Everything She Ever Wanted (82 page)

the stability of my family."

Pat finally acknowledged to her elder daughter that she herself took

complete responsibility for everything that had happened; she only

wondered if she would ever have a life again.

She had been locked up for five years.
 
If ever a woman voiced regret

and appeared sincerely rehabilitated, it was Pat Taylor.

Her letters made her children cry.

Tom Allanson had been locked up for six and a half years when Pat's

appeal for a new trial was denied.
 
The staffs at both jackson and

Buford prisons and the parole board had labeled him a model prisoner.

He had served many terms as president of Buford's chapter of the junior

Chamber of Commerce-the Rock Quarry Jaycees-been the executive state

director of the Jayr several years was chairman of the Inst' cees, and

foitutional picnic the Rock Quarry Beautification Project.
 
He

organized aI Jaycees put on for the mentally retarded.
 
He was voted

the most valuable player on the All Tournament football team.
 
He wrote

a column and articles and took photographs for the prison paper.
 
He

was vice-president of the Full Gospel Association, sang in the church

choir twice each Sunday, and, most important, on July 31, 1981, he

accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

Tom was no longer completely alone in the world.

Liz Price, his old neighbor in Zeb Ion, the woman he had had a crush on

I u when he was sixteen years old, the woman who had carried feed and

water to his animals after he was arrested, had written to him for most

of the years he was in prison.
 
His abandoned horseshoeing trailer was,

in fact, still parked on her farm.
 
It was locked and Pat had lost the

key long ago.
 
He had no idea if his tools were still inside, but Liz

told him she was keeping the trailer safe for him.

She and Tom exchanged newsy, friendly letters at first; he was still

legally married to Pat.
 
"I wrote to Liz first," he remembered.
 
"I was

so depressed.
 
I had no idea what was happening at home, and it seemed

like everybody had turned their back on me-and she answered, and she

would come to see me once in a while down at Jackson."

Liz left Georgia, moved to Florida, and vowed to forget Tom.

Unknown to him, she had always loved Tom-at least somewhere in the back

of her mind-and she needed to leave behind her all the sad reminders of

what had happened.
 
She didn't want him to know how she felt about him,

not as long as he was a married man.

For a long time Tom had no idea where Liz was.
 
He missed her letters;

she was different from any woman he had ever known.
 
She didn't seem to

want anything from him-Liz was simply his friend.

After his divorce from Pat in the spring of 1979, they got back in

touch again; Liz had moved back to Forsyth County and taken a clerical

job in the sheriff's office.
 
Gradually, their letters became more

personal.
 
Tom told her he had little hope that he would be out of

prison soon, if ever.
 
He expected to serve at least fourteen years.

That meant a probable parole date sometime in 1989.

It didn't matter to Liz.
 
She visited Tom regularly, never missing a

unday evening.
 
After a year or so, they knew they wanted to be

married, but the only way they could do that while Tom was in prison

was by common law.
 
(Later-too late for t mprison marriages were

permitted at Buford.) They presented papers to prison authorities for a

common-law marriage.
 
It took persistence, but they finally got

permission to get married.

There were no conjugal visits in Buford Prison.

That didn't matter either.
 
They had a common-law prison wedding in

late 1980, and promised each other they would have another wedding when

Tom was free.

Although Tom's applications for parole were turned down all through the

early 1980s, he gained a sense of freedom inside prison.
 
He vowed that

he would not let the years behind bars destroy him.
 
"Prison .
 
. .

doesn't mean it has to be torture or like the movies," he wrote to a

friend.
 
"Actually, it all depends on the individual's attitude and

what they are made of.
 
There are many that are miserable here and do

everything they can to make everybody else miserable.
 
Personally, I

try to I've right and follow the rules and make the best of this

time."

Buford's warden paid for Tom to take correspondence courses from

Clemson, and he received a state of Georgia certificate and license as

a water and waste water treatment plant operator and laboratory

analyst.
 
Later, he was certified for South Carolina too.
 
He paid for

his own correspondence course from Cal StateSacramento to upgrade his

skills even more.
 
