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Tommy Kincaid & Me
by Tyde

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It’s hard to know how these things start. It’s unfortunately a lot easier to ascertain how they finish though.

I’d know Tommy since school. We’d been in the same class at Riggins Elementary, Birmingham Alabama, assigned as lab partners at Robert C. Arthur Middle School and then followed each other to Ramsey High.

People would have liked to think that he was the school bully that was always pulling my braids and calling me names cause he liked me, but he wasn’t. We had a mutual respect for one another from the moment we met, the time he tripped over a rock and head-butted me in the stomach during a game of basketball. I didn’t laugh at him like the others, didn’t call him names cause of his clumsiness. I just helped him up with my hand and introduced myself.

We discovered we were quite similar…or our home lives were at any rate. His father had disappeared when he was quite young and my mother had died not long after I was born.

Now when I say Tommy’s father disappeared I don’t mean that he left Tommy’s mom for somebody else, I mean flat out disappeared. He went for a drive to the shops for some milk and never came back. Just vanished straight into thin air. He hadn’t taken any extras clothes with him, his bank accounts were untouched, the police just chalked it up to an unhappy marriage (despite the contrary) while Tommy’s mom reckoned it was aliens. Not too unusual cause a lot of folks in Alabama reckoned they had seen aliens.

Well I knew that aliens hadn’t taken my mother...that was left to a thing called pneumonia. I couldn’t have been more than ten months old when she got it. She hadn’t been well since I was born and Papa always was the one to wake up at all hours and give me my formula. So we each knew what it was like to lose a parent and through middle school we were always over each others place and I grew to love his mother and he grew to respect my father. Papa took him on fishing trips and taught him about cars and other stuff that I thought was merely the man’s domain. Mrs Kincaid helped me out and told me about the facts of life and taught me to cook and sew. We were raised old fashioned and I can say that I wouldn’t go back and change that. He was a true southern gentleman and I tried my best to be a southern belle.

Can’t remember the exact way that we fell into a romantic relationship, it wasn’t that we suddenly realised that each other had grown up and hormones were raging. We were sitting in a field out in Brookwood Forest studying for a final exam when we kissed. We just seemed to merge into one another, then we went back to studying. From that moment we were an item and were each other’s partners at the prom. We applied to colleges all over the country and got into quite a few but when we both discovered we’d been accepted at Baylor University in Waco, Texas we jumped at the chance to study together.

We started the college year as Mr and Mrs Tommy Kincaid after a wedding at a cotton plantation in Georgia. I can’t tell you which one of us proposed cause I think it may have been a mutual thing. We were shopping one day and I’d stopped in front of a men’s formal wear store and he was standing in front of the local jewellers. We both turned to face each other with one of our hands pointing towards something and saying – ‘You know that would look great on you for the wedding’. We were always like that. It’s like half the time we didn’t have to talk about things because we’d already assumed in our heads that the other knew what we were talking about…and it was so. My psych teacher told me that it was unhealthy, that kind of connection, and that one of us could turn into a psychopath. I’m not sure if she was kidding or not.

The ceremony was well attended by friends from school, those that had seen us grow up together from that first meeting time on the basketball court (by the way my team kicked his team’s butt but we never spoke of it) and those who’d met us along the way in different stages of our lives and always accepted that it was the two of us, The Tommy and Laura Show as my Papa used to call it. I studied education and Tommy studied agricultural business. We used to escape at least one weekend a month and stay on a ranch that wasn’t too far from Waco. Tommy and I loved horses. It was the way that you could escape the stress of college and just ride wherever the wind seemed to take you. The cowboys began to know us and they would teach us about feeding the cattle and how to rope and brand them. I started to look more forward to the weekends away from campus than I did the weekends there regardless of the keggers and toga parties. It took all of our strength but we stayed on the three years to finish our degrees and as soon as they would let us we hightailed it out of there and headed for the Sierra Diablo Ranch for some much needed horse therapy.

