Before He Wakes by Jerry Bledsoe Page A

leave, somebody mentioned that the bedroom should be cleaned. Brenda and Mae volunteered to do it and checked with the deputies to make sure that it was okay. The sergeant told them to go ahead.
    They were surprised that there was so little blood and disarray. They stripped the bedding, turned over the mattress and remade the bed. Mae took the soiled sheets home to wash them.
    As Brenda and Mae cleaned the bedroom, Brenda noticed the packed suitcases in the corner. Curious, she asked Barbara about them later. Barbara said that she and Larry had been planning a trip to her parents’ cottage at Long Beach on the coming weekend. Brenda found nothing unusual about Barbara being packed so far in advance. She knew how meticulous and well organized Barbara was.
    Henry Ford’s week had gotten off to a bad start. Demand was up for dairy products, and he’d been working long hours. On Tuesday, he’d had to make an extra two thousand gallons of cottage cheese and sour cream. It was something you had to stay with once you started it, and he’d worked nineteen hours that day. He was worried about Larry. When he and Doris had last visited him and his family, Barbara had mentioned that she hadn’t had a paycheck in months. Larry had spoken to him about their debts. Clearly, he was worried. Henry wanted to help but didn’t want to embarrass his son. But as he worked that day, he decided that he would ask Larry if he wanted him to go to the credit union and get a loan to help relieve his financial bind.
    Henry didn’t get home until well after midnight. Exhausted, he had eaten a sandwich and fallen into bed. He had just gone to sleep when the phone woke him. He reached blindly for the receiver and muttered a groggy hello.
    “This is Reverend Barnie Pierce,” said a voice he didn’t recognize. “It’s about Larry.”
    “What is it?” Henry said, quickly coming awake.
    “He’s had an accident.”
    “Where is he?”
    “He’s at the funeral home.”
    Later, Henry wouldn’t remember what was said after that. He only remembered being dumbstruck. He stood by the bed after hanging up the phone, silent, dreading telling Doris, who had stirred from sleep and was looking at him anxiously.
    “What’s the matter?” she asked.
    He couldn’t help himself. He broke into tears as he blurted the words. “Larry’s dead.”
    The preacher had not told Henry what had happened, telling him only to come to Larry’s house. Henry woke his youngest son, Scott, who was seventeen, and after dressing as quickly as possible, the three of them set out, riding in dazed silence.
    “It’s like you’re numb,” Doris explained later. “It’s like it’s not real.”
    At a little after three o’clock, Henry turned into the steep drive at Larry’s house. As the Fords were getting out of the car, Barbara’s parents pulled in behind them, arriving from Durham, seventy-five miles away. Barbara came out and rushed past the Fords to her parents, huddling with them, it seemed to the Fords, and ignoring them.
    “Her parents took her over,” Doris recalled later. “They surrounded Barbara. It’s been a strange thing, evidently, all through Barbara’s life, a need to protect her. Her mother did not look at us and say, ‘I’m sorry your son’s dead.’ I don’t think she ever spoke a word to us.”
    Barnie Pierce told the Fords that Larry apparently had shot himself accidentally, but Barbara offered no details and barely acknowledged their presence.
    The deputies were gone. Larry’s body had been taken to the hospital morgue in Asheboro. The room in which Larry had died had been cleaned, the bed stripped and remade. Only Brenda Monroe and the minister remained at the house.
    The Fords got the impression that everything had been done without any consideration of them. In their anguish they didn’t know what to do. Later, they would recall walking back and forth from kitchen to living room, seeking comfort and finding none, thinking only one