November 22, 2022 • 35 mins
In this extra-special Thanksgiving fiction special presentation, Margaret recounts the true origins of the Thanksgiving holiday and then reads a story from her new book, We Won't Be Here Tomorrow, to Sophie.
Join Robert Evans, Margaret Killjoy and Sophie Lichterman for a special live episode of Behind the Bastards with Q&A. Upon purchasing your ticket, you’ll be redirected to the show screen where there will be a prompt for you to submit a question to the hosts. Questions are picked at random, but be sure to get yours in as it may be featured in the live episode. The show will be available for replay for 7 days after the event.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chloe, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
which is normally a show where I your host, Margaret Giltroy,
talked to you about cool people in history. But this
week it's a very special holiday week. Everyone loves Thanksgiving.
There's a lot a terrible history of Thanksgiving that we're
going to get into in a little bit. This week
will be a little bit different. We're going to do
a short little bit of history, and then we're gonna
(00:22):
do a little bit of fiction, because I think that's
what I do when I don't have an entire episode,
is I read you short stories because I write short stories,
and so then I can read them because I've written them. Today.
My guest is very excited to be on the show,
has never been on the show before. Is Sophie Lichtman. Sophie,
(00:44):
how are you? I'm good? I think you fiction because
they ask you too, because I like it? Oh right?
Is something. It has nothing to do with you know,
not having time or anything like that. It's that I'm like, hey,
can you do this thing that you're really good at
that I enjoy that listeners also enjoy. Thanks. Yeah, okay,
(01:07):
that that's what I'm doing. Very thankful for that, because it's,
you know, a week of thanking for things thanks by
I mean, let's talk about this really awesome, awesome thing.
I can't even be serious about it. No, it's hard,
and unfortunately I finally get to go back to my
roots of how I earned the name Killjoy, which was
not by telling people about cool people, but instead by
(01:29):
complaining about things that people hold dear. I was so excited, Hooray,
we're gonna talk about Thanksgiving. The story of Thanksgiving is
a lie on almost every conceivable level. The idea didn't
originate in North America. The first American Thanksgiving feast wasn't
the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock In The colonists weren't actually
(01:51):
very good to the indigenous people, even the specific nation
that they made the treaty with. That the whole Thanksgiving
myth is built around, and the current incarnation of thanks
you mean isn't even directly related to the feast that
they had in Plymouth rock YEP. One of the first
days of Thanksgiving was in sixteen thirty eight English settlers
on a ship named Margaret. I literally included this part
(02:12):
in the script because the ship was named Margaret, I
mean respectfully and understand. Yeah, they showed up in Virginia
and declared December four, six nineteen a day of Thanksgiving,
and it was part of this Puritan idea. The idea
of Thanksgiving wasn't like something that they came up with
once they were in North America. Puritans um famously not
(02:34):
fans of fun, and so they didn't or paganism, and
they correctly assessed that all the Christian holidays were just
pagan holidays rebranded, and so they only had two holidays
that really mattered to them. Days of Humiliation and Days
of Thanksgiving. I mean that sounds like, you know, an
(02:55):
average Wednesday for me. But okay, yeah, yeah, for some reason,
the Puritans and well, I guess I would say, you know,
Protestant culture in American in general has forgotten about the
first one. Not as big on the Days of Humiliation
should be you know, a weekly day, you know, for
(03:16):
at least for like Congress in America or something. Yeah,
it should be a day of humiliation each week. They
just get to, you know, make fun of some horrendous politician. Yeah.
I think I didn't look a ton into it. I
think it's like to humble ourselves to express humility. You know,
(03:38):
I like my aversion better where you you take like
Mitch McConnell from Senate and I'll let let you know,
somebody from Congress throw things at them. Is either one
it looks like a turtle. I can't remember. Yes, yes, yeah,
Like I'm like, as a matter of fact, if we're
being you know, factually accurate, he is, Yeah, okay, just
(04:00):
just checking making sure I have the right one in
my head. The Thanksgiving in colonial America that we mythologized today,
it is two years later from the set Margaret Once.
You've probably heard this story before. Have you heard of
these people, the Pilgrims, Sophie? I was fortunately for way
(04:20):
too long every I mean just an unbelievable amount of
time in class in school. Unbelievable. Maybe I wasn't paying attention,
But did you know that they didn't actually set out
from England? They set out from the Netherlands. No, I mean,
like they taught this in school. I realized it was
not a real story. And then I was like, I
(04:42):
will not fact check this because funck them Like yeah, no, ya, totally,
many of them, many of the Puritans did set out
from from England. But this other group, the separatist Puritans,
who are the ones who get called the Pilgrims, set
out from the Netherlands because they had already fled England
and gone to and then Vilens, and then they continued
on their way and then they came over here. And
(05:04):
so those plucky Puritans, the Pilgrims, who would fucking hate
this is the best part about it all. The Puritans
would hate that Thanksgiving Thanksgiving as a harvest feast, Like
fundamentally it's a harvest feasts. It's a little bit weird.
That's a harvest feast. Every other culture celebrates harvest feast
around the time of the harvest, but we can't do
anything right, so our harvest feast is at the end
(05:24):
of November. But anyway, the Puritans fucking hate all pagan holidays,
so they would fucking hate that their day of Thanksgiving
is a fucking pagan harvest feast. Cool. So they show
up on the Mayflower and they found Plymouth and they
had a hard winter. They were like, I guess we'll
(05:45):
just die. I mean, honestly, here's I'm just going back
for one second. If they had named that ship Margaret,
maybe we would like them more. Maybe we like them more,
that's true. Or maybe I would have had to pick
a different name out of that. Maybe maybe you would
not be Margaret because you'd associated with that. Or May, Yeah,
(06:09):
you'd be May, You'd be Mayflower Killjoy. Yeah, Okay, not
not a bad name. I'm not gonna lie like it.
Kind of is a bob, I know, I know what.
It's too steeped in the afromathic. I know. Wow, life
could be different, I know, I know. Fortunately, according to this,
this myth that we all hear, the heroic indigenous people
(06:32):
of a nearby nation, the Wampanoag, plus a plucky fellow
name to Squantum, whom history remembers by the nickname a
white guy gave him Squanto, who was the last surviving
member of the patux At people, who are a subsection
of the Wampanoag. And they show up, especially this guy
to Squantum, and he's like, hey, buds, here's some food
and here's some knowledge. It's all going to be okay.
(06:53):
And he teaches them the basics of how not to
die in North America, Like here's how to get maple sap,
how to grow corn, how to catch eel. It's funny
because like the first things you read are like taught
them how to catch fish, and then you read a
little bit more into it, it's like taught them how
to catch eels. And I think people were like grossed
out by the fact that people used to eat a
ton of eels, and so like that Robert Evans, big
(07:17):
big eel guy, big guy. Don't they like not know
how eels reproduce? Even still, I have not looked into this,
but would not be surprised. There's a whole um historian.
Sophie's good to continue with the story, so people pop
(07:38):
back in. Okay, great, And you should also google medieval
eel historian and come up with this guy's name, because
apparently people used to pay their taxes in medieval England
with eels um and pay their rent with eels, and
there was just this whole eel based system in medieval
England that no one john why probably I don't know,
(08:01):
I don't remember names. Well, everyone should look up medieval
evil history and listen to podcasts about it because they're
very entertaining. But even despite all this help, half of
the pilgrims died that winner, so critical support for winter
for killing half the Pilgrims. If it had killed all
of them, maybe the world would be a better place.
