The Puppeteer: The Tragedy of the Fifteen Days

By A. L. Provost

In wartime 1943 small towns along the North Carolina Coastal Plain were invaded by many thousands of Marines from Camp Lejeune and soldiers from Ft. Bragg.
Cheap motels, cheaper booze, easy sex and young men with uncertain futures disrupted the life of rural Lenoir County. However, civilians and soldiers got along.
That is, until a soldier hired a Marine to murder the soldiers beautiful wife, and in a tragic case of mistaken identity the Marine murdered his co-conspirators teenage daughter. Then the situation changed.
Set against the backdrop of the wartime small-town South, The Puppeteer is a classic tale of murder for hire, mistaken identity, cunning betrayal and exacting revenge, during a period that came to be known as The Fifteen Days in the Summer of 1943.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 30, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465331106

A. L. Provost

The author, an attorney and optometrist, resides outside Atlanta with his wife Evelyn, an attorney, their four talented children having gone on to careers in Optometry, real estate and teaching. In May 1961 the author received an undergraduate degree in Physics-Mathematics from Berry College, and in July of that year enlisted in the U. S. Army. He served two tours of duty in South Korea, the last with U. S. Army Intelligence as a Korean linguist and prisoner interrogator. In 1972 Dr. Provost was awarded the degree of Doctor of Optometry from the University of Houston, and in 1980 earned a Juris Doctor degree from Nova Southeastern University College of Law. Dr. Provost is the author of the best-selling memoir, Reflections in an Orphan’s Eye, The Puppeteer, a mystery novel of the wartime South, and thirteen other mystery novels.

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THE PUPPETEER

The Tragedy of The Fifteen Days

A. L. PROVOST

Copyright © 2006 by A. L. Provost.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

EPILOGUE

To the memory of my parents, Ben and Nina Provost, and

To the memory of my brother, Norwood E. Doc

Provost-friend and advisor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some valuable advice: Steer clear of the author who claims he did it all by himself. Didn’t happen.

To name just a few: To lifelong friend Betty Jean Johnson, for her assistance in researching and compiling facts and photographs. To Heritage Place, Lenoir Community College, for the use of photographs, and to Sharon Moss for her efforts in this regard. To Assistant Chief Annette Boyd of the Kinston Department of Public Safety (the old Kinston Police Department), for her research and the use of photographs.

Special thanks to Harry Conlon, my literary advisor and friend. Take a bow, Harry!

And a special word to Amanda Johnson, my valuable literary assistant, proofreader, confidante, and giver of advice-some of it unsolicited but all of it priceless. Thanks, Amanda.

And finally, my gratitude to The Maker, for the blunt end of my No. 2 yellow. Without that oversized eraser this book forever would have remained an unfinished manuscript.

The Author

FOREWORD

Successful writers advise us to write about what we know. My first published book was entitled Reflections in an Orphan’s Eye, a 620-page memoir.

Within two months after publication, the book had jumped to the No. 5 position on the publisher’s list of its Top Ten Royalty Earning Books. I was ecstatic. Still am.

So here I am, back for seconds, again writing about what I know. I was born in Kinston, North Carolina, in my home at 208 East Bright Street, on April 30, 1939. This story takes place in 1943 and 1944 in Kinston, Jacksonville and the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base.

At that time I was four (1943) and five (1944) years old. I enjoyed Saturday afternoon B-western matinees at the Paramount picture show house on Queen Street, waiting in the ticket line along with uniformed Marines from Camp Lejeune.

After the picture show I would head south on Queen Street to the landmark Standard Drug Store, where I would slurp sodas shamelessly, courtesy of these same Marines, I being unaware that I was serving as a stand-in for their own younger brothers back in their hometowns, while sitting at one of the flimsy ice cream tables, reading the true (to me at least) exciting exploits of my very real heroes Clark Kent, Billy Batson, Bruce Wayne and others, in funny books-that I had neither the money nor the inclination to pay for.

My five brothers, my sister and I attended Lewis Elementary and Grainger High School, and each summer looked forward to the unique aroma of flue-cured Bright Leaf tobacco that fell in bits and pieces from the always overloaded tobacco trucks on their way to the massive tobacco auction warehouses over off West Caswell Street.

This mystery novel set in the wartime South is of course pure fiction. However, the backdrop to the story is very real indeed, and I have endeavored to render the tale more interesting by including photographs of the various settings in which the story takes place.

