Equal Access (9 page)

Pap’s grin broadened. “Love the stuff.” He
fixed his gaze on Shad. “And so do you.”

Pap had all the characteristics of a Delaney
except for his lack of brawniness; his lighter build was inherited
from his mother. But at six-foot-four Pap still carried the Delaney
height. At sixty-five his once dark hair had lightened considerably
and thinned just enough in the back to make Pap admit he was bald,
while his beard was completely gray and trimmed neatly along his
jaw. His brown eyes often sparkled with a mischievousness that
probably explained why Pap got along so well with his
brother-in-law Karl. He also wore blue jeans and a short-sleeved
shirt, which was light blue.

Shad glanced over at Dulsie, who had watched
their exchange. “Don’t you ever get tired of being right all the
time?”

Dulsie laughed, and this time Karl heard her.
He muttered something to Ken about “They’re here,” and turned
toward the rest of the family.

“There’s the experts.” Karl raised his hands
in the air as though surrendering to the group. “Tell me, Dulsie,
Shad, what would Sadie do if an armadillo came into the yard?”

Dulsie frowned slightly. “Armadillo?”

“Your dad got a surprise when he went out to
check on the turkeys last night.” Jill’s smile became amused again.
“Of course he wasn’t really using the flashlight he took out with
him.”

“Don’t blame me.” Karl folded his arms over
his chest. “You’re the one always telling me not to waste the
batteries.”

Jill shook her head and continued. “So as he
was taking his memorized path down to the barns, he found an
armadillo.” She looked directly at Karl. “By stepping on its
tail.”

Karl’s eyes widened. “Do you know how high
those things can jump?” He threw his arms back into the air.
“Almost as high as I can jump!”

Dulsie chuckled with the rest of the family.
“What were you so spooked about? The armadillo’s the one who got
stepped on.”

“For all I knew it was gonna turn in midair
and fly toward my jugular – or somewhere worse!”

“So you were wanting a big white dog for
protection about then?”

“I wanted a crucifix and a silver bullet
about then. But what would Sadie do with an armadillo? It’s not a
predator unless you’re a bug. Would she just bark at it or try to
make it into armadillo burger?”

Dulsie thoughtfully rubbed on her chin. “Hmm.
Interesting question. I can tell you this for sure.” She grinned at
her dad. “She’d have sense enough not to step on its tail.”

A geriatric gentleman who was one of the
church elders walked to the center of the chairs and spread his
arms apart as he glanced around at the scattered groups.

“Friends.” His tone was warm and solemn.

That single word was all he needed to say.
The talking throughout the room quickly subsided as some of the
members took their seats and a couple of adults led about half a
dozen kids through the door on the back wall. It led into a smaller
room that was also used as an office. As Shad approached the chairs
the entire family sat in a predictable order. Dulsie took a chair
to one side of him, and today it was Pap instead of Mam who sat on
Shad’s other side. Karl took the chair on Dulsie’s other side and
Jill sat next to her husband. It was the farthest she could sit
from Shad while remaining with her family.

One of the changes initiated by the Osage
Friends was they now began each meeting with about thirty minutes
of discussion on a scriptural passage. Karl was usually very active
in these examinations, sometimes earning a dig in the ribs from
Jill’s elbow. The congregation had long ago surmised that Karl’s
decision to become “convinced” as a Friend after he left the
Catholic Church had more to do with Jill than with God. Only
immediate family members knew the real reasons why Karl had left
his church of origin in the first place.

After the discussion the children and their
keepers returned to the main room, and everybody settled into
worship for around an hour. This was when silence reigned, to be
broken only when someone was inspired to reveal the word of God.
This belief of the Society of Friends that what they spoke and
wrote was as true a declaration as any part of scripture was part
of what led to their persecution hundreds of years ago. Even the
founder, George Fox, wound up in jail a few times for his beliefs.
But there was also much about this faith that people found
appealing, causing it to once be the third largest religious group
in the colonies before the American Revolution began.

