Where Trouble Sleeps (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

1. How would you characterize Stephen's relationship with each of his parents? With his church and his religion? 2. What prospects of stability are offered to the community by the church? Instability? 3. How is the church important to Jack Umstead? 4. How is the setting (1950s, rural community) important to the story? 5. What might Alease see in Jack Umstead and why? Does he have any redeeming qualities? If so, what are they? 6. Discuss the significance of the title. 7. How are the major characters and the community changed by Umstead's visit? 8. How does shifting point of view aid or hinder your reading of this story? 9. How might a year-2000 visit by Jack Umstead to Listre, North Carolina, be different from the 1952 visit in Where Trouble Sleeps ? 10. How were your childhood views of God and religion different from those of Stephen? 11. How will Stephen's experiences as a child in Where Trouble Sleeps influence his life as an adolescent? As an adult? Which of the adults in the novel will he most resemble as an adult? 12. What events or experiences in your own childhood could become the basis for a novel?

Alease Toomey sat at her dresser, putting on lipstick, getting ready to take her son up to see the electric chair for the first time. She blotted her lips on a Kleenex, reached for her comb. Her dresser top held the basics only--a jar of Pond's cold cream, a bottle of Jergens lotion, Elizabeth Arden rouge and lipstick, hand mirror, hairbrush--all on a starched white table doily.

She thought about little Terry Daniels, just down the road. Why not take him along, too? Seeing the electric chair might be especially good for him, and certainly his mother wouldn't be taking him up there. And it would be nice for Stephen to have some company along.

She blotted her lipstick again on the Kleenex, softened the glare.

Terry's mother, Inez, squinted through the door screen. As Mrs. Toomey explained the purpose of the trip, Inez considered the dress Mrs. Toomey was wearing, a clean white dress with big blue flowers. Mrs. Toomey's hair was shiny and had nice waves in it, and little Stephen was so neat, wearing pressed navy blue shorts and a yellow shirt with a collar, his hair pushed back in front with that butch wax it looked like. She didn't have Terry's pants ironed. But he had some that was clean. Somewhere back in there.

As Mrs. Toomey talked, Inez began to realize that what Mrs. Toomey was about to do was exactly right for Terry at this time in his little dragged-along, up-and-down life. Her hand touched the screen. She looked over her shoulder and said, "Terry, go get on some pants and shoes. Find some clean pants and a shirt." Boy would go naked to the grocery store if he had a chance. She'd done blistered his ass twice for running naked in the yard. Last time was yesterday when she saw him standing on that tire, pissing in the hole.

"We'll just wait out here in the swing" said Mrs, Toomey,

In the swing, Stephen sat next to the wall and held his mother's hand. His feet didn't reach the porch floor. The chain creaked up at the ceiling. He looked across the hot paved road at the gas station--Train's Place. He knew to take his eyes away. Train's Place was where men drank beer and said bad words. Stephen knew the evil names of two beers: Schlitz and Blatz.

Through the window screen near his elbow he saw the foot of a bed, a rumpled white sheet. He'd never seen an unmade bed in the daytime. The unmade bed made the room seem wild. He heard Mrs. Daniels's voice in there: "Where's that other sock?"

"I don't know."

"Didn't you have it on yesterday?"

"No."

"Do you want me to whup you?"

"No."

"You say No ma'am."

"No ma'am."

"You say No ma'am to Mrs. Toomey, you hear? She's taking you up to see the electric chair, and you listen to what she says and don't you take them shoes off, or nary piece of your clothes ... Do you hear?"

"Yes ... Yes ma'am."

As they got in the car, Terry's sister, Cheryl, rode up on her bicycle, leaned it against the steps, and waved to Mrs. Toomey and Stephen.

The way Cheryl was shaped all over, the way her head and her body came together like an angel, made her look to Stephen like the woman who came to him when he was almost dead on the desert after he'd been fighting Indians. Cheryl sometimes talked to him when he sat on the porch steps at the grocery store. She would sometimes even sit down beside him.

Alease let Stephen and Terry sit in the backseat together. That way they could talk, and she could kind of hear what they talked about.

"Did you know Mr. Jacobs's got a electric paddle in his office?" Terry asked Stephen.

"Terry honey" said Alease, "I don't think that's true about a electric paddle. I think somebody made that up."

"That's what Leland said."

"Well, I don't believe that's true. That's a rumor. A rumor is something that's not true. Not usually true."

Stephen rolled his little metal car up and down his leg and across the seat.

"Can I play with that?" Terry asked Stephen.

Alease looked in the rearview mirror. "Stephen. Let Terry play with your car."

The strong, acrid odor from the fertilizer factory came in through the open windows.

Stephen handed his toy car to Terry and said, "I got about five more."

They bumped over the railroad tracks, past a row of shotgun houses, some with flowers on the porch.

"I got a big wood one," said Terry. "Leland's got a real one with wheels on it that come often a scooter."

They drove past the Dairy DeeLight--where June Odum, a neighbor, worked part-time. Alease decided they might stop by on the way back for a little reward if Stephen and Terry behaved. She wasn't against a little reward for herself, either.

"Now, the reason we're going to see the electric chair," said Alease, "is so you-all can see what will happen if you ever let the Devil lead you into a bad sin. They'll put you in the electric chair and electrocute you. And little sins can lead up to big sins."

They drove past red clay road banks, past green pastures with cows, wood outbuildings, fishing ponds, some pastures holding a line or two of thick black-green cedar trees. They passed a man in a dark gray business suit changing a flat tire.

Just east of Birmingham, Alabama, big splotchy raindrops hit the dusty windshield of a northeast-bound, black, four-door, almost new, stolen 1950 Buick Eight. Jack Umstead looked for the wiper knob, found it. He was very satisfied with the feel of this big Buick. The horn sounded like it weighed a hundred pounds. He kept patting the dashboard, and when he'd stopped for coffee in the sunshine, before the rain started, he had walked around the front of the car and touched the chrome hood ornament. It was shaped like a rocket ship. The heavy wipers worked with a clean, wide sweep--wider than any he'd ever seen--and at two speeds, fast and slow. He needed the fast. In fact, it was raining so hard he might pull over and stop for a few minutes. He didn't need a wreck, and the nose of some highway patrolman sticking in his window.

Back at the blinker light, Inez sat in her big soft chair inside the house where she could look out from the comfortable darkness. She picked up her L&M from the ashtray. She liked to sit in her big chair and prop her feet on the cane-bottomed chair, with her smokes, matches, and ashtray on the little round table beside her. She liked to look out through the screen door from back in there where it was dark. She liked to watch the men over at Train's Place, drinking beer and talking. Beyond that she could see what was going on over at the grocery store.

Sometimes she went back to bed. She didn't like to cook especially and they didn't have company anymore now that Johnny had started drinking again. So sometimes she just gave up and slept. She deserved it. She'd had a hard time keeping her family going, except for Cheryl, who had made it all the way through high school and was turning out all right. She hadn't heard from her oldest son, Todd, in months. He was somewhere in Memphis, working at a gas station, he'd said.

As they pulled in and parked, Stephen's mother said, "See how big the building is? That's because there's so many prisoners."

Stephen looked at the tall fence beside the walkway--with barbed wire along the top--at the giant brick building, bigger than the hospital, sitting below a quiet blue sky with moving clouds so white they almost hurt his eyes. He reached for his mother's hand.

"See up there?" she said. "If they try to escape, that guard will shoot them. That's a shotgun he's got."...