Tales from Flay-Woman Crick (Pt. 1)

[23 February, 2016]

I’m not sure why I’m even posting this here. Instead of typing out some asinine Reddit post, I should be finishing up my dissertation, or preparing something to say in response to the questions those tenured old bastards will ask me during my PhD defense. However, the sooner I have all this shit written down – whether it be on here, or on two-hundred pages of double-spaced Times New Roman – the sooner I can forget.

Well, I can try to, at least.  

Who knows? Maybe I drew some lucky straw before I was born, and my genetics are predisposed for Alzheimer’s, or dementia, or something else like that forty-fifty years from now. Then I will finally, finally be free of it all. But that’s a long time of waiting, a long time of remembering, a long time of waking up every booze-drenched morning paralyzed, dreaming I’m back at the bottom of that goddamn creek. Back with her.

No. No matter how much my brain degrades from illness, or senility, or alcohol – nothing will ever make me forget the things I witnessed in that godforsaken town. 

Humans have always told stories to influence people; stories kept children from misbehaving, or explained then-incomprehensible natural phenomena, or convinced zealots to strap bombs to their chests… Well, If there’s anything I can gain from sharing these stories, it’s to warn you there are certain places on this earth where the curtain separating reality and incorporeality is pulled wide open. 

Plentiful Wells is one of those places.

***

[4 August, 2015 – A Brief History]

About two hours west of Austin, the town of Plentiful Wells lies right in the middle of Hill Country. The region is notable for its numerous limestone formations such as canyons, caves, and (yes!) hills. 

As the climate goes: from April to June, all the land around Plentiful Wells is lush with new growth, but once summer comes, the heat sucks all the moisture from the air, making life impossible for most things. For the remaining nine months of the year, the place is a desert – dry, rough, and cracked like an old stain on an old table. 

The town was originally settled in 1823 by the Wends, an obscure German ethnic minority in search of religious freedom. The Wends did not tolerate slavery, so Plentiful Wells became one of the few safe havens for runaway slaves in the South before the Civil War. This would not last for long. The Wendish were inexperienced with cultivating such inhospitable land; a series of crop failures and livestock deaths led the community to ruin. People scattered. The town was mostly abandoned by the time of Texas’s secession from the Union. 

During Reconstruction, the area was re-settled by carpetbaggers from the North. As the name implies, Plentiful Wells had massive subterranean reservoirs of enriched mineral water, which many of the time believed to be therapeutic. These Northerners built resorts and hotels, and Plentiful Wells grew from a humble town into a small city of nearly 50,000. During the boom period, City Council  approved a dam to block the flow of the Agua Rojo River. Leitco Valley, the flatland originally settled by the Wends, was going to be flooded. Many believed this decision was made to make a piece of real estate (recently purchased by a member of the Vanderbilts) a more desirable location for a lakeside resort. Ultimately, no resort was built. The dam was, and all of the old Wendish colonial buildings are underwater to this day.

Then, for seemingly no reason at all, the reservoirs dried up. No one knew what caused this catastrophe, and no one had any money left to figure it out; the cash left alongside the tourists. Only the infrastructure was left behind: if you were to take a tour of downtown Plentiful Wells today, you’d notice the amount of darkened windows triple the lit ones. Since the exodus, nothing else notable has ever happened in Plentiful Wells, besides a few violent altercations between the police and the local African American population during the Civil Rights movement. 

In short, Plentiful Wells is no different than any other small town in rural Texas. After all, the South is made of neglected places with neglected people. I should know. I grew up an hour east of Plentiful Wells, in another neglected place. 

So why make Plentiful Wells the focus of my research? 

I believe the answer to this question can be best illustrated by the very first interview I arranged upon my arrival into town…

***

[5 August, 2015 – Interview One: Doug Greschke]

86-years-young, Doug Greschke (who insists everyone calls him ‘Dougie’) lives on a piece of land that’s belonged to his family since 1823. Judging by the surname and year I just mentioned, you’ve probably already guessed that Dougie draws his American heritage all the way back to those original Wendish settlers of the region. In fact, Dougie has some of the strongest Wendish roots of anyone in Plentiful Wells.

