Death Sentence (54 page)

After leaving the funeral home, Ronnie stopped at a nearby flower shop and ordered an arrangement with a ribbon that said, “We love you, Ma-ma. Michael, Beverly, and Sarah Sue.”

As he drove toward Lumberton later, Ronnie did something that he later realized was irrational, an indication, perhaps, of how close he was to losing control emotionally. He found himself turning into the parking lot of a big church. He’d never been there before, knew nobody there.

He went to the church office and asked if the minister was in. When a secretary led him into the minister’s office, he said, “I’m Ronnie Burke. My mother was Velma Barfield, and she was executed last night.”

“We’ve all been praying for you and your family,” said the astonished minister.

“Thank you,” said Ronnie. “Her funeral is going to be tomorrow, and I just realized that I don’t have a suit to wear. Is there anybody in your congregation about my size who might let me borrow a suit?”

“I think we can take care of that,” the minister said. “Can you give me a minute?”

The minister left and returned shortly with another church official who invited Ronnie to go with him. They drove to a men’s shop downtown, where Ronnie was fitted with a blazer, dress pants, shirt and tie. The church paid.

“I’ll get it back to you as soon as the funeral is over,” Ronnie said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he was told.

But later, he would return the outfit as promised.

Emotion had been high at Women’s Prison as Velma’s execution had drawn closer. So many people there had cared for her that Jennie Lancaster knew that she was going to have a problem. All day Thursday, Lancaster and Phil Carter had gone back and forth between the two prisons and the hotel, trying to do what they could for Velma and her family, as well as for the inmates and staff at Women’s Prison—Velma’s second family, she called them. The anger and sorrow were deep at Women’s Prison, and on Thursday night Lancaster had assigned two members of her treatment staff to each dormitory for counseling. She also had given special permission for the inmates to stay up and watch the news reports of the execution on TV. She felt they had the right to be fully informed about what was happening.

Immediately after the execution, Lancaster later recalled, she heard staff members at Central Prison saying, “I’m glad this is over. Maybe tomorrow we can get back to normal.”

But it wouldn’t be as easy as rolling a body out to a rescue vehicle to return things to normal at Women’s Prison, she knew, and as she was leaving Central, she turned to her boss, Rae McNamara, and said, “Velma Barfield may have been executed at Central Prison, but she died tonight at Women’s Prison. Tomorrow we will have a grieving population to deal with.”

None of the inmates at Women’s Prison would be able to attend Velma’s funeral, of course, so Lancaster and Carter scheduled a service at the prison for Friday afternoon. The chapel was filled, the biggest crowd Carter had ever seen there.

“Holy Spirit,” Carter prayed, “you have gathered us in a family and you have given us a sister, a model, a Margie who has touched our lives, and who has showed us the deep, the true, the liberating and joyful things of Your love and salvation. Help us to live and reflect that life not only in our love for one another but in our love for ourselves, to find from her and from You that strength, that courage, to find that cheerfulness, that simplicity, that caring and love that so characterized her. Wipe our tears. Give us the kind of serenity with which she lived and went to meet You.”

The Roanes played and sang Velma’s favorite hymns. Hugh Hoyle read her favorite scriptures and gave the same message about her life that he would deliver at her funeral.

Jennie Lancaster spoke. “I was with her late last night. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it until I got there, and then all of a sudden things were okay and she was okay. She was strong, she was radiant, and she was positive. She was in control of her life.

“The message I want to leave with you from her is that the victory that she claimed at such a powerful time is one that you can claim over the things that have happened in your lives, the bitterness, the negativism, the hostility. You can be better than that. Don’t let that move the good things out of your heart.

“She was able last night to be full only of love and joy, and she felt complete. She felt complete with us, complete with her family, and I think we can take some steps along that journey with her. That’s the legacy she’s left, that there’s never a point in our lives where we ought to give up.”

As the service neared its close, Jimmie Little rose to speak. He told of the kindness to Velma by Jennie Lancaster, Nathan Rice and so many others in the prison system. He thanked Dick Burr, Mary Ann Tally, the Roanes, Anne Lotz, Hugh Hoyle, Sister Teresa and others who had done so much for Velma.

“There are so many heroes involved with Velma Barfield,” he said, “but I don’t think any of them is as important as each of you. What you will never know is what you meant to Velma, and how important it was to her to spend her last days here among friends. She was cut off, and she was isolated, but she knew you were there.”

At the end, he said, “I’ve had so many people ask me if I’m not so sad now that Velma is gone. And I’ve got to tell you, I woke up this morning and I felt like I had an angel on my shoulder. And that angel is Velma. And I know that she’ll always be there, looking over me. And I think she’ll be there for you, too.”

Ronnie arrived at Pam’s apartment at mid-afternoon. It seemed strange to be again at this place where he and Joanna and Michael had lived so long, a place so filled with memories.

He tried to get a couple of hours’ sleep so that he would be ready to meet people at the funeral home, but he only dozed fitfully. When Pam and Kirby and the children got ready to leave, Ronnie told them to go without him. “I’ll be on in a little bit,” he said. “I just need some time to myself right now.”

He sat alone in the living room, his mind wandering back to the afternoon his mother had come to tell him that the police had questioned her, and he had told her not to worry, that everything would be all right. He remembered, too, the night he had sat alone in this very room after she had been sentenced to death, wondering what the future held. And now, so quickly, it was the future and it held pain greater than he thought he could endure.

He was late getting to the funeral home, and he could hardly find a parking place, so many people were there. He’d just gotten out of his truck when he saw somebody hurrying across the parking lot toward him. An old friend he hadn’t seen in years. He’d had a crush on her in high school.

