On July 4, 1999, at 9:42 AM, a call was made requesting police to Rathbun Lane. It was the third time authorities had been up there in the past six months.
The first was last February during an afternoon snowstorm when a frantic Winnie phoned the Hancock County Sheriff’s office and reported that Eugene had wandered off … again. According to her as quoted in the police record, he had bundled up against the cold to feed the tîtîwaki. “What’s the tîtîwaki?″ she had asked him.
“What’s the tîtîwaki? They’re blue jays, you goddamn dummy! How did I marry someone sooo simple?” he growled from the mud room. “I’ll be back inside soon, so you and your Indian boyfriend better make it a quickie. What’s a tîtîwaki? Christ!” He then slammed the storm door and headed to his trees, she had told them.
Winnie explained at this point in the report that Eugene’s erratic behavior and demeaning treatment of her was becoming more pronounced, but no, it never escalated to physical violence; that if his dementia got much worse he’ll have to be admitted to a nursing home. In answer to the question, she could not for the life of her recollect how or why he was learning Sauk, but that his speech was becoming more and more peppered with the language (she ordered a copy of the dictionary from a Quincy bookstore for fast translations). She had heard of those in extreme religious fervor speak in tongues, mediums talking to the dead, and some old folks reverting to their native tongue, but can people with sputtering brain neurons learn a new language?
An hour had passed, the snow fell harder, winter’s dusk grew darker and still no Eugene, the transcript read. That’s when she called for rescue. It was Deputy Putnam who had found him, unhurt and unfrozen, trudging along Highway 6, a mile and a half from home. The report bizarrely concluded that, when asked where he was going, Mr. Rathbun replied, “Headed north. Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak is waiting for me.”
She had also placed a 9-1-1 call last March at 3:13 AM when her husband woke up in bed clawing at the air, gasping for it. After being rushed to the Carthage Memorial Hospital emergency room and remaining there for two days of physical and psychological tests, it was determined that Eugene’s episode was due to high anxiety and was not heart-related. He was sent home with a prescription for antidepressants with the promise to the doctor that he would not try to harm himself. “Why would I want to do that?” Eugene asked, puzzled. “I would never kill myself and take the chance of being buried alive, again. Chîhwî! (Oh, my!).
2
Gravel popped along Rathbun Lane as the city squad car, all spiffed up for this morning’s Fourth of July parade that it was now going to miss because of this call, made a slow climb up to the glass teepees. Deputy Putnam, miffed, drove at a turtle’s pace trying not to kick up dust on the fresh wax job, wondering what he was supposed to do now with the tub of bubble gum he was supposed to throw out to the kiddies along the route.
He parked, noticed nothing out of the ordinary outside, and after announcing his presence and receiving no response, creaked open the unlocked door and yelled inside if anybody was home.
“I’m in the kitchen. Just off to the right,” came the nonchalant-sounding reply. “Come on in. Hello, deputy, thank you for coming. I called to have my spouse arrested for assault and adultery.”
After a preliminary walk-through inside the house, Putman radioed his boss, Sheriff Donovan Blake, informing him that he, too, was going to be missing the Fourth of July parade. As were the ambulance driver and the county coroner. He waited for them outside, his stomach chunking out the contents of the Lions Club pancake-and-sausage breakfast he had enjoyed only an hour before.
3
Entering the kitchen, the first responders were shocked to see Eugene Rathbun sitting at the breakfast nook, casually having his coffee, and working on the part of the crossword puzzle that had yet to be blotted out from the blood and thinking material that had dripped from his face, and was now clotting maroon and purple. “Hello, guys, thanks for getting here so quickly. Before you cart the old fornicator off to jail, you wouldn’t happen to know a six-letter word for agitation, would you?”
After he surveyed the scene, Sheriff Blake called the Illinois State Police and read Eugene his Miranda rights. The suspect merely shrugged, replied with an upbeat okay and invited them to sit and enjoy some coffee, amiable, like this was just another open house. The local joeys did so to placate him, wanting to keep him calm until the state detectives got here from Macomb.
“Black please, Mr. Rathbun,” the sheriff replied and the interrogation began. “Something happened here, sir. Something not good and you called about a domestic disturbance,” he said, trying not to inflect emotions in his words, lending a sympathetic ear while giving an examining eye to the splotches of scrambled eggs gooed to the wall and the shards of Corelle Ware that had exploded all over.
The room, looking like a hurricane hit, showed the tell-tale signs of domestic violence; Eugene’s bloody face and clothes and the bloody footprints stamped cleanly against the beige carpet coming into the kitchen revealed that the violence had gone too far. “What exactly happened here, Mr. Rathbun?”
