Death Sentence (5 page)

Thomas was a senior that fall. Velma saw him at school and now and then she managed to slip off with friends and meet him surreptitiously. Only he gave her life any promise.

Thomas’ sense of humor was what had originally attracted Velma to him, but it was his tenderness that came to impress her more, a quality she’d rarely known. She never realized how deeply she needed tenderness until she met him. And when she couldn’t see him she found herself longing for him.

By her seventeenth birthday, Murphy gave in and allowed Thomas to come back around. On a Saturday night not long afterward, Thomas drove Velma to Fayetteville to see a movie. On the way home, he told her that he had a solution to their problem: they should get married. He had mentioned that before, but this time he was in earnest.

She couldn’t get married, she told him. Her father would never allow it.

They could run away, he suggested, go to South Carolina, where it was possible to marry without a waiting period or parental consent. Her father might get mad but couldn’t do anything about it. She would legally be his wife, and Murphy would just have to accept it.

But Thomas didn’t know her father the way Velma did, had never witnessed his full fury. She didn’t know what he might do if she dared such a thing. She couldn’t risk it.

Still, Velma was tempted, and the more she thought about it in coming days, the more her resistance wavered. On Thursday night, December 1, 1949, Velma told her parents that she had to attend a school function. A friend picked her up and delivered her to Thomas, who was waiting nearby in his daddy’s car. They drove to Dillon, just across the state line, and were married at the home of a justice of the peace. Velma was so nervous that she would remember few details later. Her fear only grew as they drove back home.

Thomas wanted to tell her parents. Velma resisted. Her daddy was planning to move the family back to the farm at South River at the beginning of the year, she said, and she wanted to wait until then. Thomas wanted to do it now, tonight, get it behind them. Velma said no. She didn’t want Thomas to see the inevitable explosion. She was scared of what her daddy might do to him. Tomorrow, she promised. He reluctantly dropped her off in front of her house in time to meet her curfew.

At school the next day, Velma had to confess to Thomas that she still hadn’t gotten up nerve enough to tell. She would do it that afternoon. And she did. But she told only her mother, hoping she might get her to break the news.

Her mother was not surprised, but she wasn’t about to tell Murphy. “You’ll have to do that yourself,” she said.

Velma couldn’t muster her courage before her father left for work, and she spent the night in dread, getting little sleep. On Saturday morning when her father got home, Velma was waiting nervously in the front room. She had something to tell him, she said, and blurted, “Thomas and I got married Thursday night.”

The eruption was even worse than Velma had imagined. “All hell broke loose,” Velma’s brother John recalled years later. He would not have it, Murphy raged. She was going right now to get it annulled! He would not allow her to live one minute with Thomas Burke. He knew that boy was no good, had known it all along. He never should have allowed him to come around in the first place.

Velma huddled on the couch crying as he knocked over a table, picked up a chair and hurled it across the room, then stormed into the kitchen in search of Lillie. It was her fault, he yelled. Why hadn’t she told him about it? Why hadn’t she done something to stop it?

As Velma begged her daddy to stop, he ordered her and Lillie to get ready and get in the car. Then he went in search of Olive, who was now working second shift at a different mill from his father and was still in bed. Murphy told him to get up, get the car started. By the time Olive got dressed, his father was blaming him, following him into the yard, yelling. He was part of the plot, his father accused. He’d known it all along and conspired with Velma.

Olive denied it. But his father would not hear it. “Don’t lie to me, boy!” he yelled.

Lillie told John to look after the other children while they were gone, and they all assembled in trepidation on the front porch to watch as Lillie and Velma climbed into the backseat of Murphy’s white ’47 Ford. Murphy got into the passenger seat, Olive at the wheel. But before Olive could back out of the driveway, John saw his father yell something at Olive, who snapped back. Suddenly, Murphy lunged across the seat at his son. The car jerked to a halt and Olive leaped out.

“You’ve hit me the last damn time!” he screamed.

Murphy jumped from the car just as Olive bolted, running hard for the woods across the road. Murphy took off in pursuit, the two disappearing into the pines.

Lillie and Velma scurried back to the house. A few minutes later, Murphy emerged from the woods, struggling for breath. He got into the car and roared off down the road. At first Velma and Lillie thought he’d gone off in search of Olive. But when he didn’t come back within a few minutes, Velma began to worry. Had he gone instead to find Thomas and kill him?

Not for several hours did Murphy return. The house was silent in dread. He had been drinking. He ordered Lillie to pack his clothes. He was leaving. Nobody in this family cared anything about him, he said. It didn’t matter what he thought or what he wanted for them, they always went against him.

While Lillie went dutifully about packing her husband’s clothes, he sat in his favorite chair with a look of despair. Then he put his head in his hands and began to cry.

In all her life Velma had seen a tear in her father’s eye only once, when his brother Huey had died two years earlier. Now he sat weeping openly. When he regained control, he got up, went to Olive’s room and fell asleep on his bed.

Velma packed her clothes and her few other belongings while her father slept. That evening Thomas came for her in his daddy’s car, and she moved into his parents’ house with him. She had escaped at last, but somehow it didn’t give her the pleasure she had dreamed it would.

3

Both Thomas and Velma dropped out of school after their marriage. Thomas got a job at a cotton mill in Red Springs. Murphy took his family back to South River early in the new year, as planned. He had rented his farm when he had left it two and a half years earlier, and the tenants were not due to leave until late spring, so he could not return to his own house. The old home-place was standing empty, however, and Albert Pope allowed Murphy to move back into it rent-free. By the time the tenants had deserted the small white house on Murphy’s farm, Olive had married, and he moved into the house with his new wife, Lucille. Thomas didn’t like working at the mill, and Olive and Lucille invited him and Velma to move in with them. They went early that summer.

