by Robert Mayer
The glass plant remains in operation today, having changed hands through the decades from Hazel-Atlas to the Continental Can Company to the Brockway Corporation. Three hundred and twenty of Ada’s citizens work at the glass plant, on round-the-clock shifts, producing the 1.3 million bottles and jars a day that will be filled elsewhere with Coke, Pepsi, Miller beer, Gerber’s baby food, salad dressing, pickles. Until his death in 1979, Jesse Ward, Tommy’s father, had spent most of his working life at the glass plant—thirty-two years wearing earplugs and safety glasses amid the noise and searing heat of the furnaces.
Jesse Ward was born and raised in a village ten miles north of Ada, which later would be named Oil Center because of the pumps nodding and rising in the fields. When he was still young his family bought a frame house, with no indoor plumbing, at 1609 Ashland Avenue, on the western edge of Ada. Susie Dismukes lived in a house a block away that had once been a grocery store. Jesse Ward and Susie Dismukes met at a friend’s birthday party in December 1937. They were married on April 9, 1938. Jesse was twenty-three, Susie was seventeen. On the day they were married and moved into his father’s house, Jesse planted a pecan tree in the front yard.
Jesse was a musician in those days, playing guitar in a local string band called Ragtime. The band played at parties and in local clubs and did concerts over the local radio station. One band member, the banjo player, lived behind a cafe. One night while he was asleep, the cafe caught fire and burned. The banjo player died in the blaze. His death marked the end of Ragtime.
His music gone, Jesse moved from one job to another for a few years. Then he was hired at the glass plant. He became a machine operator, working rotating shifts, one week the 8 A.M. shift, the next week the 4 P.M. shift, the next week the midnight shift: oiling and swabbing the equipment as sand and limestone and soda ash and cullet, which is smashed recycled glass, were melted in a huge furnace into 300 tons of glass a day, were spewed in molten liquid form, bright white and orange flashes in the dark plant, into molds, to cool into the bottles and jars that would be hauled away by trucks. While he worked, Susie stayed home; few married women held jobs in those days, and the glass plant was the best-paying blue-collar employer in town. To this day, while not the largest employer, it has the largest payroll in Ada; unionized, entry-level jobs start at nine dollars an hour.
Jesse and Susie Ward wanted children. But year after year passed without Susie getting pregnant. She went to see a doctor; he told her that her pelvic area was too small to bear children. They both were deeply disappointed. Jesse began to drink some. He also became a self-taught expert on pecans. He learned how to graft shoots of different kinds of pecan trees onto one trunk. He did that with the lone pecan tree in the front yard, the one he had planted on his wedding day. After several years, the one tree was producing many different kinds of pecans. One year Jesse entered his different varieties in the Oklahoma State Fair. He won a prize. He received a letter from fair officials, asking how many trees he had in his orchard. He only had the one.
For twelve years they lived that way, childless, Jesse working, Susie at home, drawing cold water from a spigot in the yard, which was the only plumbing; an outhouse stood out back. Then Susie became pregnant. Her only explanation was that she suddenly grew up. She was thirty years old when she was delivered of her first child, a boy. They named him Jimmy.
Three years passed. They thought Jimmy was all they would have. Then a daughter was born. They named her Latricia. (She would be called Tricia most of the time.) Children came in rapid succession after that: a boy, Joel; twins, Melva and Melvin; a daughter, Joice; then a seventh child, a boy, the only one they would name after his father: Thomas Jesse Ward.
Six years passed; they thought their family was complete at seven kids. Susie got pregnant again. She had to spend the last three months of her term in the hospital. She bore a healthy daughter, Kay, making four boys and four girls. The doctor told her not to get pregnant again, that it might endanger her life; she didn’t.
Despite the differences in their ages, the eight Ward kids grew up in only two bedrooms, the four boys in one, the four girls across the hall. Jesse was the patriarch of the family, but his wages at the glass plant were stretched thin by a household of ten; once food was put on the table there was little money for anything else. The kids wore hand-me-downs to school; their classmates knew they were poor. Sometimes they were teased about this, or about their name, which the other kids transformed into Wart, or Warthog. A large, poor family who lived without plumbing on the edge of town: that was all the town knew about the Wards; their very numbers made them visible. But the kids themselves were as varied as the pecans on the tree out front. Some took the slights of the other children personally, and carried the hurt inside them long after. Joice was one of these; Tommy was another. Others with more inner strength, such as Tricia and Joel, absorbed the hurt, somehow understood the natural cruelties of childhood, and let it go.
