Thoughts From the Front Porch

The funeral service for Doc and Kathleen took place on Monday, May 10, 1948. Less than a month later (and four years to the day after D-Day) on June 6, 1948, the organ chimes at the First Methodist Church were dedicated to Ross, the youngest brother in my father’s family. He had died on April 20, 1945, at the age of 23 on Okinawa. According to the local paper, Ross had been the only member of our church who’d given his life for his country during World War II. The dedication service must have been planned for a good long while. In fact, Kathleen had been in on the planning. It was she who had thought of honoring the memory of her youngest brother. And it was she who’d thought of the cathedral chimes for the church organ. Those chimes do seem to wing a heartfelt prayer heavenward. And it was Kathleen who’d made the donation with which the chimes were purchased.

It is difficult to imagine the vast depth and breadth of the communal heartache at that Sunday morning service. I wonder now whether they ever considered changing the date, holding it a few months later, when the most recent sorrow wouldn’t have been so fresh. But they didn’t. The set of chimes was installed; the plans were made; life goes on. Still grieving, family and friends sat down in church together for this express validation that made the losses more tangible. Dedicated to the memory of. It was something Kathleen had wanted. No one there that day would ever forget Ross, and they would not forget Kathleen either.

But some of her friends did seem to forget real Kathleen. Oh, they talked about her. For years they kept right on whispering about the night she died and repeating the gossip, nasty as it was, they felt driven to repeat. And as time distanced them from Kathleen, they began to abandon the person she really was. At some time after her death, one by one, they began to believe in a Kathleen who was not at all the one they knew when she was living. They didn’t do this consciously or maliciously. It was done to them. With insidious, persistent, whispered propaganda, they were turned away from her. Because the murderer didn’t stop at taking Kathleen’s life. He made it his business to kill her good name too.

It is said that Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, invented The Big Lie. Its principle is that the more outrageous the lie and the more often it is repeated, the more firmly people will believe it and the more widely it will spread. Goebbels gets entirely too much credit. American politicians have successfully indulged in that practice for years. I suppose it is taught in law schools or passed through generations in darkened rooms at Skull-and-Bone-ish secret meetings. Newspapers have used it for centuries. Look at what it did to Alexander Hamilton. And even crueler, what happened to Aaron Burr?

And it must be said southern politicians have used The Big Lie more facilely than those from any other region. We southerners do tell tales well. George Wallace may have been the most astute political genius of all time. He lied to everybody, black and white. And almost everybody believed him. When we say “politicking,” it is understood in the south that truth may take no role whatsoever in the proceedings. In the late 1800s politicians began to re-cast the history of Reconstruction in the south, so that it was mis-represented in history books and school books and even in the memories of people who’d been there and who should’ve known better. Generations grew up believing the lies they’d been taught.

Is that the real mystery? How is it that a people, any group of people large or small, want to believe the worst of others, even of someone they’ve admired or loved? Sadly, it is a reality of human nature that, whatever wicked distortion of the truth an ordinary mortal hears over and over again, eventually he or she will be inclined to believe that it must be true. Any lie, any calumny, any slander, however extreme or incredible, if repeated often enough by trusted friends, will become firmly entrenched in the fertile imaginations of those who listen. It’s a lie as persistent as southern purslane weed, almost impossible to root out and kill. The more effort there is to eradicate it, the healthier it grows until it takes over, even though facts and evidence may prove, over and over again, that the real truth is quite contrary to the lie.

I didn’t do them murders. And so began Byrd Richardson’s lies about the murders. And they were numerous. But there were so many people who knew the truth, who knew about his falsehoods. Though they were his cohorts in crime or they were witnesses or officials who had been threatened or paid off, Byrd took further precautions. Just in case anybody had reason to disbelieve his original lies, Byrd told more. Soon after the murders, even before he’d served as a pallbearer at Doc and Kathleen’s funeral, he and a coterie of his close associates began to tell other black and evil lies.  The didn’t fib or quibble. They didn’t prevaricate. They lied outright.

Being so experienced in dirty politics, it came naturally to them. They’d headed off disasters in public relations before. It requires even less effort to assault the reputation of the dead than it does the living. (And even that isn’t too difficult.) The idea was to distract the townspeople from their grief and shock at the murders of Doc and Kathleen and their horror at way they were murdered and their bodies destroyed. They would accomplish this by making Kathleen somehow at fault for what had happened.

