In the Shadow of Alabama Read online

  In the Shadow of Alabama

  judy reene singer

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Judy Reene Singer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0946-2

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-0946-2

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: June 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-0945-5

  The heart of this book really belongs to the men and women in uniform who spend their lives protecting us and our wonderful country. Whether their service is recent or in the far past, they have always served despite great personal sacrifice. My grandfather, who was in the navy, served in France during World War I, and was the victim of mustard gas. He returned home with badly damaged lungs that caused problems for him his entire life. My father served in the Army Air Corps, in Alabama, during World War II, and had experiences that changed him forever. We owe every veteran, every policeman, every fireman, and every member of the uniformed services a huge debt of gratitude. My book is a small and humble tribute to all of these heroes.

  Prologue

  My father was a difficult man, I always knew that. He carried a suitcase of grievances throughout his life, things I didn’t understand and didn’t care to. He never spoke of his time in the Army Air Force—that’s what it was called when he was a soldier. He had served during World War II, and it hadn’t been good. I knew that much. But his death left a family of walking wounded, flayed open by his hot temper, shattered to the core by his nasty insults. How my mother bore him for so long was a puzzle, yet she wept when he died.

  And now we stood together for his funeral. My sister, my uncle, my mother, and me. We stood listening to the rabbi intoning generic platitudes that meant nothing.

  My mother once had a little garden behind my childhood home where white lilies bloomed in the fall, after all the other flowers were finished. Tall plants with complex blooms, they were winter’s early harbingers and never lasted very long. They bloomed and they fell apart, spent. White lilies are fragile like that.

  We stood, the four of us, listening to the ancient tongue, while not far from us, off to the side, stood a black woman—respectful, reverential. An elegant black rose among the broken white lilies.

  When the service was over, she came over to gently touch my mother’s hand. She said she was sorry that her father, who had served in the army under mine, wasn’t able to attend. He had been very close to my father, and he had so badly wanted to talk to him about the thing that had separated the two men for an entire lifetime.

  And then she dropped a word, so charged, so fueled with anger, that I was compelled to follow it to wherever it led.

  Chapter 1

  A white horse gives the herd away. That’s what Malachi always says. A band of wild, dark horses fleeing from predators into the safety of cut-slate mountains, to seek their refuge inside the brown and violet shadows of twisted brush, can be immediately betrayed by the flash of a white horse.

  Malachi’s my farm manager, and he always likes to tell me how nature separates dark and white horses. Or maybe, eventually, the dark and white horses separate themselves, he was never clear about that. Still, the white horse is ostracized. Shunned. Becoming an outcast, driven to live at the fringes of horse society, left behind to fend for himself, because his bright color can spell death for the rest. Malachi always squeezes his eyes shut before telling me that part, as though he has to first envision it.

  “Funny thing about horses and color,” he says, finally opening his eyes and settling himself down with a grunt onto a bale of hay. His fingers fuss through the strands before selecting a thin stalk to slide between his lips. “Horses can’t help themselves, splitting apart like that. It’s always been that way; it will always be that way. It’s nature’s rules.”

  It made sense to me. I could picture a white horse moving across burnt sienna hills like a flash of lightning slicing through a thunderous sky. It made sense, though I’ve learned not to believe everything Malachi has told me over the years.

  * * *

  Malachi Charge had come with the farm, along with the tractor, the extra motor for the well pump, and six bags of lime—although they were all in better shape than he was. When I first met him ten years ago, I couldn’t help but notice the slight tremor in his hands, the barely perceptible drag of his left leg, the pale cast of cataracts in his dark brown eyes.

  “I’m seventy-five,” he told us then. He was six foot, thin as a tenpenny nail, and wearing clean but faded jeans, a short-sleeved yellow shirt, and a tan newsboy cap tilted back atop his thick white hair. “But I’ll do you a favor and stay on, because I been managing this farm for fifty years.”

  Though the deed showed that our horse farm had only been in existence for eighteen, we didn’t quibble with him. We’re not farmers by occupation, David and I, only by optimism. And with David working in the city at a large law firm, and me putting in long hours in my home office writing books, we needed this man who seemed to be part of the natural order of farming.

  Malachi is black, and we’re white, and we felt squeamish “acquiring” a person along with the farm in a sort of package deal, as if he were a piece of farm equipment. It didn’t sit right with us, and we were embarrassed by even the thought of it.

