Speaker 1: Chloe, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 1: which is normally a show where I your host, Margaret Giltroy,
Speaker 1: talked to you about cool people in history. But this
Speaker 1: week it's a very special holiday week. Everyone loves Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: There's a lot a terrible history of Thanksgiving that we're
Speaker 1: going to get into in a little bit. This week
Speaker 1: will be a little bit different. We're going to do
Speaker 1: a short little bit of history, and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: do a little bit of fiction, because I think that's
Speaker 1: what I do when I don't have an entire episode,
Speaker 1: is I read you short stories because I write short stories,
Speaker 1: and so then I can read them because I've written them. Today.
Speaker 1: My guest is very excited to be on the show,
Speaker 1: has never been on the show before. Is Sophie Lichtman. Sophie,
Speaker 1: how are you? I'm good? I think you fiction because
Speaker 1: they ask you too, because I like it? Oh right?
Speaker 1: Is something. It has nothing to do with you know,
Speaker 1: not having time or anything like that. It's that I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: can you do this thing that you're really good at
Speaker 1: that I enjoy that listeners also enjoy. Thanks. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that that's what I'm doing. Very thankful for that, because it's,
Speaker 1: you know, a week of thanking for things thanks by
Speaker 1: I mean, let's talk about this really awesome, awesome thing.
Speaker 1: I can't even be serious about it. No, it's hard,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately I finally get to go back to my
Speaker 1: roots of how I earned the name Killjoy, which was
Speaker 1: not by telling people about cool people, but instead by
Speaker 1: complaining about things that people hold dear. I was so excited, Hooray,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about Thanksgiving. The story of Thanksgiving is
Speaker 1: a lie on almost every conceivable level. The idea didn't
Speaker 1: originate in North America. The first American Thanksgiving feast wasn't
Speaker 1: the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock In The colonists weren't actually
Speaker 1: very good to the indigenous people, even the specific nation
Speaker 1: that they made the treaty with. That the whole Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: myth is built around, and the current incarnation of thanks
Speaker 1: you mean isn't even directly related to the feast that
Speaker 1: they had in Plymouth rock YEP. One of the first
Speaker 1: days of Thanksgiving was in sixteen thirty eight English settlers
Speaker 1: on a ship named Margaret. I literally included this part
Speaker 1: in the script because the ship was named Margaret, I
Speaker 1: mean respectfully and understand. Yeah, they showed up in Virginia
Speaker 1: and declared December four, six nineteen a day of Thanksgiving,
Speaker 1: and it was part of this Puritan idea. The idea
Speaker 1: of Thanksgiving wasn't like something that they came up with
Speaker 1: once they were in North America. Puritans um famously not
Speaker 1: fans of fun, and so they didn't or paganism, and
Speaker 1: they correctly assessed that all the Christian holidays were just
Speaker 1: pagan holidays rebranded, and so they only had two holidays
Speaker 1: that really mattered to them. Days of Humiliation and Days
Speaker 1: of Thanksgiving. I mean that sounds like, you know, an
Speaker 1: average Wednesday for me. But okay, yeah, yeah, for some reason,
Speaker 1: the Puritans and well, I guess I would say, you know,
Speaker 1: Protestant culture in American in general has forgotten about the
Speaker 1: first one. Not as big on the Days of Humiliation
Speaker 1: should be you know, a weekly day, you know, for
Speaker 1: at least for like Congress in America or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it should be a day of humiliation each week. They
Speaker 1: just get to, you know, make fun of some horrendous politician. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think I didn't look a ton into it. I
Speaker 1: think it's like to humble ourselves to express humility. You know,
Speaker 1: I like my aversion better where you you take like
Speaker 1: Mitch McConnell from Senate and I'll let let you know,
Speaker 1: somebody from Congress throw things at them. Is either one
Speaker 1: it looks like a turtle. I can't remember. Yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I'm like, as a matter of fact, if we're
Speaker 1: being you know, factually accurate, he is, Yeah, okay, just
Speaker 1: just checking making sure I have the right one in
Speaker 1: my head. The Thanksgiving in colonial America that we mythologized today,
Speaker 1: it is two years later from the set Margaret Once.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard this story before. Have you heard of
Speaker 1: these people, the Pilgrims, Sophie? I was fortunately for way
Speaker 1: too long every I mean just an unbelievable amount of
Speaker 1: time in class in school. Unbelievable. Maybe I wasn't paying attention,
Speaker 1: But did you know that they didn't actually set out
Speaker 1: from England? They set out from the Netherlands. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: like they taught this in school. I realized it was
Speaker 1: not a real story. And then I was like, I
Speaker 1: will not fact check this because funck them Like yeah, no, ya, totally,
Speaker 1: many of them, many of the Puritans did set out
Speaker 1: from from England. But this other group, the separatist Puritans,
Speaker 1: who are the ones who get called the Pilgrims, set
Speaker 1: out from the Netherlands because they had already fled England
Speaker 1: and gone to and then Vilens, and then they continued
Speaker 1: on their way and then they came over here. And
Speaker 1: so those plucky Puritans, the Pilgrims, who would fucking hate
Speaker 1: this is the best part about it all. The Puritans
Speaker 1: would hate that Thanksgiving Thanksgiving as a harvest feast, Like
Speaker 1: fundamentally it's a harvest feasts. It's a little bit weird.
