I came across an old issue of the Lummoxi Herald the other day. The obituaries contained these paragraphs concerning the long-anticipated death of Hazel Greultz, aged 95:
“She will not be missed nor will she be mourned. Her passing is greeted with a light hearted song and a skip in the step. No one is seen in black. Her demise brings about an end to a grim chapter in the history of the city of Lummoxi.
“As tall as a draft horse and twice as strong, she carried a sidearm in open view, rose at four in the morning to carry coal to the railroad depot, chewed pine bark for breakfast, mauled attack dogs for recreation, hunted down policemen with logging chains, and, good authority has it, she held a 220 volt live wire in her teeth just to make her eyes shine. And she would do all this before sunset.
“She was a loathsome woman. Most old-timers would agree that, like a rabid dog, when she wandered into the village one hot summer evening, she carried a vile and prurient condition that spread from one household to the next. Few anticipated the virulence of the plague she bore, estimating the moral strength, shared values and common identity of the community to be equal to any outside threat.
“This was sentimental vaporing, phatic bombast, a naïve assertion, good only as a bedtime story to tell to tiny, frightened, impressionable children to calm them down. Vice is a wagon-load of downed cattle; anywhere it can be dumped is fine enough. It infected without discrimination, filling every mind with indecency, violence and greed, creating a nation of hardened men and women, immune to conscience, resistant to compassion, and inoculated against restraint.
“Only her modesty showed limits; in her later her later years she compounded the disorder with a second and more deadly plague of delusion.”
This is true. By the 1950’s, Hazel’s reputation had hardened like concrete. She was an independent republic, self-determined, believing in the rule of lawlessness. Lawmen avoided the town, businesses shut their doors, the banks folded, and honest citizens were driven away. Soon, their vacated houses filled with idle-handed renegades, thieves, and thugs.
And then it got bad. On the night of September 23, 1953, while dancing at the Bolo Hotel, Hazel felt dizzy, lost her balance, then slipped, wrenching her back. She fell to the floor and twisted in pain. A crowd gathered and helped her to her feet. The rest of the evening she required assistance to move about. The pain would not diminish, and from that night forward, she was unable to stand erect or walk in a straight line, in fact, her listing stride became her signature. To this day in Lummoxi, the word “hazeling” means to become unbalanced.
Nevertheless, by the time the hall closed that night, she had picked through the pockets of each person that propped her up, accumulating enough money for another month of five card stud. When she hobbled to her flat to count her spoils, she heard the sound of footsteps from behind. It seemed that somebody was following her home. She remembered when this happened before, when six armed men trailed her to her cabin, and made an arrest. She was convicted and spent a dozen years staring at four stone walls somewhere in New Mexico. She felt dizzy again. For the first time in her life, she dropped to her knees beside her bed, folded her hands, and looked up at the ceiling. And there it was, she could see somebody up there, in white, talking to her.
Earlier that evening, as was her custom, she had been eating like a horse, spooning down everything on the menu, leaving trails of tomato sauce, cheese, and animal fats across her ample lap. She was not particular about the edibles she entertained; she would have eaten the serviette had it not been soaked with candle wax when the table was upset by two disoriented dancers, bounding across the floor like a wheel loosed from a runaway wagon. They barely escaped with their lives.
This evening, she ate alone. Dust blew across the table despite the shuttered windows; the wind was hot and dry at this sinkhole in the desert plain. Day or night, a layer of red soil would accumulate on every flat surface within an hour, flavoring every dish, and abrading the teeth to the gums. Smiles were an act of bravery. Residents said if you allowed the dust to accumulate, you would own enough land to form your own country. One of the dishes contained a local desert vegetable, the root of Ethereon miscalcula, or the Rose of Heaven. It gave a slight variation on the theme of grisly lame-animal soups, and tragic hog-feed stews, with their black potatoes, aged corn mash, red dirt, and fistfuls of salt and whole black peppers. Anything would help. But this root did more than give flavor, it gave purpose...
