by John Bloom
“Allan, I wish I could do something.”
“Thanks.”
Allan spent the rest of the day making funeral arrangements and attending to the solicitations of relatives and friends. Dick Sewell went with him to a funeral home to pick out the casket, and he was there when Chief Abbott came by to brief Allan on the investigation. It was obvious that the police weren’t very far along on the case. They had no suspects anyway. The most intriguing thing Abbott told him was that they didn’t believe Betty’s attacker was an intruder. Allan wondered why, but not for long. There wasn’t time. Neighbors and church members continued to bring food to the house all afternoon, and there were ticklish decisions to be made. Should Betty’s funeral be in Kansas, where most of her family friends were, or in Texas, where their personal friends could attend? Finally Allan decided to have a Monday memorial service in Wylie and a Wednesday funeral in Norwich. Both families, Allan’s and Betty’s, were planning to arrive in Wylie by Sunday afternoon.
By midafternoon Allan was finished with the most pressing duties. Dick and some of the local officials had handled the reporters by giving them a sketchy outline of the previous night’s events. Then Dick had left, the police had left, and Allan was alone for the first time since he had tried to sleep in St. Paul. He sat for a few minutes in the living room-den, still trying to get his bearings: everything was happening so fast. Then he called Candy Montgomery again and told her to bring Alisa home.
Candy told Alisa to gather up all her belongings because it was time to go home. Immediately Ian and Jenny got excited at the prospect of a trip, but Candy had to tell them they couldn’t go. They whined a little—it seemed like an arbitrary decision—and Alisa seemed perplexed. Candy started getting teary-eyed at the thought of what was about to happen, so Pat insisted on going to Wylie with her. That meant the kids would be dropped at a neighbor’s house. As they walked out to the car, Candy kept trying to carry Alisa’s bag, but Alisa stubbornly insisted she could do it herself. Candy’s behavior was too strange to escape the attention of an intelligent six-year-old. Alisa knew something was up.
Pat suggested they wait an extra fifteen minutes to make sure Allan had enough time to get ready, and then they drove slowly through the countryside toward Wylie. It was almost four when they got there. Allan looked tired when he opened the door.
“Oh Allan,” said Candy, grasping him by the arm. “I’m so sorry.”
Allan looked at Alisa, reached down and hugged and kissed her. Candy hesitated, then wrapped her arms around Allan’s chest and hugged him. Allan gave her a squeeze, and they parted.
Pat didn’t say anything. The two men simply moved together and embraced firmly. Neither Candy nor Pat could look Allan in the eye. They held their heads down and stared around the room.
“Is there anything you need?” asked Candy, her eyes starting to water, as Alisa walked on into the living room-den.
“Please,” said Allan, “don’t leave yet. I’d like you to be here when I tell her. It will help me.”
“All right,” said Candy, her voice catching. She and Pat moved on into the living room-den and sat on a couch. Candy looked nervously around and noticed, with relief, that the door to the utility room was closed. Allan sat on a chair next to that room, and had Alisa come and sit on his lap. Alisa said nothing. Her eyes were full of curiosity and the childish fear of the unknown.
Allan placed his arm around Alisa’s shoulders and looked into her face. His voice was soft and evenly measured.
“Last night,” he said, “somebody very bad came in the house and cut up Mommy very bad. And Mommy is never coming back.”
Alisa continued to look curiously into her father’s face.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
Alisa started to whimper, her eyes watering.
“Who’s going to cook dinner for us?” she asked.
A tear rolled down Allan’s cheek. “We’ll just have to cook for ourselves now.”
Alisa was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Who’s going to take care of us?”
Allan didn’t have an answer for that one. He pressed Alisa’s head to his breast as she started to cry.
Candy, who was watching from her seat a few feet away, couldn’t say anything because she was crying silently and uncontrollably. She rose from her place, walked across the room, and knelt against Allan’s chair, wrapping her arms around both the father and the daughter. The three of them wept together.