(08:23):
I'm not a big This is going to come across
a little bit. I actually the heroes of the story
are not the Pilgrims. I know, isn't that weird? So
according to this story, next year, next harvest, the Pilgrims
were like, yeah, let's have a day of Thanksgiving, which
is definitely not a pagan holiday, and we'll invite the
indigenous people with whom we will be great friends and
(08:45):
totally not try to wipe out. Except they didn't actually
call it a day of Thanksgiving back then. That just
like randomly, even though they would have called it a
day of Thanksgiving, they probably didn't. The reason that to
Squantum was the surviving member of his people is because
he had been enslaved by an English guy about seven
(09:05):
years earlier. Basically this English quote explorer. It's so fucked up,
like all these things are like, oh, we're off to
go explore. But if you read all these explorers were like, look,
we're just we're here to capture people. That's what we're doing.
And so this guy was like, hey, come on, board
my ship and we can trade. And twenty folks came
onto the ship, and then he kidnapped them and he
(09:28):
took them to Spain and never go on their ships, No,
just went on. Once he was sold into slavery in Spain,
he somehow escaped to London. He became a shipbuilder for
a while, or maybe apprentice with a shipbuilder, and then
eventually he was like, hey, I got an idea, we
should go back to North America and I know a
good spot. Specifically it was the spot he was from
because he wanted to get the funk home. And when
(09:50):
he got home, literally everyone was dead from disease, and
so and the Wampanoag. Within a generation of this whole
like peace, love and happiness, Thanksgiving thing, the Pilgrims were
breaking their treaties with them left and right. They were
hanging the Wampanoag for bullshit crimes. They were stealing their food,
they were demanding that they weren't allowed to go own guns.
(10:12):
The whole history of gun control goes real far back
with racism in this country. And they try to force
them all to become Christian, all this ship and they
leave them with no choice but go to war. It's
called King Philip's War, the First Indian War, And that's
not what we have time to go into today because
this is literally just a section of me talking it
on Thanksgiving. But but yeah, so these the people that
(10:36):
they were like supposedly friendly with or whatever, within a
generation those people were like, fuck, you're trying to kill
us all and had to go to war against the colonists.
It also wasn't the first American Thanksgiving by a long shot.
Some Spanish conquerors had done one consciously in fifteen sixty five.
The Virginia the Margaret people had done one a couple
(10:56):
of years earlier. It's not the actual story, but in
the actual Thanksgiving we currently celebrate. Of course, a ton
of indigenous people in North America had tons of harvest festivals,
as did fucking everybody on the planet except the Puritans,
who hated fun. So once again, the only joy I
can squeeze out of the story is the fact that
the Puritans would be really upset about all of this.
(11:17):
Do you want to know how how eels reproduce? Oh?
Is it known? How do eels reproduce? I know it
was waiting. I was waiting to give you this information
when you were going through there's nothing good here. Well,
this is how eels reproduce. For example, it is known
that eels produce eggs. It is believed that eels reproduced
through what is called external fertilization. This means that mating
(11:41):
using sexual organs, females release eggs. Males then released sperm
into the water, which then mixes with and fertilizes the eggs.
So they don't actually like like, they reproduce, but they
don't funk, is what I'm saying. I mean, you know,
I don't know. I met some male eels. That seems fair. Word.
I've actually never met a mail that implies of whatever. Anyway,
(12:05):
I guess who would be sponsoring this anti Thanksgiving episode today? Huh?
The concept of a national day of mourning reflecting the
fact that we're on stolen ground. Word, let's do it.
I don't know why I've said words seven times this episode,
but here we are all right, and then you know
who else? Has some words from our sponsors, and we
(12:32):
are back. And the first federally recognized Thanksgiving holiday was
made by Have you ever heard of this guy? He's
mostly famous for being a slaver um George Washington, that
the one with the with the wooden teeth guy. Well,
we're going to talk about his teeth. Cool. Cool. He
called for the you know, the American revolution all that ship.
(12:55):
He called for the first federal official federal day of Thanksgiving.
There have been a couple that churches had been doing
and stuff before then, and it was to give thanks
for winning the Revolutionary War. If you want to hear
my opinions about that war, you can listen to the
episode about Public Universal Front. Except first I want to
talk a little bit more about George Washington. Wait. Wait,
(13:16):
I swear, I swear on everything. I did not read
ahead and see that you had a whole thing about teeth.
That's just the first thing that came to my mind. Yeah,
we're talking about George Washington's teeth. This is very exciting.
George piece of ship Washington who statues should be treated
exactly the same way as any Confederate statue. Have you
(13:38):
heard about George Washington's teeth? Apparently? Oh man, so I
was about to say that Mr one dollar Bill himself,
And the next baragraph starts on the one dollar bill, ye, yep,
on the one dollar bill. George Washington has a smug,
little smile, and it's because his cheeks are a little
bit puffed up because he's wearing dentures. And in school
(14:01):
they told us his dentures were made out of wood.
That isn't true, of course it isn't. Why would they ever,
why would they ever tell us anything true about these
despicable fucking people that found it out? I know, because
then we can have complicated conversations about them. I'm not
gonna have a complicated conversation about him. I'm gonna have
a one sided conversation about him today. But it's like
(14:22):
you could theoretically eventually have complicated conversations about some of
these people if you started with the fucking truth. But
we're gonna start with the truth, and we're gonna leave
it there. He had a bunch of different dentures, but
one of his sources for teeth was that he bought,
and the word bought gets really heavy air quotes here.
He bought teeth from the people that he enslaved. He
(14:42):
his estate had over three hundred enslaved people on it,
more than a hundred personally owned by George w himself.
And it was these people that he got his dentures
from while they were still alive. Jesus fuck and yeah,
and during the revel susan a whole grip of the
people that he thought he owned, ran the funk away
(15:03):
and got into a British warship and escaped the fucking
monster they lived with. Anyway, I feel like it's just
hard to say the words George Washington a sentence without
adding the guy who ripped teeth out of living people's faces.
And in our in our country, he's the delightful, delightful
foundery with the cute little wooden teeth. I know that
we tell that story to, you know, preschool children. Yeah,
(15:27):
he's a he's a horror villain's he's absolutely horrible, like
a yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah uh. I mean like that
should be talked about in the same like not obviously
not at scale, but like King Leopold of Belgium taking
people's hands like that like this, Yeah, and there's like
(15:51):
there's some historical questions to be people work really hard
to make George Washington seems like a chill guy. There's
all of these articles you can find being like here's
the daily life of someone that he enslaved and it
like tries to be like in their free time, they
blah blah blah. No, they were fucking treated like ship.
One of the people people well only he only personally
(16:14):
owned a hundred and something of those people. The other
people just lived on his estate as enslaved. Motherfucker. Yeah no, no,
it's it's people work so fucking hard to try and
and so like, we know that he bought teeth from people,
and we know that he had all this ship with
his teeth, but it's possible he bought people's teeth and
they went in someone else's. No, he fucking there's anyway.
(16:37):
Whatever is a fucking horror villain. Then so he The
first day of Thanksgiving was the one he suggested. But
then it wasn't until the Civil War in eighteen sixty
three when Abraham Lincoln declared the current in acarnation of Thanksgiving.
And I hadn't actually realized this. The current incarnation of Thanksgiving,
(16:59):
the one that happened this week as you all are listening,
was created quote with the intention to heal the wounds
of the nation from the Civil War, and theoretically doesn't
even have anything to like mayflower in any of that ship.
But it's just not true. That's not what people are celebrating.
