The snowfall was unrelenting, like nothing we’d ever seen. We almost forgot that a mountain lay a few hundred yards beyond the village.
After two weeks, the snow was to the tops of the first floors, smothering doors and windows. To leave our houses we had to pry frozen upstairs windows and slide down the banked snow. The neighbor’s boy, John Cartwright, Junior, was the first to go to the smokehouse when provisions ran low.
I’ve tried not to think about that time until now when you come around asking about what happened all those years ago. Since you’re from the government, this must be an official investigation and I have to talk about it. It’s real hard. What took you all so damn long to find me? You’re almost too late. I’m the only one left to tell it.
Start from the beginning? That’s where I was, I think. Oh yes, the Cartwright boy.
The smokehouse was in the middle of the village. What’s that you’re writing, son? Looks like chicken scratches. Shorthand? You ready?
Junior had been gone a long time; too long. His folks thought he might have fallen into a snow bank.
Don’t give me that look. I’m getting to it. You just have to let me tell my story. At my age, roundabout is the only way I can conjure the details.
Cartwright Senior takes a lantern and goes out into the night. He was worried about Junior getting into trouble – again. Junior wasn’t right in the head. Troubled is what he was. He was mean to animals and to children. He was smart enough not to pick on older and bigger kids, unless they happened to be weak, soft kids, so’s he could make up the size difference by his meanness. Cartwright Senior couldn’t handle him so he just tried to keep an eye on him and keep other folks out of harm’s way.
Tell you how mean Junior was: one day he was feeding table scraps to the pigs. He turned his back and a pig knocked him down in the muck. Junior pulled a loose rusty nail from the fence and stabbed the pig’s eyes out. Senior had to kill the pig and carve it up for meat.
The only thing that kept Senior from sending him away to the Army, or just away, was that Junior was a hard worker. And he could hunt and trap; brought in lots of food. He’d go out days at a time and set traps and shoot game and bring it in cross-country, even through the snow. Rumor was, he’d found and a bunch of caves out in the mountains where he’d go and set his traps for hungry wolf or deer. Another rumor was that he trapped animals to torment them. He made himself useful. Still, folks moved away when he was about.
Some thought Junior went out for animals so he could slake his carnal lust. Behind his back some folks joked about Junior’s weirdness. The jokes had an edge to them, especially when they were about the way he stared at little girls. Old man Speck had two little twin girls, Cora and Eunice, about seven years old. Cartwright Senior says to Speck, “Say, your pretty little girls will be coming of age soon; might one of them make a good match for my boy Junior. He’s a good provider.” Without missing a beat, Speck says back at him, “In a pig’s eye!”
Junior was unpredictable. He might be told to do one thing, or he might tell you he was going to do one thing, and then he’d just go do something different and not let you know.
Someone said that Junior might have gone off to one of his caves. Only the Indians knew about caves, and they’d all been killed off or persuaded to move out of the valley years back. Those caves were sacred to the Indians.
What tribe? They were Intheways. Our daddies run ‘em off. I heard it wasn’t pretty, not on either side.
No one was crazy enough to go out into the frozen country to look for Junior. Instead, Senior decided to ask the new Parson to ring the church bell like a distress signal, and maybe Junior would hear it and come back. That bell rang out all over the valley across the muffling snow, but Junior never came home.
Then little Carrie Owen went missing. She was taken from her house. We later figured out how. I’m sorry. I have to stop a minute. This is hard. I’ll try to keep the telling in order.
* * *
About four days after Junior went missing, some of us were distributing food to the older folks who couldn’t get out easy when we found her. Some threw up right away, and these were tough old boys, men who were accustomed to slaughtering their own livestock and some had fought in the Civil War.
Yes, I can describe it! This ain’t easy, even after all these years.
Carrie’s daddy, Wade Owen, saw us bunching up in a knot down by the frozen river and knew something was wrong. We tried to hold Wade back, but he feigned a knee drop and scooted between our legs. He wished he hadn’t. His little girl, ten years old, was splayed out like a snow angel, but not white; all red. Her clothes had been torn off and she was split from her privates up to her throat. Her little eyes were frozen open in terror. Red pulp was everywhere.
Eviscerated? If that’s a fancy word for “gutted,” then Carrie was ‘eviscerated.’
We stayed with Wade until we were all about froze. Someone brought a bed sheet for a shroud. No one mentioned a doctor. The doctor was about twenty miles down the road, but with the snow it might as well have been a thousand miles between us and the doctor.
