Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (2 page)

Part 1

Degenerate Sons and Daughters,
Life is too strong for you—
It takes life to love life.

—EDGAR LEE MASTERS
Spoon River Anthology

1

T
he wind had blown constantly that fall, but that wasn’t unusual for Kansas. Most Kansans scarcely acknowledge the wind; however, on October 23, 1995, gusts were strong enough to scatter carefully piled mounds of leaves and make lights flicker on and off. Housewives set out candles and flashlights—just in case.

In Prairie Village, Dr. Debora Green went about all her usual errands. With three children to take care of, she practically needed a timetable to coordinate their activities. She would have welcomed a power outage so they could stay home, light faintly scented candles, and just talk to each other. Later that day, they were all back together in their beautiful new house on Canterbury Court: Debora; her son, Tim; and her daughters, Lissa
^*
and Kelly. After supper they all went to bed in their separate rooms. Debora thought she had turned on the burglar alarm, and the smoke alarm was always set on “Ready.”

Fire can erupt with a raucous explosion or be as furtive as a mouse skittering silently along a wall. It was after midnight when the wind coaxed out the first tongues of fire and blew them into billows of orange before all the sleeping neighbors on Canterbury Court even knew they were in danger. The magnificent homes were so close together that squirrels could leap from one yard’s trees to those next door.

And the roofs were made of picturesque wooden shakes, dry as bone from the long midwestern summer.

Debora Green was barely able to escape the flames that engulfed her house. She rushed to her neighbors’ house and pounded on the door, pleading for someone to help her save her children. Then she looked back at the fire and her heart convulsed at what she saw. Silhouetted against the glow in the sky, the small figure of a child scampered ahead of flames that were already eating away at the beams of the garage. As the child moved north, the roof just behind her began to give way and cave in. The child—it was Lissa—miraculously made her way up over the peak of the garage roof and down the other side, where she perched precariously on the edge of the disintegrating roof. In moments, she would surely fall into the fire below and perish.

“Help me!” Lissa screamed. Even through the thick black smoke, she had seen her mother standing by their neighbors’ house. The little girl called again and again, her small voice lost in the roar of the flames. Finally—as if Debora was moving through quicksand—Lissa saw her mother head toward her. She
saw
her! She was coming!

Lissa knew she would be all right now; her mother would save her. Debora stood beneath the edge of the roof, her legs spread wide and her feet planted firmly so that she would not slip. She held her arms open and beckoned to Lissa to jump down to her. But it was such a long way to the ground. For a moment, Lissa hesitated—and then she looked over her shoulder and saw that the garage roof was almost gone.

“Jump!” Debora ordered. “Jump! I’ll catch you.”

“I’m afraid….”

“Jump! Now!”
There was urgency in her mother’s voice, and something else, something that frightened Lissa more than the fire.

Lissa obeyed. With her arms above her head and the heat licking at her back, she leaped from the garage roof. But Debora didn’t catch her; her arms were not spread wide enough, or maybe she was standing too far back from the garage. Lissa crumpled to the ground at Debora’s feet. But the lawn was carpeted with a cushion of leaves and she was not hurt.

Lissa felt safe now. She was with her mother. She didn’t know how many houses were on fire, or if it was only
their
house. It seemed to her that the fire was everywhere, and the smell of smoke was also a taste of smoke in her mouth. Her mother led her toward their neighbors’ house, and Lissa looked around for her brother and sister. Lights began to appear in windows up and down the block. She heard sirens far away, then coming closer and closer until they died out, whining, in front of the burning house. And in her head, she kept hearing a voice crying, “Help me! Help me!” She tried to tell her mother about that, but Debora seemed to be in shock. She said nothing. She did nothing. She was just standing there, looking at the fire.

Lissa didn’t see her brother and sister and she began to scream for someone to save Tim and Kelly, someone to save Boomer and Russell, their dogs. Still her mother said nothing.

