The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  The man was C. L. Wolf, Bud Wolf’s father, Tricia’s father-in-law; an electrician by trade, a painter at Monday night art classes, a bowler on Wednesday nights, the proprietor of the small farm in Happyland that he was building with his wife, Maxine. C.L.—his full name was Charles Leo, as were Bud’s and Buddy’s, but nobody called any of them that—was fifty-seven, with gray hair and a quiet demeanor. He was not a member of the Rotary Club or of any civic group other than the Unity Baptist Church; a resident of Ada for thirty-five years, he was known only to his friends and business associates. But he was a vital cog in the life of the town, whose untouted skills enabled Ada to function.

  C.L. worked at Luton Motors, a long, dark machine shop set behind a parking area on Twelfth Street. In a small industrial town such as Ada, motors were visibly at the core of life: they ran the pumps in the oil fields, the machines in the factories, the generators at the power plant. Hardly a day went by when a motor—or five motors, or ten motors—did not burn out somewhere in town. C. L. Wolf was the only man in town who could fix them. In the long, dark shop he would hoist the motors by himself onto his work table; small motors might weigh ten or fifteen pounds; larger ones might weigh 250 pounds. Opening the motor, he would rip out the tangled mass of blackened, burned-out wire that was its core. He would take strands of gleaming new copper wire and thread them piece by piece into the motor’s heart, braiding them into the appropriate thicknesses. When the braiding was done, he would soak the motors in chemical solutions and varnishes, coating them, hardening the copper coils. Four or five hours of patient hand labor were required on every motor. Sometimes Solo Cup or Brockway or some other factory that operated around the clock wanted a burned-out motor repaired immediately. At those times, C.L. went home and wolfed down the supper that Maxine had prepared and then went back to the shop, telling her not to wait up; he worked alone through the night and waited for the motor to be picked up at six or eight in the morning; then he went home to get a few hours’ sleep. In thirty-five years he had rewound about fifteen thousand of the town’s motors.

  C.L. was not the owner of the shop; he was one of four employees, but the only one who could rewind motors. After thirty-five years he was still receiving humble wages, no paid vacations, no paid holidays; on those rare occasions when his work was caught up and there were no motors in the shop to rewind, he would be sent home, and would not be paid for his time until additional motors came in. The only fringe benefit known to exist at Luton Motors was that every year the boss bought several tickets to the annual Rotary Club pancake fry and gave them to his employees, so they could have a free pancake lunch.

  So it was that C.L. came to the firehouse and filled his plate and took the three butters from Dr. Haraway and sat on a metal folding chair and began to eat. As he did, he recalled how he and Jack Haraway had grown up together in a town called Atoka, fifty miles south of Ada; how they had played football together. It was during the Second World War, and after graduation C.L. joined the Army Air Corps, went off to be a radio operator in the South Pacific. After the war, in 1950, he moved to Ada, because his parents had, and went to work for Luton Motors. At about the same time, Jack Haraway completed dental school and opened his office in Ada; eventually he acquired a large house east of town, and became active in church and civic affairs.

  The two men, despite their boyhood together, had never become friends in Ada. When they passed on the street, they would nod. C.L. well knew who Jack Haraway was, but the dentist usually acted as if he could not quite place C.L.

  As he drank his coffee, people passing among the tables said hello to him, and he said hello back. He knew a lot of the pancake eaters through the motor shop.

  “Most everybody in town has motors,” he said. “Even dentists have motors. On their drills, you know.”

  He did not recall Dr. Haraway ever sending him a motor to be fixed.

  That same afternoon, the first day of spring, Bud Wolf, on vacation from the feed mill to allow Tricia to rest, needed to get out of the house for a time. He decided to take a brief hike: to go look at the site where, in his taped statement, Karl Fontenot said he and Tommy and Odell Titsworth had raped and killed Denice Haraway and burned her body.