My parents and my maternal and paternal grandparents are buried in Maplewood Cemetery, along with many historic figures from Kinston’s interesting past. And as I discussed in my Reflections in an Orphan’s Eye, the imposing Lenoir County Courthouse and the Kinston police station are to me very real indeed.

After making several changes to the storyline and correcting (lots of) grammar and punctuation errors, I sat down and read the manuscript one final time before sending it to the publisher.

By the time I reached the last page I was all choked up. The characters had become too real to me. Should The Puppeteer affect you in a similar manner, then I feel I have done my job well. Enjoy the story; it’s a good one.

The Author

PROLOGUE

Yesterday the Puppeteer died.

And last night I dreamed it was 1943 again. And in my dream all the puppets, good and bad, who had been players in that wartime Southern tragedy, were asking me if I could make the nagging, lingering shame and hatred of the past go away.

And in my dream I refused them all their requests. Because their hurt had been my hurt, their shame my shame, their loss my loss.

And if I could not come to terms with my own inadequacies, and cause my own anguish to disappear, how could I, a mere puppet myself, possibly save them?

For like the others, I had been manipulated at will by the Puppeteer.

And I will take the hurt, the heartache, the uncertainty and pain with me. They will follow me to my gibbet. This was the promise I made a week ago, when after two decades the Puppeteer confessed to me the secrets that controlled the events better known as The Fifteen Days in the Summer of 1943.

CHAPTER 1

The Setting

From the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition:

Kinston. A city of east-central North Carolina southeast of Raleigh. It is a tobacco market. Population 25, 234.

Jacksonville. A city of eastern North Carolina near the Atlantic Ocean north-northeast of Wilmington. Population 18, 237.

From Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language:

Camp Lejeune. A U. S. Marine Corps base in southeast North Carolina southeast of Jacksonville on Onslow Bay.

If one places a straightedge on a map of North Carolina, with the left end lying on U. S. 70 just aways south of Raleigh, and using a new, just-sharpened No.2 yellow, draws a straight line toward the coast at Morehead City, conceding a shallow hock of a dogleg east of New Bern, the line will trace the route Raleigh-Goldsboro-Kinston-New Bern-Morehead City-Atlantic Ocean.

This southeasterly route traverses a region designated the North Carolina Coastal Plain, but what for nigh onto two centuries the astute(?) locals have referred to as tobacco, or scrub pine, country.

Giving geologists and eighteenth-century jackleg cartologists their due, the indigenous population always has contended there are two North Carolinas, the magnificent, awe-inspiring grandeur of the mountainous and heavily-forested wilderness that is western North Carolina, and the rest of North Carolina, the other part, that of scrub pine and tobacco fields, that provides the backdrop to our tale.

Scrub pine is a scraggly pine tree with prickly cones and drooping or spreading branches, a depressing sight indeed when contrasted with the glorious longleaf pine of western North Carolina, a quite statuesque tree with long needles in bundles of three and long cones.

Image4516.TIF

Place Locator-Kinston

1. Lenoir County Courthouse

2. Standard Drug Store

3. Paramount Picture Show

4. Kinston Police Station

5. Pulley’s Barbecue

6. Grainger High School

7. Tobacco Auction Warehouses

8. Maplewood Cemetery

9. Tiffany Street Baptist Church

10. Barnett Residence

11. Griffin-Martin Residence

12. Duncan Residence

13. Parrott Residence

14. Kinston Bus Station

Map of Kinston, North Carolina

Image4526.TIF

A caravan of a dozen always-overloaded tobacco trucks heading north on Queen Street, on their way to the massive auction warehouse on Herritage Street (Courtesy of Heritage Place, Lenoir Community College.)

Image4536.TIF

Women at work in the hanger room of tobacco stemming and redrying plant in Kinston. (Photo from the North Carolina Collection, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Image4544.TIF

Kinston’s tobacco warehouses, such as the Eagle Warehouse, were successful in establishing the area as one of the best tobacco marketing centers in eastern North Carolina. (Courtesy of Heritage Place, Lenoir Community College.)

Image4557.TIF

The Central Warehouse was Kinston’s third warehouse operated by Benjamin May and J. F. Berry. It was located on the corner of Herritage Street and North Street. (Courtesy of Heritage Place, Lenoir Community College)

vIt is believed to be the consensus among historians and theologians alike (both groups claiming to possess expertise on the subject) that in reality heaven is a place on earth called North Carolina, and that long before that lovely land was called The Old North State or The Tarheel State, it was known affectionately among the angels as God’s Country. Except for the other part, that is.