Jimmy, the oldest boy, started smoking marijuana in his teens. Tricia, three years younger, heard about this from a friend. She was at an age, fourteen, when tattling on your big brother seemed a lovely thing to do. She told their dad about it. Instead of scolding Jimmy, their father called Tricia a liar; he told her he did not want to hear anything like that again. Tricia would think years later that if her father had put a stop to Jimmy’s drug use right then, all that followed might not have happened. But he didn’t; perhaps he sensed that he couldn’t. Jimmy got in with a bad crowd. He was never in serious trouble with the law, but he got a reputation in town as a lowlife, a drinker, a troublemaker; a reputation that would settle indiscriminately over all of the family: “those Wards.”
Jimmy in time went off to Vietnam to serve his country, came back with a nervous condition, was in and out of hospitals as he went through marriage, fatherhood, divorce. While on tranquilizers prescribed by doctors at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City, he would move through Ada quietly, a tall, pale specter, seeming invisible, living on disability payments.
Tricia, the oldest girl, was, perforce, her mother’s helper. After school she would take care of the little ones, Tommy and Kay. On Sunday mornings she would go to church with her mother and Joice. During periods when the others lapsed in their devotion, Tricia would go by herself, or take Tommy along, getting a ride with the preacher and his wife. One day when she was in the ninth grade, a boy in her class started pestering her, and grabbed her shoe. She threw a stick at him. He dropped her shoe into a sewer. She punched him in the eye, blackening it. His name was Charles L. Wolf Jr. He went by Bud. They didn’t speak for a year after that. She would go to her locker and find gross things in it, placed there by Bud. But when he asked her out on a date, she accepted. Attention turned to affection. They were married before graduation, while still in their teens, on St. Patrick’s Day.
They had no goals higher or lower than to raise a family and live their lives in Ada, with the blessing of Jesus their Lord. So they both desired it; so it would be.
Tricia was tall and thin and big-boned with blond hair worn long and straight in the high school fashion of the time, big-boned in a way that would soon accommodate a certain earthy fleshiness, which, if Bud ever complained about it, he did so only in jest; there was, as they might say at the feed mill later on, more to grab ahold of. She had an easygoing wholesomeness that brooked no ill will toward any fellow creature. She moved through the days of her life poorer than she might have liked, but with the inborn certainty that her contentment and salvation would come not through riches or book learning, to which she was not partial, but through her husband, and through the children her body had been created to create, and through a simple, unquestioning faith in the teachings of Jesus, as related by the Baptist church.
Bud, for his part, in high school had worn his hair long in the protest fashion of the time—more for the fashion than for the political protest it then implied—and had drunk his quota of high school beer; but he turned short-haired an
d straight by his wedding day. At times he would simmer with some inner rage which after a marital squabble early on would lead him to storm from the house in silence, hunting rifle in hand, not saying where he was going—leaving Tricia to wait and wonder whether she had misjudged the man she’d hoped was hidden in the boy, to wonder whether he would return at all, whether he might, to quiet some demon beyond her ken, even turn the rifle on himself. But then he would return. With the passing years the rifle walking happened less and less, and then stopped altogether, except for genuine hunting, as the calm in the man overcame the frenzy in the boy. Bud worked for the city of Ada for two years as a bookkeeper, of all things—book learning might have been a path open to him had he chosen to follow it—and then signed on at the feed mill, a solid provider. With the help of Bud’s parents, they purchased a frame house on Ninth Street, a house with a hole in the porch that Bud eventually repaired. There, they started a family: Rhonda was born in 1974. She grew up blond as her mother and thin as a beanpole and pretty as a far-off New York model, with one troublesome freckle smack at the point of her otherwise perfect nose. Then came C. L. Wolf III, in 1977, called “Buddy,” a boy with a bowl haircut and a gap between his two front teeth, a boy who always had a frog in his pocket, real or imaginary. Then there was Laura Sue, in 1978, cute and loving and most likely of all to curl up trusting as a puppy in the nearest available lap. This Bud and Tricia had, along with the assorted foster children and Tricia’s brothers and sisters crashing in their house from time to time—taking advantage of them, others would say. But this was a view that never seemed to cross Tricia’s mind—her family was as her flesh—and Bud, having married both spirit and flesh, was willing to put up with all of them as his own. If on occasion their telephone was disconnected because the relatives ran up bills that Bud’s paycheck couldn’t cover, this and other material discomforts would usually be numbered among the minor testings of the Lord. No sweat—or not too much sweat, most of the time.
