An American Outrage

by Wuori, G. K.

• ISBN13: 9781565122925
• ISBN10: 1565122925
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-10-06
• Publisher: Algonquin Books

Summary

This is the story of what happened to Ellen DeLay in Quillifarkeag, Maine. Quilli (to the locals) has a lot in common with the small towns that Stephen King so often writes about: there are strange characters with strange names (to some of us) who have lived in the area all their lives, as did their parents before them and their grandparents before that--you get the idea. The narrator tells us that his daughter is a killer and he wants to get the whole story down. He takes his time about it, but what we know from the get-go is that Ellen DeLay was gunned down by four female officers of the law who pumped two hundred rounds into her body.Ellen had been married to Joe for 25 years, but she left him after he accidentally locked her in the part of his truck where he kept his tools--for four days. Ellen thought that Joe was trying to kill her while Joe thought that Ellen had left him. In any case, this incident prompted Ellen to head for the north woods, where, over the years, she learned to dress hunters' kills and became a respected businesswoman. There were a few, especially kids, who thought she was just a crazy woman in the woods but, for the most part, Ellen was left alone.

Excerpts

Excerpt

Night falls up here to the haunting call of unseen loons on the lakes and ponds that are everywhere in this part of northern Maine. It is a lonely sound, as though nature had worked hard to define sadness and had come close in the unforgettable cry of that bird. Nearby, the careworn homes of St. Antoine de Plupart bear human witness to that sadness. This is a rough town of good people who are not strangers to desperation, though it is safe to say that the events of last night will test their fortitude.

Some miles from here is the home of one Ellen DeLay, a reclusive woman in her forties, about whom, so it is said, there were always stories--tales of a sort that led people to question her sanity, or just tales of a woman who'd had enough of life in its conventional sense, who opted out and took to the woods.

Last night, this Ellen DeLay was shot and killed by four police officers who stormed her small house. Early police reports have it that she, herself, fired a weapon at some fishermen who were near her home. As the officers, responding to a complaint from the fishermen, approached her house they were met with gunfire. Nearly two hundred rounds of ammunition were expended in the gun battle. . . .

Corky Crépiter

Maine Public Radio

August 13, 1994

*****

It is easy to make fun of small towns and I have done so myself. Perhaps it's because we find our human follies more manageable on a smaller scale. Perhaps, indeed, it is because these urban miniatures are simply funnier. I once wrote to a friend in New York that it's the job of society to pull sensibility, constructive behavior, and even upright posture out of at least a few promising souls in any given group. That society often fails is what keeps people telling stories, and I guess the ridicule begins there.

Quillifarkeag (Quilli) has its basic streets and roads, its basic services. Its institutions consist of a few churches and schools, a branch of the state university, a modest hospital, and a good-sized potato-processing plant whose french fries you have eaten.

Beyond the basics, the only things worth noting in Quilli are the people themselves: worthy, unworthy; large-minded or small-talking; cribbage players, mechanics, farmers, hustlers, young academics, cripples; the pious, the unrepentant, the unrelenting. Good folks in service to metabolism, but they are neither more nor less goofy than those in the big cities.

Walk up the steps of the New York Public Library, as I did once when I was in the army, and while you're being mesmerized by the grandeur of stored knowledge, you're not about to notice the sane or insane or meaningful or totally ludicrous behaviors going on in the offices and apartment buildings at your back and sides. There isn't an attention span broad enough for all that, nor is there time. Walk up the steps of the Quilli library, though, and the first thing that might happen is you'll smell fiddleheads cooking upstairs and you'll think, Isn't that weird? Personally, I hate fiddleheads. They are to me what slugs would be if slugs were vegetables.

The building itself is a communal construct: white, clapboard, double-hung windows, a porch and four gables. What else can you focus on but the fiddleheads cooking upstairs, or that our librarian is blind, a menacing misanthrope whose spirit never left the Vietnam that blinded him. He's a good librarian, though, and that matters in a small town. Quilli is built on two rivers and sits between two smaller towns: Quiktupac, well to the north; and St. Antoine de Plupart, forty miles west. One of the rivers is the Quilli Stream, an insipid thing that rises to true majesty in carrying off the winter melt, then turns to simple mud for most of the summer. The other river, the Pappadapsikeag, cuts around the Quilli area like a drunken bee as it makes its way to the St. John. The Pappa (as we call it) is said to contain buried stashes of British gold. Even at its beginnings, long after the grand Algonquin natives overpopulated themselves into second-tier units, this part of the country was thought to be a good place to hide, whether treasure or people. No one's ever found any British gold, but once a year Don's Grocery has a Gold Pound Sale where they offer some great bargains. I'm not sure the British unit of money was even the pound back when some troops supposedly carted a general's retirement fund up the river, but mercantilism thrives only on success, not truth.

