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