“My Mamaw [Dougie’s grandmother] was born in 1864 – and her mother was just a girl when the Wend-folk came to Texas,” Dougie begins. 

We’re sitting in the cramped living room of Dougie’s ranch house. Books and trinkets fill shelves mounted to wood-paneled walls; the shag carpet dry-aged with decades of tobacco smoke. In the corner of the room, Fox News plays quietly on a mid-2000s CRT TV. The logo is burnt into the corner of the screen. 

“See, old King Frederick of, uhm, Prussia I think it was… Frederick wanted to unite the Lutheran Church and the Reform Church into a single, state-sanctioned, nationally-approved Church. ‘Course for the Wend-folk – being devout Lutherans – they weren’t gonna tolerate that. So they commissioned a schooner called the Ben Nevis, sailed across the sea, and landed on the shores of Galveston. From there they made their way inward, and set up homes in this lovely strip of land we’re sitting on now.”

Beneath Dougie’s obligatory Texan accent, there’s an extra lilt. The vowels round out in a particularly European way.

“My Mamaw taught me Wendish when I was a kiddo. Didn’t want the language to die out,” Dougie says.

I ask, “Do you know if anyone else can speak Wendish?”

He shakes his head, “Far as I know, not here. There’s probably some who still do in the Old Country...”

“What’s it sound like?”

“Same way German, Czech, and Polish do – like a smoker’s coughing fit.”

“I’d love to hear some.”

Dougie smiles and tells me in perfect Wendish, “the weather outside is hot, sunny, with three clouds in the sky that look like piles of horse-shit.” 

Indeed, the weather outside was hot, sunny, and the three clouds did look like piles of horse-shit. 

We exchanged some more niceties for a while. Eventually, I asked, “Dougie, did you hear any good stories about the Wends growing up?”

Dougie chews on the flavored wood mouthpiece of the Black & Mild he’s smoking. “Yessir, I’ve heard a few...”

***

There was one story in my family that was gruesome as all hell. It wasn’t a story people liked telling, either. Truthfully, I’m not sure who told me, but I guess I heard it at some point from someone... This happened to my Great-Grandmommy a year or two after the Wend-folk settled Plentiful Wells. 

Now… the land here has always been harsh, and harsh land means a harsh life, ‘specially back then. Death became a nasty habit for the Wend-folk in those early years. 

But one death stood out among the others. 

One morning, a group of children were sent to collect water from a nearby crick – my Great-Grandmommy being one of them. She followed her friends to the embankment, kneeled down, and dipped her bucket into the water. Suddenly, up comes something large, and red, and slimy. Kiddos panic. They run back to the village and grab some grown-ups. The grown-ups rush out there; and right off the bat, they knew exactly what was in the water. They turned around and yelled at the children, cussed at them, swung switches at them, threatened them with whoopings – anything to scare them off. It worked. All the kiddos ran straight back to the village. 

All, except for Great-Grandmommy… She ran slower than the rest, and turned her ass right back around to find out what was going on. Hiding in the underbrush, she slowly made her way back to the crick.

The way whoever told me the story told it, Great-Grandmommy never forgot what she saw that day. 

She never forgot the pastor and his son going down, wading into the belly-high water, and gingerly carrying the body out of the crick. She never forgot the butcher running into a thicket and losing his breakfast, nor the smattering of women crying into their kerchiefs. More than anything, she never, ever forgot the dead woman laid out on the shore, skinned and hacked to shreds like a slaughtered animal. 

No one knew who she was. No one from town was missing. They theorized it might’ve been some Indian girl from a rival tribe that got caught by Ol’ Apache, and tortured for no other reason than that she was from a different tribe. Either way, they figured she wasn’t no Christian, so they buried her out in the woods, no ceremony, in an unmarked grave. 

At this point, Dougie’s cigarillo is burnt down to the mouthpiece. He snubs it out in a filled ashtray.