In Durham County in northeast-central North Carolina, the Flat and Eno rivers merge to form the broad and deep Neuse River. Named for the Neusiok Indians, the river meanders slowly for about three hundred miles in a southeasterly direction toward the Atlantic Ocean. The Neuse becomes navigable as it flows generally southeast past Kinston.

In 1740 William Heritage founded a planters’ trading post on the Neuse River, and the fast-growing settlement was incorporated as Kingston in 1762. The town prospered, and following the Revolutionary War, zealous patriots, in a fitting show of disdain for their former English rulers and King George III in particular, reincorporated the town, dropping the g (and by now the despised King George III) to give us Kinston. Early Kinstonians apparently were a patriotic, unforgiving, vindictive and spiteful lot. God bless their defiance.

Kinston’s north-south main street was appropriately named Queen Street, and was bisected in the center of town by King Street. Richard Caswell, the first governor of North Carolina, lived in Kinston, and was one of the town’s original trustees. He served two terms as governor, the first from 1776 to 1780, and again from 1784 to 1787.

The Neuse, a Confederate ironclad gunboat better known as a ram, was constructed in Kinston. The boat was sunk by its crew in 1865, as fierce fighting between Union and Confederate forces raged in and around Kinston. The Neuse’s hull was raised in 1963, and the boat has been designated a state historic site.

Several decisive Civil War battles were fought in and around Kinston, which was a strategic railway depot on the way to the important Confederate naval base at Wilmington.

In December 1862, a Union Army force consisting of 10,000 infantry, 640 cavalry and 40 light artillery pieces under the command of Major General John G. Foster, defeated the Confederate forces at Kinston, and control of the town changed hands several times after that date.

In March 1865, during the final Union Army assault on Wilmington, General William T. Sherman’s army of 80,000 men defeated the forces of Confederate General Baxton Bragg and General Robert F. Hoke, forcing the Confederate forces to abandon Kinston. General Bragg was actually rewarded for suffering this final, inglorious defeat by having named in his honor the largest army installation in the world, Ft. Bragg. Apparently North Carolinians still give points for trying.

Lenoir County was created in 1791 from the old Dobbs County. It was named in honor of William Lenoir, a hero of the bloody and decisive Revolutionary War Battle of King’s Mountain near what is today Charlotte, North Carolina. The good guys won that one.

When Kinston was established in 1762 it was still in Dobbs County. Kinston became the county seat of Dobbs County in 1764, and when Lenoir County was formed in 1791, the town became the county seat of Lenoir County.

In 1943 Kinston was just another sleepy Southern town of less than twenty thousand inhabitants. Some of these citizens were engaged in farming and growing cotton, but tobacco remained king in Lenoir County. Harvesting the precious golden leaf during the day, running moonshine down U. S. 70 at night. What a life!

On the northeast corner of Queen Street and King Street stood the historic Lenoir County Courthouse. The Kinston Police Department was located on West Bright Street, two blocks west of Queen Street.

In 1943 Kinston’s main street, the north-south Queen Street, was known by other names as well. From Snow Hill north of town, Highway 58 came south and quickly yielded to Queen Street just inside the city limits.

At the intersection of Vernon Avenue, Queen Street picked up U. S. Highway 70 coming east from Raleigh and Goldsboro.

U. S. 70/U. S. 258 and Highway 58 turned south on Queen Street until they crossed the Neuse River Bridge, in an area the locals called The Bottom, because the land was quite low and tended to flood during periods of heavy rainfall.

Just south of this landmark bridge, U. S. 258 took a gradual southwesterly route toward Jacksonville, while U. S. 70 continued its southeasterly meander toward New Bern, Morehead City and the Atlantic Ocean.

Some thirty miles due south of Kinston, U. S. Highway 258 veered east onto State Road 24, and after twenty or so miles this well-worn two-lane macadam reached Jacksonville. You were now near the coast and into some pretty desolate marshland. You really wouldn’t want to live there. Nor visit even.

Between Jacksonville and Onslow Bay lay the sprawling 110,000 acres of swarming mosquitos and snake-infested desolation known as the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base. Until the base was renamed, on December 20, 1942, it had been known as Marine Barracks, New River. The New River splits the sprawling base into east and west sections.

