My Great-grandfather, the Rapist
Scott Schaible
My father died suddenly in his sleep in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on a cold March morning in 2002. Over the two years following his valve replacement surgery, which the cardiologist believed to be the result of complications from Lyme Disease, I only saw my father a handful of times – and never dressed beyond his bathrobe and slippers. He simply never recovered. Lots of people have open heart surgery and play golf a month later, but no such luck in his case. He suffered hearing loss, mysterious aches and other issues that were the biproduct of a tiny deer tick infecting him some years prior. I knew just before the phone rang that morning that my mother was calling; she and I had a connection, a sixth sense of sorts, and you either understand and accept such things, or you don’t. I hoped Dad was okay and maybe she was just calling to say hello, but I could tell it wasn’t just a check-in call as I picked up the kitchen landline. “Hi there. I’m calling you first. Your father died a few hours ago. He had a massive heart attack in his sleep. I did CPR until the paramedics arrived, but he was just gone. I love you and he loved you, too. I need to call your brothers now. Hoping you can get a flight soon.” He had just turned 64 years old. His father had died at a similar age. Not a great trendline for the Schaible men.
I made several trips to see Mom that spring and summer. A couple months after my father was cremated, I stayed with her while attending a pet industry trade show in Atlantic City, about a ninety-minute drive each way, opting to pay for a couple tanks of fuel instead of overpaying for dumpy casino lodging. One night I woke up after midnight to use the bathroom. Like usual in recent years, my mother was in the family room flipping channels, the soft glow of cablevision beckoning around the corner toward the guest room. “Hey, I hope I didn’t wake you,” she whispered. I gave her a kiss on her cheek, and I could detect a hint of Sanka Decaf and Close-Up toothpaste. I never understood why she slept so little, but now I am the same age she was, and I’m the one who can barely sleep. I sat down in Dad’s chair and nibbled a Tastykake Lemon Pie – a rare find in Colorado, but available in every Wawa and c-store in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. On the screen was the movie Accused starring Jodie Foster. As her character described being attacked in a tavern, Mom said something that would change me forever: “Gosh, that makes me think of Grandma.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, confused.
“Well, you know. About that day in the barn,” she calmly replied. I knew my mother grew up on a picturesque farm in the Greenawald district outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Classic fieldstone main house and other buildings, and a massive barn, situated on several hundred rolling acres with a Collie named Dash that would attack the fattest, meanest groundhogs with no fear. The fertile Lehigh Valley marked the easternmost boundary of what is know as Pennsylvania Dutch country.
“No, I don’t know anything about Grandma and the barn,” I said. Grandma was what we called her grandmother – my great-grandmother. Her name was Bessie, my grandmother was Florence, and my mother was Myrtle. Old-school names, all of them with impossibly green eyes, like some otherworldly geothermal pool in Yellowstone. I had known Grandma until she passed away when I was ten years old. She was the sweetest, most petite, and agreeable old soul I would ever know. She was born in 1888 and lived with my grandparents for as long as I knew. My mother proceeded to tell me the story she’d been told that there were crops coming ready and they did what they always did – hired random laborers for several days to bring it all in. And one day one of them took Bessie into the barn and raped her.
I was blindsided. I was nearly 40 years old and never heard about this very relevant family history. “Well, who did you think was my mother’s father?” my mother asked.
“Allie, of course,” even though I never knew him. Alvin, aka Uncle Allie, was legendary, I’d seen pictures and heard stories. He died when I was a baby.
“Uncle Allie was Grandma’s brother,” she said. “He never married after that and took care of Grandma and my mother. That’s just what people did in those days.” I was wide awake and agitated. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that this person’s DNA was in me, a part of who I was – I was still processing the idea that anyone would sexually assault my great grandmother, who was such a sweet woman. She never revealed any hint of bitterness or trauma.
“Who was this piece of shit, and what happened to him?” I needed to know so I could continue to breathe and function. Mom said she never knew his name and all she was told was that the guy ran off, and that Uncle Allie and some other men set out after him. I turned – squirmed – in my father’s chair, hanging on every word. “And?” I pressed. She was told that they came back a couple days later and said they’d caught up with him somewhere in a neighboring county, and that he was already dead from pneumonia.
“Wow. And you believed that?” I growled after a moment to my lonely, widowed mother, missing her husband and simply repeating what she’d been told. “Well, yes. That’s what they said,” she replied. I told her in a blast of certainty what I believed had to be the truth: Allie and the men caught up with the rapist that same night or early the next day, found him spending his wages on a meal, and they waited and watched. They got him away from the café or boarding house and took turns beating him senseless with their fists and with whatever else they found – sticks and bricks – and when they were finished, they burned his corpse in an old drum, feeding the flames with dry leaves and kerosene, then dumped whatever remained into the Jordan Creek. Over sips from a flask of rye, purchased with the coins they took from the dead man’s pockets – worn Barber Dimes and Liberty Head nickels – they made a pact and repeated the story that they would take to their graves, from which they would never deviate, for Bessie’s sake and for their continued freedom from incarceration: “We found him in some hamlet to the northeast. The bastard was already dead.” It’s what I would have done, so it’s what Occam’s Razor would suggest transpired. The pneumonia story was a plausible ruse; in the early 1900s it was the leading cause of death.
Nine months later, my grandmother Florence was born in the same farmhouse where she would give birth to my mother 20-odd years later. All this news – this dead-end in my family tree that had been hiding in plain sight – it came to me by chance late one night when a movie about sexual assault happened to be on the television, on the channel Mom happened to click while turning the pages of the World Weekly News or another supermarket tabloid. Just over a year later my mother died, from the cancer that she decided not to divulge or fight because her best friend, my father, was gone and her kids were making their way. Her work here was done. I was angry about what had happened to Grandma for a brief while, until I concluded what seemed to be the likely demise of this miserable rapist – this subhuman who also happened to be my great-grandfather. This all took place over 100 years ago. There can be no corroborating the veracity of the story my mother shared, just as there is no way to know if my interpretation of the story is correct or might be as wrong as a raccoon out in daylight. The whole matter was open and shut to me. My Ancestry family tree goes far back on my paternal grandfather’s side – into Bavaria in the 1700s. And it spans way back on my maternal grandfather’s side as well. A few more things fell into place after I spit into a tube and submitted it in 2013, but I rarely log in more than once every few years. I never click any of the “Hey, I think we are second cousins” outreach that turns up in the inbox.
On a recent Christmas, my brother Drew told a story about our grandfather Luther – our mother’s father, we called him Pop Pop – and we could not remember if he was the oldest of 12 children or 11. “Let’s check the Ancestry,” I said, and a minute later we were perusing our family tree. Pop Pop was the oldest of 12 – one of which was simply labeled “Infant – Boy” who only lived a couple of days. My kids took an interest and clicked around, snickering about having so many ancestors with names like Jakob and Johannes, and the sheer volume of women named Marie (think the wedding reception scene in Goodfellas). I went to shut the laptop when something caught my eye. Occupying the blank space next to Grandma Bessie – this genetic dead-end – there now appeared a photograph with a green leaf, a hint of a potential match. It was a simple granite tombstone with a one-syllable, Pennsylvania Dutch surname.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Scott Schaible
Scott Schaible grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, a town memorialized in the iconic HBO series The Sopranos. He graduated without distinction from Newark Academy and Lafayette College and served as a special assistant to a US Senator before moving to Denver, Colorado in 1993. He opened a communications agency and raised three children like they were still in Jersey, teaching them that nobody messes with you without some payback. His works have been published in SHIFT: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Please See Me, RITUALS, The Casting Aspersions Anthology and more.