Joel, the next oldest after Tricia, was the most ambitious of the Wards. He attended Oklahoma State Tech, a vocational college near Tulsa, for two years, became an auto mechanic, developed the most solid earning capacity in the family. He went to work in Tulsa, bought a house there. After Jesse Ward died in 1979, Susie, as the family called her, or Miz Ward, as everyone else did, came to rely on Tricia and Joel as the two sturdy rocks of her family.
Melva, one of the twins, also tall and solid, married an Army man; she moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, where her husband was stationed. Melvin, the other twin, blue-eyed bearer of his own rowdy streak, saw Jimmy getting into trouble, felt that if he stayed in Ada the same would happen to him. He enlisted in the Navy, was stationed in Virginia. Joice, the stocky street runner among the girls, married a heavyset fellow named Robert Cavins. They had three kids, moved from job to job in the Ada area, Joice exhibiting a boisterous, inflammable personality that perhaps was a cover for insecurity. Kay, by six years the youngest, pretty and quieter than the others, graduated from high school in June 1984. She married her sweetheart, a local boy named Billy Garrett, in August.
And then there was Tommy, Tricia thought, sitting alone in the living room, stunned by his call from the jail. He’d been the baby of the family for six years, till Kay came along. The other boys used to tease him. “The runt of the litter,” Tommy was smaller than Jimmy and Joel and Melvin, even when he reached his full height of five-feet-eight-and-a-half. As a kid he was sweet, polite. He loved going to church with her; when she and Bud started dating, Bud took a liking to Tommy, would take him hunting, fishing. He was eleven when they got married; in their wedding album, starting to fall apart now after thirteen years, there were pictures of Tommy at the wedding, cute in his new blue suit.
Then had come the turning point: the death of their father. Of all the kids, Tommy had been the closest to Jesse; he took it the hardest when their dad developed cancer. The doctors operated, found it had spread all through him. They sewed him up and sent him home to wait for death. For three months Jesse Ward lay in the house on Ashland Avenue that he had inherited from his father, the pecan tree he had planted still bearing fruit out front. The last few days they took turns sitting at his bedside, Miz Ward and all eight of the kids, and Bud. Two of them, Melvin and Tommy, couldn’t bear it; they would disappear for days at a time, unable to watch their father waste away.
To ease the pain of his father’s death, someone gave Tommy a joint to smoke. Some say it was Jimmy; some say it was Robert Cavins; some say it was a friend. Whoever it was, within a week the family could see that Tommy was doing a lot of dope. Perhaps Jesse Ward could have stopped him if he were alive, perhaps not. Susie Ward couldn’t. Tommy quit high school, grew fond of beer, of cheap wine. He began to run with a bad crowd in the streets. He got arrested occasionally for misdemeanors, had to be bailed out, might sass the police in the process; he was another one of “those Wards,” in the eyes of the town.
But would he kill somebody? It was impossible, Tricia thought, pacing the living room, unable to sit still. Jut-jawed, Tommy had a temper; he would get angry sometimes; but when he did he would punch a wall, or the refrigerator, and hurt himself, not the person he was angry at. The house on Ashland had plenty of holes in the walls to prove it. The time his former girlfriend, Lisa Lawson, broke up with him, Tommy had gone out and banged himself up on his motorcycle; he’d never laid a finger on Lisa. Then he had come home and put his head in Tricia’s lap and cried.
Now the police were saying he killed the Haraway girl. Tricia didn’t believe it, not for a minute—not if Tommy said he didn’t. She knew he might do a lot of things, but not kill.