If God had chosen to personify the Carolinas as a man, surely Camp Lejeune would be its left armpit.

And any grunt who has survived a summer of boot camp or infantry training in both places, would likely not disagree that Parris Island, located down the road aways in the South Carolina swamplands, would be the matching armpit. It can give a civilian an instant attack of diarrhea just driving through either of these wretched hellholes.

The Time

Despite the debilitating economic effects of The Great Depression, life in small-town North Carolina was simple. That is, until Pearl Harbor.

On December 7, 1941 the Japanese launched their surprise attack, hitting Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya and Thailand. The following day the Anglo-Americans declared war on Japan.

Seemed as though God had loaded the world onto a giant rollercoaster, set the speed on runaway, released the clutch, and walked away for four years.

At the end of December 1941, the federal government issued an order forbidding the sale of new tires anywhere in the country. And on May 15, 1942 gasoline rationing began, not so much because gasoline was in short supply, rather, gasoline rationing would save rubber used in the manufacture of tires.

Also in 1942 the War Production Board (WPB) prohibited the further manufacture of automobiles for private use, and the same year drastically restricted the construction of new private homes.

In the summer of 1942, the U. S. government instituted rationing and price controls throughout the nation. These measures were considered equitable because they prevented those with the financial means to do so, from scooping up those goods and materials for which the war effort created shortages.

Because the military required sufficient amounts of cotton and wool to clothe its troops (including 64 million flannel shirts, 165 million coats, and 229 million pairs of trousers), the shortage of cloth available to civilians led to shorter skirts, rising several inches above the knees, and to the creation of a new two-piece bathing suit.

Each man, woman and child in the United States monthly was issued a book of ration stamps, and each essential item in short supply was assigned a price in points. The stamps in the ration book, that was worth forty-eight points each month, could be spent on any combination of goods, including meat, butter, canned vegetables, sugar and shoes.

In early 1942 the U. S. government greatly expanded its food and materiel storage facilities at the Cherry Point Marine Air Station, located near the North Carolina coast.

During World War II, United States Marines brought recognition and honor to The Corps, and tens of thousands of these young Marines, fresh from boot camp at Parris Island, received their advanced training at the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base south of Jacksonville.

On August 7, 1942 the American First Marine Division landed on several islands in the Pacific Ocean Solomons chain, and the Marines engaged the Japanese forces on the island of Guadalcanal.

For longer than six months the Marines held their ground in often fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the Seventeenth Japanese Army, until in February 1943 the Japanese Imperial Army, having lost more then 20,000 men, retreated to the island of Bougainville.

During this decisive six-month long campaign, the First Marine Division lost slightly more than a thousand men, a testament to the superior training and bravery of American Marines.

Such was the level and gravity of the state of preparedness at Camp Lejeune in the beginning of 1943, and it is this time period and place that provide the backdrop to this Southern Shakespearean tragedy.

The Parrott Family

Ben Parrott was born in 1905 in the small sandbar of sand fiddler-infested beach on the coast of North Carolina called Swansboro. Founded in 1730, the tiny village’s claim to fame appears to be, of all things, its drinking water.

Generations of the area’s inhabitants firmly believe that water flowing from any spigot (that the locals pronounce spiikit) in the world must smell like rotten eggs, thanks to the sulphur that contaminated the water supply along the coast.

Ben Parrott married a young girl named Nina Kellum. She was a petite, pretty, auburn-haired woman about five-foot-two, with an engaging smile and an easy walk.

Nina Kellum Parrott had more cousins than you could shake a stick at. They were mostly named Kellum, and a smattering of the females also were named Nina. The first time Ben told his friends in nearby Jacksonville that he was going steady with a pretty girl named Nina Kellum, his friends immediately asked, Which one? Poor Ben Parrott.

And it appeared that all of Nina’s cousins, male as well as female, were pretty, petite, auburn-haired and about five-foot-two, to the point that, to residents and outsiders alike, the area appeared to be one really large pool of incest.

In the vicinity of Jacksonville lay two flyspecks on a Texaco road map, one called Kellum and down the road aways was Kellumtown. Somewhere between these two villages is probably located the famous Kellum Gene Pool, with little petite, pretty, auburn-haired male and female Kellums splashing around in the pool, even in the dead of winter. But then again, in an area of the country where the words when and what are polysyllables, we won’t expect a lot.

