Blood Games (25 page)

“I would ask him, ‘Why, James, did you do such a thing?’” Slayton recalled. “He would just shrug his shoulders He did things just to see if he could get away with it.”

Slayton saw Bart’s troubles with the law as a logical outgrowth of his earlier defiant behavior. But he did not ask Bart about his arrest and conviction. When students had problems, he left it to them to come to him if they wanted to talk about them. Bart didn’t come.

“James thought it was stupid to believe what I did,” he said. “He had developed the attitude that life is out there for you to get out of it what you want the easiest way you can get it. And it’s just a game.”

23

Bart’s problems with the law only added to the tumultuous mix of emotions that had been simmering in his family, and soon after his sentencing, those feelings boiled to the surface.

Joanne’s job at Memorial Hospital in Danville regularly took her out of Caswell County and made her realize how much she resented its isolation and attitudes. “Caswell County is not the real world,” she said later. “You’re never accepted as an outsider. Unless you’re going to talk about tobacco or the weather or the latest car wreck on the front page of the Caswell
Messenger,
there’s nothing to talk about. I would walk into a country store and there would be dead silence.”

Her resentment of Caswell County was nothing compared to her resentment of Jim’s infidelity. The unforgiving nature that had caused her to shun her father’s funeral and sever all ties with her mother would not allow her to forget. “I couldn’t get over Judy Gold,” she said. “It wasn’t the same after that. I couldn’t make it the same.”

Although she loved Jim, she had concluded that they were too much unalike. “We were two people just existing in the same household. We didn’t communicate, didn’t even really know each other. There was no common ground except for the children. Jim had such a passion and love for the farm. I wanted more than I had there. I knew there was more out there. We couldn’t make it together.”

Jim knew that Joanne was unhappy, but he wasn’t expecting what happened on Saturday, May 3, only five weeks after the trauma of Bart’s court appearance. Joanne called him into their upstairs bedroom and told him that she was leaving. She had rented an apartment in Danville. She wanted to get away from everything and think.

“I tried to get her to stay,” Jim said later. “She walked out. Just left.”

And left all four children with him. Bart was seventeen, Emory fifteen, Carrie seven, Alex five. Joanne had taken them all upstairs to talk with them before she left. Bart and Emory had little to say afterward. Bart, as usual, showed no reaction. Emory was at first distraught, later grieved. The girls, especially Alex, were confused and worried. Alex kept asking when her mother was coming back.

Jim’s mother, Carolyn, would never forget that day. After Joanne left, Jim came to her house with the children. Once again she had been left largely in the dark about what was going on in her son’s family. She hadn’t even known that Bart had been arrested until she read it in the newspaper. She had been shocked by that, and when she saw Jim this day, she knew she was in for another shock.

“He looked perfectly awful,” she said. “Just ghastly. I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘Joanne’s gone.’”

Carolyn couldn’t believe that Joanne had left her children.

“I don’t think anybody can understand why I did it,” Joanne said later. “The only way it was going to work was for me to leave. I had no attachment to the farm and Jim did. I couldn’t afford to take the children. And Jim needed to know his children. He never packed their lunches, never tucked them in, never disciplined them. He didn’t know who liked what on their plates. He called me one time when Carrie was in the hospital and asked me how to wash Alex’s hair. I had to leave. That was the only way it was going to work, the only way he was going to get to know his children.”

A week after she left, Joanne returned to pick up the children for Mother’s Day. They talked about almost everything but her leaving. Nobody but Alex wanted to bring that up.

“When are you coming home?” she asked.

Joanne had no answer.

Jim knew the answer already. He returned home that night to discover that she had taken all her clothes, the silver and china from their wedding. He knew she’d never come back.

Not long afterward, Jim discovered that if Joanne had left to think, it hadn’t taken her long to decide what she wanted. He learned that a coworker, Alan Ferguson,* was living in the apartment with her. Ferguson had just married for the second time a year earlier, to a woman who had two children from a previous marriage. Jim and Joanne had gone to their house for a Super Bowl party in January. Jim knew that Alan and Joanne were good friends. He just hadn’t realized they were that close. Alan was the coach of the hospital’s women’s softball team. Joanne was on the team. They played on Thursday nights, and afterward the team members would go drink beer and eat pizza. Jim had seen it as a night out with the girls for Joanne. Now he realized it might have been something else.

He called Alan’s wife, who had become suspicious of Alan and Joanne long before Jim. She had hired a private detective, who had come up with evidence of a tryst before Joanne and Alan left their spouses. She was going to use the evidence to obtain a divorce, she said, and Jim was welcome to use it, too.

Alan Ferguson, meanwhile, had begun looking for jobs outside of Danville. He landed one in another Virginia town and Joanne followed him there.

Back at the farm, Jim was coping with taking care of his children. Emory took most of the responsibility for the girls. Carolyn came to get the girls each morning and took them back to Milton so they could catch the school bus at her house. Then she waited for them in the afternoon and took care of them until Jim got home from work.

Alex continued to say that she wanted her mother and daddy together again, and Jim tried to make her understand that it probably wouldn’t happen.

“It may be the best thing,” he told her. “Your mother’s happy. We’ll be happy, too.”

“I was trying to be a lot more optimistic than I was feeling,” he said later. “Joanne leaving was like knocking a crutch out. I was so dependent on her. I really wanted her to come back.”

Jim worried that Bart might think his troubles played a part in the breakup and blame himself for it.

“Well, how are you taking it?” he asked his son one day.

“Okay,” Bart said with a shrug.

Actually, Bart was the least affected by the situation of anybody in the family.

