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-a-month 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 ill. “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 money-grabbing “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 co-endorsement 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 often as she 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 jail 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.
r /> 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 attorney in Atlanta. “Baby,” Tom pleaded. “You just got too much hate and revenge built up that you got to stop.”
In between visits, Pat and Tom spoke on the phone. Every evening, the guards in the Fulton County jail carried telephones from cell to cell, and each prisoner had his allotted time to talk. In order to “buy” phone time, Tom traded everything he could to his fellow prisoners. He didn’t smoke, but he bought cartons of cigarettes to barter for time. He gave his cellmates the best bunk, his desserts, and other choice items off his food trays. He did chores, read legal papers for the illiterate, and even prevailed upon Pat to call the wives and girlfriends of his fellow prisoners to deliver messages—a task she performed grudgingly—so that he could have some of the other men’s phone time.
Their phone talk was so precious to them. They discussed everything from legal strategy to what they would do in the future. Pat recorded their conversations, she told Tom, so she could listen to his voice later and not be so alone. She could never accept that despite all the minutes he collected from other prisoners, Tom’s time on the phone was limited. She blamed him when he had to hang up precipitously.
With each legal setback, Pat grew more negative. She reminded Tom in every phone call that he was going to prison for at least twelve years and that she would be “an old woman” when he got out. Her voice was very soft, alternately choked with tears and icily accusatory. His was desperate as he pleaded with her to try to understand. But it seemed there was no way he could win with Pat in their phone conversations. Each time he heard her voice, he hoped they could have a loving, warm call, but she twisted his words, found fault in almost everything he said, and accused him of being cruel to her. Tom was baffled. She knew he would never do anything to hurt her. What more did he have to do to prove he still loved her?
Pat preferred to be Tom’s only visitor and discouraged even family members from going to see him. She told him that Paw and Nona complained about the cold, the guards, the long walk up the corridor, and that he shouldn’t ask them to visit. She even complained on occasion about Boppo. If she did allow her family to visit Tom, she wrote out questions she wanted them to ask him. When Susan or Debbie or Ronnie left Tom, Pat debriefed them to be sure that she knew everything they had discussed with him.
Most of all, Pat detested Matthew Rawley*, a college friend of Tom’s. He was a minister and tremendously supportive of Tom, who needed all the bolstering he could get. When Rawley first came back into Tom’s life, Pat had appeared to like him well enough, although she debated religious issues with him continually. “Show me. Show me where the Bible says that,” she would demand. “If there is a God, then show me in the Bible.” He listened patiently to her arguments and then pointed out his source, but Pat came to hate the young minister when she learned that Tom sometimes asked his advice.
From then on, every time Pat heard that Matt had visited Tom in jail, she pitched a fit. She spent much of their precious telephone time accusing Tom of betraying her by letting him visit. In the end, she demanded that he choose between herself and the Rev. Rawley.
Of course, Tom chose his wife.
***
Boppo and Papa, who had once had every expectation of living a comfortable retirement, were now fending off creditors. The Dodson Drive house was long gone, and it looked as if they were going to lose the Tell Road farm too. Pat and Ronnie were, of course, living with them, and Ronnie was sent to the same military school that Tom had attended. Boppo was very protective of the skinny, quiet boy, and she insisted that he at least have proper schooling, despite their reduced circumstances. He was no student and couldn’t maintain the C average the school required. He dropped out in the ninth grade.
Both Susan and Debbie hit rocky places in their marriages. Bill Alford told Susan he didn’t want to be married anymore. Susan and her friend Sonja Salo were accepted for training as flight attendants on Eastern Airlines. Susan and Bill were divorced, but they remarried within six months. Bill took care of Sean while Susan moved temporarily to Newark, New Jersey, to attend Eastern’s six-month training school. But whatever else was going on in the family, it was of minor importance compared with Pat’s predicament. She wouldn’t let anyone forget it, or the injustice that was being done to Tom. And as if in confirmation of all the disparaging things Pat and Margureitte had said about Tom’s ex-wife, his children, Sherry and Russ, were removed from their mother’s custody by children’s protective authorities. There was a possibility that Little Carolyn would have visitation rights, if she straightened out her life and found a permanent residence. In the meantime, Big Carolyn’s brother, Seaborn Lawrence, was caring for them, despite Tom’s wish that they go to Pat.