But… most of the Wendish stuff I picked up as a kid were folk remedies. My granddaddy had something he called “Lebenswecker Öl” – or “life-awakening oil” – that was some kinda herbal tincture that stung like a sonofabitch, and smelled like one, too. People swore by it as a cure-all. You’d lather up with it if your muscles were sore. Prick your skin with needles and soak it in the stuff to clear up rashes or zits. Hell, you could drink it and it’d make you shit out a tapeworm thirty-foot long. I think my grandaddy was one of the last folk around here to know how to make it, ‘cause after he died, I never did see another bottle of the stuff.

There’s also a tradition of chanting and using our words to cure illness, (the Dutch did this kinda stuff too up in Pennsylvania; called it Powwow magick). When I was eight, I had a hell of a fever. Mamaw taught me this chant that goes:

‘Run, run, first fire,
Meet all children, pipes, river courses,
With the first fire, 

May God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost help you…”

Of course, that all rhymes in Wendish. But then, you slap your forehead a few times with the palm of your hand; repeat this several times a day, and the fever should break the next morning. 

Not sure where I heard this next one, but there was also a love spell women could perform where they’d keep an apple in their craw all night long, sweat all over it, and the next morning feed it to their sweetheart of choice. I don’t know if the same thing worked for men: I’m sure there are plenty of fellas who’d eat an apple that tasted like pussy, but not very many ladies who’d eat one that tasted like pecker-sweat. 

Dougie laughs.

I’m sorry, this… this remedy shit probably isn’t what you want to hear. Truth is, even by my Mamaw’s time on this Earth, a lot of the Wendish stories had stopped being told. Spreewald – the place in Germany where the Wends came from – was a beautiful, ancient forest on the edge of a river. It was a place where the Old Magic had an effect on people; it influenced their lives from day-to-day and informed the decisions people made. 

Then, they came here. There were no majestic King Stags anymore, just scrawny whitetails with their stringy meat. No more tall pines that hid fairies in their branches, just scraggly mesquites with inch-long thorns. The New World killed the Old Country’s magic, and our stories died alongside it. 

But, a few persisted. I can do my best in showing you a few of their old bones – if I can remember ‘em... 

Here, Dougie takes a moment to collect his thoughts. He licks his lips nervously. 

Off the record, I get the feeling Dougie’s trying very hard to impress me. He seems very lonely. He wears a wedding ring, but I figure his wife was long-since dead. I’m unsure if he has children.

Now that I think about it, there were a lot of witch stories that survived. One was about a girl who fainted while working in a barn. Her friends tried to wake her up, but nothing worked. They were afraid she was dead, but then a little white mouse scurried out from a pile of hay, jumped into her mouth, and went down her throat. The girl shot right up, and got back to work. The village-folk believed the mouse was a devil, so the local pastor asked the girl’s parents to take her to the church for an examination. As soon as the girl crossed the church’s threshold, her body seized, and she fell to the floor in spasms. The girl died there, and out of her mouth came a little white mouse that fretted off into the tall-grass. 

In another story, a pastor goes to a woman’s house because it’s rumored she’s a witch. The pastor offers her some money to fill up a pail with milk. The only problem is that the witch doesn’t have a cow. So, in front of the pastor, she hammers a nail into the wall, and ties a piece of string to the nail. She milks the string like it’s an udder. Milk spurts out. Before long, the pail is full. The pastor offers her more money to fill another. At first, the witch refuses because she could kill the cow her magick is feeding off of. But the allure of cash money is too strong for her. She milks the twine again until it squirts blood. Almost immediately, her neighbor runs out of his house crying ‘bout how his cow withered up like rotting fruit and dropped dead. 

Having now proved the witch is the witch, the pastor reveals that he wants to save the witch’s soul. He tries very hard for several years to convert her, and the two develop this odd friendship. One day, the pastor makes the witch promise that if she were to die before him, she would send a messenger to inform him if she made it into heaven. 

Several years pass. The witch dies. Soon after, the pastor is sitting alone in his garden, and this bird starts flying over his head, and then… this bird —

Dougie trails off. His eyes widen and stare unfocused at a far-off wall. It’s like he just saw someone walk out in the middle of the highway and get liquidated.

I nudge him politely, ‘What about the bird, Dougie?’