“Nothing that wasn’t coming, I guess,” he replied uninterested, studying the puzzle, contemplating synonyms. He put down the pen and made eye contact for the first time. “I was only trying to stop my wife from running away with her Indian boyfriend who I caught in the act.”
Those gathered round the nook looked at each other, trying like hell not to betray their casual air. “Okay, Mr. Rathbun, let’s go back a little bit in time. So, sir, how long has your wife had this...Indian boyfriend?”
“Ever since we built this goddamn place,” he replied, thinking as he sipped. “But two years ago is when things started getting really hot and heavy between them. That morning, I heard her in the pantry whispering to him on the telephone and although most of their phone sex was muffled, I did make out a few words. One was methihkwiwi, I’m sure, because it is a Sauk phrase that she has become obsessed with ever since I heard it coming from her two-timing labia that day. Then I overheard her whisper that the night’s tryst would have to be canceled since Quashie was now locked in the attic and she hasn’t found the asshole’s key, yet.” Eugene looked out over the bluff, dead-fish-eyed and sighed, “methihkwiwi...fucking phrase destroyed my life.”
He stopped and smiled. “I picked up on their scheme pretty quickly, especially after I found her Sauk dictionary that she had hidden in her nightstand. Haha, fuck you Gene, I’m learning his language, its nice for love-making. And then she supposedly translated a few words in that language that she told me that I was speaking, even though I understand Sauk like I understand quantum physics.” He offered the pot around and continued.
“So...” He hunched his body over the table, conspiratorially, and whispered, “She claims I’m in a mindless stupor babbling nonsense words like titiwaki that only she knows is the Sauk word for blue jays. Convenient, no? Easy to convince the shrinks that your poor loving husband’s brain is swiss cheese. Boo-fucking-hoo. Reserve him a room in the Doddering Wrecks nursing home and let Quashie shack up in this fancy fucking glass wigwam that I built.” He scanned the room, took a beat, asked if anyone knew the Sauk word for sucker, and continued.
“Methihkwiwi. Oh Christ, that word became her obsession. Do any of you know what methihkfuckingwiwi means? It means ‘hail is coming down’ in her beloved Sauk. Benign, right?” He rolled his eyes and smiled. “Because she thought her long-dead grandmother was trying to warn her that her life was in danger.” Again, he grew secretive. “Because a long time ago she was pulled from the river as a baby and her only words were ‘me think me wee-wee’. My wife needs committed, not me. She’s crazy,” he said softly, so Winnie wouldn’t hear.
Putnam filled his cup and urged him on. “So, Mr. Rathbun, what happened here? This morning?”
“I was working my crossword, as usual while she was making breakfast. Her lifelong habit of having a nervous Independence Day started with that horrible family tragedy back in 1913 that I don’t think she’s ever fully recovered from. It was compounded by our septic tank thing on the same date. I’m sure you’re all still laughing over that one. Hahaha. Well, guess what--fuck you, everybody.”
His mild agitation was met with Deputy Putnam at the ready to break out the metal cufflinks, if necessary, but Eugene regained his cool and continued.
“July Fourth is unlucky for us, she said, like a broken mirror or walking under a ladder. Anyway, she sat down with the breakfast plates and began badgering me with the ‘be careful doing this, be careful doing that, today. And, Gene, be especially careful today, FLUSHING!’, then nearly shit herself laughing. Her boyfriend, standing near the sink, doubled over in laughter, too. That’s when I threw the plate of eggs at him. But there was no fight.”
It was her, he claimed, who had done all this damage after he tossed his eggs. It was her who threw the salt shaker at him, who pushed all the shit off the countertop, who emptied the wastebasket on the floor. “She told me to make my own stupid breakfast--she’s had enough. That she was going upstairs to blow off some steam. I demand she be arrested!”
“And indeed she will be, sir,” Putnam guaranteed, his stomach made more unsettled by the coffee he was pretending to enjoy. “You can be assured of that.” They kept up the chit-chat until the state police detectives arrived twenty minutes later. The local officials, relieved when the big boys got there because this was way beyond their expertise, waited outside, ready, if necessary, but hopefully not.
The county sheriff walked the detectives through the crime scene, following the crimson drips and smears and splatters up the stairs that were getting more pronounced, repeating what Eugene had told him in the kitchen, until they got to the landing in front of the music room. “This,” he said, “was where the alleged perpetrator changed his story. Mr. Rathbun confessed that, yes, there was a horrible fight in the kitchen, but it was not with his wife, but with her boyfriend who had been standing there, goading him on. He was defending her honor and their marriage. And he thought he had prevailed.”
Now the discussion between the police got more hushed.