After Ben Parrott graduated high school in Jacksonville, he attended a two-year trade school in Raleigh to learn what was referred to at the time as the cooling trade, the rudiments of the trade that one day would be called refrigeration systems.

Except that during the twenties, thirties and most of the forties, a refrigerator was indeed an almost unattainable luxurious oddity in the South and elsewhere. Foods requiring a lower temperature in order to prevent spoilage were stored in an icebox.

After graduation from the trade school in Raleigh, Ben Parrott accepted the position as manager of the only ice plant in the growing town of Kinston, and in 1939 moved his family to town and rented a three bedroom white-painted wood frame house on West Washington Avenue, near the corner of Mitchell Street, two blocks from Queen Street, Kinston’s main street. And nearly every street in Kinston was paved.

In 1939 Ben and Nina’s growing family of four boys included John, age sixteen, the twins Bill and Doc, age thirteen, and Al, age ten.

In the 1940’s Kinston, North Carolina’s claim to fame was that some forward-thinking genius, convinced that the general public would believe anything as long as it was in print, and furthermore, that the certainty of such belief would likely be directly proportional to the size of the printed material, constructed huge billboards along the highways leading into town proclaiming proudly, KINSTON-WORLD’S FOREMOST TOBACCO CENTER.

And it worked like a charm. Before the billboards had been up a year, if a Kinstonian happened to be in Raleigh, or New York, or London, or even Moscow, and someone asked him where he was from, the vacuous farm person from Lenoir County would immediately smile broadly, his chest girth would increase about six inches, and he would announce to the questioner (and to anyone within a hundred yard radius), Kinston, World’s Foremost Tobacco Center.

Kinstonians are God’s living proof that one can be nice and polite without necessarily being intelligent and insightful.

Those country bumpkins astute enough not to be bamboozled by such obvious hype, and the scrub pine clodhoppers whose I. Q.s hovered in the vicinity of their normal body temperatures, took solace in the belief that at least Kinston was a better known tobacco center than Snow Hill, New Bern or Goldsboro. Or Moscow.

And because of this love affair with the golden leaf, there were more meanings to the Lucky Strike cigarette slogan, L. S. M. F. T. in Lenoir County than anywhere else along the North Carolina Coastal Plain, beginning with lucky sailors and loose brassieres, and extending as far as their limited monosyllable-filled word banks would allow.

But then again in 1943 a goodly percentage of the adult population of Lenoir County likely believed that incest was a small, boll weevil-type bug that crawled underneath bed sheets at night, and pornography appeared to be nothing more then a Southern cornpone mispronunciation of the word photography.

The Parrott family moved to Kinston in June 1939, and quickly discovered that the uncanny Southern art of transforming short words like yes and how into the polysyllables yayees and hayow had preceded their move from Swansboro by about two centuries.

World War II started in December 1941, and in May 1942 Ben Parrott resigned his position as manager of Kinston’s ice plant, and began working as a civil service employee at Cherry Point, with the impressive job description of refrigeration engineer.

Several other men from Kinston worked at Cherry Point, and the government bus picked them up every morning at five o’clock in front of the Standard Drug Store on the corner of Queen Street and Caswell Street.

In the fall of 1941, at age eleven, Al Parrott attended Lewis Elementary School, on the corner of East Peyton Avenue and Independence Street. He walked south one block, turned left on Peyton Avenue, crossed the wide Queen Street (Kinston’s north-south main street), crossed McLewean Street and at the next corner, where Peyton meets Independence, he crossed the expansive dirt playground and entered Lewis Elementary School.

Al’s seventeen-year-old brother John, and the twins Doc and Bill, age fifteen, walked east from their home on West Washington Avenue, crossed Queen and McLewean, turned left on Independence, crossed Lenoir Avenue and Vernon Avenue, before arriving at the imposing Grainger High School, that appeared all the more impressive because the school had been built atop the highest land elevation in the area.

Michael and Sarah Barnett

Michael and Sarah Barnett had been childhood sweethearts while growing up in Durham, North Carolina during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Sarah liked to tell her girlfriends that she and Mike were meant for each other.

And even after Sarah contracted polio at age sixteen, and since that time had worn cumbersome metal braces on her left arm and left leg, she and Mike were a couple. They were in love.

