Thoughts From the Front Porch

Nathaniel Hicks was born in eastern Virginia in the year 1803. He was the youngest of only two Hicks sons; they were a strong, intelligent, and God-fearing family. At his mother’s knee he was taught how to thread a needle and use it, to read history, poetry, and the Bible. Ethics, astronomy, mathematics, carpentry, horse-shoeing, hunting, fishing, animal husbandry, and all the other practical skills of survival, he learned by trailing around behind his father from the time he was able to walk. By these methods he acquired an admirable education. By the time he turned nineteen, Nate had left his family and made his way to a well protected bend of an Alabama river. He came alone and on foot, leading a sturdy pack mule named Jenny. It was a journey of four months duration.

From Surrey in Virginia, he came, bearing due west and vowing to make twenty miles a day. He found soon that in mountain and river territory, his goal would need to be adjusted. He encountered little trouble in this first leg of the journey, except that the River Staunton ran wider, deeper and faster than he had expected, spring snows in the mountains having poured their melt into the feeder streams. But he’d been told of a ford near Rockymounte, where he was able to cross. He approached the Blue Mountains where the altitudes were not so great, and crossed over them near Mountgomery.

And then Nate made for the pass through the Allegany Mountains at Aspinville and left Virginia for the first time in his young life. At Abington, Kentucky he took the western most road headed south, because it was south and west he was headed. Soon enough he discovered he’d taken the long way ’round. He trudged through the town of Furnace, just inside the northern edge of Tennessee. Aptly named, Nate thought Furnace, as it wasn’t much better than Hell.

Escaping Furnace, Nate went overland back east to Jonesboro, Tennessee, and from there followed what he believed was DeSoto’s final route south into the Cherokee country of Alabama, through Crowtown and across the river Tennessee at Creeks Crossing. All of it was an exciting spectacle to Nate, but Jenny balked at the unfamiliar and, of course, everything was. Nate encouraged or pulled the mule along, saying there was “nought to be a-skeered of.” And he believed it too, for Nate had too little experience to be afraid. Jenny was more difficult to convince.

After crossing the Tennessee River, Nate found he had to make a choice from among three roads, an uncommon luxury and dilemma. Determined to be more careful this time, he consulted his well-worn map, a gift it had been from his mother, when he’d turned ten. He’d dreamed many times since of this journey. His map showed only one road. And Nate figured it made little difference, so took out down the road headed, again, most southwesterly, and pulled Jenny through Turkey Town and Old Coosa village. Luckily, it was a good choice. He found his way to a path on the western side of the Coosa River, and headed south beside it.

A few days later, on a crisp October afternoon in 1822, Nate looked across the river towards the east, at the thick evergreen forests of “Talladegee” and the Creek Indian territory, just as he imagined DeSoto had done hundreds of years before him. Hardwood groves made patches of yellow, red and orange in amongst the dark evergreens. A breeze flickered through, showing the nearer leaves’ pale undersides and then, as the wind died down, the upper, stronger colors flamed up again. It was so much the way the trees had behaved at home in Virginia. As a hearth fire does, the turning trees warmed him, and he knew he’d found the right place. Before he’d bedded down for the night, Nate prepared to be open for trade.

Like DeSoto, Nate too had come for gold, in a way. But, unlike his predecessor, Nate knew he’d have to earn it. He’d had a well-made plan before he set out. He’d had a good idea where he was going, to just such a place as he’d found, in the new State of Alabama. And he’d known exactly what he’d do when he arrived there. He’d had no intention of stumbling up and down the territory as DeSoto had done. And, Nate was stocked with a much more worthwhile set of values and virtues than DeSoto had ever had. Nate would not abuse his welcome.

Instead of wandering creation and browbeating Indians for the gold that might lie ’round about for the taking, Nate found a spot he liked and made it his home. The irony of the history lesson always made Nate smile to himself. DeSoto had come with a highly inflated idea of his own worth and importance in the New World, where no one had ever heard of him. The Creeks and Cherokees welcomed him civilly, with original southern hospitality, if you will. DeSoto responded by behaving savagely, taking a chief prisoner and attacking whole tribes. Nate wondered at the pride in men and the folly it causes them to undertake.

The exalted early explorer had not understood, apparently, the simplest rules of diplomacy or economics. The very fact that gold was DeSoto’s single-minded obsession made it instantly more valuable to the perceptive native folks to whom he’d inquired about it, whether they’d cared for it before or not. DeSoto had thought the Indians would bow and scrape and give him anything for which he asked. But if the Indians ever had the gold, they certainly wouldn’t have parted with it cheaply after seeing DeSoto’s desire for it. The explorer had given the Alabama Creeks entirely too little credit.