Speaker 1: That's a harvest feast. Every other culture celebrates harvest feast
Speaker 1: around the time of the harvest, but we can't do
Speaker 1: anything right, so our harvest feast is at the end
Speaker 1: of November. But anyway, the Puritans fucking hate all pagan holidays,
Speaker 1: so they would fucking hate that their day of Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: is a fucking pagan harvest feast. Cool. So they show
Speaker 1: up on the Mayflower and they found Plymouth and they
Speaker 1: had a hard winter. They were like, I guess we'll
Speaker 1: just die. I mean, honestly, here's I'm just going back
Speaker 1: for one second. If they had named that ship Margaret,
Speaker 1: maybe we would like them more. Maybe we like them more,
Speaker 1: that's true. Or maybe I would have had to pick
Speaker 1: a different name out of that. Maybe maybe you would
Speaker 1: not be Margaret because you'd associated with that. Or May, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'd be May, You'd be Mayflower Killjoy. Yeah, Okay, not
Speaker 1: not a bad name. I'm not gonna lie like it.
Speaker 1: Kind of is a bob, I know, I know what.
Speaker 1: It's too steeped in the afromathic. I know. Wow, life
Speaker 1: could be different, I know, I know. Fortunately, according to this,
Speaker 1: this myth that we all hear, the heroic indigenous people
Speaker 1: of a nearby nation, the Wampanoag, plus a plucky fellow
Speaker 1: name to Squantum, whom history remembers by the nickname a
Speaker 1: white guy gave him Squanto, who was the last surviving
Speaker 1: member of the patux At people, who are a subsection
Speaker 1: of the Wampanoag. And they show up, especially this guy
Speaker 1: to Squantum, and he's like, hey, buds, here's some food
Speaker 1: and here's some knowledge. It's all going to be okay.
Speaker 1: And he teaches them the basics of how not to
Speaker 1: die in North America, Like here's how to get maple sap,
Speaker 1: how to grow corn, how to catch eel. It's funny
Speaker 1: because like the first things you read are like taught
Speaker 1: them how to catch fish, and then you read a
Speaker 1: little bit more into it, it's like taught them how
Speaker 1: to catch eels. And I think people were like grossed
Speaker 1: out by the fact that people used to eat a
Speaker 1: ton of eels, and so like that Robert Evans, big
Speaker 1: big eel guy, big guy. Don't they like not know
Speaker 1: how eels reproduce? Even still, I have not looked into this,
Speaker 1: but would not be surprised. There's a whole um historian.
Speaker 1: Sophie's good to continue with the story, so people pop
Speaker 1: back in. Okay, great, And you should also google medieval
Speaker 1: eel historian and come up with this guy's name, because
Speaker 1: apparently people used to pay their taxes in medieval England
Speaker 1: with eels um and pay their rent with eels, and
Speaker 1: there was just this whole eel based system in medieval
Speaker 1: England that no one john why probably I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't remember names. Well, everyone should look up medieval
Speaker 1: evil history and listen to podcasts about it because they're
Speaker 1: very entertaining. But even despite all this help, half of
Speaker 1: the pilgrims died that winner, so critical support for winter
Speaker 1: for killing half the Pilgrims. If it had killed all
Speaker 1: of them, maybe the world would be a better place.
Speaker 1: I'm not a big This is going to come across
Speaker 1: a little bit. I actually the heroes of the story
Speaker 1: are not the Pilgrims. I know, isn't that weird? So
Speaker 1: according to this story, next year, next harvest, the Pilgrims
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, let's have a day of Thanksgiving, which
Speaker 1: is definitely not a pagan holiday, and we'll invite the
Speaker 1: indigenous people with whom we will be great friends and
Speaker 1: totally not try to wipe out. Except they didn't actually
Speaker 1: call it a day of Thanksgiving back then. That just
Speaker 1: like randomly, even though they would have called it a
Speaker 1: day of Thanksgiving, they probably didn't. The reason that to
Speaker 1: Squantum was the surviving member of his people is because
Speaker 1: he had been enslaved by an English guy about seven
Speaker 1: years earlier. Basically this English quote explorer. It's so fucked up,
Speaker 1: like all these things are like, oh, we're off to
Speaker 1: go explore. But if you read all these explorers were like, look,
Speaker 1: we're just we're here to capture people. That's what we're doing.
