Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

age.
    As Shaw and his daughters played out their evening ritual, the boys, finally skinned out of their winterwear, made their way over to their mother for their own quieter greeting. There were only two of them, sorely outnumbered in this house of females, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in presence. The elder, Gee Dub, was dark-eyed and curly-haired, but otherwise the image of his father, even down to his never-fail good nature. He was amazingly grown-up for a fifteen-year-old boy, and always had been old for his years. He had never given his parents any trouble to speak of, and Alafair could hardly credit her luck with him. Somehow, she just knew deep inside it couldn’t last—no child was such an unmitigated joy. Charlie-boy, on the other hand, had kept his parents on their toes for all of his ten years. His big blue eyes were deceptively innocent. He wasn’t a particularly noisy boy, or naughtier than most, but he was the hardest-headed child to ever draw breath. Once he made up his mind to do something, he did it in the face of punishment, or the wrath of God.
    Gee Dub leaned over to give his mother a casual kiss. She was continually amazed at how easy he was about affection, for a boy. “Daddy’s in rare form, tonight,” he observed.
    “Daddy always paints everything large,” Alafair conceded. She grabbed Charlie and squeezed him to her with a noisy smack on the cheek, just to tease him.
    “Oh, Ma, quit now,” he managed, squirming, and Alafair laughed. The big yellow shepherd, who was Charlie’s particular friend, nudged at her skirt, and she rubbed his head. “You’ve just got to have some loving, too, don’t you, Charlie-dog?” She straightened. “You fellows are freezing! There’s hot water for you on the stove. Go wash up.”
    The boys and the dog ran for the back porch as Shaw headed toward her with his arms full of daughters and Blanche and Sophronia dragging on his knees. “Y’all sit down, now,” he ordered the girls, “while I kiss your mama and wash my hands.”
    “You couldn’t wash your hands and then kiss their mama?” Alafair teased.
    “First things first,” he told her, giving her an authoritative kiss on the mouth. “Where’s Phoebe?” he asked, when he drew back. “I’m missing a girl.”
    “Out on the back porch getting some buttermilk,” Alafair told him. “She had a little adventure today and the girls were teasing her. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it at the table.”
    ***
    When they were all seated properly in their places, including Phoebe, Shaw folded his hands on the table and silence fell. “Charlie, would you say the blessing tonight?”
    Heads bowed and Charlie drew himself up. “Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies. In Jesus’ name, amen,” he intoned.
    “Amen,” all said, in chorus, and the clatter of self-service began.
    Supper in the evening was a lighter meal than midday’s dinner, and consisted mainly of leftovers from the main meal of the day, along with fresh cornbread and couple of newly opened home-canned vegetables from Alafair’s store to round out the meal. Wednesdays’ fare, according to custom, was a huge pot of soupy brown beans and fatback, and home fries with onions on the side. The butter, white at this time of year, and its resultant buttermilk, were fresh that morning. The sweetened carrots and cooked tomatoes had been canned in the summer. Shaw and Alafair both liked to float raw onion in their beans, so Martha had chopped a bowlful. Each member of the family had his or her opinion on the proper way to eat cornbread in conjunction with beans. Some liked to open a square of cornbread on the bottom of the bowl and spoon beans over it. Some considered cornbread wasted if it was not slathered with butter and eaten along with the beans. Others preferred to crumble their cornbread into their buttermilk. Some preferred a combination.
    Shaw was a butter man himself, dolloping it into his beans and onto his carrots and potatoes as well as his cornbread. “Who has something interesting to tell me?” he asked in the midst of his buttering.
    “I seen Mr. Leonard cutting across the back field over by the creek again today,” Charlie told him. “He was riding a mule and toting some big old saddlebags.”
    “Which Mr. Leonard was that?” Shaw wondered.
    Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. All them Leonards look alike to me.”
    “I swear, Shaw,” Alafair interjected. “That path to