The plan was simple: malign Kathleen’s character. The lies didn’t have to be particularly believable. If they heard it often enough, people would believe anything. And these weren’t insipid, whining lies either. Those weak whimpering lies are so easily denied and found out. Oh no. For this plan to work, they would have to spread outrageous lies. The lies they told were bold and extreme and filthy. They were such shocking lies that they left the listeners speechless when they heard them told. But they were not speechless for long. These were the type of lies that must be shared.

Historically, it seems, it’s always the woman who is most susceptible to blame. Could be that’s Eve’s fault. No lie told about Doc would have been horrid enough to make the act of murder seem somehow less evil than it really was or make the murderer somehow less to blame. And possibly Kathleen had made it easier for people to believe those lies Byrd and his friends told, by being a free spirit, unencumbered by some of the conventional rules of conventional small town living.

She’d never cared much what people thought or said about her, and maybe she should have, just a little. It’s a fact that in her youth, she had been married and divorced twice, showing she had been perhaps impulsive in her affections. Both those earlier marriages had ended quite quickly, after just weeks or months. She and Doc had been impulsive too, when they married. But they had been married for almost a decade when they died. She’d settled into a life she loved with a man she loved. And Doc loved her. There was no doubt at all about that.

So, shocking lies were purpose-built and told, and many of Kathleen’s former friends were seduced into believing them. Some believed that she’d been engaged in a love affair with Byrd Richardson. Some were even willing to believe that she’d tempted him and, defenseless, he’d succumbed to her charms, that she was a siren who caused “his downfall.”

Some believed that on the night she died, with a crowd of her friends present, with Byrd Richardson watching, Kathleen had stripped off all her clothes and put on a long mink coat, swept her breakfast table clear of poker chips and cards, and then danced upon it for all there to see. As all these lies came to be believed, they were enough somehow to make Kathleen’s and Doc’s deaths less horrific and their killer less heinous. Well, she ought not to have done that nekkid dancin’ on the table. Then, it prob’ly wouldn’t never have happened.

Maybe the belief in those lies made the town feel a little less culpable in their own minds. As time went on, and the murderer lived among them and did just as he pleased, some may have used their faith in those falsehoods to assuage whatever guilt they might otherwise have felt. They were as good as certain who the killer was and did nothing about it. And they lived in fear.

Even the people who absolutely knew he did it and knew he lied about it, the ones who conspired with him to cover up the crime and lied about it for him, somehow down through the decades, they convinced themselves there had been no murders and that there was never any such house fire. One of them would have been a key witness, would have been the only one who could have sent him to prison. That person, who backed up his alibi and told police they were engaged in a telephone conversation at the time when the murders occurred, told me many years later exactly that. There was no fire. There were never any murders at all. As if Kathleen and Doc had never even existed at all.

But let’s look at those falsehoods logically and compare them to the facts we know. First, the love affair: There’s no doubt that this man had made many passes at many women. We’ve had some of those women recount for us the unwelcome advances he made towards them. We don’t know how many women were able to deflect his pawing and groping, how many were afraid to say no, how many were forced against their will. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. That’s the hallmark of a spoiled child grown into a criminal.

Kathleen was, when she died, a Republican candidate in a run-off election for a seat on the county school board. That alone seems to suggest at least that she wanted to donate her time to serve the school children of her county, a worthy pursuit of a thankless task, especially for a woman unable to have children of her own. For a Republican in Alabama in the 1940s, the race itself was probably as thankless as the office she sought. But the facts certainly prove that a substantial number of people in her county found her stable and trustworthy enough to give her their vote.

According to the people who knew him and were willing to talk about him, Byrd Richardson evoked utter disgust. He was an huge man of enormous appetites. He was often too drunk to get out of the car he drove home (on those nights when he’d made it to his own driveway), and he had to be helped into his house. The wife who helped him get inside, he often beat until she screamed for help. Screamed bloody murder, if you like. We don’t know how often he abused her physically or verbally or emotionally, when she did not scream. He shot guns into the air in town, near the houses of other people, where children lived, as a show of his power and uncontained freedom to do as he pleased. He was often so drunk that he relieved himself in his own front yard. He had the chronic bronchial cough of a sick drunk and heavy smoker, and what he coughed up he spat on his own floors or anyone else’s, expecting others to clean up after him. It might be said that the only attractive things about Byrd Richardson were his extreme wealth and lack of heirs.

Kathleen was happy in her marriage, and she had made her feelings about Byrd clear to those who were close to her. She simply could not stand the sight of him. She found him revolting. She was certainly not interested in his money. If he made a drunken pass at her the night she died, and I believe he did, she rejected him absolutely and without pity or apology. A new experience for him perhaps.