When Lissa saw a police car screech to a stop in front of the burning house and a policeman running toward them, she begged him to save her brother and sister. He listened to her screams and then ran by without even stopping. Lissa clung to her mother and looked up into her face for reassurance, but she saw no expression at all. Debora was transfixed by the fire. The two of them just stood there, braced against the wind that was turning their house into a raging inferno.

Debora had saved one of her children. Was it possible that the other two were trapped in the fire, unable to escape? It was every mother’s nightmare. And it was happening to her.

*
The names of some individuals have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the book.

2

H
avana, Illinois, is a small town like thousands of other farming communities in the Midwest. For most drivers traveling from Keokuk, Iowa, to Bloomington or Champaign, Illinois, Havana is only a blur along State Highway 136 east of Adair, Table Grove, Ipava, and Duncan Mills, west of San Jose and Heyworth. Over the years, Havana’s population has remained at just over 4,000 citizens. It sits in historic country, close to the birthplaces of both Carl Sandburg and Wyatt Earp, and near a number of lakes and the Illinois River. The Spoon River, immortalized by Edgar Lee Masters, flows into the Illinois a few miles west of Havana. And, like the characters in Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
, it has had its share of grotesques, tragedies, triumphs, and human frailties that spawn gossip, the vast majority of it of import only to people living in Havana.

Joan (which she has always pronounced “Joanne”) Purdy and Robert Jones settled as newlyweds in Havana. They were married very young; Joan was barely eighteen, and Bob was a year younger. Their second daughter, Debora, would recall that both her parents came from large families and that each had been raised “in poverty.”

Pretty and blond, Joan was a brilliant student and had won a partial scholarship to Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. She
did
enter there as a freshman, even though Bob Jones hadn’t wanted her to go. Stephens is a prestigious women’s college; many of Joan’s fellow students were wealthy, while she had to work to make up the difference between her scholarship and the cost of tuition and room and board. College girls in the late forties wore cashmere sweaters with pearls and long skirts—sometimes so tight they could hardly walk. The “New Look” was in, and girls who wanted to be well-dressed had to toss out their entire wardrobes and start over.

Joan Purdy couldn’t afford to do that. She was an unsophisticated girl, she was homesick, she missed Bob, who was still in high school, and she felt out of place with the far more worldly coeds—“snooty girls”—at Stephens. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would soon drop out of college and say yes to Bob’s marriage proposal.

Bob was a handsome young man, as good-looking as movie stars Guy Madison or Gene Barry, whom he closely resembled. His hair was almost black and naturally wavy, and he combed it back from his forehead. He wasn’t a big man, no more than five feet eight inches or so, but he was muscular and tan.

The young couple were married on Halloween, 1948, and Joan’s dreams of being a math teacher evaporated. She became pregnant almost immediately and gave birth to their first daughter, Pamela, in the hot summer of 1949. Her second baby came less than two years later: Debora (who was first called Deborah, then Debra, Debi, and Deb before she finally settled on a spelling that suited her) was born on February 28, 1951.

By all accounts, the Joneses’ marriage was happy enough, despite their youth. Had Joan worked, she would probably have earned more than Bob did in the early years. But spouses didn’t switch roles in the fifties, so Joan stayed home and kept house. The marriage lasted; they were still together as their golden anniversary approached.

Both Pamela and Debora were cute little girls. And both of them were exceptionally bright, but it was Debora who showed true genius. Her uncle Gordon Purdy, who lived in Minnesota, remembered that she taught herself to read at two and a half by poring over the newspaper. He was astounded to get a letter written by his toddler niece.

Some who knew her said that Joan resented giving up her education to marry Bob, and that she sometimes took her frustrations out on her daughters with verbal abuse. Perhaps. Maybe she only wanted them to succeed beyond anything she had ever accomplished. If she seemed resigned to her role as a mother and housewife, she nevertheless wanted her girls to go to college and have professions. When Joan found fault with either girl, it was usually because she had failed to study hard enough. Where Bob was easygoing, Joan could be almost obsessed with the idea that her daughters had to succeed. She would brook no criticism of them from anyone outside the family.

