Haunting IV — The Foreword

Foreword

“By the cold and religious, we were taken in hand

Shown how to feel good and told to feel bad

Strung out behind us, the banners and flags

Of our possible pasts lie in tatters and rags” — Pink Floyd, “Your Possible Pasts”

So, I guess it is fair to ask “What implores someone to write a book about a girl who was murdered over a hundred years ago, whose murder has never been solved, and whose murder will never BE solved?”. Well, I can only answer the question for me ( as though there are a platoon of others engaged in such a seemingly pointless endeavor) , but I suppose it begins with the story of the Book of Job.

Early in my life , I was , I suppose, a Catholic. When I say “I suppose” I was a Catholic, it was because my parents were Catholic and their parents were Catholic. I don’t think , even when my parents parents were alive, that my mother and father were particularly enamored with the religion, but I think they felt a certain duty to their own folks to raise us ( my brother and myself) in the same tradition in which they were raised. I understand that, that is the way for many of us. However, as a byproduct of this situation , I found myself in Sunday School or in CCD (extra religious training Catholic children attend during the week) or in other situations in which the mainstays of the faith were taught to me. It was Father Meese, a priest who I grew to dislike with a passion as I progressed through my years, who sat down with a bunch of us kids ( I think we were nine or ten) and lectured us about Job.

For those of you who have never heard of the Book of Job or who don’t know the story, I will paraphrase what I recall. Father Meese told us that God and Satan were conversing one day, and God was expounding on the piety and virtuosity of this dude Job. The Big Guy was really talking Job up, and so Satan got irritated. Satan said something like “Of course he is loyal and devoted to you, look what you have given him! “. Indeed, Job had material wealth, a wonderful wife, and myriad healthy and happy children. According to Meese now, God bet Satan that Job would never turn his back on him no matter what happened, and he gave Satan license to ruin Job’s life to put him to the test. Satan proceeds to do a number on Job- he kills his kids, he kills his wife, he ruins him financially and finally, he puts boils and pestilence all over him. Job, though he does waver slightly and laments his own birth, never does turn on God and therefore God wins the bet. Meese explained that this was evidence of our merciful and forgiving God. I was horrified. I looked around at my companions, and they all just seemed to be accepting what Meese said at face value.

I couldn’t.

I had questions.

“Father Meese,” I asked “God and Satan knew each other right?”

“Of course,” replied the Father, “Satan was an angel in Heaven until he fell”.

“Ok,” I continued “So, Satan would have known that God knows everything- correct?” .

“Well , yes I guess he certainly would have known that,” Meese answered.

“Then why would Satan bet with someone who he KNOWS knows everything?”

Meese was stymied and he got a bit red in the face. Finally he said “Well Satan proposed the bet, not God” which didn’t address my question at all. I sensed he was dodging, but this was a priest and I was a child. There had to be something in what he said.

But, I had further questions.

“Father Meese,” I pressed onward “God is loving and merciful right?”.

“Of course he is,” came the answer from the flustered father.

“Well then why did he allow Satan to kill Job’s poor wife and kids? He did that so he could win a bet? That doesn’t sound so loving to me Father, it sounds cruel and heartless”.

“HOW DARE YOU QUESTION A PRIEST OR QUESTION THE WORD OF THE LORD. DO YOU KNOW WHAT HERESY IS? IT IS DOUBTING THE WORD OF THE LORD AND IT IS AN UNFORGIVABLE SIN! DO YOU WANT TO COMMIT HERESY?” he screamed at me in front of all my classmates.

I certainly did not want to commit heresy even though I wasn’t overly sure what the hell it was. But, I also didn’t believe his story, and yelling at me wasn’t going to force me to acquiesce.

Right then, I lost faith.

I went through the motions though, and I continued to prepare for Confirmation, which is a big deal in the Catholic church. I did, however, ask my parents if I could quit once I got through Confirmation and pleased them and my grandparents. My parents were fair and wonderful people, and they said they would be fine with that.

A child has to do a lot to prepare for Confirmation, and one of the things you had to do was a certain amount of community service. So I ended up picking up trash outside of a Catholic High School one day in order to fulfill my obligations with a bunch of my CCD classmates. A friend and I started horsing around and evidently some of the adult chaperones thought we went too far so we got hauled in for a lecture by, guess who, Father Meese!

Meese railed at us and berated us and culminated his tirade by crossing his arms, look at us side-eyed and saying “At this point, I am just about ready to call off Confirmation for you two. What do you think of that?”

At this point I had had enough. I was probably thirteen and I had long ago abandoned the faith in my mind as I explained earlier. So I said, ”I don’t care. I am just doing this for my parents and my grandparents”.

That was probably THE second to last thing he ever thought I would say. The thing he least thought I would say came next in “But you won’t call off Confirmation. My grandfathers are both Knights of Columbus and they give a lot of money to the church”.

He was flabbergasted, as was my friend, and he angrily threw us out and told us he was going to have to think long and hard about what to do.

Guess what? I was Confirmed, and I was transferred to the guidance of a different Priest, Father Heenan, which was fine with me, for the remainder of my training. Right after Confirmation, i walked away from the church for good. I have never been back.

