Death Sentence (6 page)

The house into which Thomas moved his family had two stories, with dormers and a huge, columned and balustraded wraparound porch. Azaleas grew around the porch, and the house was shaded by big oaks, pines and dogwoods. It was just down the street from Parkton Baptist Church and the town’s small business district: a grocery store, a cafe, a gas station, a drugstore with a marble soda fountain, a Laundromat, a hardware store, a doctor’s office and the tiny station for the town’s single policeman. Parkton School was only a couple of blocks beyond, within easy walking distance.

The whole family loved the new house. It was spacious, with a big yard for Ronnie and Pam to play in, and other children, Alf Parnell’s twins, were next door. Velma’s brother John and his wife lived right across the street, and Velma’s new house became a family gathering spot. She spent a lot of time in her big kitchen cooking and baking for her family. Her brothers and sisters often dropped by for a cup of coffee, a piece of cake, or a slice of pie. So did Wade Holder, a young coach at Parkton School who had moved into her parents’ house as a boarder and had become one of the family. Velma was almost a second mother to her baby sister, Faye, who was only five years older than Ronnie, and Faye often stayed at the house. To Ronnie and Pam, Faye seemed more like an older sister than an aunt.

Since their house was so close to the church, the family’s religious activities increased. Velma began teaching a children’s Sunday school class, and helped with youth groups and vacation Bible school in the summer. Thomas became an usher. If something was happening at the church, the Burke family was sure to be involved.

Velma and Thomas didn’t just participate in their children’s church and school activities. Whatever the children wanted to do, they did with them. They went to movies, bowled, played miniature golf. Velma especially enjoyed playing basketball with her children. She never liked the beach, but Ronnie and Pam loved it, so she learned to like it, too. Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, Wrightsville Beach were just two hours away, and during the warm months Thomas, Velma and the children frequently spent weekends there, sometimes going just for the day. Every year they attended the Azalea Festival in Wilmington.

When he was ten, Ronnie decided to go to a week-long summer church camp in an adjoining county. His mother wasn’t sure that she could stand to be separated from him for a week, but she took him. Once there, though, Ronnie was reluctant to get out of the car. He didn’t want to leave his mother, and Velma had to talk him into staying. He cried when she left, and both had a difficult week.

“I wouldn’t say I was a mama’s boy,” Ronnie would say later, “but I was close to it. I really loved my mama to death, a real adoring-type love.”

Pam, on the other hand, adored her father. She wanted to go wherever he went, and he took her with him everywhere, even to the barbershop. She thought he was the funniest person who ever lived. He always thought up some new way to make her laugh. He loved to watch
The Three Stooges
and
The Andy Griffith Show
on TV, and Pam always climbed into his lap to watch with him.

Early in 1963, when she was thirty, Velma started hemorrhaging. A gynecologist diagnosed fibroid tumors in her uterus and recommended a hysterectomy. Velma talked about it with Thomas. They had agreed that they wanted only two children, a boy and a girl. They decided Velma should have the surgery, but they had no way of knowing it would become a turning point in their lives.

“After she had that hysterectomy, seemed like she never was the same again,” Velma’s brother John would say years later. Doctors never warned her of the hormonal changes that the surgery could produce and how they might affect her moods. Sometimes she would be depressed for days. At other times she would feel edgy, nervous, and she didn’t understand why. She would snap at the children, or at Thomas, then feel bad about it.

With time, she came to believe that Thomas thought that she was somehow less a woman now that she couldn’t bear children and that she was not as attractive to him. She began to fret again about her weight. She normally weighed about 125, hardly fat. Yet she went to a doctor and got diet pills, which seemed only to make her edgier, more nervous. She would stay on her diet for a while, then go into a baking binge and gorge on sweets, feel guilty about it and get depressed.

Sometimes she would go on spending sprees. Mostly she bought things for the children, but she also bought for herself, clothes and jewelry, things she didn’t need. The spending became so obsessive on occasion that she bought knowing she didn’t have money in the bank to cover the checks she was writing. When they bounced, she kept it secret and somehow managed to pay off the merchants before legal action was taken or Thomas found out.

During that same year Thomas had a falling out at the Pepsi plant. Velma came home from work one morning to find a note from him saying that he had gone to Florida with his sister’s husband to try to find a job. John told her that the two had stopped by his house that morning and asked if he wanted to go. Velma was baffled. Never before had Thomas done anything so impetuous and foolish. She was hurt and angry.

When Thomas called the next day from Jacksonville, Velma let him have it. She’d never heard of anything so stupid, and if he thought she was bringing those kids and moving to Florida, he had another thing coming. Although his brother-in-law stayed, Thomas meekly returned home and got back his job at the Pepsi plant.

In 1964, Velma began having pains in her lower back. When they grew severe, she went to a doctor. At first he thought she might have a simple muscle strain and prescribed pain tablets—she wouldn’t remember later what they were. The trouble persisted, and Velma continued to take the tablets.

Ronnie entered seventh grade that fall. He was almost thirteen, and his interests were changing. Velma was on the second shift at the mill, had been working nights for six years. When school was in session she rarely saw her children during the week, except when she was called upon as a grade mother. She wanted more normal hours, more time with Ronnie and Pam, and although she had to take a cut in pay, she got a job as a clerk at Belk-Hensdale department store, usually called Belk’s, in the Tallywood Shopping Center in Fayetteville.

An ominous sign of what was to come soon followed. Driving to work one morning, Velma blacked out at the wheel. Her car left the road, plowed through a woman’s yard and nearly struck her house before coming to a halt. Velma said she didn’t know what had happened, but Thomas and John thought they knew. They were sure that she had taken too many of those pain pills.