Nate chose his house plot carefully, near enough to the the rough river landing to serve flatboat pilgrims in need of provisions, but on high enough ground to escape occasional high water. And directly adjacent to the old road. There he staked out a homestead and survived a cold, wet winter with only a pine-branch lean-to for shelter at night. In the daytime he kept busy, exploring the area, fishing for his dinner, or setting traps for small game and coming back to take his kill, then cleaning and roasting it over his small fire. All the while he was choosing trees for uniform size, marking them for the ax, taking them down to stack, and getting the word out that he had goods for trade.

His trading post had been established from the start, stocked with the small supply of goods he’d brought in his mule pack from Virginia. But he’d paid in advance and arranged for more of the same to be sent, in small increments, before he’d left home. Fort Strother was near enough to walk to and back in one day, if he got an early start, put a good leg to it, and left Jenny tethered at the homestead site.  Nate had gone to back to the fort (where he’d spent the last night of the long journey) a day or two after settling, There he was able to post a letter to his mother and father. It was just a word to let them know he was well and where he could be contacted. They would see to it his shipments were made and sent to Fort Strother. Nate gained friends living in the confines of the fort. once they knew him well enough they gladly spread the word that Nate was a trustworthy trader.

Nat’s first offerings were simple: a small quantity of tobacco, molasses, smoked meat, colored beads, sewing needles and twine, and of course, lead and powder. His first customers were his Creek neighbors and the occasional Cherokee from a little ways up the river. They would sometimes wander in with a handful of herbs and a hankering to taste molasses. Nate found their herbal medicines surprisingly effective. Once in a while, a native trudged in packing a pack of cured deerskins. Just the sort of thing Nate had hoped to supply to the outland travelers passing by along the ancient road or river. Skins took time to clean and cure. And a skin coat kept the weather off. Leather had many uses. And fur made a warm bed. Many a man passing by and looking to settle in the western frontier east of the Mississippi River, would be glad of a chance to trade for skins. Nate bargained and traded wisely, but he was always honest. And his business thrived.

Any strangers he ever ran across, Nate always treated with the same circumspect civility, whether they be English, German, French or native.  Foreign cartographers, he learned in time, would frequent his establishment at the rate of one or two a year. He willingly shared his ration of salt-cured meat and cornmeal johnny-cake with guests. The friendly Creeks and Cherokees showed him how to choose wisely among the wild-growing native greens to supplement his diet. The French paid handsomely in small gold bits just for a dry place to sleep. The Germans always traded in lead and preferred to sleep in the open. There arose amongst them all a mutual trust. Each helped the other, during the course of business, in learning their respective languages.

As soon as weather allowed it, Nate planted a small kitchen garden. He’d brought just corn and bean seeds, carefully kept in a pocket, all the way from his mother’s garden. A Creek friend surprised Nate with sweet potato sets to plant. Nate surprised the Creek by recognizing the plant. And they laughed together because neither had suspected that the other had ever seen such a wondrous thing as a sweet potato.

It took Nate more than year to start his building, and he’d made do well enough in his lean-to. Trees were best downed in cool weather, so they wouldn’t dry out too fast and split. Long-dried logs lasted best when built, so his cabin logs needed time to dry. One year was hurrying the process, Nate knew. But a two-year delay for a cabin was more than the eager young settler wanted to wait. In the meantime he planned the cabin’s setting, squared it up north and south and marked where the corners should be. He gathered flat river rocks and hauled them up to the site and laid a stone foot for his log walls to come. The floor would be smooth packed earth. But a stone foundation, chinked with red clay, would make the logs a bed out of the wet.

Once he started in the late fall of 1824, building took him only three weeks. He split a flat plane on one side of the first logs laid with a broad ax. This flat side went down on the stones. The pieces chopped away, he saved to use where his finished walls would need large chinks. All the other logs were left round and long enough to extend past the corners on the outside. They were were saddle-notched where each crossed another at the corners and each notch fit snugly over the log below. When he had it completed, his rudimentary cabin’s interior was only about eight feet on an side. But it was tight and dry, with a small loft space for sleeping and storage overhead. It was home and a more respectable and permanent place of business for Nate.