Speaker 1: And so this guy was like, hey, come on, board
Speaker 1: my ship and we can trade. And twenty folks came
Speaker 1: onto the ship, and then he kidnapped them and he
Speaker 1: took them to Spain and never go on their ships, No,
Speaker 1: just went on. Once he was sold into slavery in Spain,
Speaker 1: he somehow escaped to London. He became a shipbuilder for
Speaker 1: a while, or maybe apprentice with a shipbuilder, and then
Speaker 1: eventually he was like, hey, I got an idea, we
Speaker 1: should go back to North America and I know a
Speaker 1: good spot. Specifically it was the spot he was from
Speaker 1: because he wanted to get the funk home. And when
Speaker 1: he got home, literally everyone was dead from disease, and
Speaker 1: so and the Wampanoag. Within a generation of this whole
Speaker 1: like peace, love and happiness, Thanksgiving thing, the Pilgrims were
Speaker 1: breaking their treaties with them left and right. They were
Speaker 1: hanging the Wampanoag for bullshit crimes. They were stealing their food,
Speaker 1: they were demanding that they weren't allowed to go own guns.
Speaker 1: The whole history of gun control goes real far back
Speaker 1: with racism in this country. And they try to force
Speaker 1: them all to become Christian, all this ship and they
Speaker 1: leave them with no choice but go to war. It's
Speaker 1: called King Philip's War, the First Indian War, And that's
Speaker 1: not what we have time to go into today because
Speaker 1: this is literally just a section of me talking it
Speaker 1: on Thanksgiving. But but yeah, so these the people that
Speaker 1: they were like supposedly friendly with or whatever, within a
Speaker 1: generation those people were like, fuck, you're trying to kill
Speaker 1: us all and had to go to war against the colonists.
Speaker 1: It also wasn't the first American Thanksgiving by a long shot.
Speaker 1: Some Spanish conquerors had done one consciously in fifteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: The Virginia the Margaret people had done one a couple
Speaker 1: of years earlier. It's not the actual story, but in
Speaker 1: the actual Thanksgiving we currently celebrate. Of course, a ton
Speaker 1: of indigenous people in North America had tons of harvest festivals,
Speaker 1: as did fucking everybody on the planet except the Puritans,
Speaker 1: who hated fun. So once again, the only joy I
Speaker 1: can squeeze out of the story is the fact that
Speaker 1: the Puritans would be really upset about all of this.
Speaker 1: Do you want to know how how eels reproduce? Oh?
Speaker 1: Is it known? How do eels reproduce? I know it
Speaker 1: was waiting. I was waiting to give you this information
Speaker 1: when you were going through there's nothing good here. Well,
Speaker 1: this is how eels reproduce. For example, it is known
Speaker 1: that eels produce eggs. It is believed that eels reproduced
Speaker 1: through what is called external fertilization. This means that mating
Speaker 1: using sexual organs, females release eggs. Males then released sperm
Speaker 1: into the water, which then mixes with and fertilizes the eggs.
Speaker 1: So they don't actually like like, they reproduce, but they
Speaker 1: don't funk, is what I'm saying. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I met some male eels. That seems fair. Word.
Speaker 1: I've actually never met a mail that implies of whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I guess who would be sponsoring this anti Thanksgiving episode today? Huh?
Speaker 1: The concept of a national day of mourning reflecting the
Speaker 1: fact that we're on stolen ground. Word, let's do it.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I've said words seven times this episode,
Speaker 1: but here we are all right, and then you know
Speaker 1: who else? Has some words from our sponsors, and we
Speaker 1: are back. And the first federally recognized Thanksgiving holiday was
Speaker 1: made by Have you ever heard of this guy? He's
Speaker 1: mostly famous for being a slaver um George Washington, that
Speaker 1: the one with the with the wooden teeth guy. Well,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about his teeth. Cool. Cool. He
Speaker 1: called for the you know, the American revolution all that ship.
Speaker 1: He called for the first federal official federal day of Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: There have been a couple that churches had been doing
Speaker 1: and stuff before then, and it was to give thanks
Speaker 1: for winning the Revolutionary War. If you want to hear
Speaker 1: my opinions about that war, you can listen to the
Speaker 1: episode about Public Universal Front. Except first I want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about George Washington. Wait. Wait,
Speaker 1: I swear, I swear on everything. I did not read
Speaker 1: ahead and see that you had a whole thing about teeth.
Speaker 1: That's just the first thing that came to my mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking about George Washington's teeth. This is very exciting.