“Thank you,” said Allan, as Candy and Pat got ready to leave. “Thank you for being here.”
On the evening of the same day, four hundred miles to the north, in a small house near the main street of Norwich, Kansas, big Bob Pomeroy sat on a chair in his sparsely furnished living room. He was surrounded by people—almost every family in the county had come by at one time or another that day, bearing food and sympathy—but Bob could just as well have been totally alone. He sat off to one side, reaching deep into himself. For one of the few times in his life, he was unable to act.
For a while Bob had been the only one in the family able to deal with the tragedy. That was his role; it had always been his place to carry the heaviest burdens. After Allan had called with the news, Bob had immediately started bringing the Pomeroys together. He called Richard, the youngest son; then he called his brother Jack, who drove over to Stoney Creek to retrieve the older son, Ronnie, from the country music festival. Then he got in the car and drove a mile east to his elderly parents’ farmhouse to break the news to them. Within an hour all the Pomeroys had gathered together in the tiny living room, with Bob trying to soften the impact with suppositions. He guessed that maybe Betty had been killed by a burglar. Or maybe a kid had been playing with a .22 rifle and a stray shot had gone through the window. Or it could have been some kid who was mad at Betty because she had given him a bad grade. But on second thought Bob decided that wasn’t very likely.
After a while, though, everybody stopped talking about it, including Bob. The men tried to comfort the crying women. Bertha took it so hard that she had to be given tranquilizers. Then they sat around in the living room and just kind of stared at one another. No one wanted to go to bed, so they sat up all night. Around five in the morning Bob finally lay down for a while, but he didn’t sleep. Then, throughout the next morning as the neighbors started arriving, they continued to sit and stare. Whatever happened was beyond comprehension; it was all the more baffling because it happened so far away, in a strange state, where the police didn’t seem to know much. Bob comforted himself with the knowledge that, if she was killed by a gunshot, then at least she probably didn’t suffer much.
Then, in the early afternoon, Allan had called from Dallas.
“Bob,” he had said, “it’s worse than we thought.”
“What?”
“Betty—she wasn’t shot. She was killed with an ax.”
Until that moment, Bob had been as stoic as a father can be expected to be, but now he ground his eye into his enormous sleeve. Now he knew Betty had suffered. He couldn’t even continue the conversation, except to go along passively with Allan’s funeral plans. All he could think of was Bertha. There was no way to tell her that. She wouldn’t be able to take it.
For the rest of the day Bob had withdrawn into himself, stewing over it, trying to figure out some way to tell her, or better yet, to avoid telling her. Finally, that night, Bob got up from his chair and asked Ronnie to go into the kitchen with him. Ronnie was calm and levelheaded; maybe he would know what was best.
Bob told Ronnie what Allan had said, and then, “I haven’t told Bertha or Richard about it.”
“We’ve gotta do it,” said Ronnie. “They’ll have to know.”
Bob waited while Ronnie went to get Bertha and Richard. Then, since there were still neighbors visiting, the family gathered in a small hallway just off the kitchen, the only private place in the house.
It took all of Bob’s strength simply to state the bare facts.
“Betty wasn
’t shot,” he said. “She was killed by an ax.”
Everyone was speechless for a moment, and then Bertha started to break down. The boys helped her to a chair. But the more remarkable thing was that finally Bob couldn’t stand it either; big tears started to roll down his cheeks, and he had difficulty talking. The sight of a 260-pound man crying, the one person who held everything together, was almost too much for the others to take. This family, they began to think, may never be the same.
Still later that night, in the fashionable, secluded subdivision called Montecito, in the town of Fairview, Texas, Pat and Candy Montgomery were getting ready for bed. Both of them were dog tired. As Candy threw her nightgown over her head, Pat noticed something on her legs. Her thighs were covered with unsightly purple bruises.
“Where did you get those?” he asked.
