I never have forgotten that or how Harmon held my hand all through the Lions Club luncheon that day at the Black Angus in Poteau, not letting go even when he had to stand up and be recognized as one of the people who had been pushing for the park in Heavener for years.
I liked the American Legion meetings the best. There’s something prideful about seeing all those old men in their uniforms, and all that red, white and blue crepe paper. And when one of them would die, they’d play Taps. There’s nothin’ sadder or prettier than Taps.
We had a nice home in Oklahoma City. Two-story and brick and all. With the kids from Poteau going to the University of Oklahoma down the road in Norman and running up for weekends, the bedrooms were full most of the time.
“Who’s here now, Bonita Faye?” Harmon would ask when we sat down to supper and there’d be three or four plates set.
“Harry and a friend of his from Tulsa. They’re just eatin’ and runnin’. There’s some kind of rock concert in town.” Or “Sary and the baby. She was lonesome for Michel while he’s away at that agriculture meeting and Patsy sent her up here to mope around. Patsy said she was sick and tired of Sary cryin’ all day to her. By the way, you got to put the baby bed back up in her room.”
“We might as well just leave the dang thing up all the time.”
All the kids that cluttered up our house and our lives weren’t all Patsy’s or even Michel’s. Harmon never forgot what a helping hand meant to a boy who was alone and who felt like the whole world was against him. Time after time, he’d bring by some boy for “a good meal” or “just to spend one night.”
One of them, a half-breed from eastern Oklahoma showed up one day as much in need of a bath as a meal. Harmon held him by the neck of his dirty blue-jean jacket and told me, “This is R.J. Walker. He’ll be staying the night and he’s hungry.”
I said, “And I’ll be feeding him just as soon as you show him the bathroom and what soap is for, Harmon.”
That hot bath washed away some of the belligerence I had detected in the fifteen-year-old and when he sat down to the kitchen table in one of Harmon’s bathrobes, all that was left in his dark brown eyes was an old tiredness.
After he’d eaten and gone to bed, Harmon told me R.J.’s story. “He’s an orphan. Has been for several years. He’s gone from one foster home to another.” Harmon sighed, “It’s an old story, Bonita Faye. We just throw away our kids…leave them on their own until they do something we can punish them for…and we say it’s all their fault. This one was caught stealing something to eat from the 7-Eleven.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out tomorrow.”
During the night, I heard a strange noise coming from the room where R.J. slept. I got up without waking Harmon and went in to see the boy. He was asleep…dead to the world…but tears were running down his cheeks and every so often, he’d sob.
The next morning at breakfast Harmon said, “Bonita Faye, I’ve been thinking…”
“Yeah, me, too, Harmon.” I buttered his toast.
“Maybe we could…”
“Yeah, I reckon we could.” I poured his coffee.
R.J. stayed with us for three years until he went off to Carl Albert Junior College in Poteau. One of the delights of my life was seeing the light begin to shine in his eyes. He was a good boy and a good student. And Harmon was his own personal hero. After his graduation from Carl Albert, R.J. joined the state police ‘cause he wanted to be a trooper like Harmon had been.
A lot of boys came and went in those years, but R.J. Walker was the only one who became family.
Harmon never seemed to mind that we didn’t ever have any babies of our own and that was good ‘cause while I woulda if I’d had to, I was just as glad to skip that part of being a woman.
And he didn’t give no never mind to my gaining weight either. Least he never said so in front of me. In fact, he always acted like he liked having more of me around to cuddle. I’d hear him brag to some of his friends on poker playing night. “No, sir. Never had to get me a divorce like Joe here to get me a new woman. I just grew one. I’ll bet you Bonita Faye has more than doubled her weight since we married.”
I had to think on it real hard to make a compliment out of that one.
But I knew what he meant. Now I wasn’t waddle-down-the- aisles fat, but I had put on a little meat from the time when I was Billy Roy’s skinny little widow woman.