  “You may as well let me live here,” he said, when I told him how I felt funny about it. “I got no place to go.” I guess it was that Robert Frost thing. Home is, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. He didn’t seem to have family, and so we told him of course he could stay on.

  “I won’t be any trouble at’al,” he declared. “I got my Social Security.”

  But we in
sisted on a regular salary and the title of farm manager, and then made things proper and official by naming the place Water-from-a-Rock Farm, because it seemed like that was what we were trying to get. He lived in the small cottage he had always lived in, behind the barn, except that we renovated it for him. And he continued to do what he had apparently always done: gardening, puttering, fixing things, napping the afternoon away, and being bossy.

  It’s been ten years.

  And Malachi, still wearing the tan newsboy cap, insisted on his last birthday that he was just turning seventy-five. Again. If it even was his birthday, since it floats from month to month each year, depending on his mood, needs, and circumstances.

  “I could use a new winter coat,” he told me in the beginning of November, when the air started to chill. “It’s my birthday, anyways.”

  I couldn’t say no to him, because he was my friend, my guide, and my father-substitute, but I couldn’t resist teasing him. “I thought your birthday was in May, when you picked out all those new plaid shirts.”

  He just nodded and spit on the ground. “Yep. May, too.”

  * * *

  My career keeps me at the computer, but I make sure I get outside for a few hours every day. I need to feel the changes in the wind, see the sky moving through its expressions of grays and blues, and witness the tangerine pinks that sweep through at sunset in what the old artists used to call the Hudson Valley sky. I like to stand by the barn at night and stare up, looking for the first shift of stars and moon that heralds another gliding change of constellations and seasons.

  * * *

  Spring is the best.

  I am always pleased how the flowers know enough to come back on time, how all the grass renews at once, how green things push out of the ground, filling in the dead spaces. The earth lies dreamless for months, brown and empty, then thin emerald blades glide up through the black loam, celadon buds, rolled up like tiny, tight cigarettes, appear on once-dormant sticks, everything obeying a simultaneous choreography. The protocol of brave gold daffodils, followed by an unvarying succession of grape hyacinth, yellow forsythias, pink tulips, purple and white lilacs. I finger the new leaves, gently touch the folded infant flowers, and wonder how they all know when it’s their time. How do they strike their annual bargain with the warm spring sun and cool nights? What summons them? The lengthening of days? The rains? Do they hold underground meetings? They come without bidding, they come in their time. I can’t figure it, but all these things make sense to Malachi because he knows nature.

  “They can’t help themselves,” he says. “It’s in the rules.”

  * * *

  He told me once that he was born and raised in Missouri, and had farmed all his life and that’s how he knows things. He begins watering and tilling the soil as soon as the ground warms and softens, usually late April. He’s “waking the gardens,” he says. He prunes bare branches and sows seeds in little paper cups that he leaves on his windowsill and bosses me into buying more plants, more seeds, more bags of fertilizer, more equipment. He’ll stand with me a few months later, nodding proudly as I marvel again at small, curled lettuce leaves and tomatoes flowering yellow, and basil growing like a fragrant weed.

  “What did you learn?” he would ask me. “What did you learn?”

  And like a schoolgirl, I recite his lessons back to him. “Start your seeds early, be patient, make sure they get what they need.”

  * * *

  Foals come in the spring.

  That is something I understand very well.

  I breed horses, have bred them for years, and I understand the swelling promise of equine life that mares carry for eleven months. Though I never wanted children of my own, I think I understand how the mares feel when their bellies bulge out and shift from side to side. When their legs swell as they clumber around wearily, waiting to foal.

  “I’ll sit up with her,” Malachi tells me when a mare begins to bag up, her udders engorging with milk, the area around her tail sinking in. Signs that she is ready to foal. I will watch her for hours, fretting, waiting, until Malachi finally pushes me out of the barn. “Go get some rest and let me do my job.” He sends me off to the house as evening falls. “Trust me.”

  And I do. I trust him more than I ever trusted anyone in my life.

  He finally summons me in the very beginning hours of morning, calling me on the intercom to come right now, and I rush to the barn.

  A foal dives into its new life, head and neck centered between two small hooves that are sculpted like clay flowers, its long, spindly front legs reaching out for the world. It slips wetly to the ground, knowing what it must do next. An hour later, it’s standing.

  I have to touch it. Tenderly touch the thumb-size nostrils set into a fine muzzle, the silky mane, the short, curly tail, run my finger over the pink gums waiting for teeth. I look into its dark eyes that know everything about being a horse right away. I am fifty-three, and I still don’t know everything about being a person.

