Hell With the Lid Blown Off Page 14

  Trent looked abashed when he explained that Alafair had insisted on coming back with him, but Shaw didn’t give him any grief over it. He was quite aware that a twenty-two-year-old deputy sheriff didn’t stand a chance against Alafair. He passed Mr. Eichelberger into Trent’s care and helped Alafair take down the pack from behind the saddle. His unnecessary aid gave him a chance to talk privately with his wife for a moment.

  “You didn’t need to come,” he said to her, though he was glad she did. He knew from experience that Alafair’s quiet, competent presence was calming and would do Mr. Eichelberger good. Not to mention Shaw himself.

  “Trent told me what happened.” Her eyes brimmed, but she blinked back the tears. “I loved Miz Eichelberger.”

  Shaw put an arm around her. “I tidied her up best I could. I found a quilt in the rubble and covered her up. She’s beyond trouble now.”

  “Amen. How is he?”

  Shaw glanced at the man on the washtub. “He’s a little better. He’s making sense when he talks. He knows she’s gone. He wanted to look at her, so I took him around back. He cried a mite. I think he’ll do, but he’ll have a hard row to hoe.”

  “We’ll do the best we can for him.” Alafair handed Shaw the drawstring bag containing a pair of Kurt Lukenbach’s overalls and a shirt—far too big for the diminutive Mr. Eichelberger. “I took the girls back to Mary’s. She’s fixing dinner for them. Streeter and the boys are all still at our house. The porch is fixed. When I left they were boarding up the broken windows and salvaging what furniture they can out of the bedrooms. There are a couple of leaks in the roof that’ll have to be dealt with right quick. Still, I think we can sleep in our own house tonight. Phoebe and her bunch aren’t up to going anywhere, even if they had somewhere to go. So Mary and Kurt will be having company for a while yet. They’ll be glad to get the rest of us out of there, even if we all have to sleep on pallets at home for a spell.”

  “I think I’d better round up my helpers and set them to clearing the road from here to town. We can’t leave Miz Eichelberger here in the yard. We have to get her back to town as soon as we can. If this weather keeps up, the road will be impassible tonight, even without the downed trees.”

  “I surely would like to get into Boynton long enough to check on my girls and my new granddaughter.”

  “We will, sugar, one way or the other.”

  “What are we going to do with him in the meantime?” She nodded at Eichelberger.

  He shook his head, unsure. “If the young’uns are at Mary’s, then we better take him to our place for a bit.”

  Alafair approved of that idea. “Maybe I can get him cleaned up and fed, let him rest a while before he has to face his plight.”

  Trent stood up from Mr. Eichelberger’s side as they approached. He had heard the end of their conversation. “The mud on the road is already sucking at the horses’ feet,” he warned.

  The previous winter had been one of the wettest of Shaw Tucker’s lifetime, and the road to town had often been too boggy to travel easily. Bringing supplies home had been difficult, to say the least. He had learned a few tricks then, though he had hoped he would never have to put them into practice again. “Trent, when we get back to the farm, you and the boys get to clearing the road. Don’t worry about moving every stick and branch. Just do a good enough job for us to get the buckboard through. Tell Gee Dub to bring along a couple of good saws. While you’re doing that, me and Streeter will fetch Miz Eichelberger’s body and load up the buckboard with sand and boards. We’ll carry our dead to town this afternoon. If we can’t get there by road, we’ll go cross-country.”

  Mary Lukenbach

  After Mary Lukenbach had fed dinner to her charges, she packed an enormous basket of food for the repair crew and set out for her parents’ house. She filled a little pail with biscuits and a small basket with the fresh summer squash she had managed to pick before the storm, then loaded down her littlest sister, Grace, and her newfound cousin Chase Kemp and took them with her. She left her husband, Kurt, at home to look after Phoebe, Zeltha, and John Lee. Blanche and Sophronia were competent helpers, so she left them with Kurt. But Mary wouldn’t think of expecting him to handle two overstimulated little whirlwinds on top of everything. Being a former grammar school teacher as well as the second-oldest of ten had already given Mary expert child skills. She gave the children a task.