The only time Harmon and I ever argued was about money…my money. Over the years, the revenue from my “French Joint Venture” continued to mount up. It represented only a very small part of Claude’s holdings and I think he really held on to the souvenir business only because of me and Denis. Denis had turned the company into a quality enterprise. He dealt only in the finest products and opened his own kiosks throughout France. With the increase in tourism in Europe, it was quite a profitable venture for all of us. Harmon didn’t mind if I spent the money on the kids’ education…in fact, he was glad I did…but the lines were clearly drawn about what I could use the French money for and what I had to spend his on. Tuition, room and board, books and trips to Europe were okay, but Christmas and birthday gifts, furniture and clothes came from his account.
Going back to Paris, France, was not on Harmon’s priority list. He’d enjoyed his one visit and sometimes talked about France like he had been born there, but once he’d seen it, he didn’t ever care to go again. Or any of the other places that we took Michel, and later R.J., on their spring vacations from school. Not back to Washington, D.C., or the Grand Canyon or Disneyland or none of the other U.S.A. vacation spots. So the kids and I always picked someplace new each spring to visit and every summer Michel and I headed to Europe, leaving Harmon on his own to fish or play cards or whatever. After R.J. came into our lives, he was company for Harmon. R.J. never did want to go to France. Harmon always told people I was away visiting relatives and in a way, I guess I was. Next to Patsy and R.J., the Vermeillons were the only family I had outside of Harmon himself.
Harmon would go with me to Poteau for holidays though and we’d stay in the guest room in our own house or up at the big house the kids had built for Patsy and Jerry. It was a pale pink brick with the second most beautiful yard in town. Visitors thought it must belong to the mayor and were always surprised that was the local handyman’s home.
Harmon and I “got by” in a way that Mama woulda been proud of. I loved the bigness of him, the way the silver shown in his brown hair and the way I knew he loved me every day whether he took the time to say so or not. He’d burst in the house evenings and shout, “Bonita Faye.” And when I’d say, “In the bedroom, Harmon,” or “out here in the den, Harmon,” he’d follow me around until we’d wind up at the kitchen table drinking coffee while he told me about his day.
I like to think all that adds up to real love.
I was expecting him home early one spring day in 1985 when I heard the front door open. I waited for Harmon’s call so I could tell him I was in the kitchen, but it was Omega’s voice who called, “Bonita Faye?”
“In the kitchen, Omega. What are you doin’ here? Can you stay for supper? Harmon and I are just goin’ to have a light one. We’re supposed to be watching our weight.”
Well, sir, when that boy who was a United States Senator walked into my kitchen, I knew. Some things just don’t have to be told with words if you know how to read someone’s face. I sat down heavy on a kitchen chair and said, “Tell me about it, Omega.”
This is how Omega told it to me, and how I’m tellin’ it to you.
“There was this kid that was supposed to be transferred from the county jail to McAlester. And you know how Harmon always took time to talk to country boys gone bad? You know how he always said, ‘I was raised up hard, too, and but for the grace of God, I coulda ended up going down the other road?’
“Well, Harmo
n had heard about this boy and said he would take him down to the state pen himself if the sheriff didn’t mind. So Harmon and a deputy took him down there. The deputy drove and Harmon rode in the back with the boy. This wasn’t just one of your ordinary kids in trouble. He’d killed a man and was on drugs before he was arrested.
“The kid went crazy when they got to McAlester and got the deputy’s gun. He was waving it around and talking out of his head. Harmon coulda shot him, but he never even went for his gun. The boy shot him in the heart and Harmon died instantly.”
We buried Harmon in the national cemetery in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Someone from the American Legion played Taps and the wind blew the flags set up for Memorial Day. Everywhere you looked, there was the red, white and blue waving in the spring breeze. It was the most beautiful and the saddest day of my life and I never want to talk about it again.
