Blood Games (19 page)

Many things had changed by that time. Strains had crept into Jim’s and Joanne’s relationship. Later, they would disagree about the main cause. But three factors were primary.

First, Jim disliked village life. He longed for fields and woods and isolation. He had acquired another farm from his mother, this one eighty acres, several miles from Leasburg, near Hyco Reservoir, a huge lake that has its beginnings in Caswell County. The farm had an ancient two-story farmhouse on it, with big chimneys on two sides, but it was not in good condition and lacked any modern conveniences. Jim loved spending weekends there, puttering around, taking long walks, roughing it in the old house, activities that were not quite as appealing to Joanne and the children.

There was an additional attraction. The farm adjoined another of Carolyn’s farms, Hickory Hill, where Jim’s brother, Bill, was now living with his family. After getting out of the Air Force, Bill had married and eventually returned to the University of North Carolina to finish his degree. Both Bill and his wife Lydia had taught briefly in Caswell County schools, then quit to drop out of mainstream American life and tour the country in a Volkswagen van. They had returned to Carolyn’s farm to live off the land, hunting and fishing and growing vegetables and other necessaries. “They were…” says Carolyn, pausing as if she has trouble even saying the next word, “… hippies.”

Long-haired friends regularly came and went in great numbers from the wooded farm where Bill and Lydia lived, and the county was abuzz with rumors of the scandalous activity that was believed to go on there. It was even whispered that people danced naked on car tops. Nobody said anything directly to Carolyn about this, of course, but she was well aware of the talk and was horrified about it.

“My parents were hippies when it was cool,” their daughter Kenyatta said years later. She was named for Jomo Kenyatta, the champion of African nationalism and revolutionary first president of Kenya whom her parents greatly admired. Kenyatta was the same age as Emory, Jim and Joanne’s younger son. “I thought it was great when I was little,” Kenyatta said. “I used to lead stoned people around in the woods giggling. I was a tour guide.”

Joanne disapproved of Bill’s and Lydia’s lifestyle and didn’t want her children around them. She had a strong aversion to drugs and once had walked out of Bill’s and Lydia’s rented house in Chapel Hill when she realized that other guests were smoking marijuana. Jim enjoyed visiting at his brother’s house, though, and Joanne was certain that he used marijuana there. She was willing to tolerate that, but she laid down one rule: He was not to bring any into her house.

Later, Joanne would blame her differences with Jim about Bill and Lydia for much of the strain that had come into their marriage. He blamed something else: her mother.

Soon after Emory was born, Joanne’s mother had remarried. Margaret and her new husband came frequently to visit, and soon they were coming every other weekend. After Jim and Joanne moved into the Thompson house in 1974, Joanne’s mother persuaded her husband to move to Caswell County into the old house at Cedar Hill Farm from which Joanne and Jim just had moved. Carolyn rented it to them.

Joanne didn’t encourage her mother to move so close, but neither did she protest, much to her later regret. “My mother always ran my life, and I guess she wanted to continue to do so,” she said years later.

As Jim saw it, that was exactly what began to happen. Joanne had gone to work in the drug store in Yanceyville after Bart started to school, and when she wasn’t working, her mother usually was at the house. Often Margaret would come to the house before Joanne got home from work, cook dinner, and have it ready when her daughter arrived. Even Joanne began to feel a lack of family privacy. Also Margaret, unaccustomed to the isolation of Caswell County, constantly wanted Joanne to go places with her. “Mother depended on me for her entertainment,” Joanne said.

Once Joanne and Jim had done everything together. Joanne had even taken up hunting to please Jim. Now it seemed to Jim that he and Joanne never did anything together anymore. And her mother was always there, setting the agenda.

“I guess what he was wanting and what I was wanting wasn’t the same,” Joanne said years later. “I was working out in the world for the first time in six or seven years. Jim was a homebody. He didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t care to have people over, and I did. I needed more than what was just there in the house, and he didn’t. He wanted to be on the farm, free and loose and in earth shoes. He admired Bill and Lydia. They were able to do something he couldn’t do.”

They didn’t bicker and argue about these differences. They became two people living together who had not grown together, rarely reaching out or communicating. One night in April 1977, as they sat quietly apart, Joanne broke the silence.

“I think you need to move to the farm,” she said.

“I do, too,” he replied.

Next day, before the boys got home from school, she helped him pack up his stuff and load it into his old, dented Ford pickup. The truck was light blue—Carolina blue it was called in North Carolina, the school color of his alma mater.

Bart was eight then, soon to finish the third grade. Emory was six, just nearing the end of his first year in school. When they got off the school bus that afternoon, their parents were waiting. Joanne sat them on the back steps of the house and took a seat between them. Jim stood nearby.

“Your dad’s going to go live at the farm for a while,” Joanne told her sons “You kids and I will be staying here. He won’t be far away. He’ll be coming over. You’ll still see him.”

That was it. Jim got into his truck, and Joanne and the boys stood at the back of the house and watched him drive away. Joanne was fighting back tears, but for the boys’ sake, she tried not to show it.

18

Bart Upchurch, four months shy of being nine years old, watched with an air of detachment as his father drove away that spring day in 1977. Later, he remembered the moment clearly but attached no emotional significance to it.

“They explained it to me. I thought, okay. I didn’t really understand it. There was some sort of trouble going on, but I didn’t know what. There wasn’t any commotion. At that time, there wasn’t really anything traumatic.”

Later, Jim thought that his leaving had no special effect on either of his sons. “I never detected any emotional problem from either one of the kids because of it,” he said. “If it was there, it was something I didn’t see.”

