That family was gathered closely around her, both in terms of relationship and physical proximity, a closeness whose most visible manifestation was the midday meal.
Ernestine prepared it every day, cooking all through the morning while she completed other chores. By noon it was ready, the table completely stocked with beef or chicken, corn, peas, potatoes, corn-bread, and iced tea. As they had for generations, the Alday men arrived right on time, seated themselves around the table, and bowed their heads for the traditional noontide blessing in a portrait, as someone later observed, that Norman Rockwell could have painted without the loss of a single stroke.
After the blessing, the talk turned to the farm, as it always did. Ned, neatly dressed in flannel work clothes, shunning, as all the Alday men shunned, the baggy denim overalls more common to the area, had been working with Jerry, the two of them plowing a distant field, though at a slower pace than they liked, since the ground still contained muddy patches from the late rains. It had been particularly arduous that morning, and Jerry’s boots were encrusted with the dark soil he’d been slogging through since first light. As for Jimmy and Shuggie, they had already mapped out their activities for the afternoon. Jimmy would be plowing the fields behind Jerry’s trailer on River Road, while Shuggie intended to join his Uncle Aubrey, borrow some equipment from a neighbor, and work a different field to the west.
By one in the afternoon, the men had finished their meal and were on their way out of the house. As she cleared the table, Ernestine watched as each one of them went through the screen door, made his way down the short flight of steps, then vanished, as it would later seem to her, into the blinding light of the midday sun.
While the Aldays were routinely moving through a typically uneventful working day, Carl was in crisis mode. The immediate trouble was the car. It had begun to act up. And although he and Wayne agreed that it was probably caused by some malfunction in the carburetor, neither knew what to do about it, except to keep the motor running continually. Thus, even when they stopped to get something to eat or go to the bathroom, the engine churned greedily, incessantly guzzling gas hour after hour.
By late afternoon, they were nearly out of gas again, and with no way of refueling, since they were also running out of money. “We were always out of money,” Coleman would say a few days later. “We were spending a lot, mostly on booze and gas. We usually had booze, but we were always running out of gas.”
Curiously enough, gas was harder to come by than a car. To break in and hot-wire a car took only a matter of seconds. To siphon gas took a great deal longer. Some rudimentary technology was required, along with a few cumbersome devices. To score well with gas, it was necessary to find a tank in some remote field or behind an isolated house. Thus, unable to shut the motor off, the broken carburetor greedily pumping gasoline into its churning engine, their wallets empty of everything but gas receipts, they began cruising the back roads in search of just such a tank.
By mid-afternoon Ned and Jerry were having machine trouble too. After the midday meal, they had headed back to a parcel of land they’d leased from Otis Miller. These were good fields, but they’d been made difficult by the wet, muddy ground that still lingered in the wake of recent rains. Consequently, not long after they’d begun plowing, the tractor had bogged down, and they’d returned to the Alday homestead and picked up a jeep they intended to use to pull the tractor from the bog in which it had become mired.
After several unsuccessful attempts to pull it free, Ned and Jerry decided to get more help. They drove out of the field and headed down River Road, hoping to find a few of the other Alday men to lend a hand. In the bright mid-May sun they could see the broad fields of their neighbors, the green leaves of their budding crops, even from time to time the slender fronds of the small palm trees that had managed to sprout in this northernmost corner of the semitropical zone. But as they continued up the narrow paved road, they found no one who could help them free the tractor, and so they returned to it for yet another try.
At about the same time that Ned and Jerry were returning to the stranded tractor, Jimmy was finishing up his day’s plowing in a long flat field only a mile or so from his brother’s trailer. He had only a few more chores before he could head over to Jerry’s trailer, where the men often met to plan the next day’s farming while Mary worked in her flower garden in the front yard. It was always something he looked forward to at the end of the day, a rural version of winding down.