Around the campfire one night Tommy looked at me with those hazel eyes of his and silently asked me a question. I gazed back at him and my eyes nodded their agreement. When Mama died Papa took her assets and invested them in the stock market with an old friend of his. Papa had said it was my college fund and that I wasn’t to touch it till I turned 18. I had other plans though. As soon as I had turned 14 I got myself a job and started putting aside 65% of my pay packet to save for university. I was determined that Papa wouldn’t have to pay for my education, and he didn’t. By the time I was 17 and half I was assistant manager at the Pizza Palace in my area and had through putting my money in fixed term accounts to reap the most benefits been able to save up $12,467.89. Of course that was helped along by the fact that I received a part scholarship to Baylor University and only had to use $9,000 of the money. So Papa decided that the money that he’d saved for me would go towards a place when Tommy and I had left university and got ourselves jobs.

That silent night by the bonfire we’d decided just what that place would be…our very own ranch. Tommy was happy to handle the majority of dealings with the stock and I was to handle the chickens, vegetables and whatever else needed doing around the ranch. It would be a mixed produce farm with meat and milk from the cattle, meat and eggs from the chickens and vegetables from the garden. Tommy hired two cowboys (or rather I should say stole from the Sierra Diablo) and a young cowpoke while I looked about getting a lady to help me around the house with the cooking and in some years time she could be a nanny.

We were a happy little family there in the south west of Alabama with Tommy, myself, Johnny, Calvin, Jeremy and Louisa. The ranch had it’s ups and down as all places do but after five years we settled into things and it was about this time that I fell pregnant. This was only one of two times when Tommy couldn’t read my look…simply because it was nothing he’d ever encountered before. He let out a whoop and lifted me off my feet, swinging me around before suddenly setting me down and thinking that I shouldn’t exert myself or I could hurt the baby. He lathered attention on me like it was going out of fashion and the ranch started to suffer for it but he didn’t seem to care. Johnny and Calvin, along with Jeremy seemed to be handling most of it and there wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle he assured me even though the profit column of the ledger was making a slightly less than rapid decline.

Louisa never got the chance to see if she’d be a good nanny and I never got the chance to see how good a mother I could be, our little daughter was stillborn that summer. We sold the ranch and moved to a small cottage around Bankhead Lake in west Alabama, Tommy got a job at the local store and I home-schooled the children of the farmers that land surrounded us.

We didn’t talk about our little daughter as was our fashion but we both cried about her over the years, just didn’t tell one another. We could read it in each other’s eyes of course but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about it. I don’t know why we didn’t have any more children. Perhaps I couldn’t anymore, or maybe he couldn’t, or maybe God didn’t want us to. Ten years after our little girl had been stillborn I found Tommy dead on the kitchen floor with a gunshot wound to his head.

I held the gun and tossed it’s weight from hand to hand. I couldn’t read the look in his eyes, was it one of confusion, of surprise? I didn’t understand why the cops cuffed me and read me my rights. I don’t understand why they charged me with his murder. I wasn’t even there, was I?

Little Sally Jenkins had just finished her math lesson with me and Tommy had come home from the store. She’d saddled up and was prepared to leave when she realised that she’d left her Snoopy pencil on our kitchen table. She walked onto the verandah and she said she heard me and Tommy talking. She didn’t want to interrupt so she just stood outside the window looking in hoping that we would finish soon. I was sitting on Tommy’s lap and telling him about my day. He was stroking my hair and I was kissing his neck lightly. He held me tight and for some reason I was crying. Then she said that I asked him to stand up.

This was only the second and last time that Tommy never knew what was behind my eyes. Then I took the gun out of my apron and held it behind my back and told him that I loved him so much and that I couldn’t bear the pain anymore. The pain that we’d never spoken about, the one thing that I couldn’t just push under the rug and forget about forever, the pain of losing my daughter, my flesh and blood.

Sally says tears streamed from my face as I raised the gun up level with him and he just looked at me as if I wasn’t his wife. I pulled the trigger once and only once and his body flung backwards from the force of the bullet and he crashed onto the floor. She said the floor shook. I don’t remember.

Sally jumped onto her horse afraid that I would come after her too and headed to the sheriff. My recall of the events went like so: Sally left from her lesson and I went out to collect the eggs from a few chickens that we kept for old times sake. Went I came back I found Tommy dead on the floor and my fingers clasped around the trigger. I don’t know why I would have done it. He wasn’t to blame for our daughter, neither of us were. Did I really love him too much that I couldn’t bear it? The words of my psych teacher came back to me and I realised she hadn’t been kidding about us. I was sentenced to go to the electric chair on November 16th.

The last words that I ever uttered were ‘Tommy Kincaid, I love you’

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THE END

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