by Bob Leman
"I don't want it," I said, instantly and without having to think about it. "I don't want it."
That was during the summer of 1934. What Uncle Caleb had told me was, I have no doubt, all he then knew, or had heard, about the feesters. It was not until five years later that he learned something further, when, on his thirty-fifth birthday, Grandpa Scoggins handed him a deed to the Phillips place and told him the rest of the story. I was sixteen then, still spending my summers in Sturkeyville, and once every summer Uncle Caleb and I made the excursion up Dexter Lane and ate our lunch in the clearing. The house and the lake never changed at all from year to year, and even though I was five years older now, and (I firmly believed) reasonably sophisticated, the place still seemed pretty spooky. I said as much to Uncle Caleb.
"Yes," he said. "I want you to promise me something, Nick. Promise me that you'll never go down there. That you won't even come this far unless I'm with you."
I stared at him. He appeared to be perfectly serious. "You believe it!" I said, incredulously. "You believe there's feesters in there!"
"I didn't say that. I just said I don't want you going down there. I mean it, too."
And he did. His expression left no doubt about it. It was quite obvious that this was a matter he took very seriously. I said, "Well, sure, Uncle Caleb. Sure. I promise."
I was more than a little intimidated. He had never used that tone with me before. I was not wholly surprised, though. Each summer I was finding him a little changed; somewhat more detached, a bit gloomier, a touch more cynical. My mother and grandmother did a lot of worrying about him, although they simultaneously seemed to find a certain melancholy romantic satisfaction in his state of mind; "An old-fashioned broken heart," they said. For myself, I found it totally unsatisfactory; I wanted my old Uncle Caleb back.
Then Holmes Ungelbauer died. He died around Christmastime, suddenly, of pneumonia. He was a wiry polo player of thirty-six, the sort of person of whom it is said that he never had a sick day in his life; the fact of his death was difficult for the town to accept. He left no children, only his widow, the former Dorothy Hodge.
My grandmother's letters to my mother that winter as usual concerned themselves largely with Uncle Caleb and his state of mind, and we were easily able to infer from what she wrote that despite his undoubted grief over Holmes's death, a faint but perceptible improvement in his spirit was coming about. Within a year he was openly paying court to the widow, and during the summer after the courtship began — my last summer before going into the army — he was a different man altogether; he was, I think, very much like the young man who had lost Dorothy to Holmes ten years before, the young man I did not remember because I had been too young when it happened. He was playful and funny and his ironies had lost their bitter edge. He was a happy man, a man who clearly believed he was going to recover a thing of value that he had given up as forever lost.
He did not get it, of course. He had bad luck, Uncle Caleb. I was in the army by then, and my mother's long, chatty letters, reaching me in Fort Ben- ning and Camp Shelby, and then in a series of forlorn places in Western Europe, kept me up to date (more up to date than I thought really necessary, to tell the truth) on events in Sturkeyville. The villain was a man named Willing, Otis R. Willing. At any rate my mother and grandmother thought of him as a villain. But then Dorothy was someone they had always known, and Willing was a newcomer, and so it was natural of them to assign the guilt (if guilt there was) to him, not to her.
He was vice-president and general superintendent at the foundry, a big, serious engineer from Purdue or perhaps Michigan State, a former Bright Young Man at Big Steel, who had been lured away by a challenge to put the moribund Hodge Brothers Foundry back on its feet. He had burst violently into the musty corridors of the old firm a few years before, an expensive expert with a reputation to uphold and a fierce joy in his work. He began with a merciless pruning of deadwood, ridding the offices of a puttering horde of routine-bound functionaries who had long since ceased to do any productive work, but who, by tradition, had every reason to believe they would remain on the payroll until at last their infirmities precluded even token appearances at work. He turned then to the denizens of the executive wing and found that he could not depose them; they were, after all, members of the family. But he bypassed them ruthlessly, so that within a few months they were left as functionless ornaments in their elegant offices, free to practice their putting on the carpet or gather together for futile indignation meetings or otherwise fill pointless days. Their responsibilities were assumed by men who came with Willing, men like himself, competent, assured, socially graceless, and, by Sturkeyville's standards, without backgrounds. They came with their prairie accents and degrees from unknown colleges and remade the plant; well before the arrival of the fat contracts of the war the foundry was moving steadily toward profitable operations.
