by Donis Casey
“Down to the root cellar,” Alice had answered with timely ease, and Alafair had gone back to her cornbread unconcerned. When dinner was on the table, Phoebe had been at her place. Alafair made a mental note of Alice’s complicity.
“We usually met way over behind their barn so John Lee’s daddy wouldn’t see. John Lee would always wait for me there on Wednesday evenings, even though I couldn’t always make it.”
“What did you do at these meetings?”
“John Lee never put a finger on me, Ma, I swear it on a stack of Bibles a mile high.”
“I believe you,” Alafair assured her. She did, too. She may have despaired of Phoebe’s reputation, but she knew Phoebe too well to doubt her honor. “Now, go on.”
Phoebe visibly relaxed. “Mostly we’d just talk. He likes to hear about my family. I think he likes to know that somewhere there’s folks who are happy. Sometimes I’d bring him books to read. He can’t read too fast, but he wants to know things. Sometimes I’ll help him….” With no warning she burst into tears. “Oh, Mama,” she sobbed. “He’s so good. Why does God send him all this trouble?”
Touched almost to tears herself, Alafair enfolded her daughter in an embrace. “We can’t understand the ways of God, sugar,” she soothed, “but sometimes I think God tempers special people like steel. He makes them able to stand great sorrow and able to experience great joy.”
“When is John Lee going to get some joy, Ma?” Phoebe asked, her voice muffled by her mother’s shawl.
“Patience, child. The boy is only nineteen. Besides, you must be a great joy to him.” She drew back and lifted Phoebe’s chin, brushing the tears from the girl’s cheeks with her fingers. “I know you are to me.”
Phoebe mastered herself, calm again. “You may not think so when I tell you the rest of the story, Ma. You say you would have forbidden me to go over to the Day place, and you would have been right to do it. Mr. Day was a bad, dangerous man, and John Lee and I knew it. John Lee didn’t want me coming over any more than you would have, and I’d never have done it, either, except that we couldn’t figure out any other way to see one another without big trouble. We talked about running away. But John Lee felt he had to protect his ma and the kids. Besides, we’d have had to run far away so his daddy couldn’t find him, and I don’t want to be away from you. So we just met by his barn when we could. We never spent more than half an hour together, and we never got caught, until that night.
“There was more to it than just that Mr. Day wanted John Lee for a slave. John Lee told me that his pa hated us Tuckers. Envy, I reckon. There’s so many of us, and we aren’t poor. And Cousin Scott is the sheriff, and Uncle Paul is the mayor, and Uncle Alfred is the president of the Grane. You can imagine.”
Alafair was listening to this discourse in amazement. Phoebe, her little bunny rabbit of a girl. Well, still waters run deep indeed, and Phoebe had quite grown up while Alafair’s attention was distracted by some of the more unruly members of the family.
“So we figured we’d just have to wait,” Phoebe was saying. “We expected that things would change, somehow, someday.”
“You might have had to sneak around for years!”
Phoebe’s bottom lip pooched out in determination. “We knew that. But what else was there, unless we both just gave up on our families and our responsibilities? John Lee’s sister Maggie Ellen did that, you know, ran away. He said it hurt his mother something awful. We just know that we are meant to be together, and that we’ll get our opportunity someday.” She took a breath. “I didn’t want it to be this way. John Lee shouldn’t have run away, I know it. But I saw what happened with my own eyes, and I offered to help him my own self, at least ’til we could figure out what to do. He was protecting me, Ma. If he hadn’t shot at his daddy, Mr. Day might have done me an injury.”
Alafair pushed Phoebe away from her and clutched her chest in shock. “Oh, my Lord, when your daddy hears this story, he’ll have an apoplexy. I might have one myself right now. Let me sit down and tell me what happened, for pity’s sake.”
