Читать книгу Buried Memories - Irene Pence - Страница 10

FOUR

Roxboro, a village nestled on the green plains of North Carolina, lies in the heart of the tobacco-growing territory. Betty Lou, born there on March 12, 1937, came into the world at a time when the town of 5,000 was trying to pull itself up from the Great Depression. Almost everyone knew poverty, including her young parents, who struggled to make a living as sharecroppers on a tobacco farm. It was a meager beginning for someone who would later be known as Betty Dunevant Branson Lane Threlkeld Barker Beets.

Betty, the second child of James and Louise Dunevant, began life in a small pine cabin that had no electricity, no running water, and no glass in the windows. Rarely did the family have milk or fresh vegetables. They survived on salt pork, flour, and meal—a diet barely capable of nourishing Betty and her older brother, Dewey. Their only source of heat, a black coal stove, could have heated the small home, except that heat escaped through the broken windows, leaving colds and influenza as Betty’s constant companions.

When winter came and the tobacco crop had been harvested, Mrs. Dunevant had time to take on another job as a domestic, the occupation she listed on Betty’s birth certificate. She cleaned the homes of wealthy people, who had beautiful furnishings, heavily fringed drapes, and thick carpets. She’d return to her little house and describe the mansions to Betty, giving her daughter every glittering detail.

“Life’s gonna get better,” Betty’s mother promised her five-year-old daughter one day. With eager anticipation, Mrs. Dunevant and her husband packed the family’s meager belongings and moved twenty miles north to the more-industrial Danville, Virginia, sitting on the border between Virginia and North Carolina. There Betty’s parents found work in the cotton mills and placed the children in a communal day-care center. The young couple now happily provided more of life’s necessities for their children. They rented a snug little house that stayed warm in the winter, and the general health of the family improved thanks to plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables, and red meat.

However, in that same year, Betty came down with measles. She suffered prolonged sore throats, hacking coughs, and a fever that sometimes reached 105 degrees and lasted for days. Her mother took off from work to care for her, and for hours sat in Betty’s small bedroom and sponged her thin body with cold water and placed ice-filled compresses on her forehead. Betty’s flaxen hair stuck to her moist scalp and her blue eyes looked dull and lifeless.

With many sleepless nights, and Betty’s high fever, her parents’ frustration mounted. “You should feel her skin,” her mother said to her husband one night. “It’s as hot as a frying pan.” She sank into a chair and began crying. “She’s so sick. I pray to God it doesn’t happen, but I’m afraid we’re gonna lose her.”

Their mood remained somber as Betty endured the long, tedious illness. Ear infections further complicated her convalescence and ultimately left her with a hearing loss. After she recovered and returned to her white clapboard school, she strained to hear her teacher. Learning became more difficult and she felt disconnected from the other students.

By the time she reached fourth grade, her teachers decided it would be best if Betty repeated the grade. Their judgment humiliated Betty, and her embarrassment grew when her former classmates saw her in the halls at school. They taunted her with chants, calling her stupid, and making her feel different. Keeping her head down, she said nothing as she hurried by, believing what they said.

After Betty turned eight, her mother gave birth to a son, Jimmy, and two years later, another daughter, Jackie.

Four years after that, and without any prior symptoms, one day at work her mother suffered what doctors labeled “a psychotic break with reality.” The mill summoned an ambulance to rush Mrs. Dunevant to a hospital, where she remained for a week. She came home pale and shaken. The doctor had given her medication, and frequently came by to visit. She suffered hallucinations with strange voices playing in her head. She became hysterical, pushing out her hands to ward off unseen demons.

Betty cowered to see her mother act so suddenly and strangely violent. Watching her mother’s strange behavior, she wondered if that condition could be inherited.

The following year, Mrs. Dunevant’s mental illness worsened, forcing her to be institutionalized at Eastern State Hospital in Virginia for three months. To combat her serious problem, the barren public psychiatric hospital had to administer shock therapy and seventeen rounds of deep insulin coma therapy.