  “Now, go get some sleep and let me clean them up,” Malachi commands me, and I obey him because he has become my father. Because I have long given up on my own father, and I need Malachi’s care and management.

  As I leave the barn, he’ll take a clean old towel and rub the foal down, gently talking into its lily-petal ears, slapping the bottom of its feet. Imprinting it, he tells me. Loving it, like it was his own child, holding it in his big, round arms.

  * * *

  “I made you tea,” he’ll say when I get off a horse, tired from training it, which is not my real job, only my joy. He’ll bring me a cup of steaming tea from his kitchen, holding it in his ever-so-slightly shaking hands, chamomile or dandelion or some other concoction he invented from the plants he grew and dried the previous summer. Or he will bring me whole wheat crackers spread with his favorite sardines—he tells me the best ones come crisscrossed—or sandwiches with tomato and garlic roasted until it’s melted, or burdock root and cattail sprouts laid across buttered toast and seasoned with salt. He’ll gently brush the hair from my eyes like a loving parent and hand me a bowl of one of his special snacks, shelled walnuts and sugared cranberries mixed with shredded wheat.

  I grab handfuls and thank him, and he smiles. “Way back, was a time I used to cook,” he explains.

  “For squirrels?” I joke, peering at the usual nuts and berries, but I eat it gratefully, thinking how much I love this man.

  * * *

  I stand at the fence that surrounds the fields behind my house and stare at my horses. Sixteen of them, broken up into small herds. The youngsters are in one field. The four broodmares with foals at their side, in another. Then my riding horses, of sorts, because they aren’t actually totally broke to ride yet. All of them black Friesians, glowing like seals. Except for Lisbon. He’s a Thoroughbred. And he’s nearly pure white. I adopted him from a horse rescue about three years ago. He came with a mysterious history that left him head shy and frightened, with nervous, rolling eyes that didn’t comprehend. It took almost two years before he allowed me to bridle him properly, without having to take all the straps apart and reassemble them around his face.

  * * *

  White horses are not considered white, of course. Malachi must have told me a hundred times they are called grays, even though I already know that. He always likes to point out how white horses are born dark, sometimes black, sometimes bay or chestnut. How the white comes slowly, a few hairs that start around the face, then creep down into the coat, more every year, until the horse has turned pure white. I stare at my hair in the mirror sometimes, and wonder when I will be called a gray.

  Malachi comes up behind me while I am figuring out the yearlings. We stand by the back fence and watch them together. Four of them, black as the dark side of the moon, their long manes and tails falling in thick, curly tangles. These horses will never turn white; Friesians are forever black by nature. I watch them gallop past me, bucking and playing, legs carved like ebony balusters, tails flaring over
their backs, held high with excitement. I bred them to sell, and he comments that they look too thin.

  “Feed ’em some arsenic,” he announces through the ever-present piece of hay he chews on. “It’ll make their coats shine like glass. Plump them up, too, so they’ll sell fast. People like fat horses.”

  “They’re well-fed,” I say defensively. “They get plenty of good grain and alfalfa. The vet says they look fine. He says young legs don’t need so much weight. That youngsters fill out as they mature.”

  “Is that what you learned from the vet? Ha!” He pulls out the piece of hay and throws it to the ground. “Arsenic won’t hurt them,” he says. “Years back, we did it all the time. Called it Potter’s mixture. Cut your feed bill down. What with the economy, you should be cutting back a little, anyways.”

  “No,” I say to Malachi. “You’re talking poison.”

  “They won’t gain weight natural,” he says. “You can’t trust nature to do what you want.” He makes a face at my refusal and turns away from me. “Nature has her own rules, for her own self. She likes young horses lean; people like ’em fat. If you want to sell ’em, you can’t trust her to do right by you. You can never trust nature. Not ever.”

  And, displeased with me, he mutters to himself all the way back to the barn.

  Chapter 2

  Today, the phone rings incessantly. Three times before I finish my morning coffee. The barn phone rings six more times while I am outside with the horses, the jangling old phone sound amplified by the quiet morning air. I know it’s my sister Sandra, who is obsessed about being the first to spread news, good or bad, although she specializes in and relishes the latter. I feel guilty, but I don’t want to waste two hours on the phone impatiently struggling to be sympathetic.

  My morning is spent riding. When I’m finished, I groom Lisbon with leisurely strokes, while Malachi grins at me, his hands on his hips. The barn phone is ringing again.