by Donis Casey
“It’s hours to dawn,” James observed. “Let’s get some sleep.”
That was the practical thing to do, Shaw realized. But the strange incident had shaken him. “You go on. I think I’ll sit up a spell.”
“Suit yourself.” James gave him a crooked smile and clapped him on the back before crawling back into the tent.
After retrieving his boots, coat, and hat, Shaw sat down on a log they had dragged near the fire to serve as a bench. It was freezing, and unnaturally quiet. Every breath fogged the air in front of his face. He poked up the fire and fed it until it was a jolly blaze, big enough at least to hold off the worst of the chill. At the dim limits of the firelight he could barely see a low mist clinging to the base of the trees in the woods. He heard Charlie sigh and shift positions.
As he settled back, Buttercup sidled up and put her head in his lap, her soulful brown eyes gazing up at him. He sat by the fire with the dog until he lost track of time and had to check the positions of the stars to determine how long he had been there. He was shocked. He was sure he hadn’t fallen asleep, but what seemed like a few minutes had apparently been a couple of hours. No hint of dawn yet. One of the older boys was snoring softly in his tent. There was no wind at all, just dead quiet and a bone-numbing chill in the air. Buttercup’s head was still on his knee, her eyes open, staring up at him. He couldn’t see the other two dogs.
She lifted her head and looked toward the woods, her floppy ears shifting forward. Shaw followed her gaze. The fire had died down and he could barely make out the edge of the woods beyond the perimeter of light. The low-lying mist had thickened and long tongues of fog licked out from the tree line into the clearing, illuminated by the sliver of new moon.
One of the slender blackjacks seemed to move. Shaw’s breath stopped. Not a tree, but something upright. A bear? He glanced at the dog, whose attention was riveted upon the moving shadow. Her hackles raised and her lip curled, but she didn’t bark or charge off, which made Shaw feel marginally better. She’d be going crazy if she had spotted a bear. He opened his mouth to speak to her, but reconsidered. He wasn’t sure he wanted to alert whatever was watching that he was aware of it.
Buttercup stood and trotted toward the woods in a businesslike manner and the shadow in the woods faded back into the darkness. Shaw gasped, leaped to his feet and made a lunge for one of the shotguns stacked in a tripod by the fire. He was into the woods in a trice. The thick carpet of leaves were damp with fog and his footfall was muffled, but the pop and crackle of dried twigs on the trees snapping as he plunged further into the forest stopped him in his tracks. The brush at the edge of the tree line was too thick and brittle for him to walk through without being heard.
But not for whatever creature he had glimpsed. Strain his ears as he may, the only sound Shaw could hear was Buttercup snuffling around. She was obscured by the mist and he couldn’t see her. In fact, once he was ten feet into the woods he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
He squatted down and breathed a tiny whistle. Buttercup materialized at his elbow. “What did you see, gal?” he whispered. He gave a low quavering whistle, a signal for the dog to track.
She disappeared again, nose to ground. Shaw remained hunkered down in the fog with the shotgun across his knee and listened to the dog range back and forth through the brush, left and right, further and further, then nearer again.
She suddenly reappeared, sat down in front of him and regarded him with a quizzical cock of the head.
She had been unable to pick up a trail. Shaw sighed. What had he seen? Something had been there. Buttercup had seen it too, so he wasn’t hallucinating. An animal surely, considering how silently it had melted into the forest.
He stood up. He knew it wasn’t an animal.
A single, icy, sigh of wind passed, causing him to clutch the collar of his coat, ruffling the remaining dry leaves on the trees.
The sound was like a voice. Shaw, it said.
The hair on the back of his neck rose. The dog was gone, probably back to the warmth of the fire like the sensible creature she was. Shaw turned around and took a few steps toward camp before another breath of wind passed by.
Shaw…
He stopped dead, rooted in his tracks. He knew that voice.
He managed to open his mouth enough to speak. “Pa?”