People are celebrating, um, the other ship. They're celebrating the
Mayflower ship because no one's even fucking because that's not
(17:20):
the story that we hear. We don't hear that. It
is a dave Thanksgiving to sit down with the people
who enslave people and break bread with them. And while
I'm just on a tear about I'm not like a
big fan of US presidents as like a general, I
will say Abraham Lincoln not a slaver. Famously the opposite
of that, his vice president was a slaver. But you know,
(17:42):
and no, what he gets marks off as great is
that they oversaw the largest mass hanging in US history
of thirty eight members of the Dakota Nation Minnesota. Not
just was president during the hanging of but like personally
provided the executioners with the list of names after like
looking through the trial transcripts after these people have been
on trial for like five ten minutes each or whatever.
That's where Thanksgiving comes from. And so yeah, happy thanks Giving.
(18:12):
I felt weird coming from you. I f hate Thanksgiving.
It's ship the idea of getting together with your family
or friends or chosen family or whatever you're into, and
like literally giving thanks That's cool, although it is worth
knowing that the idea of Thanksgiving was literally this idea
of erasing all of the other holidays that almost every
(18:34):
culture had naturally um set in front of them. Personally,
I dislike that people post the same picture of their crusty, dusty,
musty ass food all day. I don't want to see
your plate. I've seen it. I know what you're eating.
We're all forced to eat it or choose not to
eat it because it's bad. We got it, all right,
(18:57):
Yeah yeah, fucking sweet potatoes with mashed potatoes and your
fucking dry ass meat, like, we got it. And I
say this as a vegan, but one of the cringest
things is when vegans act as if the problem with
Thanksgiving is um the meat that's being eaten, as compared
to the colonization. Am it's a symptom? Yeah totally yeah. Yeah. Anyways,
(19:26):
which brings us to what we're really going to talk
about today, which is something unrelated to any of that,
which is a short story. But first, do you know
what else is a short story? Is it the story
of products? A show. Yeah, I like having a show, Sophie.
Do you like having shows? I like you having this show. Well,
(19:49):
then I guess it's a good thing that we are sponsored.
Cool in a complicated way. Here's some ads, and we
are back. And the story I'm going to read today
is a retelling of a story that my father told
me when I was younger. Uh. It is the last
(20:09):
story in the book that I've been hawking at the
end of every single fucking episode as long as you've
been listening to this podcast called we Won't be here Tomorrow.
And so shout out to my dad for writing a
story that I then stole and to my own words,
and I'm now reading to you. It's called the thirty
seven Marble Steps. I grew up near the foothills of Appalachia.
(20:30):
And there's something to these forests. The trees themselves aren't old,
but the mountains are old. The mountains are old and
battered and smoothed over. And what is a forest but
the outbursting of life come up from the land. The
trees themselves are not old, but the forests are old
because these mountains are old. I grew up near the
foothills of Appalachia, and I remember when the Blair Witch
Project came out, set close to where I lived, and
it it didn't surprise anyone, like, yeah, the movie is
(20:53):
a work of fiction. But there's still something to these
mountains and these forests. There's still something there, something that
that movie drew from. My father told me this story
when I was a kid. He told me the story
under the bows and the stars, and it's not something
I'll ever forget. The next day, he took me to
the place it happened. He took me to the marble steps.
There are thirty seven marble steps in the middle of
(21:14):
the forest, far from any road. The steps climbed steep
and twisted up from a seasonal creek up to a
tiny concrete foundation peppered with stones. There's no house there anymore.
There is, however, a crack in the foundation. The crack
is narrow and long, and underneath there's nothing, not soil,
not rock, just nothing. You shine your flashlight through that
crack and you see nothing. You slide your skinny arm
(21:36):
through that crack and you feel nothing. You drop a
coin through that crack and you hear nothing. I tried
all those things. There was a house on that foundation,
years ago, years before my father was born, probably before
his mother was born, maybe before her mother came over
from the Old Country fleeing persecution. I couldn't tell you
when exactly there was a house on that foundation. It
(21:56):
doesn't make sense, for there have ever been one, not
out there's no road, not out where. Whoever built it
had to carry marble and concrete on their back or
on the backs of animals. I can't tell you why
there was a house. I can only tell you that
there was one. I can tell you about the woman
who lived there, too. I can tell you that she
didn't have a name, that she didn't need a name.
(22:17):
Names are not for yourself, there are for other people.
You live alone in a house in the woods, the
top of the marble steps, and you don't need a name,
because no one calls you anything. The people from the
nearby town, they just called her the woman who lived
in the woods. This woman lived alone, and she was ageless,
like all women who live alone. Learning that one myself,
it's been been nice. Bonus say, yeah, she lived only
(22:44):
five miles or so from that nearby town. That town
has gone now too. It probably had a name, though
I don't know it. The woman lived close enough that
people hiking or hunting in the forest saw the smoke
from her chimney and saw the lights in her windows.
Sometimes people even saw her herself wandering the four wrist.
They saw her hair pinned up in a bun in
the summer and under hats and hoods in the winter.
(23:05):
They saw her gaze, alternatively blank and fierce. Sometimes they
heard her sing. It went like this. She walked paths
through the woods, sometimes down even to the road alongside
the town. She had a stick in one hand and
a burlap sack and the other bad man, bad man,
braise the bones, she sang as she beat bushes with
the stick, A good whack, a good thump against the branches. Bugbear, bugbear,
(23:28):
boil the bra Animals, all kinds of animals would run
out from the bushes and the brambles right into her sack. Rabbits, groundhogs, snakes, possums, raccoons, mice,
birds and lizards. Every creature under the sun, and every
creature that hides from the sun would run right towards
her and into that sack. Once it was good and full,
she twists the end closed, lifted like it weighed nothing,
(23:51):
and beat the bag with a stick until the squirming
stopped and the crying stopped and everything inside was dead
or willing to pretend. She'd throw that bag over her
shoulder and walk away whistling. Now instead of singing that
same tune. I know the tune. I could hum it
to you, but I don't know how to write it.
So maybe that tune will die out one day and
maybe we'll all be the safer when it does. Or
(24:11):
I'll record an audiobook version and y'all are stuck knowing it. Well,
it's a podcast, so you can sing it now. Ha ha,
Why miss, we've been doing that's one okay. Anyway, It's
just funny when you when you write stuff and you
like write it for being written, you know. Anyway, dogs
(24:33):
went missing sometimes around that town. Cats to lambs, and
calves and chickens, never children. One reason people in the
town put up with that woman as long as they
did is that whenever a kid went missing, they'd wind
up back at home right in their crib, not crying
the blood of berries, tinting their lips. One day, a
little girl not yet seven years old got swept away
(24:53):
by the river surely she drowned. The parents thought, the
whole town thought. That night walked up to her own
house wearing a burlap dress, her hair brushed, and braided,
her belly full. She didn't say a word about what happened,
but everyone knew that the lady with the bag and
the stick was watching out. It went like that for years,
for generations. Was it the same woman? No one could
(25:14):
tell Bruno. Bruno baked the bread, She sang, boatman, boatman,
based the bear a good whack of good thump, and
she had the animals, and off she went on her way,
never said a word to a soul. This was fine,
and this was good, and no one in town thought
too hard on it until one day it wasn't fine.
It wasn't good. People mostly want to let each other alone,
(25:36):
and that woman wasn't hurting anyone. A boy came up
in that town, and he became a man while he
was at school in a nearby city, And when he
came back as a man, he decided he wasn't going
to be the sort to just let people alone. John
was his name, at least as I haven't Big John.
They called him because there were an awful lot of John's,
and this John was the tallest. One day in early March,
(25:57):
John was walking home from the mill. The sun was
near to set, and the wind was something wild, and
a little bit of snow was being thrown here and there.