A few families, those looking for a little land and a better life, found Nate’s area to their liking. They built snug cabins and settled in on homesteads of their own. Within a five years they had a little settlement. And Nate had improved his trade to the level of mercantile store. Women are the key, Nate often said, to civilization. They keep us in order. Keep us clean and close to God. Give us something to hope for in a new generation. And, they demand a wider stock of goods than bachelor farmers and simple silent trappers. Women wanted bolts of fabric and tins of tea.

After ten years of thrift and hard work, along with a good dose of business sense, Nate was supplying an up-and-coming community of yeoman farmers with a good deal of its needs and wants. He built a bigger house of squared up logs on stone pilings, with a planed floor and windows, one each facing east and west. By ‘33, the settlers fairly poured into Alabama. Cropwell was an established town by then, with an official United States Post Office. And it lay by the path of the same reliable road that had served the early explorers three or four hundred years before, and Indian travelers for maybe ten thousand years before that. In 1833, though, Nate wrote to his father that the traffic along that road was something to see. Exciting it was indeed for him catch a certain sound that had become familiar to him, to hear as many as three or four mule carts a week come rolling in from some distance, or driving and to and fro from Ashville to Wilsonville.

When he finally felt prosperous enough in his own mind, Nate went in search of a wife. He was twenty-nine years old. He was happy to find that he wouldn’t have to go far afield, women being known to be unreasonable and overwrought when taken far from their mothers. Nate found his woman downriver, at a Shelby County church service. She was a steady and sensible sixteen-year-old, who talked very little. She was strong enough to help him in his business and not bad to look at either. Not much courtin’ was necessary. Maggie Byrd came with a small bundle of clothing and a smaller dowry, but with an established family name in the area.  And a lot of local cousins. That would be good for business. Nate and his hardy bride went right to work and had ten children over the next twenty years. Nate often laughed at his early expressions of the spiritual virtues and dry goods needs of women. Eight of his children turned out to be girls.

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

The Right Southern Corner

On a sleepy Sunday afternoon near the beginning of June in 1932, fifteen-year-old Claudia Aderholt sat in a rocking chair on her grandparents’ front porch and considered her situation. She’d arrived on Friday, with her mother and two younger sisters, Eleanor and Eileen, to stay with Mama’s people. Because they had no place else to go.

It was hot on the porch, but now and then a weak breeze would ruffle through Granddaddy’s forsythia, lift Claudia’s sun-streaked brown hair, and move on. The shrubbery was in need of pruning. A few yellow blossoms still clung to it. Overgrown as it was though, it did provide shade from the afternoon sun and protection, for those who took refuge there, from the prying eyes of passersby. This suited Claudia very well. She’d seen, and been seen by, plenty of people for the time being. She rocked and considered hard for a good little while.

Claudia still wore the clothes she’d worn to church that morning. She’d worn them through the noon dinner and afterwards as she helped with the dishes. She didn’t have much of anything worse, or better, to put on. It was a formerly navy blue cotton dress, now faded from numerous washings and ironings to a multitude of subtle, varied blues. It was quite a bit too short-waisted, since Claudia had “shot up,” as her mother put it, over the past two years. Claudia wore her old dress with a wide mismatched belt, because it almost served to hide her misplaced waistline. They’d let the hem down as far as it would go, which wasn’t far enough. And the old hem had left a pale, pencil-thin line where the skirt had once come to.

Her shoes were sensible. (When new, they’d been her mother’s.) And now they were worn down at the heels and up at the toes. Claudia had polished them the best she could. She’d gone bare-legged to church, having given her last decent pair of socks to her sister. The idea of hosiery had never entered her young head. Claudia blushed as she thought of how she’d tried to hide her feet in those dowdy old shoes and her rough, farm-girl ankles, by tucking them beneath her chair. One girl in the Sunday School class, Adelaide Forney, the lawyer’s daughter, had been so patronizing and vicious with her smiles. She’d been elegantly dressed and wearing silk stockings over smooth, perfect legs. Claudia had heard her daddy often say that no matter what was happening to the rest of us, the lawyers always seemed to thrive.

Claudia had worn her mother’s old hat to church too (because in 1932 hats were expected), though she’d been ashamed of it, with it’s frail, dust-colored flowers and tired felt. It was further adorned with greyish grosgrain ribbons that grew shorter (while Claudia grew taller) with continual raveling and trimming. It was a hopeless cycle of ruin and repair that soon would end in no ribbon at all. She hadn’t complained about the hat though. Because, the younger girls had worn older dresses and worse bonnets, all of which had been hers when new. And neither of them, not ten-year-old Eleanor nor Eileen, who was only six, could remember having ever had anything new of their own.

