Everything She Ever Wanted (45 page)

verdict had been genuine.
 
She lived in a soap opera kind of world, her

every perception colored by what she read and what she watched on

television.
 
She had always preferred shows like Perry Mason and

Burke's Law where trials ended with a surprise witness and the innocent

defendant was reunited with his or her lover.
 
That had not happened.

They had taken Tom away from her.

Pat was frantic that she was going to lose Kentwood too, her perfect

plantation.
 
She could not bear to have anyone else live in the rooms

Tom had remodeled just for her, or to have someone else enjoy her

special roses.
 
She went to Susan and Bill Alford and begged them to

buy Kentwood-to save it for her.
 
Bill was going to college.
 
Susan's

job at Colonel Alan's horse farm in Riverdale hardly paid enough to

cover the six-hundred-dollar-amonth mortgage on Kentwood, much less the

balloon payments.

Nevertheless, they went to the bank and tried to get a loan.
 
They

failed to qualify and told Pat there was no way they could help.

"I'd rather see it burn then," Pat spat out.
 
"I'll be damned if I'll

let anyone else have it!"

In November, Tom wrote to his grandparents every few days, beseeching

them to help Pat.
 
He had no money to pay an attorney to work on his

appeal.
 
Everything he and Pat had built up was being sold, all the

horses and saddles, the buggies and the tack, their tools, farm

equipment, Tom's guns.
 
The Radcliffes had mortgaged the Tell Road farm

twice and were selling whatever else they could.
 
Kentwood Farm would

go back to Hoyt Waller if they didn't come up with thousands of dollars

by December.
 
They were already three months behind on payments.
 
"You

are our last straw," he pleaded to old Paw Allanson.

Tom truly believed his wife would die if he didn't get out and take

care of her.
 
He had never known her when her health was not in

jeopardy, and the strain of his trial and conviction seemed to have

worn her down like wind against a sand dune.
 
Although Pat insisted to

Tom that she would get a job, he begged her not to.

She couldn't work; she was far too .
 
"We have no other choice," he

wrote to Paw.
 
"It all boils down now to a matter of life and death.
 
I

love you both, please help me, Tom."

Paw had held tightly to his money for so long, secreting it here and

there on his farm, and he had already helped Tommy out quite a bit.

But it was hard for him to let go of the amounts of cash that Pat and

Tom needed, both for attorneys and for Pat's medicine and doctors.
 
Tom

was asking for at least twenty-five thousand dollars for his attorneys,

and Lord knew how much more it would take to support his wife.

With growing urgency, Tom sent his letters to Paw and Nona, extolling

Pat and damning his aunt jean Boggs as a moneygrabbing "vulture."
 
He

bombarded the old people with scare techniques, warning them that there

would be no one left to take care of them if Jean ever got control of

their money.
 
But he only wrote what he believed to be the truth, what

Pat assured him was the truth.

He did love his grandparents, and if he was freed, he would have taken

care of them.
 
He loved Pat beyond all reason, and believed she was

slowly dying without him.
 
She did nothing to assuage his worries and

prodded him to keep writing to his grandparents.

His letters were transparent, but they worked on Paw and Nona.
 
Tommy

was more of a son to them than the son they had lost.

Grudgingly, the old couple eventually came through with enough money to

pay the lawyers and Pat's doctors.
 
But they would not mortgage their

own home to save Kentwood just as things seemed to be as bad as they

could possibly get, the Radcliffes sustained another blow: fires.

They seemed to come out of nowhere, as if some malevolent "barn burner"

right out of William Faulkner were passing through Georgia.
 
They began

on Tell Road in the last week of November.

Colonel Radcliffe woke in the early hours one morning to the acrid

smell of smoke.
 
Throwing on a robe, he hurried by Pat's room and saw

her standing at the window, clothed in a negligee.
 
She gazed,

transfixed, up past the show ring.
 
His eyes followed hers and he saw

smoke billowing from the stables.
 
Pat had apparently been too

frightened to move or even cry out.

The stables were two hundred yards away, halfway up to Fanny Cash's

place, and the colonel saw tongues of orange flame already licking at

the red siding of the U-shaped structure.
 
Although he was in his

sixties, he had kept himself in good shape.
 
By running full tilt, he

was able to save the two terrified horses inside, but the stables were

lost.
 
