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would do
    anything to please her, at least anything within his power.
     
    But Tom knew he had no power at all with his father.   He never had.
     
    Pat's aunt Alma rocked on the porch glider one velvet night in June,
    but she couldn't relax.   "I can't put my finger on it," she commented
    to Liz Price, "but something bad's fixing to happen.)$ .   . .
     
    On June 28, Pat was alone at Kentwood.   Tom had gone over to
    Barnesville to shoe horses, and Ronnie had said he would be in Zebulon
    on a painting job.
     
    It was a glorious sunny day and Pat was finally feeling well enough to
    do a little more work around the place.   She got out the riding mower
    to cut the grass.   In a statement she later gave to a Pike County
    deputy, she described the terror she had endured that afternoon.
     
    I was there by myself and we have a great big huge yard; we have
    fifty-something acres there .   . . and I was cutting way up the very
    front part of the road-which is a long way from the house.   I was on
    the small riding mower and I was just nonchalantly cutting around.   I
    had just started cutting .   . . a I nd I saw a truck go by.   It looked
    just like our truck, a blue camper truck.   I knew it wasn't ours
    because the camper top was off.   . .
     
    . You know how something just goes through your mind and it just sort
    of sticks?   I went on around-it was a good acre-and there is a big tall
    hedgerow about fourteen feet high between our farm and the field next
    to us and .   . . I could see the top of a camper.
     
    I thought, Well, gee, that man must have had trouble with his truck.
     
    .
     
    . . And all of a sudden I got right at the end of the hedgerow where we
    have a great big tall tree.   And there he stood.
     
    Sleeves rolled up, and he just dropped his pants.   . . . I didn't know
    what to do.   I slammed the brakes on the tractor and it seemed like I
    was frozen for an hour, but I know it wasn't but a second."
     
    Pat told the deputy the most shocking part of her ordeal.
     
    She recognized the man.   She had seen him for years around East Point,
    and lately his picture had been in all the papers and on political
    signs.   The man who had exposed himself to her was Walter Allanson, her
    husband's father!
     
    "I was sure it was him.   The only thing that threw me offthere was a
    cigar in the man's mouth.   . . . I had never seen his daddy smoke a
    cigar.   . . . I have never seen him with anything except a cigarette in
    his mouth.   . . . I slammed the tractor into third gear.   It doesn't go
    very fast.   I headed across to go to the neighbors next door, and there
    were no cars over there, so I headed back up my long, winding driveway
    and another acre to get back to the house.   I ran straight into the
    house."
     
    Tom always kept his "shoeing book" right there in the house so that Pat
    would know exactly where he was all the time in case she had a "sinking
    spell."   Pat hadn't called the sheriff first; she called Tom.   She was
    in such a panic that he could barely understand her, but then she
    blurted out that his father had stood right out there in their hedgerow
    and exposed his penis to her.
     
    Tom could scarcely take in what she was saying, but one thing was
    certain-she was hysterical.   "He said, 'Shug, for crying out loud, stop
    and hang up the phone and call the sheriff!"   And Pat had done just
    that.   The sheriff told her he was on his way, and before Pat could
    dial again, the phone rang.   It was Ronnie, calling from Atlanta, where
    he was visiting Margureitte.
     
    She was so frightened that she really wasn't sure where Ronnie was, she
    told the sheriff later.   She had thought he was in ZebuIon painting a
    house.
     
    But then, who knew where Ronnie was half the time?   He and his friend,
    Cecil "Rocky" Kenway-who often stayed at Kentwood with him-were like
    most teenagers, taking off for God knows where whenever they pleased.
     
    Ronnie told his mother that he