  They were more than halfway to her parents’ farm, walking across the middle of a muddy, branch-strewn field, when it started to rain again. Chase wasn’t bothered, but Grace began to whine. Mary removed her own floppy, big-brimmed felt hat and plopped it on the little girl’s head, which amused Grace for the moment. Mary took her hand and quickened the pace. The path was muddy already. More rain would turn it to glue. Mary’s honey-gold hair was coming loose from its coil and plastering long, uncomfortably wet tendrils to her neck. Chase was fifty feet ahead of them by now, flitting hither and yon and swinging the basket of squash about alarmingly.

  “Chase,” Mary called. “Slow down!”

  As the words left her mouth, he disappeared over the top of a little hill that abutted the path, and she huffed impatiently.

  “Where’d he go?” Grace wondered.

  Mary picked her up, pail and all, ready to go after Chase, but he reappeared on top of the hill and waved at them.

  “Chase, quit your fooling and get down here!”

  “Quit your fooling!” Grace echoed.

  “There’s a baby doll over here,” he hollered back. “It’s all muddy. The wind must have blowed it in!”

  “Never you mind. It’s raining and we need to get dinner to your auntie’s house before we drown.”

  “I want to see the baby doll,” Grace protested.

  “It’s crying,” Chase yelled.

  Mary hesitated and her eyebrows knit. She put Grace and her picnic basket down and with a stern warning to the children to stay put, she clambered up the hill. Sure enough, leaning against a pile of branches and half buried in wet grass and muck at the bottom, she saw a round-headed little baby doll.

  Mary let out a breath, relieved. Until it moved.

  Her heart leaped into her throat. Without a thought she half slid down the slippery rill, unaware and unconcerned that she was covering the seat of her dress with mud. She touched the little hand, and it moved again. Mary dropped to her knees and frantically dug the baby out of the mire, then scooped a handful of black mud off of its face. It was a little girl, maybe six months old, dressed in a white cotton shift and nothing else. She was barely breathing.

  Mary scrambled back up the hill with the baby in her arms. She grabbed Grace by one hand and rushed to her mother’s house as fast as she could go, dragging the startled girl behind her and leaving Chase to keep up as best he could.

  Alafair Tucker

  Once Alafair got Mr. Eichelberger home, she managed to sponge the filth off of him and get him decently dressed. She had just ensconced him at her kitchen table with a mug of hot coffee, a bowl of warmed-over bean soup, and a piece of leftover cornbread when Mary burst through the back door with her muddy bundle and two small children in her wake.

  “Mama!” Mary yelled, so loudly that Alafair leaped to her feet, knocking over her chair. “We found a baby! It must have gotten picked up by the wind and blown all the way out to your pasture.”

  “My stars! Is it alive?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Alafair took over. “Grace, bring me that tub yonder. Mary, put the little’un on the cabinet while I get some rags. Chase, take this bucket and pump some water for me. Scoot, now!”

  Everyone rushed to his or her task, eager to assist.

  The baby’s eyes were closed and her chilly limbs were limp. Alafair could feel a heartbeat, but the child’s breath was undetectable. Still—she was pale, not blue. Alafair gave Mary a hopeful glance.

  Mary
and her mother cleaned off the baby as best they could with kitchen rags until Chase lugged in a half-full pail of cloudy water from the well pump outside the back door. Alafair would normally have warmed the water in the reservoir of her cast iron stove, but time was at a premium. Mary removed the baby’s sodden shift and sat the child in the tub of cool water. The tiny body shuddered under Mary’s gentle touch, and surprised blue eyes opened wide. The baby’s pink bottom lip pooched out and she started to cry.

  “Oh, thank you, Jesus!” Alafair exclaimed. Mary said nothing. She was weeping as well.

  Grace was hovering around, worried. Alafair had her fetch a clean towel from the pantry to wrap around the infant, then sent her to stand by the stove until she dried. Since she had lost most of her clothes in the storm, Grace was clad in one of Chase’s shirts, which made a perfectly adequate dress for her, tied around the middle with twine for a belt.