After high school Sarah took a clerk’s job at the local five-and-dime in Durham, and lived with her family, while Mike attended Duke University.

The year before Mike graduated from Duke University Divinity School, he and Sarah finally tied the knot, and the couple set up housekeeping in the home of Mike’s parents.

Upon graduation from Divinity School, Mike was offered the position of pastor at the small but growing Tiffany Street Baptist Church in Kinston, because the long-time pastor, the Reverend Donald Cutts, was retiring due to increasingly failing health.

The couple moved to Kinston, where they set up housekeeping in the church rectory, a twenty-year-old, three-bedroom, one-bath brick home on Tiffany Street, located adjacent to the church.

Citing Sarah’s illness, and with the knowledge that doctors had cautioned her that as she aged, the physically debilitating effects of the polio could become much worse, Michael informed Sarah that he was not interested in the couple having children.

The angst-producing polio epidemic was in full force in 1943, and the dread of contracting the deadly virus was as real in the small town of Kinston, North Carolina as anywhere else in the nation.

Poliomyelitis, that everyone just called polio, is a virus that causes the disease infantile paralysis. This lightning-fast crippling condition results in deformation of the bodies of mainly children and young adults.

The polio virus is transmitted via water contaminated with fecal material. The virus enters the body through the mouth, multiplies in the intestines, and then migrates to the central nervous system. The virus results in inflamed nerves in the brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis of the chest, legs and arms.

The dreadful polio could cripple a child overnight, leaving his limbs limp and useless, and the epidemic years, that began in 1916 and were still going strong in 1943, were filled with a widespread and quite intense paranoia among the children and young adults in Kinston. Just one case of polio in a town could lead to the immediate closing of municipal swimming pools and school playgrounds.

The polio epidemic in the United States began in 1916. It was not until 1943 that a vaccine, consisting of killed-virus influenza and developed by Dr. Jonas Salk and Thomas Francis, proved successful in clinical trials.

Those unfortunates suffering chest paralysis were confined to a Drinker respirator, the seemingly ever-present iron lung. This frightful metal cylinder encased the entire body save the head, exerting a push-pull motion on the patient’s chest to aid in breathing.

In the early forties there existed no specific cure (or really effective treatment) for infantile paralysis, and twenty-five percent of those afflicted with the disease sustained permanent disability including muscle atrophy.

Mercifully young Sarah had been spared the chest paralysis form of the dreaded disease, and thus escaped being trapped for years in a Drinker respirator.

However, Sarah did suffer the ongoing debilitating effects of muscle atrophy, and could not move about without the aid of cumbersome and heavy metal braces on her left arm and left leg, with the additional aid of a metal crutch.

Equally as devastating to Sarah’s mental well-being was the social stigma attached to her disease. If the neighborhood teenagers observed Sarah walking down the street, or shopping in a grocery store, they always greeted her and asked if they could help her get across the street safely or carry her groceries home for her.

With a ready smile and a lighthearted giggle the preacher’s wife always declined offers of assistance. Sarah Barnett was a brave, kindhearted Southern Lady in the truest sense of the word, and everybody in town loved her.

However, Sarah’s marriage was another side of the coin.

Michael’s decision to forego raising a family had a predictable, quite negative impact on the couple’s marriage.

Over the next few years their relationship continued to steadily deteriorate, and although the couple rarely argued openly or even disagreed, the spark of desire that had initially ignited their love in youth became but a dying mound of charred and rapidly cooling embers.

Unfortunately, as happens so often as such relationships decline, Mike and Sarah, without discussion, simply drifted farther apart.

Mary Griffin

Mary Griffin was born in the small coastal town of Morehead City, North Carolina, the only child of Horace and Mary Lou Griffin. The quiet, friendly girl started high school the same year Michael Barnett became the new pastor at Tiffany Street Baptist Church.

Six years later, while the marriage of Mike and Sarah Barnett was in its quiet but final death throes, Mary Griffin graduated from the University of North Carolina, and accepted a job as the fourth grade teacher at Lewis Elementary School in Kinston.

Mary Griffin had been raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, and growing up in the small town of Morehead City, her parents rarely allowed her to date. So when Mary moved to Kinston, and with another female teacher rented a two-bedroom, one-bath wood frame house on Towerhill Road, she became backyard neighbors to a ruggedly-handsome, dark-haired man over six feet tall, probably ten years older than she, who lived in the brick house adjacent to the church with a slow-moving, apparently older woman who had been afflicted with polio.

