The Ridge: The Whisper of the Leaves - Chap. 21

At 11:30, just about the time Cubby Lawrence was in the police station, Gerald Borden was going to his locker at Wynne High School to get his lunch. Like James, he attended the city’s school even though he lived much closer to the Fortner Crossing Community School. He didn’t have any plans to go to go to college as James did, however. His parents simply thought he might get a better education in the larger school.

Gerald had just sat down in the lunchroom and was opening his lunch box when Mr. Albert, the school principal, rushed up to his table.

“Gerald.”

Gerald looked up and saw the concern on the man’s face.

“Yessir,” he said.

“There’s a lady in my office from Dr. Price’s office,” The principal seemed anxious. “She said that your father is there and that he’s got a problem. It’s pretty bad and your mother asked if she could come get you. So, you need to go.”

As he said this, a tall, pretty, Auburn haired woman in her late twenties stepped out of the hall and into the lunchroom. Under normal circumstances, Gerald would have been eyeing the statuesque woman, but these were not normal circumstances. She smiled at Gerald, so he stood up and gathered his things to leave.

Gerald knew that his father, who was almost sixty, had a bad heart. He had been diagnosed with angina when he was just thirty-five and had occasionally gone to the doctor with chest pains. However, he had been doing fine and was given a good report on his heart just two weeks before. But, then again, Gerald thought, maybe it is something else. Maybe he had an accident while plowing or something.

“Is it his heart?” Gerald asked the woman as he trotted up to her.

“We don’t know for sure,” The lady said giving Gerald a smile of comfort this time. “Maybe by the time we get back the doctor will know more. Are you ready?”

“Yea, let’s go.”

The two went out to where the woman had parked a black Ford sedan and within moments, they were heading toward the town’s only clinic a little over a mile away. Gerald was obviously nervous and anxious. But his nervousness turned to terror and confusion, when an arm reached over from the back seat and put an ether loaded cloth over his mouth. He struggled briefly, but the drug took effect in just seconds and the boy’s body fell limp.

“There ya go. Easy as it gets.”

“Don’t get too cocky, Katie,” Sally Lawrence said while looking at her sister in the rearview mirror. “We ain’t got ‘im home yet and once we get there, no tellin what Daddy’ll want to do with ‘im.”

Like Sally, Katie Lawrence was tall and pretty in the face, but where Sally had a model’s figure, Katie had the figure of a coal miner. She had gotten her father’s bulky muscles and while no one would consider her fat, she still weighed almost 200 pounds.

“Well, whatever he does,” Katie answered. “It’ll be worth it after what he did ta Brother.”

“Brother” was what the two Lawrence girls called their baby brother, Al. Their mother started it innocently enough and they and the rest of the family carried it on into adulthood.

Of the three children of Cubby and the late Martha Lawrence, Sally was the oldest at twenty-eight, Katie next at twenty-six and Al last at twenty-four. They, along with everyone else in the family, knew Al was a bootlegger. And while the sisters didn’t necessarily approve of it, especially Sally, they were glad to get the gifts that he so willingly bestowed on them. Time and again he would have a good week or month and invariably, some new dress or piece of jewelry or something else just as special would suddenly be found on each of their beds.

With the rest of the world, they knew he could be mean and cruel and, obviously, even deadly. But with them, he was the perfect angel. For that reason, it was an easy thing for them to go and get this boy and take him back to their father.

The gravel roads were muddy from the rain the night before, so Sally had to drive slower than she normally would. It took nearly twenty minutes to drive the five miles to their place on the Ridge south of Wittsburg. Gerald was still unconscious when they arrived.

The house was old and badly in need of repair and painting. Chickens and guineas ran freely in the yard and hardly moved when the car came up. A large hog pen, and all the rest of the place, other than the farmhouse, was on a slope of the Ridge and ran away downhill from the house. This was a logical layout because it allowed for better drainage of the various droppings whenever it rained.

The predominate smell on the farm was of hog manure. At this early date in March, though, that smell was virtually nonexistent compared to the odor that would emanate from the pena couple of months later. Once the summer sun began to bake the perpetual mixture of mud and excrement and hog slop, anyone within two miles would know that there was a hog farm close by.

“Ja git ‘im?” Cubby Lawrence yelled as he was coming through the gate of the hog pen.

“We got ‘im, Daddy?” Katie said and flashed a giddy grin. Sally said nothing.

Mud and whatever else happened to be on the ground, both fresh and stale, were caked on Lawrence’s overall legs up past the knees. His meaty hands were covered with a layer of the same mixture and he did not bother to wipe them off before he reached into the car for Gerald. He pulled him out with one hand and let him crumple to the ground. He didn’t move.

“How much that junk ya use on ‘im?” Lawrence looked at Sally.

“Ask Katie,” Sally said as defiantly as she had the courage to muster. “She’s the one who put ‘im out.”

Lawrence eyes flashed and he flicked his hand out much faster than anyone would have thought possible, catching Sally flush on the right cheek. He hardly put any effort behind it, but it was enough to make her gasp and take a step back.

“Keep ‘at smart mouth to ya self, girl,” Lawrence pointed a finger at her.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Tears were coming to Sally’s eyes, her cheek beginning to redden almost instantly from the blow and from embarrassment. Lawrence did not acknowledge her apology.

After so many years, she should have known better than to “sass” her father. But, she forever maintained the hope that he would eventually see her as a person and not just another head of livestock. Any love coming from her parents had always been through her mother and now she was gone.

As he had gotten older, Brother had acted as a buffer between their father and the rest of the family. They were the same height, but the father had at least a hundred- and fifty-pound advantage on the son.

There was one time, and one time only, that they had had a real fight involving fists, kicking and whatever other tactic they could come up with. It was a few months after her brother turned twenty-one and, in that encounter, the son got the best of the father.

After the fight, Lawrence showed her brother the respect she had always craved for herself. That made her say things to him that caused slaps like she just received. Lately, she had begun to think that nothing would ever change until she simply left the family.

After the slap, she looked at Katie who had the expected smug grin on her face. Katie was the most like her father of the three kids, even more so than her brother. And it seemed like he could sense that and gave her sister far more leeway than he ever gave her.

“Yall pick ‘im up and bring ‘im over year,” Lawrence motioned at the boy then lumbered toward a small outbuilding beside the barn that served as a woodshed. He jerked the door open and motioned inside.

“Put ‘im in year ‘til he comes to,” He said and started walking back to the hog pen. “When he does, we’ll have a talk with ‘im. And make sure ya latch ‘at door girl.”

Sally knew the last remark was for her. She couldn’t remember the last time her father had called her by her name.