He saw the woman, and he heard the woman, and
he saw a cat run into her bag, and he
decided enough was enough. He waited until she was far
enough distant, and then he followed her off through the
woods up to that seasonal creek. Most people they took
(26:20):
one look at that house up on the top of
those marble steps perched down over the gully, and they
went right back the way they came. Big John, though,
he waited until the woman went into the house. Then
he climbed each of those steps himself. Smoke was pouring
out the chimney, and lamp light flickered through the unshuttered windows,
and Big John went up to one of those windows
and looked inside. The woman was there, and she had
(26:42):
the sack over one shoulder, and she went up to
the middle of the bare concrete floor, and she tapped
her sticks seven times, tap tap tap, tap, tap tap tap.
She tapped her stick seven times, and she stepped back
and she waited, and a trap door was there where
nothing had been, And she reached down and grabbed the
iron rung and pulled it up, and Big John heard
a wailing, a keening from within. He couldn't describe it
(27:04):
better than that in all the years he tried in
human and animal demonic. The woman up ended the sack. Animals,
including that cat, tumbled out down into the darkness. Soon after,
far worse sounds came from that trap door, and the
woman smiled and cooed like she was tending a pet,
and she closed that trap door. She tapped on it
(27:27):
seven times with her stick. Tap tap, tap, tap, tap
tap tap. The trap door was gone. On the wall.
Hung up with the coats and the cloaks were animal
collars and tags, dozens of them. Big John had seen enough,
and he turned to go, but snuck in one last
look and saw the woman at her stove, singing again,
cooking what looked and smelled for all the world like
(27:49):
vegetable soup. Big John snuck down those stairs as quietly
and carefully as he could, but as soon as he
reached the path by the creek, he ran all the
way back to town. Five miles He ran and when
he showed a at the sheriff's house. He was panting
and sweating and pale and just worn out, and his
body was just about to give up on him. He
knocked on that door, tap tap tap, The sheriff answered
(28:11):
the woman. He said the cats, He said the dogs.
He told the sheriff what he'd seen, And of course
the sheriff didn't believe him about the trap door, and
he didn't believe him about the vegetable soup, but he
believed him about the animal collars. Everyone in town knew
that the woman stole pets and live stock, anything with
fur feathers that was small enough to fit into her sack.
Everyone knew it, but no one had admitted it, because
(28:33):
if they'd admitted it, they would have had to do something.
But here was Big John standing at the doorstep of authority,
and that authority decided to finally admit to himself what
he already knew. It wasn't yet late, just past dinner,
and the sheriff rounded up his posse and headed into
the forest with guns and lanterns, ready to find the
woman and bring her to justice. Big John, though he
(28:54):
stayed at home. He'd used up all his nerve for
that night, maybe for the rest of time. Now this
is where you expect the story to go all wrong,
and it will, but doesn't go wrong the way that
it might have. The sheriff climbed the thirty seven steps,
his posse following. He showed up at the woman's door,
banging with the handle of his revolver on the wood. Bang, bang, bang.
(29:16):
The woman answered, and the sheriff arrested her, and the
posse tore apart the cabin looking for contraband. They found
the dog collars and the cat collars, and that was enough.
But they found nothing else besides hot barley soup on
the stove, flavored strong with garlic and wild onion. No bones,
no midden, no trap door, no basement at all. Big
(29:36):
John had been seeing things. They marched the woman five
miles back to the sheriff's office and locked her into
the town's one holding cell. And by then it was
the middle of the night, and the woman was steel
faced and unbroken. You have to feed her, the woman said,
feed who. The sheriff asked, someone has to feed her?
The woman said, someone must go up there and feed
(29:57):
my daughter. You don't have a daughter. The sheriff said,
and that was that, and the woman was sent to
the city for trial, and no one thought much about
her again, because what is a prison but a place
to put those who wish to forget those who make
you uncomfortable? What is a prison but the bbolivion. A
week later, Big John was walking home in the evening
out along that road when he heard a terrible thing,
(30:19):
a wrenching, a scream of wood and steel, and a
scream of animal throats, and a scream of emptiness and horror.
Then nothing, nothing happened except from then on children from
that town. They weren't returned with berry juice on their
lips when they went missing. When children went missing, they
(30:40):
stayed missing. And now there's a concrete foundation peppered with
stones and a crack in it, and nothing on the
other side. And people don't camp there much, and people
don't build towns there no more. And that forest is old,
and no one knows how those marble steps got there,
and no one knows much of anything anymore. There's no
moral to us, to be sure. I'm not here saying
(31:02):
that you've got to let the little evils go on
address so that you don't let out the big evil.
I'm not even saying what was in that basement was evil,
not for sure. I'm not saying it was right what
happened to that woman? And neither am I saying it's
okay to steal cats and feed them to monsters. I'm
just saying it happened. I'm just telling you about the
thirty seven marble steps and that foundation and that crack
(31:22):
that goes off to nowhere. That's what I got. I
was like, I was waiting to see if you were
going to do more song. Yeah. I wonder if you
get in trouble for accidentally singing things on podcasts but
you're not supposed to. I'll just never sing again anywhere, honestly.
(31:48):
Um yeah, suck you the man we work for. Like,
I'm like, eat it, oh man, I love that story.
You told that story at a book signing event that
I went to of yours, and it's it's so cool
(32:09):
and it's so cool that it got passed down from
your dad too. It's, uh, it's cool people who did
cool stuff in my in my book, and my dad
is definitely cool people. I'll go ahead and say that
I got lucky in the dad lottery. He he made
that story up because there are Okay, that the one
(32:30):
thing about lying to kids one that story scared the
hell out of me when I was little, right, but
everything scared the hell out of me. But he called
them the marble steps, and they're not marble. There's there's
real steps in the woods near where he grew up,
where he had taken us to go camping, and but
they're concrete steps with marbles in them, imbedded into them.
(32:53):
And so for most of my young life I believed
that marble as a construction material meant concrete with marbles
in it, because the marble steps create with marbles. That
makes absolute sense. Also, I feel it would be really
cool to have, like like I actually think that'd be
a really cool design. I know. Yeah, there were cool steps,
(33:14):
and I don't know what the hell they were doing there.
They were far away from anything. There was no road,
just some concrete steps with marbles in them in the
middle of nowhere, up to a pad with a crack
in it. Apparently, So, maybe my dad didn't write the story.
Maybe he's big John your conspiracy theory, which means it
(33:35):
must be time pressed to end this episode. Yeah, that's
that is a that is fair. There should be a
big red button that actually all podcasts, someone should be
able to press a red button as soon as they
start talking about conspiracy theories. We do. We do have
something to announce, though. What do we have to announce?
Is it the fact that I'm going to be a
guest on a Behind the Bastard's live show. It is
(33:57):
that we're doing a live stream virtual show thing like
we did uh gosh, I don't know many months ago
with prop for Behind the Bastards, and that will be
happening on December eight, and you can purchase tickets at
moment house dot co slash b t B if you
(34:20):
so desire, I'll also link that. But if you so desire,
that is happening, and then that people can ask us
questions even though you and I are just the uh
the victims of that what you call guests of Behind
the Bastards. Uh, I don't know. I was gonna say,
I've been stockholmed a little too long. Well, I believe
(34:48):
that people in the audience can ask us questions. So
when you purchase your ticket, there'll be like a prompt
to submit a question that you can be for Robert,
could be for Margaret, be for me, It could be
for all of us, could be you know whatever, whatever
your heart desires, and we may or may not choose
your question. Um. Also, Robert is going to be writing
a script behind the Bastard script for that event and
(35:11):
it should be a good all time. And if you
can't make it at six pm on December, do not
worry because this event is available on demand for one
week past the time of livestream. Yeah, did I do
the thing? You did the thing? We did the thing.
