Death Sentence (7 page)

Thomas responded by cutting down on churchgoing. Eventually, he would stop altogether. To him, the issue was not whether he had an occasional beer or two, but his independence, his right as a man to make his own decisions. Neither would give in, and their arguments grew more frequent and intense.

“My mom would not leave any situation alone,” Ronnie, her greatest defender, later would admit. “Daddy would just walk into the house, and Mama would find something to pick a fight about.”

Not for many years would Velma realize that she was as much at fault as Thomas. Her chastising him for drinking unleashed something dark and suppressed within her. She was becoming just as short-tempered as her father once had been.

“Anything that my husband would do would agitate me,” she said. “Coming home late. Being at a Jaycee meeting longer than I thought he should. Things like that really bothered me.”

Even if Thomas hadn’t been drinking, she would confront him, accusing, yelling. He’d make the slightest mess in the kitchen, and she would be on him. “In the house, I couldn’t stand anything that was left out of place,” Velma said. “I just couldn’t take it. I liked for things to be clean, and I liked when I cleaned it for it to be left that way.”

In the beginning, when her mother would start a fight with her daddy, Pam would try to stop it by pulling her mother into a bedroom and separating them, but it became more and more difficult.

“She wanted to stay and fight and yell,” Ronnie said of his mother. “She was very combative.”

The situation deteriorated further that summer. On July 18, 1966, just nine months after Thomas had moved his family into their new home, his mother came running across the field that separated their houses screaming for help. She had found her husband slumped dead at the breakfast table. John Burke was only sixty, and although he had suffered for years from emphysema, his death was an unexpected shock.

Thomas had always been close to his father, and he was overcome with grief. He became depressed and remained so for weeks afterward, gradually retreating deeper and deeper into alcohol.

Velma wasn’t understanding of his loss. Any time Thomas came home with alcohol on his breath, a confrontation was certain. Screaming and cursing inevitably followed. Thomas would stalk out, slamming the door and driving away, only to return drunk hours later, making his wife even angrier.

Neither Ronnie nor Pam could understand how things had spun so rapidly out of control. Their lives had been so happy in the big white house in town, but in this new house only misery reigned.

Pam had many friends at school and church, and she sought escape in activities with them. Other times she stayed with her grandparents Murphy and Lillie, who had bought a house in Parkton beside the armory in 1958. When these sanctuaries were not available, she retreated to her room during the fights. Her father had bought her a set of drums, and she would put a stack of 45s on her stereo, turn up the volume and play along, shutting out the rancor beyond her door.

Ronnie, on the other hand, felt an obligation to intercede, to stop his parents from fighting, to try to make things right again. And although he rarely succeeded in bringing peace, he still felt the need to be close by in case things got out of hand.

As Thomas’ drinking grew worse, his behavior became more erratic. Sometimes he would get so angry during the arguments that he would throw things. One night he threw a Pepsi bottle, which shattered on the floor. Then he passed out on the couch. The next morning, Ronnie got up and found that his mother had swept up the broken glass and placed it beside the couch, where Thomas might step on it when he got up.

“Why did you do that, Mama?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I guess I thought it might make him think about what he’s doing.”

Thomas had not yet become violent toward Velma, but he seemed constantly on the verge. Ronnie was afraid that he was going to hurt her someday.

At fifteen, Ronnie was tall, thin and rangy like his daddy at that age, hardly athletic, no fighter. He had no notion that he could whip his father, if it came to that, but that didn’t keep him from challenging him. Several times he rushed to separate his parents when his father seemed threatening.

“You’re not going to hit her,” he yelled at his father more than once.

“He never did,” Ronnie would recall years later, “but there was always the fear that he would, that he was going to do something really bad. I just wanted him to know that if he ever hit my mother, I was going to be glued to his butt.”

Early in 1967, the inevitable happened. Thomas was charged with drunk driving. A judge gave him a suspended sentence, a warning, and took away his license, causing him to lose his job. He became despondent, seemed not to care anymore. His drinking grew even worse. As did the fights with Velma. The misery in the household increased. Pam and Ronnie dreaded going home after school, dreaded weekends. They were too embarrassed to have friends come to their house.

Eventually, Thomas got another job, back at the mill where he had worked when he and Velma had first married. Because he couldn’t drive, he had to ride to work with others. He was a proud man, and this step backward was a great humiliation. Velma thought the shame might cause him to take stock, stop drinking and turn things around. But it had the opposite effect.

Velma had been telling Thomas all along that he was an alcoholic, that he needed to get help. He denied it. He could quit anytime he wanted, he told her. Drinking wasn’t his problem, he insisted. His problem was her nagging, her belittlement, her constant badgering.

If he wouldn’t get help, Velma finally decided, she would do it for him. She later claimed that she talked with two doctors, both of whom recommended that she have Thomas committed to Dorothea Dix State Hospital in Raleigh, known as Dix Hill, or more commonly as “the crazy house.”

When she mentioned this to Ronnie, he argued against it. He knew how proud his father was, knew that he couldn’t be forced to accept anything against his will, knew what a stigma commitment would be to him. He thought they should encourage his father to seek help on his own. But Velma was fed up. She couldn’t go on like this, she said.

Ronnie begged her to reconsider, but soon after he entered the tenth grade, Pam the ninth, Velma went to the courthouse in Lumberton and signed the necessary paperwork. A court order was issued. Deputies stopped the car in which Thomas was riding to work one night and took him into custody. He was held overnight in jail and driven to Raleigh the next day.

Three days later, Thomas signed himself out of the hospital without treatment. He returned home and was waiting when Velma arrived from work.

“You put me in there with all those crazy people,” he said to her. “I’m not crazy!”