Speaker 1: George piece of ship Washington who statues should be treated
Speaker 1: exactly the same way as any Confederate statue. Have you
Speaker 1: heard about George Washington's teeth? Apparently? Oh man, so I
Speaker 1: was about to say that Mr one dollar Bill himself,
Speaker 1: And the next baragraph starts on the one dollar bill, ye, yep,
Speaker 1: on the one dollar bill. George Washington has a smug,
Speaker 1: little smile, and it's because his cheeks are a little
Speaker 1: bit puffed up because he's wearing dentures. And in school
Speaker 1: they told us his dentures were made out of wood.
Speaker 1: That isn't true, of course it isn't. Why would they ever,
Speaker 1: why would they ever tell us anything true about these
Speaker 1: despicable fucking people that found it out? I know, because
Speaker 1: then we can have complicated conversations about them. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna have a complicated conversation about him. I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: a one sided conversation about him today. But it's like
Speaker 1: you could theoretically eventually have complicated conversations about some of
Speaker 1: these people if you started with the fucking truth. But
Speaker 1: we're gonna start with the truth, and we're gonna leave
Speaker 1: it there. He had a bunch of different dentures, but
Speaker 1: one of his sources for teeth was that he bought,
Speaker 1: and the word bought gets really heavy air quotes here.
Speaker 1: He bought teeth from the people that he enslaved. He
Speaker 1: his estate had over three hundred enslaved people on it,
Speaker 1: more than a hundred personally owned by George w himself.
Speaker 1: And it was these people that he got his dentures
Speaker 1: from while they were still alive. Jesus fuck and yeah,
Speaker 1: and during the revel susan a whole grip of the
Speaker 1: people that he thought he owned, ran the funk away
Speaker 1: and got into a British warship and escaped the fucking
Speaker 1: monster they lived with. Anyway, I feel like it's just
Speaker 1: hard to say the words George Washington a sentence without
Speaker 1: adding the guy who ripped teeth out of living people's faces.
Speaker 1: And in our in our country, he's the delightful, delightful
Speaker 1: foundery with the cute little wooden teeth. I know that
Speaker 1: we tell that story to, you know, preschool children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a he's a horror villain's he's absolutely horrible, like
Speaker 1: a yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah uh. I mean like that
Speaker 1: should be talked about in the same like not obviously
Speaker 1: not at scale, but like King Leopold of Belgium taking
Speaker 1: people's hands like that like this, Yeah, and there's like
Speaker 1: there's some historical questions to be people work really hard
Speaker 1: to make George Washington seems like a chill guy. There's
Speaker 1: all of these articles you can find being like here's
Speaker 1: the daily life of someone that he enslaved and it
Speaker 1: like tries to be like in their free time, they
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. No, they were fucking treated like ship.
Speaker 1: One of the people people well only he only personally
Speaker 1: owned a hundred and something of those people. The other
Speaker 1: people just lived on his estate as enslaved. Motherfucker. Yeah no, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's people work so fucking hard to try and
Speaker 1: and so like, we know that he bought teeth from people,
Speaker 1: and we know that he had all this ship with
Speaker 1: his teeth, but it's possible he bought people's teeth and
Speaker 1: they went in someone else's. No, he fucking there's anyway.
Speaker 1: Whatever is a fucking horror villain. Then so he The
Speaker 1: first day of Thanksgiving was the one he suggested. But
Speaker 1: then it wasn't until the Civil War in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: three when Abraham Lincoln declared the current in acarnation of Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: And I hadn't actually realized this. The current incarnation of Thanksgiving,
Speaker 1: the one that happened this week as you all are listening,
Speaker 1: was created quote with the intention to heal the wounds
Speaker 1: of the nation from the Civil War, and theoretically doesn't
Speaker 1: even have anything to like mayflower in any of that ship.
Speaker 1: But it's just not true. That's not what people are celebrating.
Speaker 1: People are celebrating, um, the other ship. They're celebrating the
Speaker 1: Mayflower ship because no one's even fucking because that's not
Speaker 1: the story that we hear. We don't hear that. It
Speaker 1: is a dave Thanksgiving to sit down with the people
Speaker 1: who enslave people and break bread with them. And while
Speaker 1: I'm just on a tear about I'm not like a
Speaker 1: big fan of US presidents as like a general, I
Speaker 1: will say Abraham Lincoln not a slaver. Famously the opposite
Speaker 1: of that, his vice president was a slaver. But you know,
Speaker 1: and no, what he gets marks off as great is
Speaker 1: that they oversaw the largest mass hanging in US history
Speaker 1: of thirty eight members of the Dakota Nation Minnesota. Not
Speaker 1: just was president during the hanging of but like personally
Speaker 1: provided the executioners with the list of names after like
Speaker 1: looking through the trial transcripts after these people have been
Speaker 1: on trial for like five ten minutes each or whatever.
Speaker 1: That's where Thanksgiving comes from. And so yeah, happy thanks Giving.