“Oh, just housework. You know how I’m always bumping into the dishwasher.”
“You bruise so easily. Come on, we need to get some sleep if we’re going to make it to church in the morning.”
9 Country Church
It was a church service that had first brought Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore together, and it was the church that would lead them to their times of closeness and, eventually, their mutual hatreds. For the Methodist Church of Lucas, Texas, was, more than most places of worship, an institution controlled by and large by women. The epicenter of Candy Montgomery’s universe, almost from the day in 1977 when she moved to her dream house in the country, was this drafty white clapboard building known to its congregants simply as “the church.” Set back from the roadside, paint peeling, steeple rusted, its floors echoing hollowly under the tread of men’s heavy soles, it did not at first resemble a place likely to house the more liberal strains of Methodist theology.
Formed in the time when the land still tolerated cotton and farmers came to the tiny village of Lucas to do their ginning, the church had always been a backwater outpost in a vanishing town. Supported by no more than ten or twenty families, it had managed for long stretches without any full-time minister at all. In recent years, though, it had become a postgraduate receptacle for young seminary students trying out their pulpit skills for the first time, most of them staying a year or less before moving on to less obscure parishes. Most church members were farmers and storekeepers, born into the faith and natural adherents of the easygoing fundamentalism that distinguished them from the other two Lucas churches, Baptist and Church of Christ. Such families sought only a stewardship of quiet devotion and were generally well satisfied with the young divinity students who came to them directly from the Perkins School of Theology, part of Southern Methodist University of Dallas, where the bishop often looked when he needed to fill the empty pulpits of tiny country churches. It was an arrangement that pleased both the parishioners and the parish. All that changed when Lucas Methodist welcomed its first full-time pastor.
Jackie arrived in July 1976, a brassy, convivial sort with a lusty laugh who, at forty-one, was just beginning a career at an age when most had long since settled the patterns of their lives. Normally the arrival of a new pastor would be greeted with unalloyed gratitude, since any ministerial student, no matter how green, was preferable to a vacancy. But Jackie Ponder was not merely a young liberal idealist. The Reverend Ponder was also a woman.
If the Methodists had been searching for inspirational feminists to direct the new ecclesiastical order of the seventies, they could hardly have invented a better role model than Jackie Ponder. She was spiritually self-made. Born an Arkansan, she had grown up in San Antonio, where she attended a strict Lutheran school. At nineteen she married a doctor, raised two children, and wasn’t able to enroll in college until the age of thirty. She received an English degree despite having no natural talent for classwork, then, like the female parishioners who would later cling to her, started searching for that “something more” that marriage had failed to give her. For most of her life, she had wrestled with her religious feelings, at one point rebelling against the church entirely and alienating both her mother and her husband. While in her thirties, she declared herself an atheist and went through a dark period of almost total seclusion from everyone except her husband. It was a painful, wrenching time for her and her family. Then, while attending graduate school one summer at North Texas State University and spending all her spare time reading philosophy and psychiatry, she had a mystical experience in which she felt a divine voice giving her instructions to serve as “a channel for His love.” Six weeks later, she heard the same inner voice, compelling her to go into the ministry. At first she doubted the evidence—by this time she had scorned the strict Methodism of her youth and advertised her agnosticism—but she finally succumbed. When she did, her sister tried to talk her out of it. Her husband, who had been uneasy but tolerant throughout Jackie’s attempts to find herself, became literally sick. At the age of thirty-seven, she enrolled at Perkins. She was one of only twenty women in the school. For the first time, she said, she felt at peace with herself.
