EDITOR’S NOTE:
An acquaintance of this publication’s, Professor Barnard Simmons, contacted us recently about an extraordinary discovery in his family’s archive: a trove of macabre stories written by his great-aunts in the 1930s, when they were little girls. “Perhaps you’ll find an excerpt fitting for Halloween?” he wrote. Indeed, we have. We’ll let Professor Simmons take it from here.
Preface
I am not the author of the remarkable story you are about to read. It is an artifact from my family’s distant past, written by my three great-aunts, the Simmons sisters: Emma, Eulalie, and Elizabeth, the last known as Libby. The three girls and their elder brother, my grandpa Andrew, grew up in the 1920s and 30s on their parents’ farm, in the western Massachusetts village of Frawley.
Of my great-aunts, I knew only one, Eulalie. The other two did not live to see their 20s. Emma died at age 18 of weensy, a then incurable bacterial infection she contracted from milking a jenny, or female donkey. Libby was tragically stricken by Herkimer’s swinepox, likely caused by eating tainted boar jerky brought north from Panama by a seafaring uncle. She broke out in blue spots and ran a high fever for her final seven months before expiring at 16.
By the time I came along, Eulalie was blind and living in a senior home outside Boston. Her unseeing eyes always brightened, though, when she described her childhood days on the family farm in Frawley. With neither a telephone nor a radio in the house, she, Emma, and Libby busied themselves making their own amusements, writing stories, painting scenes of nature, and penning songs, accompanied with whatever materials were at hand: a tea-chest bass, a saucepan beaten with a wooden spoon, a lyre made from the salvaged scapula of an unfortunate black bear.
Sadly, said Eulalie, the fruits of their labors were long gone: the folio containing the Simmons sisters’ works was believed to have perished in a suspicious fire that claimed the original farmhouse in 1956. But a recent renovation of the property’s cowshed yielded a startling discovery in the hayloft: an old trunk bearing four silver teething rattles, a stoppered bottle of homemade plum wine, and a box inscribed with the word NONSENSE in Eulalie’s elaborate hand. Within it: the long-lost portfolio!
Every one of my aunts’ stories is a gem. I am grateful to AIR MAIL for this opportunity to share one of them with you. I should warn the more sensitive readers among you that the Simmons sisters’ tales might be considered shocking to modern eyes and ears. Living so close to nature exposed Emma, Eulalie, and Libby to spectacular beauty and wonder, but also to violence and death—subjects that the sisters did not shy away from in their storytelling.
Without further ado, I give you … “Sally Ribcage.”
—Barnard Simmons
Preface, Massachusetts
Sally Ribcage
The fourth of May brought a blast of heat that baked April’s mud into hard, dusty ground. Peg and Sarah decided to celebrate by taking a walk into Brinton Wood, their first since the autumn previous.
They brought along two things: a satchel of lemon-curd puffs, to eat when they required strength, and their papa’s scythe, to hack away the bramble that might otherwise scratch their faces and tear to bits their fine yellow pinafores.
Peg and Sarah passed through the thickety part of Brinton Wood with no trouble. The surprise came upon their reaching the clearing where the hiking trail up Mount Tingle began. There, Peg stumbled bottom over noggin.
“Ow! Sary, it’s the tripping fairy!” she said as she sat up and dusted off her pinafore. “What other devilish creature would unfoot me so?”
Sarah usually laughed at the way Peg spoke in rhymes. But at this moment, she held in her chuckle the way one keeps in a sneeze during church, trapped up the chute of one’s nose. For it was clear that Peg was not amused.
“All my years up Tingle Trail, never have I ever sat on my tail,” she muttered dourly.
“Look, sister!” said Sarah. “You weren’t tripped by a fairy! You stumbled into a foot crater!”
Sarah did not lie. They both stared astonished. Before them were a series of deep footprints: a pair that appeared to belong to a grown man, a pair that appeared to belong to an older boy, and a pair that appeared to belong to a girl about their age. The footprints pointed up toward the mountain trail. Curiously, there were no footprints pointing in the other direction, back down the mountain.
“Do you suppose, Peggers, that this family of trekkers walked up in the mucky season and decided to stay atop Mount Tingle?”
“To my eye, the answer be ‘aye.’”
And off they went to investigate.
Perhaps half a mile up the trail, the footprints stopped. Or, rather, they became indistinguishable from the depressions and trenches left in the ground during muddy season by the pummeling heavy rains and melting mountain snowcap.
The path was thankfully now dry and shaded by leafy oaks, but it was rutted and sloppy, a bother to navigate. Peg and Sarah were tiptoeing their way alongside the trunk of a fallen sassafras when they encountered a ghastly sight.
“Is that—is that a dead girl, Peggers?”
“Her hair is damp and she lies face down. Did she freeze or did she drown?”
