Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

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.
    He strikes back. Alafair could understand it. Faced with the loss of all that is dear to him, the boy pulls the derringer that Phoebe has given him for protection and fires.
    She looked down at Phoebe, who was standing just below her on the hillock, looking up at her mother patiently. “Show me what happened,” Alafair instructed.
    Phoebe nodded. “Me and John Lee were sitting right here like this.” She demonstrated by sitting down. Alafair moved down off the hillock and stood off to the side where she could take in all of Phoebe’s reenactment.
    And Phoebe was quite a little actor, Alafair noted to her amazement. She watched, skeptically, to be sure, as Phoebe hopped around the clearing, playing the parts of innocent maid, evil accoster, and heroic rescuer with desperate verve. Alafair interrupted the performance periodically with questions.
    “Now, did Mr. Day fall down like that right on top of you?” she asked.
    “Yes, ma’am, he did,” Phoebe assured her. “Knocked the wind right out of me.”
    “And that was right about here?”
    “Yes, near as I can remember, it was right here.”
    “When you and John Lee came to the house afterwards, you didn’t look much like you had been rolling around in this leaf litter, here,” Alafair noted.
    Phoebe reddened. “John Lee and I hid out for a bit, like I told you, to get our breath back. Brushed each other off as best we could. John Lee picked a mess of twigs out of my hair.”
    “Couldn’t disguise that black eye John Lee had, though,” Alafair observed.
    “No,” Phoebe agreed with some heat. “It wasn’t the first one his daddy had given him, either.”
    “Well, go on, then,” Alafair urged. “John Lee fell down right over there when Mr. Day clobbered him, and then you two struggled and fell down here. Why didn’t you run away when