“Mr. Rathbun said he then returned to his crossword puzzle, feeling macho, like he had gone from Clark Kent to Superman for the first goddamn time in his life. And what did he get for his chivalry? Nothing but an ungrateful, pissed off wife who surveyed the mess he made and told him to make his own damn breakfast, she was going upstairs to relax.” They crossed the threshold.
Only crime-scene photos and Stephen King could describe the room in all its gory detail, but Deputy Putnam’s description may have come close when he said later, and off-the-record, “it looked like a paintball war in there, but only red-dyed pellets used for bullets.” The eye of the hurricane had hit here.
The sheriff continued with the timeline. “He told me he was trying to think of a six-letter word for agitation and was getting that way himself because his wife couldn’t relax with a book, or by crocheting, or by anything else that might require quiet. Oh, fuck, no--she had to get out her goddamn woodwind and make it really hard to concentrate. So he went up to kindly tell her to play a little more quietly, please. At least, that was his intention.” The sheriff shifted his weight. “Then I asked him what had set him off.”
He exhaled loud and long and continued. “It was opportune that he had come up here, Mr. Rathbun told me, because when he got to the landing he said he heard the boyfriend chanting methihkwiwi to her clarinet seduction . . . then it got quiet, then he heard dual heavy panting. Eugene peeked in, ready to defend her honor once again. This would be it--a fight to the finish--and fucking-A, he was a superhero. He told me he grabbed her horn, vanquished his enemy for good, then came down to finish his puzzle.” They studied the crime scene in silence.
The crumpled mass in the corner of the room was once Winifred Rathbun, though one couldn’t tell by her face–that was pulp. She was wearing a white robe that wasn’t white any more. Chunks of black plastic, like the Corelle Ware in the kitchen, were scattered everywhere, including shards embedded in her skull, the autopsy report noted, indicating the severity of the bludgeoning. It was also (more scientifically) stated that the mouthpiece and barrel of the instrument was used as a sex toy, pre-beating.
Back downstairs, Eugene was finishing his puzzle, his coffee, and, most likely, his final moments of freedom. When led away and questioned again about his tale of Indians and affairs and jealousy, he looked dazed and seemed to have no idea what the fuck they were talking about. “Then why’d ya do it?” asked one of the state troopers as cuffs and leg irons click-clickety-clicked around Eugene’s wrists and ankles, shuffling him out of his dream house for good.
He seemed surprised that the reason wasn’t obvious. “Why’d I do it?... I put up with her shitty clarinet playing for over fifty fucking years and just couldn’t take one more off-key note of Baby Elephant Walk, that’s why I did it. Screw the cheating, tone-deaf bitch.”
4
The town of Dallas City was just as shocked, as heart-broken, as grieved, as tongue-flapping as it was on that Independence Day 83 years previous, and the rumor mill was in full grist just like the good old days. Unfounded twitter about the Burg Family Curse began floating around anew among bar, church, and social circles around town that, mercifully, claimed its last Burg family member.
Stories resurfaced that if you went down to the river at night near Blackstone you can hear the giggles of the sisters enjoying their last roller coaster ride. Now there were witnesses who said they could hear clarinet music sometimes up on the bluff when the wind was blowing just right.
And then there was the Dallas City High School music teacher. What caused his pad-of-butter-on-a summertime-dashboard meltdown in the first place? Some heard it was a stroke. Dementia. Altzheimers. A brain tumor. They blamed it on his mind, on his nerves, on an Indian curse. Maybe it was the half century of bad high school band music that drove him mad. Folks combed old DCHS annuals poring over pictures for early clues throughout his teaching years for psychological problems they might spot in hindsight. Mr. Rathbun was becoming notorious--the town’s very own O. J. Simpson.
Eugene’s trial was short and sweet. Taking the witness stand on his own behalf, he led the jury through the horrific events of the day as calm and cool as if he was describing a lazy afternoon on the bluffs, sticking to the story of killing his wife in a blind rage. When grilled about the love-triangle-gone-weird MO, he simply responded to the prosecuting attorney with, “wîna îyashkâtowêwa!” (That is foolish talk!) which did little to help his case.
After less than an hour of deliberation, the jury ruled Eugene mentally incompetent and sent him to live out his days at the Chester Mental Health Center, the only state of Illinois’ maximum security forensic mental health facility for those who have been found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity.
It was rumored around Dallas City that he would sometimes sit in his cell in solitary, mute, in a staring contest with one of the padded walls until erupting into angry chants of Methihkwiwi!, followed by a physical attack on said padded wall, followed by an injected sedative and bed-straps.
Eugene Johnathan Rathbun died naturally on July 4 (naturally), 2011, and was interred next to his loving wife who he beat to death with her own clarinet.
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