“When it finally did happen,” he said later, “I knew it was for good. At some point, I think there was always some kind of tension that I never consciously recognized. Mom had sort of started complaining when I was in about the tenth or eleventh grade, but that was as far as it got. There was never a lot of arguing, never any violence or anything like that. When it happened, I said, ‘Damn, this has been going on and I never noticed it.’

“When they finally did separate for good, it wasn’t anything that was like some violent, emotionally wrenching thing for me. As far as these things go, it was as painless as something like that can get.”

Joanne returned in June for Bart’s graduation. The family gathered at the farm afterward. The happiness of the situation was underlaid by unspoken anger, resentment, and pain. The tension grew worse when Jim opened Bart’s report card, which had been enclosed in his diploma. Although Bart had been graduated sixty-fourth in his class of 228, with a B average he clearly had done almost nothing in his last semester. He’d flunked two subjects, and he slipped by in three other subjects with only a point or two to spare. A C was his highest grade, and he had only one of those—in Weldon Slayton’s English class. Jim’s anger uncharacteristically exploded.

“If you’re not going to get serious about life and about going to school, there’s no sense in you even going to college,” he told his son. “You’re not headed in any direction that’s positive. You’ve got to get control of your life. You’ve got to take on some responsibilities. If you want to go to college, you’re going to have to work for it.”

Joanne was surprised. “He was getting all over Bart about it,” she recalled, “really chilling him out.”

She figured Jim’s outburst was prompted more by Jim’s distress over the breakup than by Bart’s lackadaisical attitude toward school.

“I preached for thirty minutes,” Jim said later. “I was really mad. Bart just couldn’t care less about grades, or school, or anything else. I just felt like he was heading down the drain.”

“I think you’ve said enough,” Joanne finally told him, bringing the sermon to a halt.

Bart’s future was still in doubt. He had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. His strong interest in the military had led him at one point to consider applying to the U.S. Naval Academy, and he actually had begun the process before discovering that his chances were too slim to be realistic. Instead, he’d sent out applications to three or four colleges. One of those was N.C State University in Raleigh. In the space allocated for an essay describing why he wanted to attend State, Bart had been succinct: “North Carolina State University has one of the better schools of engineering in the Southeast. My family can afford the tuition. It offers Army R.O.T.C. It is close to home.” Bart wasn’t even interested in engineering. He was applying to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences to study sociology and anthropology, courses that piqued his interest when he read the catalog descriptions. And in February, he had received notice that he had been accepted.

But another possibility still appealed to him. His longstanding interest in the military led him to think about joining the army. The year before, when his family had been at the state fair, Bart had stopped by the army recruiting exhibit and talked with the recruiters. They had given him a test and told him he scored highest of anybody who had taken it that day. He had talked with the local recruiter since.

Bart had decided to enlist for three years, save his money, and earn enough in credits from the army to pay for his college later, but a hitch turned up. Because of his conviction, he would have to get permission from his probation officer to join. Jim went to talk to the probation officer.

“He said, ‘No, Bart needs to go to college. He has to have half a term before we can get him off probation.’ I said, ‘I don’t think he’s emotionally mature enough to do it.’ He wouldn’t budge. Let’s just say the probation officer and I disagreed.”

Bart was upset about that decision. But with the army out of the question, he saw no choice but to attend N.C. State. He certainly didn’t want to stay in Caswell County.

Jim talked to his mother about it.

“If he wants to go to State, let’s let him go.” Carolyn said.

“He seemed to be positive about it,” Jim said later.

Carolyn sent off the check for tuition and took Bart to buy new clothes for campus.

In July, Jim and Bart went to N.C. State for freshman orientation. Bart was a little awed by the campus. “It was just full of pavement and bricks,” he said later. “I walked up on campus, looked at Lee dorm, got lost.”

On campus that day, Jim and Bart ran into Neal Henderson and his mother and stopped to chat. Although they played Dungeons and Dragons together, Bart and Neal never had been close, perhaps because each felt a little competitive with the other. Neal was very close, however, with Emory. Yet here were Bart and Neal, friends, both from Caswell County, both coming to State. One thing had seemed logical months earlier when both had learned of their acceptance at State.

“You want to room together?” Neal had asked in class one day.

“Sure,” said Bart. “Why not?”

Now they began making plans about what they would bring to the dorm room they would be sharing.

24

In August of 1986, when Bart and Neal moved into room 405B of a four-room suite on the fourth floor of Lee Residence Hall, a high-rise red-brick dorm on the West Campus, N.C. State University was only six months away from celebrating its centennial. In its hundred years, it had become the largest university in the state, with some 24,000 students on a campus of 623 acres on the edge of downtown Raleigh.

The university had strong programs in engineering, math, textiles, agriculture, forestry, veterinary medicine, design. It was a national center for research in science and technology. It also had a seething rivalry, especially on the basketball court, with the University of North Carolina, the nation’s first state university, thirty miles away in Chapel Hill. Carolina students considered themselves far more erudite and sophisticated than State students. Cars of Carolina supporters sometimes bore bumper stickers that read: “Honk if you love Carolina; moo if you from State.”

The N.C. State campus was split down the middle by a main-line railroad track and bordered on two sides by major thoroughfares, Hillsborough Street and Western Boulevard. Hillsborough Street was lined with diversions: restaurants, bars, ice cream parlors, record shops, used book stores, and other businesses catering to students. Western Boulevard offered a shopping center with movie theaters, a motel, fast-food restaurants, Pullen Park, Central Prison, the TV station where Jesse Helms gained fame as a commentator before his election to the U.S. Senate, and Dorothea Dix Hospital, the state’s primary mental institution.