A couple of the men wrapped Carrie’s remains in the bed sheet. We took the bundle to the smokehouse and locked it inside. The smokehouse became the village morgue.
We looked around for signs. We knew it wasn’t no wild animal had done that.
We took Wade back to his house. We wanted to be with him when he told Carrie’s mother what had happened, but we also wanted to find out how Carrie could have been taken out of the house. Speck and I had young children, too, and we didn’t want ours to be next. * * *
Now here’s how we learned what happened. Carrie’s folks woke up and found her missing. No upstairs doors or windows were open.
We found the break-in down in the root cellar where Carrie’s folks hadn’t looked. A transom window at the top of the cellar wall had been ripped out. It was protected from snow cover by the roof of a lean-to where firewood was stacked. One of the men took Wade’s guns so he wouldn’t shoot himself. We got him drunk on his own whisky and put him to bed. We left Missus Owen sobbing and praying by the fire.
We were thinking it had to be Junior. Wade wanted to go out and hunt him down. We kept him from going out to die in the snow. Defense is what we needed; not some foolish offense.
We set about planning how to defend ourselves. We were down to two families with young children, my Christopher and Speck’s twin girls.
We decided against talking to the Parson. He was new to the community and didn’t really know us, and we figured that since he was spiritual man he was soft, not what we needed.
The Specks moved into my house with their children while Mister Speck and I made a plan to secure my house. Since Junior had got through an exposed cellar window at the back of Wade’s house, we figured he might walk right up a snow bank and through a window, or break in with strong hands. He’d torn Wade’s window clean out of its frame.
You want me to describe the house? The house was big. Heavy timbers all ‘round for structure, and no cellar with windows. My house was the most fort-like in the village. Still, no fort can’t be breached.
Yes, there was a breach. I’ll get to that.
I had plenty of firewood stored in the pantry and one of us would go out in daylight to the smokehouse for provisions. Other families without young children stayed in their own houses. They weren’t as threatened as us with young’uns.
* * *
Next day, Missus Owen couldn’t get out of bed to visit the Parson. Two days later the snow stopped for a while. Missus Owen got out of bed and called on the Parson to ask was to be done for her daughter’s Christian burial. In the circumstances, a dispensation from convention was granted. Carrie would be buried with the thaw.
The Parson asked how the families were managing. Missus Owen told him that the other family with children not old enough to use firearms, the
Speck twins, had moved into my house. The Parson offered to minister to us in our homes. Services in the chapel could wait until the snow abated. Missus Owen passed the Parson’s message on to me, and I told the Specks.
The Specks were pleased that this new Parson had offered to have religious services in our home, especially as we were preoccupied with protecting our young ones. Several days later when the weather calmed some, Mister Speck went down to the church and invited the Parson over.
We made ourselves as comfortable as possible in the upstairs bedrooms. The downstairs kitchen was snow packed on the outside and was too cold. We kept the two fireplaces and the kitchen stove burning so the heat rose through ventilators and kept the upstairs warm.
My wife and I occupied our own bedroom and kept our son in there on a floor pallet. Mister and Missus Speck took Christopher’s room with their seven-year-old twin daughters, Eunice and Cora.
The village people were resourceful and they’d canned and stored the harvest – corn, beans, and potatoes – and put up meat in the smokehouse. Each family had stored dry firewood. We were ready for a siege.
* * *
It started snowing again, a “white-out” day and night, before the Parson could come over to the house for services. The chamber pots began to stink. We went out the window to dump them to the side, then poured hot ashes on top.
That made a chute straight to the bottom of the snow bank. We’d have hell to pay in the spring.
Loss of sleep from the strain of constant fear and guarding against Junior started playing tricks on Missus Speck’s mind. She cried and said nothing could be done to keep Junior from killing all the children. My wife tried to comfort the frazzled woman; finally with whiskey. Missus Speck was a teetotaler and very devout, but she discovered that the medicinal wonders of watered down spirits settled her nerves.
One evening the Parson finally appeared, rapping at the upstairs window. The temperature had fallen and it was hard to open the window. The Pastor climbed in and stood shaking from the chill. We warned him to pinch his nose against the odor off the chamber pots and led him downstairs so he could warm himself by the large fireplaces. The Parson asked how we were managing with hygiene and sanitation. I showed him the windows where the glass had broken from the pressure of the snow and ice, and demonstrated how we chipped ice into pails and melted it on the stove for water for drinking and sponge bathes. While he was warming his backside at the fireplace, I went back to the pantry and got some more wood to put in the stove.
