No one survives the Hellhole.
To portray a family’s loose relationship with truth, folklore must be confronted, namely whether to concern themselves, nearly 50 years later, with their great uncle’s disappearance, or just forget about it, and stop sniffing around the henhouse. Lumber tycoon Barzillai Wallace was swallowed by a geographical oddity, and the family has ever wobbled in indecision to speak of it, or be likewise devoured by it.
Five men, Robert, friend Chuck, and the Keane uncles, Moira’s brothers, all in their forties, tan, thin, in open collared polo shirts and white shorts, played poker and chess and smoked on the screen porch at Woman Lake, recounting family stories, picked and unraveled for relative truth or infamy, but not both, recorded by public knowledge or crime reports, and facts so thin as to need stretching, as in the bottom of a can of whitewash stranded and alone with a section of fence left to paint.
It was late summer, 1972.
They twirled cigar coals into ashtrays made of green depression glass, slotted into wicker and bamboo armchairs.
Moira’s feet scuffed pine needles on her walk up from the beach with two empty glasses. Picking her way along flagstones, she heard:
.There’s a name for that.
.Embezzlement.
.Ehh.
.Embezzling a racketeer i’nt embezzlement.
.You say.
.Thieving off a thief, more like.
Dunking her feet in a dish pan of water at the door, she then clapped the screen door twice and opened it.
Moira - Solving all the problems?
Since no one answered, her husband Robert found her eyes and smiled.
Uncle Pat Keane, who sat at the poker table with brother-in-law Robert, Robert’s friend Chuck, while Uncles Terry Keane and Joe Keane played chess by the window, asked.
Pat - Did he jump or was he pushed?
Quiet held, then popped off with snorts.
Terry - What you mean, ‘Jump?’ Psh. Fall or pushed. You ever been up there on Crown Falls? It’s not hard to get up. Easy half mile walk.
Robert’s friend Chuck - Surprised no one’s died there.
Pat - Except Uncle Barzillai did. 1932.
Robert - Barzillai, ‘Man of Iron.’ Railroad titan, captain of industry. Born in a sod house, lived in four mansions, died in a hole.
Terry - I mean no one else.
Pat - No body was ever found.
Quiet Uncle Joe - Nothing goes in ever comes out of the Hellhole. Does it flow underground? Join back with Crown River in the Lake? Nope. Bye-bye. Clean death.
By lake, Joe meant Superior, close to the Canada border. Chatter stops on the porch.
Friend Chuck, grinning - Keep it low or Kid McCool’s boys will wake from the dead and come get us and toss us down there.
Terry - I’s going to say, Joe, that’s bleak.
Joe - No muss, no fuss.
Everyone coughed and laughed.
Joe - Bleak is true. Aunt Mayme said. She was up there with Kid McCool’s dopes when he went in. No splash, not a sound. Just gone and quiet.
Terry - And no body.
Joe - No body.
Pat - How in God’s name, ‘No body?’
They fussed and expostulated if Barzillai died accidentally, was murdered, or faked his death and reappeared to live out life in Venezuela. He had been to Caracas among his world travels.
Robert - Wun’t he a daredevil? Didn’t he ride a log skid into the lake for a stunt? He beat a moose to death with a stick on Crown Isle when his gun jammed.
Terry - He shot a moose calf nursing, and the mom about stomped him flat.
Pat - Jesus lord, a moose calf.
Quiet Uncle Joe stared at his brother Terry’s last knight and bishop on the chessboard.
Uncle Pat - Let’s raise a toast to Uncle Barzillai, daredevil, drowned man, murdered man maybe - [Pat shook his fist mightily] - single-handedly clear-cut the Nor’Shore of white pine.
Terry - Not ‘single-handedly’, cripes.
Pat - Why ya gotta spoil a story?
Without clinking anyone, they raised glasses and sipped.
Moira slid past them with two tall glasses, careful not to trip on flip flops stranded around the floor.
Moira - God rest whatever soul Barzillai had.
Pat - Keep those kids in line down there, Mory.
She clicked her cheek like a cowboy at his horse with a side wink back at her boys.
The men mused over the twisting ambiguities of truth about their families, tucked inside fluff, wondering about the numbers of lies, both omission and outright, required to get to this epoch of fog decades later in 1972 where deeds on trashed property, even lakeshore now considered priceless, after attempted seizure by an Irish mob, provide the new crop of children its comforts of fireplaces, indoor toilets, glass and curtained windows, lamps and plenty of books and comic books.
