Free Zion by Dayne Sherman Page B

to the electric motor on the saw. The blade whirled, and it screamed when it entered the wood, the sound stinging his ears. He was careful to make the cut smooth, keeping the plywood as steady and as tight as he could on the big table. He was aware that a careless move could cost him a finger or worse.
    After it was split down the middle, he placed one of the pieces on the back of a frame he’d built for a professor’s bookshelf. He was fashioning this solid, functional shelf for a faculty member’s office in Rayburn Hall. He wished he had the budget to buy oak or perhaps birch, which stained nicely, instead of this god-awful pine, but he did the best he could with the materials the college could afford.
    Because he was such a meticulously detailed man, he served as the lead cabinetmaker at the shop, and during his off-duty time, he was a handyman and general carpenter for the junior college faculty and staff in their private residences. Not long after taking the position at the college, he converted his old horse and cow barn into a shop. This was where he now worked on projects at night and on weekends. He no longer had any cattle, hogs, horses, or chickens on the place, and he didn’t even own a dog. Jubal had died of old age five years earlier, and Tom had long ago forsaken the hunting and farming he used to do until the mid-1960s. From time to time, he’d plant a garden, but he hadn’t planted anything in several seasons.
    Wesley, who was now twenty, worked alongside his father on projects at home, and he was essential to keeping their little business going. Soon to graduate from the junior college himself, he studied nearly free on his father and mother’s staff tuition exemption, which covered everything but his textbook rental and lab fees each semester. Now he was planning to study architecture at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. It was his dream to become a professional architect, a designer and builder of homes and businesses, schools and churches. The university was a hundred miles away, and going to the university would mean he could no longer help with his father’s projects. Tom said he planned to cut back on his outside work as a result, knowing he couldn’t do any large jobs without Wesley’s help.
    At closing time, the carpentry crew left the Quonset hut and punched the time clock with paper cards. Tom turned off the lights and pulled down the big garage doors and locked up the shop. He was at the tail end of the line of men leaving the Ponderosa, the time clock made a loud cha-punt sound as he placed the card into the slot for the stamp. It read 16:34 in faded blue ink. He dropped the card into a slot on the steel cardholder at the end of a long hallway in the main administrative building near North Oak Street.
    “Have a good weekend and happy birthday, Tom,” Shaffer said.
    Tom thanked him for the catfish meal, and they walked to their trucks. Dust billowed as the vehicles left the parking lot in a line entering the street.
    He was not going directly home but to the Claiborne House in downtown Pickleyville. It was Dr. Howell Claiborne’s family residence. Tom and Wesley were to meet with him about a project, designing and building a home study. He knew that Dr. Claiborne had left the junior college administration under a dark cloud. Most everyone at the college had heard about his affair with Charity LeBlanc during his wife Eliza’s prolonged illness.
    Tom also remembered Charity from the 1960s. She ran with men in town, business men and the local Sicilian mafia, even dated Sloan Parnell. Tom guessed that she was in her early thirties now, and he’d seen her on campus twice in months past.
    The rumor mill said that the president had retired because of three consecutive scandals. First, he started the indiscretions with Charity and moved her into his old family home downtown while his wife of more than forty years was in the hospital for a surgery. Second, a short time