He soon ran Buford's water and sewage treatment

plant and Tom was the only trusty working outside the plant who had a

driver's license.
 
He was outside regularly, running errands as far as

seventy-five miles away.
 
He was always back on time, to the minute.

Later, he grinned as he remembered one amusing incident.

"One time, we had a busload of prisoners over at the warden's place to

help him move-and he got an emergency call that his wife had been in an

accident.
 
He took off, running, and yells, 'Tom, take the guys

back."

So I come driving up to the prison with a whole busload of prisoners,

delivering them all safe and sound."

Since he never had anyone to send him money to buy even the smallest

necessities, like shaving cream and toothpaste, in the prison

commissary, Tom worked with leather to make belts, purses, and

billfolds to sell, and he was good at it-so good that he could even

help Liz out from time to time.
 
After a while, he the control building

for the even had his own "house" of sortstreatment plant.
 
It was

air-conditioned and had hot water, a shower, a carpet on the floor, a

couple of big old comfortable chairs, and a radio.
 
He added a hot

plate and adopted two stray kittens for company.

It wasn't a real house, and Tom couldn't stay there at night, but he was

on his own from morning until dark, except for breaks for meals

at the prison.
 
He wasn't required to work that long, but he much

preferred being outside working to being inside.

Sometimes, in the early evenings, he cooked up a pot of greens and sat

listening to the radio with his two cats asleep on his lap.
 
He had

long since learned to appreciate and savor small pleasures.
 
He could

have walked away from prison easily.
 
He never did; he never really

thought about it.
 
He visited with Liz on Sunday evenings and hoped for

the day he might be, paroled.

P A R T As he later described it, Tom Allanson "Was the farm" at

Buford.
 
He did all the plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting by

himself on the three-quarter-acre plot they gave him.
 
He bought his

own seeds.
 
When his crops ripened, he gave away produce to the warden,

officers, teachers, and secretaries and, of course, to Liz.
 
He grew

watermelons, corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, and sweet potatoes

in the summer and turnips, mustard greens, collards, and cabbage in the

winter.
 
There was an arbor of muscadine grapes.
 
He was most serene

when he was out alone "bush-hogging" a watermelon field, working under

the Georgia sun until the sweat glistened and rolled off his bare

back.

Tom had marked a decade at Buford in August of 1987.
 
He was a

middle-aged man.
 
He cautiously hoped to make parole.
 
He had three

jobs waiting for him on the outside; his expertise in waste water

treatment was much sought after.
 
But once again he was disappointed.

After his ten years at Buford, on November 6, 1987, he was suddenly

transferred back to Jackson Prison.
 
They needed him to run the sewage

treatment plant; it was due to open December I and would be five times

bigger than the one at Buford.
 
Jackson had no one left to operate a

Class treatment plant.
 
One of their few trained men had tried to

escape and been transferred out, and another was due to be released.

Jackson's waste treatment complex was way out on the end of the

property and had no fence at all; Tom could hear the rush of the Towali

a River and the roar of cars on the highway.
 
There were no nards out

there.
 
He was quite solitary.
 
He was glad that he was still a trusty,

but Jackson meant that Liz was a hundred miles away, and visiting was

much more difficult for her.

In a way, it was ironic.
 
Tom had worked so hard to improve himself and

to get training that would help him find a good job when he was

released.
 
Instead, he had made himself invaluable to the Georgia

prison system, and it would be a hardship for them to let him go.

Pat Allanson served a total of seven years.
 
When Tom was transferred

down to Jackson in 1987, she had been out of prison for three years.

They had had absolutely no contact for a long time.
 
She had told Tom

again and again that she could not live without him, that her old life

had ended when she met him and that she would have no life at all

without her man.
 
A hundred leaded with her to hang times-a thousand

times-Tom had p on, that they would have a life somewhere down the

road.

And she had replied only, "If you loved me, you would give up your life

for me, and love me on the other side."
 
Had he surrendered to her

demands, he would have been long dead, a suicide at the age of

thirty-three.

Despite her dire predictions about her failing health, Pat had not only