Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

came from the giant wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen, where all six of Alafair’s other daughters were in a frenzy of meal preparation.
    Dark-haired Martha, twenty and the eldest, was the general of this evening’s repast, and directing her troop with a skill that was beginning to approach Alafair’s own. Almost-nineteen-year-old Mary, the best if sloppiest cook in the house, was spooning fried potatoes into a ceramic dish. Alice was in charge of dessert, since she had a particular talent for pies, and tonight’s offerings were already cooling on wire racks on the cabinet. The youngest girls, Ruth, Blanche, and Sophronia, ages twelve, seven, and six respectively, were setting the table with much rattling and clanking of dishes.
    “You girls done with your lessons?” Alafair asked the young ones, as she hung Phoebe’s coat on the rack next to the back door.
    The two little girls shrieked and skipped and both spoke at once, somehow conveying the message that they had no homework tonight. Blanche dropped a serving spoon on the floor and gazed at it in befuddlement before Ruth scooped it up and handed it back to her. “Now you got to go wash it off,” Ruth informed her disdainfully.
    “Ma,” Blanche implored, indignant, “I just swept the floor this afternoon.”
    “Go wash the spoon, Blanche,” Alafair told her, ignoring the faces that the girls made at each other as Blanche flounced off toward the wash basin with the spoon.
    “I see Phoebe has deigned to grace us with her presence,” Mary interjected.
    “Phoebe was occupied with her new beau,” Alice explained.
    Mary looked up from her spooning, interested. Mary was blond and blue-eyed, like Alice, but not so tall. She wore her light hair in a careless braid as thick as a rope down her back, and had a habit of flicking the tail of it against her cheek when she was contemplating devilment. Now, she fingered the blue-ribboned tail dangerously. “Phoebe has a beau?” she asked. “I thought she had made a vow to die a maiden because there’s no man in the world good enough for her.”
    “No, you’re thinking of Martha,” Alice told her gleefully. “Phoebe’s the one who would just dry up and blow away with embarrassment if a boy looked in her direction.”
    “Has Phoebe got a beau, Mama?” Sophronia asked. “What’s a beau?”
    “You all just mind your business and leave Phoebe alone,” Alafair scolded. “Phoebe, go out to the porch and draw up a pitcher of buttermilk. And be quick about it. I hear Daddy and the boys coming up to the house already.”
    Phoebe gave her a grateful sidelong glance and left out the back door with a haste that was just short of unseemly.
    “Now, you girls leave Phoebe alone,” Alafair warned, giving Alice an especially stern glower. “She’s just trying to be friendly to that poor Day boy, and I think he could use all the friends he could get.”
    “John Lee Day,” Martha said, intrigued.
    “Is Phoebe going to marry John Lee Day?” Blanche asked.
    “No,” Alafair assured her. “Go get some more big spoons for these dishes here.”
    The front door slammed open and Shaw Tucker and his sons and their dog, Charlie-dog, spilled into the parlor, ripping off coats and hats and scarves and piling them haphazardly on the coat tree. The two black, white and tan ’coon hounds, Buttercup and Crook, who followed Shaw almost everywhere, stayed outside. “We’re home, Ma,” Shaw boomed, like he did every evening of the world. “It’s drizzling rain. We’re froze!” The girls poured into the parlor to greet their father, and Alafair followed behind. She stood in the kitchen door and watched fondly as Shaw indulged in his favorite ritual of kissing his seven beloved daughters hello.
    Alafair’s dark brown eyes softened. After twenty-one years of marriage, the sight of Shaw Tucker still made Alafair’s heart warm up. He was on the tall side, close to six feet, and slim as a rail still, hard from the physical work of a large farm upon which he raised horses and mules, a few cows, a few crops. Not one gray hair streaked his head full of dark brown hair, and his amber and green eyes shone with humor and intelligence. A toothy white smile flashed at his girls from beneath his big bush of a mustache. Alafair was always amused at how the girls clung to him like vines when he came in from work in the evening, as though he had been gone for weeks, and how he always gave each of them a showy smooch in order of