Death Sentence Read Free Page B

moved his wife Isabelle and their burgeoning family. Here they would finish rearing their nine children, losing a daughter, Sophia Velma, to fever at the age of three, and a son, Joe Tyson, to blood poisoning at fourteen. A daughter, Annie Belle, also would precede her parents in death, a victim of the flu epidemic that swept through the country in the winter of 1918-19, dead at twenty-six.
    In 1926, ten years before his own death, John Bullard began dividing his land to parcel it out to his surviving children. The house and about forty acres surrounding it would go to his youngest child, Murphy, who was expected to remain at home to look after his aging parents and crippled sister.
    Murphy was a gregarious young man, boisterous and volatile, but eminently likable. Lillie McMillan likely would have been drawn to him even if she hadn’t lived in a place where choices were few, for she was his opposite.
    Friends described Lillie as smart, sweet and docile. Tall and thin, with short, dark hair framing her thin, pretty face, she was from a Presbyterian clan who lived only a few miles from the Baptist Bullards. Like Murphy, she was the youngest in her family. Her mother had died when she was twelve, her father when she was fifteen. She had been left to live with her married siblings, staying first with one, then another, each for only a while. She hated that period of her life and carried deep resentments about it.
    For a while she had lived with her brother Jim, thirteen years older. Jim was married to Murphy’s sister Mary Void, and they lived within sight of the Bullard homeplace in an abandoned frame schoolhouse that had been converted into a home. That was how Lillie had come to know Murphy. She was fifteen months older than he.
    Neither family expected their wedding. Lillie slipped out of a window of her sister Nellie’s house to run away with Murphy to South Carolina, where they married on July 27, 1929, two days before her nineteenth birthday. They returned to live with his parents.
    The house into which Lillie moved with her new husband was neither as big nor as nice as some in which she had lived. It sat alongside a sandy lane by a swampy area through which a small creek—the Little Branch, local people called it—flowed into a pond a quarter of a mile away. The pond provided energy for a neighbor’s grist mill, cotton gin, and country store, the commercial heart of the community. It was lined with young cypress trees and had a brooding aura of mystery about it. The black water actually was clear, and where the pond was deepest its bottom was sandy white. On hot summer evenings, boys slipped away to skinny-dip in the dark water and to dangle earthworms and caterpillars around cypress knees in hopes of catching sunfish.
    The Bullard house was small and plain, built of heart pine, the unpainted boards brittle and gray with age. Lichens and moss grew on the gray cypress shingles of the roof, which leaked in heavy rains, calling for a marshaling of pots and jars. The main part of the house had but four rooms, three bedrooms and a living room. The kitchen was attached to the back of the house and could be reached only by going out the back door and passing along a narrow, L-shaped porch.
    The heat inside the house could be insufferable in summer, and the front porch, shaded by chinaberry trees and a big magnolia, offered the only escape. It was worst in the kitchen, where Isabelle Bullard cooked on a wood range. No screens covered the windows or doors, and any time the weather was warm the house swarmed with flies and mosquitoes. In cold weather, a brick fireplace in the living room provided the only heat in the main part of the house. Winter winds whistled through the bare walls, and after all had gone to bed and the fire had died, the only warmth came from nestling deep under hand-made quilts.
    The house had no modern conveniences, not even electricity. (Power lines would not reach the area until after World War II.) A