Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

handsome boy ogling her nearly caused her to stagger and catch at her breast as though a mule had kicked her. And Alafair Gunn, who until that moment had regarded all the male race except for her father with the contempt it so richly deserved, had instantly been reduced to an inner helplessness that she would rather have died than shown.
    But in Shaw, she had been lucky, and she knew it. Little had he known, but she would have done anything for Shaw; gone against her better judgment, ruined herself, anything rather thanlose him. If Phoebe felt like that about this boy….
    Fear gripped her. Alafair had been lucky. Shaw was good. But what of sweet Phoebe, so vulnerable to hurt in a way the other children didn’t seem to be?
    Her hands dropped from Phoebe’s shoulders in helpless resignation. “Well, you’re in the soup, now, girl,” Alafair said. “You might as well tell me about it.”
    “I went over there Wednesday afternoon. I can get away for an hour or so on Wednesday afternoons, because Martha doesn’t work but half a day and everybody’s home. You don’t usually need me, and if I only do it once a week or so, nobody much notices I’m gone.”
    Alafair suddenly remembered an incident of two or three weeks earlier. Had it been on a Wednesday? “Where’s Phoebe?” she had asked the milling crew of kids in the kitchen.
    “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