We did it. We're so good at our jobs. Amazing, iconic, legendary.
The episodes over Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
(35:37):
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chloe, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
which is normally a show where I your host, Margaret Giltroy,
talked to you about cool people in history. But this
week it's a very special holiday week. Everyone loves Thanksgiving.
There's a lot a terrible history of Thanksgiving that we're
going to get into in a little bit. This week
will be a little bit different. We're going to do
a short little bit of history, and then we're gonna
(00:22):
do a little bit of fiction, because I think that's
what I do when I don't have an entire episode,
is I read you short stories because I write short stories,
and so then I can read them because I've written them. Today.
My guest is very excited to be on the show,
has never been on the show before. Is Sophie Lichtman. Sophie,
(00:44):
how are you? I'm good? I think you fiction because
they ask you too, because I like it? Oh right?
Is something. It has nothing to do with you know,
not having time or anything like that. It's that I'm like, hey,
can you do this thing that you're really good at
that I enjoy that listeners also enjoy. Thanks. Yeah, okay,
(01:07):
that that's what I'm doing. Very thankful for that, because it's,
you know, a week of thanking for things thanks by
I mean, let's talk about this really awesome, awesome thing.
I can't even be serious about it. No, it's hard,
and unfortunately I finally get to go back to my
roots of how I earned the name Killjoy, which was
not by telling people about cool people, but instead by
(01:29):
complaining about things that people hold dear. I was so excited, Hooray,
we're gonna talk about Thanksgiving. The story of Thanksgiving is
a lie on almost every conceivable level. The idea didn't
originate in North America. The first American Thanksgiving feast wasn't
the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock In The colonists weren't actually
(01:51):
very good to the indigenous people, even the specific nation
that they made the treaty with. That the whole Thanksgiving
myth is built around, and the current incarnation of thanks
you mean isn't even directly related to the feast that
they had in Plymouth rock YEP. One of the first
days of Thanksgiving was in sixteen thirty eight English settlers
on a ship named Margaret. I literally included this part
(02:12):
in the script because the ship was named Margaret, I
mean respectfully and understand. Yeah, they showed up in Virginia
and declared December four, six nineteen a day of Thanksgiving,
and it was part of this Puritan idea. The idea
of Thanksgiving wasn't like something that they came up with
once they were in North America. Puritans um famously not
(02:34):
fans of fun, and so they didn't or paganism, and
they correctly assessed that all the Christian holidays were just
pagan holidays rebranded, and so they only had two holidays
that really mattered to them. Days of Humiliation and Days
of Thanksgiving. I mean that sounds like, you know, an
(02:55):
average Wednesday for me. But okay, yeah, yeah, for some reason,
the Puritans and well, I guess I would say, you know,
Protestant culture in American in general has forgotten about the
first one. Not as big on the Days of Humiliation
should be you know, a weekly day, you know, for
(03:16):
at least for like Congress in America or something. Yeah,
it should be a day of humiliation each week. They
just get to, you know, make fun of some horrendous politician. Yeah.
I think I didn't look a ton into it. I
think it's like to humble ourselves to express humility. You know,
(03:38):
I like my aversion better where you you take like
Mitch McConnell from Senate and I'll let let you know,
somebody from Congress throw things at them. Is either one
it looks like a turtle. I can't remember. Yes, yes, yeah,
Like I'm like, as a matter of fact, if we're
being you know, factually accurate, he is, Yeah, okay, just
(04:00):
just checking making sure I have the right one in
my head. The Thanksgiving in colonial America that we mythologized today,
it is two years later from the set Margaret Once.
You've probably heard this story before. Have you heard of
these people, the Pilgrims, Sophie? I was fortunately for way
(04:20):
too long every I mean just an unbelievable amount of
time in class in school. Unbelievable. Maybe I wasn't paying attention,
But did you know that they didn't actually set out
from England? They set out from the Netherlands. No, I mean,
like they taught this in school. I realized it was
not a real story. And then I was like, I
(04:42):
will not fact check this because funck them Like yeah, no, ya, totally,
many of them, many of the Puritans did set out
from from England. But this other group, the separatist Puritans,
who are the ones who get called the Pilgrims, set
out from the Netherlands because they had already fled England
and gone to and then Vilens, and then they continued
on their way and then they came over here. And
(05:04):
so those plucky Puritans, the Pilgrims, who would fucking hate
this is the best part about it all. The Puritans
would hate that Thanksgiving Thanksgiving as a harvest feast, Like
fundamentally it's a harvest feasts. It's a little bit weird.
That's a harvest feast. Every other culture celebrates harvest feast
around the time of the harvest, but we can't do
anything right, so our harvest feast is at the end
(05:24):
of November. But anyway, the Puritans fucking hate all pagan holidays,
so they would fucking hate that their day of Thanksgiving
is a fucking pagan harvest feast. Cool. So they show
up on the Mayflower and they found Plymouth and they
had a hard winter. They were like, I guess we'll
(05:45):
just die. I mean, honestly, here's I'm just going back
for one second. If they had named that ship Margaret,
maybe we would like them more. Maybe we like them more,
that's true. Or maybe I would have had to pick
a different name out of that. Maybe maybe you would
not be Margaret because you'd associated with that. Or May, Yeah,
(06:09):
you'd be May, You'd be Mayflower Killjoy. Yeah, Okay, not
not a bad name. I'm not gonna lie like it.
Kind of is a bob, I know, I know what.
It's too steeped in the afromathic. I know. Wow, life
could be different, I know, I know. Fortunately, according to this,
this myth that we all hear, the heroic indigenous people
(06:32):
of a nearby nation, the Wampanoag, plus a plucky fellow
name to Squantum, whom history remembers by the nickname a
white guy gave him Squanto, who was the last surviving
member of the patux At people, who are a subsection
of the Wampanoag. And they show up, especially this guy
to Squantum, and he's like, hey, buds, here's some food
and here's some knowledge. It's all going to be okay.
(06:53):
And he teaches them the basics of how not to
die in North America, Like here's how to get maple sap,
how to grow corn, how to catch eel. It's funny
because like the first things you read are like taught
them how to catch fish, and then you read a
little bit more into it, it's like taught them how
to catch eels. And I think people were like grossed
out by the fact that people used to eat a
ton of eels, and so like that Robert Evans, big
(07:17):
big eel guy, big guy. Don't they like not know
how eels reproduce? Even still, I have not looked into this,
but would not be surprised. There's a whole um historian.
Sophie's good to continue with the story, so people pop
(07:38):
back in. Okay, great, And you should also google medieval
eel historian and come up with this guy's name, because
apparently people used to pay their taxes in medieval England
with eels um and pay their rent with eels, and
there was just this whole eel based system in medieval
England that no one john why probably I don't know,
(08:01):
I don't remember names. Well, everyone should look up medieval
evil history and listen to podcasts about it because they're
very entertaining. But even despite all this help, half of
the pilgrims died that winner, so critical support for winter
for killing half the Pilgrims. If it had killed all
of them, maybe the world would be a better place.