Now about the nude dancing: People said that Byrd said that Kathleen danced naked the night she died. Well, it makes a fascinating story. It makes a very titillating adolescent male fantasy, But it’s not such a convincing lie, when held up to the light. The behavior described in that fantasy would be the act of a woman who is desperate for male attention and tragically unsure of her ability to attract it. That woman would have a character and personality diametrically opposite to that of my Aunt Kathleen. She was neither desperate nor unsure. She was more confident than most. She never lacked for the attention and admiration of men. She often got more than she wanted. And, it’s difficult to imagine even a sad and desperate woman doing such a degrading thing while sober and in her right mind.

So let us consider whether Kathleen was under the influence of alcohol the night she died. I’d like to be able to report the amount of alcohol found in her body by the state toxicologist. But, unfortunately, according to his report, her body was so utterly consumed by the fire that only a portion of the stomach, intestines, heart and lungs remained. All her extremities were destroyed. Even her chest and pelvic bones were totally gone. There was no blood left to test.

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that she had been intoxicated and, further, that she had taken a notion to provide such a humiliating performance. Wouldn’t Doc have prevented her, if he were able? Fortunately, Doc’s upper body did have enough blood and tissue left for such tests. (Although, interestingly, his lower limbs, abdomen, and pelvis were also destroyed by the fire. Perhaps special attention was paid to those areas by the person who poured the gasoline over the bodies.) Those tests show that he had indeed been drinking. He had alcohol in his bloodstream when he died. But, according to a letter from a state forensics official, the alcohol found in Doc’s blood was about half the amount accepted by the National Safety Council in 1948 as the maximum legal allowance for a person driving a car. Doc was at the very least legally sober enough to operate an automobile when he was killed.

Some may suggest that Doc could have been drunker earlier in the evening, when the dance could have occurred. But witnesses said that he and Kathleen were out to dinner until 10:00 o’clock. Then friends came over for cards. None of those friends, when questioned by police, reported any such dancing. And they said Doc didn’t drink to excess. Byrd Richardson didn’t leave the river camp till midnight and couldn’t have arrived at the card party before 12:30. The other guests, who all reported that Byrd was there, left sometime after he arrived. The murders must have taken place early in the wee hours of the morning. The fire was discovered between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. There had to be time after the murders to go for the gasoline, bring it back and set the fire. So whatever alcohol Doc had in his blood at the time he was murdered was probably the most he’d had that night.

Doc was not drunk. And he would not have allowed such a dance, if by some uncharacteristic lapse in judgment or even consciousness, Kathleen had been inclined to perform it. If Byrd Richardson had insulted his wife, Doc was sober enough (and certainly would have been angry enough) to order him to leave his house. Another new and unpleasant experience for Byrd.

According to a letter written by one of the state investigators, witnesses who spent the evening playing cards with the murdered couple and who were present at the scene before the murders occurred “said that [Kathleen] had been drinking much less than [Doc] on that evening.” In fact, she drank very little, if at all. So Doc had consumed little enough alcohol that he could have driven a car legally, and Kathleen had consumed even less than he did.

Now consider this thirty-six-year-old woman. She’d had very little, if anything, to drink. She was about to face a runoff election for the school board. She was planning to attend within the month a service at the Methodist Church, a service very important to her, honoring her dead brother and dedicating the new organ chimes to him. Would she have stood on a table and performed a provocative dance, in the nude, except for a full length fur coat, in the presence of her friends? Would she have done it under any circumstances? No. Certainly not. Absolutely not. It would’ve been irrational, unwise, ill-advised, out of character. Whatever else she may have been, Kathleen was not dull-witted. She would never have done any such thing. Of course, there is the fact that Kathleen never owned a full-length fur coat, but that’s a minor detail in the face of the other facts. And then, there is Byrd’s alibi, which put him at home in bed, talking on the telephone, when the table dance was supposed to have occurred and when the murders did occur. So many lies, they begin to conflict with one another.

Early and often he lied. It’s a secret that belongs to powerful politicians. Just as he routinely bought influence and bought elections by paying people to vote, early and often and on behalf of the citizens of several cemeteries, Byrd Richardson and his associates fabricated those accusations against Kathleen. The lies they made up were absurd lies, almost laughable except for the circumstances. And together, they spread them around to win him some form of favor or sympathy amongst the townspeople.