  Bud knew the area well. He and Tommy used to go hunting there often, years ago. They had been close then, when he and Tricia were newly married and Tommy was growing into his teens. Tommy had become for a time the brother that Bud never had. (He had one sister, who’d left Ada years ago.) Bud had become Tommy’s idol; unlike Tommy’s brothers, Bud didn’t treat him as a runt.

  It was a gray day, with intermittent drizzle. Bud drove his old green Pontiac to the edge of town and parked beside the power plant just outside the city limits, at the very spot where, on the tape, which Bud had seen at the preliminary hearing, Tommy had said they parked that night. As Bud got out of the car, his boots sank into mud made thick and soft by several days of rain. He opened a gate in a wooden fence, closed it behind him, began to follow a double path of tire tracks down a sloping meadow of wild grass and underbrush studded with thickets of trees.

  As he slogged through the wet grass, Bud recalled pleasant days of hunting here with Tommy, hunting rabbits, squirrels, coons, doves. He came to Sandy Creek, swollen and muddy now, and recalled that one time as they walked along, Tommy, about twenty feet ahead of him, still a boy, had seen a cottonmouth water moccasin, about six feet long, an inch and a half across. Tommy had begun jumping up and down on the snake, yelling, “Shoot him, Bud! Shoot him!”

  “Get away from him,” Bud had yelled, but Tommy had kept jumping on the snake as it slithered toward the water, jumping up and down on it and yelling, “Shoot him, Bud!”

  Finally the snake had slithered into the water and gotten away, and Tommy had wailed, “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “Because you were riding the thing,” Bud replied, “because if I shot, I would have killed you.”

  Tricia had been there, too, hiding behind a tree far from the snake, and for months afterward they laughed at Tommy, and called him “the snake rider.”

  Another time, Bud remembered as he walked along, looking for the burned-out house, he had shot a snake, and he and Tommy had run to it and cut off its head; and as they did, a frog’s leg began to move in the opening. There was a lump in the snake, and it moved toward the opening and crawled out: a frog that the snake had just eaten, a frog that was still alive, that Bud’s shot seemed to have saved. But after crawling a few feet away, the frog, too, died, its belly punctured by the same .22 shot that had killed the snake.

  Recalling the times that he and Tommy had shared, Bud admitted to himself, or took upon himself, a burden of guilt: the feeling that if only he had stayed close to Tommy, his brother-in-law might not be in this mess. But Tommy had gotten in with a bad crowd, with drug users, and they had drifted apart.

  Bud paused, looked around. It had been years since he’d been out this way. He couldn’t find the house. Then he remembered that it was on a hill. Tricia used to say she would like to live in that house because it was high up with a view of the highway but was also isolated. He climbed over a barbed-wire fence and to the top of the hill behind it. There he found the remains of the house.

  The spot held pleasant memories. In the days when the house was standing, abandoned, Bud used to station himself in front of it to shoot at doves. When he missed, and the doves wheeled about in the sky above the trees, Tommy, standing behind the house, would get a shot at them.

  Now there was no house left, just a foot-high foundation, filled with rubble, fragments of burned wood, a broken old stove. A few inches above the ground, the foundation was sectioned into quarters by thin white string, placed there by the police when they searched it in October for evidence, for some proof that Karl’s and Tommy’s “confessions” were true. The string was still intact. On a tree about a hundred feet away, bright yellow ribbons fluttered: also placed there by the police, as a marker, five months earlier.

  In his
tape, Tommy had said Odell Titsworth carried Denice Haraway here from the power plant. According to a story in the Ada News, Denice Haraway weighed 110 pounds. Bud thought: I couldn’t carry Rhonda this far. Heck, I couldn’t carry Laura Sue this far.

  He looked at the rubble in the corner of the house where, Karl had said, they burned the body. Police had gone over the area with a metal detector, looking for dental fillings. All they had found were rusty nails, which lay haphazardly now where the police had tossed them, outside the foundation of the house.