He had already packed his clothes, and he took them and left. Several days passed before Ronnie and Pam learned that he had gone to Florida to stay with his sister and was looking for a job.

Pam was distraught. “I remember crying a lot,” she would recall. She thought that her father was gone for good, that he didn’t want to be with her, that she might never see him again.

But Thomas couldn’t find work in Florida, and three weeks later he returned. Both Pam and Ronnie were relieved that he was back. They saw his return as a ray of hope that things might improve, but they were wrong.

Parkton was a town in which everybody knew everybody else and gossip was common. Thomas was so embarrassed about his admission to Dix Hill that he did not want to be around other people. He was sure that people were pitying him, and he left the house only to buy beer or vodka. He spoke to Velma only when necessary. If she criticized, or tried to pick a fight, he turned away, refusing to respond. Even when Velma found his hidden vodka and angrily poured it down the drain, he remained quiet. A sullen silence settled between them. As much as Ronnie and Pam had hated the arguing and yelling, they came to detest the unspoken hostility even more.

The strain wore on Velma as well. She got so she could hardly eat. Her weight had been dropping regularly, and by the late fall of 1967 she had gone from 130 pounds to only 103. One Sunday morning, Ronnie got up and found his mother passed out on the kitchen floor. He could not revive her. His father had gone to sleep drunk on the couch the night before and was of no help.

Frantically, Ronnie called Murphy, who rushed across town. By the time he got there, Velma had come around. She had just fainted, she said. She’d be all right.

Murphy insisted on taking her to a hospital in Fayetteville. On the way, she burst into tears. She didn’t know why she was crying; she just was. And she couldn’t stop. At the emergency room, when a doctor tried to question her, she couldn’t answer for crying. He admitted her and ordered a sedative and intravenous fluids.

The next morning, another doctor examined her, but Velma was still crying and couldn’t talk to him either.

“I’m not going to be able to let you out of here until you can tell me what’s wrong,” he told her.

When he returned later that day, Velma had calmed, though she still frequently burst into tears. The doctor questioned her gently. Velma had been brought up to believe that a person did not talk about intimate problems outside the family. She had adhered to that despite all the troubles of her childhood, despite the collapse of her marriage. But this doctor seemed so understanding that she began to respond, tentatively telling him what had been going on in her life.

“I think you’ve had a nervous breakdown,” she would recall him telling her. The stress had built up until her body couldn’t take any more, he explained. “I’m going to keep you here until we can build you back up.” He prescribed vitamin shots along with sedatives.

Velma remained in the hospital for a week. Before she was released, the doctor recommended that she seek professional guidance for her marital problems. To help her until she could work her way through the situation, he gave her a prescription for tranquilizers. Later, Velma would remember only that they were “little blue pills.” She was supposed to take them regularly, but she didn’t in the beginning.

Nor did she seek professional help for her marriage, and as a new year began nothing had changed. During much of 1968 Thomas would be out of work. His drinking and withdrawal would grow even worse. When Velma felt really low, she would take one of the tranquilizers. “I found I could cope better if I took it,” she later recalled. “And then not just one, I knew that two would be better than one. I could feel that.”

When the prescription ran out, she got it refilled. And when she could no longer get it refilled, she went to another doctor and got more prescriptions for tranquilizers, first for Librium, a milder predecessor of Valium, then for Valium. On occasion, she also got Butisol, a barbiturate sedative.

When she began having frequent severe headaches and trouble sleeping, she sought out still another doctor, who prescribed not only painkillers but more Valium and sleeping pills. She told none of the doctors about the others, nor about the other prescriptions she was taking. Neither did she tell her family. But they were soon to realize that her medicine taking was getting out of control.

At times Thomas would go for periods without drinking, as if he were trying to prove to himself that he could.

In the summer of 1968, he decided that he wanted the family to go to the mountains, where they once had gone regularly on vacation. Ronnie was working six days a week on a tobacco farm to help out with family expenses and couldn’t go. Pam went with her parents, but the trip was miserable. Her father wasn’t drinking, but her mother had taken so many pills that she had trouble getting out of the car at overlooks. For the first time Pam realized that her family’s problems had been compounded.

Later in the summer, both Ronnie and Pam went to the beach on a one-day trip with their parents, Faye, and Velma’s brother Jesse. Thomas did drink on that trip, so Velma took the wheel on the way back. She didn’t tell anybody that she had taken extra pills. In St. Pauls, not far from home, she lost control of the car, careening through a gas station lot, nearly clipping the pumps before coming to rest against a bridge railing. A quickly sobered Thomas took the wheel the rest of the way home.

The misery of that year still had not peaked. Ronnie was soon to see just how ugly his parents’ substance abuse problems could get.

Thomas’ behavior grew more bizarre the more he drank. At times he would sit in his car in the carport, drunk, revving the engine at full speed, sometimes until the car ran out of gas.

One Monday evening that fall, Thomas came home and sat in the carport racing the engine over and over. Finally, Ronnie went out to get him. “Daddy, stop it and come on inside,” he pleaded from the passenger door.

“Leave me the hell alone!” Thomas snapped at him.

Ronnie walked around the car to the driver’s side, reached through the open window, shut off the engine and took the keys.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” his father yelled. “Give me back those goddamn keys!”

“I’m not giving you the keys,” Ronnie said. “Come on in the house.”

Ronnie started to return inside, but his father caught him at the back of the car and grabbed him by the shoulder. When Ronnie turned to face him, he saw that his father had a hawk-billed pocketknife in his hand, the blade open.

“I told you to give me those goddamned keys,” Thomas told him, holding the knife only inches from his chest.