At around 4:00 P.M., Carl spotted a tank sitting by itself in a field about fifty feet from the road. Carl slowed the car, then eased it onto the shoulder of the road. From the passenger side, Wayne slid over so that he could keep his foot on the accelerator while Carl checked it out.
From their places in the back seat, George and Billy watched as Carl trudged out to the tank, his short legs slogging over the still damp ground. They could see him circling the tank slowly, stopping to fiddle with it from time to time, before he shook his head and returned to the car.
“It’s gas, all right,” he told them, “but it’s diesel. We’ll have to keep looking.”
He pulled in behind the wheel again as Wayne slid back over to his usual place, riding shotgun against the passenger door. They would have to keep looking, Carl told him, as he pressed down on the accelerator, moving the car back again onto the road, his eyes sweeping left and right, searching with increasing desperation for a place to hit.
Some fifteen minutes later, they settled motionlessly on what everyone agreed was a perfect mark.
At approximately four-thirty in the afternoon, Bud Alday was heading toward his house on River Road when he saw his nephew, Jimmy, pull his tractor up into the driveway of Jerry Alday’s trailer. He called to him briefly as he passed, and Jerry waved and called back before heading on up into the drive. As he continued down River Road, Bud could see other vehicles around the trailer, Jerry’s blue jeep in the driveway, and almost out of sight, parked just behind the trailer, a dark-colored car he didn’t recognize. Two miles farther down the road he glanced over his shoulder and saw two other relatives, his brother Aubrey and nephew Shuggie, at work in the fields. He waved to them broadly and continued down the road toward home.
For a time after Bud passed, Shuggie and Aubrey continued to work in the fields. Earlier that day, they had borrowed some farm equipment from Otis Miller. With light now growing dim, they off-loaded the borrowed equipment and returned it to the Miller farm. It was a little after five, and, tired and thirsty, they decided to drop by the local grocery. They bought soda and crackers and Shuggie bought a pack of cigarettes. For a few minutes they chatted with Leonard Roberts, the owner. Then they left, telling Roberts they were off to feed their hogs.
Later, finished with the hogs, their day’s work done, they headed back down River Road. On the way, they passed Jerry’s trailer and noticed the various Alday vehicles parked in its driveway: Jerry’s green John Deere tractor, Jimmy’s blue jeep, Mary’s blue and white Chevy Impala. It had the look of a family council. They decided to pull in.
About twenty minutes later, Benny Alday drove past Jerry’s trailer on his way home. The driveway was crowded with vehicles, Mary’s blue and white Impala, Jerry’s jeep, Jimmy’s truck, the Alday family tractor, all of them parked in the wide open spaces around the Alday trailer. He did not see the dark green car Bud had previously glimpsed, or notice that for all the people who must have been gathered together inside the trailer at that moment, none of its interior lights had been turned on.
By six o’clock the first blue haze of evening was beginning to settle over the coastal plain, but as long as some light remained, Mrs. Eddie Chance continued to work in her garden. She had nearly finished the day’s weeding when she glanced up River Road toward the trailer of Jerry and Mary Alday and saw two cars pull out of the driveway. She recognized one of them as Mary Alday’s, but the other was not familiar, and, as she would later say, it left her with only the vague impression of something dark.
A short way d
own River Road, fifteen-year-old Michael Jackson was watering flowers in his front yard when he saw two cars move slowly past his house. He recognized the first one as Mary Alday’s, but noticed that it was being driven by a long-haired young man he did not recognize, and that a black man sat hunched slightly forward in the back seat. Directly behind it, he saw a dark-colored Chevrolet Super Sport with two long-haired boys inside. It cruised very near the Alday car, and Michael got the impression that it was carefully following it. Both cars drifted past him slowly, then returned about five minutes later, moving in the opposite direction, as if heading back to Mary Alday’s trailer down the road. Five minutes later they passed a third time, moving once again down River Road, the same people, the same cars, only this time they were going very fast.