Speaker 1: I felt weird coming from you. I f hate Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: It's ship the idea of getting together with your family
Speaker 1: or friends or chosen family or whatever you're into, and
Speaker 1: like literally giving thanks That's cool, although it is worth
Speaker 1: knowing that the idea of Thanksgiving was literally this idea
Speaker 1: of erasing all of the other holidays that almost every
Speaker 1: culture had naturally um set in front of them. Personally,
Speaker 1: I dislike that people post the same picture of their crusty, dusty,
Speaker 1: musty ass food all day. I don't want to see
Speaker 1: your plate. I've seen it. I know what you're eating.
Speaker 1: We're all forced to eat it or choose not to
Speaker 1: eat it because it's bad. We got it, all right,
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, fucking sweet potatoes with mashed potatoes and your
Speaker 1: fucking dry ass meat, like, we got it. And I
Speaker 1: say this as a vegan, but one of the cringest
Speaker 1: things is when vegans act as if the problem with
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving is um the meat that's being eaten, as compared
Speaker 1: to the colonization. Am it's a symptom? Yeah totally yeah. Yeah. Anyways,
Speaker 1: which brings us to what we're really going to talk
Speaker 1: about today, which is something unrelated to any of that,
Speaker 1: which is a short story. But first, do you know
Speaker 1: what else is a short story? Is it the story
Speaker 1: of products? A show. Yeah, I like having a show, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Do you like having shows? I like you having this show. Well,
Speaker 1: then I guess it's a good thing that we are sponsored.
Speaker 1: Cool in a complicated way. Here's some ads, and we
Speaker 1: are back. And the story I'm going to read today
Speaker 1: is a retelling of a story that my father told
Speaker 1: me when I was younger. Uh. It is the last
Speaker 1: story in the book that I've been hawking at the
Speaker 1: end of every single fucking episode as long as you've
Speaker 1: been listening to this podcast called we Won't be here Tomorrow.
Speaker 1: And so shout out to my dad for writing a
Speaker 1: story that I then stole and to my own words,
Speaker 1: and I'm now reading to you. It's called the thirty
Speaker 1: seven Marble Steps. I grew up near the foothills of Appalachia.
Speaker 1: And there's something to these forests. The trees themselves aren't old,
Speaker 1: but the mountains are old. The mountains are old and
Speaker 1: battered and smoothed over. And what is a forest but
Speaker 1: the outbursting of life come up from the land. The
Speaker 1: trees themselves are not old, but the forests are old
Speaker 1: because these mountains are old. I grew up near the
Speaker 1: foothills of Appalachia, and I remember when the Blair Witch
Speaker 1: Project came out, set close to where I lived, and
Speaker 1: it it didn't surprise anyone, like, yeah, the movie is
Speaker 1: a work of fiction. But there's still something to these
Speaker 1: mountains and these forests. There's still something there, something that
Speaker 1: that movie drew from. My father told me this story
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. He told me the story
Speaker 1: under the bows and the stars, and it's not something
Speaker 1: I'll ever forget. The next day, he took me to
Speaker 1: the place it happened. He took me to the marble steps.
Speaker 1: There are thirty seven marble steps in the middle of
Speaker 1: the forest, far from any road. The steps climbed steep
Speaker 1: and twisted up from a seasonal creek up to a
Speaker 1: tiny concrete foundation peppered with stones. There's no house there anymore.
Speaker 1: There is, however, a crack in the foundation. The crack
Speaker 1: is narrow and long, and underneath there's nothing, not soil,
Speaker 1: not rock, just nothing. You shine your flashlight through that
Speaker 1: crack and you see nothing. You slide your skinny arm
Speaker 1: through that crack and you feel nothing. You drop a
Speaker 1: coin through that crack and you hear nothing. I tried
Speaker 1: all those things. There was a house on that foundation,
Speaker 1: years ago, years before my father was born, probably before
Speaker 1: his mother was born, maybe before her mother came over
Speaker 1: from the Old Country fleeing persecution. I couldn't tell you
Speaker 1: when exactly there was a house on that foundation. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense, for there have ever been one, not
Speaker 1: out there's no road, not out where. Whoever built it
Speaker 1: had to carry marble and concrete on their back or
Speaker 1: on the backs of animals. I can't tell you why
Speaker 1: there was a house. I can only tell you that
Speaker 1: there was one. I can tell you about the woman
Speaker 1: who lived there, too. I can tell you that she
Speaker 1: didn't have a name, that she didn't need a name.
Speaker 1: Names are not for yourself, there are for other people.
Speaker 1: You live alone in a house in the woods, the
Speaker 1: top of the marble steps, and you don't need a name,
Speaker 1: because no one calls you anything. The people from the
Speaker 1: nearby town, they just called her the woman who lived
Speaker 1: in the woods. This woman lived alone, and she was ageless,
Speaker 1: like all women who live alone. Learning that one myself,
Speaker 1: it's been been nice. Bonus say, yeah, she lived only
Speaker 1: five miles or so from that nearby town. That town
Speaker 1: has gone now too. It probably had a name, though
Speaker 1: I don't know it. The woman lived close enough that
Speaker 1: people hiking or hunting in the forest saw the smoke
Speaker 1: from her chimney and saw the lights in her windows.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people even saw her herself wandering the four wrist.
