a smile. “No, I don’t, son. But I do know that some bad things happened out there, though I didn’t ken that a lonely death was one of them.”
“What bad things?”
It was Sally who answered. “That place is haunted.”
The matter-of-fact statement was so unexpected that for an instant Alafair wondered if she had actually heard it. “You don’t say?”
Sally McBride reminded Alafair of a wren, small, plump, and brown, with curious, lively, black eyes, and black hair wound into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her mother had been a full-blood Cherokee from a remote hollow in the Ozark Mountains, and Sally’s view of the world and her place in it was very much influenced thereby. “There’s been a spirit wandering around out in them woods for years. That’s why Peter’s never been able to rent it out. Everybody around there knows about it.”
Alafair glanced at Shaw, who was regarding his mother with a startled expression. She turned back to Sally. “Y’all never mentioned it!”
Sally shrugged. “Peter’s heard reports from a couple of folks who’ve seen it, always at night. It sighs and moans and likes to do mischief to a campsite, if a body is inclined to stay out there overnight. I’m surprised it didn’t bother the boys when they was down there Friday night.”
Alafair knew that Indians were often gifted with the ability to sense the other world, but Peter McBride had been raised in Irelandm and she didn’t know as much about the Irish. Peter had never claimed to have insights, as far as she knew. But judging by the elves, fairies, banshees, and silkies who graced the stories he delighted in telling at every opportunity, the veil between the worlds was mighty thin in his native land. “Any idea who it is?” she asked him.
Peter shook his head.
“Somebody who ain’t figured out yet that he’s dead,” Sally said.
Peter looked at Shaw. “Whoever it is, you may have found his bones, son.”
***
After the kitchen was back in order and the children had made their escape, Sally, Alafair, and Martha wandered over the front yard, inspecting the condition of the herb garden. The garden lined the rock path to the gate and took up much of the area between the porch and the rail fence that surrounded the yard. At this time of year the annuals were long gone, pulled up and dried, and were now hanging in fragrant bundles from the rafters on Sally’s back porch. The perennials were mostly dormant and following the recent frost many were beginning to die back. The mints close to the house, however, were still lusty.
“How did Peter come to buy that property off of Hawkins in the first place, Ma?” Alafair pulled a wintergreen leaf off the bush and nibbled it. “There’s not even a graded path leads to it. Shaw says there’s naught but two ruts running through the woods and the brush for a good two or three miles after you leave the main road.”
Alafair couldn’t see her face, hidden as it was by the stiff brim of her poke bonnet, but Sally’s head bobbed up and down. “I know it. I think Peter liked it that it’s way off yonder and they never much cleared the place. Almost all that acreage is native woods. But mostly he was just trying to do a favor for a friend who needed the money. Of course, that’s before he knew there was a haint on the property.”
“Not much of a stand-up fellow, was he, to sell Grandpapa a haunted farm?” Martha’s tone was ironic.
Sally leaned over and broke off the dried tip of a l
avender twig. “Naw, but Roane always was a scoundrel, to my way of thinking.” She sniffed the herb in her hand then briskly rolled the brittle leaves between her palms, reducing them to powder. “This’d make a nice dream pillow,” she observed. She dusted off her hands and resumed her wander.
“Why was Papa friends with him, then?” Alafair had always known Peter McBride to be a pretty shrewd judge of character.
“I wouldn’t say he trusted him. But Roane saved his life once when they were in the cavalry together. And it was Roane who told Peter about this property we’re standing on and helped him make a good bargain for it. Roane did do the right thing every once in a while.”
“You ever seen the ghost, Grandma?”
“I never did, Martha, darlin’. But Peter caught a glimpse of it and spoke with others who have, too. He’s not much of a one to be fooled.”
Alafair was about to ask if Peter had ever seen a ghost before when Martha nodded toward the road.
“Look, Grandma, yonder comes Cousin Scott and he’s got somebody with him.”
Two men on horseback had just passed through the front gate and were riding toward them up the long drive that led to the house. The shorter, rounder, jolly-looking man on the tall chestnut gelding was Shaw’s cousin, Scott Tucker, town sheriff of Boynton, Oklahoma. Alafair was surprised. They had just seen Scott and his wife and boys at church that morning and the dinner plans he had related to them then had not included a midafternoon social call. The other man, a tall, dark-eyed, morose person with a black mustache almost as thick and handsome as Shaw’s, was a stranger to her.
“Hey, Aunt Sally,” Scott called as soon as the women turned in his direction. The two men dismounted and hitched their horses to the posts at the watering trough in front of the picket fence before removing their hats and entering.