An executive position in the foundry carried with it a social position in the town; Willing was immediately and automatically a member of the country club and the hunt (a purely honorary membership; he did not ride at all) and was invited to take his lunches at the round table at the Updegraff Hotel. If he had had a wife she would have been asked into the Hospital Guild and the Bridge Whist Society. But he had no wife, and that lack made it difficult to fit him into social life at the level of his entry. There was, furthermore, a whiff of wickedness about his reputation: Fred Ungelbauer, who sat on boards of directors in Pittsburgh, had brought back rumors of a mistress of long standing, and that, together with his age (he was probably about forty), set him somewhat apart from the manageable classification of Eligible Bachelor. But, although it was an awkward situation, it was not a real problem because for the first couple of years he appeared quite literally to have no time for anything but his work. Then he married the widow Ungelbauer, and there was no longer any question about his place in the scheme of things.
They presented the town with a fait accompli. One Monday morning Wetzel Avenue awoke to see Willing's car parked in Dorothy's driveway. The street watched avidly until Willing emerged from the house and drove off to the foundry, and then it began to telephone Dorothy. By noon the whole town knew that they had been married on Saturday in a county seat a hundred miles away.
***
I never learned where Uncle Caleb heard the news, or what his initial reaction was. He was not the sort of man who displayed emotion in public, and he may have managed not to show what he felt. But the shock must have been enormous. He had lost Dorothy again, and not only lost her, but lost her to a man who could never have entered his head as a rival, a man he would have thought of only as hired help, a worthy person, no doubt, but not the sort who had any right even to dream of someone like Dorothy. I think I understood Uncle Caleb's mental processes pretty well, and it seems to me that this action of Dorothy's — this action that he surely at first flatly disbelieved — must have been a humiliation almost beyond bearing. When he lost her to Holmes he lost her to an equal. But Otis R. Willing — ah, that was humiliating.
In November I stepped on a land mine in a vinyard above the Moselle, and by Christmas I was in the hospital in Baltimore, with a right leg that was going to be a permanent problem, but comforted by the knowledge that I would never again have to spend my days and nights in a frozen hole. My parents came, and my mother cried over me for a time, and got over it, and then cried again when I asked about Uncle Caleb. When she left the room to seek a vase for the flowers she had brought, I put the question to my father.
"He's in bad shape, Nick," he said. "Drinking hard. Turning into a hermit. He moved out of grandpa's house a year ago, and he's living alone in the country with his horses. He's fixed up an old farmhouse out by Howard's Lake, and even your grandparents don't see him more than once a month. It's bad."
It was indeed. Not long after V-J Day I finally got back to Sturkeyville, and on the second day of my visit I borrowed grandpa's car and drove up to the end of Dexter Lane, where Uncle Caleb had set himself up in
the old Kraft farmhouse. I was appalled. Although he had not in fact changed in appearance very much, nor become dirty and slovenly, as I had half expected, he had undergone a change of character. Or of personality, at least. His old detachment and gentle irony had soured and curdled and become an unnerving blend of pessimism and cynicality. I found myself almost disliking him. We sat in the big room he had created by knocking out all the first-floor walls except those of the kitchen, and I listened to his bitter commentary with sorrow and incredulity. He had reached the point of viewing all accomplishment — including the war just ended — as futile and pointless; all human effort, in his black view, was inspired by sordid and ignoble motives; all human beings were knaves, and women were the worst of the lot. Not that they were entirely wicked and malicious, he said; they were simply empty and thoughtless and without character, and hence easily susceptible of being led by evil men into discreditable behavior. And such men were the basest and lowest of our low race.
I knew he was talking about Willing, and he knew I knew, and soon he began to use the name. He had been drinking pretty steadily, and as his rage and resentment fed upon themselves his speech began to lapse into incoherency. I was a little frightened, and I tried — as I had been trying all afternoon — to change the subject.