On her first Sunday in town, the shy, five-foot-six, large-busted, sexy-looking though not exactly beautiful brunette walked up the front steps of the Tiffany Street Baptist Church, where she was met, much to her pleasant surprise, by the strikingly handsome dark-haired man.

Sensing her discomfiture, the tall man smiled down at Mary’s suddenly flushed face and introduced himself as Pastor Michael Barnett. Twenty-two-year-old Mary Griffin fell in love at the front door of the church.

The Baptist preacher likewise was smitten at the first sight of the pretty young school teacher. As of the time of this chance encounter, Mike Barnett and his wife had not been intimate for several years. And although her husband had tried his best to be discreet, Sarah felt certain Michael had been seeing other women for the past year or more.

Women possess an almost uncanny, mystical sense about men and their intimate relationships with others. Several quite pretty young women who attended the Tiffany Street Baptist Church had sensed the absence of intimacy between Mike and Sarah Barnett, and subsequently made subtle (and at times not so subtle) overtures to the pastor that they were available.

Mike Barnett had picked up on some of these guileful and insidious romantic advances, but any assignations or dalliances with other women had been carried on away from Kinston.

However, Mary Griffin had been a different matter indeed. Though not exactly a raving beauty, her large-busted, slim-waisted figure resting on a five-foot-six-inch well-proportioned body turned heads whenever she walked down the Queen Street sidewalk or entered a room. Mary Griffin literally seemed to radiate sex, and men and women alike were quick to pick up on men’s natural attraction to her.

But Mary Griffin possessed two quite admirable qualities that appealed to Mike Barnett from the beginning. He found that Mary did not flaunt her sex, and she did not openly flirt with men.

And even more important, the preacher came to understand, was that through her actions and comments the young teacher let it be known that she was available.

The weak-willed pastor was so captivated by Mary Griffin, that two weeks later he telephoned Mary and asked if he might stop by her house to get her views on the upcoming church bazaar.

This was fine with her, she said, because her roommate was going to a picture show at the Paramount with her fiancé, and would be gone from seven ’til ten that night.

When Mike Barnett knocked on Mary Griffin’s front door at eight o’clock that night, neither showed any pretense about their mutual physical attraction.

An hour later, as Mike was getting dressed, Mary came over and sat beside him on her bed. She was still naked. She spoke softly.

I’ll never make demands on you, Mike, and I’ll be here whenever you need me. She kissed her new lover tenderly, then left the room so her pastor, a man of God, could get dressed and get back to the rectory in time for a late supper with his polio-stricken wife.

When the two lovers were with church members or other townspeople, they maintained a polite distance. Not once did Mary ever attempt to exchange conspiratorial side glances with her pastor. Never did she use innuendo or act as though the two shared any sort of private joke. Mary Griffin was the epitome of spinsterish reserve.

Plainly stated, not until she was alone with Mike could he ever tell that she even wanted to be alone with him. And he seemed to fall in love with Mary again every time he was with her.

Michael’s father had an old saying he liked to quote to his son, and to anyone else who would listen. And it applied to Michael’s relationship with his newfound love, whose back yard nearly backed into the Tiffany Street Baptist Church’s back yard.

If you play too close to a fire, Michael, eventually you’re going to get burned, cautioned his father.

And Michael had been well aware when he began his affair with the voluptuous, ravishing, hot-blooded young teacher, that he was taking a risk of being consumed by those flames of passion. Once advised is twice warned, Michael’s daddy would say.

From the very beginning of his involvement with Mary Griffin, Michael Barnett feared discovery.

Michael’s wife bore no blame for his affair with Mary Griffin. Sarah had always been a faithful, caring wife, and supported her husband in any endeavor.

As physically debilitating as was Sarah’s polio, she never complained of the constant discomfort cause by the braces on her left arm and left leg.

In short, Sarah Barnett was a devoted, faithful wife who had never given her husband cause to deceive her and betray their marriage.

At the beginning of 1943, Michael Barnett and Mary Griffin were sitting close together atop a large keg of dynamite, and that volatile keg was edging, day by day, closer to the flames of adultery referred to by Michael’s prophetic father.

And the question of who would light the fuse would be answered sooner than later.

Frank Russell and Jarvis Melton

On December 20, 1942, the sprawling 110,000-acre U. S. Marine training facility Marine Barracks, New River, was renamed the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base.

