The Accursed Read online

  Upton took pains to defend Jack London against “vulgar and meretricious gossip” circulating at the present time about London and the “temptress” Charmian; for if London remained with his wife, or chose to leave her, how should that matter to Socialism? In any case, London had denied even knowing the exotic “Charmian” and that was enough for Upton Sinclair to endorse.

  At this moment he glanced up to see, or to seem to see, the apparition of the horse-drawn buggy yet again—now making its way in his direction.

  “Is it coming for me?”

  The vehicle seemed to be solid enough, drawn by a bay horse with a splotched white star on its forehead; it was more commodious than the ordinary two-seater buggy, in fact a landau, gray or pearl in color; its black top was partly lowered and its fringed hammer-cloth distinctly white. A gentleman was driving it, flicking a whip light over the bay’s withers, and a lady sat close beside him, her head inclined against his shoulder and a part-opened silk fan raised to shield her face from the sun.

  In astonishment Upton stared. And in that instant he blinked, and rubbed his eyes, for the vision had abruptly vanished, and the cornfield was empty again.

  “Am I losing my mind?—me? Who has always prided himself on his rationality?”

  UPTON RETURNED TO his writing, as swiftly and powerfully as he could. Though it was difficult to keep his mind from wandering: for perhaps the landau had something to do with the poison in the Princeton atmosphere? A man had been arrested and, probably by now, condemned, in the matter of the Spags murder; but Upton had no faith in the local police, that they’d arrested the actual murderer. And there had been other acts of violence and vandalism in the county, it was rumored. And sporadic demonstrations of the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan, that sprang up overnight, in rural enclaves of New Jersey, like deadly nightshade.

  It was sobering to recall, as Marx and Engels had taught, that the proletariat isn’t invariably saintly but, as a consequence of brutalizing labor, often transformed into brutes. Drunkenness—prostitution—licentiousness of all sorts; robbery, manslaughter, murder, “lynchings”—all were inevitable consequences of the capitalist crime against human nature. Why should the proletariat not steal, or become brutalized, even against their brothers and sisters? Who has taught wage slaves to be good?

  Once, on her way home from a long tramp across the Stony Brook Creek, Meta had accepted a ride from a neighboring farmer in his crude horse-drawn wagon; Upton had been distressed to see his wife in the company of so uncouth an individual. As a Socialist, he was bound to identify with all workingmen and all exploited persons; yet, as a well-bred young man of a good family, with a love of the arts, and a wish to believe in the natural goodness of humankind, he was frankly dismayed by the degenerate behavior of some persons in the area. Wife- and child-beating, venereal disease, drunkenness, outright madness and rampant cruelty were all to be found within a few miles of the Sinclairs’ rented property. Most widespread was sheer stupidity, for Upton had discovered that few farmers knew how to farm intelligently, or seemed to care; their most lucrative undertakings were the illegal manufacture of “applejack” (sold, it was said, surreptitiously to the most exclusive eating clubs at Princeton University) and the shameless prostitution of their voters’ rights as male citizens of the United States—such votes were sold, in Mercer County, for a meager two dollars! Nor could it fail to astonish the young Socialist who’d written so passionately of wage slavery in Chicago, with a special grievance against child labor, to discover, in his very backyard, so to speak, that the young children of neighboring farmers were expected to work for as many as sixteen hours a day on their family farms; the more cruelly in that their fathers’ crops were haphazardly sowed, and each farm chore involved a waste of human energy and spirit. Most sickening, when the scanty crop was at last harvested and sown, the father was likely to “drink it up” as quickly as possible.

  Upton had learned that the only efficient farmers in the Hopewell Valley seemed to be those who’d acquired, through superior intelligence, cunning, conniving, or outright cheating, farms of substantial size, above one hundred acres; which farms replicated, in a sense, factories, in the mass means of production and in the employment of “dirt-cheap” labor. These farmers, though genial enough in conversation, God-fearing Christians of Protestant stock, could not have prospered as they did without a systematic and sustained exploitation of others, including their own families. Rural America was no paradise, indeed; the farm no idyllic retreat, as some urban Socialists seemed to think.

  Upton was particularly distressed that even poor farmers had so little sense of camaraderie with others like themselves, or worse off than themselves; he and Meta had both been shocked by jocular references to the terrible lynchings in Camden, some months before, made by neighbors—“If it takes that to teach ’em, it’s their own fault.”