Another development, dark with portent, came at the same time. Thomas was talked into joining the Parkton Jaycees, a group of young men who undertook community projects. They also liked to have fun. They met weekly, and they sponsored regular weekend dances at the armory to raise money.

With Velma now home with the children in the evening, Thomas felt free to go off to Jaycee meetings. This was the first time since their marriage that he had undertaken any activity outside his family, and Velma didn’t like it, although she said nothing in the beginning.

Everything was changing, she realized, and she sensed somehow that the only happy years of her life might already be behind her.

Part Two

On the Wings of a Dove

4

The sixties were turning into a turbulent decade, rife with assassinations, racial violence, riots, war in Southeast Asia, and a youth culture that seemed to be abandoning all that their parents held dear. All of that flickered across TV screens in Parkton to little effect. Change was slow in coming to rural North Carolina, and when it did, it often seemed to slip in insidiously. That would be the case with the single development of the sixties that would alter Velma’s life most drastically.

In 1963 the Food and Drug Administration approved the marketing of a drug named Valium, which promised to relieve stress and deliver tranquility, and an anxious age embraced it. It was quickly becoming the most widely prescribed drug in the world, but nobody was aware then of the dangerous effects it could produce.

By the spring of 1965, as the first American combat troops were entering Vietnam, Horace Parnell, who owned the Corner Grocery in Parkton, gave notice to Thomas and Velma that they would have to move. The big house in which they had been living was the Parnell family home, the house in which Horace and his brother, Alf, who lived next door, had grown up. Horace had always intended to remodel it and move into it himself, and the time had come.

Nobody was happy about the prospect of leaving the Parnell house, but Thomas tried to make the best of the situation. He and Velma had been renting all along, he pointed out, and it was time they had a home of their own.

Thomas’ parents had moved closer to town by this time, into a small white house with several acres on McCormick Road on the northern edge of Parkton. The health of Thomas’ father, John, would no longer allow him to farm, and he was working at a pawnshop in Fayetteville owned by his brother-in-law. He offered to give Thomas a lot on which to build next to his own house.

That summer Thomas hired a local builder to begin work on a three-bedroom, brick ranch-style house with a single-car carport. The whole family was excited about the new house. They went almost every evening to check its progress.

More was changing than just their place of residence, however. The bonds that held Thomas and Velma together were about to unravel. The first crisis came that summer. One weekend when Velma took Ronnie and Pam to Carolina Beach, Thomas stayed home to help with a Jaycee project. On Saturday night he drove into Fayetteville. He was returning home alone after midnight in his black ’62 Ford Galaxy when he apparently dozed off.

The car left the highway, hit a culvert, sailed into the air and landed on its wheels in the driveway of a house. Thomas’ head banged the steering wheel, and he was knocked unconscious. Nobody saw or heard the accident, and because the car looked as if it had been parked in the driveway, no passersby noticed.

After Thomas came to, dazed and bloodied, he made his way to his sister’s house in town, nearly a mile away. She called the rescue squad, and an ambulance took him to Highsmith Hospital in Fayetteville.

Nobody knew how to get in touch with Velma and the children. They didn’t learn about the accident until they arrived home Sunday evening. Velma’s brother John hurried across the street to tell them, then drove them to the hospital. Pam, who was almost twelve, was panic-stricken. She would never forget how horrible her daddy looked. His eyes were black and swollen, his head swathed in bandages, his nostrils clogged with dried blood. Pam was afraid he might die.

“I’m fine,” he assured her. “It just looks bad.”

In reality, he had suffered a concussion and his nose nearly had been severed. He was in great pain, but within minutes he was smiling and joking with Pam.

Thomas remained in the hospital for several days and was back at work within a week. But he complained frequently of headaches afterward, and they would increase in severity and number as time went on.

Although Thomas denied it, Velma was convinced that drinking had been the cause of his accident. She saw that as a perfect example of the horrors alcohol could wreak.

Velma abhorred alcohol. Her church did not preach against it without good reason, she was convinced. To Velma, there was no such thing as social drinking. Taking even a single drink was inviting the devil into your body. She had seen it in her father as a child.

One of the qualities she had most admired about Thomas when they were dating was that, unlike so many other boys, he resisted the temptation of alcohol. She had vowed that she would never marry a drunkard, never live with a man who drank.

Thomas had been perfect in that respect. So many men Velma knew still wanted to go out with their old buddies to drink and carouse after they were married, but not Thomas. He had devoted himself completely to family, work and church for fourteen years. Then he had joined the Jaycees.

Velma had been aghast when she had discovered that Thomas had been having a beer or two with his fellow Jaycees after their meetings, and she wasn’t reluctant to let him know. Thomas, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong. Why shouldn’t he have a beer, if that was what he wanted? He worked hard; he had a right to relax.

The friction quickly escalated into arguments, and both remained rigid in their positions. Ronnie and Pam were deeply distressed that their once happy and loving family had become tense and argumentative. They wanted things to be back as they were. They kept hoping that their parents would see what they were doing and change their ways, but that was not to be.

The new house was finished by fall. Thomas took out a loan of $11,500, with payments of $80 a month. He planted red maple saplings in the front yard and moved his family in mid-October. Two weeks later, Velma celebrated her thirty-third birthday in her own house, a house she couldn’t have conceived in her childhood, with luxuries undreamed. She knew she should have been happier, but she wasn’t.

A month after that, she and Thomas observed their fifteenth anniversary, but it was not the same as the anniversaries that had passed before. An edginess prevailed, a vague and unspoken uncertainty. A wedge had been driven between them.

Velma was certain about what was separating them: alcohol. How could she hold her head up in church if people found out Thomas was drinking?