Before He Wakes (14 page)

He enjoyed it, he had to admit, was glad that he had helped Barbara through a moment of need, but it left him feeling guilty, too, and later he prayed for forgiveness for his moment of weakness.

Jim thought that what had occurred that evening had been a one-time thing. Not wanting others in the church group to suspect anything, he acted the next day as if it hadn’t happened at all. But that night, at Barbara’s suggestion, he joined her for another walk along the beach and it turned as passionate as the night before.

Not long after they returned home from the beach trip, Jim got a call from Barbara inviting him to go out to eat. He was financially strapped at the time and told her jokingly that he didn’t know if he could afford to take her out.

“You pay for it,” he said, laughing, “and I’ll go.”

No problem, she told him. She had plenty of money.

Jim picked her up at her parents’ house, and Barbara paid for dinner. With Barbara staying with her parents and he living with his brother, they had no place to go to be alone later, and sex did not resume until July, after Barbara had bought a new three-bedroom brick house at 5516 Genesee Street. The house was plain, with a low-pitched roof and high windows with ornamental shutters. A tiny concrete porch, hardly wide enough for a chair, was set across half the front of the house. The yard was bare except for a few scraggly pines. The house was diagonally across the street from the one Barbara had first looked at—the house owned by Russ Stager.

After Barbara moved to the new house, she frequently invited members of the young adults group from the church over for get-togethers after services. Jim was always there, and by this time other members could tell that Barbara and Jim were getting close. Before long he was going by regularly at other times, usually after the boys had gone to bed.

Knowing that Barbara was a regular churchgoer, Jim assumed that she had never had sex outside her marriage, and as her drive continued unabated and he grew to know her better, he felt comfortable enough to joke with her about her sex life with Larry.

“Are you sure you didn’t screw him to death?” he asked one night.

Jim enjoyed her company, wanted to keep seeing her, but by the beginning of August she was already talking about marriage. She had been hinting at it before that, and Jim had been taken aback. Her husband had been dead only four months, and she was wanting to get married again? He thought that a normal person would be grieving longer than that, not even thinking of having someone else take the place of a husband lost so suddenly and unexpectedly. It made him wary.

By mid-August, he felt pressured. “It was like she was on a mission to get married,” he recalled later.

Jim tried to deal with the matter reasonably. He thought that he might very well be happy making a life with Barbara, but they had known each other for only a few weeks, he pointed out. He wasn’t sure whether he loved her or not. He didn’t see how she could be sure that she loved him, especially after all she’d been through. Perhaps they could grow to love each other with time, he said. They might indeed be able to develop a successful marriage, but he had to be sure this time, and there were other considerations that he didn’t want to deal with then.

Barbara seemed unaffected by his reasoning. She wanted marriage.

By the end of August, Jim felt that he had no choice but to break it off. “Barbara,” he said, “this is not going to work. You’ve got two kids. I don’t have any. You can’t have any more. I want to have kids of my own. Even if I did grow to love you, I don’t know if I could marry you because of that.”

Barbara cried, but Jim knew that his words had had the intended effect. It was as if a curtain had suddenly dropped between them.

“When I said that, that was the end of our relationship,” he said.

They remained friends, still chatted with each other at church. Barbara, Jim knew, remained intent upon her mission. She was looking for another man to marry.

The next time she would not make the mistake she had made with Jim. Never again would she tell a man who wanted children of his own that she no longer could have any. Even if she had to lie, she would get what she wanted. And she already had her eye on the man she wanted, her across-the-street neighbor, Russ Stager.

11

Like Barbara, Russ Stager was a Durham County native, born in the same hospital as Barbara, five months earlier. Like Barbara, he was a first child. His mother, Doris, was twenty-one, a tiny, delicate woman, and the birth was difficult.

“I was scared to death,” she recalled years later. “I screamed so loud that I disturbed everybody in the hospital.”

She clenched her hands so tightly during the long hours of labor that she later said she had feared that she’d squeezed them off. The baby finally arrived at 1:22
A.M
. on Thursday, May 22. He weighed six pounds, eight ounces, had dark, curly hair and a lusty cry. His parents had decided long before that if their child was a son, they would name him for his father, and he became Allison Russell Stager III. To avoid confusion, his father, known as Al, would call his son Rusty.

Al Stager Jr. had been born and reared in Paterson, New Jersey, but by the time his son was born he was a dedicated North Carolinian. He had come to the state in 1944, a soldier on his way to war, training at Camp Butner, just north of Durham. He had met Doris at a USO dance not long after he arrived in the state, and their attraction had been immediate and mutual.

“She was a good-looking woman,” he recalled forty-five years later, as she glowed in his presence. “Pretty. I liked southern belles.”

Doris had graduated from Durham High School just five months earlier and was working as a secretary at Durham Realty Company. She had been born on a hardscrabble tobacco farm. The youngest of seven children, she had been only sixteen months old when her parents separated and her mother, Belle, had brought her and her older brother Earl to Durham to live with Doris’s elder sister Erma, who was twenty-three years older than Doris and had moved to Durham several years earlier to work in a tobacco factory.

Al and Doris’s romance was a whirlwind, and with his unit about to ship out to the war in Europe, they married on December 9, 1944, just two months after they met. Doris went to New Jersey to see him off on New Year’s Eve. After fighting in France, Belgium and Germany, Al returned with a chestful of medals on their first anniversary, and Doris was waiting for him. “I didn’t stand there and wait for him to get to me, either,” she later recalled.