About me, a few things ought to be said, although the following account is not about me. That I am short, white-haired, middle-aged (a personal definition), divorced (for now), opinionated (thus: wordy, talky), educated, healthy, a newspaper reader, a book reader, and a little chubby are all tags that friends might hang on me if the question was, Who is Splotenbrun Doll? That I am missing the middle finger of my left hand might suggest an answer to the question, What does he do? Carpenter is the best answer, cabinetmaker, tradesman. More obliquely--problem-solver; it's what carpenters do.

Completing that public self then is the nickname: Splotchy. People feel comfortable calling me that, though the truth is I have no idea where it came from or when it was first laid on me. Sometimes names just happen.

There is another quality, however, another tag that is now properly mine, and as I write it here for the first time the door will open into this narrative, the beginnings of purpose will be seen: I am the father of a killer.

*****

There are many ways that could be written, but I wanted to put it down sharp and nasty the first time, to take myself out to an edge to see if there was any way back. Could I, in other words, redeem my child, my daughter? Could I somehow find in the truth a way to say, You did the right thing, child?

That's unusual because Wilma is not a silent woman. She is wordy, God knows. She was born talking from a talking mother, and, if you recall my "tags" from above, that is my vice, too. I have often joked with friends that her mother and I didn't give her genes, we gave her words. She knows them all, too, and she is sometimes rough with her language, very rough.

Still, she came up to me one day when I was working an easy job and she said, flat-out, "I have a problem, Pop." "What's your problem?" I said.

"I want you to tell my story," she said. "It's getting away from me; it's getting away from everyone, and there are some things that shouldn't be forgotten--not ever."

"Why me, dear? Surely, there must be--"

"Parts, Pop. It's all parts--big ones, little ones, scattered ones. You can put them together. There needs to be a wholeness to it. There really does."

"I'm not exactly the town historian, Wilma."

"But you know everyone, Pop. You've built half the houses in the area, and there isn't anyone who won't talk to you. I don't know that you need a credential to be the historian around here. Maybe you just need to know the story."

Since the first subheading under the heading Parenthood is always Manipulation, there was never any doubt what my answer would be.

*****

So the carpenter slips out from the joists with sawdust on his beard and becomes the teller, the sentinel of history. It's a large task at a time in my life when I would have thought all my major purposes had been accomplished--or at least written off as silly or unattainable.

Certainly, my purpose has not been found within marriage. My daughter's mother, Grenada, and I have been married and divorced from each other three times, and we may even be headed toward a fourth union. Grenada is a headstrong woman with a zest for sass (her description of me, I believe, is similar), but neither of us has ever loved another, nor will we. It just seems, though, that once each decade we both start thinking forever?, and a black cloud of panic descends upon us. Permanence, we decide, is not a desirable condition, "not an American condition," Grenada said once, and so we'll split, our union trumped on a geopolitical plane.

Nor did I ever, to be honest, find much purpose in my work, at least not in that lofty sense where the romance of the trades clashes with dirt, sweat, and the constant entanglement with spiders and mice. (There are no rats in northern Maine.) I once thought that things of the mind had little worth compared with things done with the hands. I'm still not sure about the mind, but my hands have gotten pretty beat up over the years. At least the hands heal.

But it has been a life of good work and things accomplished. It has taught me that nearly everything is malleable and that nearly everything can be changed. It has also taught me that there's hardly ever any good reason behind the things that people actually do.

*****

Very well. I will embrace this new purpose then and put 1990 - 1996 into a package small enough to be held with horror or embraced with wisdom. If there's a nice part to all of this, or at least a part that accords well with my own nature, it's that it's all about people, nothing more--lives that tried to be good and didn't make it.

Copyright © 2000 G. K. Wuori. All rights reserved.