Ed Garland’s motion for a new trial was delayed on February 20. With that piece of bad news and at Pat’s repeated urgings, Tom’s letters to his grandparents grew more pressured. The same theme wound through all of them. They must not trust Jean Boggs—she was only trying to get their money. They must believe in him and in Pat, who could be counted on to take care of them in their old age. Pat warned Tom of the danger that his grandparents’ wills could easily be broken if someone unscrupulous influenced them. That would be a catastrophe for them, she explained, now that he was in jail. He was currently an heir, but her name was not on those wills. He was locked up, she pointed out, and if one of his grandparents should die and her name was not specified as executor, whatever would happen to the other? Who would care for the surviving grandparent?
Moreover, they had to be realistic. His grandparents’ money and property could quite possibly bypass Tom. He had already lost his birthright, his parents’ assets, and now Pat cautioned him that he would probably be disinherited by Paw and Nona because they were old and didn’t understand. If that happened, he would never have enough money for the legal fight needed to get him out of jail.
She was very persuasive and Tom saw the logic behind her arguments. He wrote another letter. Meanwhile, quietly, subtly, and without much fuss, Pat was moving into Tom’s grandparents’ lives. His letters made Pat seem like family to them, and she visited them as often as she could, ran errands, sat with Nona, cooked special little meals for them. Even when she wasn’t feeling well, she talked to them on the phone every day. It was a bad time for the old people; their son and daughter-in-law were dead—murdered—and their grandson was in jail.
Paw and Nona had been semi-estranged from their daughter Jean ever since the trouble when Paw sold his land to Walter instead of her. The old people’s lives had a vast empty spot and Pat began to fill it. She carried messages back and forth between Tom and his grandparents. Sometimes she took Debbie with her to help out in the little house on Washington Road, and Boppo often stopped by to visit.
As each new day passed, Pat revealed a different facet of her mercurial personality. With Tom, she was alternately accusatory or loving, “his Pat” who couldn’t survive without him. With his attorneys, she was imperious and demanding, and her voice had a stainless-steel edge. When she was with Paw and Nona, she gave them advice and took charge of their lives. With her parents, as always, she was a dependent, spoiled child given to tears and temper tantrums. She worried Boppo sick when, in a fit of anger, she would hop into the watermelon red Cougar they had given her and roar off down Tell Road. She drove like a maniac, leaving a cloud of dust behind her. Invariably, she would then edge her car back down the road and park it where the barn hid it from the house. If Boppo or Papa spotted her there and came out to try to talk sense to her, she’d flick on the lights and speed off again.
***
Pat and Tom usually talked on the phone late at night, and each time Tom hoped they could make it through an entire call without accusations and depressing thoughts.
&
nbsp; “I love you, darlin’. I miss you more than anything in this world,” he whispered one night into the phone. “You’re my Pat, and you’ll always be my Pat. We gonna make it, Sugar. I need you more than anything in this world. You’re my life—my whole entire life wrapped up in my Pat, okay? . . .”
“Okay,” she murmured flatly.
It was not going to be a good phone call and he had only a few minutes to talk. “I’ll mail you a letter tonight. Shug, I’m going to try to call you back.”
“I’ll talk to you Monday,” she said without one word of endearment.
“I’m going to try to call you back. I love you.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to you on Monday. . . .”
He had done something to make her angry. She could change so quickly from being sweet to being mad at him, and he seldom knew what he had done to cause it. He lay back on his bunk and listened to the radio. There were no dedications from Pat to Tom.
But, as always after each phone call, Tom sat down and wrote another letter to his grandparents, pleading for them to love Pat, to help her—and to do that, they would have to help him get out of jail. He was worried more about her than about what would happen with his appeal.
Pat had developed some kind of an infection on her hip and was using a crutch to take the weight off her right leg. She told Tom she had a continual fever, and now he had something else to worry about.
“How do you feel?” he asked during one phone call. “Now that you called,” she said, “I feel much better. . . . Well, I’ve still got a fever . . . and I had a bad night.”
“When are you going to the doctor?”
“Monday.”
“For sure?”
“For sure, honey.”
“I’ve been living on dreams ever since I met you,” he began, trying to cheer her up.
But Pat could not be consoled. “We can’t be like normal people and think about any kind of future,” she said. “We can’t even plan other than today. When things got bad, [at least] we could reach out and touch each other.”