Inside Eden

Sherman’s almost sixty now with thirty-two shed away in the Dodge Correctional Institute. I’d go to visit him and everybody’d give me filthy looks thinking I’m his brother. My sister was fourteen when she had him and we’re only separated by a year. On top of that we all have the same protruding profile. Sherman was Mr. Handsome though, a real champ. Beat all the records. Three-peat state championships for wrestling, highest ACT score in his class, longest consecutive sentencing in Fond du Lac county history. Ninety years with fifty of extended supervision. First degree reckless homicide and two cases of child abuse causing great bodily harm. Steiner worked long and hard to get him anything but the death sentence but nothing approaching freedom. That was his tight-rope. No one in town could hear his case. Everyone knew he did it, so there was no getting off. Everyone in the state knew he did it. Steiner said in court, 

“The maximum sentence is reserved for only the worst of the worst, and it’s a bit of a stretch to say that he should be given the maximum sentence.” 

Nobody was having it. Steiner almost got it as bad as Terri and Me, but no one more than Sherman, obviously. He wouldn’t talk at all during the trial. Wouldn’t get a word out of him. You could feel the spectators’ urge to clap when Judge Mallory responded,

“I don’t know if I’ve seen a worse way to die or worse injuries to worse a victim.”

They couldn’t constrain themselves when the verdict was read. The tide of justice overrode the shores of their decency. Sherman was guilty on all charges. The room exploded. Mallory laid down the sentencing and the energy sustained through Sherman’s march to the exit. He tried to hold the stoic resolve of a man who knew he was right, a man who knew the truth and was aware of his persecution, but it fell through as soon as the numbers punctured the air. Lost his breath and he nearly gasped to get it back and lifted his eyes and chin up. His nostrils flared and his eyes got red. The tears carved his face like glaciers. Couldn’t ever grow a good beard. They flowed all the way down in between his goatee and side-burns and dripped from his jaw onto his jumper. One person in the crowd led the chant that the others eagerly followed, “Rot in pieces.” It had all the elements of a melodrama. Sherman wouldn’t get out of his seat, so they pulled him out. His legs spread wide, feet grazing the pews.

I don’t know how people get away with rape and murder and DUI’s. I understand the white and upper class thing. Maybe if he raped a stripper or ran down a black kid or shot me in a hunting accident. People can forgive those things. That’s within the realm of knowledge. People have watched movies and read articles and listened to crime podcasts about those kinds of things. It’s part of the public consciousness. They couldn’t visualize what happened to those kids. You couldn’t adapt a miniseries about it. You couldn’t show that on screen. People don’t want to see it. Hear it, maybe; read it, maybe. But they won’t see it. And that’s why it’ll never matter. Acknowledging that this can happen is enough to convict someone, just to get it out of our heads. 

Mabel wasn't stable. You likely call her a bad mother if you lived within three blocks of her. It always gets complicated when you throw in impoverished and single mother and Hispanic. A lot more leeway there, is all I’ll say. But not every and not always. Just then and there, in Eden, Wisconsin, 1982. The tide was turning, slowly. More like churning. Mabel was ignorant, neglectful, sadistic. In court you couldn’t separate her from the Magdalen herself. Yeah, she worked three jobs with twin infants to feed and walked with a limp. What they left out in court is that all three jobs amounted to about twenty-eight hours a week and the kids were on formula and that she really only had them for two whole days out of the week. Moralistic judgement aside, it is accepted fact within the community that she habitually abused psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and acid, among other things, though she claimed to abstain from everything sans the one joint right before bed. In court, Sherman was the violent delinquent. The unambitious loser. The Atheist. The Socialist. The Communist. It’s easy to label someone a socialist. The scapegoat of the modern era. Not too long ago, they would’ve called him a Jew and that would’ve been the end of it. You wouldn’t have to go through this ridiculous saga of misinformation. One is all it took then. Maybe his features played a factor in it. We told people we were Italian and that almost made it better. Maybe just because we had the satisfaction of them being wrong. I could get by with the terrible accents and gestures as long as they were the wrong ones. Maybe they all knew. 

They weren’t Sherman’s. Mabel and Denny shared ten years and four abortions together. The twins could almost be considered lucky. Denny’s a piece of shit, as his name suggests. A sociologist might chalk it up to his impoverished environs. A psychoanalyst might hone in on the sexual abuse levied by an older cousin. A manager at a paper mill would say that he’s a piece of shit.