With the blunt-edged handle of the scythe, Peg gently poked at the tattered coat of boiled tweed that the poor girl wore. At this, the body heaved slightly and emitted a soft moan. Peg and Sarah leapt high as a scared stoat, as their papa liked to say.
“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
From the face-down girl came a delirious murmur.
“Mama … Mama, is that you?”
The sisters gently rolled the body over.
It was more ghastly than they could have imagined. She was a blond girl of six or seven, her pretty face round and smudged, her eyes ringed with dark. Below her neck, her chest was ripped apart, her ribcage butterflied open, revealing a faintly pulsing heart.
“My word, it looks like you’re part eaten!” said Sarah.
“A shame,” said Peg. “Do you have a name?”
“Sally,” said the girl.
“Sally, do you have a second name?” said Sarah.
“I … I am too weak and part eaten to remember.”
“In that case we shall call you Sally Ribcage!” Sarah said brightly. It had clearly been a long time since Sally had any fun. A silly name would be good for a laugh.
“Tell us, Sally Ribcage, what’s your story? Whatever it is, I bet it’s gory,” said Peg.
“In that respect, you are correct,” said Sally Ribcage, mustering all of her strength to think up a rhyme herself. “But … I am so, so hungry. Have you … girls got … any … food?”
Peg retrieved a lemon-curd puff from the satchel, unwrapped it from its wax paper, and gently fed it into the mouth of Sally Ribcage, one nibble at a time.
“Ah, thank you. It has been weeks since I have eaten anything but worms and winterberries,” the girl said. The rings around her eyes flushed ever so slightly pink as she choked down the curd. And so she rallied to tell her tale.
It was as Peg and Sarah had suspected. Sally Ribcage, when she was still known simply as Sally, had gone trekking up Mount Tingle with her father and her brother, Pelle. They were of Swedish stock and accustomed to winter treks. But in western Massachusetts, a frosty March landscape can turn into a violent mud bath in the blink of a hoot owl’s eye.
In this respect, Swedish stock or not, it is foolish to press forward when white turns to brown.
Sadly, it was too late for Sally Ribcage and her relations to benefit from this lesson. They had walked through a snowy Brinton Wood and begun up Mount Tingle, only to be accosted suddenly by March rains and a furious gush of melted snow.
Very quickly, Sally, Pelle, and their father descended into a river of forest muck. They survived the better part of a week waist-deep in mud, eating the tinned biscuits they’d brought and drinking rainwater that they collected in the biscuit tin.
But the scent of the biscuits drew the attention of a curious gray wolf, who did not take kindly to Pelle’s protests. After a brief struggle, the wolf’s will triumphed over the boy’s. Pelle was dragged away, never to be seen again.
Sally’s father lasted a week further until a wily Canadian lynx separated him from his good arm. Once he breathed no more, the turkey vultures finished him off.
Sally, being lighter and more nimble than her relations, eventually extracted herself from the muck. She made a ring of rocks to be her camp, which she named Camp Farsa in memory of her father. Farsa is what girl Swedes call their papas.
But a further two weeks of ongoing rains and night freezes left the poor girl shivering and helpless. A den of bears awoke from hibernation and discovered her. They were enjoying her morsel by morsel until the heat wave sent them scampering to Scutter’s Pond for drinking water.
“And that,” said Sally Ribcage, “is why you find me as I am.”
“A most uncomfortable way to welcome spring!” said Sarah.
“New season, part eaten,” added Peg.
“Please explain to me, Sally Ribcage,” said Sarah, “why your mother didn’t come looking for you. You cried out for her when we poked you.”
“We lost her when I was but three,” said the part-eaten girl. “Her mare, Esme, startled and kicked her into the hay baler. When you two arrived and made that shrieking noise, I thought it might be a welcome whistle. I thought I had woken up in heaven. And so I expected to be re-united with Mama. Yet here I am, still on the Tingle Trail, part eaten.”
The effects of the lemon-curd puff were wearing off. The exertion of speaking had worn out Sally Ribcage. “Sarah, the blade of your scythe is so pretty and shiny,” she said drowsily.
Sarah instantly understood. “You really do want to see your mama, don’t you?” she said.
“With all due haste, if you don’t mind,” said Sally Ribcage.
After it was over, Sarah drew a rag from the satchel and wiped the blade clean. She heard a fluttering sound from above.
“Look, Peggers, the hawks have returned from the south! I suppose they shall do the rest,” she said. “Shall we go back?”
“Let’s,” replied Peg. “Gone at such a tender age. Poor, poor Sally Ribcage.”
Emma, Eulalie, and Libby Simmons, 1930s farm girls from Frawley, Massachusetts, live on in blessed memory. And in the head of AIR MAIL Writer at Large David Kamp