Before He Wakes by Jerry Bledsoe Read Free Book Online Page B

complications other than that her feet sometimes swelled. After that, she spent most of her time alone in her trailer watching TV, growing more miserable by the day.
    Barbara finally gave birth to a boy on December 2, 1968, at Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro. She was twenty, the same age her mother had been when she was born. The child was named James Bryan in honor of her father, and he would be called Bryan. Larry barely made it to the hospital before his son was born. His mother had called to tell him that Barbara was going into labor, and he drove home so fast that he thought he might have set a new speed record for the stretch of U.S. 421 that separated Boone from Greensboro. On the way in, he stopped at his parents’ house and picked up his sister Jane, who became terrified of his driving, especially after he ran a red light.
    His family couldn’t recall seeing Larry quite so exultant as when he first gazed upon his son.
    “He was proud,” Jane recalled, “really excited, just on cloud nine.”
    When Doris and Henry went with their son to see the baby on the day after his birth, they were startled that Barbara grabbed Larry and began kissing him passionately, even trying to put hickeys on his neck as he pulled away, protesting good-naturedly.
    “It wasn’t normal,” Henry recalled. “It just wasn’t normal.”
    After Christmas, Larry got a job managing Ivy Hall, an ivy-covered brick building on the edge of the Appalachian campus. It was owned by Barbara’s Greensboro obstetrician, who operated it as a private men’s dorm. The job offered a small salary and a free three-room apartment on the first floor. Larry sold the trailer and moved his family into the apartment. They had to share a bath with the students on the hall.
    The new parents were having a tough time making ends meet, so Barbara found somebody to keep Bryan and took a job as a clerk at Sears. As for Larry, the pressure of living on a tight budget while being a husband, father, full-time student and boardinghouse manager was showing. His grades fell from their usual high marks. He wasn’t able to carry as heavy a schedule of classes. To make up for this, he decided to remain in Boone after finishing spring classes in 1969 so that he could attend summer school. Larry’s parents saw him only when they went to the mountains for occasional visits. Larry couldn’t afford trips home.
    Larry’s sister Jane enrolled at Appalachian that fall and spent time when she could with Larry and Barbara, sometimes baby-sitting for them. One change that she noticed right away in Barbara was that now that she wasn’t pregnant, she was brazen about sex.
    One weekend, Jane recalled, she and her new boyfriend went for a ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway with Larry and Barbara. Barbara kept teasing Larry, grabbing at his crotch and giggling about it. Larry protested lamely, clearly embarrassed. It was obvious that he did not share Barbara’s openness. Worse, although he had not yet admitted it to anyone, he now realized that Barbara’s sexual needs were far greater than his, and the first indications that she would transgress all marital bounds to satisfy them soon began to appear.
    That fall, Jane baby-sat one Saturday while Larry and Barbara went to a campus football game. Afterward, Barbara claimed to have spotted a young man in the crowd whom she recognized. The man had attempted to rape her while she was in high school, she said. Now she was certain that he had come to Boone looking for her.
    What concerned Larry about her story, he later told his mother, was that Barbara had seemed not so much frightened by the incident as excited by it, as if it were a scene in some TV show in which she was the star—or some high school fantasy coming true.
    This was not the first time that Barbara had told him about men who supposedly had sexual designs on her. Several times she had mentioned that “dirty old men” had said suggestive things while she was working at Sears.