Jackie liked to tell people that she lived by only one great commandment: “Love God with all your heart, mind, and soul.” It was a simple and infectious idea. Jackie was a big woman, with broad, thick features and an overgrown Afro hairdo, but the most noticeable thing about her was her voice: it was loud and incessant and full of energy. It could fill a room with bravado. Perhaps that’s why the Methodist district superintendent accompanied her to Lucas for her visit with the church Pastor-Parish Committee. He wanted to be certain that the congregation would be able to deal with her, not only as a woman, but as a woman who would undoubtedly be more forceful and assertive than any of the ladies of the church. Jackie was as nervous as they were. But if anything won them over, it was her self-confidence. She looked like a person who would care about the church and not simply use it as a stepping-stone to another job.
As it turned out, Jackie was not entirely ready for a church pastorate. She was so exuberant about her new life that she was crestfallen when the church didn’t instantly fall under the spell of her preaching. At that time the church was divided into two factions, one demonstrative and charismatic, one quiet and traditional. Until Jackie arrived, the two groups had coexisted in more or less mutual tolerance, but things started to fall apart under her leadership. Her confidence in her own spiritual maturity often made her seem harsh and judgmental to those who were less secure. She was a self-described mystic, yet she had no patience with the charismatics. The older farmers in the church could accept her anyway, as a spiritual person who was simply immature, but the young charismatics grew more and more hostile as Jackie pursued a rather aimless, secular method of preaching and church management. When the charismatics asked to have a special prayer meeting to seal off the church from Satan, Jackie flatly refused on theological grounds. It was the first of many no’s, and with each passing week, a few more members would stay away. The church had never been very large to begin with. After eight or nine months, attendance had dwindled from about eighty regulars to no more than twenty-five on most Sundays. One of the women who left in a huff decreased the church income by fully one-third. Jackie’s husband, meanwhile, was still finding it difficult to accept his wife’s new career, and especially disliked the tiny backwater church to which they were now irrevocably connected. Jackie tried to disguise her growing depression, but the fear of failing as a pastor and a wife preyed on her night and day. She continued to pitch into her Sunday sermons with enthusiasm, though, and refused to believe that her commitment to being a “channel for His love” could be frustrated.
If Candy Montgomery had not visited Lucas Church in March 1977, or if Jackie Ponder had not been there to welcome her, the lives of both women might have been very different. Both were the sort of restless spirits who spend their lives expecting next year to be better than this one, and then are consistently and sincerely amazed when it is not. They were, in a word, romantics. Those who didn’t know them well might not have thought so. Candy tended toward cynicism, in
an offhandedly impish way, while Jackie had a strong streak of vague visionary idealism. (“God is Love,” “Love is All” were the constant refrains of her sermons.) But the cynic and the idealist are more closely related than either believes. The two women, almost on their first meeting, became soul sisters.
In a sense both Candy and Jackie had, by early 1977, achieved their earthly ambitions already. Candy’s most devout wish since her girlhood had been to marry, live in a big country house, and raise lots of kids and animals. “Lots” had been amended to two children and three pets, but she still felt that a lifelong dream was complete when she and Pat finally had enough money to get their country house. One of Pat’s fellow workers at Texas Instruments, Phil Green, had led them out to eastern Collin County one weekend to show them the beautiful shaded countryside among the horse stables and farms along Farm Road 1378, and they had picked out their place on the spot. It was just up the road from the Green house, in a new subdivision called Montecito, on the crown of a hill obscured at the moment by ravines and blackberries and a few oak stands. They got the land for $10,000. The house eventually cost $60,000 more because they insisted that a chic Dallas architectural firm do the blueprints. They accepted the first design submitted: a cathedral look, open and airy, with a lot of exposed beams and skylights, the children’s rooms isolated from their own, an oversized double garage, and a workshop and study for Pat. They also looked at the school before making the move: they found they were in a minuscule one-school district, named Lovejoy after a farm family which had donated the land for a tiny red elementary schoolhouse. Far from being disturbed by the lack of urban amenities, the new immigrants of Montecito universally praised Lovejoy School as a return to simplicity and proudly boasted that it had all the advantages of any city district because it had more closely supervised instruction. In February 1977, the Montgomerys made the move from Plano.