It was equally distressing to Claudia, though, that all of them had worn these things just two weeks before, the last time they’d been to the First Baptist Church. She feared that every person who’d seen them at their father’s funeral would distinctly remember their outfits. Though, logically, she knew that was hardly likely. There was nothing striking about their apparel to make the Aderholts conspicuous, except its well-worn and mended, clean but honest look. That was something to be proud of. And one shabby dress often seemed the same as another. There had been, thankfully, few in attendance at the funeral outside of relatives. And most of them had been adults, not girls her own age.

Still, Claudia had seen the disdainful glances of the other girls in Sunday School, girls who had never known hardship or constant dread. They still had their fathers and homes and would probably never face a single moment’s serious anxiety as long as their girlhood lasted. They would never worry where the next bite of food might come from or feel the certainty that a parent would die soon. Nor could they have any understanding of watching a father gasp for air, neither living nor dying, neither conscious nor out of pain.  Watching and waiting for the end, she was woefully unable to divine how long a human person can hover in the agonies of death without actually expiring. It was a long journey down an unfamiliar road, when the end seems always out of sight. And all the while, the slow withering and shrinking of her father kept dragging the family down and down into further depths of poverty. Claudia wasn’t a cruel child and she’d loved her father and grieved for him. But out of love, she had wished him dead, finally. She was practical by nature. She refused to turn a blind eye to reality, when she could stand to look at it.

Kinder people, at least Claudia had heard it said that they were kind, had taken Mrs. Aderholt aside and offered her their children’s hand-me-downs. Mrs. Aderholt, being the thoroughly Christian woman she was, had humbly accepted every offer and expressed sincere appreciation for their generosity. She’d often said that in these times that were hard for everybody, it was ’specially important to appreciate Christian charity.

Claudia found it difficult to appreciate their charity or even accept their Christianity. She knew that the girls in church next Sunday, and in school next fall too, would recognize every drooping sweater and tuckered-out blouse or skirt and know exactly who had condescended to give the Aderholts their worn-out wardrobes. They would know who had worn them before. The donors’ gifts of what they themselves no longer wanted would make them the object of praise. “How thoughtful. How generous,” everyone would say. The whole town would feel good about it, thinking themselves superior, though it made Claudia more miserable than ever. The benefactors would feel themselves rising in town’s estimation, even in their own estimation, while the Aderholts fell lower and more to be pitied in everyone’s eyes, even their own. Was this really Christian charity, the charity that suffereth long and is kind? that vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up?

Claudia roiled inside with fury and humiliation at the thought of it. She knew what she felt wasn’t the Christian way either, and she was ashamed of herself. She was prideful. She should have accepted the misfortune of her situation, as well as the happiness of others. Charity envieth not too. And she did envy them their easy lives. But it wasn’t their fault if they had easy lives. After all, she supposed that some of them were good people, some of them did mean well. But not all of them. She could not convince herself that all of them meant well. She tried to be happy that her sisters would have something besides her own cast-offs, worn out before outgrown. But the thought of those scornful girls and their whispers, the arrogant expressions on their faces, made her so angry. They were puffed up. That was against the Bible. Even the kind faces, full of compassion for the Aderholts, had made Claudia furious. How dare they feel sorry for her?

It was a troublesome philosophical dialogue this little girl had inside herself. After much ambivalence, she came down on the side of pride. And to some degree, self-preservation. Whether she was wrong or right or responsible or a victim of sad circumstance might be a subject of debate. But that is where she landed. Claudia decided she’d rather wear her own clothes, the clothes her father had paid for, when he’d been able, than put on anything these people gave her. Truth be told, those clothes, worn as they were, were about all the material goods the Aderholts had to their names. They were all there was of what their daddy had left them.

Claudia’s daddy had been sick for a long time and he’d kept working. For more than a year though, for almost two in fact, he had not been able to work. He’d tried, until he just couldn’t struggle out of his bed. The pain was too great. And then, after all the fight was gone out of him, he died. He left his family with nothing to live on, outside the legacy of their own determination and deep-rooted work ethic. He’d been a hard worker himself and a loving father too, though not very wise in the ways of a dishonest world. After his efforts and agonies, he’d done all he could. There’d been bills to pay that could not be paid. And in the end, they’d lost what little he’d accumulated in all his fifty-two years to creditors and bank foreclosures.