Speaker 1: They saw her hair pinned up in a bun in
Speaker 1: the summer and under hats and hoods in the winter.
Speaker 1: They saw her gaze, alternatively blank and fierce. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: heard her sing. It went like this. She walked paths
Speaker 1: through the woods, sometimes down even to the road alongside
Speaker 1: the town. She had a stick in one hand and
Speaker 1: a burlap sack and the other bad man, bad man,
Speaker 1: braise the bones, she sang as she beat bushes with
Speaker 1: the stick, A good whack, a good thump against the branches. Bugbear, bugbear,
Speaker 1: boil the bra Animals, all kinds of animals would run
Speaker 1: out from the bushes and the brambles right into her sack. Rabbits, groundhogs, snakes, possums, raccoons, mice,
Speaker 1: birds and lizards. Every creature under the sun, and every
Speaker 1: creature that hides from the sun would run right towards
Speaker 1: her and into that sack. Once it was good and full,
Speaker 1: she twists the end closed, lifted like it weighed nothing,
Speaker 1: and beat the bag with a stick until the squirming
Speaker 1: stopped and the crying stopped and everything inside was dead
Speaker 1: or willing to pretend. She'd throw that bag over her
Speaker 1: shoulder and walk away whistling. Now instead of singing that
Speaker 1: same tune. I know the tune. I could hum it
Speaker 1: to you, but I don't know how to write it.
Speaker 1: So maybe that tune will die out one day and
Speaker 1: maybe we'll all be the safer when it does. Or
Speaker 1: I'll record an audiobook version and y'all are stuck knowing it. Well,
Speaker 1: it's a podcast, so you can sing it now. Ha ha,
Speaker 1: Why miss, we've been doing that's one okay. Anyway, It's
Speaker 1: just funny when you when you write stuff and you
Speaker 1: like write it for being written, you know. Anyway, dogs
Speaker 1: went missing sometimes around that town. Cats to lambs, and
Speaker 1: calves and chickens, never children. One reason people in the
Speaker 1: town put up with that woman as long as they
Speaker 1: did is that whenever a kid went missing, they'd wind
Speaker 1: up back at home right in their crib, not crying
Speaker 1: the blood of berries, tinting their lips. One day, a
Speaker 1: little girl not yet seven years old got swept away
Speaker 1: by the river surely she drowned. The parents thought, the
Speaker 1: whole town thought. That night walked up to her own
Speaker 1: house wearing a burlap dress, her hair brushed, and braided,
Speaker 1: her belly full. She didn't say a word about what happened,
Speaker 1: but everyone knew that the lady with the bag and
Speaker 1: the stick was watching out. It went like that for years,
Speaker 1: for generations. Was it the same woman? No one could
Speaker 1: tell Bruno. Bruno baked the bread, She sang, boatman, boatman,
Speaker 1: based the bear a good whack of good thump, and
Speaker 1: she had the animals, and off she went on her way,
Speaker 1: never said a word to a soul. This was fine,
Speaker 1: and this was good, and no one in town thought
Speaker 1: too hard on it until one day it wasn't fine.
Speaker 1: It wasn't good. People mostly want to let each other alone,
Speaker 1: and that woman wasn't hurting anyone. A boy came up
Speaker 1: in that town, and he became a man while he
Speaker 1: was at school in a nearby city, And when he
Speaker 1: came back as a man, he decided he wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be the sort to just let people alone. John
Speaker 1: was his name, at least as I haven't Big John.
Speaker 1: They called him because there were an awful lot of John's,
Speaker 1: and this John was the tallest. One day in early March,
Speaker 1: John was walking home from the mill. The sun was
Speaker 1: near to set, and the wind was something wild, and
Speaker 1: a little bit of snow was being thrown here and there.
Speaker 1: He saw the woman, and he heard the woman, and
Speaker 1: he saw a cat run into her bag, and he
Speaker 1: decided enough was enough. He waited until she was far
Speaker 1: enough distant, and then he followed her off through the
Speaker 1: woods up to that seasonal creek. Most people they took
Speaker 1: one look at that house up on the top of
Speaker 1: those marble steps perched down over the gully, and they
Speaker 1: went right back the way they came. Big John, though,
Speaker 1: he waited until the woman went into the house. Then
Speaker 1: he climbed each of those steps himself. Smoke was pouring
Speaker 1: out the chimney, and lamp light flickered through the unshuttered windows,
Speaker 1: and Big John went up to one of those windows
Speaker 1: and looked inside. The woman was there, and she had
Speaker 1: the sack over one shoulder, and she went up to
Speaker 1: the middle of the bare concrete floor, and she tapped
Speaker 1: her sticks seven times, tap tap tap, tap, tap tap tap.