  And: “A Nigra has got to learn he ain’t a white man and if it’s a female Nigra, her too.”

  At the same time, Upton wished to believe that in the near future a special cadre of Socialists would establish a co-operative “home colony” in a secluded rural place like Mercer County. Was there a contradiction? What was one to believe? As Upton fiercely noted in his journal:

  We must, like the prophet Zarathustra, overcome our own weakness, that we may become Übermensch.

  YET, A HALF hour later, Upton happened to look up from his writing table, to see an astonishing spectacle outside his window: in fact, an obscene spectacle, not thirty yards from the cabin, at the edge of the cornfield.

  The gentleman and the lady from the landau had alighted from the vehicle and, imagining themselves alone and unobserved in this rural place, were now embracing most intimately, and passionately. Upton rubbed his eyes: was the woman Meta, his own wife?

  “It can’t be! No.”

  The man had a ruffian’s swagger, a solid body and a ruddy complexion; for his excursion into the country he was wearing “sporting” clothes, and a yachting cap. Judging by the fashionable cut of his clothes, his class was that of the capitalist exploiter; and judging by the extreme ruddiness of his skin, he could be nothing other than a carnivore.

  The stricken Upton Sinclair found it difficult to make out the woman’s features, as in mock protestation of her companion’s forwardness she squirmed, butted, punched (lightly, with playful fists), tried to kick, and wildly laughed, while her amorous suitor held her in a lewd embrace; the silk fan had been allowed to fall to the ground. The young woman was wearing an attractive striped silk dress in the fashionable “hobble” silhouette, now partly undone; her red-blond hair, fashionably coiled at the top of her head in a Gibson Girl style, had loosened in the amorous struggle. Upton had never seen the striped dress, he was sure, nor had he noticed his wife’s hair so styled; yet there was no mistaking Meta’s pert Scots profile, or the girlish ring of her laughter.

  “Stop! You must stop! Meta!”

  Upton threw down his writing things, and ran outside.

  But now, another time: where had the lovers gone?

  Nor were the pearl-colored landau, and the bay horse with the splotched white star, visible.

  “Meta? Where are you? Where are you hiding? Answer me.”

  Yet it seemed that the cornfield was empty, as before. Only the desiccated stalks moved, in a continuous teasing whisper. In a moment’s madness, Upton ran to the barn, to locate the revolver on a high ledge, where he’d hidden it beneath a canvas; next, he returned to the cabin, where, beneath a loose floorboard, he’d hidden the bullets. With shaking hands he forced bullets into the revolver’s chambers, he knew not whether in the correct direction, or not; for he had no clear idea how to load a gun. A great artery was beating in his head as he ran outside, waving the gun: “I’ve seen you! I know, now! I will murder you both!”

  Though there was no one in sight, Upton lifted the gun, aimed it recklessly and pulled the trigger. A terrible, deafening crack! nearly split his eardrums.

  Yet, the wildness was u
pon him: Upton pulled the trigger again, and again. Where the bullets flew, into the rippling cornstalks, he had no idea. But there were no outcries, there was no sign of anyone hiding—“Where are you! Devils! Adulterers! How dare you taunt me!”

  To this there was no reply. Only the dry mock-whispering of the cornstalks; and, as he began at last to hear, the faint crying of an abandoned baby in the farmhouse.

  FOR IN TRUTH there was no one in the field, nor had ever been, it seemed. After returning to his son, to strap him into the awkward backpack, which Upton had yet to adjust correctly, Upton hurried back to the field, to look more closely, making his way along rows of broken stalks.

  In the field, he discovered skeletal remains of—something. Some small creatures, rabbits perhaps. Tufts of grayish fur, or feathers—the devoured prey of an owl?

  At the farther edge of the field he discovered a sizable mound of horse manure, but couldn’t decide to his satisfaction whether the excrement was fresh, or a day or two old.

  “And no other damn’d clue!”

  A few hours later, near dusk Meta returned.

  In a drab cotton skirt of some faded floral design, that looked as if it had been fashioned out of a seed sack, her bonnet limply askew and her shoes covered in dust, a scattering of thistles on her clothing, Meta approached the house in no great haste, yet not in apparent dread; rather, like a young woman in a dream. Through the kitchen window Upton observed her, still in his astonished state, with a headache now, and a sickened sense of malaise through his body.