“Mr. Day come upon us. We were reading and didn’t hear him in time to hide. He was drunk, of course. He called me a bad name, and him and John Lee got into it. They had already had one dust-up earlier that day. He caught John Lee one on the eye and knocked him silly for a minute, just long enough to reach over and grab me by the skirt. He’d dragged me over when John Lee came to himself and pulled out the little pistol I’d given him. He hollered at his pa to let me go, and when he didn’t, John Lee shot. I thought by the way Mr. Day staggered that he was hit, but I never saw any blood. Mr. Day just let me go and wandered off toward the barn. Me and John Lee ran and ran. We stopped for a while by the creek and got our breath and brushed ourselves off. I cleaned his cut eye as best I could. Then he walked me all the way up to the house. It was the first time he’d ever walked me up to the door, and I was so proud of him.”
“Did John Lee only fire once?”
“Yes, I think just once. Yes, just once.”
“Now, think, honey. Are you absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mr. Day walked away toward the barn under his own steam?”
“Yes, ma’am, I know it for a fact.”
“You said you thought at first that Mr. Day had been hit. Where did you think the bullet hit him?”
“Why, in the right side. He staggered a bit to the left. Sure not in the head, Ma. He would have dropped dead right then and there, wouldn’t he?” Her cheeks flushed, and a look of excitement came into her eyes. “Ma, I can be his alibi, can’t I? I mean, I saw the whole thing. I saw that John Lee didn’t shoot Mr. Day in the head, that he was still alive when we ran away. That proves that John Lee didn’t kill his father, doesn’t it?”
“What did John Lee do with the gun?”
Phoebe drew up. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t pay no attention.”
“That gun is a two-shot, Phoebe. Maybe John Lee came upon his dad passed out next to the house later that evening, after he left you, and finished him off. That fight Mrs. Day told us John Lee and his pa had, I don’t know if that was before this business with you or after.”
“Oh, no, Ma,” Phoebe exclaimed. “It couldn’t be. No, he threw the gun away, I remember now.”
“Mercy!” Alafair clapped her hands against her cheeks in dismay. “Oh, my girl, God smite me for letting you get mixed up in this ugly thing.”
Phoebe was surprised. “You didn’t have anything to do with it, Mama. How can you know everything all the time?”
“Because I’m your mother. Oh, why didn’t you tell me your problem? It’s a hard one, I know, but maybe Daddy and I could have helped you some way. Maybe we could have got that man locked up for something.”
“Are you going to tell Daddy?” Phoebe asked anxiously.
“Well, I’ve got to, darlin’, can’t you see?”
“Please don’t, Mama,” Phoebe pleaded with a vehemence that startled Alafair. “Not yet, anyway. Not until we find some way to prove that John Lee couldn’t possibly have done this awful thing.”
“Honey, you know your daddy and I don’t keep things from one another.” Not things of such monumental importance, anyway, she added to herself.
“I’m just asking you to hold off telling him for a little while. If Daddy finds out now, before we can clear John Lee, he’ll turn him in. And once Cousin Scott has him, it’ll just be too tempting to say that he’s surely the one who did it, and leave off looking for the truth.”
Alafair had not missed Phoebe’s assertion that we could clear John Lee, and she smiled. The girl might have a grown-up life of her own, now, but she still depended on her mother with unconscious ease. I should encourage her to talk the boy into giving himself up right now, she thought. Then he’d be safe and warm and well fed while they went about the business of clearing him. If, in fact, he could be cleared. Alafair wasn’t as sure of John Lee’s innocence as Phoebe seemed to be. The way things now stood, Phoebe was implicated, per
haps as an accessory to murder. Right and proper behavior and legalities now all stood a distant second to Alafair’s need to protect her daughter. There was no way in the world she was going to turn that boy in until she had unshakable proof that Phoebe was not involved in any way with the murder.
“All right,” she said briskly. “But I think we need to find someplace to hide John Lee other than in that soddie. Your daddy goes out that way too often, and you can never tell when one of the other kids might get a notion to play there. Besides, Scott and Trent will get to searching the vicinity pretty quick now, and that hay store is just too obvious. Let me ponder on it tonight.”
Phoebe nearly swooned with relief. “Oh, Mama, thank you,” she sighed.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Alafair warned her. “If I find out that John Lee did it, I have no intention of helping him escape punishment.”
“No, no,” Phoebe gushed. “You won’t have to worry about that, Ma. Oh, thank you, thank you.”