  Mary sat down in a chair with the baby in her arms and began to croon to her, and Grace leaned on Mary’s lap and joined in the familiar lullaby.

  Alafair stood watching for a moment as the baby sucked eagerly on Mary’s knuckle. She was sure the little girl badly needed sustenance but unsure how to provide it quickly. She was the mother of many children, but she had never before had need of a baby bottle. She decided to make a knot in a dishtowel and soak it in water so the child would at least have something to suck until she could make up some gruel. She was turning to take another towel out of a drawer in her baker’s cabinet when she noticed that poor addled Mr. Eichelberger was no longer in his chair at the table.

  Blast! she thought, though she never would have uttered such a shocking epithet aloud. What next?

  She quickly assembled her wet dishtowel pacifier and handed it to Mary, then headed outside to look for Mr. Eichelberger. Surely he had gotten out the back door while they were distracted. She circled the house, but he was nowhere to be found. She stopped in the front yard, and put her hands on her hips, thinking. The boys were out clearing the road. Shaw and Streeter were in the barn preparing the buckboard to carry the dead. There was no one to spare to hunt for a befuddled old man who was probably trying to find his way to a home that no longer existed.

  It was going to have to be her. She walked up the newly repaired front porch steps and into the house to tell Mary where she was going, but as she passed into the parlor, she found Eichelberger sitting demurely in one of her armchairs. Chase Kemp was standing beside him, cheerfully relating how he had discovered the living baby doll. Eichelberger looked at her when she came in. His eyes were full of sadness, but aware. He gave her a hint of a smile, and she smiled back, weak with relief.

  Chase had taken charge of the old man. Alafair had not even noticed when Chase led him into the parlor and seated him in the armchair with his blanket around him and his mug of coffee on the side table. Alafair paused, touched. Chase was not generally so thoughtful. Perhaps he had never before had the opportunity to be.

  Alafair Tucker

  The day after the storm was one of the longest days Alafair could remember living through. She had planned to survey the damage to her large truck garden in the afternoon, but the weather kicked up again with heavy intermittent rain, wind, and a couple of brief hailstorms. During a lull, she scribbled a note to let Kurt know what had happened to his wife and sent Chase running with it. Chase didn’t come back, but Blanche and Sophronia did. They said they were eager to see the baby, but Alafair suspected that after living through the tornado, the girls were too spooked to be away from their mother for long. When she did propose leaving them alone while she made a foray to her garden, they objected strenuously.

  So for a few hours Alafair was stuck in a dark, leaky house with boarded-up windows, three nervous young girls, a shattered old man, a fretful yellow dog, and a stupefied infant that the wind had blown in. And Mary.

  Mary heaped plates with the food she had brought for them from her own house and firmly insisted Alafair and the girls take their dinner into the parlor to eat and keep Mr. Eichelberger company. Then she busily shuttled around Alafair’s kitchen with the foundling on her hip, stirring up a pot of stew for their supper.

  Alafair found herself looking at Mary with new eyes. Martha had always been her mother’s lieutenant, and Mary was her older sister’s laughing, easygoing shadow. But Martha was stuck in town, and circumstances had thrust Mary to the fore. She stepped up heroically.

  Married less than two months, she had taken in her suddenly homeless sister’s stricken family without a second thought, and for who knew how long? She had provided shelter and sustenance to her parents and siblings as well, and had opened her home to her little cousin as though he was her own.

  What a heart she has, Alafair thought, on the verge of tears. And Kurt as well. No wonder they fell in love. They were made for each other.

  Shaw Tucker

  Shaw and Streeter McCoy came back to the house a little after noon in the middle of a downpour. The men pulled off their sodden boots and hung their limp hats on the back porch before they entered, but they were both so wet that they couldn’t avoid dripping all over the kitchen floor. Not that it mattered.

  Shaw entered first and found himself eye-to-eye with Mary, who was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in one hand and an unknown, round-eyed infant on the other arm.

