That Saturday afternoon the Reverend Abel Adamson of Second Methodist Episcopal Church of Blytheville, Arkansas, and his thirteen-year-old son Matthew watched Grandma’s Boy, starring Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis.
Over the weeks that followed (on those Saturdays for which the pastor had no visitation appointments) the two sat together in close companionship, father and son, in Jonesboro’s Empire Theater, and enjoyed, as well, Tom Mix in Arabia, Brawn of the North starring the German Shepherd Strongheart, Clarence with Wallace Reid, Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, Oliver Twist featuring Jackie Coogan in the title role, and The Prisoner of Zenda with Lewis Stone and a newcomer to the silver screen named Ramon Navarro. There was sin and bad behavior in every picture, but every transgression was properly punished in the end.
It wasn’t until the next year, with their attendance at a showing of The Covered Wagon (starring J. Walter Kerrigan and Lois Wilson), that the two were finally spotted by a member of Abel’s Blytheville flock. The inadvertent sidewalk interloper was Cleo Summers, a deaconess and head of the church’s women’s Bible study class. She spied her minister and his son going in to view an afternoon screening, and though the movie commanded a higher ticket price than usual due to the fact that it was very long and quite sweeping in its story of transcontinental migration, Miss Summers paid the price and marched with a sense of strong moral purpose into the darkness, where she planned to ambush her pastor as soon as the lights came up.
She did not.
Instead, Deaconess Summers confessed to Abel and Matthew over a cherry phosphate that she simply couldn’t help loving the film. Having grown up in a Nebraska sod house when the American West was still wooly and wild just like in the picture (and “couldn’t you almost hear the whoop of those Indian savages when they launched their attack upon that caravan of pioneer wagons?”), there was little in the picture to criticize and much to applaud.
Deaconess Summers didn’t tell a soul whom she had seen and what she herself had seen (with immeasurable delight), except for members of that secret society of two dozen or so from her Blytheville church who had been making similar surreptitious excursions to the Jonesboro picture shows (just like those morally bankrupt Catholics and Episcopalians!), and who later came to share their enthusiastic assessments with one another in a more organized fashion at the soda fountain counter — a band of the most exuberant Methodist cinephiles, together with their own Reverend Abel Adamson serving as honorary chaplain.
When, several years later, internecine disharmony in the Baptist community of Jonesboro rose to the level of injury, death, and the calling in of the Arkansas National Guard by the governor to restore order — the events of those tumultuous years dubbed by Arkansas historians “The Jonesboro Church Wars”—the Blytheville Methodists withdrew themselves to the safe confines of their own cohesive Methodist community (founded, in fact, in 1879 by a Methodist minister named Blythe). Concomitantly, the open secret of movie attendance by Abel and Matthew and Abel’s congregants lost its semblance of sin, and Blytheville’s own movie theatres became more commercially fruitful and multiplied.
It was also about this time that the Reverend Abel Adamson and his son Matthew stopped going so often to the movies.
They went fishing instead.
1923 CONSPIRATORIAL IN NORTH CAROLINA
Emory Jones was cold. He stood next to the radiator to warm up. Two other jurors were doing the same — a man named Sykes and another named Fogleman. Albert Sykes was an insurance salesman. Horace Fogleman worked for Vick Chemical. Fogleman was telling Sykes what went into his company’s popular Vaporub. He was rattling off the list of ingredients using his fingers like an abacus.
“Oil of eucalyptus, menthol, oil of juniper tar, camphor.”
Albert Sykes nodded. “You can certainly smell that camphor and eucalyptus.”
“Then you got your oil of nutmeg and your oil of turpentine.”
“You put turpentine in your Vaporub?”
Fogleman nodded.
“Never ever thought to check the ingredients on the label. My sister, she slathers that stuff all over my two little nieces — you know, when they get a mite croupy. Clears that congestion right up. You married, Horace? Got kids?”
“No and no. But it’s probably for the best. I spend sixty, sometimes seventy hours a week down at the Vick laboratory. Why, this courthouse is the first place I’ve spent any time at all outside of that plant and my rented rooms at Mrs. Harvey’s.”
The two jurors who’d been in the washroom now emerged and joined the other men. The man whom the other eleven had designated as foreman, an older gentleman by the name of Dean Tuttle, had been waiting for them to finish up. He now called all of the jurors back to the table.
Tuttle was a district manager for the Southern Life and Trust Company. There were three insurance men in the room, Greensboro being, arguably, the “Insurance Center of the South.” All three knew each other; the insurance community was tightly knit. There were three textile men present as well. White Oak Cotton Mills, which employed both Emory Jones (beamer operator) and another man, Wesley Lowermilk (dolpher), was the largest denim mill in the world. (Inarguably.) In fact, each of the twelve men serving as Superior Court jurors at the Guilford County Courthouse that week came quickly to realize that they were on a first-name basis with at least three and sometimes four or five of their juror brethren. Enoch Voss, who ran the Piedmont Café downtown, actually knew, on sight, every man in the room.
The fact that there were so many threads of acquaintance woven throughout this group of men wasn’t all that unusual for a city the size of Greensboro; at 43,500 residents it still felt more like a big small town than a bustling metropolis. The jurors’ paths crossed in a variety of ways. And there was something else that linked them — something of which only one of them was presently aware. Something fairly important.
Tuttle, who sat at the head of the table nearest the door, cleared his throat. “How would you like to proceed, gentlemen? Shall we discuss the case first or would you care to take a preliminary vote?”
The jurors responded with silence. A couple of the men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. It wasn’t the kind of case that lent itself to easy discussion. The details surrounding it would never have been bandied about in mixed company, and because of this, each of the twelve men was grateful that the administrators of the court hadn’t yet capitulated to pressure by women’s rights advocates to bring members of the gentler sex into the jury pool. In this particular case, the charge being aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and the defendant being a woman, it would, of course, have only been fair. Technically speaking, this was not a jury of Lorene Wimbish’s peers. None of the jurors wore a dress.
At least, not in public.
In simplest fact, Mrs. Wimbish had walked in on her husband in the midst of a sexual act with someone who was, obviously, not his wife. She had stormed from the room and then returned with a gun and a retaliatory gleam in her eye. She had fired upon the two, striking Burley Wimbish’s lover in the side. The bullet had missed all the internal organs and spared its target (or was the target Burley? Mrs. Wimbish had testified at one point that it was her husband she wanted to see dead) the deadly complications of peritonitis.
Because Mr. Wimbish’s lover had survived the assault, Lorene Wimbish had the good fortune to escape a murder indictment. Instead, she was being tried for firing a gun at her husband and at the man he was blithely mounting from behind: one Marcellus Teague, an assistant paymaster at the Orange Crush Bottling Company. It was a case of such a scandalously prurient complexion that the Greensboro Daily News and the Greensboro Daily Record and the Greensboro Patriot didn’t know how to cover it without giving offense to sensitive female readers, and Lord help the child who happened to steal a peek at the morning paper before Papa had quarantined it. The North Carolina Christian Advocate, a weekly published in Greensboro, avoided the story as if it were the pox.