"What do you hear from your neighbors down at the lake?" I said.
"Neighbors?"
"The feesters. They're your neighbors now, aren't they?"
He gave me a startled, suspicious glare. "The feesters ? What do you know about the feesters?"
"Why, I know all about them," I said. "You told me yourself. Five-foot aquatic maggots with sharks' mouths. Members of the local gentry until The Curse of Hoog, Fish-God of the South Seas, fell upon them. Named for selected Muses. I've always wanted to meet a maggot named Polyhymnia. "
His face changed expression several times as I spoke, altering from suspicion to anger, and then to an odd combination of fear and something akin to smugness. "Careful, there, Nick," he said. "Be careful. Don't make fun of things you don't know anything about. You might be sorry."
"Now what the hell does that mean? 'Might be sorry.' You mean the feesters might come and eat me?"
"You might be sorry."
"Oh, for God's sake," I said. I felt sick. He was deadly serious. This was not just drunken maundering, it was lunacy. I shouted at him: "For God's sake, Uncle Caleb, what are you talking about?"
"Never mind," he said. "Never mind. Believe what you like. Call it what you like. Just stay away from Howard's Lake, that's all."
And that was all I got out of him. I had to report to my grandparents not only the total failure of my attempt to lure him back to real life, but also my conviction that it was hopeless to try. He had, to put it simply, gone off his head; I saw nothing to do but wait, and hope for some sort of recovery. I was very wise at that time, with a far greater certainty of the answers to hard questions than I possess today, and it was perfectly clear to me that a man who believed in ancient curses and monsters at the bottom of the local lake was, ipso facto, insane. But I thought it was only temporary, a consequence of preserving into advanced age (he was over forty) emotions that were seemly only in the young. It had been, to be sure, a bitter experience for him, to lose Dorothy twice; but I myself had loved and lost, and recovered very nicely, and I saw no reason why Uncle Caleb, an older man whose feelings could not possibly be as deep as mine had been, should not show an equal resilience in recovering from his geriatric infatuation.
Then he lost her for the third time. That is how he saw it, at any rate. It might plausibly be argued that in none of the three cases had he lost her, because he had never in fact had her. But when she was once more widowed, he allowed himself a certain amount of hope again, and when that small hope was extinguished, he went irretrievably over the edge.
It had been a foolish hope, to be sure. Dorothy had rejected him twice and apparently had been entirely contented through all the years with Holmes and Willing. After Willing's murder and the attendant turmoil and publicity, no reasonable person could have expected her to stay in Sturkeyville and take up with Uncle Caleb. But Uncle Caleb was by then very far indeed from a reasonable person.
He was a suspect in the murder. The prime suspect, the only suspect, really, except for the general fear of a vagrant madman. As it happened, Uncle Caleb was investigated and absolved almost immediately, and the crime was generally believed to have been the work of an insane hobo, who had probably caught the next freight train out of town. The case went down on the books as an unsolved murder. And the town went in fear.
Their fear was quite sensible; it had in truth been an atrocious crime. Willing had been working late that night, as was his habit. He was building an entirely new plant for the foundry, south of town in the direction of the lake, and the last weeks before production was to begin were hectic in the extreme. A night watchman saw him leaving the building at about eleven o'clock. It was a night of torrential rain, and water had shorted out some of the new wiring, so that there were no lights in the parking lot. Willing's was the only parked car.
The watchman's later testimony was that he had heard what he thought might be a scream, coming faintly through the roar of the rain. He went immediately to the door that gave onto the parking lot, and peered out. He could see nothing. He ran (as fast as he could; he was an old man) to his cubicle for the flashlight he should have been carrying. He threw its beam out into the parking lot. Then he stood frozen in the doorway for a little time, retching and trembling. When he was able to overcome his paralysis, he ran (faster this time) to the telephone.
The sheriff was an experienced lawman who had seen his share of grisly sights, but he admitted afterward that he had been shaken by what had been done to Willing. "Get the tarp, for God's sake," he said to a deputy. "Jesus Christ. I never saw anything like that. That's crazy." He stopped. "Crazy," he said. "Caleb Scoggins, by God. That's Otis Willing, there. Got to be Scoggins. We'll just go out there and get him. Keebler, you stay here till the meat wagon comes. Stark, you come with me. By God, we'll beat him home."
