Blood Games (20 page)

Water came from a stone-lined well outside the kitchen, brought up by hand in a bucket attached to a rope on a rusted pulley. The outhouse was down the hill. Baths were taken in the kitchen in a huge galvanized tub.

The house was shaded by big trees—hackberry, wild cherry, black walnut, cedar. Jim set out fruit trees, apple and cherry, to go with the big pear tree beside the house. Two log tobacco barns stood at the edge of the woods in front of the house, and a third was out of sight, just down the hill. Behind the house, a corncrib slanted precariously on its stone foundation. A hundred feet beyond it was a small livestock barn. Nearly ten acres had been fenced for pasture, plenty of room for horses and cows. But goats came first.

Emory was allergic to cow milk, and Jim and Joanne had been buying goat milk for him. Now that they had room for goats, why should they buy milk? They ended up with a herd of six—and more milk than they knew what to do with. Some they sold, some they gave away. Joanne began making cheese with the rest.

Goats led to sheep. They began raising lambs for slaughter and a calf each year for beef, eating only meat they had raised. If they ran short, Jim always could supplement the supply in the freezer by hunting. Some mornings he would rise early and see more than a dozen deer grazing in the mists of his pasture.

Years later, Jim would think of these days on the farm after he and Joanne were reunited as his “Walton Family days,” perhaps the happiest period of his life. “It was just something I wanted to do,” he said. “It was almost like I was driven to do it. To me it was fun.”

Certainly, Joanne had never seen him happier. “The farm was always his passion,” she said. “He loved the farm dearly. Jim was happy there. We were very, very happy there. It was the first time I’d seen Jim really come into the picture of family life. He was more open. We were doing things as a family.”

Everybody had specific chores, including Bart and Emory. Bart always did his, but without enthusiasm. One of their chores was tending to the goats and milking them. They joined a 4-H dairy goat group and began taking their goats to shows and fairs. Emory’s goat, Diva, won a blue ribbon at the Greensboro Agricultural Fair, and both boys took goats to the N.C. State Fair in Raleigh. The
Caswell Messenger
featured the boys and their goats in a front-page story.

Although the family was closer together, working as a unit, Jim realized that the life he enjoyed so much was from an earlier era, when life was simpler and harder, and that it was not easy on his wife and children.

“I probably imposed it on the family,” he said later. “I used to tell the kids, ‘No matter what happens after this, you can always say you had it worse.’ I don’t think the children appreciated it at all. They wanted to be just like every other kid, have the things that other kids had, and do the things that other kids did. I think sometimes I was real selfish when I look back on it. But I don’t think it hurt any of them.”

A daughter, Carrie, was born in September 1978, followed by a second daughter, Alex, in September 1980. All along, the plan had been to remodel the old farmhouse someday, add plumbing, a bathroom, a modem kitchen, a better system for heating, but the arrival of Carrie and Alex made it almost imperative. Jim and Joanne wanted to do as much of the work as they could themselves, but living in the house and working on it, they realized, would be difficult. They would need another place to live for a while. As it happened, an ideal place was available. It was less than half a mile away, close enough to make tending to the livestock on the farm no problem.

The Judge Long House, as it was called, was a green-shuttered, white-columned, nineteenth-century mansion set on a spacious lawn shaded by two-hundred-year-old oak trees. An immense magnolia sheltered one side of the house. The family moved in December 1981. The house had twelve rooms, enough so that every child—Bart, thirteen, Emory eleven, Carrie, three, and the baby, Alex, one—could have a private room. To everybody’s great relief, there were two full and functioning bathrooms. Joanne was thrilled to have a dishwasher, a washing machine, and dryer. The Upchurches had returned to civilization, leaving their Walton Family days behind. But they were leaving behind the innocence of those days in more ways than they realized.

19

Sheep farming had been a prosperous enterprise in North Carolina in the days before synthetic yarns. At the turn of the century, the state counted more than half a million sheep within its borders, but by 1980 sheep farming had become little more than a hobby. It soon enjoyed a resurgence in Caswell County.