“She will not be missed nor will she be mourned. Her passing is greeted with a light hearted song and a skip in the step. No one is seen in black. Her demise brings about an end to a grim chapter in the history of the city of Lummoxi.
“As tall as a draft horse and twice as strong, she carried a sidearm in open view, rose at four in the morning to carry coal to the railroad depot, chewed pine bark for breakfast, mauled attack dogs for recreation, hunted down policemen with logging chains, and, good authority has it, she held a 220 volt live wire in her teeth just to make her eyes shine. And she would do all this before sunset.
“She was a loathsome woman. Most old-timers would agree that, like a rabid dog, when she wandered into the village one hot summer evening, she carried a vile and prurient condition that spread from one household to the next. Few anticipated the virulence of the plague she bore, estimating the moral strength, shared values and common identity of the community to be equal to any outside threat.
“This was sentimental vaporing, phatic bombast, a naïve assertion, good only as a bedtime story to tell to tiny, frightened, impressionable children to calm them down. Vice is a wagon-load of downed cattle; anywhere it can be dumped is fine enough. It infected without discrimination, filling every mind with indecency, violence and greed, creating a nation of hardened men and women, immune to conscience, resistant to compassion, and inoculated against restraint.
“Only her modesty showed limits; in her later her later years she compounded the disorder with a second and more deadly plague of delusion.”
This is true. By the 1950’s, Hazel’s reputation had hardened like concrete. She was an independent republic, self-determined, believing in the rule of lawlessness. Lawmen avoided the town, businesses shut their doors, the banks folded, and honest citizens were driven away. Soon, their vacated houses filled with idle-handed renegades, thieves, and thugs.
And then it got bad. On the night of September 23, 1953, while dancing at the Bolo Hotel, Hazel felt dizzy, lost her balance, then slipped, wrenching her back. She fell to the floor and twisted in pain. A crowd gathered and helped her to her feet. The rest of the evening she required assistance to move about. The pain would not diminish, and from that night forward, she was unable to stand erect or walk in a straight line, in fact, her listing stride became her signature. To this day in Lummoxi, the word “hazeling” means to become unbalanced.
Nevertheless, by the time the hall closed that night, she had picked through the pockets of each person that propped her up, accumulating enough money for another month of five card stud. When she hobbled to her flat to count her spoils, she heard the sound of footsteps from behind. It seemed that somebody was following her home. She remembered when this happened before, when six armed men trailed her to her cabin, and made an arrest. She was convicted and spent a dozen years staring at four stone walls somewhere in New Mexico. She felt dizzy again. For the first time in her life, she dropped to her knees beside her bed, folded her hands, and looked up at the ceiling. And there it was, she could see somebody up there, in white, talking to her.
Earlier that evening, as was her custom, she had been eating like a horse, spooning down everything on the menu, leaving trails of tomato sauce, cheese, and animal fats across her ample lap. She was not particular about the edibles she entertained; she would have eaten the serviette had it not been soaked with candle wax when the table was upset by two disoriented dancers, bounding across the floor like a wheel loosed from a runaway wagon. They barely escaped with their lives.
This evening, she ate alone. Dust blew across the table despite the shuttered windows; the wind was hot and dry at this sinkhole in the desert plain. Day or night, a layer of red soil would accumulate on every flat surface within an hour, flavoring every dish, and abrading the teeth to the gums. Smiles were an act of bravery. Residents said if you allowed the dust to accumulate, you would own enough land to form your own country. One of the dishes contained a local desert vegetable, the root of Ethereon miscalcula, or the Rose of Heaven. It gave a slight variation on the theme of grisly lame-animal soups, and tragic hog-feed stews, with their black potatoes, aged corn mash, red dirt, and fistfuls of salt and whole black peppers. Anything would help. But this root did more than give flavor, it gave purpose...
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