Death Sentence (9 page)

She shouldn’t pay attention to anything her in-laws had said, Ronnie told her. She couldn’t have known that something like that might happen. And she shouldn’t feel bad about not being able to save his daddy. If she had tried, she probably would be dead herself.

Ronnie thought that his mother should go back to work immediately. He and Pam would return to school. Resuming normal activities and staying busy would help to keep their minds off their grief.

“We’ve got to move on from this,” he said.

And then words came that he hadn’t intended to speak: “At least Daddy’s drinking won’t be a problem anymore.”

Although he felt too much guilt to admit it, from the moment he had learned of his father’s death, despite the pain, he had felt a wave of relief. Perhaps peace and happiness could now be restored in his family.

“I know,” his mother said, “but I’d rather have him here drinking than dead.”

For a moment Ronnie fell silent, ashamed of his thoughts. Then he took his mother’s hand. “Mama, it’s going to take time,” he said, “but everything’s going to be better.”

5

In the weeks following his father’s death, Ronnie still had confidence that his mother could rid herself of drugs (the source of her problems was gone, after all). He pushed her into activity to take her mind, as well as his own, off what had happened. Together, they handled the estate, filed for Thomas’ small life insurance policy, which barely covered the funeral costs, dealt with insurance adjusters, oversaw the repairing of the house, consolidated some of the debts that had piled up in all the months that Thomas had not worked, and applied for monthly Social Security benefits for Ronnie and Pam—Velma could collect those until each was eighteen.

Dealing with such matters helped Ronnie, but he still couldn’t believe that his father was gone. He felt guilty that he had not been able to do more to help him see what his drinking was doing to him, where it was leading them all. Pam had a far harder time adjusting. For weeks she regularly closed herself in her room and cried.

After school let out in June, Ronnie returned to work full-time for the farmer who had employed him the year before. Pam got a summer job at the Belk’s store with her mother. She had worked there during the two previous Christmas seasons. Velma still got up and went to work, but she had to fortify herself with pills to face each day.

Ronnie had no idea how many prescriptions she had from how many doctors, or how much of each she was taking every day, but he knew that too often she was taking too much. Despite his confidence that she wouldn’t need so much medicine once the shock of his father’s death had passed, she seemed to require more and more.

Pam knew that people at work were talking about her mother’s drug taking. At times Velma seemed listless, disinterested, inattentive to her duties. Her speech was occasionally slurred. Velma’s boss, D. N. Geddie, was aware of these problems as well, Pam knew, and she told Ronnie her concerns. Ronnie, too, had worked at Belk’s during Christmas, and he knew Geddie thought highly of his mother. She’d always been a good employee. She even had risen to the position of buyer until the strain had grown too much and she had requested to be assigned again as a sales clerk. He was sure that Geddie was aware of all that his mother had gone through and would be tolerant.

Still, Ronnie gently warned his mother that she had better watch herself. She didn’t want to risk losing her job. Velma assured him that while she was working she would never take more medicine than the doctor prescribed. But although Ronnie didn’t yet realize it, that was something she no longer could control, for she already was addicted to her primary medication, Valium.

Although people around the world were now gobbling down Valium in ever increasing quantities (billions of pills each year, reaching a nadir of some seven billion by 1975 when one out of every dozen people in the United States would be taking it), another decade would pass before alarms would be sounded about its dangers and steps taken to curtail its usage. By then, millions of people, most of them women, including the former First Lady Betty Ford, would be addicted. Not until the eighties would it be fully understood that a normally prescribed dosage taken over a period of only four months could prove addicting to some people, and that combining Valium with alcohol and other drugs could be deadly.

Only then would doctors begin to learn that Valium accumulated in the fatty tissues of the body, creating a tolerance that demanded higher and higher dosages to achieve the same effect. And while the side effects of Valium usage—drowsiness, lethargy, slurred speech, loss of coordination, concentration, memory and sexual desire—were known (and Velma had suffered most, if not all), doctors were then unaware of some of its other effects on the addicted. Those included confusion, depression, nightmares, sleeplessness, suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, delusion, paranoia, hostility, and, for some, rage that could erupt in violence.

Withdrawal from Valium could be as difficult as withdrawing from heroin, causing headaches, nausea, insomnia, trembling, sweating, cramps, panics, even psychosis.

But in the early years of Valium’s distribution, it still was seen as a harmless feel-good drug that relieved doctors of many problems, and they prescribed it freely. Anybody who went to a doctor with a complaint of anxiety was apt to leave with a prescription for Valium, refillable for up to a year. Bothersome patients who came frequently with vague maladies went away happy with Valium and often didn’t return until the prescription needed to be renewed, making the doctor happy as well.

Velma never had a problem getting doctors to prescribe Valium for her, and as time went on and she needed more and more, she just acquired more doctors. Manipulating physicians became almost second nature to her. She became expert in describing symptoms and masking her drug intake. In the nine years between Thomas’ death and her arrest, she would get prescriptions from more than two dozen doctors, not only for Valium but for nearly two dozen other drugs, most of them also addictive, including barbiturates, narcotics, sleeping pills, stimulants and antidepressants, all of them prescribed by doctors trying to be helpful, and all of them dangerous and unpredictable when combined with Valium.

On September 28, five months after Thomas’ death, one of Velma’s friends at Belk’s, Pauline Barfield, who worked in the department next to hers, died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage. Older than Velma, Pauline had six children and six grandchildren. All but two of her children, both daughters, were grown and gone from home, and one of them soon would be entering college. Pauline’s husband, Jennings, had been a civil service worker with the Army Corps of Engineers at Fort Bragg, but emphysema and diabetes had forced him to take medical disability retirement while he was still in his forties, and he had since developed heart problems.