After his foolhardy protestations in the bank on Saturday morning, Byrd and his family could see, no doubt, that he would look guilty. And they knew he was guilty. There were witnesses whom they had been unable to bribe, but could only threaten. They couldn’t completely count on fear to keep them quiet. The family would try to prevent an indictment (and eventually succeed) with their local and state-wide influence.  But they couldn’t be fully certain immediately after the murders that their influence would be enough. They needed potential jurors to have some sympathy for Byrd, well-entrenched and well ahead of any potential trial.

I wonder now what hymns were played that Sunday, June 6th, 1948, on the organ, with chiming flourishes, of course. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” keeps ringing through my early church memories. And “America the Beautiful.” And what Bible verses may have been read? I wish they had read from the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, first chapter, if only just verse 3. It’s just possible someone among them would have heard and remembered in days to come the prophet’s description of the Messiah. “He will not judge by appearances nor make decisions based on hearsay.” That’s a perfection for which all human beings should strive, though we all would certainly fail again and again.

More likely verses come to mind, including some from the 91st Psalm:

“Under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. . . .”

Safe at last, all three of them, Ross, Kathleen and Doc.

Though almost all the people of our town have believed for sixty years that Byrd was guilty of the murders, some were also persuaded to believe that Kathleen, his innocent victim, somehow shared in his guilt. Like all dirty politics, it worked. I suppose it’s still working. There are people who still believe it. Bless their hearts. After three generations, that old devil Byrd still reaches out from the grave, or the depths of Hell, to keep the truth hidden.

It was a good day for Satan, when Byrd landed on his brimstone doorstep. He’d found himself an apt apprentice.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved.

The Right Southern Corner

What could be better than free stuff, especially in these days of uncertain earnings?  Fact is, the Earth gets bombarded with a tremendous amount of free energy from the sun every day, very little of which we use directly.   On a clear day there is actually enough solar energy striking every square yard of Earth to toast a slice of bread.   So how can we grab a little for ourselves?

For most, it can be as simple as opening the curtains.  In wintertime sunlight comes toward us at a lower angle due to Earth’s polar axis tilt, just right to beam free energy right into your home.  Open those south-facing “window  treatments” wide and let that wam sunshine in.   It doesn’t matter if you have storm windows, as this form of heat is mostly infrared which will go right through glass.

Any dark object in the path of those sunbeams will absorb loads of free energy and release it to the room later; that’s how solar collectors work. Floors made of dark ceramic or terrazzo are especially good for this purpose, but anything dark you can place in the light’s path will help.  Don’t believe me? Just set a black iron skillet next to a window and see how hot it gets.   This is the best kind of heat, folks; free and non-polluting.

Conversely, a white window shade or blinds placed on this same window in summer will reflect heat away from your living quarters.  No need to close them all day, just when the sun is shining into that window.  The sun cooperates by coming down from a much higher angle in summertime, so a properly placed awning or wide eave overhang can also pay for itself.

White blinds or shades, preferably the opaque kind,  also keep all that infrared from absorbing into drapes or curtains.   Dark window treatments, floors and furniture can soak up an astounding amount of solar energy that will be slowly released into your living space for hours after the sun has gone down.  If you’ve wondered why your home is still so warm after sundown, that could be the reason.

It’s an easy formula: hot weather–shut the sun out; cold weather– let it in.  You’ll save big bucks either way.

Another cheap way to dispose of excess heat is to simply blow it out.  It makes little sense to continue cooling inside air when the air outdoors is cooler, so why not shut off the AC and bring in some of the cooler stuff for free?  Well, nearly free, that is; the only expense will be a little juice to run a window or whole-house fan as opposed to several kilowatts for the AC.

A good indoor/outdoor thermometer is a godsend for manipulating Nature’s thermal bounty.  They can be had for less than twenty bucks at any hardware or WalMart.   Watchful monitoring of the temperature differential between out- and in-doors soon becomes second nature after you learn the difference it can make in your power bill.

First thing to do is calibrate your new thermometer set. This is as simple as setting it on a table with the outdoor sensor plugged in and laying next to the main unit.  Within a few minutes, both readings should be the same.  When you blow on them, the temperature should rise slightly due to the warmth in your breath.  If they don’t match after several minutes, fan them a bit, and if they still don’t match within a degree or so take it back to the store.

Hang the indoor unit at eye level on a shaded wall near a window if it has a corded sensor.  If cordless, you can hang it most anywhere, but the indoor unit should be placed where plenty of moving air can reach it to assure an accurate reading.  Don’t install it in a dark corner or on an un-insulated outside wall.  Somewhere near a central air intake grille is best.