  “Meta! Where in hell have you been?”

  There was a familiarity to this question, that quickened the sense of malaise in Upton.

  Meta protested: hadn’t she told Upton that she was “going for a walk”?—she was sure that she had.

  “I’ve only been gone for an hour, or a little more.”

  An hour! But Upton bit his tongue, not wanting to quarrel. He returned to the table where Meta would see, as she entered, yawning, removing her bonnet, that her disheveled hair would tumble about her shoulders, that he’d been cleaning the revolver: unskillfully oiling its parts, with greasy fingers.

  Upton didn’t doubt that his narrow, clean-shaven and fiercely indignant face was shrouded in a melancholy of its own, or that his deep-socketed eyes were moist. At his elbow the kerosene lamp gave off a feeble flickering glow.

  Seeing the revolver, Meta stared for a moment; then asked, casually, or carelessly, why the gun was “allowed” back in the house, since Upton had forbade it?

  “The murders in New Jersey are mostly unsolved. It shouldn’t surprise us if there are more to come.”

  “Murders? Have there been more than one?”

  “I think, yes. Many more.”

  Meta shivered, shaking her hair loose, and removing a fragment of cornsilk from it.

  THE TURQUOISE-MARBLED BOOK

  Disgust! And dismay.

  That’s what I feel, to be utterly frank, as I approach one of the most painful episodes of this history, the subject of the chapter that follows, titled “The Bog Kingdom.”

  This is Annabel Slade’s “confession.” It is a very disturbing and in some respects an obscene document, which I choose to present without censorship or distortion, as earlier historians have done; it has been taken nearly verbatim from a notebook identified (by me) as “The Turquoise-Marbled Book.”

  Historians must rely upon sources. Historians do not “invent” sources. Yet it is as much of an invention, that’s to say a lie, to omit or distort sources, in the interests of protecting “innocent parties.”

  The fact is, my historian-rivals have dealt with Annabel Slade’s confession in very unprofessional ways. They have been misleading, obfuscatory, and timid; they have not been honest, and they have not been professional. (Ironic that I, an “amateur” historian, should accuse these others of unprofessional behavior; but so it is.)

  Granted, the subject matter is disconcerting, if not frankly repulsive. And its exact authenticity can’t be guaranteed.

  (But then, what of the past can be verified exactly, even if we were eyewitnesses?)

  Yet there is no excuse for the historian Q. T. Hollinger to relegate the “unconfirmed tale of a ‘bestial’ birth” to a mere footnote in The Unsolved Enigma of the Crosswicks Curse: A Fresh Inquiry (1949), and to so vaguely paraphrase Annabel’s story that one can’t grasp the poetic flavor of its highly refined language. As for Hiram Tite in The Unsolved Mystery of the “Crosswicks Horror”—this sensationalist study isolates the final humiliation and (evident) death of Annabel Slade in a separate chapter, yet deals with it so ineptly in its particulars as to suggest to the skeptical reader that it is nothing more than rumor or gossip, or that category of twaddle dismissed as old wives’ tales. The Vampire Murders of Old Princeton, by an “anonymous” author, is too contemptible to justify serious comment; yet little more can be said for Croft-Crooke, with his impressive academic credentials (Harvard B.A., Yale M.A., longtime headmaster of the Lawrenceville School), or Miss Helena Worthing, with hers (Barnard B.A., Columbia M.A.). What is most disturbing to me are several articles written, in obvious haste, for New Jersey newspapers, that confuse Annabel’s tragic fate with the alleged fates of victims of the “Jersey Devil.” (This quasi-mythical creature went on a rampage in January 1909, when reports of miscarriages, stillbirths, and other abnormalities among women were noted, including at least one of a monstrous birth to a young woman in the Pine Barrens—improbable and unverified incidents which fall entirely beyond the scope of my fact-based chronicle.)