Speaker 1: She tapped her stick seven times, and she stepped back
Speaker 1: and she waited, and a trap door was there where
Speaker 1: nothing had been, And she reached down and grabbed the
Speaker 1: iron rung and pulled it up, and Big John heard
Speaker 1: a wailing, a keening from within. He couldn't describe it
Speaker 1: better than that in all the years he tried in
Speaker 1: human and animal demonic. The woman up ended the sack. Animals,
Speaker 1: including that cat, tumbled out down into the darkness. Soon after,
Speaker 1: far worse sounds came from that trap door, and the
Speaker 1: woman smiled and cooed like she was tending a pet,
Speaker 1: and she closed that trap door. She tapped on it
Speaker 1: seven times with her stick. Tap tap, tap, tap, tap
Speaker 1: tap tap. The trap door was gone. On the wall.
Speaker 1: Hung up with the coats and the cloaks were animal
Speaker 1: collars and tags, dozens of them. Big John had seen enough,
Speaker 1: and he turned to go, but snuck in one last
Speaker 1: look and saw the woman at her stove, singing again,
Speaker 1: cooking what looked and smelled for all the world like
Speaker 1: vegetable soup. Big John snuck down those stairs as quietly
Speaker 1: and carefully as he could, but as soon as he
Speaker 1: reached the path by the creek, he ran all the
Speaker 1: way back to town. Five miles He ran and when
Speaker 1: he showed a at the sheriff's house. He was panting
Speaker 1: and sweating and pale and just worn out, and his
Speaker 1: body was just about to give up on him. He
Speaker 1: knocked on that door, tap tap tap, The sheriff answered
Speaker 1: the woman. He said the cats, He said the dogs.
Speaker 1: He told the sheriff what he'd seen, And of course
Speaker 1: the sheriff didn't believe him about the trap door, and
Speaker 1: he didn't believe him about the vegetable soup, but he
Speaker 1: believed him about the animal collars. Everyone in town knew
Speaker 1: that the woman stole pets and live stock, anything with
Speaker 1: fur feathers that was small enough to fit into her sack.
Speaker 1: Everyone knew it, but no one had admitted it, because
Speaker 1: if they'd admitted it, they would have had to do something.
Speaker 1: But here was Big John standing at the doorstep of authority,
Speaker 1: and that authority decided to finally admit to himself what
Speaker 1: he already knew. It wasn't yet late, just past dinner,
Speaker 1: and the sheriff rounded up his posse and headed into
Speaker 1: the forest with guns and lanterns, ready to find the
Speaker 1: woman and bring her to justice. Big John, though he
Speaker 1: stayed at home. He'd used up all his nerve for
Speaker 1: that night, maybe for the rest of time. Now this
Speaker 1: is where you expect the story to go all wrong,
Speaker 1: and it will, but doesn't go wrong the way that
Speaker 1: it might have. The sheriff climbed the thirty seven steps,
Speaker 1: his posse following. He showed up at the woman's door,
Speaker 1: banging with the handle of his revolver on the wood. Bang, bang, bang.
Speaker 1: The woman answered, and the sheriff arrested her, and the
Speaker 1: posse tore apart the cabin looking for contraband. They found
Speaker 1: the dog collars and the cat collars, and that was enough.
Speaker 1: But they found nothing else besides hot barley soup on
Speaker 1: the stove, flavored strong with garlic and wild onion. No bones,
Speaker 1: no midden, no trap door, no basement at all. Big
Speaker 1: John had been seeing things. They marched the woman five
Speaker 1: miles back to the sheriff's office and locked her into
Speaker 1: the town's one holding cell. And by then it was
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, and the woman was steel
Speaker 1: faced and unbroken. You have to feed her, the woman said,
Speaker 1: feed who. The sheriff asked, someone has to feed her?
Speaker 1: The woman said, someone must go up there and feed
Speaker 1: my daughter. You don't have a daughter. The sheriff said,
Speaker 1: and that was that, and the woman was sent to
Speaker 1: the city for trial, and no one thought much about
Speaker 1: her again, because what is a prison but a place
Speaker 1: to put those who wish to forget those who make
Speaker 1: you uncomfortable? What is a prison but the bbolivion. A
Speaker 1: week later, Big John was walking home in the evening
Speaker 1: out along that road when he heard a terrible thing,
Speaker 1: a wrenching, a scream of wood and steel, and a
Speaker 1: scream of animal throats, and a scream of emptiness and horror.