  “Who’s this?” It wasn’t the first thing Shaw had planned to say, but this was a day full of surprises.

  “We don’t know, Daddy. Chase found her out beside the path that crosses the pasture between my place and here. We figure she got picked up by the tornado and blown in from who-knows-how-far. She’s shook up, but we can’t find anything else wrong with her. It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed.”

  The little pink fingers clutched Shaw’s big brown finger and her wide blue eyes gazed into his kind hazel ones. His wet black hair was sticking out every which way and his bristly mustache was floppier than usual. It occurred to him that she must be wondering what manner of creatures inhabited this place to which she had been delivered. He straightened. “If that don’t beat all,” he said. One more odd thing to add to the list.

  “Her folks must be frantic. If they’re alive,” Streeter said.

  Alafair had heard their voices and came into the kitchen in time to hear the end of their exchange. “That’s why we’ve got to let Scott know we have her. You fellows stand over by the stove with Grace and dry off. I’ll dish you up some of this stew Mary made and pour you a hot drink.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be dry anytime in the near future,” Streeter observed.

  Shaw smiled because it felt so true. “We’ll have a quick bite, Alafair, but the buckboard is ready and we’re going to try for town right quick before the weather gets any worse. The boys haven’t come back yet so I don’t know if the road is cleared enough or not. Even if it is we may not be able to get through because of the mud. I can’t say how long the trip will take. We’re bound and determined, though. Streeter’s hankering to get home and I’m hankering to deliver the remains of the departed to the undertaker. We’ve already put Miz Eichelberger in the wagon and pulled a tarp pulled over the bed.”

  “I want to come with you,” Alafair said.

  “I know you do, honey. But you can’t. Not now.”

  Alafair drew herself up, desperate to make her case. But she had long ago learned to judge by the look in Shaw’s eyes when it would be productive to argue and when it was better to keep her peace. She didn’t argue.

  Trenton Calder

  Me and Gee Dub and Charlie had the worst dadblamed time clearing that road. I swear the mud was ankle deep and our horses didn’t like that one little bit. We had better luck when we got down on our feet and dragged stuff off to the side with might and main and our own six hands. Mostly the road was blocked with tree limbs and the like. There were a fair number of entire trees, though, and we had to do some sawing. One big
old loblolly pine near to got the best of us. We ended up sawing a chunk out of the middle and using the horses and some ropes to lug it out of the way.

  After we had been at the task for a few hours, we were all covered with enough sap and mud and muck and gunk head-to-toe that it was hard to tell which of us was which. The more dirty and miserable we got, the more we took to joshing about it. Gee remarked that when the wet slop on us finally dried out, it’d be hard as cement and we’d be found later in various statue-like attitudes, unable to move one way or the other. We all got tickled at that and laughed and hooted a lot more than the joke was funny. What else can you do?

  We found more than just trees that we had to move. There was a piece of somebody’s wall with the unbroken window still in it. Charlie found a perfectly good mop in a bush. We could more or less track the path of the twister by the line of trees standing up with no leaves or branches and the steel windmills that were twisted like corkscrews. The bridge across Cane Creek was partly torn up. We pondered on that for a spell, then decided to re-lay as many sound boards as we could find. When we got done, you could walk across if you watched your feet. We reckoned a wagon might stand a chance. We came across a number of trees that had been decorated with odd objects; a tin bathtub, clothes, dead animals. No more dead people, thank goodness.

  As we got fairly close to the turnoff toward town, one of Mr. Tucker’s brothers, Howard McBride, met us on the road. His dad, Mr. Tucker’s stepdaddy, had asked him to see if he could get to the farm. Howard already knew what had happened to Phoebe and John Lee Day because of Gee Dub’s trek into Boynton the night of the storm. Word gets around fast. Anyway, Howard fell to helping us, but it was nigh to a hopeless task. It kept raining off and on, and eventually the road could have been clean as a whistle and it still would have been too boggy for any wheeled conveyance to navigate—and maybe any animal as well.