The outdoor sensor must be mounted in open shade and free air, not touching a solid surface or too close to a porch ceiling which can radiate heat to it and cause a false reading.

You will be amazed at the differential between indoor and outdoor air at various times of day.  After sundown or in the early morning hours it will often be cooler outdoors in the summer than indoors. Unless the humidity is unusually high, shut off that AC and open some windows.  This becomes much more effective if you have a means of pulling this cooler air indoors in large amounts.

Good window fans are dirt-cheap, and can pay for themselves in a few months if used wisely.  Whole-house fans are even better, albeit somewhat more expensive.  Add a countdown timer to shut it off after a few hours, and you have the makings of a real air-handling system.

When using either of these devices, shut all windows except a couple at the opposite end of your house.   This will cause a steady stream of cooling, cleansing air to move through your whole home, carrying away ambient heat as well as accumulated pollutants.

If your free-air device is equipped with a timer, you can set it to shut off in the wee hours to save electricity and avoid drawing in morning dew.  Obviously, you would not want to use this system during the height of the pollen season or if rain is predicted.

Another inexpensive heat-helper is the ceiling fan.  Moving air helps to cool our bodies by bringing more air into contact with it, which in turn helps our sweat evaporate more rapidly.  Few people realize that we sweat nearly all the time in summer, even if it’s not actually dripping off our eyelashes.  Fans do not cool things off; they merely make people feel cooler because moving air dries sweat faster.  However, if the ambient air is more than 98F degrees, a fan will actually make you warmer.  Shut off ceiling fans if you’re not home, as the motor wastes energy and creates heat.

Contrary to popular myth, setting a ceiling fan to run in reverse during winter is not a good idea.  The theory is that it will suck air up from the center of the room, mix it with warmer ceiling air, and blow it down the walls to eventually mingle with cooler floor air.  In actuality, this method is more likely to make a cool draft down the back of your neck.  Better to run the fan on its slowest speed in a normal direction, i.e. blowing straight down.  That way, it pulls warmer air directly from the ceiling area and re-mixes it with room air.

Placement of your home’s main thermostat control can also make a big difference in comfort and savings.  Install it at eye level somewhere directly in the path of air returning to the intake grille. This assures the thermostat will respond more promptly to temperature changes, provide more even warmth or coolth,  and not run too long for each cycle.  The unit will cycle more often, but you will avoid temperature extremes that waste energy.

Another important point about thermostats: never place one where air from a floor or ceiling register can blow directly upon it.  This fools the thermostat and causes extremely short cycling.

Air-shifting is not just for your home; an automobile works the same way.  Leave a couple of windows cracked open about an inch in summer while parked.  When you start up, roll at least one rear window all the way down and set your AC control on Vent or whatever setting brings in outside air to mix with the conditioned air. Once the car cools off a bit, roll up the window and shift the AC control to Max, which re-circulates inside air with no outside being brought in.  Simple, but very effective in cooling a hot car quickly.

A lot of energy is there for the taking, folks.  With a little extra effort and common sense, we can get it for free.

Views From Benny Hill is a series by Jerry Smith

Views From Benny Hill

Byrd Richardson lied early and often after the murders. He’d lied early and often before the murders too, so it was nothing new to him. But there was something plainly odd about his lies that Saturday morning. He strode into his family’s bank, early, when his deed was only hours old, and started jabbering away to no one in particular about how he’d “hadn’t done it.” In fact, he denied his own guilt so loudly and with so much force that he aroused the suspicions of everyone who heard him. “I didn’t do them murders.”

One young and wide-eyed teller caught his attention. She was so very pretty. And, stunned, she listened so attentively to every word. Byrd thought he recognized her. She was one of those–what was their name? Hell, it didn’t matter to him. He walked over to stand in front of her window and didn’t move until he’d told it all he meant to say, it seemed, just to her. Everyone in the bank lobby was listening though, in shock, and quite frankly, disbelief. The pretty teller, young as she was, clearly perceived that he protested his innocence too much to be an innocent man.

When, finally, he walked away and up the marble staircase to his uncle’s office, she consciously measured her breathing and willed her heart to beat less conspicuously. Well. How disturbing. How horrifying. How frightening. She thought of her friend who worked across the street, in the law office. Wait till Alice hears about this.