Pat visited Tom in jail and told him about this latest disaster

in their lives.
 
She said she had been hurt helping Papa save the

horses.
 
It wasn't true; she had never left her bedroom that night.

That same week, the barn at Kentwood burned too-to the ground.
 
It was

fortunate that the only livestock they had left was a lone renegade cow

that had been off foraging for herself up in the orchards.
 
And then to

bring Tom down even further, he learned that his maternal grandmother,

Mae Mama Lawrence, had died.
 
She too had cut him out of her will.

The house that Pat and Tom had loved so at Kentwood also fell victim to

flames, just before Christmas.
 
Pat collected insurance on both the

house and the barn and deposited the checks in her bank account,

ignoring the fact that they required a coendorsement with the mortgage

holder.
 
Then she wrote Ed Garland a five-thousand-dollar check on the

account, which bounced.
 
The bulk of the insurance on Kentwood wasn't

hers at all, but Hoyt Waller's.

The other policies were written not only in her name and Tom's, but

also in Paw's, as he had helped so much financially when they bought

Kentwood.
 
Collecting on the policies was complicated and prolonged.

Pat and Tom's share was gone at once for legal expenses.

The Kentwood sign came down and the blackened timbers of the house and

barn were lonely charred relics in the cold December fog.
 
The holly

bushes still lined the curving driveway, and the white fence was as

pristine as ever, but nothing else was the same.
 
The property went

back to Hoyt Waller, and Pat's dream of a Zebulon plantation had

disappeared in the flames.
 
Now all she had left was Tom, and she clung

to him desperately, fearing he would abandon her too.

Pat came to see Tom in the Fulton County jail as o ten as s was allowed

to, usually on Wednesdays.
 
She walked up the long, long passageway to

the old jail.
 
It was built on an incline, the slope steep enough to

wear her out.
 
They were not allowed to touch, but talked to each other

through a glass partition using telephones.
 
Pat would raise her small

hand and hold it up to the glass against Tom's huge paw.
 
She was as

loving as she had been in the very first days of their courtship,

staring through the glass at him as if her heart were about to break.

"It about drove me crazy," Tom recalled.
 
"She dressed in the most

revealing, seductive clothes she could."

Tom had introduced her to country and western music and they had a

dozen favorite songs that were special to them, ballads of passion and

betrayal, of hopeless love and longing, songs like "For the Good

Times," "Blanket on the Ground," and "Please, please, don't stop loving

me, 'cause I couldn't live with you gone."
 
The lyrics brought back the

memory of what Tom and Pat had been to each other.
 
Late at night, she

would call disc jockeys and ask them to play special songs "for my

Tom."
 
Lying on his jail bunk, he would listen to his tinny little

radio, trying to stay awake to hear the songs his wife had selected for

him.

Pat and Tom remembered their slogan.
 
"First things first."

They both scribbled that phrase on the back of every letter they

sent.

"First things first.
 
Again and again Tom promised Pat their love would

survive.

As bittersweet as their time together was, dissension seemed to

accompany Pat's 'all visits.
 
She rarely moved quietly through the

security system with the other visitors; every jailer remembered Tom

Allanson's wife; she didn't care for their rules and she let them know

it.
 
She accused them of deliberately losing some of her letters to Tom

and she began to number them so she could catch them at it.
 
Pat

attracted attention to both of them.
 
She was impatient and petulant

when Tom begged her to obey the jail regulations.
 
But even as she

proclaimed her undying love for him, she annoyed the guards who

controlled his daily life.

Tom could never be sure what mood Pat would be in.
 
Sometimes she was

cheerful and full of enthusiasm about some fancy card or drawing she

had made for him.
 
She was so talented artistically, and she loved to

make him old-fashioned lovers' cards with lace and hearts and little

pop-up figures.
 
He plastered his cell walls with the pretty pictures

she fashioned for him.
 
She embroidered on men's boxer shorts and gave

them to him for Christmas.
 
Despite the chortles from the men in his

cellblock, he wore them.

Sometimes Pat's anger spilled over during her visits.
 
Tom promised her

they would be together after Ed Garland got him a new trial, but Pat

had come to truly hate Garland.
 
She told Tom he was disrespectful to

her and she put up with him only because he was supposed to be the best