One of the county’s most famous plantations, Melrose, built in 1770 by James Williamson, had been turned into a sheep ranch by a young Duke University graduate named James Coman, who moved to Caswell County from Durham with dreams of reviving the sheep industry in North Carolina. Several other families in the county also were raising a few sheep, enough that a Caswell Sheep Producers Association was formed.

Jim and Joanne Upchurch had been gradually increasing the size of the herd of ewes that they kept on their farm, primarily for the lambs they slaughtered to fill their freezer. A by-product of their herd, of course, was wool, for which they had little use. That was the reason they joined the newly formed association. At one of the meetings they met James Coman and got swept up in his dream.

By July 1982, seven months after they moved out of their farmhouse to begin remodeling it, Jim and Joanne joined Coman and another couple, Bill and Pat Bush, teachers who also had a small flock of sheep, to start a new venture in the sheep business.

They would raise lambs for meat, but their primary business would be selling fine-quality finished wool yarn to hobbyists. Joanne was a talented knitter who had spent many cold winter hours in her farmhouse making items of apparel for her family, and she knew that fine wool yarn was difficult to come by.

The venture was begun with a ton of wool that the group already had on hand at their farms. They found a processor in Virginia that would produce their yarn on a rare, nineteenth-century device called a spinning mule. The mule-spun yarn, as it was called, was as light and fluffy as if it had been hand-spun. After the wool was spun, it had to be trucked back to Caswell County, where it was hand-dyed. That was done in an old tenant house at Melrose in a row of huge stainless-steel pots heated by portable gasoline stoves. It seemed fun at first, although it was hard, back-bending work, a regular weekend project for the two couples and Coman, accompanied at first by much beer drinking and laughter.

After the yarn was hung out and dried, it was packaged and placed in a few outlets to see how it would go. It sold so quickly and at such good prices that the group bought four more tons of wool from other sheep farmers and began producing their yarn on a bigger but no less primitive scale.

By December 1982, they were so encouraged that Coman sold off some of his flock to raise capital, and he and the two couples incorporated their partnership as the Caswell Sheep and Wool Company.

Joanne had given up outside work when she moved to the farm, pregnant with Carrie, three and a half years earlier. As the only one in the group without a full-time outside job, she was chosen to keep the company’s books and be its marketing director, although she would receive no salary for the extra work. She went at the job with great enthusiasm.

The idea in the beginning was to sell the yarn at craft shows, but Joanne had a grander vision. She not only got several major retail outlets around the state to carry their yarn, but she wanted to distribute it nationally as well. She began flying off to trade shows in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and St. Louis, setting up booths and trying to interest dealers. “She got really obsessed with this thing,” Jim recalled later.

The company began to get attention. A reporter for the Greensboro
News & Record
wrote a story about it that nearly filled the entire feature page, including three color photographs: one of Joanne holding a baby lamb, another of her knitting, and a third modeling a jacket and cap that she had designed and made from the yarn.

The business was expanding rapidly, but more money seemed to be going out than coming in. Soon the company had gone through James Coman’s original investment, and the partners had to sign a note for a loan from a Durham bank to keep going. When that was gone, the partners had a falling-out. Coman demanded to see the books. “Joanne just turned a deaf ear to everything,” Jim recalled later. “She was real sluggish in getting those books to him.”

Not long after Joanne turned over the books, Jim got a call from a lawyer who represented the company, a friend and neighbor, who asked him to drop by his office. James Coman was there with a cardboard box full of records for the Caswell Sheep and Wool Company. The lawyer told Jim that it seemed as if Joanne had not accounted for some of the company’s money.

“I said, ‘Maybe she made some mistakes,’” Jim recalled later. “They chuckled and said, ‘It’s more than that.’”