I have often wondered what would have happened if I had had a better priest- one who took a philosophical approach to his Theology rather than an antagonistic one. Perhaps I would be different today , but I doubt it. I don’t judge those who have faith however. I know it is an important and beautiful part of the lives of many people. If people start trying to impose their views on me or try to get me to buy in, however, I step away from the truce and can admittedly be quite vitriolic in my attacks on belief systems based in nothing- all of them.

But, once you abandon the idea of God you are kind of sent adrift. I don’t find it scary, I find it fascinating. And perhaps because of this fascination, I was lead into my profession. I am a high school English teacher and though I am not particularly in love with The Great Gatsby, there is one line that always stuck with me. It’s at the end, when Gatsby is dead and his only friend, Nick Carraway, realizes that essentially nobody besides himself and one other person will be attending his funeral. All of the people who used to take advantage of Gatsby’s generosity abandon him and Nick here’s Gatsby’s voice in his head saying “ ‘“Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone’ “. The line has always reminded me of The Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby”, for obvious reasons.

The existential nature of so much of literature has inspired me to do the following exercise with my students. I put down a series of names as I will do here and ask the kids if the names mean anything to them:

James Candalazo

Aubrey Beech

Benjamin Harrison

Harold Stenbacher

Elaine Simmons,

Justin Freeman

Alfred Wells

Millard Fillmore

Allison Reubach

Stephen Green.

To the best of my recollection the students have never recognized that two of the names- Millard Fillmore and Benjamin Harrison- are deceased US Presidents. I then make the point that if the memory of people who have achieved such success in life as becoming the president is slowly eradicated by the march of time, what does that mean for the rest of us? Sounds like my class is really upbeat huh? Well, it is. After this somewhat morose exercise, I assure my students that life is wonderful even to existentialists because it can be full of happiness and miracles and to prove it, I tell them, I will perform a miracle right now. In an idea I borrowed from Richard Dawkins, I then produce a deck of cards and ask my students to shuffle them when they are done, I put on a big show of waving my arms over and around the cards as though I am some kind of swami and, with a big sigh, I announce that I have done it as I fan a totally eclectic and random hand of 52 cards at them. They , of course, laugh at me because I have done nothing in their eyes- all they are looking at is a meaningless, disorganized compilation of cards. I then ask them if they would have been astounded if, when I had fanned the cards out all of the suits had been together, perfectly ordered from deuce through ace, and they all concede that that WOULD have been a miracle. Without knowing it, the students bring me around to my point via their concession. Statistically, the odds of getting my random trash hand and the fantasy hand where everything lines up are EXACTLY the same. In fact Dawkins, whose mathematical skills dwarf my own (not that it is hard to do), tabulated the odds for EITHER hand at 1 in 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000. The only thing that makes the fantasy organized hand special is the meaning WE put to it, and the only thing that makes the hand I actually get dealt insignificant is the lack of meaning we put to it. But, the fact that I got dealt the specific unplanned and disorganized hand that I got was no less a miracle statistically then the hand they admitted would be miraculous. The point, I tell them, is that if you look for beauty in the mundane, you just might find it. And, if you look for the wonder in life, it is there regardless of whether you believe in a creator or not. The fact that any of us get to live at all is a miracle beyond calculation, so you can start right there. Furthermore, just because one doesn’t believe in the religious versions of an afterlife doesn’t mean the existential mind MUST totally disregard the possibility of life beyond this one, it just means we don’t subscribe to the ubiquitous ideas that are presented to us. If I believe in the concept of infinite space, how could I rationally dismiss the idea of an afterlife? It ain’t possible.

But, speaking of hands of cards, not all of us are dealt such good ones in a metaphorical sense, and that bothers me. For some reason, the girl whose grisly, unfair, and unsolved death constitutes the epicenter of this writing really bothers me. At the end of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Linda Loman chastises her two sons, Biff and Hap, for ignoring the plight of their dying father , Willy. She screams that Willy is “… a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.” I feel the same way about Eva Roy, who in 1918 at the age of 14 was wiped off the planet by the savage desires of criminal who got away with murder. She was a wonderful daughter, a lovely much younger sister, and an important person within the small community that is now my hometown. The fact that such a person could just have her life robbed from her haunted me, and so I ended up researching and writing about her. I hope to God (lol) you like the story.

I want to warn you about something though. I am a bit of a true crime buff on top of my other various hobbies, and, as such, I have written her murderer in the first person and imagined the personality type that could do something so awful to an adolescent girl. Writing this person was a chore because I really, really don’t want anyone to think that there was any part of his personality in me. I refer to him as “X” and if you are particularly sensitive you may want to skip the chapter in which I give a first person account of the attack based on the extensive research that I have done on what happened to Eva. I will provide readers with a sanitized non-first person version of what happened as well. I felt compelled to write this person in the first person because it is truly my belief that there are certain individuals who are not fit to be a part of humanity and when we find them, they should be executed. I will save this part of the argument for the end of the book though.

For now, I just don’t want Eva’s past to be reduced to “tatters and rags”. She was a valuable person who was taken away by a person I deem not valuable. This is my way of trying to help at least one poor soul who died through no fault of their own to not just fade away.