Her mother’s mental state was not lost on Betty’s classmates. When they saw Betty, they faked seizures, waving their hands in the air and saying, “Who am I?” The ugliness of her classmates continued and now they made her feel both stupid and crazy. Education for Betty became an excruciating experience that she’d do anything to escape.

Thirteen-year-old Betty Dunevant slammed a kitchen drawer shut as she prepared a dinner of beans and ham. It was the third time that week she had reheated the ham, and the dry meat had begun to taste like sawdust.

Betty found that cooking and cleaning for the family in her mother’s absence was sheer drudgery, and her weight dropped to eighty pounds. Frequently too exhausted to attend classes, she missed many days of school.

Adding to her problems, her father drank heavily to overcome depression about his wife’s condition. When he was drunk, Betty would cringe every time she saw him remove his belt, knowing she had done something to displease him and he’d soon be beating her with the buckle of that belt. After the beatings, he received obedience from her, but unbeknownst to him, he was creating a tough exterior on his daughter. She came to accept that she would be beaten if she didn’t mind him.

Betty dreamed of the day she could escape. That day came when she met a handsome eighteen-year-old, Robert Franklin Branson. Branson’s black hair and olive skin contrasted sharply with Betty’s fair coloring. He was a quiet youth, who worked in a zipper factory. His prospects seemed limited, but fifteen-year-old Betty didn’t mind.

Betty had not yet had her first period and her mother feared that Betty could be pregnant, so she encouraged her young daughter to marry Branson, even though Betty insisted that she had never had sex with anyone. The two married on July 18, 1952, just a month after Betty finished ninth grade.

A year later, their first child, Faye, arrived. Instead of being happy to be married and have a new baby to love, Betty Branson found she had traded one frustrating situation for another. She complained to her husband, “I’m no better off now than when I had to cook and clean for my parents, and having this baby is just like being saddled with my brother and sister.”

Thinking more money would make Betty happier, Robert Branson went to the giant Norfolk shipyard looking for a better paying job. When he signed on, he thought his wife would be pleased that he could shower his small family with a few luxuries. Instead, he came home each night to an angry, disillusioned woman who wanted her freedom. “I’m only sixteen,” she whimpered. She frequently ran into former classmates who would embellish with enticing detail their proms, football rallies, and all the other high school activities Betty was missing.

The young couple’s heated arguments and misunderstandings led to a six-month separation. Betty wasn’t sure what she wanted; she only knew what she had missed. But when forced to take Faye and move back with her parents, she slipped into a deep depression. Spiraling down into her dark mood, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing two bottles of aspirin. Betty’s parents called her husband with word of the suicide attempt, and he rushed to Betty’s bedside and talked her into reconciling.

The next year, Connie came along. With a new baby the Bransons wanted a new start, and Robert found he could make more money with a construction job in Texas. Collecting their two daughters and the few household items they had accumulated, they moved to Mesquite, a small town just southeast of Dallas.

The area looked foreign to them after coming from water-laced Norfolk, Virginia. In Mesquite, trees grew along the sides of creeks that veined the area, but in 1955, few additional trees had been planted, and some residential lots had no trees or shrubbery at all. They rented a plain, unimaginative house no larger than a double-car garage. Frequently, the wood trim became sun damaged, and the paint peeled.

Fortunately, Branson did well in his new profession and Betty could continue as a full-time mother and stay home with her children.

Once in Texas, the family blossomed, and a third daughter, Shirley, arrived in February of 1959. Three years later, Phyllis was born. Finally, their first son, Robert (Robby) Franklin Branson II, entered the family in 1964, and a second son, Bobby, was born in 1966. Now after fourteen years of marriage, they had six children.

Betty was only twenty-nine and still very pretty. She had a knack for choosing clothes that accentuated her figure, a figure that few women would possess after giving birth to six children. Her small waist emphasized her large breasts, and she applied makeup like a professional. She wore four-inch high heels to give the illusion of being taller than five-two.

