Death Sentence Read Online Free PDF Page B

service. But he stayed behind, working at the mill. Too many children were dependent on him.
    In 1945, Murphy sold his farm to Albert Pope and bought the adjoining land, eighty acres, that his brothers Huey and Jesse Martin had received from their father. Jesse Martin had built a small white house near the old homeplace, and Murphy moved his family into the more modern quarters. He was tired of mill work, and with eighty acres and crop prices climbing he thought that he could make farming pay. He increased his acreage of tobacco and cotton and began hauling his vegetables to the farmers’ market in Raleigh. But two seasons was all it took to prove that he couldn’t provide for his family by farming, and late in 1946 he went back to the mill.
    Early the next year, Murphy quit Puritan Weaving and took a job at another textile plant in Red Springs, thirty miles south of Fayetteville, making his daily drive back and forth to work more than ninety miles. A coworker told him about a house for rent just north of Parkton, sixteen miles south of Fayetteville, and Murphy moved his family there after school was out that spring.
    Once a tenant house on a large farm, this house was more primitive than the one his family had lived in for the past two years. Although Velma had dreamed of leaving South River, she now felt uprooted. She had grown up surrounded by family, giving her security and people to turn to in times of need, but here she knew no one, had no place to go. She had longed to live in a town with stores filled with wondrous goods, cafes to eat in, and lots of activities available. But all she got was Parkton, a sleepy little farm town, where nothing seemed to happen and there was nothing at all to do. Even that was a couple of miles away from this tiny, ugly, tin-roofed house where she quickly came to feel herself a prisoner.
    Before the move, Olive had dropped out of school to work full-time on the farm. Now he went to work at the mill with his father. That fall Velma started the ninth grade at Parkton Public School, two months before she turned fifteen. Her grades had been falling for a couple of years, and they would get no better as she struggled to fit in and make new friends.
    She soon discovered an activity, though, that brought her both pleasure and attention: basketball. She was good at it. Parkton had a girls’ basketball team, and the coach saw her playing and encouraged her to try out. To her surprise she made the team. But she had to stay after school to practice, and before the season was well under way, her mother, who had just given birth to the twins, Ray and Faye, insisted that she drop out because she needed her at home. Velma’s disappointment and the deepened drudgery she faced only strengthened her resentment of her mother.
    But she soon developed another interest. Thomas Burke, the son of the Bullards’ next-door neighbors, lived just a quarter mile away in a white house with French doors and a big front porch. The house was much nicer than the Bullards’. It was set far back from the road behind two long rows of pecan trees.
    A year ahead of Velma in school, Thomas was tall and lean with shiny black hair, jug ears, and an impish grin. He wasn’t the best-looking boy Velma had ever taken note of, but he was the first to pay attention to her. Velma was surprised. She had thought she never would be able to interest any boy. Although others thought her pretty, she felt unattractive, aware only of her defects.
    In the fourth grade, she had run head-on into a boy on the playground at school and was briefly knocked unconscious. A big contusion grew on her forehead. In time it receded but not completely, leaving her with a small, permanent knot about which she was extremely sensitive (playmates who dared call her “Knothead” never did it but once). She never could quite devise a hairstyle to hide the hardly noticeable disfigurement adequately.
    Velma thought her teeth were ugly, too. She had a gap that