Chapter Six
The most irritating thing about a cold Saturday morning in November, as far as Alafair Tucker was concerned, was that school wasn’t in session. She huddled over her rag basket, trying without much success to sort material for a quilt top and ignore her squabbling offspring in the kitchen. Their morning chores were done, so in an attempt to keep a screaming fight from breaking out she had sent the girls to wash vegetables and peel potatoes for dinner.
“Ma!” Grace’s piping voice rose. “What’s a garment? Blanche keeps saying that I have a garment on my back but I can’t reach it and she won’t brush it off of me!”
Alafair didn’t look up from her task. “Blanche, quit saying that Grace has a garment on her back.”
“Grace keeps bothering us, Ma,” Blanche responded. “She’s pulling potato peels out of the bucket and putting them on her head…”
“They’re curls!”
“Grace, quit playing with the pigs’ dinner and let your sisters do their work.”
“Grace, stop it,” Sophronia yelled. “Give me that carrot!”
Grace squealed. “Mama!”
Alafair bit her lip and forced a breath out her nose. No use. She placed a scrap of calico on the side table. “Grace, come here.”
Grace ran into the parlor, her bare feet beating on the wooden floor. “Ma, I didn’t do nothing!”
Alafair didn’t argue with her. “Where’s your socks? You’ll catch your death! Go put on some shoes. But first go over there in the corner and bring me my quilting hamper.”
The child rushed to the sideboard to retrieve a homemade honeysuckle vine basket nearly as big as she and brought it to her mother. “Are we going to quilt?” Grace was excited. At barely three years she wasn’t yet old enough to ply a quilting needle, but she loved to watch Alafair lower the quilt frame from the ceiling. Once the wooden frame was down at lap-height Grace could spend hours playing house under the stretched material while the family females sat in a circle around it, sewing and swapping stories.
Alafair stood, walked over to the corner of the room and unlashed four cords wound around a knob high on the wall, far out of the reach of little children. The cords were attached to the four corners of the nine-by-seven foot board rectangle which served as her quilt frame. When not in use the frame was raised up to the ceiling by means of an ingenious system of bent-nail eye bolts, pegs, and pulleys which Shaw had fashioned for her years earlier, shortly after he and his brothers had built the house. All she had to do to lower the frame was loosen the ropes and let it down. When she finished a quilting session, a couple of tugs raised it back up to the ceiling, out of the way and out of sight.
Ten-year-old Blanche and nine-year-old Sophronia both appeared in the kitchen door. “Are we going to quilt?” Blanche echoed. Both the older girls were just beginning to learn the skill and were eager to practice.
“I’m going to stitch for a while before dinner. Y’all, on the other hand, are going to be busy getting things ready for me to cook. Blanche, you finish peeling the potatoes and skin an onion for me. Then mix up a pan of cornbread. Fronie, you run out to the cellar and bring back a couple of them acorn squashes and clean them out.”
Sophronia loved to clean and carve winter squashes and pumpkins, so she was gone out the back door in a flash. Blanche loved the close and delicate art of quilting. She gave her mother a look full of longing and maybe a touch of resentment. But after a quarter-century of child-rearing, Alafair was immune to wheedling. Blanche knew it, so she did no more than frown before turning to her task.
Alafair had just stretched this particular quilt onto the frame a couple of days earlier,
so most of it was wound around the side boards which had been attached with pegs through holes near the middle of the end boards, creating a long, narrow, strip of quilt to work with. Alafair stuck the ends of the frame through a couple of slat-back chairs to steady it, pulled up a chair for herself and sat down. She spent a couple of minutes rummaging through her sewing hamper, threading a needle, finding her favorite thimble.
She figured she had maybe half an hour until the girls had done as much prep work on dinner as they were able and she would be called to do the actual cooking. But she had planned a simple dinner just for herself and her three youngest. The two eldest girls, Martha and Mary, along with their middle sister, Ruth, had gone to town early that morning. Shaw and the boys were on a hunting trip with James and his sons and wouldn’t be back until Sunday morning, so Alafair would be able to leave the frame down all day if she wanted.