  The place, with its curious strings, had the undeniable feel of a murder scene—except that the police had found no evidence here of a murder.

  Bud looked farther through the rubble. Near the rear had been a room that had been tiled. A mound of broken tiles was all that remained. Atop the mound, washed clean by the rain that still was falling, was a curved fragment, about an inch and a half wide. Painted in the broken tile, against a soft white background, was a lovely pink rose.

  The first pretrial hearing in the case of the State of Oklahoma versus Tommy Ward, following his March 4 arraignment, was held on March 21. His mother and his brother Joel drove down from Tulsa, leaving at four in the morning, to be present in the courtroom. Dorothy Hogue of the Ada News sat in the first row, taking notes. Alone at the prosecution table, District Attorney Peterson browsed through lawbooks, chewing on the end of a black pen. Attorneys Wyatt and Addicott arrived, carrying books and folders. The court reporter, Hugh Brasher, took his place beside the bench, and then Judge Ronald Jones arrived, also laden with lawbooks, and took his place. The spectator section was empty, because this would be a day for technical motions only. For the same reason, the defendant was not required in the courtroom; Tommy Ward this day would not get forty-three steps of fresh air.

  The court convened at 9:45 A.M., fifteen minutes late. The hearing lasted two hours and five minutes. Little of substance was decided. Wyatt and Addicott, taking turns, argued their case on eleven motions they had filed with the court.

  The major motions requested a separation of the trials of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot; a separate trial for Tommy Ward on each of the three counts remaining against him: armed robbery, kidnapping, and murder; a change of venue because of pretrial publicity; a request for state funds to pay for a psychologist or psychiatrist to examine the defendant; a request for examination at a state mental hospital; a motion to suppress certain statements made at the preliminary hearing, on the ground that on October 25 Don Wyatt had been prevented by the police from visiting his client in jail. On all of these the judge requested written briefs to be submitted to the court by April 1. He would then give the prosecution ten days, till April 11, to respond with its own written briefs.

  Two other motions involved requests that the prospective jurors be questioned individually, out of earshot of the others, about their opinions on the death penalty; and that the jury be sequestered during the trial. The judge said he would rule on these motions at the time of the trial.

  On only one motion did the judge issue a ruling that day. The defense had requested that he declare the death penalty unconstitutional, as cruel and unusual punishment. The judge noted that the United States Supreme Court had already decided that issue. Mike Addicott argued that the Supreme Court had been “flip-flopping” on the issue, and might change its mind again next year. The judge overruled the motion.

  Only a few comments during the two-hour hearing seemed noteworthy: Regarding the tapes, the district attorney said, “We have confessions in which each defendant admits his guilt.” To which the defense replied that the confessions had not been given “freely and voluntarily,” that they had been “illegally obtained by coercion by the police, the investigators reciting to the defendants their beliefs about what happened and then asking the defendants, ‘That’s what happened, isn’t it?’…It’s clear from the inconsistencies [on the tapes] that these people weren’t even there.”

  At one point Judge Jones asked if there would be a defense of insanity. “We don’t know at this point,” Don Wyatt replied. “Not at this moment.”

  When the defense said it would need transcripts of the preliminary hearing in order to argue some of its motions, the court reporter said, when asked by the judge, that the transcripts would not be ready until early May. The judge seemed upset by the delays in bringing the case to trial. He looked at the defense attorneys.

  “We are not urging a speedy trial,” Don Wyatt said.

  The district attorney was hoping that physical evidence against the defendants—perhaps even Denice Haraway’s body—would turn up in the months that now still lay before a trial. The defense, apparently unafraid of this, believed that the more time that passed between the disappearance of Denice Haraway and the trial of Tommy Ward, the more time there was for public passions to cool—as, indeed, they seemed to be doing—the better the chance that Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot might be acquitted.