Phoebe’s total belief in John Lee’s innocence made Alafair feel a little better. “Get a hold of yourself, now. Tell you what. You make up a sandwich with that leftover roast pork and you and me can take it out there to him in a bit, while everybody’s getting ready for bed.” Phoebe’s head was nodding wildly. “Right now we’ve got to get back in there before they come looking for us,” Alafair continued. “But before we’re done with this, you have to promise me that you will not go out there to see that boy without me along. Otherwise, I’m telling your daddy this minute.”
Phoebe promised on her life.
***
Alafair had a side word with Shaw as the children were readying for bed. What she told him was the truth, though not the whole truth. She implied to the bewildered father that she was offering counsel and comfort to a girl teetering on the edge of heartbreak, and that mother and daughter intended to step outside for a little walk and a heart to heart before sleeping. Shaw had no reason to find this suspicious, having lived through several girlish traumas in the twenty years he had had daughters. He did offer the opinion that it was too dang cold to go traipsing around outside in the dark, but after Alafair pointed out to him with some asperity that there was not a corner of the house that was beyond eight sets of prying ears, he admitted that she was correct. She comforted him by promising that they would go to the barn for a bit.
When Alafair and Phoebe finally left the house, bundled to the eyes and clutching food and drink under their coats, it was pitch dark and bitingly cold. They made their way to the soddie with a detour through the barn, because Alafair had said they were going to the barn, and she did what she said. When they reached the soddie, Alafair paused by the door and drew Phoebe over to her.
“I don’t want you telling him anything about what Doctor Addison found, Phoebe,” she warned the girl. “In fact, don’t be talking to him about his father’s murder at all, or about what’s going to happen. You leave that to me.”
“But I can talk to him?” Phoebe asked anxiously.
“Sure you can. I’ll even let you two alone for a few minutes before we go back to the house, if you promise to do as I ask.”
“You know I’ll do whatever you say, Mama,” Phoebe assured her.
John Lee was sitting on a bale of hay in his little cubicle, obviously waiting for them. He stood when Alafair squeezed herself through the opening in the bales. “Hello, son,” she greeted. She reached back through to relieve Phoebe of the lantern, and was holding the light high when Phoebe popped into view, so she had a clear and unobstructed view of John Lee’s face.
The greeting he was about to give Alafair died on his lips when Phoebe appeared, and the look of absolute adoration that came into his eyes when he saw her daughter startled Alafair. Oh, she had known beforehand that she had a problem on her hands with Phoebe’s affection for John Lee. But in one moment of insight, she realized that these two children loved one another with the kind of love that would wither them if it were thwarted. She swallowed.
“Phoebe, I’m glad to see you,” John Lee managed.
“Oh, John Lee, me too,” Phoebe breathed.
Alafair cleared her throat ostentatiously, and both youngsters looked at her, abashed. “Well, John Lee, I’m glad to see you’re still here,” she said.
His eyes widened in mild surprise. “Well, I said I’d stay here ’til I heard from you, Miz Tucker,” he noted.
She smiled. “So you did. And you’ve managed to keep from freezing, too.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. He was trying to look at Alafair, but his eyes kept straying to Phoebe against his will. “I sleep mostly during the day. Got plenty of quilts and the hay is a good insulator. I jump around a lot at night. It ain’t so bad. Worst thing is the boredom, that and not knowing what’s going on with my ma and the kids. I’d have asked for some books, you know, to practice my reading, but it’s too dim in here for that. I just been weaving things out of straw.” He reached down behind his sleeping nest and proffered a couple of little straw dolls, deftly woven.
Alafair took one and examined it. “Pretty good,” she admitted. “Best not to be idle.”
“Do you have some news for me, Miz Tucker?” John Lee asked, managing with some effort to control the anxiety in his voice.
Alafair glanced at Phoebe, who had as yet made no attempt to say anything. “Well, first of all,” Alafair began, “your ma and the kids are fine, though worried about you, of course. We heard that your daddy was definitely shot in the head with a small caliber bullet out of a small pistol, but they aren’t sure whether that was what killed him or the cold.”