(08:23):
I'm not a big This is going to come across
a little bit. I actually the heroes of the story
are not the Pilgrims. I know, isn't that weird? So
according to this story, next year, next harvest, the Pilgrims
were like, yeah, let's have a day of Thanksgiving, which
is definitely not a pagan holiday, and we'll invite the
indigenous people with whom we will be great friends and
(08:45):
totally not try to wipe out. Except they didn't actually
call it a day of Thanksgiving back then. That just
like randomly, even though they would have called it a
day of Thanksgiving, they probably didn't. The reason that to
Squantum was the surviving member of his people is because
he had been enslaved by an English guy about seven
(09:05):
years earlier. Basically this English quote explorer. It's so fucked up,
like all these things are like, oh, we're off to
go explore. But if you read all these explorers were like, look,
we're just we're here to capture people. That's what we're doing.
And so this guy was like, hey, come on, board
my ship and we can trade. And twenty folks came
onto the ship, and then he kidnapped them and he
(09:28):
took them to Spain and never go on their ships, No,
just went on. Once he was sold into slavery in Spain,
he somehow escaped to London. He became a shipbuilder for
a while, or maybe apprentice with a shipbuilder, and then
eventually he was like, hey, I got an idea, we
should go back to North America and I know a
good spot. Specifically it was the spot he was from
because he wanted to get the funk home. And when
(09:50):
he got home, literally everyone was dead from disease, and
so and the Wampanoag. Within a generation of this whole
like peace, love and happiness, Thanksgiving thing, the Pilgrims were
breaking their treaties with them left and right. They were
hanging the Wampanoag for bullshit crimes. They were stealing their food,
they were demanding that they weren't allowed to go own guns.
(10:12):
The whole history of gun control goes real far back
with racism in this country. And they try to force
them all to become Christian, all this ship and they
leave them with no choice but go to war. It's
called King Philip's War, the First Indian War, And that's
not what we have time to go into today because
this is literally just a section of me talking it
on Thanksgiving. But but yeah, so these the people that
(10:36):
they were like supposedly friendly with or whatever, within a
generation those people were like, fuck, you're trying to kill
us all and had to go to war against the colonists.
It also wasn't the first American Thanksgiving by a long shot.
Some Spanish conquerors had done one consciously in fifteen sixty five.
The Virginia the Margaret people had done one a couple
(10:56):
of years earlier. It's not the actual story, but in
the actual Thanksgiving we currently celebrate. Of course, a ton
of indigenous people in North America had tons of harvest festivals,
as did fucking everybody on the planet except the Puritans,
who hated fun. So once again, the only joy I
can squeeze out of the story is the fact that
the Puritans would be really upset about all of this.
(11:17):
Do you want to know how how eels reproduce? Oh?
Is it known? How do eels reproduce? I know it
was waiting. I was waiting to give you this information
when you were going through there's nothing good here. Well,
this is how eels reproduce. For example, it is known
that eels produce eggs. It is believed that eels reproduced
through what is called external fertilization. This means that mating
(11:41):
using sexual organs, females release eggs. Males then released sperm
into the water, which then mixes with and fertilizes the eggs.
So they don't actually like like, they reproduce, but they
don't funk, is what I'm saying. I mean, you know,
I don't know. I met some male eels. That seems fair. Word.
I've actually never met a mail that implies of whatever. Anyway,
(12:05):
I guess who would be sponsoring this anti Thanksgiving episode today? Huh?
The concept of a national day of mourning reflecting the
fact that we're on stolen ground. Word, let's do it.
I don't know why I've said words seven times this episode,
but here we are all right, and then you know
who else? Has some words from our sponsors, and we
(12:32):
are back. And the first federally recognized Thanksgiving holiday was
made by Have you ever heard of this guy? He's
mostly famous for being a slaver um George Washington, that
the one with the with the wooden teeth guy. Well,
we're going to talk about his teeth. Cool. Cool. He
called for the you know, the American revolution all that ship.
(12:55):
He called for the first federal official federal day of Thanksgiving.
There have been a couple that churches had been doing
and stuff before then, and it was to give thanks
for winning the Revolutionary War. If you want to hear
my opinions about that war, you can listen to the
episode about Public Universal Front. Except first I want to
talk a little bit more about George Washington. Wait. Wait,
(13:16):
I swear, I swear on everything. I did not read
ahead and see that you had a whole thing about teeth.
That's just the first thing that came to my mind. Yeah,
we're talking about George Washington's teeth. This is very exciting.
George piece of ship Washington who statues should be treated
exactly the same way as any Confederate statue. Have you
(13:38):
heard about George Washington's teeth? Apparently? Oh man, so I
was about to say that Mr one dollar Bill himself,
And the next baragraph starts on the one dollar bill, ye, yep,
on the one dollar bill. George Washington has a smug,
little smile, and it's because his cheeks are a little
bit puffed up because he's wearing dentures. And in school
(14:01):
they told us his dentures were made out of wood.
That isn't true, of course it isn't. Why would they ever,
why would they ever tell us anything true about these
despicable fucking people that found it out? I know, because
then we can have complicated conversations about them. I'm not
gonna have a complicated conversation about him. I'm gonna have
a one sided conversation about him today. But it's like
(14:22):
you could theoretically eventually have complicated conversations about some of
these people if you started with the fucking truth. But
we're gonna start with the truth, and we're gonna leave
it there. He had a bunch of different dentures, but
one of his sources for teeth was that he bought,
and the word bought gets really heavy air quotes here.
He bought teeth from the people that he enslaved. He
(14:42):
his estate had over three hundred enslaved people on it,
more than a hundred personally owned by George w himself.
And it was these people that he got his dentures
from while they were still alive. Jesus fuck and yeah,
and during the revel susan a whole grip of the
people that he thought he owned, ran the funk away
(15:03):
and got into a British warship and escaped the fucking
monster they lived with. Anyway, I feel like it's just
hard to say the words George Washington a sentence without
adding the guy who ripped teeth out of living people's faces.
And in our in our country, he's the delightful, delightful
foundery with the cute little wooden teeth. I know that
we tell that story to, you know, preschool children. Yeah,
(15:27):
he's a he's a horror villain's he's absolutely horrible, like
a yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah uh. I mean like that
should be talked about in the same like not obviously
not at scale, but like King Leopold of Belgium taking
people's hands like that like this, Yeah, and there's like
(15:51):
there's some historical questions to be people work really hard
to make George Washington seems like a chill guy. There's
all of these articles you can find being like here's
the daily life of someone that he enslaved and it
like tries to be like in their free time, they
blah blah blah. No, they were fucking treated like ship.
One of the people people well only he only personally
(16:14):
owned a hundred and something of those people. The other
people just lived on his estate as enslaved. Motherfucker. Yeah no, no,
it's it's people work so fucking hard to try and
and so like, we know that he bought teeth from people,
and we know that he had all this ship with
his teeth, but it's possible he bought people's teeth and
they went in someone else's. No, he fucking there's anyway.
(16:37):
Whatever is a fucking horror villain. Then so he The
first day of Thanksgiving was the one he suggested. But
then it wasn't until the Civil War in eighteen sixty
three when Abraham Lincoln declared the current in acarnation of Thanksgiving.
And I hadn't actually realized this. The current incarnation of Thanksgiving,
(16:59):
the one that happened this week as you all are listening,
was created quote with the intention to heal the wounds
of the nation from the Civil War, and theoretically doesn't
even have anything to like mayflower in any of that ship.
But it's just not true. That's not what people are celebrating.
People are celebrating, um, the other ship. They're celebrating the
Mayflower ship because no one's even fucking because that's not
(17:20):
the story that we hear. We don't hear that. It
is a dave Thanksgiving to sit down with the people
who enslave people and break bread with them. And while
I'm just on a tear about I'm not like a
big fan of US presidents as like a general, I
will say Abraham Lincoln not a slaver. Famously the opposite
of that, his vice president was a slaver. But you know,
(17:42):
and no, what he gets marks off as great is
that they oversaw the largest mass hanging in US history
of thirty eight members of the Dakota Nation Minnesota. Not
just was president during the hanging of but like personally
provided the executioners with the list of names after like
looking through the trial transcripts after these people have been
on trial for like five ten minutes each or whatever.