I just remembered something…

His voice cracks. I nudge again, ‘Go ahead…’

Dougie shakes his head.

No, I – I don’t think this’ll be something you want to hear… Maybe… I think there are some stories about giants –

I recognize the tone of his wavering voice. Dougie’s scared. 

I shut my notebook, and stand. ‘Well then,’ I say, ‘I think I have everything I need from you, Mr. Greschke.’

Dougie’s eyes sag like filled water bladders.

Are – are you going so soon? There are other stories I can –

‘Mr. Greschke, In the past, I’ve found when a subject is… hesitant to tell me a story, there’s an underlying truth exposing something sordid about the locale I’m researching. If you refuse to give me what I’m asking for, I can always talk to any of the other interviewees I have lined up. Your name will be struck off my research, and I’ll complete my paper without your involvement.’

He sinks into his chair.

Alright… please sit. I’ll tell you what you want to hear. Just please sit…

I loom over him a moment longer, but ultimately I obey his request. He begins to speak. 

After Pearl Harbor, my Pa enlisted in the Marines, and he was shipped off to Fort Rucca in Alabama. I was eleven when he left. 

At the time, everyone lived together in this house. Ma slept in her too-big, empty bedroom; my two older sisters, Charlotte and Eudora, shared the same room with me; and Mamaw slept in the attic. Pa brought her here and got her settled on the third floor loft a few months before the Japs hit Hawaii. This filled two needs: first, Mamaw was left all alone after Grandaddy passed (naturally, Pa wanted to take care of his own mother in her time of need). The other reason was… well, Mamaw’s mental faculties weren’t fully there anymore. 

It wasn’t all bad. In the mornings, before we left for school, Mamaw reviewed Wendish words and phrases with my sisters and I. It didn’t really matter if it was stuff she had taught us years ago, it made us feel like things were normal. By the time we came back home, however, she was long-gone mentally: drool trailing out of her mouth, sitting in a massive armchair that ate her up the way bone cancer eats up an old dog. 

Worst of all, she had night terrors. I’d wake up to her screaming. It was gibberish mostly – things about ‘black hearts’, and ‘fingers digging from the earth’. Ma got woken up one night by the commotion, and I guess she couldn’t take it anymore. She ran up those stairs to the loft, and screamed at Mamaw, saying things like how we all wished she would just die and leave us alone. Ma’s screaming woke Charlotte, Eudora, and I. We heard everything. Christ, I’ll never forget hearing that old woman’s whimpering after Ma came stomping back downstairs. I wish I had gone up to give her company. Instead, I just cried into my pillow. 

Of course, the nightmares did not go away. So, my sisters and I became Mamaw’s nighttime caretakers. We went in cycles: Charlotte would go up one night, then it was Eudora’s turn, then mine. That went on for a few weeks, but soon, even my sisters got sick of it. My one and only job then was giving Mamaw comfort at night. 

I hated it.

Although we had electricity in the house, none of it ran up to the attic. Ma gave me a tiny candle and a book of matches that I kept on the nightside table I shared with Charlotte. If Mamaw started crying, it was my job to light the candle, walk up the stairs leading to the third floor, and take my place beside her cot. 

Now, I loved the hell outta Mamaw. But Christ… feeling my way through that pitch-black room with just a little flame to guide me; seeing that sunken-bodied old woman in shaking spasms; plugging my ears because she was screaming so loud it hurt; waking her up; calming her down; stripping her bed of linens ‘cause she had sweated or pissed or shit through the fabric; accepting her apologies even though she called me by my Pa’s name… God help me, I don’t think I hated anything in my life more than that. I’ll never forgive my mother or my sisters for putting that all on me…

One night, however, I woke up and it was silent. It was confusing, but then again,  I reckoned my body had just conditioned itself to waking up at that particular hour. I laid there listening to the silence – I mean, what’s the use of going to sleep when you’re just gonna be woken up again soon? 

Time passed, and still nothing. So, after some debate, I allowed myself to doze off. I turned over on my side and –

I heard it. 