Still farther down the same road, Jerry Godby was busy filling a chemical tank on the back of a 3020 John Deere tractor when he glanced up and saw two cars traveling down River Road. The first car had rushed by too quickly for him to see it very well, but he saw the second very clearly. It was a dark green Chevrolet, and as it passed, the driver, a young man with shoulder-length hair, waved at him politely, and Godby waved back.
Only a few minutes later, as Godby was spraying the peanut field on the north side of Hamock Springs Road, he again saw the same two cars, one so close behind the other that for a moment Godby thought they might be about to begin a drag race. One was green, and he recognized it as the same car he’d seen only a few minutes before. The other was blue with a white top, a Chevrolet Impala that reminded him of the one driven by a neighbor down the road. He squinted to see if he could make her out, but he only saw two men, one in front, driving, one in back, sitting off to one side. It was an oddly formal configuration in a part of the country where chauffeurs were unknown, and because of it, he decided the car must belong to someone other than his neighbor. Besides, as he continued to watch the cars move down the road, there was no sign at all of Mary Alday.
At approximately 6:30 P.M., Barbara Alday, Shuggie’s wife, left for her job at the Dairy Bar Restaurant in Donalsonville. On her way, she passed Jerry’s trailer, and noticed that Mary was not working in her flower garden as she usually did this time of day.
That wasn’t the only thing she noticed, however.
The tractor was pulled up onto the carefully maintained lawn and parked in an odd position, one she doubted Jerry would have parked it in, since he’d always been very careful about damaging the lawn. For the briefest instant, she felt that something was wrong in the Alday trailer, then dismissed the thought and continued into town. Once at work, the thought returned to her, and at around 7:00 P.M., she began calling the trailer. Finally, after several attempts, she called a friend, Bill Woods, and asked him to go to the local high school and find out if there was a Young Farmers’ meeting, the only local gathering, other than church services, that the Aldays were likely to attend. Woods did as Barbara asked, then called her back to report that no meeting was being held.
By ten o’clock the same night, Inez Alday, Aubrey’s wife, had also begun to worry about her husband. Earlier in the day, Aubrey had told her the exact location of where he intended to work that day, and so, with her son, Curtis, she decided to drive down to the area of the farm he’d indicated. They reached it a few minutes later. It was a clear night, and she could see a long way out into the distance. If anyone had been working out there, she would have been able to see the lights from the tractor and go out to them. But there were no lights, and so for a time she and her son remained by the road, staring out into the empty silence of the nightbound fields.
Nearly a hundred miles to the west, at the Riverside Restaurant in Elba, Alabama, Mrs. Birdie Kieth saw a blue and white Chevrolet Impala pull into the restaurant’s parking lot. Two men got out of the car, a tall man in his mid-twenties and a black man with thick, dark-rimmed eyeglasses. The black man seemed to position himself by the door while the white one sauntered up to the counter and ordered coffee and barbecue sandwiches. After a time, the black man stepped over and played the jukebox, while his friend remained at the counter, eyeing the cash register each time Mrs. Keith opened it.
While the black man swayed to the music of the jukebox and the white one waited for the sandwiches he’d ordered, Mrs. Kieth disappeared into the back of the restaurant, retrieved the pistol she always kept there, and gave it to Mrs. Jacobs, one of her employees. “Stay behind the curtain,” she told her, “and keep an eye on those guys.”
A few minutes later, after joking with one another boisterously for a while, the two men paid the bill, left the restaurant, and disappeared down the road, leaving nothing behind but the money they’d paid the bill with. But like the two men themselves, that was odd, too. She could not remember ever having been paid such a substantial bill with nothing but coins, especially these coins, all of them the same, all of them Kennedy half-dollars, the sort you expected to find in a little household bank.
Chapter Seven
At about the same time Inez Alday was returning with her son from the empty fields, Ernestine was also beginning to worry about her family. She had long ago gotten used to the long hours the Alday men kept during planting season. And when that planting season came late, as it had this year because of the incessant and unseasonably late rains, the hours grew even longer, stretching into what rural people call “can see to can’t see” working days.