That's where Thanksgiving comes from. And so yeah, happy thanks Giving.
(18:12):
I felt weird coming from you. I f hate Thanksgiving.
It's ship the idea of getting together with your family
or friends or chosen family or whatever you're into, and
like literally giving thanks That's cool, although it is worth
knowing that the idea of Thanksgiving was literally this idea
of erasing all of the other holidays that almost every
(18:34):
culture had naturally um set in front of them. Personally,
I dislike that people post the same picture of their crusty, dusty,
musty ass food all day. I don't want to see
your plate. I've seen it. I know what you're eating.
We're all forced to eat it or choose not to
eat it because it's bad. We got it, all right,
(18:57):
Yeah yeah, fucking sweet potatoes with mashed potatoes and your
fucking dry ass meat, like, we got it. And I
say this as a vegan, but one of the cringest
things is when vegans act as if the problem with
Thanksgiving is um the meat that's being eaten, as compared
to the colonization. Am it's a symptom? Yeah totally yeah. Yeah. Anyways,
(19:26):
which brings us to what we're really going to talk
about today, which is something unrelated to any of that,
which is a short story. But first, do you know
what else is a short story? Is it the story
of products? A show. Yeah, I like having a show, Sophie.
Do you like having shows? I like you having this show. Well,
(19:49):
then I guess it's a good thing that we are sponsored.
Cool in a complicated way. Here's some ads, and we
are back. And the story I'm going to read today
is a retelling of a story that my father told
me when I was younger. Uh. It is the last
(20:09):
story in the book that I've been hawking at the
end of every single fucking episode as long as you've
been listening to this podcast called we Won't be here Tomorrow.
And so shout out to my dad for writing a
story that I then stole and to my own words,
and I'm now reading to you. It's called the thirty
seven Marble Steps. I grew up near the foothills of Appalachia.
(20:30):
And there's something to these forests. The trees themselves aren't old,
but the mountains are old. The mountains are old and
battered and smoothed over. And what is a forest but
the outbursting of life come up from the land. The
trees themselves are not old, but the forests are old
because these mountains are old. I grew up near the
foothills of Appalachia, and I remember when the Blair Witch
Project came out, set close to where I lived, and
it it didn't surprise anyone, like, yeah, the movie is
(20:53):
a work of fiction. But there's still something to these
mountains and these forests. There's still something there, something that
that movie drew from. My father told me this story
when I was a kid. He told me the story
under the bows and the stars, and it's not something
I'll ever forget. The next day, he took me to
the place it happened. He took me to the marble steps.
There are thirty seven marble steps in the middle of
(21:14):
the forest, far from any road. The steps climbed steep
and twisted up from a seasonal creek up to a
tiny concrete foundation peppered with stones. There's no house there anymore.
There is, however, a crack in the foundation. The crack
is narrow and long, and underneath there's nothing, not soil,
not rock, just nothing. You shine your flashlight through that
crack and you see nothing. You slide your skinny arm
(21:36):
through that crack and you feel nothing. You drop a
coin through that crack and you hear nothing. I tried
all those things. There was a house on that foundation,
years ago, years before my father was born, probably before
his mother was born, maybe before her mother came over
from the Old Country fleeing persecution. I couldn't tell you
when exactly there was a house on that foundation. It
(21:56):
doesn't make sense, for there have ever been one, not
out there's no road, not out where. Whoever built it
had to carry marble and concrete on their back or
on the backs of animals. I can't tell you why
there was a house. I can only tell you that
there was one. I can tell you about the woman
who lived there, too. I can tell you that she
didn't have a name, that she didn't need a name.
(22:17):
Names are not for yourself, there are for other people.
You live alone in a house in the woods, the
top of the marble steps, and you don't need a name,
because no one calls you anything. The people from the
nearby town, they just called her the woman who lived
in the woods. This woman lived alone, and she was ageless,
like all women who live alone. Learning that one myself,
it's been been nice. Bonus say, yeah, she lived only
(22:44):
five miles or so from that nearby town. That town
has gone now too. It probably had a name, though
I don't know it. The woman lived close enough that
people hiking or hunting in the forest saw the smoke
from her chimney and saw the lights in her windows.
Sometimes people even saw her herself wandering the four wrist.
They saw her hair pinned up in a bun in
the summer and under hats and hoods in the winter.
(23:05):
They saw her gaze, alternatively blank and fierce. Sometimes they
heard her sing. It went like this. She walked paths
through the woods, sometimes down even to the road alongside
the town. She had a stick in one hand and
a burlap sack and the other bad man, bad man,
braise the bones, she sang as she beat bushes with
the stick, A good whack, a good thump against the branches. Bugbear, bugbear,
(23:28):
boil the bra Animals, all kinds of animals would run
out from the bushes and the brambles right into her sack. Rabbits, groundhogs, snakes, possums, raccoons, mice,
birds and lizards. Every creature under the sun, and every
creature that hides from the sun would run right towards
her and into that sack. Once it was good and full,
she twists the end closed, lifted like it weighed nothing,
(23:51):
and beat the bag with a stick until the squirming
stopped and the crying stopped and everything inside was dead
or willing to pretend. She'd throw that bag over her
shoulder and walk away whistling. Now instead of singing that
same tune. I know the tune. I could hum it
to you, but I don't know how to write it.
So maybe that tune will die out one day and
maybe we'll all be the safer when it does. Or
(24:11):
I'll record an audiobook version and y'all are stuck knowing it. Well,
it's a podcast, so you can sing it now. Ha ha,
Why miss, we've been doing that's one okay. Anyway, It's
just funny when you when you write stuff and you
like write it for being written, you know. Anyway, dogs
(24:33):
went missing sometimes around that town. Cats to lambs, and
calves and chickens, never children. One reason people in the
town put up with that woman as long as they
did is that whenever a kid went missing, they'd wind
up back at home right in their crib, not crying
the blood of berries, tinting their lips. One day, a
little girl not yet seven years old got swept away
(24:53):
by the river surely she drowned. The parents thought, the
whole town thought. That night walked up to her own
house wearing a burlap dress, her hair brushed, and braided,
her belly full. She didn't say a word about what happened,
but everyone knew that the lady with the bag and
the stick was watching out. It went like that for years,
for generations. Was it the same woman? No one could
(25:14):
tell Bruno. Bruno baked the bread, She sang, boatman, boatman,
based the bear a good whack of good thump, and
she had the animals, and off she went on her way,
never said a word to a soul. This was fine,
and this was good, and no one in town thought
too hard on it until one day it wasn't fine.
It wasn't good. People mostly want to let each other alone,
(25:36):
and that woman wasn't hurting anyone. A boy came up
in that town, and he became a man while he
was at school in a nearby city, And when he
came back as a man, he decided he wasn't going
to be the sort to just let people alone. John
was his name, at least as I haven't Big John.
They called him because there were an awful lot of John's,
and this John was the tallest. One day in early March,
(25:57):
John was walking home from the mill. The sun was
near to set, and the wind was something wild, and
a little bit of snow was being thrown here and there.