Or rather, I didn’t hear it. The whole time I was awake, lying in my bed, waiting for Mamaw’s cries… there was an almost imperceptible noise that had gone unnoticed. It wasn’t speech. It wasn’t the creaking of bedsprings or floorboards. In the corner of my room, hidden beneath my sisters’ tired sighs… something was breathing. 

My mind whirred and shot sparks like a cheap tinker-toy. Whatever was there was smart enough to know it would be caught if I just opened my eyes – as soon as I turned my body, the thing reflexively held its breath. Whatever was there was not some feral animal. It was intelligent. 

I laid there. Eyes closed. Keeping still. Hoping whatever was in the room would lose interest, and go back where it came from. I listened as hard as I could, but I couldn’t hear anything. ‘Nothing can hold its breath for that long,’ I thought. Maybe it was just the wind blowing, or water moving through the pipes –

I don’t really know why I did it – maybe it was just to prove to myself my imagination was running rampant – but I opened my eyes. I was a fool for doing so. 

 In the outline of the darkness, I saw this… thing crumpled up in the corner of my room. Near the top of it, two tiny beads of light bounced off a pair of black marbles. It was staring right at me. 

People think pure terror happens instantaneously. It doesn’t. It’s a drunken warmth that starts in your ass, and turns your legs to smoke. The warmth climbs, scorching your belly, and filling your lungs with pitch. Finally, the burning reaches the top of your head, and your whole body is doused with gasoline.

When the fire finally starts, you’ll find you’re made of wood. 

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak or breathe. Jesus, I couldn’t even close my eyes and wish it all away like a dream. It was too close. If I said or did anything, it would realize it was found-out, and be upon me instantly. What would it do then? Would it dig its claws into my belly and rip my guts out? Would it sink its teeth into my throat? Or would it offer something… worse than death?

My calculations didn’t make a difference. It stood up. 

The pane of our bedroom window cast a cross-shaped shadow across the thing’s body as it rose. Ribs showed through paper-thin skin. Blood ran down its chest, bulged over its round belly, and congealed in white pubic hair. There was something in one of its hands: a mass of feathers and flesh and broken bone. I could smell it rotting. 

The thing spoke. The voice was a tired wisp that could only throat a single, guttural word I did not recognize. It sounded like nonsense. The word repeated three times, each time quieter and more solemn than the last. 

When it finished, the thing shuffled to the bedroom door, nudged it open, and excused itself to the rest of the house. 

A black fog consumed me. Piss ran down the front of my thigh and pooled on the mattress. ‘No better than Mamaw,’ I thought. ‘I’m no better… no better…’

I awoke to the world shaking. 

No, that was Eudora – she was on top of me, grabbing me by the shoulders, begging me to wake up. The first word in my head was: ‘Fire’. But that wasn’t right, either – the whitewashed walls of our room shone with sunlight, not with flame. 

Eudora yelled at me to get out of the house. My body was slow to respond, but it wasn’t as useless as it had been the night before. I leaped out of my bed, and headed for the door. Before I opened it, I looked back and saw Charlotte crying in her bed. Eudora slapped her, and grabbed her by the arm. She then looked at me –

‘Go!’ she shouted.  

I opened the door to the hallway and found Ma standing on the third floor staircase, cradling Pa’s shotgun in the nook of her arm, screaming at us to get out. One glimpse of the floor explained everything…

Buzzards. Dozens of them. Ripped apart like a fickle child’s least-favorite teddy bear. Infusing the floorboards with their putrid blood.

They led up to Mamaw’s room. 

Eudora gathered Charlotte and I into the yard. Then, she ran inside to grab one of Pa’s varmint pistols from the kitchen drawer. She came out a bit later and told us Ma was gonna stay inside and call some folks. 

We burned in the midday-sun for two hours. Then came an ambulance. Like a clown car, more men filed out of that white van than I thought possible. They met Ma on the front porch, she said some things to them, then they went inside. Mamaw came out on a gurney. She was alive, but there was nothing behind those eyes anymore. The person I loved was lost to some permanent madness. And those lips I kissed  – I don’t know how many times before – were drenched with blood.  