The town was already buzzing about the horrible deaths of Doc and Kathleen McIntosh. Nobody coming into the bank talked of anything else—not the awful of price of those new British-built Fords nor the wisdom of buying raw wool futures. Nothing that had occupied the customers’ minds on Friday was important in the least on Saturday morning. The sweet young teller couldn’t believe that they were really dead. She expected to see Doc walk in any minute and ask to visit his safe deposit box. Kathleen though—when she thought of Kathleen, tears came to her eyes and she almost sobbed. But she caught herself. The bank wouldn’t have that.

Working away at check-cashing and deposit-taking, smiling and totaling sums, the teller kept her outward composure and showed no sign of the horror any girl would feel after such a moment. Nor did she show the nervous anticipation she felt, knowing she was just about to share it with her friend. The teller and her friend, who like to call herself a legal secretary, met every morning for a coffee break.

Alice would be full of talk about the deaths, eager to tell what people had said across the street. But nothing Alice could’ve heard would top the teller’s story. Mr. Pete walked out every morning at 9:30, crossed the street and met Mr. Forney in front of his office. Then the two of them, each dressed to a T in a respectable three-piece suit with a fresh rosebud in his lapel, would stroll down to the shoe shop for a shine, cross the street at the corner drug and complete their constitutional in front of the bank at precisely ten minutes before ten o’clock. They’d always tip their fedoras to the ladies and stop for a word with some gentlemen on the sidewalk or a shopkeeper or two.  But the time in which they made their circuit, the “survey of the kingdom,” as one of the other tellers liked to call it, almost never varied more than a minute. Mr. Pete’s return to the bank was the signal that allowed the tellers to begin their morning breaks, one at a time. On this particular Saturday morning, Mr. Pete was out for an unheard of extra fifteen minutes.

When the time finally came for her break, the young teller was careful to be poised as she retrieved her purse and repeated the mantra to herself “be normal, be normal,” as she walked down the steps and onto the sidewalk. There was Alice waving wildly and running across the street at the corner.

“What took you so long for Pete’s sake!” Alice was eager to talk and talk quickly. They had only fifteen minutes. “You will never guess what all I’ve heard tell of this morning.”

“Oh really?” said the teller with a mysterious air. “Do tell.”

“Well,” said Alice, looking around, as if for spies might be lurking. “Let’s grab a booth at the drugstore.”

Safely ensconced in their booth, with so little time and so much to say, the girls each began to talk as rapidly as they could. Yet each still kept an ear open to what the other was saying. Alice had heard, of course, about the shocking deaths and a scant few gruesome details. And she was as grieved as her friend was. As the whole town was. She knew Doc as such a sweet man. And a generous man too. He’d fitted her cousin Flora (Remember? her daddy works in the spinnin’ room at the cotton mill?) with glasses, had them made in Birmingham and went to pick them up. And then, he wouldn’t let her daddy pay him a dime. And Kathleen. Alice had always admired her. She was, well, “spunky” was the only word Alice could think of to describe what she meant. But Alice had not heard that anyone was saying they were murdered.

“Murdered? No, I don’t believe that. Do you? Who would want to do that?” Alice was just a bit huffy. “It looks to me like we’d hear about that over in the county attorney’s office before you would at the bank.”

“Oh,” said the teller. “I expect you will hear it over there sometime. Maybe sometime next week.”

“Wait a minute. What are you up to?”

“Oh I just heard the murderer practically confess, is all.”

“You did not.”

“Well, maybe not exactly. But I do think they were murdered. And I think I know who killed ‘em. And you will never in a million years guess who it was. Or what he said to me.”

“I am not interested in guessing. Good grief, girl. Don’t you know we haven’t got a million years? We’ve only got five more minutes! Out with it.”

“Okay. Here it is. I’m sitting there counting my drawer this mornin,’ first thing. And here comes Byrd Richardson into the lobby of the bank. Through the front door.”

“Ugh. He never comes in that way.”

“No. He doesn’t—he comes in the back way. But not today he didn’t. And he looked awful too.”

“Worse than usual? Good grief.”

“Mm-hm. But today he’s telling the world and all that ‘he didn’t do them murders down in Eden’.”

“Who ever said he did?”

“That’s what I thought. He came right over to my window and . . .”

“Wait a minute,” Alice said. “We’d better pay and get out of here. Keep talking.”

The girls moved toward the register, whispering away, and distractedly laid some change on the counter, then moved out the door without missing a beat or a syllable.

“Okay he’s at your window. So?”

“So. He said to me ‘if anybody comes in here saying I kilt ‘em, you tell ‘em different. I never did it. I wasn’t there last night. I was home in bed. And I can prove it’.”