“I’m going to walk in with you, okay?” she said, taking him by the arm.

Nobody had yet been allowed inside the parlor where Velma’s body lay, because everybody was waiting for Ronnie. He made his way through the crowd to the door where Pam, Kirby and the children waited with the rest of the family.

“Would it be okay if I have just a minute with her alone before you let everybody in?” Ronnie asked a funeral home employee, who opened the door for him.

The coffin was banked with flowers, and more flowers lined the walls of the room. At the head of the coffin stood the red and white carnations he had ordered that morning for the grandchildren. His mother wore a blue nightgown that Gales Roane had bought. She was wearing her glasses and her hair was perfectly curled. Beside her head were two tiny white Bibles.

Ronnie’s mind went back to the night he first stood by his father’s coffin, more than fifteen years earlier, never dreaming that was the beginning of a chain of events too bizarre to believe, leading him to this moment. If he had not loved his mother so deeply and trusted her so completely that he was unable to believe his father’s warning, if he had not suppressed that knowledge after his father’s death, might he have taken some action that would have made everything different, that would have prevented the deaths of Jennings Barfield, of his grandmother, of Dollie Edwards, John Henry Lee and Stuart Taylor? In preventing those deaths might he have saved his mother, too? He burst into tears, and as he cried, he suddenly realized that Joanna was at his side, and her parents, and Michael, and Pam, and they all were hugging him.

“We fought so hard to keep her alive that it’s just hard to accept,” Ronnie said, not wanting anybody to know what he really had been thinking.

It took more than two hours for all the people to pass through the receiving line. People came whom Ronnie hadn’t seen in years, old friends from high school and college, colleagues from jobs he’d held, competitors from his miniature golf-playing days, distant relatives, friends of his mother and father, people who’d worked to save his mother’s life, on and on they came, all paying their condolences.

Reporters were in the crowd as well, but they kept a discreet presence, as did the four plainclothes police officers who had been assigned to mill about and make certain that nothing out of the ordinary happened.

After the crowd had thinned, Ronnie spent some time holding Michael and talking to him. Then he asked Joanna to walk with him to the chapel where the funeral would be the following afternoon.

“Ronnie, I’m so sorry,” Joanna said when they were alone.

“Mama wanted me to tell you that she loved you,” Ronnie said.

“I loved her, too,” Joanna replied, wiping away tears.

“Michael seems to be taking it okay.”

“I think so,” she said. “I packed some clothes for him in case you wanted him to stay with you tonight. I thought it might be good for both of you.”

“Thank you,” Ronnie said. “I was going to ask if it would be all right.”

Later, back at Pam’s apartment, after he had put Michael to bed and kissed him good night, Ronnie and Pam sat at the kitchen table talking about the great outpouring of love and support they had felt at the funeral home. Both had been overwhelmed by it.

“Tomorrow may be the last time we’ll ever see some of these people,” Ronnie said. “Do you think we need to say something at the service to thank them?”

“I can’t, Ronnie,” Pam said.

“I really think we ought to.”

Both were exhausted and soon went to bed, but when Ronnie finally slept, he was jolted awake by a dream. Somehow his mother had survived the execution and she had come to him. But the authorities were close behind, intent on taking her back to execute her again, and this time Ronnie knew that he would not let them have her. He would protect his mother at whatever cost. Even in the first moments after he awoke, the dream still seemed real, and he was desperately trying to figure how he would hide her, until cold reality took hold again and kept him from returning to sleep.

A limousine came the next morning, and Ronnie, Pam, Kirby and the children arrived at the funeral home early. Ronnie and Pam went for a final look at their mother. As they stood by the coffin, Jimmie Little came in. He reached into the coffin and picked up the two tiny Bibles.

“These were for you,” he said, giving one to Pam and the other to Ronnie. Ronnie opened his and read:

Dear Ronnie, my precious son,

This is my last note to you. I love you much. Please hide this word away in your heart. Prepare to meet me in Heaven.

I love you.

Momie

Jesus is our answer

Pam’s had the same message.

They all stood crying together as attendants came, closed the coffin, and began rolling it toward the chapel.

The chapel was packed for the funeral. The order of service strictly followed Velma’s plan, with one exception.

“Ronnie has chosen to speak for the family to all of you,” Hugh Hoyle said after Phil Carter had given the invocation and Sam Roane had sung a medley of Velma’s favorite hymns. “Ronnie, would you come?”

Ronnie rose from the second row, where he was sitting with Joanna and Michael, and made his way to the front, feeling awkward in his new, borrowed clothes.

“This isn’t going to be easy, so I hope you’ll bear with me,” he said, but he was remarkably in control, just as his mother would have wanted.

“The times we talked with Mama, she always impressed upon us that she had been helped by a lot of people. We can’t name them all. We just want to thank you all, and we love you in a real special way.

“Knowing that we did everything that was possible makes it much easier for us to accept this. I think Mama would want to be remembered simply as a good Christian and nothing else. I myself have never encountered such faith in God. The two things that in all our visits always came out, one was that if we got to this point, for all of us, everyone in this room, to put their lives back together very quickly and go on. That was important to her. And I think there’s not a soul in this room that can’t guess what the second one is, that we always reevaluate our relationship with God so we can be with her when our time comes.”

Phil Carter returned to the pulpit to recite some of Velma’s favorite scriptures. He went on to tell how she had shared her faith with other inmates at Women’s Prison.

“I cannot count the number of women who have sat with me and said, ‘I don’t know if I would have made it if not for Miss Margie.’ She had a second family in Raleigh, a family who loved her very much. She was an inspiration to all she touched and will continue to be.”