  That night, on Ada’s one local television station, KTEN, the anchorwoman reported on both the six and ten-thirty newscasts about a hearing “in the death”—not the disappearance—of a local convenience store clerk. The station showed film of Tommy Ward, in his prison whites, with his hands cuffed behind him, walking from the jail to the courthouse, then back again. Superimposed on the film was the word “today.” The only problem with the showing of the film was that Tommy Ward had not been in the courtroom—had not left the jail—that day.

  To the Ward family, the newscast was one more example of a determination by the media to help convict Tommy.

  More likely, it was simply small-town journalistic incompetence: bad reporting; loose use of file film.

  The impact, however, might be the same.

  Don Wyatt still did not know what his defense of Tommy Ward would be. He felt that he would have to put Ward on the witness stand, in an attempt to refute the prosecution’s taped confession. But he knew that because of the many lies that Tommy had been telling, the district attorney could easily rip apart his credibility.

  Affidavits had not yet been taken from the witnesses who could give Tommy an alibi. Robert Cavins had been under pressure from the corrections department, for which he now worked, not to be certain in his testimony about which night that weekend he had found Tommy asleep at 11:20. Robert had been threatened with the loss of his job if he did not agree to be interviewed by the OSBI about his knowledge of the case, without an attorney being present. He had agreed to do so. An affidavit was needed, as well, from Willie Barnett about the time the family said Willie had spent with Tommy on the crucial night.

  Wyatt decided that what was needed was a meeting of all prospective witnesses for the defense. Following the hearing on March 21, in a parking lot across the street from the courthouse, he told Joel and Miz Ward to pick a day on which all members of the family who had anything to say relevant to Tommy’s defense could get together, along with any other witnesses they knew of, such as Willie Barnett, and he would meet with them.

  Wyatt was feeling pinched by the poverty of the Ward family. The $3,000 retainer was almost gone. He wanted to hire an investigator to follow up on possible leads that Tommy and the family had mentioned. But he did not want to spend his own or the firm’s money to do it. He wanted to win the case, but he was not in the charity business; he had sometimes done charity work in his younger days; but he felt he was too old for that now. He wanted more cash to use in Tommy’s defense.

  He got word of this to Tricia, who relayed it to Miz Ward and Joel. The afternoon of the hearing, while Tricia rested on the sofa, trying to preserve her pregnancy, Joel and Miz Ward went to a finance agency to try to mortgage the house and the land it stood on. They asked for $20,000.

  There were legal problems, they were told. The house and the land had belonged to Jesse Ward, and when he died six years before, it had not been probated. Legal work was necessary before clear title could be established and a loan be given.

  The lawyers were set to work on the problem. Jo
el and Miz Ward drove back to Tulsa to await developments.

  On Ninth Street, the telephone was ringing. Bud answered it, frowned, cupped his hand over the receiver. He turned to Tricia.

  “Do you want to talk to Lisa?” he asked.

  Tricia was hesitant, afraid. She’d had no contact with Lisa Lawson for a long time. She was afraid the district attorney had talked to Lisa, had learned of Tommy’s rage the night they had split up, was afraid he would put Lisa on the stand as a witness against Tommy, to testify to his violent temper, to suggest he might well have killed Denice Haraway. Reluctantly, Tricia took the phone.

  The call was not what she had feared. Lisa Lawson Smith merely said she wanted to be friends; she said she believed Tommy was innocent, that he could never do such a thing, that even in his rage she knew he would never hurt her. She wished Tommy well.

  Tricia debated about the note from Tommy to Lisa: whether to tell Lisa about it, whether to give it to her. It was an odd coincidence, Lisa calling out of the blue, just a few days after Tommy’s love note to her arrived. Tricia decided not to mention the note; there was no point. Lisa was a married woman now. Why stir up old feelings?

  She did not know what to do with the note. She decided to give it to Miz Ward, for her to decide. The question was whether to tell Tommy, now, that Lisa was married, and have him face reality; or to let him, alone in his jail cell, hold on to his fantasy.