The original congregation that settled here
less than a decade before the Civil War broke out were adherents to
the teachings of Elias Hicks, a man whom many people claimed had
strayed from orthodox Quakerism. His ideas were popular enough to
become fairly widespread, especially among rural folk. No sooner
did the congregation get established in their new location than
Quaid Delaney made his appearance.

And he’d made quite an entrance. One October
morning three Friends who were traveling together found an unknown
man lying in the middle of the road. His spent horse was standing,
barely, nearby, and Quaid had been shot five times. They hauled him
to the nearest house and brought in a doctor, who dug out three
bullets that were still lodged in his flesh. Next the congregation
held a meeting in order to decide what to do with the stranger.

There was not a line of volunteers eager to
keep Quaid while he either recuperated or expired. They suspected
he was a man of violence, and the people who shot him up might come
looking to finish the job without regard to anyone they thought was
in their way.

But Grace Riggs offered to take him in. She
was a widow whose husband had died of lockjaw while Grace was still
pregnant with their daughter, who upon Quaid’s arrival was less
than three years old. And because Grace had a problem, her charity
was not altruistic. Her late husband’s family never liked that he
became a Friend, and his brother claimed the man had borrowed money
from him. In his effort to obtain repayment of a loan Grace was
certain never happened, the brother-in-law was in the process of
taking her farm away. Grace hoped that keeping a convalescent in
her home would buy her some time, especially with winter coming
on.

The brother-in-law remained obstinate. But
luckily for Grace the burly Irishman under her roof decided to come
to her aid. Quaid, it turned out, was a riverboat gambler and a
conman’s conman. His victims were other miscreants whom Quaid felt
obliged to relieve of their ill-gotten booty as he traveled up and
down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. His current predicament
was the result of his latest scam not going entirely the way he’d
planned, especially the part about getting shot.

Grace figured out that Quaid’s apparent
hedonism had roots in more noble sentiments. He was mad at God for
allowing his mother and siblings to die of starvation in Ireland.
He was mad at his father for abandoning them. And Quaid was mad at
himself because he questioned his decision to come over to this
country when he was only thirteen in order to earn money that would
bring the rest of his family out of Ireland. But the person to whom
Quaid entrusted the money had instead taken off with it.

So Grace’s brother-in-law fit right into
Quaid Delaney’s grudge.

For years afterward people in the community
would theorize what it was Quaid did that made the brother-in-law
pack up and leave town. What made their tongues wag faster,
however, was the news Quaid and Grace were going to marry
immediately. After all, why else would Grace burden herself with
the whiskey-drinking, gun-toting, smoking and gambling Irishman?
Some gossip mongers were no doubt disappointed when their first
child was born more than a year after the wedding.

Quaid, who was neither a drunkard nor an
addict, had given up gambling and used his gun only for hunting and
dispatching varmints ... except for that one time during the war he
had to take out some two-legged varmints, as his descendants liked
to refer to the incident. He embraced his second chance to take
care of a family, and although many in the community considered
Quaid to be quarrelsome, he had one trait nobody could fault him on
and it undoubtedly helped the Friends congregation tolerate him
better. Quaid was a very generous man.

Pap’s Grandpa Ward confirmed to him that the
rumors were true about Quaid having amassed a small fortune during
his riverboat days. Quaid’s own family never directly benefited
from the defiled money – Grace wouldn’t allow it – but he was quick
to help anyone, known or stranger, who was in need. And Quaid was
especially fond of giving support to widows and orphans.

Four generations later when a woman from the
respectable Leeds family married a man from the suspect Delaney
clan, the old people who remembered childhood stories told to them
about the exploits of Margaret and Quaid jested it could only
signify a beginning and an end to both ancestral legacies. Shad
wasn’t entirely sure what that was supposed to mean, but he did
know the first born child of that union was instrumental in
changing his life completely. Had Erin not intervened in her
unique, divinely inspired fashion, Shad was certain that if he
survived childhood he would have become someone horrifying as an
adult.

