Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

John Lee seemed pretty flibber-flobbered, but who wouldn’t be? He just said his daddy had froze to death. I didn’t know ’til later that Harley was shot. John Lee has always been a good boy—he’s the only reason that family has been able to keep body and soul together, to my thinking. I can’t imagine that he did it, but even if he did I wouldn’t blame him at all. Harley was worthless.”
    “Is any life so worthless that it deserves snuffing out just like that?” Alafair wondered.
    “Oh, yes,” Zorah said. “Harley’s was. I’m shocking y’all, I can tell.” She stood up, fussed around a little bit with the cream and sugar on the side table, and sat down again. “Yes, I’d have done him in myself, if the opportunity had ariz, and gone on about my business without blinking an eye. Did the sheriff ever tell you how Harley harassed me and J.D. after he lost out on Daddy’s will, and put my kids in danger?”
    “Why, no, he never did. You said a while back that Harley had threatened to do you harm. Did he actually try to do it?”
    “Yes, he did. It was bad at first. Mean things kept happening around here. Rat poison got in the cow’s feed. Made her dreadful sick. Her milk was off for days. The barn door and the gate to the corral or the chicken coop kept getting opened in the middle of the night, and animals would wander all over and we never found some of them again. A dead dog got throwed down the well. One of our plow mules got hamstrung—that was real bad. We kept calling the sheriff, and he kept going out to Harley’s to talk to him; threaten him, finally, I think. But we couldn’t really prove it was Harley doing it, and he denied it. Finally, my boy Doyle come running home from school one day white as a sheet, telling me that somebody tried to grab him in the woods.
    “That was about all we could take, Miz Tucker. J.D. grabbed up his shotgun and rode over there black as a tornado. I was scared out of my wits that he’d shoot Harley, not that I’d have cared about Harley, but I didn’t want J.D. to get in trouble. I begged him not to go, but he wasn’t in any mood to hear. Finally, he came back home in a much better state, and said that he’d told Harley he’d shoot him if anything else happened on our property. That was the end of it, then. Harley started drinking too much of his own liquor not too long after that, and probably couldn’t think straight enough to do mischief, anyway. The last time I ever saw Harley was about a week or so before they found him dead. He showed up here one night about supper time, drunk as a lord, pounding on the front door and cussing at us. J.D. just shooed him off like a stray dog, and he went staggering back toward home.”
    She paused in her narrative and heaved a sigh. “How does somebody get like that, I wonder,” she continued thoughtfully. “Harley just had to blame everybody in the world but himself for his troubles. How he tortured his poor wife! He never beat on the kids much, that I know of, anyway, but he made their lives miserable. Why, my niece Maggie Ellen was so scared of him that I give her the means to protect herself. She asked me for money to get away from him, and I gave her what little money I could. She wanted to take some of the kids with her, or at least Naomi, and I didn’t give her enough for that. So I guess she got out while she could. I hear she’s in Okmulgee now. Maybe I’ll go look her up, now that Harley is out of the way.”
    “Well, I never thought much of Harley, either,” Alafair told her, “but I didn’t know he was that horrible, or we’d have done more to help the family.”
    “I blame the drink. He liked to make his own brew even before Oklahoma went into the Union as a dry state. Harley wasn’t always a devil, though it’s hard to remember that after all these years. He was always full of blow and bluster and had a kind of a mean sense of humor, but he was a good enough brother. He seemed besotted with my sister-in-law, and he was a good provider at first. He asked her pa for her, and her pa let him take her, though I surely thought she was too young. She didn’t seem to mind. Harley had the bluest eyes. She liked that.”
    Alafair smiled. She thought those were the first good words she had ever heard anyone utter about the unfortunate Harley Day.
    ***
    As they drove back out onto the road to resume their trip to Boynton, Alafair broke the thoughtful silence. “I heard that Harley and