Grace, now shod in mismatched socks, skipped back into the parlor from the bedroom and immediately crept under the stretched quilt. She would stay there, lost in a pretend world, as long as Alafair would allow it. Alafair briefly wondered if she had ever sat down to quilt without a child or two playing beneath the frame.
The quilt she was working on now was a crazy quilt that she and her daughters had pieced over the fall. Since most of the quilting would be done by her and the younger girls, Alafair wasn’t taking quite as much trouble with the stitching as she would for a fancy quilt, like the double wedding ring she and several Tucker clan mothers were making for Mary’s wedding in May. No elaborate pattern of stitches for this quilt. She sewed simple outlines around the patches.
She had just gotten into the rhythm and was beginning to feel the sweet calm that came on her when she was absorbed in her art, when the back door banged and Sophronia ran into the parlor, her cheeks and nose rosy with cold, clutching an acorn squash under each arm.
“Ma, Daddy and Uncle James are back!”
Grace shot out from under the quilt and through the kitchen, crying, “Daddy!” But Alafair’s eyebrows knit. “Already?” Even if they had bagged all the birds they wanted, her men wouldn’t have come home a day early without another reason. The greatest pleasure of these hunting trips for them was camping out in the woods together.
“The boys, too. They just come in and rode up to the barn!”
Alafair anchored her needle through the material and stood up, a little worried at the unexpected turn of events.
Chapter Seven
“He was buried in a shallow grave way up in the woods.” Charlie spoke between mouthfuls of fried potatoes and gravy. “Looks like he’d been there for years.”
Six hungry males showing up unexpectedly for dinner had forced Alafair to abandon her plans for a leisurely meal for herself and the girls. She and her helpers had thrown together a pan of biscuits, opened several jars of canned vegetables, carved slabs of ham off the joint in her cupboard, sliced up Blanche’s carefully peeled potatoes and fried them up in bacon grease, used the drippings with milk and flour for gravy, and had dinner on the table within twenty minutes.
Blanche and Sophronia did waitress duty. Alafair was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee in her hand and Grace in her lap, listening to her menfolk relate the tale of the discovery that had cut short their hunting expedition.
James took up the story. “We were on that piece of land that Papa bought back some years ago, the old Goingback place just southwest of Oktaha. Papa’s never had a tenant out there, never goes out there at all to my knowledge, so the property has run wild. Shaw suggested it’d be a good place to hunt some birds. I’d never even been out there before.”
“Mama, there wasn’t nothing left of him but a skeleton and a couple scraps of clothes and his boots.” Charlie made this contribution while ladling gravy over his second helping of everything. “Between the rain and the critters his rocky grave finally shifted and sank enough that his right foot was sticking out from under the bank and Buttercup sniffed it out.”
“Then she took a notion to wrench it off and fetch it back to us,” Jerry added.
At the mention of a booted skeleton Alafair had felt Grace shift in her lap. The child was now leaning forward with her elbows on the table and both hands over her ears. Alafair sighed. She didn’t relish the idea of having to deal with a scared little girl in Mama and Daddy’s bed all night. She crooked a finger and Sophronia came to her side. Alafair drew her down and murmured into her ear. “You and Grace bundle up real good and go on over to Phoebe’s for a spell, puddin’.” One of Alafair’s two married daughters lived across the creek on the adjoining farm. “I’ll come get y’all in an hour or two and you can have some pie and do some quilting if you’ve a mind.”
Grace may have stopped her ears but she wasn’t deaf to her mother’s suggestion. She leaped down and seized Sophronia’s hand, excited. Her year-old niece Zeltha was her favorite playmate and most ardent admirer.
The girls disappeared and Alafair turned back to the conversation. “I always wondered why your Papa bought that piece of land, James. It’s way out there on the edge of nowhere. It ain’t close to his farm or not much close to any town either, and as far as I know he’s never put it to any use.”
James shrugged. “Tell you the truth, Alafair, I had kind of forgotten that Papa even owned it. Jerry asked if we could go to some different place to hunt. If Shaw hadn’t suggested we try the woods out there I doubt if I would have ever thought of it again.”