“Between my parents,” Debora would say cautiously later on, “I think I would say my mother was the strongest—the one who made the decisions.”

Joan was the serious parent, and Bob was fun—the parent who made jokes and played games with the girls. Joan demanded excellence and high grades, although the girls were both good students. Debora was, in truth, a lazy student, but it didn’t matter; she was so smart she didn’t have to exert herself, not even to make straight A’s. If she heard it once, she heard it a thousand times: she was a genius.

Forever after, Debora would define herself in terms of her scholastic accomplishments and her intelligence. She would also judge others, perhaps unconsciously, by how smart they were and how well they did in their careers. Everything came so easily to her that she had little comprehension of her peers’ problems in grasping reading and math. She was also agile and athletic, and a gifted musician.

Her father drove a Butternut Bread bakery truck and gradually moved up in the company. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” Debora recalled, “but we always had everything we needed.”

Later, when asked about her childhood, Debora could not remember anything unusual, anything negative. It was almost as if her memory was blank. She described an idyllic existence, with no family dissonance. But, in fact, there was at least one unpleasant incident. Debora was very angry with her father when he came home drunk from a bowling tournament. It was late, but she was still up and she startled Bob as he was counting several hundred dollars he had won in the tournament. Furious, Debora bawled him out. Later, when she found out that he had always meant the money for her college fund, she was ashamed about what she said to him that night. She did not mention that in her recall of her young years, nor did she speak of the fact that she wet her bed until she was twelve.

Debora and Pam shared a room, and they got along well—as sisters do, with the normal squabbles. If Pam resented Debora’s transcendent intellect, her sister wouldn’t remember it. Debora took piano and violin lessons and excelled at both, continuing the piano lessons well into her college years.

Pam was perhaps prettier than her younger sister, her features softer and more feminine than Debora’s. Pam’s hair was almost as dark as her father’s, and she was small-boned. Debora was more solid, but “square” rather than chubby; she was growing up to be a cute girl rather than a pretty one, given her round face and the slight bump on her nose. Her forehead protruded above her eyebrows, a feature that would become more pronounced as she grew older and that gave her a slightly masculine look. Moreover, she was something of a chameleon; all her life, her appearance and weight seemed to change and blur continually, so that even acquaintances sometimes failed to recognize her. One thing was constant, however: Debora’s hair was wonderfully thick and wavy, a gingery-auburn color. She wore it long and hanging down her back, sometimes naturally wavy and sometimes absolutely straight.

The Joneses moved to Metamora, Illinois, a hamlet even smaller than Havana, when Pam was in her last year in high school. Debora spent her freshman and sophomore years in Metamora’s small high school, where her academic excellence shone even brighter. But the family stayed in Metamora for only two years. Bob was moving up in the parent company, Roman Meal, and eventually stopped driving a bread route and became a district manager. The family moved to a house at 3122 North Sheridan Road in Peoria when Debora was about to begin her junior year. For most teenagers, that would have been an unfortunate time to move, and going from a high school in a little town of a few thousand to one in a city with almost 200,000 people would be terrifying. Not for Debora.

Asked if she had ever felt frightened inside even though she was capable of keeping up a fearless façade, Debora shook her head firmly. “I always felt confident,” she remembered. “I always felt I could accomplish anything I set out to do. I was never scared—not until later… .”

“Debi” Jones rapidly became a popular member of the class of 1969 at Peoria High School. Even then, she had developed the wonderful sense of humor that drew people to her. Extraordinarily witty, she could turn anything into a joke—to the delight of her fellow students, and occasionally to the annoyance of her teachers.

The late sixties were turbulent years for teenagers, but Debora never wandered from the path she had set for herself—or, perhaps, that her mother had set for her. Harry Whitaker, who was the principal of Peoria High in the sixties, would remember her twenty-five years later as an outstanding student. “She seemed to follow all the rules. She didn’t take drugs and she didn’t drink. She was rather an aggressive girl,” he commented. “You could tell she was going to be successful.”