  My primary source of information for this section of the chronicle is a journal measuring eight inches by twelve with a turquoise-marbled cover in which Josiah Slade seems to have written sometime after the New Year of 1906, at the bedside of his sister Annabel; though not transcribed in code, like Adelaide Burr’s journal, this account has been difficult to transcribe because it was clearly written in haste, and with emotional anguish, resulting in numerous disjunctions, confused figures of speech, abrupt breaks and elliptical statements. And the reader will note the abrupt ending—as, it is believed, Annabel Slade began labor, with a sequence of powerful contractions of the womb, that would continue for twenty excruciating hours.

  On the flyleaf of the journal is the poignant inscription, in Josiah’s hand: God grant me the strength to be equal to all that my sister will reveal.

  SINCE THIS IS a chapter many readers will wish to skim, or to skip altogether, as it is concerned with the historian’s trade, and of as much interest to admirers of screen actors as an account of the “backstage” of film production might be of interest to those admirers, I think it is judicious at this point to enumerate certain of my prized research materials, which are not to be found, nor even alluded to, in most of the libraries, special collections, historical archives, etc., that contain information pertinent to the subject. The Turquoise-Marbled Book is one of the most precious, obviously; and though in Josiah Slade’s hand it is kept separate from the morass of letters, notes, newspaper items, and other memorabilia relevant to Josiah, to be found between the pages of the Beige Morocco Book—Josiah’s diary for the years 1901–06. (Typical of a young male diarist, Josiah did not faithfully record each day of his life but rather went for long stretches without writing a word. And there are pages roughly torn out.) In addition, as the reader knows, I have relied heavily upon Mrs. Adelaide Burr’s Crimson Calfskin Book—now so faded and shabby, it seems a melancholy document indeed, despite the vivid and “perky” writing of that inveterate invalid; and also Mrs. Johanna van Dyck’s multi-volumed journal, known to historians as the Ivory Book, as it resides in the Princeton Special Collection, and has been consulted by numerous historians. (Unknown to these historians, Johanna van Dyck kept a second, secret diary, which I have called the Black-Dappled Book. It is a small-sized diary of about sixty written pages, much of the entries undated, and not very coherent; for it did happen, Johanna van Dyck gave (premature) birth to a baby boy in Februar
y 1906, at about the time that Annabel Slade gave birth; during which time her usually devoted husband Pearce suffered from a variant, it seems, of the Princeton malaise, with unfortunate consequences about which I do not wish to comment.) Most consistently rewarding has been Wilhelmina Burr’s Brown-Dappled Book which is filled to bursting with notes, personal documents, news clippings, love letters (?) from unidentified individuals, photographs, and even tradesmen’s receipts, as well as Wilhelmina’s minutely observed diary-entries; yet more crowded and untidy, the Sandalwood Box, in which I store a miscellany of Woodrow Wilson material that has made its way into my private possession; and the Rose Brocade Box, in which materials pertaining to the Grover Clevelands are kept. I have also at hand the Orange-Marbled Book which was once the diary of Mrs. Henrietta Slade, but it is disappointing in its particulars, and of little use to the historian; and the Fleur-de-lis Book of Mrs. Amanda FitzRandolph, whose confused and hallucinatory accounts of her “possessed” infant son are both shocking and questionable, and of little practical use.

  Most prized, and kept under lock and key here in my study, is the Ebony-Lacquered Box in which are stored all materials pertaining to Winslow Slade; though I am doubtful about this material also, and sometimes wake in the night wondering if I should destroy it at once. Priceless matter it is, to me, throwing light, and a great deal more, on these events of long ago; but the wisdom of introducing certain facts into my chronicle, that so refute the material of the Princeton Special Collection regarding Dr. Slade, that cannot be verified, and cannot fail to disturb, is an ethical issue not easily resolved.

  For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a “sensationalist” rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!

  AS FOR THE DOCUMENT known generally as “The Confession of Annabel Slade”—or, as I prefer, “The Bog Kingdom”—Josiah didn’t date it exactly but since Annabel (evidently) returned to Crosswicks in the second week of December 1905, and since her confinement and its (unspeakable) aftermath took place within a fortnight, it is reasonable to presume that Josiah transcribed his sister’s distraught tale sometime between December 12 and Christmas Day. It is possible that the entire confession was told during a single protracted period, for Annabel’s voice seems to falter, and grow faint, and takes on a sporadic strength again, with the rhythms of a human soul baring itself utterly; no revisions were made afterward by Josiah or by Annabel, one can tell from the document.