The stoop, a rock and cement half-circle splits two inches from the porch, which feet strike it as a tympani, always groaning. The big waffle iron itself from a mess hall won an honorary spot on a butcher block table in the kitchen after it was taken off wall hooks and Great Aunt Sadie brained a dope burglar from Kid McCool’s gang with it in the late forties. The plywood porch on cinder blocks sagged toward the beach, its sky blue paint peeling from years of sandy feet traffic from the lake to fetch terry towels, followed by the whack of the screen door.
In 1972, teenagers would take over the beach when the fish boil was pilfered, and parents would fall back to the porch to escape mosquitoes.
Tucked in the bay among tall, whispering pines, lay one well furnished log cabin built in 1949 and three tiny cabins added in the fifties with cherry pattern cafe curtains facing the lake. All that is left of the former resort, The Waffle Iron, has been retired from rentals and privatized to the Keane and Lafferty cousins alone. It looks a once-fortified compound as vertical, black-stained round posts dot the perimeter of a few acres of mown and pine needle-matted lawns in surprisingly sturdy array, though some of their slats have fallen down.
On the beach, Lafferty son Bobby, 17, sings and plays Sentimental Lady and Tiny Dancer on guitar. His theatrical sister Bríd harmonizes along. A pot of sunfish and bass, with onions, carrots, and potatoes, hangs steaming over the dying fire, the fish picked out and almost empty, ladle hooked off the edge. Corn in the pit below bakes in tinfoil, and the boys are moaning, but every girl here is a cousin.
For teens up north, it’s Friday night splendor of the game, Sardines, smoke, lemon dripped into fish, and wild yearning, girl cousins relaxed in cotton bikinis, sand in their bottoms and fronts, hair up in towels or headbands, arms draped, eyes down, critiquing each other’s bust fits and eyeliner, stomping off barefoot, pretend-mad, back laughing, among boy cousins with sun-bleached hair and golden washboard stomachs, belching and reaching down endlessly, not discreetly, in a lost cause to loosen and fail to extinguish their relentless thickening and sighing manhood, and no help for it but to run into the cool water, knees up.
A dozen kids are sat on logs, damp sand and bulrushes. They have run an extension cord to play records outside and tell scary stories, one about rats in New York tenements nibbling on baby fingers in cribs, or a zombie with no hands, crawling up the stairs with a thump-thump, drag. Soft waves lap into shore. Pit smoke curls up and turns over the water.
Teen Willie eyes his mother returning from the cabin with drinks.
Uncle Sean sees Willie eyeing Moira and looks up.
Sean - What’re they saying?
Moira - It’s about Uncle Barzillai.
Willie - Mom, Mom, can you tell about the Hellhole? [He knows.] Can you tell about it? It’s a perfect time.
Moira - Oh well, it’s just a story Uncle Seanie has to tell.
Uncle Sean is the Keane’s beaten man. He has not fully matured. He has been a handyman, substitute math teacher, a flirt and a raconteur, mostly at once. He is fond of the drink.
Sean - You know I wasn’t there, my dear.
Moira - You were there.
Sean - Well I was at Winnebago, but I was only seven. Auntie Mayme was actually up there on Crown Falls when Uncle Barzillai fell in. ‘Fell in,’ so they say.
Moira - Irish mafia.
Willie - How could they not find his body?
All kids - What do you mean, his body?
Willie - He got pushed or he fell into the Hellhole.
All kids - What’s a hellhole?
Willie - It’s a hole of water where nothing gets back out.
Twelve year old Freddie stands behind the group with a cigarette lighting a firework sparkler in his hand.
Freddie to little cousin - Here, take this one; I’ll light another.
Sean turning around - That a cigarette in your hand?
Freddie - just yours, Uncle Sean, for lighting sparklers, see?
Freddie takes a drag on the cigarette coughs and laughs.
Sean - Put it out.
Freddie - Okay.
He doesn’t put it out.
Freddie - That’s up on the Crown Falls.
Little Cousin - What’s Winnebago?
All kids - What is a hellhole.
Sean - Okay, be quiet, little ankle biters, and I’ll talk.
Moira - Don’t scare them.
Sean - Aw, scared is all right. Life is scary.
~~End of part one.
The rest of Hellhole, 2/2, is written. I will send it tomorrow.