His mother, Carolyn, whom Bart called Nanny-ma, did see a change in her grandson. Bart never showed his emotions. In that way, he was like Carolyn and his father. He wouldn’t allow anybody to see him cry. If he were about to cry, he would duck his head or run away. But when he came to visit his grandmother after his father left home, he would cry when the time came to leave. It caused her to recall the crying jags Jim had had as a child soon after she married Charles Thomas. She was certain that the separation was the reason for Bart’s crying.

“It had a devastating effect on him,” she said. “It was a turning point in his personality. He was without his father.”

Bart’s crying, she thought, was a symptom of a security breakdown, a weakness sensed by bullies among his classmates, who began taking lunch money from him on the school bus. Bart also developed another problem soon after his father left, one Carolyn didn’t know about until later. He began wetting his pants.

Joanne wasn’t concerned about the wetting at first. She saw that Bart could control it if he wanted to. He never did it at school. He didn’t wet the bed at night. He only did it after school at home. She thought he did it for attention and didn’t really associate it with Jim’s leaving.

Like Jim, she thought that the boys were not greatly affected by the separation. For one thing, there already was an emotional distance between Jim and his sons, she said later.

“Jim was not close to the children. Jim is a very private, very individual person, very quiet, passive, reserved, a very inward person. He’s a good father, but he didn’t really do things with the children. He didn’t take them to school, to plays, to Scouts. He would not sit on the sofa and read to them. I read to them. I took them up to bed, tucked them in, and gave them hugs. Jim never gave them hugs. He didn’t know how to do that.”

With Bart, Jim thought, the separation between father and son was not just one-way. “Bart maintained a certain distance all the time,” Jim said later. “Even as a little boy he was not one for showing his feelings. Bart was difficult to communicate with. He would not open up. He didn’t want you cuddling him.”

As Joanne remembered it later, the boys never even asked about their father after he left.

“It wasn’t as if Jim left and they never saw him. We began seeing each other again almost immediately.”

The farm was only a few miles away, and only a couple of weeks after he left, Jim was coming over regularly. He sometimes ate dinner with Joanne and the boys, sometimes even spent the night. Occasionally, he would take the boys to the farm for the weekend. Later, Bart remembered feeling resentment about only one aspect of his parents’ separation: having to spend weekends at the farm with his father. “Dad didn’t have a color TV,” he said.

Jim had gotten fed up with his job at the social services department and quit before he and Joanne split up. He went to work as a salesman at a lumber company in an adjoining county, but the job was no more satisfying and not much better paying than the one he had left, and in the fall of 1977, he returned to work for the Caswell County Department of Social Services.

If he was not finding his professional life satisfying, Jim was at least enjoying the isolation and primitive lifestyle of the farm. He spent a lot of time hunting and walking alone in the woods. Fortunately, he also devoted a lot of time to cutting and chopping wood for heating and cooking. That winter proved to be one of the harshest in years, and he felt good about surviving it in the drafty, uninsulated house, his only warmth provided by his own labor. “I’d get up in the morning and have to break the ice on a bucket of water to make coffee,” he recalled.

By winter, he and Joanne were again finding warmth in one another, and before the season was out, she discovered that she was pregnant again. Pregnant. And their relationship still unresolved.

Jim did not want to return to live again in the house in Leasburg. He had grown too attached to the farm. And the problem of Joanne’s mother remained. She was still at the house regularly, constantly reminding Joanne of what a mistake she’d made in marrying Jim and getting stuck in the wilds of Caswell County. At one point, at her mother’s urging, Joanne even had considered taking a job in a distant town and leaving Caswell County forever, but something held her back.

On her birthday late in January, Joanne came home from work to find her mother had cooked dinner and made a cake for her. That was to be her birthday, she and her mother, dinner and a cake. She could see an endless string of similar birthdays in her future and she suddenly knew it wasn’t what she wanted. But Joanne couldn’t bring herself to admit that to her mother just yet. Within a few months, though, the explosion would finally come.

One day that spring, Joanne came home to find her mother and stepfather at the house again, sitting at the kitchen table. It had been a frustrating day, but later she didn’t remember what touched off the bitter confrontation that followed.

“It was not planned,” she said later. “It was just one of those things where you get out of your car and words just come out of your mouth. I blew up. I guess I said things I wanted to say all my life. My mother is a very strong-willed person. She had to be a strong person. But if my mother says the sky is purple, that’s right. You don’t argue with her. I said, ‘There is no compromising with you, Mother, it’s either your way or nothing. Since there can be no compromise, that’s it.’”

She ordered her mother out of her house, and told her she never wanted to see her again. She had cut her mother out of her life for good.

But she was not willing to do that with Jim. She was more than three months pregnant, and now that she had resolved the problem with her mother, she wanted to resolve the problem with her marriage, too.

“She told me, ‘You’re going to have to make a decision,’” Jim recalled later. “‘Either I’m going to have an abortion, or we go back together.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s try it again.’”

Joanne was even willing to make a major concession. She was ready finally to move to the farm. She and the children moved in with Jim in April 1978, in time to plant a big garden.

The house into which they moved was in splendid isolation at the end of a narrow lane that wound through deep woods to an open ridge crest with a sweeping view to the southwest of distant ridges. The house had been built in the 1830s, a solid two-story structure on a stone foundation with a dark and dank cellar underneath. Never painted, its board walls had cured a dark gray. The tin roof had rusted to a deep maroonish-orange. A dilapidated front porch stretched the full width of the house. Inside were two high-ceilinged, plastered rooms downstairs, both with fireplaces. One served as a living room, the other as a dining room and den. Upstairs were two bedrooms. The boys shared one. Jim and Joanne took the other. A kitchen had been built onto the back of the house, standing high on the sloping ground. In it was an old wood-burning range that was used not only for cooking but for warming water and for supplemental heating of the house. There was no kitchen sink, for there was no running water.