Speaker 1: Then nothing, nothing happened except from then on children from
Speaker 1: that town. They weren't returned with berry juice on their
Speaker 1: lips when they went missing. When children went missing, they
Speaker 1: stayed missing. And now there's a concrete foundation peppered with
Speaker 1: stones and a crack in it, and nothing on the
Speaker 1: other side. And people don't camp there much, and people
Speaker 1: don't build towns there no more. And that forest is old,
Speaker 1: and no one knows how those marble steps got there,
Speaker 1: and no one knows much of anything anymore. There's no
Speaker 1: moral to us, to be sure. I'm not here saying
Speaker 1: that you've got to let the little evils go on
Speaker 1: address so that you don't let out the big evil.
Speaker 1: I'm not even saying what was in that basement was evil,
Speaker 1: not for sure. I'm not saying it was right what
Speaker 1: happened to that woman? And neither am I saying it's
Speaker 1: okay to steal cats and feed them to monsters. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying it happened. I'm just telling you about the
Speaker 1: thirty seven marble steps and that foundation and that crack
Speaker 1: that goes off to nowhere. That's what I got. I
Speaker 1: was like, I was waiting to see if you were
Speaker 1: going to do more song. Yeah. I wonder if you
Speaker 1: get in trouble for accidentally singing things on podcasts but
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to. I'll just never sing again anywhere, honestly.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, suck you the man we work for. Like,
Speaker 1: I'm like, eat it, oh man, I love that story.
Speaker 1: You told that story at a book signing event that
Speaker 1: I went to of yours, and it's it's so cool
Speaker 1: and it's so cool that it got passed down from
Speaker 1: your dad too. It's, uh, it's cool people who did
Speaker 1: cool stuff in my in my book, and my dad
Speaker 1: is definitely cool people. I'll go ahead and say that
Speaker 1: I got lucky in the dad lottery. He he made
Speaker 1: that story up because there are Okay, that the one
Speaker 1: thing about lying to kids one that story scared the
Speaker 1: hell out of me when I was little, right, but
Speaker 1: everything scared the hell out of me. But he called
Speaker 1: them the marble steps, and they're not marble. There's there's
Speaker 1: real steps in the woods near where he grew up,
Speaker 1: where he had taken us to go camping, and but
Speaker 1: they're concrete steps with marbles in them, imbedded into them.
Speaker 1: And so for most of my young life I believed
Speaker 1: that marble as a construction material meant concrete with marbles
Speaker 1: in it, because the marble steps create with marbles. That
Speaker 1: makes absolute sense. Also, I feel it would be really
Speaker 1: cool to have, like like I actually think that'd be
Speaker 1: a really cool design. I know. Yeah, there were cool steps,
Speaker 1: and I don't know what the hell they were doing there.
Speaker 1: They were far away from anything. There was no road,
Speaker 1: just some concrete steps with marbles in them in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere, up to a pad with a crack
Speaker 1: in it. Apparently, So, maybe my dad didn't write the story.
Speaker 1: Maybe he's big John your conspiracy theory, which means it
Speaker 1: must be time pressed to end this episode. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that is a that is fair. There should be a
Speaker 1: big red button that actually all podcasts, someone should be
Speaker 1: able to press a red button as soon as they
Speaker 1: start talking about conspiracy theories. We do. We do have
Speaker 1: something to announce, though. What do we have to announce?
Speaker 1: Is it the fact that I'm going to be a
Speaker 1: guest on a Behind the Bastard's live show. It is
Speaker 1: that we're doing a live stream virtual show thing like
Speaker 1: we did uh gosh, I don't know many months ago
Speaker 1: with prop for Behind the Bastards, and that will be
Speaker 1: happening on December eight, and you can purchase tickets at
Speaker 1: moment house dot co slash b t B if you
Speaker 1: so desire, I'll also link that. But if you so desire,
Speaker 1: that is happening, and then that people can ask us
Speaker 1: questions even though you and I are just the uh
Speaker 1: the victims of that what you call guests of Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. Uh, I don't know. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: I've been stockholmed a little too long. Well, I believe
Speaker 1: that people in the audience can ask us questions. So
Speaker 1: when you purchase your ticket, there'll be like a prompt
Speaker 1: to submit a question that you can be for Robert,
Speaker 1: could be for Margaret, be for me, It could be
Speaker 1: for all of us, could be you know whatever, whatever
Speaker 1: your heart desires, and we may or may not choose
Speaker 1: your question. Um. Also, Robert is going to be writing
Speaker 1: a script behind the Bastard script for that event and
Speaker 1: it should be a good all time. And if you
Speaker 1: can't make it at six pm on December, do not
Speaker 1: worry because this event is available on demand for one
Speaker 1: week past the time of livestream. Yeah, did I do
Speaker 1: the thing? You did the thing? We did the thing.
Speaker 1: We did it. We're so good at our jobs. Amazing, iconic, legendary.
Speaker 1: The episodes over Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.