After the funeral, the Aderholt girls and their mother had gone back to the only home they’d ever known to “tie up loose ends” as Mama said. They discovered it was a good thing to go to be moving away. They were ashamed to walk down the street at home and always feared the step of the grocer or butcher behind them, demanding his due. They spent the last days there in the house retrieving what little there was, at least what they felt they could lay an honest claim to. Most if it, which really belonged to the creditors, they would leave behind.

During those last hours at home, as they sorted through their paltry belongings, Claudia had come upon a satchel on a shelf of her father’s chifforobe. It was filled with many years’ old bank statements and bills and  papers, so much that should have been discarded long before she found it. She looked through it all and tried to make sense of the chaotic state they were left in. It seemed to Claudia that some things didn’t add up. In the whole useless stockpile of papers, there was nothing that could help them, only things that could hurt them. There was no sense to it. Daddy had borrowed, even before he got sick, when there was money in the bank, when there seemed to be no reason to need a loan. Why would he do that? These were business problems, maybe, that only an adult might sort out. But who that adult would be, Claudia couldn’t imagine. Mama had no interest in figures or business. Daddy had made payments on a mortgage, even after the mortgage had been paid off. And yet they’d been foreclosed on. That was a fact that had been hammered home so often, it shouldn’t have occurred to Claudia to question it. But she did question it. She liked details to be logical and make sense.

Things were missing from the records that should have been there, she felt, such as the deed to their home place. Claudia had known for many months that the time would come when they’d be thrown out. She’d long dreaded the day when they’d hand that deed over and often pictured herself and her mother facing this final degradation. Outside the bank president’s office door, she imagined, inquisitive townsfolk would stare from the lobby at the Aderholts’ cruel disgrace, like the crowd at a public execution. All of the spectators would have faces radiant with relief. This time, the ax of misfortune would fall on someone other than themselves. As if the Aderholts’ misfortune would, in a way, give their neighbors a reprieve for one more day. Now it seemed, after all, the deed wasn’t there in the house. And so that humiliation was one, at least, they wouldn’t have to endure. She didn’t know exactly where the deed was, but what did it matter? What did any of it matter? Home wasn’t theirs anymore anyway. Maybe the bank had the deed in hand, but Claudia wasn’t going to worry about that right then.

One thing she was sure of, there was nothing of value in the old satchel. It contained only the muddled trivia of their descent in the world, painful enough to live through once. Claudia had no wish to save it to remember on some future sunnier day. Early one morning she placed the papers in amongst the stove’s few remaining embers, watch them catch and burn, then put the satchel away for some other use. On Thursday, she’d packed it with the Eileen’s few treasures: a small worn blanket, a threadbare doll, a sparse set of children’s books, fairy tales that Claudia, too, had loved long before Eileen was born, when she, too, had a childhood. Those few things might bring Eileen a little comfort, when they took their inevitable journey back to the strange new town where they had to go and live.

On Friday morning, they’d picked up their small bundles, walked to the livery stable, and caught a ride to Gearing in Mr. Arbuckle’s mule-drawn wagon. The rest they’d left for the banks and businesses to sort out.

As Claudia rocked pensively or violently by turns, all by herself on the porch, she thought through these events and looked to the future. It didn’t look good. Her grandparents could offer shelter, but not much more. Times were bad, as her mother said, for everybody. Well, if not everybody, at least for the kinfolks the Aderholts were to live with.

Mrs. Aderholt knew how to scrub a floor and keep a kitchen. She knew how to grow a garden and can green beans. She could make a good dinner from black-eyed peas and cornpone. Mama could pray better than anybody Claudia had ever heard utter a prayer. She was an inspiration.

But it was too late for a garden. And she couldn’t hire on as somebody else’s mother. Praying, the best Claudia could tell, was almost always a voluntary vocation, with no hard cash attached. Mama couldn’t go to preaching at the Baptist Church, because they had a perfectly good preacher already. And Mrs. Aderholt wasn’t Aimee Semple McPherson. She’d had no education to speak of. So, she couldn’t teach or nurse, the only acceptable occupations for ladies. The last resort for women with a bit of respectability left, the cotton mill, had just let a flock of women workers go. The last fired would surely be first hired, when hiring commenced again. Certainly they would get jobs before any fifty year old woman with no experience would be hired on. Claudia’s mother wouldn’t be able to find a job that paid. Or paid enough. Of that, Claudia was quite sure and certain.