Two months later, some more men arrived at our house; only the uniforms they wore were green, not white. There was an invasion of some island in the Pacific, and Pa was killed. We were devastated, but I moreso. Unlike my Ma, and Charlotte, and Eudora, I recognized the name of the little island Pa died on. I heard it before. Two months before. 

I didn’t comprehend it at the time, but that name had been spoken three times – enunciated with bloodstained lips – in a guttural, vacant voice coming from the corner of my bedroom. 

‘Guadalcanal.’  

Mamaw told it to me. 

***

I had endless questions for Dougie, but I could see the story had taken its toll. All that youthful vigor he mimicked was gone. Now I just saw a lonely, tired old man, sitting lopsided in his armchair. I recalled how he described his grandmother sitting in her chair, and thought the description also applied to Dougie. Bone cancer on an old dog…

I thanked him for his time, wrote my phone number on a card, and slipped it under Dougie’s ashtray. “I’ve overstayed my welcome, so I’ll see myself out, Mr. Greschke.”

He didn’t look at me, just nodded. 

I was almost out of the room when Dougie said, “At the time, we all wondered: why buzzards? And where did Mamaw get so many? 

I turned and asked, “How did she?”

He still wasn’t looking at me. He shrugged, “I don’t know where they came from. No one could explain it… But I might know why she killed those buzzards.”

His mouth trembled. I decided not to push him. He said, “I had a son, once. Like Pa, he died in war. Unlike Pa, he didn’t have a choice. He was drafted. June 24th, 1971. Vietnam. 

“As hard as I tried – prayed for this to never happen again – those men in green uniforms were at my door once more, holding a folded-up flag.

“I wanted to kill myself. I took Pa’s shotgun – the same one Ma held on the third-floor staircase years ago – and I walked far enough into the grazing fields to where I couldn’t see the house anymore. We’d sold the cattle off long ago, so at least I’d be alone…

“Leitco Lake stretched out before me. My Great-Great-Grandaddy was wise: he made his homestead on the high plain, away from the rest of the village. Our family was one of the few who stayed on the land, and kept it throughout the years. Even when there was famine, even when the Vanderbilts flooded the Valley, we found a way to stay. Now, none of that mattered. There was no family left to stay.

“Before I could place the muzzle under my jaw, I heard several squawking birds. I don’t think I ever heard birds sound that way before – all chittering and squealing like that. It was strange enough to snap me out of it, and I looked over my shoulder. ‘Bout a hundred yards away was an old oak Freddie used to play on. I fixed a tire swing on it when he was seven. That all was long-gone by the time he was thirteen, but he still liked to sit out there, underneath the shade. 

“It was right where Freddie used to sit. It looked like a man. It had arms, legs, and a head. But it wasn’t. It was a collection of flapping wings, and black feathers, and fleshy necks. Buzzards – all mashed together in an effigy of a man. And he was dancing. It was joyous, and vulgar, and orgiastic. I finally realized why that squawking had caught my attention moments before, why it sounded so human…

“He was laughing at me.” 

The air in the room was hot and suffocating. Dougie looked up at me, “I never finished the story – the one about the witch.”

I said quietly, “How did it end, Dougie?”

“The bird landed on the pastor’s shoulder and it spoke to him: ‘No matter how hard you tried to save her, only a finger made it to heaven. The rest burns in hell.”

***

[5 August, 2015 – Post-Mortem]

It’s 2:34 AM, and I’ve just finished transcribing Dougie’s interview onto a Google doc. I don’t know what to make of his story, and I’m in no place to psychoanalyze, but it’s clear Dougie’s connection to his Wendish heritage had a profound effect on his psyche during moments of high trauma, and caused him to hallucinate. Anyway – that’s all the theorizing I have left this evening.

It’s my first night in Plentiful Wells, and I’m excited for what my other interviews will offer. I’m currently staying in the Charleton House: an old Victorian estate that was the site of a grisly murder-suicide in 1911. It also happens to be the only operating Bed and Breakfast in Plentiful Wells. How morbidly fortunate for me! 

I’ll get a chance to talk to the owner tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I’ll try to get some rest. Maybe it was just Dougie’s story, but the chirping of the birds outside my second-story window sounds strangely human tonight.