Back upstairs we assembled in my bedroom. He asked us to kneel with him in prayer. He asked for the Lord’s protection during our ordeal and for the safety of the children. Delicately, without referring to the details, he blessed in particular Carrie Wade and assured us that Carrie resided in Heaven with Our Savior.
The Parson hoped to see all of us soon in the Lord’s house when the weather permitted, then backed through the window and down the snow bank.
Three days passed, then came a shriek in the night from downstairs. I grabbed my pistol and met Mister Speck outside the makeshift door we’d put up to dampen the smell of the chamber pots. I took the lead with my pistol cocked. Then I saw it, framed by the light from the fireplace.
The Speck twins, Cora and Eunice, were seated together on the parlor settee. Mister Speck yelled to his wife to stay upstairs. I couldn’t tell which girl was Cora and which Eunice. Their heads were covered with chamber pots; their bodies were covered with the contents. They were lifeless. I removed the sacrilege from the girl’s heads, and when I did their necks flopped to the side, like rag dolls. Their little necks had been snapped like baby chicks.
My wife came down and boiled water. I led Mr Speck upstairs. Mister Speck watched the windows while we were busy downstairs. It took all night stoking the fire and melting water to clean those two little bodies. I burned their dresses. Sheets were brought down to wrap the bodies.
The next morning Mister Speck and I tried to figure out how Junior got in. The upstairs window was open just a crack. We had closed it tight each night, but now it was open. Our surprise turned to guilt, then to shame. We had let our guard down. Junior had come in during the night and crept down to the first floor where he waited for the girls or Chris to answer nature’s call. The girls had gone down together believing that no harm would befall them because they were in the house-fort. There he’d struck. By dumping the pots onto the girls he taunted us and insulted our feeble efforts to resist him. That boy was a beast from Hell.
Finally, the thaw set in and the roads were passable. A horse and buggy with a man and woman pulled into town. They, Parson Wainwright and Missus Wainwright, stopped at the store and announced their arrival. They told the clerk that they had come to replace the former Parson. The puzzled clerk asked, “Already? He’s only been here a short while. “No, that couldn’t be. He died last fall.” The clerk told Pastor Wainwright that a Pastor was already here. “What denomination? Methodist. Can’t be,” Wainwright says. Wainwright explained that he’s the only Methodist Parson sanctioned by the Synod; him and his predecessor who died last year.
The store clerk came running down the road to where I was standing outside my house investigating the remains of the snow bank below the upstairs window. It had collapsed with the melt and exposed a tunnel burrowed from near the road and ending in a little ice cave at the front door. I turned the handle. The door wasn’t latched from the inside. I couldn’t remember if I had latched and locked it, but, if I had, it had been unlatched and never discovered. The clerk caught his breath and told us a parson just came into town saying there ain’t no preacher supposed to be here but him; says the regular one died and no other was sent to replace him till now.
Men ran to get their guns. We ran to the Parsonage. He sees us armed. He ran but was stopped by men who stood blocking him. Men hauled him outside.
The fathers of the dead children bound his hands. The Parson was hollering something about revenge, our loved ones for his, murdered by our fathers. I heard there was a struggle. The Parson’s shirt was torn and he had primitive tattoo markings all over his body. The men were taking him apart, trying to get him to tell them what he’d done with Junior. He never did say. Didn’t say he didn’t know; just didn’t say.
No, I never saw him again after the men took him out through that door. The ladies came over and cleaned the place out and made it nice for the new Parson; the real Parson. This time we asked to see his credentials and he showed them to us. We asked if the church ever sent a parson up country alone, unmarried. No, never done. Could give rise to problems, especially in small communities, he said.
My son, Christopher, survived. He had kids of his own. All girls. He named each one after the girls who were killed that winter. He never had a boy; didn’t have to struggle over whether to name him Junior. Christopher still lives in the village, and farms the valley meadow. It’s very peaceful there; a good place to raise children.
So you want me to tell you what you’ll find if you go poking around. You wouldn’t go poking in the cemetery; that’s consecrated ground where decent folks are buried, including the children who perished that winter. You might instead go digging around the pigpen. Under the pigpen. You might find a fire pit with some bones. So I hear.
So all your scratching has been for the official record of your investigation? You have one final question? You want to know who disposed of the Parson? I thought you might be getting around to that. Well, then, my answer is – all them that’s dead and gone.
# # #
Terence Gilmore Cady is a recovering semi-retired trial lawyer, nationally certified child welfare law specialist. Graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, class of 1965. Active in the Free Speech Movement at Cal-Berkeley, 1964-65. Read more here.
Photo: Pablo Guerrero