Debora had entered Peoria High in the 1967-68 year, and 1968 was the year of the Illinois Sesquicentennial, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the state’s admission to the Union in 1818. “I remember we read
Spoon River Anthology
in English in my junior year,” she said later. “It was part of Sesquicentennial.” Although her intelligence was turned more toward science and math, Debora enjoyed reading Masters’s work, and tended to choose epic books with historical links after that. She would always be a prodigious reader, able to lose herself in a novel so completely that the rest of the world faded away.

Debora was a cheerleader for Peoria High, served on the Student Council, and was a National Merit Scholar. The list of accomplishments after her name in the Peoria High yearbook,
The Crest
, was as lengthy as those found under top students’ pictures in yearbooks all over America. She sang in the Concert Choir;, she was a Music Accompanist, a member of the French Club, Music Workshops, Senior Services, and the
Crest
business staff. She was a superlative athlete as well, so much so that her steady boyfriend, Greg Short—who was on the varsity football and wrestling squads—wrote in her yearbook, “You know, it’s really terrible going with someone who is by far more athletic than I…. But, you know, I think I like you more because I have to compete with you. It isn’t fair, you being so darned talented….”

Short, who went on to become a lieutenant in the Peoria Police Department, dated Debora for two years. They attended the proms together, posed for silly pictures that appeared in the yearbook, and were expected to stay together after high school. It would be fair to say that Greg Short was totally in love with Debora. He declared his devotion over and over in his yearbook “love letter.”

Debora was the covaledictorian of Peoria High School in 1969. She and the other valedictorian, Scott Russell—now assistant superintendent of the Peoria School District—had perfect grade-point averages. Debora had never had less than an A in her life. She had scored close to a perfect 800 on both sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. She was headed for the University of Illinois.

Most of the scribbled messages in Debora’s copy of
The Crest
referred to her intelligence: “To the girl who never studied in history but always managed an ‘A’”; “You really are too smart for your pants….”; “All the luck at college, but you don’t need luck too much”; “To the laziest chemist in the class. For being so smart, you don’t look it or act it. Go easy on the profs next year—you’re so smart.”

Debora did excel at the University of Illinois, but her grade-point average was no longer unblemished. She received her first B in college. Greg Short remembered how that affected her. “She perceived it as an abject failure…. She was very, very, disturbed by that. She was the smartest person I ever knew.”

Debora continued to date Greg for the first quarter of college, but then the romance faded. “He wasn’t nearly as smart as I was,” she would say many years later. “He was just going to a community college or some small college—we drifted apart.” The last time Greg talked to Debora was in 1971; she had moved on to a new phase of her life and he didn’t fit in.

Debora was a natural at chemistry and had set her sights on becoming a chemical engineer. She had never had any particular pull toward medicine. “My mind works the way an engineer’s does,” she would explain. “But after I started in engineering, they told me there was a glut of engineers and I should consider another major. I chose chemistry—pre-med—and I graduated in three years.”

Medical school is a challenge to the most dedicated, the most motivated students. Debora became a physician by default. Medicine had never been a passion or even a goal for her. She applied to the University of Chicago and the University of Kansas medical schools. Her grasp of chemistry was phenomenal, of course, but her scores were lower in other areas. “I didn’t do that well on the medical aptitude tests,” she would say later. “But I was accepted at both. I chose the University of Kansas Medical School.”

KU is in Lawrence, midway between Kansas City and Topeka on the Kansas Turnpike with its medical school in Kansas City. It is the home of the famous Jayhawks basketball team, whose all-time star was Wilt Chamberlain, but Debora had little interest in the sport. She began medical school in the fall of 1972. She had picked KU because her parents were living in the Kansas City area. Bob Jones’s rise through the ranks at Roman Meal necessitated regular transfers; for the moment, Debora’s parents lived close to her.