Poverty is the real evil. For every Patrick Bateman there’s twenty Mabels working part-time at a Dunkin’ Donuts. The poor part of any town is a cigarette-smoke-stained forest of taking trees twisting and reaching into pockets and children’s underwear. Poverty is the real nightmare. Not these big budget “satires” of suburban living. The suburbs are uncomfortable, I’m sure, but it's not half the sentence that poverty is. Poverty is one drawn out holocaust. The Holocaust was poverty concentrated. As long as it’s spread thin enough, no one acknowledges the destruction and pits and quagmires save for quippy jokes and references here and there. Only something like poverty can make a father sell his daughter’s pussy for cash. Only something like poverty can make a mother neglect her children and shoot up all day. That poverty is savage isn’t an elitist take. No one knows what poverty looks like. The image in their head is a little African toddler with a distended stomach, not the white trash mother of six shouting at the Dollar Tree cashier. It’s more and more passé to even talk about it without yourself sounding like a shallow imitation of a yuppie pining for Dorsia. Denny’s a dipshit and a loser and an opportunist. He might be evil, too. He’s mostly a stupid, dumb fucking bastard. Mabel’s a fucking bitch. She’ll never die, no matter how much I pray. She’ll outlive me, likely. People that live in poverty are supposed to die fifteen years earlier than their middle and upper class counterparts, but she’ll outlive Gates and even Musk. She learned how to weaponize her class. 

Mabel’ll never have to work again. Fully taken care of. Damages and so on. Sherman fucked up, a lot. I can’t help but think about how him living in Madison and sticking it out and graduating and getting a job in Appleton or Green Bay or Milwaukee or something. Mom and me told him not to fuck around with Mabel. In mom’s own words, 

“She’s an evil bitch. She’s gonna ruin your whole fucking life, you wait and see, she’ll be the end of it.”

I said,

“Yeah, I wouldn’t do it. She’s fucking weird. Don’t fuck someone with kids that isn’t trying.”

He said,

“You guys gotta give ‘er a chance. She is trying to do something with her life. She said she’s not working as much right now so that she can get ready to go to school next year. She’s just taking a little time for herself before she has to go in working and going to school and all that.”

She did eventually go to school. After the trial she went to UW Milwaukee and got a degree in Nursing and now she’s a RN at a nursing home in Kewaskum. 

Denny moved out a couple days before Sherman moved in. Denny stayed with his mother, right across the street from mom and me. He’d always be sitting on his porch, cigarette in his greasy fucking lips, and wave at me with a big shit-eating grin. I never waved back. Some people it’s okay to judge by their appearance. He was and still is in that half-way state of kinda fat and kinda skinny. Big, paunched belly and wire arms and legs. Greasy black hair and stubble. He’s got a giant fucking mole at the crease of his jaw and neck. Always wearing a leather duster and jeans and scuffed up white K-Swiss’s. Mabel presented herself a little better. Pretty face but everything else isn’t worth talking about. Real skinny but not shapely. No ass, no tits. Brownish-red hair with cropped bangs. She dressed like she was halfway committed to the punk aesthetic but stopped short of full Nazi-boot regalia in favor of The Gap. Denny would just sit there and smile and wave at me, grinning his little shit grin. Stupid fucking smile, knowing full well the plan and what would happen. Me, looking like an idiot on my mother’s porch, my brother two blocks away about to fuck his life away. Lost his life on the same street he got it. 

December 16th, 1982. Siren’s crowded the street. The entire town cast in lights. Orange tungsten coated the street with splashes of red and blue. The sirens replaced by echoing moans about two blocks down the street. People started walking down, slowly. Father’s telling their children to head back inside and mother’s pulling them in and closing the door behind themselves. All twelve of Eden’s finest were there. Radio chatter indicated that Winnebago County would be sending more officers. The ambulance came from St. Anges. Closer to the scene I got, the more sobbing women filled my field of view. They occupied the intermission of screaming coming from the house. A pitiful, moaning howl that didn’t sound real enough to me. These women on the street were real, and they’d only heard about it. By the time the cops were pushing me back, there wasn’t an upright woman in the lot, nor were there any men without a haunted look in their face. Eyes pointed nowhere particular. I got there right as the younger officers were dragging him out onto the porch. I could see blood trickling down his head and staining the back of his white shirt. His buzz cut was splattered. I could see beads of blood perched at the ends. The older officers maintained the perimeter as the crowd got rowdy. All I wanted to do was get my nephew out of there. They made a show out of it. Once they started beating the shit out of him, the crowd backed off. They cheered and watched as they laid into him. It was like I was stuck in mud. Like wading through a strong tide, a rip current. The old guard focused on me and pushed me and pulled me, but I kept forward. I couldn’t stop calling his name, I wanted to let him know that I was there and that I was gonna help him, but I don’t think he heard me. All he could hear was people shouting pig and faggot and asshole and murderer and scum. Maybe he didn’t hear that either. Maybe all he could hear was his ribs and femur and jaw bend and fracture. A baton to the knee ended my effort. Took a shot to the back of the head and a couple more to my ribs and it was over for me. The police dragged me out of the swarm and left me on the street. Sherman told me later that he thought he was going to die and that all he could think about was staying awake. He’d’ve preferred to die on that porch and spare the trial and the years burned in Dodge. 

