LYDIE POTTER'S DISAPPEARANCE

Orchard Cove Tennessee 1941

Clyde Potter drove his newly acquired Model A past Walter’s house. Seeing Walter coming out of his sheep barn he stopped. “Hey Walt, I got me that car.”

Walter examined it. “What’d it cost you, Clyde?”

“A good hunk, I can tell you. But I managed, and she’s a beauty don’t you think?”

“She is that.  Lydie all right with it? She said to Mary she wasn’t going to have no car before the roof was fixed.  Get the roof fixed?”

“Not yet, but I nearly got enough saved up for it. Lydie is coming around.”

“Guess she’ll  be all right when you drive her to church and she don’t have to walk or ride Old Solomon.”

“Guess so,” Clyde said.

Lydie did not come to church Sunday; nor to Wednesday prayer meeting; nor the next or the next Sundays.  In Orchard Cove  one did not miss church more than once without explanation.  So questions floated; rumors soared. Mary nagged Walter to check.

“Check  what?”

“On Lydie. It ain’t like her to skip church.  She might be sick.”

“Then ought it not be you and some of the other women to check? It don’t seem right for me to do it.”

Lydie was not at home when Mary appeared at her door.  She was gone when Walter, yielding to Mary’s nagging, checked.  Lydie, it seemed, had dropped out of sight.  Clyde offered no explanation.

The incessant questions of one after another of the men and women of Orchard Cove proved too much for Clyde. Under duress and sweating brow he confessed. He had traded Lydie to Harry Martin over in Peavine for the car.