Shaw finally spoke up. “It’s mostly heavy woods, James. Papa may have plans for that timber eventually. I don’t know. But for some reason when Jerry mentioned finding a place that hadn’t been hunted on for a spell that property of his came to mind.”
Alafair gave him a sharp look. These were practically the first words Shaw had uttered since they returned. She had known from the moment she saw him that morning that something was eating at him and it wasn’t just the discovery of an old burial in the woods.
He looked tired. His fine, black-lashed, hazel eyes were sunken and he seemed distracted. Almost haunted, Alafair thought. She shifted in her chair, itching to get shed of the company so she could ask him what was on his mind.
Shaw glanced at her, aware of her scrutiny, before he continued. “Funny thing is that parcel of land hadn’t crossed my mind in years. Not until last month when Papa’s feud with Mr. Doolan heated up again.”
James snorted. “Not again? What is it this time?”
“Doolan wants to breed one of his mares to Papa’s prize Tennessee Walker stud and Papa says he’d sooner kick Doolan all the way to Texas.” Shaw shook his head. “Who knows what it is between those two old reprobates? The point is that I got to thinking what good friends Papa and Doolan used to be, along with the man that used to own that property, Roane Hawkins. They were in the Army together out in Arizona. Three Irishmen. Papa said they were like three brothers. Do you remember Hawkins, James? He married Goingback’s widow.”
James scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I recall somebody called Mr. Hawkins used to work with Papa and Mr. Doolan back in Arkansas. That was when I was still at home.”
“Same fellow. Hawkins came out here to Oklahoma when it was still the Indian Territory and ended up staying. That was even before we moved out here. A year or so after we came to the Territory I went out there over a summer to help Hawkins clear land for a sawmill. He was married to the widow by then. I was trying to earn money to build this house.”
Alafair nodded. “I remember. You were gone out there for several weeks.”
“I didn’t enjoy it much, either. Hawkins was a sharp dealer and it took some persistence on my part to get my money out of him. Unless I’m mistook, Papa bought that land off him and his wife several years later. Seems I heard that Hawkins wanted to move on and Papa bought the section just to help out an old Army pal.”
“Where’d they go?” Gee Dub asked.
“I don’t know, son. Papa’d know, more than likely.”
This information in
trigued Alafair. “Could it be that this body has something to do with why those folks wanted to move away?”
Shaw’s expression lightened. “Trust you to make that connection, honey. I think that Slim was some drifter who ran afoul of someone on the road. Or a Creek who got shot in a skirmish. I’d bet that whoever put him there wanted to find a likely looking ill-cleared or abandoned farm where he could get rid of a body and nobody would find it for a long time. And nobody did.”
“But what about that poor dead man? Y’all didn’t just leave him there! ” Blanche was appalled at the very thought.
Shaw put his arm around her waist as she stood by his chair. “‘Course not, sugar. Uncle James and the boys sat in the woods with him real respectful while I rode in to the post office in Oktaha early this morning and wired the sheriff in Muskogee. Since it looked like an old burial he sent out one of his deputies, a fellow name of Morgan. Morgan knew of the place and managed to get down there pretty quick. He studied the situation for a spell, asked us for the particulars, then sent us packing. He said we’d likely never know what happened. We gave him our names and told him where we were from and he said he expected the sheriff would get in touch with us later with more questions. So we came home.”
“About how long do you guess he’s been there?” Alafair asked.
“Maybe a decade, I’d reckon,” James said, “judging by the state of the body. His flesh had turned to dust but his boots were left. A long time.”
Alafair thought about this for a moment. “I wonder if his wife and children have been missing him all this time?”
Chapter Eight
It was late that night before Alafair could get Shaw to herself and ask what was bothering him. After James and his sons left for home, Shaw immediately set out to inspect the barns and livestock to make sure that while he was away his foreman and future son-in-law, Kurt Lukenbach, had maintained Shaw’s exacting standards. It was an unnecessary exercise considering Kurt’s Germanic efficiency. But Shaw was never one to let the youngsters think he wasn’t keeping a keen eye on them.