Get a lawyer? Thanksgiving was only a month away; she’d been wondering how they were going to afford a turkey; Bud was planning to go to a loan company to get money to pay the October bills. How could they afford a lawyer?
She thought of Susie. Of Mama. She would have to tell Mama, though it would break her heart.
Miz Ward was staying in Tulsa at the time, to help Joel, who had hurt his leg at work and was having trouble getting around. Tricia had to summon all her self-control to get her fingers to dial the number correctly.
Crying, she told her mother about Tommy’s arrest. Miz Ward listened with a quiet bewilderment. It wasn’t so; Tommy wouldn’t do such a thing.
She remembered the time the police came looking for Tommy, a few days after the girl disappeared. He had gone down and talked to them. There had been no problem. They had let him go. Why would they arrest him now, six months later?
It was all a mistake, Susie Ward thought. Things would get straightened out.
“We have to get him a lawyer,” Tricia said.
“Yes, I guess we do,” Miz Ward agreed, in the soft, laconic way she had of speaking; such emotion as she might be feeling rarely was evident in her voice.
Miz Ward talked to Joel; Joel talked to Tricia. Being the two strongest ones, Tricia and Joel sometimes butted heads, got into arguments. But now they would need each other; Tommy would need them both. Joel and Miz Ward drove to Ada from Tulsa.
Tricia called Bud’s mother, Maxine, who lived ten blocks away on Seventeenth Street. The two sets of in-laws, the Wolfs and the Wards, were not close, did not always get along, but Maxine loved Tricia, her daughter-in-law, mother of three of her four grandchildren. Why, that’s crazy, Maxine told Tricia. Tommy wouldn’t do such a thing. Whenever she had met him, he had always been nice, polite. She was thinking, but not saying: unless he was on drugs, and it was the drugs that made him do it; you never knew what someone might do on drugs. But mostly not believing it.
When Maxine hung up the phone, it was Tricia she was concerned about. She telephoned Reverend Larry Jones, the preacher of their church, the Unity Missionary Baptist; the preacher went to Tricia’s house, to offer her such comfort as he could.
Tricia did not know much about the legal system, had never been in trouble that way. All she knew was that lawyers cost a lot. They would probably have to get o
ne of those public defenders, she thought—not knowing a technicality, that in Oklahoma there are public defenders only in the major cities; in the smaller towns the right-to-counsel for the poor is granted through court-appointed private attorneys.
She called some friends, spoke of Tommy’s plight; told them he said he didn’t do it, despite what the TV was saying about a confession. Don’t settle for a public defender, her friends told her. They’re not experienced, they don’t try very hard; that would be signing Tommy’s death warrant.
Bewildered, not knowing where to turn, Tricia called the office of the state attorney general in Oklahoma City. The advice was similar: in a capital case it would be better to hire a private attorney, if that were at all possible.
Tricia hung up, frightened. She did not see how that would be possible.
In its Wild West days, Ada had been renowned as an open city, a haven for outlaws. Belle Starr used to hang out in a hideaway called Devil’s Den, about thirty miles from Ada, a lichen-covered rock canyon that later would become a tourist attraction, a place for picnicking. According to legend, the Jesse James gang once held up the bank at Francis, a few miles northeast of Ada, and found only eleven dollars in it, and, encountering the sheriff as they were leaving, ridiculed the place for its slim pickings. Outlaws who had fled from the States into Indian Territory walked the streets of Ada with impunity. Until 1909. That year a local man named Gus Bobbitt was shot dead. Four itinerant outlaws were arrested for the murder. As the men were being held in the local jail, the citizens of Ada rose up in wrath. They stormed the jail, took out the men before they could be tried, and hanged them in a nearby barn. The lynching of the four suspects—Jim Miller, Joe Allen, B. B. Burwell, and Jesse West—is the moment in its history of which Ada is most proud. It was, in the words of a history book published by an Ada bank, “one mob action in America entirely justified in the eyes of God and man.” At the Ada Chamber of Commerce, situated in an old railroad depot on Main Street, there is available only one picture postcard of the town. It is a faded black-and-white photograph of the lynching: the four suspects clearly visible, dangling simultaneously from ropes affixed to the barn’s rafters, while in the background morning sun filters in over the heads of onlookers, and to the right, beside the dangling bodies, a white horse grazes peacefully.