As she rocked, Claudia noticed how boney her bent knees looked beneath the pale thin former hemline of her dress. Like glass knobs on a dresser drawer. She’d heard her mother and grandmother talking quietly about “how ‘pore’ Claudia’s arms and legs was gettin’.” She hadn’t taken much notice about it then, when she’d overheard them, except that it caused them uneasiness. But after that morning in church she did care, very much. She had lost weight in the last few months as she’d grown taller, instead of adding pounds, as growing girls are supposed to do. So she had a skinny frame she was ashamed of now. It worried her mother, who had plenty of other worries already.

She known she was way too thin to be fashionable in 1932. Not that Claudia had ever given a hoot about fashion. But once, when she’d slipped off to the bus station for the afternoon, she’d read an entire Redbook magazine, including the full-color advertisements for mayonnaise and linoleum, Chesterfield cigarettes and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. She’d learned about a lot of things. Curves were back. Girls should be rounded, in some places, and slender in others. All over skinniness meant poverty (in fact “poor” was another word for “thin” in the Alabama of the 1930s, when so many really were painfully poor and thin.)

Claudia made up her mind about a lot of things that Sunday in the porch rocker. She decided that she would grow fatter as soon as possible, if for no other reason than to show up those hateful girls she’d met that morning. For the first time in her life, Claudia dreaded the Sunday coming up next week, when she’d have to go back to that church and face again those haughty girls in her new Sunday School Class.

Claudia decided that she would have to go to work to help take care of her family. She’d work and go to school too. She’d sign up for a book-keeping class in the fall, so she could understand those figures and papers, and nobody would take advantage of her or her family again. She would see to it by the time school started that she and her sisters would have decent clothes, so that they would never have to take charity or be ashamed of what they wore again.

Claudia was seized with a sudden yearning to get a job and go to work right away, so she could walk to the corner drugstore and buy an ice cream sundae anytime she felt like it. But it was Sunday. Probably, the soda fountain wouldn’t be open for business. Just to take a task in hand and work till it was complete would’ve made Claudia feel better. She longed to find a brush and bucket and scrub the porch floor right then and there. But she knew if she did such a thing, she’d be scolded. It was Sunday. People driving by might see. Her mother and grandmother wouldn’t even sew on a button on Sunday. They said it was a sin. If it hadn’t been Sunday, Claudia would’ve walked to town that very minute and found somebody who would hire her. But there was nothing to do except to wait for Monday. And make plans.

And that is exactly what Claudia did.

She went into her grandparents’ house and searched for a scrap of paper and a pencil. She didn’t ask for it, because she knew it would cause as much concern for her soul as a request for a needle and thread. She found an old laundry slip with an unused back in a kitchen drawer and a pencil stub in a cup on her grandfather’s desk. A faithful disciple of small economies, Claudia wouldn’t waste a fresh new sheet of paper just for this, a blueprint of her life’s ambitions. She sat back down in the rocker and wrote out her plan. Then she memorized it carefully and folded it into her pocket for easy access.

Early Monday morning, Claudia Aderholt, a thin and gawky fifteen-year-old girl in a worn-out blue dress, walked out of her grandparents’ house right in the middle of The Great Depression and found herself a job. After that, she knew there would be no stopping her. She’d never look back.

Although, perhaps, after all, in years that followed, Claudia did look back. She went to work with a vengeance at the the corner drugstore, as the soda jerk’s apprentice. And she didn’t do much talking. She listened carefully to the directions she was given and followed them to a T. She made herself useful in a thousand ways and tried her best to fade into the background. She had never been one who wanted attention drawn to herself. She overheard conversations among the people who sat in the booths near the back and at the tables in the front. And she learned a lot.

There was a particular table in the front corner where the same group of men gathered everyday at the same time. They paid her no mind when she refilled their coffee cups or cleared them away, but kept chatting on any number of topics. She found them especially interesting, but never let on that she heard anything at all.

On Friday, as she washed dishes behind the counter, Claudia shyly spotted a dark and tall young man, about twenty-two years old, dressed in the latest and most expensive casual fashion. He too was on the slim side, but not too slim, and in no way did his rather handsome young figure portend the massive man he would become.

Claudia dipped out of sight on the pretext of putting something away under the counter. She didn’t want to be seen. She needn’t have worried. He never would have noticed her anyhow. She was beneath his notice that day, and she knew it. She also knew, without being told, that this young man could be no other than Byrd Richardson.

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

The Right Southern Corner

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

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