John Lee’s eyebrows rose. “The head,” he repeated. A large puff of steamy breath escaped him, and he sat back down heavily on his bale of hay. “So I didn’t kill my daddy after all,” he murmured.
“It is not at all clear,” Alafair pointed out firmly. But he looked back up at her with a face suffused with relief.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t mean I’m proved innocent. But now I know I’m innocent.”
“You could be, son. But we’ve got to have proof. Now listen carefully, and tell me the truth. What did you do with that pistol after you shot at your father?”
The big black eyes, now suffused with the light of hope, widened at her question. “I threw it down, Miz Tucker, right there in the woods, by the hillock where we was sitting. It’s lying there still, I imagine.”
“You’d better hope so, boy, because if it is, and if it still has one bullet in it, then that means you didn’t shoot your daddy while he lay beside the house. If it isn’t there, then somebody came along and picked it up and probably used it to kill Harley, and that somebody could easily have been you.”
“Or me,” Phoebe interjected. “We’re the only two who knew it was there.”
“No,” Alafair and John Lee said at once, and Phoebe almost laughed.
“I’m glad y’all have such faith in me,” she admitted, “but the law could see it that way.”
“Miz Tucker,” John Lee said firmly, “I think we’re agreed that we got to keep Phoebe out of this.”
Phoebe started to protest, but Alafair cut her off. “Oh, we’re agreed, John Lee. Question is, can we? We haven’t got much time, is the problem. One more day, maybe two. I think me and Phoebe better go over to your place tomorrow and hunt for that pistol.”
“I can show you right where,” John Lee told her.
Alafair shook her head. “No, you don’t stir a foot out of here ’til I tell you. It’s too dangerous for you to go hotfooting it all over the county, and you being hunted. Phoebe can show me where you all were.”
“What about school?” Phoebe wondered.
Alafair sighed. “I guess you’ll be sick again tomorrow,” she said.
***
That night, Alafair dreamed she was running toward town with the baby in her arms. She could feel the life going out of him, and she could hear a voice screaming in fear and desperation. She knew it was herself screaming, but s
he didn’t have time to consider the fact because she had to run….
***
It was close to seven o’clock the next morning when Alafair and Phoebe finally were left alone and began their trek on foot through the fields and stands of pin oak to come up to the Day farm. Phoebe was a competent guide, having long ago figured the best way to get onto the neighboring homestead unseen. They crawled under the barbed wire fence, holding the bottom strand up for each other, and crossed over onto the Day place into a good sized grove of trees, their dried brown leaves like butcher paper shussing in the winter breeze, black boles standing out against a gray sky, and half melted streaks of white snow outlining the ground. They automatically fell silent when they entered the Day property, and picked their way warily through the trees. Alafair could see the back of the barn through the trees when Phoebe took her hand and halted her on top of a small mound just at the edge of the woods.
“This is where we were,” Phoebe said in a voice just above a whisper. She bent down and picked up something off the ground. “See, here’s the book I brought him, laying right here where I dropped it when Mr. Day surprised us.” She handed the wet and ruined book to her mother, who looked down at it thoughtfully for a moment before eyeing her surroundings. It was a good place for a tryst. They could see out, but it would be difficult to see two lovers hunkered down in the trees with their heads together. She shook her head. How could a falling-down drunk have surprised two healthy young people? They had been reading, they said, engrossed in the book, or more likely, in each other. Oh, Alafair remembered how it was. An elephant could have charged them, ears all aflap, and they wouldn’t have noticed it ’til they were trampled. Day had grabbed Phoebe by the arm, jerked her up. That’s what they had said. Alafair could envision it. Phoebe would have screamed, the boy would have leaped up and shoved his father away. Then what? A blindly inebriated man, insane with drink, mad with rage, numb to pain, flails out at his son like he had a hundred times before. Beats him, blackens his eye. At first, the boy is inclined to take it, like he had a hundred times before, simply out of habit. But something new is added. Phoebe. Besides being shamed before his love, he knows that if he doesn’t stop the man once and for all, his love may be in danger, too. His fair Phoebe, who has never known violence. She is a dream to him. Beauty and love and sanity to a boy who has known none of those things, when all the ugliness of his world suddenly bursts in and threatens it all.