Coman was claiming that a lot of company money was missing and Joanne had embezzled it. Jim had a hard time accepting that. “If she had any money, it didn’t show up anywhere,” he said later. He knew that Joanne had mishandled the books. It was a job she never should have taken in the first place, he thought; she couldn’t even keep her own checkbook straight. But he also thought that most of the money that was unaccounted for had been legitimately spent, although Joanne didn’t have the receipts or records to prove it.

Jim consulted a lawyer friend, George Daniel. Daniel learned that Coman had talked with the county district attorney, Phil Allen, Jim’s old buddy from high school and college. Allen let Daniel know that if Coman chose to press the matter, an indictment might be forthcoming.

“George said, ‘Well, they’ve got a case,’” Jim recalled. “We didn’t have any choice but to deal with it. I said, ‘Let’s do what we can to keep it out of court.’ The kids would have been devastated by it. I just didn’t want it to be publicized.”

The alternative was to come to a settlement with Coman so that he wouldn’t press charges. He wanted the bank loan repaid and his original investment returned.

“Hell, he had us over a barrel,” Jim said. “What could we do? Either go to court on a felony charge or pay him what he wanted.”

Jim went to his mother, who had paid off some bills Joanne had accumulated while they were separated, and told her about the situation.

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Carolyn asked.

“We need thirty thousand dollars,” Jim said.

She arranged a loan, and the lawyers took care of the matter. But the situation opened a new rift in Jim’s and Joanne’s marriage.

“I was really upset about it,” Jim said. “It really caused us some terrible hardships at the time. We had this terrible debt. We had to struggle along after that. It really hurt our relationship.”

Soon Joanne would be hurt in turn, and the source of her anguish would stem, ironically, from their churchgoing. After the girls were born, Joanne had decided that the family should start going to church. Although Jim was not particularly religious, he went along for the sake of the children and family unity. They joined St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, which Jim’s family had helped to found. It was a small church that shared a priest with another church in an adjoining county. On a good Sunday, maybe twenty-five people attended services. The Upchurches added measurably to the congregation. Bart and Emory were confirmed and became acolytes. Joanne was elected president of Episcopal Women. Jim became a churchwarden.

Not long after Jim and Joanne joined the church, they became acquainted with another couple, Ted and Judy Gold*, who had three children. The two families soon were attending social functions together. Joanne didn’t like Judy from the beginning. She thought that Judy was flirtatious and had an eye for Jim.

“She’s after you,” Joanne told her husband. “She’s chasing you.”

Jim laughed it off. But he soon found himself involved in volunteer work with Judy. “One thing led to another,” Jim recalled later. “We started having an affair. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t go looking for anybody. I had not had any affairs. But I was so disillusioned with my marriage.”

Late in June, Joanne found a letter from Judy in Jim’s billfold and confronted him about it, but he denied that anything was going on between them. Judy called and invited Jim, Joanne, and the children to their house for a cookout on July 4. They went. Joanne was friendly but also wary and watchful.

Not long afterward, Joanne saw a blanket in the back of Jim’s four-wheel-drive Japanese pickup truck and became even more suspicious. One day, she was driving to Person County with Bart and Emory to help with a church cleaning project, and she spotted Jim’s truck parked at Hyco Lake with nobody around. She might have stopped and searched for Jim if the boys hadn’t been along, but she already had a picture of what she likely would have found.

After more than a year and a half, Jim and Joanne finally were finishing work on their old farmhouse. They had torn off the front porch, removed one chimney, replaced rotted boards, and painted the old house blue. Inside, they had added a large bathroom, a modern kitchen, plumbing, and new wiring and lighting. They had redone the floors, and Joanne had painted and wallpapered and added new moldings. They moved back into the house in early August.

A time that should have been joyous, returning to the redecorated house on the farm that Jim loved so dearly, was instead sullen and strained. Jim seemed preoccupied and even more remote than usual, as if embroiled in some inner conflict. Suspicions about her husband’s fidelity were gnawing at Joanne. The air in the house was nearly palpable with tension.