THIRTY-THREE
COUNTY SHERIFF DENIES REOPENING FOUR-DECADE-OLD MURDER CASE
The LeFlore County Sheriff’s department today denied that they are reopening a 40-year-old murder case at the request of an accused killer’s granddaughter. Sheriff’s deputy Johnny Stovall admitted that Elizabeth Jenkins, granddaughter of Steuben Ross, has requested that the case against her grandfather be re-examined. Ross was accused of killing Poteau businessman Billy Roy Burnett in September of 1950.
The Winslow, Ark., native died in a freak truck accident before he could be charged with Burnett’s murder, but the murder weapon found in the bed of Ross’s truck led authorities in both Oklahoma and Arkansas to conclude that Ross had shot Burnett on Cavanal Hill and the case was closed.
Now, 20-year-old Elizabeth Jenkins of Albuquerque, N.M., has revealed to the police that her mother, Ellen Ross, later adopted by Fayetteville professor H.B. Abernathy, repeatedly stated before her death earlier this month that her father, Steuben Ross, was innocent. Ellen Ross was four years old when the motherless child accompanied her father up on Cavanal Hill in the fall of 1950, the night Ross supposedly shot Burnett.
“My mother told me about my grandfather, my real grandfather, before she died. She was only a baby, but she remembered going camping with her daddy and she says he didn’t kill Mr. Burnett. She said there was someone else up on that hill that night,” Jenkins said.
Poteau Sheriff Delbert Hoyle and Deputy Harmon Adams were the investigating officers on the case that was closed after Burnett’s shotgun was found in Ross’s wrecked truck bed. Ross died in an accident near Mountainburg, Ark., two days after Burnett’s murder. Hoyle died in 1962 and Adams, who became head of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) died five years ago at the hands of a deranged prisoner at McAlester State Penitentiary.
Adams’s widow, Bonita Faye Adams, was married to the victim, Billy Roy Burnett, at the time of the murder. Mrs. Adams lives in Poteau, but was unavailable for comment about Jenkins’s accusations.
Stovall said his office is investigating Jenkins’s story, but so far there is not enough evidence to reopen the case.
Jenkins said that she also will continue to investigate the case.
My phone rang.
“Bonita Faye? You’re home. Have you read the paper?” It was Patsy. She was almost crying.
“I got home last night. I thought it was too late to call. Yes, I’ve just read the paper. What on earth is going on, Patsy?”
“I don’t know. I swear to God, I don’t know. I only got back from visiting with Carrie in Corpus yesterday myself. Is she really Elly’s daughter? And, Bonita Faye, is it true? Is Elly dead?”
That was the hard part. I hadn’t known that my little Elly was dead, had died somewhere out in the West while I was in Hot Springs taking the mineral baths to ease my arthritis. I had been with Elly all her life, all her life that I had known of her until her marriage to Charles Jenkins in 1969. After that I had let her go and now she was dead, had died wondering about her real daddy. I had owed Elly and I had let her down.
I remembered the first time I had seen her. The moon had been bright up on Cavanal Hill and as I raced past an empty campsite, Billy Roy’s shotgun still hot in my hand, I had seen the moon reflected in a pair of startled eyes. I had thought it was an animal, a raccoon maybe, but she whimpered in fright as I ran by, and I had seen that it was a little girl sitting alone on a rock in the path.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “Someone will come for you.” When I reached the bottom of the hill—when I finished my mad pell-mell charge down it—I hadn’t associated the child with the truck full of firewood parked on the road. I had stopped to push my tangled, leaf-filled hair out of my face and I realized I still clutched the shotgun and had thrown it in the back of that pickup where it fell down among the stacked cords like the snake I had felt it to be in my hands.
I hadn’t known that someone else would be accused of Billy Roy’s murder—hadn’t known that anyone but me would ever be suspected. That’s why I reacted so violently when Sheriff Hoyle had sat in my kitchen and told me about little Elly Ross. I had been waiting for him to say it was me, and he went and said it was Elly’s daddy who they thought killed Billy Roy.