On the Alday farm, just as in industry, time was money. What could not be planted could not be harvested and later brought to market. Because of that, much had to be done to ensure that the 552 acres of Alday land were fully planted, and to do it required that the men work from dawn to dusk to make up for the valuable time the rains had stolen. At the noon meal, Ned had even warned her that he and the boys might well be working late into the night.
Consequently, for the first few hours, as supper grew cold on the table and she continued with her other chores, Ernestine had allowed for the lateness by reminding herself of what Ned had told her. By nine o’clock, however, with the late-spring air pitch-black outside, she could not imagine that the Alday men were still at work, and she began to talk to Fay about what they might do to find out where the men were.
Nor was Ernestine the only Alday woman who had begun to grow concerned. At nine-thirty Shuggie’s wife, Barbara, came over to ask if Ernestine had seen or heard from any of the men.
Ernestine shook her head. “I haven’t heard from any of them,” she said.
Barbara then told Ernestine that earlier she’d become sufficiently concerned to take a drive down River Road in search of Shuggie. She’d driven by Jerry’s trailer and seen something that made her worry even more.
“There were lots of cars there,” Barbara said, “just about everybody. Jerry’s jeep and Jimmy’s pickup truck, along with the family tractor.”
But the one vehicle that should have almost certainly been there was missing.
“Mary’s car was the only one that wasn’t there,” Barbara said.
The fact that Mary Alday’s car was not among all the other vehicles Barbara had seen around the trailer caused the women to theorize that something might have happened to one of the men, a sudden illness or a farming accident that would have caused everyone to pile into Mary’s car and head for the nearest hospital.
As a theory, it sounded plausible enough, so Ernestine began calling the hospitals in the area. The results were disheartening. None of the hospitals had listed any Alday as having been either treated and released or admitted as a patient. It was as if they had all disappeared into thin air.
Something was wrong, but Ernestine could not imagine what it was. She knew that wherever the Aldays were, they were certainly together. Other than that, she knew only the places where they would not be found. Since the Aldays did not drink, they would not be off drunk somewhere. Nor would they be apt to lose themselves in the nearby tourist traps of Panama City. There were no church, town, or Democratic Club meetings scheduled for that Monday evening.
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In light of all this, only one conclusion seemed possible.
Something was wrong.
But what?
Repeatedly Ernestine called other members of the family in the hope of locating Mary and the missing Alday men, but none of them had heard or seen any of them since earlier in the day. Throughout the night she, Barbara and Fay continued to discuss the various possibilities, one by one dismissing each while hoping that at any moment they might hear the familiar sound of the jeep or the tractor, or Man’s missing blue and white Chevrolet Impala, the one the rest of the Aldays seemed to have packed themselves into late the preceding afternoon, before disappearing without a trace.
Finally, at approximately 2:30 in the morning, Ernestine gave up. She had called everyone she knew, exhausted every avenue in her search for her missing family. Fay and Barbara had gone back to Jerry’s trailer and knocked at both back and rear doors, but no one had answered. In addition to the calls and visits to the trailer, various members of the family had meticulously searched very inch of the Alday land, moving into the fields and woods, endlessly driving the many roads that skirted around and through the farm, everything from county highways to obscure wooded paths. But all of this searching had turned up nothing, not so much as the faintest suggestion of where Mary and the Alday men might be.
It was time to take the next step.
With Fay and Barbara still at her side, though growing more frightened every minute, Ernestine called the only son she still had of whose whereabouts she was absolutely certain, Bud Alday, who’d seen Jimmy pull into the driveway of the trailer many hours before.
He arrived at Ernestine’s a few minutes later. By then his son-in-law, Roy Barber, and his nephew, Andy Alday, had also arrived. Together with Barbara and Fay, the five Aldays drove to Jerry’s trailer on River Road, determined once and for all to find out what had happened to their missing relatives.