At the time of his arrival at Camp Lejeune in early 1943, fresh out of Parris Island, Lance Corporal Frank Russell was twenty-three years old, a quite troubled young man, already weighed down with the childhood detritus of incest, physical abuse and failure.

The strapping six-foot-three, two hundred thirty pound Marine had been the schoolyard terror while attending grammar school in Boston, Massachusetts, and because of his great size and mean disposition, throughout high school Frank Russell had relished his role as the neighborhood bully, to the extent that even his teachers, male and female alike, gave the ill-tempered, troubled lad a wide berth.

Bernie, Frank’s uneducated father, couldn’t hold down any menial job for very long, and for several years had vented the frustrations of his own life by physically abusing and sexually humiliating his wife Mildred.

One Saturday night when Frank had just turned thirteen, out of hatred for his father and frustration over his fear that his father would turn his anger on him, Frank attempted to defend his crying, pleading mother by stepping between his parents.

In a violent rage the father lashed out at the boy, cursing and screaming at both his wife and son. Then, in a drunken stupor, the father stalked out of the house, cranked up the family’s battered old black Ford pickup truck, and the boy heard the screech of rubber on the dirt street as the truck sped away in the darkness.

At least, thought the frightened youngster, holding his aching face, the sorry bastard probably wouldn’t return until the next day. At nine o’clock Frank said goodnight to his mother and went to bed.

By eleven o’clock his father had not returned home, and the boy could hear his mother’s sobs through her closed bedroom door.

Approaching the bedroom door, the concerned teenager knocked softly.

Yes? his mother answered through her crying.

Mom, are you okay? came the boy’s concerned inquiry.

After a long pause and no answer, Frank started to repeat the question, thinking that perhaps his mother had not been able to hear him through the closed door.

However, Mildred had indeed heard her son’s imploring voice. The delay in responding was caused by her making a snap decision, one that would affect, in an adverse and indelible manner, the thirteen-year-old boy’s psyche and relationship with women for the remainder of his life.

Frank? his mother asked.

Yes, mom, the boy replied.

Do you have your pajamas on?

Yes, Mom.

Take off your pajamas and get into bed. I’ll be with you in a minute, she said softly.

Though not understanding his mother’s instructions, the teenager took off his pajamas and lay naked beneath the sheet.

Presently the boy heard the slide bolt click in place on the inside of the front door, then sensed his mother’s footfalls as she approached his bedroom door.

A moment later she sat on the edge of her son’s bed, her naked body bathed in the moonlight streaming through the open bedroom window.

Do you love me, Frank? she asked softly.

Yes, mom, the boy replied.

From now on, when we’re alone in this house, you are to call me Mildred. That’s my name. Do you understand?

Yes, mom… . I mean, yes Mildred, the boy stammered.

And from now on, I’ll call you Frank. Do you understand?

Yes… Mildred.

You love me, and I love you. That’s all that really matters from now on. Do you understand?

Yes… Mildred.

Tell me you love me, Frank.

I love you, Mildred.

She lifted the sheet and slipped in beside him, her warm body touching his. Then she leaned over on her side and without hesitation or comment, kissed her son, not on his cheek, but full on his mouth, long and hard, as though trying to release her pent-up anger toward her abusive husband.

Thus began the young boy’s intense sexual relationship with his mother that continued unabated for nearly three years.

From that first night, every time Frank’s father physically or mentally abused either Frank or his mother, then stalked out of the house to go drinking with his rowdy friends or to visit the local prostitutes, Frank’s mother would come into her son’s bedroom.

Both mother and son referred to their sexual encounters as visits. And the door bolted from the inside served as security for their incestuous trysts.

So when her husband banged on the front door late at night, Mildred would get out of Frank’s bed, close his bedroom door, release the slide bolt lock on the front door, let her husband into the house, and get into her own bed.

When Frank was fifteen years old, girls at school took an interest in him, and because his mother had unashamedly taught the boy the ways of sexual love, he had his way with the girls in his school-as long as he never brought a girl home with him.

One Saturday night nearly three years after the visits began, Frank attempted to protect his mother from a physical assault by his drunken father, and in a rage his father grabbed his hunting knife from off the dresser, and slashed the left side of the boy’s face, leaving a deep and permanent scar running from his cheekbone to his chin.

Before daybreak the following morning,