“Oh my gosh, what else did he say? What did you say?”

“I don’t know. He just blathered on sayin’ a lot of the same, in different ways. And he was loud about it. Everybody in there could hear. It was like his ole voice was bouncin’ off of the walls. Protestin’ too much. That’s what he was doin’. Just like in Hamlet. You remember that, from Mrs. Whitestone’s class? Methinks?”

Alice stared into space and repeated after her, looking stunned. “Methinks.”

“I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move. I just sat there and listened. But I’ll tell you one thing. I know by the way he was talkin,’ they were murdered. And he is the one who did it. What’s he comin’ in there this mornin’ talkin’ about it for? Nobody’d had time to accuse him of anything yet. He just knows they will, though, that’s all.”

Of course, it never occurred to the innocent young teller that Alice wouldn’t know enough to keep it on the QT. But, of course, Alice couldn’t wait to whisper to rest of the county soliciter’s office what she’d heard from the her friend who worked at the bank.

In the early afternoon, the teller was called on the carpet by the bank’s president. Mr. Pete sat at his desk and beside him in a chair pulled ’round for the purpose, sat his brother, Mr. Byrd, Sr. with his arms crossed. Most terrifying of all, Mr. Byrd’s son, Byrd, Jr., was right there, glaring at her, leaning against the wall. A more frightening situation for a young girl, one cannot imagine.

She could not bring herself to look at any of them, but stared instead at the portrait of Harry Truman on the wall over Mr. Pete’s head. Truman was a kind-looking man. But he couldn’t help her now.

Three men, two of them rather large, all of them powerful beyond belief, all of them two or three times her age, seemed to glower at this girl, barely eighteen, from their side of the huge mahogany desk. She felt so small and defenseless. The truth is she was small and defenseless. She thought for a moment they meant to kill her too. It would’ve been very little trouble for them. Just one blow to her head from Byrd, Jr.’s enormous fist would do it. Then they would drag her out the back, put her in the trunk of that Lincoln, and her mother wouldn’t begin to worry till it was too late, at suppertime. She’d be at the bottom of the river by then.

His fist was clenched already. And his face was purple. But, she calmed herself. Mr. Pete would never allow that kind of behavior in his bank. She could sense somehow that Mr. Pete wasn’t as angry at her as the others were. He was very worried and he was angry, but she didn’t think it was at her, exactly.

She knew shouldn’t have told what she heard in the bank, just as she wouldn’t ever tell who’d been overdrawn last week. For some reason, it was just as unprofessional, she supposed, to tell what the bank president’s nephew talked about. And in that moment of fear, she was sorry she’d told it. But she wasn’t really sure, given the same circumstances, she might not do exactly the same thing again. Being entirely too frightened to speak, she was, blessedly, unable to express all these thoughts. She simply stood there, still as a stone, and listened, as not her boss Mr. Pete, the man who’d hired her, but his elder brother Mr. Byrd, Sr. (which she found very odd indeed) severely berated her for expressing her opinion on the subject.

She took her tongue-lashing bravely and she fought back tears. After being thoroughly terrified and threatened with dismissal if she ever dared share any other such “gossip” he called it, the young teller was, to her surprise, kept on as an employee at the bank for as long as she wanted the job. And given raises. And the subject of “her indescretion” never arose again. At least, not inside that bank. She often wondered why it was that they didn’t fire her that very day, since they had been so very angry. Of course, if they had fired her, they would have lost all control over everything she said and did.

Whatever else they may have been, the Richardsons were very clever at maintaining control.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved.

The Right Southern Corner

Of all mankind’s inventions, nothing outshines the wheel for simple, functional ingenuity. Unlike fire, which came to us free from the sky, or birds’ wings that we learned to imitate, there are no wheels in Nature. Round stuff, yes, but no wheels. When Man got his wheels, his horizons broadened. Wheels are like magic, allowing us to move huge loads with little effort. Even more magical, they permit a bicycle to roll down the road rigidly upright when common sense tells us it should fall over.  So how does all this work, anyway?

Before we get into actual kinetics, let’s ponder the invention of the wheel itself.  It’s an ancient device, going back to the earliest days of recorded history.  Though Nature has no examples of real wheels, it’s easy enough to conjecture that Stone Age men noticed that something being dragged over round stones moved easier than on rough ground.  No doubt they also cut trees into short logs for the same purpose.