They slipped and slewed up Dexter Lane through the downpour. "No car's been down this road," the deputy said. "Not a track."
"He went down before the rain started."
"That was early this morning," the deputy said.
"He walked, then. Or rode his horse. Watch what you're doing."
The Kraft house faced the end of the road, and the headlights lit up its front. There was no sign of life. The deputy swept about with the spotlight. "Nobody's used the front door," he said. "Not a track."
"You take the flashlight and go around the house," the sheriff said. "I'll watch the front.”
The deputy disappeared into the rain. He was back in a few minutes. "Nobody's been in or out since it started raining. Not a human track. Looks like maybe a dog dragged something through. But no Caleb Scoggins."
The sheriff felt a sense of triumph, as he never failed to mention when he told about it. "I figured I had him, then, he said. I figured to hide the car in the woods, and then me and Stark would lay low till he got there. I thought he'd probly come back over the hills and wouldn't see the car tracks. And right then, by God, was when the front door opened, and there stood Caleb in his pajamas, blinkin' in the headlights."
So Uncle Caleb was cleared, and the town was left with the mad hobo theory and went in fear at night. Dorothy was not one of the fearful: she left town immediately and never came back, except many years later, to be buried. I suppose there were too many memories of tragedy in the town for her to stay, but her flight also served to save her from the terrors of the next few years. Because there were more murders.
Two of them, both crimes of the most appalling gruesomeness. There was a disappearance as well, which added to the general disquiet, although it appeared to have nothing to do with the murders. But then it was a frightened town in those years, apprehensive of the darkness and suspicious of strangers. The sensational press had a
feast, spreading the story of the Sturkeyville Butcher from coast to coast and seizing the opportunity to recount once more the stories of Jack the Ripper and other mass murderers.
And Uncle Caleb, bereft now for the third time, disintegrated rapidly, crawling further into the bottle and wholly abandoning any effort to live a life of normal sociability. News of him came from Mattie Helms, my grandmother's housekeeper and my old friend, who was my only corespondent in the town since my grandfather's death and my grandmother's stroke. Mattie wrote, "Well Nick you would not believe your Uncle Caleb, I think the poor man has left his senses entirely, he does not wash and is very dirty and drunk. It is safe to say that Dorothy Hodge has a lot to answer for but God will judge. Now he has left the Kraft farm, he has moved to the old Feester house by Howards lake which is said by the country people to be haunted as I guess you know. It is almost a hundred years since anyone lived there, what it must be like inside I can not imagine. I wish you and your mother would come Nick and see if you can help him. "
But I saw no way to help him, and indeed I was beginning to have certain small doubts about wanting to. The suspicions that nagged at me were of course unmentionable; I hardly let myself think about them, let alone discuss them with anyone else. It seemed to me, though, that I could read the same fear between the lines of Mattie's letter, and my mother's near-hysteria when Uncle Caleb's troubles were discussed seemed perhaps a touch excessive even for concern about a beloved brother's disintegration. Mother and Mattie were, of course, no more anxious to put their dread into words than I was, and we all kept our own counsel.
What troubled us was this: we had, reluctantly and unwillingly, been forced to conclude that all three of the murdered men stood in a relationship to Uncle Caleb that might have seemed to him — given the decrepit state of his mentality — to be inimical: first Willing, the contemptible man who had snatched away Dorothy and exposed Uncle Caleb to ridicule; then Gunther Hodge, who had brought Willing to Sturkeyville; and then Stark, the young deputy who had come to arrest him on the rainy night of Willing's death. These were not pleasant thoughts. But the person who had disappeared could in no way, I was grateful to note, be connected to Uncle Caleb: she was Wanda Karsky, a seventeen-year-old miner's daughter with a reputation for wildness, and no one but her parents thought there was much of a mystery about her disappearance. The consensus was that she had run off with a man and would end up on the street of a big city.