Jennings had frequently stopped by Belk’s to see his wife, and he often took time to chat with Velma. She thought he was a nice man, sweet-natured and good-hearted, and she knew how devoted he was to his wife. Ironically, Pauline had always worried so much about his health, but it was she who died unexpectedly.

Velma knew what a shock his wife’s death must be to Jennings, and she went to the funeral home to offer her condolences. He was touched. He knew that she had recently lost Thomas.

Velma had no idea that she would ever see Jennings again after Pauline’s funeral, but one day early in 1970 she glanced up and saw him standing there, looking forlorn despite his smile. They chatted about how each was doing, she would later remember, and talked about Pauline. Velma could tell that he missed her terribly and that he was lost and lonely without her. She was surprised that he’d even been able to come into the store because it had to stir memories of happier times.

Velma told him how thoughtful he was to come by, and that it was good to see him. As he started to leave, he turned as if he’d forgotten something, hesitated, then said, “Would you like to go get something to eat after work?”

Surprised, Velma told him that would be nice.

After that day Jennings began regularly dropping by to see her, and several times they went out to eat.

She didn’t tell her children about it. She wasn’t sure how they would react. After all, their father had been dead only a matter of months, and here she was going out with another man.

Seeing Jennings did not affect the cycle of Velma’s addiction. She still had good days and bad, days when she took too many pills and days when she didn’t. At times she seemed perfectly normal.

That fall she began complaining of a kidney condition. Once a week, sometimes more often, Velma would wake Ronnie at two or three in the morning and tell him she couldn’t stand the pain. He’d have to take her to St. Pauls, ten miles away, to see a doctor who had been treating her for many years. Because he didn’t feel comfortable leaving Pam alone, Ronnie would wake her and make her go with them. His mother would call before they left, and the doctor would be waiting on the curb in front of his house, satchel in hand.

“It’s that ol’ kidney colic again, Doctor,” Velma would tell him.

The doctor would give her a shot, and often Velma would be asleep before they got back home.

Pam became especially irritated about these frequent middle-of-the-night trips. She had trouble enough in class without going sleepless, and she especially needed her rest during basketball season. She was leading her team to another conference championship, and during a home game against Magnolia High she scored forty-three points, a school record that would be standing nearly three decades later.

Velma still came to all of her games, but there were times that season when Pam wished that she hadn’t. When she looked into the stands to see if her mother was in her familiar spot, she became anxious about the shape she was in. One night when the coach benched Pam after a foul, Velma made her way down from the stands and stood screaming at him. Pam wanted to run to the locker room and hide.

Velma always encouraged her children to talk to her about anything that was bothering them. As a girl, she had longed to have somebody to talk to about her own problems. Yet when Ronnie tried talking to her about her drug taking, she became defensive.

Doctors wouldn’t prescribe that medicine if she didn’t need it, she snapped at him. But doctors didn’t tell her to take more than they prescribed, he countered calmly. Only reluctantly would Velma acknowledge that she sometimes took too much. She would promise to control herself, but the same patterns always returned.

“The drugs just helped me cope, I thought,” Velma would say later. “I felt that I had to have them. I lived for them from day to day.”

Ronnie and Pam began considering other measures for controlling their mother’s drug taking. They tried seizing all of her medicines and doling them out only as prescribed. But they soon discovered that she was getting more prescriptions and hiding the pills. She hid them all over her body, in her bra, even in her hair curlers.

At one point that year, Ronnie and Pam drove to St. Pauls and talked to the doctor who seemed to be her major provider. They told him about the situation and asked him not to give Velma so many prescriptions. The doctor heard them out, then told them that their mother had conditions that required treatment and he could not ignore them.

Meanwhile, bills for medicines and doctors piled up faster than Velma could pay.

Perhaps if Ronnie hadn’t had so much upheaval in his life, he would have been valedictorian of his graduating class. He missed by only a few points. Even so, as salutatorian he used his opening remarks at commencement to salute his mother. Tears flowed from Velma’s eyes as Ronnie credited her for being responsible for all he was or ever would be. It was she who had stressed the importance of studying hard, who had instilled genuine values in him. He would be forever indebted to her. Nobody in the crowd was left with any doubt that Ronnie loved his mother dearly.

Traditionally, graduating students at Parkton School took off for a weekend of partying at Carolina Beach as soon as commencement ended. Ronnie had arranged a room with his buddies Julius Hagins and Oscar Everett. Juniors sometimes went, too, and Pam was going with a group of her friends.

She had already left when Ronnie’s buddies drove him to his house to get his bag. Julius and Oscar waited in the car while Ronnie went inside. His mother had been crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“I’m just a little bit sad.”

“Why?” Ronnie said. “You’ve got every reason to be happy.”

“I guess I just never wanted y’all to grow up and go away.”

She burst into tears again and Ronnie embraced her. “I’m not going anywhere, Mama,” he assured her.

A few minutes later, Ronnie went outside and told his friends to go ahead without him. His mother wasn’t feeling well, he said, and he didn’t want to leave her alone.

That night, they sat at the kitchen table talking. Velma told him how proud she was of him. “I know I rode you hard to make good grades,” she said. “It’ll pay off for you one day.”

They stayed up late, reminiscing, laughing. Ronnie couldn’t remember when he’d seen his mother happier. The evening was far more satisfying, he realized, than partying at the beach ever could be. A few weeks earlier, for Mother’s Day, Ronnie had bought his mother a Jimmy Dean record called “I.O.U.,” a country boy’s recitation of lasting debt to his mother. Velma had cried when she first listened to it. Now Ronnie played it for her again, and she cried just as hard.