She bleached her hair to recapture the blond of her childhood, and regular perms gave it an overly fluffy appearance—a look that fit in well at the local bars. She liked to have a good time, and spending all day taking care of six children wasn’t her idea of a good time. She began to crave men who reminded her that she was still sexy and desirable.

For her clandestine activities she recruited her older daughters to babysit her young sons, then put on her Sunday-best cotton dress and drove to The Silver Slipper, a bar in East Dallas.

She strolled inside a room lit by the red-and-blue neon-outlined beer signs, and loud jazz pounded from the jukebox. The men stopped sucking on their long-neck beers and glanced admiringly at her, and some invited her to join their table. They laughed at her jokes, and asked why a pretty thing like her hadn’t been there before. Betty’s charm worked overtime as the men took turns dancing with her, holding her close, and smothering her with compliments. This, she realized, was living.

At last she recaptured the fun she had missed in her teenage years, and her husband made enough money to take her mind off the misery of the poverty she had known as a child.

Gradually, her life away from home became a source of friction at the Branson household. Even the children grew perturbed by her outside interests, and the home she had kept so immaculately fell into disarray.

Branson warned her, “Betty, I’m not going to put up with this. I always thought you were a good wife and I know the kids love you. But I can’t handle how you’re acting while I’m out trying to support our family.”

Her husband had his own romantic options, for he still cut a handsome, lean figure. His full head of black hair complimented his tan, relatively unlined face. In 1969, after seventeen years of marriage, he demanded a divorce and this time there would be no reconciliation. He married a younger woman shortly after the divorce became final.

Betty received full custody of the children and Branson was ordered to pay $350 a month for their support. Now the children suffered through their mother’s muffled sobs. “I still love and miss your daddy,” she told them. Betty kept an eight-by-ten photograph of her ex-husband on a table in the living room. On the photo he had inscribed: “More than yesterday, but less than tomorrow,” a promise that no longer held true. The children thought that their mother never seemed happy with anyone else after that.

Betty’s second daughter, Connie, told a friend, “Most of the good things I remember about my mother were before she and my daddy divorced. Mama worked so hard to please him. When Daddy worked nights, she would put on makeup before she went to bed so when he’d get home around two or three in the morning, she’d look nice for him.”

In those earlier years, the children had benefitted from Betty wanting to be a good wife and mother, but now after the divorce, all the family customs fell apart. They weren’t together for Christmas or Thanksgiving. There were no more big family dinners with turkey and all the trimmings, and no Easter egg hunts at their paternal grandparent’s house. Gone were the picnics and the trips to the zoo.

The children were painfully aware how drastically their parents’ divorce had changed their lives.

Betty was experiencing life without a man, a life that contained many hardships, especially when Branson went months at a time without paying the court-ordered child support.

To forget her problems, she increased her nights of club hopping and drinking and dancing. Before long, her family began disintegrating and fluttered away like birds from a nest.

First, Faye followed in her mother’s footsteps by marrying at fifteen and moving out. Betty sent ten-year-old Phyllis and eight-year-old Robby to live with their father and his new wife. She kissed Robby good-bye, and with tears in his eyes, he asked, “Mama, when can I come home?”

Betty said, “Soon,” but five years would pass before she saw him again and only then for a few minutes. It would be a total of ten years before he moved back with her.

As the family breakup continued, Connie went to live with her sister Faye. Shirley sometimes lived with Betty and sometimes with friends. Bobby, only three at the time of the divorce, had his mother’s eyes, and had obviously stolen her heart, for he was the only child she refused to relinquish to other family members.

After Betty’s divorce, her vulnerability soared, for she spent hours worrying how she’d pay her bills. The financial woes that had shadowed her childhood now followed her into her adult life.

It was a time of short skirts and big hair, and in spite of her financial situation, Betty kept up with both. Every morning after her shower, she pinned a blond hairpiece of cascading curls into her own hair, working each curl into place. Heads turned wherever she went.