Thomas took temporary work at different farms, for a while picking butter beans. Soon he found a job in Fayetteville, driving a delivery truck for the Double Cola Bottling Company. Velma took a job, too, at a drugstore soda fountain in Fayetteville, but Thomas didn’t want her working and she quit after a few weeks.

That summer Murphy left Puritan Weaving once again, taking a better-paying job at a new mill that had opened in Raeford, once again giving him a round-trip drive of nearly ninety miles. One morning, late that summer, he went to sleep at the wheel of his ’48 Buick on his way home. The car hit the guardrail of the bridge over the South River. A board from the rail pierced the windshield, grazed Murphy’s head and exited through the roof of the car, which went off the bridge and smashed into the trees. Murphy was bruised and bloodied, but he had escaped death by less than an inch, and it had a sobering effect, making him realize, for one thing, that he couldn’t continue to live at South River.

He needed to be closer to his job, and by the end of the year, he had sold his farm and moved his family back to Robeson County, into a big white farmhouse he rented only a half-mile from the house in which they once had lived near Parkton.

Thomas and Velma had preceded them. They moved into the small house where her family had lived earlier, just down the road from Thomas’ parents. Soon Velma was pregnant, and on December 15, 1951, she gave birth to a son at Cape Fear Valley Hospital in Fayetteville. She had turned nineteen a month and a half earlier. The child was named Ronald Thomas.

The moment she first held her baby was unlike any other in Velma’s life. “I was thrilled beyond words,” she later wrote. “I cried I was so happy. Now, bless his heart, he was ugly, but I thought he was the prettiest baby I had ever seen. I checked him over and over and over from head to toe. He was so precious. I guess I was looking for any little blemish that maybe didn’t look right. He didn’t have any hair, and I would just rub lightly over his little bald head.”

Velma could not hold Ronnie enough. She cooed to him, spoke to him in baby talk. He laughed, and his dark eyes connected with hers as nothing ever had.

Within a year of Ronnie’s birth, Velma was pregnant again. By then a new soft-drink bottling plant had opened in Parkton, and Thomas gave up his job with Double Cola to sell Dr. Pepper. On September 3, 1953, Velma gave birth to a daughter, Pamela Marie.*

Velma was adamant that her children would not have a childhood like hers. They would be loved. Nobody would scream at them or beat them. They would be treated with respect. They would have things that she never had. She also wanted her children to grow up with religion. From infancy she took them to the Baptist church where she was now a member with Thomas. The family rarely missed a service, and nobody doubted her devoutness.

From the time Ronnie was old enough to talk, Velma read to him. She bought children’s books by the score. And when Pam grew old enough, she read to the two of them together.

“Some of the best times I had with them was when they wanted me to read to them,” she later recalled. She read every book so many times that Ronnie and Pam knew them by heart. Still, they begged her to read more.

“Sometimes when I would be reading to them, I would intentionally mess up, rearrange the words, and believe you me, they had memorized all these stories so that when I would start messing up, they would stop me. I loved seeing the expression on their faces as I read to them.”

This was the early fifties. Although attitudes were soon to change, in the South at that time men were expected to work and bring home the living. Women stayed home, cooked, kept house, tended the children. That was fine with Velma. She didn’t want to be apart from Ronnie and Pam even for short periods.

Velma never had been to North Carolina’s mountains, nor had her parents. Thomas loved the mountains. He’d gone there on vacations with his family. One summer when the children were still small, Thomas and Velma’s brother John decided it was time that Velma and her parents saw the mountains. Thomas had a week’s vacation coming, and he and Velma made plans to leave the children with his parents, go to the mountains for half the week with John and her parents, come back, drop off the Bullards, get the children and go to the beach for the rest of the week.

They left on Sunday. By the time they got to Asheville, where they spent the first night, Velma missed Ronnie and Pam so much that she was almost physically ill. The next day, they drove across the Smoky Mountains to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, but Velma couldn’t enjoy herself for thinking about the children.

“I’d give half my life right now to be back there with those kids,” she told Thomas that night. “I miss them so bad I can’t stand it.”

She wanted to cut the trip short and leave for home the next day, and the others gave in to her wishes. Although they didn’t arrive until after midnight, Velma insisted on going to Thomas’ parents’ house and waking them to get the children. Only when she held Ronnie in her arms was she finally content.

When Ronnie started first grade at Parkton School, he was reluctant to go because he didn’t want to leave his mother, so Velma went with him the first day and stayed all day to help him adjust. Ronnie’s teacher, Mrs. Cooper, had taught his father, and she was so sweet and understanding that Ronnie took to her immediately. He would come home every day telling new things about Mrs. Cooper.

Velma took her first job soon after Ronnie started school, mainly to provide more for her children. She worked third shift, midnight to eight, running a twisting machine at a textile plant in nearby Red Springs. She still served as a grade mother for Ronnie’s class, though, and was there for every class party, field trip and special event.

After Pam started school, Velma planned to rotate as grade mother, one year for Ronnie’s class, the next for Pam’s. But Ronnie got upset. Why couldn’t she still be his grade mother, too? Velma gave in, and for all their years of elementary school she was grade mother for both.

She joked with her children that they had automatic arms. Anytime a parent was needed as a volunteer at school, Ronnie’s and Pam’s arms automatically shot into the air, and Velma never failed them.

By the time Ronnie started third grade, Thomas had a new job making more money driving for the Pepsi-Cola bottler in Fayetteville. He moved his family out of the tiny, dilapidated house near his parents and into a big white house on South Fayetteville Street in Parkton.

Parkton had only a few hundred residents. The mainline tracks of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad divided the town, and residents were as inured to the wail and rumble of passing trains as they were to the muffled thump of shells exploding in training exercises at Fort Bragg, the huge army base fifteen miles north of town.