He saw the woman, and he heard the woman, and
he saw a cat run into her bag, and he
decided enough was enough. He waited until she was far
enough distant, and then he followed her off through the
woods up to that seasonal creek. Most people they took
(26:20):
one look at that house up on the top of
those marble steps perched down over the gully, and they
went right back the way they came. Big John, though,
he waited until the woman went into the house. Then
he climbed each of those steps himself. Smoke was pouring
out the chimney, and lamp light flickered through the unshuttered windows,
and Big John went up to one of those windows
and looked inside. The woman was there, and she had
(26:42):
the sack over one shoulder, and she went up to
the middle of the bare concrete floor, and she tapped
her sticks seven times, tap tap tap, tap, tap tap tap.
She tapped her stick seven times, and she stepped back
and she waited, and a trap door was there where
nothing had been, And she reached down and grabbed the
iron rung and pulled it up, and Big John heard
a wailing, a keening from within. He couldn't describe it
(27:04):
better than that in all the years he tried in
human and animal demonic. The woman up ended the sack. Animals,
including that cat, tumbled out down into the darkness. Soon after,
far worse sounds came from that trap door, and the
woman smiled and cooed like she was tending a pet,
and she closed that trap door. She tapped on it
(27:27):
seven times with her stick. Tap tap, tap, tap, tap
tap tap. The trap door was gone. On the wall.
Hung up with the coats and the cloaks were animal
collars and tags, dozens of them. Big John had seen enough,
and he turned to go, but snuck in one last
look and saw the woman at her stove, singing again,
cooking what looked and smelled for all the world like
(27:49):
vegetable soup. Big John snuck down those stairs as quietly
and carefully as he could, but as soon as he
reached the path by the creek, he ran all the
way back to town. Five miles He ran and when
he showed a at the sheriff's house. He was panting
and sweating and pale and just worn out, and his
body was just about to give up on him. He
knocked on that door, tap tap tap, The sheriff answered
(28:11):
the woman. He said the cats, He said the dogs.
He told the sheriff what he'd seen, And of course
the sheriff didn't believe him about the trap door, and
he didn't believe him about the vegetable soup, but he
believed him about the animal collars. Everyone in town knew
that the woman stole pets and live stock, anything with
fur feathers that was small enough to fit into her sack.
Everyone knew it, but no one had admitted it, because
(28:33):
if they'd admitted it, they would have had to do something.
But here was Big John standing at the doorstep of authority,
and that authority decided to finally admit to himself what
he already knew. It wasn't yet late, just past dinner,
and the sheriff rounded up his posse and headed into
the forest with guns and lanterns, ready to find the
woman and bring her to justice. Big John, though he
(28:54):
stayed at home. He'd used up all his nerve for
that night, maybe for the rest of time. Now this
is where you expect the story to go all wrong,
and it will, but doesn't go wrong the way that
it might have. The sheriff climbed the thirty seven steps,
his posse following. He showed up at the woman's door,
banging with the handle of his revolver on the wood. Bang, bang, bang.
(29:16):
The woman answered, and the sheriff arrested her, and the
posse tore apart the cabin looking for contraband. They found
the dog collars and the cat collars, and that was enough.
But they found nothing else besides hot barley soup on
the stove, flavored strong with garlic and wild onion. No bones,
no midden, no trap door, no basement at all. Big
(29:36):
John had been seeing things. They marched the woman five
miles back to the sheriff's office and locked her into
the town's one holding cell. And by then it was
the middle of the night, and the woman was steel
faced and unbroken. You have to feed her, the woman said,
feed who. The sheriff asked, someone has to feed her?
The woman said, someone must go up there and feed
(29:57):
my daughter. You don't have a daughter. The sheriff said,
and that was that, and the woman was sent to
the city for trial, and no one thought much about
her again, because what is a prison but a place
to put those who wish to forget those who make
you uncomfortable? What is a prison but the bbolivion. A
week later, Big John was walking home in the evening
out along that road when he heard a terrible thing,
(30:19):
a wrenching, a scream of wood and steel, and a
scream of animal throats, and a scream of emptiness and horror.
Then nothing, nothing happened except from then on children from
that town. They weren't returned with berry juice on their
lips when they went missing. When children went missing, they
(30:40):
stayed missing. And now there's a concrete foundation peppered with
stones and a crack in it, and nothing on the
other side. And people don't camp there much, and people
don't build towns there no more. And that forest is old,
and no one knows how those marble steps got there,
and no one knows much of anything anymore. There's no
moral to us, to be sure. I'm not here saying
(31:02):
that you've got to let the little evils go on
address so that you don't let out the big evil.
I'm not even saying what was in that basement was evil,
not for sure. I'm not saying it was right what
happened to that woman? And neither am I saying it's
okay to steal cats and feed them to monsters. I'm
just saying it happened. I'm just telling you about the
thirty seven marble steps and that foundation and that crack
(31:22):
that goes off to nowhere. That's what I got. I
was like, I was waiting to see if you were
going to do more song. Yeah. I wonder if you
get in trouble for accidentally singing things on podcasts but
you're not supposed to. I'll just never sing again anywhere, honestly.
(31:48):
Um yeah, suck you the man we work for. Like,
I'm like, eat it, oh man, I love that story.
You told that story at a book signing event that
I went to of yours, and it's it's so cool
(32:09):
and it's so cool that it got passed down from
your dad too. It's, uh, it's cool people who did
cool stuff in my in my book, and my dad
is definitely cool people. I'll go ahead and say that
I got lucky in the dad lottery. He he made
that story up because there are Okay, that the one
(32:30):
thing about lying to kids one that story scared the
hell out of me when I was little, right, but
everything scared the hell out of me. But he called
them the marble steps, and they're not marble. There's there's
real steps in the woods near where he grew up,
where he had taken us to go camping, and but
they're concrete steps with marbles in them, imbedded into them.
(32:53):
And so for most of my young life I believed
that marble as a construction material meant concrete with marbles
in it, because the marble steps create with marbles. That
makes absolute sense. Also, I feel it would be really
cool to have, like like I actually think that'd be
a really cool design. I know. Yeah, there were cool steps,
(33:14):
and I don't know what the hell they were doing there.
They were far away from anything. There was no road,
just some concrete steps with marbles in them in the
middle of nowhere, up to a pad with a crack
in it. Apparently, So, maybe my dad didn't write the story.
Maybe he's big John your conspiracy theory, which means it
(33:35):
must be time pressed to end this episode. Yeah, that's
that is a that is fair. There should be a
big red button that actually all podcasts, someone should be
able to press a red button as soon as they
start talking about conspiracy theories. We do. We do have
something to announce, though. What do we have to announce?
Is it the fact that I'm going to be a
guest on a Behind the Bastard's live show. It is
(33:57):
that we're doing a live stream virtual show thing like
we did uh gosh, I don't know many months ago
with prop for Behind the Bastards, and that will be
happening on December eight, and you can purchase tickets at
moment house dot co slash b t B if you
(34:20):
so desire, I'll also link that. But if you so desire,
that is happening, and then that people can ask us
questions even though you and I are just the uh
the victims of that what you call guests of Behind
the Bastards. Uh, I don't know. I was gonna say,
I've been stockholmed a little too long. Well, I believe
(34:48):
that people in the audience can ask us questions. So
when you purchase your ticket, there'll be like a prompt
to submit a question that you can be for Robert,
could be for Margaret, be for me, It could be
for all of us, could be you know whatever, whatever
your heart desires, and we may or may not choose
your question. Um. Also, Robert is going to be writing
a script behind the Bastard script for that event and
(35:11):
it should be a good all time. And if you
can't make it at six pm on December, do not
worry because this event is available on demand for one
week past the time of livestream. Yeah, did I do
the thing? You did the thing? We did the thing.
We did it. We're so good at our jobs. Amazing, iconic, legendary.
The episodes over Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
(35:37):
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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