Read Online The Next President by Joseph Flynn - Free Book Online

immediate difficulties.
    “What is it, Evan?”
    He said, “Grandma, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to know about the feud.” He’d seen how her face clouded when the subject came up that day at the lawyer’s office.
    “Oh.” She closed the book and put it aside. For a moment she was quiet, seeming to seek her own counsel. Then with a small, decisive nod she began, “The feud started in 1865 with incest, rape, and a hanging.”
    Belle recounted how Wilbert Cade, returning home from the Civil War, chanced to meet and fall in love with the beautiful eighteen-year-old Edina McCray. Determined to marry her, he finally won the permission of her father, Cullum. Family lore had it that in the end Wilbert had to pay old man McCray a hundred dollars for his consent, a princely sum at the time. Not long after the couple was married, Wilbert returned home from a trip to buy a plow horse and found Edina’s brother, Birk, raping his new wife in Wilbert and Edina’s bed.
    Far from being intimidated by being caught at such a heinous act, Birk was defiant. He said his sister had been his first, their daddy had no right to sell her, and he was taking her home. It was said that the only reason Wilbert Cade hadn’t shot Birk McCray to death on the spot was that Edina had pleaded for his life; she wanted to see her brother hang. Birk was tried and convicted of crimes against God and nature.
    Having their shame aired publicly did not sit well with the McCrays, several of whom attended the trial. Nor was it lost on them that half the members of the jury who convicted their kinsman were Cades. As was the hangman.
    The McCrays came for vengeance a month after Birk’s execution. A dozen McCray men—“our jury,” as they called themselves—raided Wilbert Cade’s farm one night. They hanged Wilbert from an apple tree in his front yard, burned his house and barn, and slaughtered his animals. They let Edina live, but they carved WHORE into her belly.
    A cycle of reprisals began that continued sporadically until the last two official deaths in the feud occurred more than seventy years later.
    In July 1939 Lawler Cade was found hanging from an oak tree. He was rumored to have informed revenue agents as to the whereabouts of an illegal still the McCrays were running. In December 1941 Ransom McCray was found shot between the eyes in the doorway of his home. He was said to have been the McCray who’d slipped the noose around Lawler Cade’s neck.
    Further bloodshed was prevented only by the outbreak of World War II the day after Ransom McCray was killed. All of the Cades and McCrays who might have directed their lethal energies against one another were sent off to other parts of the world to kill new enemies.
    Evan was more than a little taken aback at the savagery in which his forebears had played a principal part, but he picked up on one important detail of his grandmother’s narrative.
    “What did you mean. Grandma, when you said the last two official deaths in the feud occurred in 1939 and 1941? Were there any unofficial deaths after that?”
    At first Belle Cade was plainly reluctant to answer.
    “Come on, Grandma,” Evan chided.
    “You can’t hold back on me now.”
    Belle moved to the sofa where her grandson sat and took his hand.
    “Evan, this feud has been a curse upon our family for far too long. It nearly ensnared your father… and now, I fear, it’s placed you in danger.”
    Evan saw that his grandmother was speaking in deadly earnest, and that frightened him.
    “If that’s the case,” he said, “don’t you think I should know everything I can?”
    Belle looked into her grandson’s eyes and decided that she had to tell him as much as she could.
    “Has your father ever spoken to you about Alvy McCray?”
    Evan shook his head.
    Belle told him the story.
    Evan was agog.
    “Dad pistol-whipped this guy with Grandpa’s .45?”
    He considered his father to be the most easygoing man in the world. If he had any