Doris was very close to her mother, her brothers and her sisters, who had been bound together by love and hardship, and Al, who had only a half-brother and always had longed to be part of a big family, thought that they should settle in Durham to be near her family, who had accepted him into their fold wholeheartedly. They moved in with her mother, sleeping on a foldout couch, and Al took a job reading water meters for the city of Durham. They had moved to a two-room apartment in Doris’s sister’s house and Al was selling life insurance when their first child was born.

When Russ was two, his father landed a job as installer and repairman with Durham Telephone Co., which later was to become part of General Telephone and Electronics. It was a job with promise, and Al would be quick to get promotions, remaining with the company until his retirement because of bad health thirty-four years later.

With the new job, Al moved his family into a house of their own, and three years later, just before Russ turned five, his parents bought a three-bedroom brick house at 1605 Delaware Avenue. This house was in a nicer neighborhood, shaded by huge trees, closer to schools and parks. There they would remain for the next twenty-five years.

Russ was a reticent and well-behaved child. When he started school at E. K. Powe Elementary, though, he proved to be less than studious. He was too fun-loving, wanted to play and talk too much to have patience for the rigors of learning, and he repeated a grade in elementary school.

As Russ was about to finish third grade, only weeks before he turned eight, the Stager family increased by one. A daughter, Cindy, was born and Russ became a doting older brother.

Russ was a natural athlete and mastered almost any sport with ease. He loved water sports, and on summer weekends the family often went to nearby lakes for swimming, fishing and skiing. Team sports were his favorites, though, especially football and baseball. He played on Little League teams, and by junior high he was the football team’s star halfback.

“If he ever got two steps, he broke out into a gallop and he was gone,” his mother recalled years later.

He did that once in a game at the county stadium, and the woman seated in front of Doris jumped up, whooping with excitement. “Hey, that’s my son chasing him!” she cried.

Doris interrupted her own cheering to let her know, “That’s
my
son he’s chasing.”

Injuries plagued Russ, and his mother would never forget taking him to football practice and seeing him get out of the car stiff with pain but determined to play. After an injury to his back, however, a doctor warned that if he continued to play football, he might be permanently disabled.

That kept him off the football team at Durham High School, but he did make the baseball team, playing outfield and catcher. By then Russ had decided what he wanted to be: a high school coach.

He developed into a trim and strong young man—five feet nine, 150 pounds—with an engaging and magnetic personality, a memorable smile and an infectious laugh. A fellow student later recalled that Russ had friends in all of Durham High’s three distinct social classes and was the only person at the school who could pass easily from one group to the others. He happily and unashamedly drove an old Ford Falcon, hauling great loads of his friends around in it, and many of them made his family’s house on Delaware Avenue their home base. His mother sometimes felt that she was operating a fast-food emporium, forever frying hamburgers and french fries for Russ and his friends.

“He had a Robert Redford type of appeal,” one female admirer later recalled. “Women loved him.” He had many female friends and could have had his choice of dates, but throughout high school he had only one steady girlfriend, Linda Whitaker, whom he had begun dating in junior high.

Russ’s parents never worried about their son’s activities. They knew that he was levelheaded and firmly grounded in the values he had absorbed from family and church. The Stagers had belonged to Westwood Baptist Church when Russ was growing up, but when he was twelve he started attending Grey Stone Baptist Church after hearing the minister, Malbert Smith, speak at school. Grey Stone had a much bigger congregation than Westwood and more activities for young people, including many sports teams. Russ became such an enthusiastic member of the church that his family moved their membership there as well.

“Every time those doors opened, Russ was there,” his mother later recalled of his early years at the church.

After his graduation from Durham High in 1966, Russ wanted to attend Campbell College, a strict, conservative Baptist institution, but his grades were too low to gain admission. Instead, he enrolled at Mount Olive Junior College in the eastern part of the state, where he had to complete a remedial English course before he could begin classes.

Russ’s strong interest in Durham High’s sports teams continued unabated, and he often returned home for important games. One weekend early in 1969, he drove to Raleigh to watch Durham High play a crucial basketball game with Sanderson High. At the concession stand, he started talking to a dark-haired, dark-eyed Sanderson student who was selling popcorn. Her name was Jo Lynn Ellen. He left with her phone number. A few days later, he called and asked if she’d like to go out for a pizza on the coming weekend. She said yes. She thought that Russ was cute and funny, and after one date she knew that he was full of life and loved to have a good time. They began dating regularly and would continue off and on for the next six years.

Sports and good times interfered with Russ’s accumulation of credit hours, and by the time he began dating Jo Lynn, he had dropped out of Mount Olive and enrolled for a semester at another junior college on the coast, College of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City. He was tired of struggling for grades, but the Vietnam War was raging and the draft was waiting for dropouts. There was, however, an alternative. He joined the Army Reserves and was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for six months of training. Afterward, he was ready to try college again, and this time he was accepted at Campbell, where he majored in physical education and played on the baseball, soccer and tennis teams.

After his graduation in 1972, Russ spent a term student teaching in Cary, near Raleigh, where he would be close to Jo Lynn. The following year, he applied to the city school system in Durham and was rewarded with the fulfillment of his adolescent dream. He became a physical education teacher and assistant coach at Holton Junior High.

It quickly became evident that Russ was born to coach. His players not only respected him, they nearly idolized him. He praised them and made them feel good about their abilities, even buying certificates and plaques to hand out for extraordinary individual efforts. His even temperament and good humor served him well for calming tempers, settling disagreements and soothing hurts. His persistence and optimism inspired perpetual hope and effort.

His Christian attitude showed itself in other ways as well. Many of his players came from poor families, and he often used his own money to help them buy athletic shoes and other gear they could not afford. He had them to his house for meals, black and white alike, and sometimes took groceries to their homes in hard times. He organized raffles, bake sales and other activities to raise money for equipment.