You got to believe me when I say I would have confessed if Steuben Ross had still been alive…if Elly hadn’t been already so settled in at Fayetteville in what seemed to be a better life for her. And I’d of told any time during those years that I kept watch over her through me and Patsy’s network if there had ever been the slightest indication that child was suffering ‘cause of my sin.
What had I missed?
What had I missed looking at Elly’s school pictures, pouring over each one, trying to see inside her soul? What had I missed the year I had gotten up the nerve to meet her face to face in Fayetteville at the social get together at the University?
I had convinced myself I had missed nothing, yet now I read in the Poteau paper that when my Elly lay dying away off in New Mexico that her soul was troubled and it was all because of what I done to her.
My phone rang.
It was a newspaper reporter from Fort Smith wanting to come out and talk to me about Billy Roy’s murder.
I said come on ahead.
My phone rang.
It was a television reporter from Fort Smith who wanted to get me on a news program they was doing about Billy Roy. They was going up on Cavanal Hill and would I come along and be interviewed?
I said no, I wouldn’t. The arthritis in my knees wouldn’t let me climb mountains or hills any more, but to come on ahead to the house and I’d give them an interview.
My doorbell rang.
It was Elizabeth Jenkins, Elly’s daughter.
She stood there in the doorway with her suitcase in her hand. It was one of them expensive flower-patterned kinds that folds over on itself. Didi had brought the same kind of luggage when she had visited last.
That’s what I saw. The suitcase and then the girl.
“Mrs. Adams? I’m Elizabeth Jenkins.”
“Yes, I thought you might be. You look some like your mother.”
“You knew my mother?”
“Yes, some.”
“May I come in?”
Where were my manners? Of course, she could come in. As we settled down in the living room, Elizabeth’s suitcase still in the front hall, I looked her over good. She did have some of the same look of Elly, but it was a fragile out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye resemblance. As fragile as the girl herself.
Where Elly had been strong her daughter appeared delicate. Elly had thick, shiny brown hair, Elizabeth’s was a fine blonde. Head on, eye to eye, there was nothing that would have made me stop in the street and exclaim, “Oh, I know you. You’re Elly Ross’s daughter.” Elizabeth seemed a faint shadow of the vibrant young Elly I remembered, so frail that she didn’t even seem able to bear up under the long name of Elizabeth.
“What did your mother call you?” I asked suddenly.
> “Why, ‘Libby.’ But how did you know?”
Libby. Yes, she could be a ‘Libby.’ Elly knew she had over-named her only child.
She was pretty though. But I was afraid to touch her…touch those small-boned arms with their fine white hands. Afraid she’d disappear, or worse, break, under my touch.
“Tell me about your mother. How she died.”
The eyes, lighter than Elly’s, filled with tears. “It was cancer. In one way, it was quick. In another, it was too long.”
“She suffered then?”
“Yes, but I was with her all the time. My father and I. We stayed with her until she died.”
“Was that when she told you about her daddy, Steuben Ross? I read about it in the paper.”
“Yes, I knew my mother was adopted. That the Abernathys weren’t my real grandparents. But, Mother never mentioned that she knew…that she remembered…anything about her real parents. Oh, not her mother, of course, but about her father. She told me about it when I sat with her at the hospital. The doctors said it was the drugs that made her remember. I don’t know if she even realized what she was telling me. You can imagine how shocked I was to hear my real grandfather was an accused murderer.”
The not-quite-Elly child leaned forward. “What can you tell me, Mrs. Adams? What do you know about your first husband’s murder that Mother didn’t?”
THIRTY-FOUR
By the time the reporters came to the house, I had fed Libby a roast-beef sandwich, potato salad, milk and chocolate cake at my kitchen table.
And I had come to a conclusion.
What I would of told Elly if she’d asked…what I might of told Harmon if he’d asked, I was not going to tell Libby. That child was not grieving for her dead grandfather, she was grieving for her dead mother and I couldn’t give Elly back to her.
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