But the real secret was not the wheel itself; it was the AXLE that finally set us to rolling where we had once only walked or dragged.  Round objects without axles are merely rollers, but if you bore a hole in the middle and poke a stick through it, you have real wheels.   Nature invented roundness; Man invented the Axle.

Some cultures like the Egyptians had wheels, whereas other much older cultures did not.  It’s no wonder the Indians at first thought white guys were gods.  I can just imagine a bunch of Spaniards rolling a wheelbarrow down the gangplank somewhere in the West Indies, and Caribbean Indians saying, “Hey! What the heck is that??  Sure beats dragging stuff behind us between two sticks.”

Wheels effectively multiplied our powers of mobility and efficiency.  As things got a bit more advanced and started rolling faster, we learned some very interesting, seemingly magical things, like the fact that a rolling wheel doesn’t fall over even if you push on it sideways.  It’s an effect that’s poorly understood by most folks.

A wheel doesn’t fall over because it’s moving in a straight line.  Like any other object, once in motion it will take a lot of force to make it change direction.  The real magic of a wheel is that while moving in a straight line it is also moving in an  infinite number of directions at the same time, but all in that same straight line.

Every atom of a wheel actively resists any effort at change in any direction except straight ahead.  Ever play with a toy gyroscope?  When the wheel inside is  spinning rapidly, any attempt to tilt it off-axis results in an equal push being generated at right angles to your nudge.  It tries to literally wrench itself from your grasp in an effort to restore all its motion back into a straight line.  The heavier the wheel and the faster the spin, the more resistance to change it can exert.

This force is sufficient to allow one to balance the gyroscope from one end of its axle,  parallel to the ground and seemingly defying gravity.  In fact, if you hang a  gyroscope by a string from it’s axle bearing, this same energy will make it slowly swing around in circles as the speed decays and the wheel begins to sag.

In actuality, what you’re seeing is not a true circle, but a very flat spiral.  Because of this sagging, the force generated is not applied at precisely 90 degrees, so the wheel moves in a slow circle as it tries to restore its straight line motion.  Give the wheel a motor of some sort so it doesn’t slow down, and it will hang in one spot forever.

Aircraft gyrocompass wheels turn at extremely high speeds and keep themselves aligned with any point you select.  Put two or three of them together at right angles to each other, hook them to the controls, and you have a device that’s capable of flying a plane hands-off along any course you select.

This directional inertia also works to our advantage on two-wheel vehicles.  Even at very slow speeds, a bicycle will not fall over.  At higher velocity, it becomes virtually rigid in its uprightness.  On machines that move much faster, this force is so pronounced that it becomes difficult to steer the dang thing to the left or right.

One of the first surprises new motorcycle riders experience is when they first try to turn a corner at any usable speed.  If you twist the handlebars to the right, the bike will lurch to the left, perhaps throwing itself into oncoming traffic in the process.  To further confuse new riders, at lower speeds the bike WILL turn in the same direction you push the handlebars, although very clumsily.

When you’re on a bike, you’re actually riding astride two heavy gyroscope wheels, both capable of exerting lots of force in their effort to stay in line with each other.  To turn at speed, you must push the handlebar slightly in the opposite direction.

This throws the two wheels slightly out of line with each other, which creates a counter-force at ninety degrees to the variance, which in turn tries to twist the framework of the bike in the direction you actually wanted to go in the first place; give it a little help by leaning your own body weight in that direction and, like magic, you execute a finely coordinated turn that feels perfectly natural and looks cool to onlookers.

Competition bikes can take corners at very high speeds, leaning into curves at really steep angles.  Were the rider to suddenly push the handlebars in the “right” direction, these machines would instantly turn into lethal piles of wildly gyrating wreckage.

Launch a well-balanced, spinning wheel into airless space, and it will turn in the same straight line forever, even though you can shift it sideways with ease by pushing directly on its axle point at exactly ninety degrees to the wheel’s rotational line.   Further, it will simulate gravity by using centrifugal effect to force everything toward the inside of its outer rim.

Like with real gravity, the faster the wheel turns the more you will weigh as you stand inside the rim with your head toward the axle.  If you then climb up a ladder toward the center, you will feel progressively lighter until you reach the axle, where you’d feel weightless.  [Note:  the correct term is centrifugal EFFECT, not centrifugal FORCE.  It's not a force, simply a way of expressing what happens when something gets flung in a circular direction]

Such great things came from the simple act of poking a stick through a hole, don’t you think?

Views From Benny Hill is a series by Jerry Smith

Views From Benny Hill