And that reminded Shad he still had to do
something about Wally.

Shad’s gaze slid to Karl, who was sitting
with a slouch that kept him propped in his chair while his arms
were folded over his chest. Karl’s head was tilted back, eyes
closed. The man was known to sometimes start softly snoring during
a meeting, earning him another dig in the ribs from Jill’s elbow.
Otherwise quite vocal, Karl was one of the few, including Shad, who
was never moved to speak in these meetings. Of course, Karl liked
to remind people that everybody knew how folks who claimed God
talked to them had to be schizophrenic.

When Jill first started to murmur that Shad
wasn’t “good enough” for Dulsie, the family was a bit baffled by
her conclusion. After all, Jill herself had married Karl, who was
another upright individual who unfortunately came from an unsavory
past. Jill pointed out they knew what Karl’s past was, but why did
Shad remain so tight-lipped about his own history? What was he
hiding?

Shad suspected that Jill’s maternal instinct,
which was said to run strong in her family, had tapped into that
threat which once lingered in his psyche. It made sense to Shad,
except there was one thing about her intuition he couldn’t
understand. Jill didn’t seem to sense this threat until after it
had left him.

Now why was that?

Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever
knew.

--John Greenleaf Whittier

Located on a back road just a couple of miles
from the Meeting House, the home where Dulsie grew up had
originally been built as a 1920’s bungalow on the side of a hill.
It was basically a single story home with a pebbly concrete
basement, but Dad, who had once worked for a contractor, changed
the entire character of the place. He built an additional wing
which gave the house its current mutated L-shape. Dad also widened
the porch so that it spread the full width of the original house,
and built a bigger back porch and pantry on the side opposite the
new wing. There was little left that suggested the original
bungalow.

To one side of the house was Dad’s sprawling,
metal-sided workshop, and behind it sat an old, single-car,
clapboard garage that now served as the wood shed. Farther back on
the next hill were four long turkey barns. The driveway that led up
to the house was long and a bit meandering.

Throughout her childhood Dulsie considered
this place to be her primary home and the Delaney farm as her
secondary home. She had been a “surprise baby,” born when her older
brothers were eight and ten years old. Apparently this had caused a
bit of financial hardship for her parents because Mom quit working
for a few years in order to tend to Dulsie. Aunt Maddie and Uncle
Pax were always very generous with Dulsie’s family, and also
watched Dulsie whenever Dad was unavailable after Mom went back to
work. This favor wound up being “returned” when Dulsie was in high
school and Uncle Pax’s hospitalization caused financial hardship
for the Delaneys. Although Shad didn’t need to be watched, he was
around Dulsie’s family more simply because her parents were there
to help out. That was how Shad learned just what his parents had
gone through to keep him away from that woman – Dulsie also refused
to give her any maternal title – and out of state custody.

The weekly dinner after First Day meeting had
been going on since before Dulsie was born. It used to include her
maternal grandparents’ home, but in the years of their failing
health the dinner became restricted to her home and Shad’s home.
Her paternal grandparents were never included because Dad was
estranged from them. People who bothered to notice that he had
nothing to do with his family of origin used to sometimes inquire
about this, and Dad simply stated they had a falling out when he
left their church.

Dulsie knew that was a cover story with only
a seed of truth, but Dad had to appear as the “bad guy” to preserve
the family reputation. She did have some memories of her Grandma
Wekenheiser from when Dulsie was around four or five years old, and
she remembered liking the woman. But she never met Grandpa until
the day of Grandma’s funeral.

It wasn’t much of a meeting. Shad and her mom
looked cozy compared to Dad and Grandpa. The two men barely
acknowledged each other and no introductions were made. There was
one time the aged but still hulking man scrutinized Dulsie with
such intent that she became uncomfortable and stepped behind Shad
to escape his gaze. It probably had something to do with the fact
Dulsie’s resemblance to Dad meant she also resembled his
mother.