I didn’t hear the end of it for two years. I lost my job at the prison. Inmates would give me shit. Guards would give me shit. There was nowhere I could go. Not to Lomira, not to Fond du Lac, not to Beaver Dam. Nowhere. Inmates kept telling me that they were gonna wear his ass out and beat him and kill him. All the inmates are innocent if you ask them. They were set-up by the cops or their friends. But not Sherman, he was to be the sole guilty inmate, that everyone agreed on. Collins said that he’d fuck Sherman himself, that he wouldn’t get a night of peace in there for what he did, I hit him in the nose. 

The story goes, according to Mabel, that Sherman had been abusing drugs for months. Doing acid and shrooms and PCP and coke. He was out of his mind and she wanted to help him because his family wasn’t doing anything for him. He’d been hitting the kids at dinner and anytime they cried he’d just scream at them until they stopped. December 16th, 1982, he’d taken fifteen tabs of acid, drug test did prove this, and in the night, he had freaked out and stomped the life of one of the twins and had broken the other one’s legs by the time Mabel stopped him with a hammer to the skull. Mabel said that he was made that the kids weren’t his and that he wanted to have kids of his own with her but she was done. 

Sherman didn’t do drugs. He drank. He’d done terrible things while he was drunk, but nothing like that. He’d never. It’s true, that you never truly know a person. You’re only just acquainted with whatever series of lies and fake secrets that they’ve disclosed. No one even knows themselves, but everybody knows that. People don’t stomp the life out of infants when they’re fifteen deep. They wig out and reevaluate their lives, but they don’t do that. Sherman lost his scholarship because he got a DUI. He got kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment because he hit her during a fight. He isn’t a saint, but those two details shouldn’t immediately brand him as a child murderer. The way he tells it, Mabel drugged him by putting acid in his coffee and he spent the whole day in a stupor. Everything was shifting and breathing. Voices and music that weren’t there blared. He tried watching tv but it started to sweat and eventually he felt like he was stuck in a time vortex, that everything was going backward and Mabel kept walking in and out of the walls and talking in reverse. He was eventually able to fall asleep but woke up in the middle of the night when he heard one of the babies screaming from their room. Mabel wasn’t in bed, so he got up to check on the kid. As he approached the door, Denny was dropping the final stomp to the living child’s leg, flattening it. Mabel was standing next to him, looking down at the kid. He looked behind her and saw the body of the other one. He didn’t want to go into too much detail. This was the part that kept him awake. He never got any counseling or treatment. Just rape and beatings. Denny was wearing Sherman’s shoes and pants. Sherman couldn’t speak. He said it was like everything shut down. He couldn’t run or fight. It was like a dream where you’re stuck and something is coming after you and you’re trying to swing at it and nothing happens. Mabel noticed him and ran at him and it all came back to him. He turned and took off through the house, aiming for the door. Down the hall and through the kitchen, he slipped on the mat in front of the sink, but caught his balance enough to stay upright, but that fraction was all Mabel needed to get a swing at his head with the hammer. He realized that he had the bloodied shoes and pants on when he was curled up in a ball on the porch as the batons and boots were cracking down on him.

He told it all to me just once and we never talked about it again. He never brought up the case or Mabel or Denny. Not Eden or anybody. All he wanted to know was what me and ma and Terri and Paul were up to. We all tried to stand up for him. We weren’t brought to the stand and the only time journalists would talk to us would be to berate us or ask what it was like to live with such a scum bag. They asked if me or Paul abused him or if Dad did anything to him. There was never any real questions. No one really listened. The kid grew up to be a disability check for Mabel and Denny. I don’t think he ever got a real job ever again. Sherman tried to kill himself again a couple weeks ago. He’s been in solitary confinement all but the first two years. He kept getting raped and tortured and beaten. Someone finally took a small bit of pity and locked him away. Every couple of years there’s a story that doesn’t let people forget what he’d done. Every year the podcast episodes double. I guess the drama in the story isn’t interesting enough for a movie or a tv show yet. I’d like to see one from his perspective though.