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  For a short while, things went smoothly between the two men. But Firman was of a volatile and, according to contemporary accounts, lawless character. It wasn’t long before he picked a quarrel with Cartwright over some trifling matter. The bad feelings between the two men intensified. Finally, Firman tried to oust Cartwright and his family from the land, claiming it as his own and accusing them of trespassing. The matter ended up in litigation. On the day the issue was to be decided, Firman failed to make it to court. The case was decided in favor of Cartwright, who decided to celebrate by stopping off in the barroom of the Boyington Hotel at Wautoma, the county seat. There he ran into Firman.

  The men exchanged angry words, until, stung by a particularly bitter insult, Firman sprang upon Cartwright and knocked him out of his chair. Cartwright fell backward, hitting a potbellied stove, which tumbled over, scattering live coals across the floor. Cartwright jumped to his feet and fled the building, pursued by Firman, who caught him by the collar, wrestled him to the ground, and dug his thumbs into Cartwright’s eyes. Unable to break Firman’s hold, Cartwright groped for his back pocket, pulled out a pistol, and fired into his enemy’s body. At the third discharge, Firman emitted a deep moan and slumped to the ground. He died within the hour, and Cartwright was immediately arrested.

  Cartwright was held in jail at Oshkosh until he was released on bail. In the meantime, the friends of Firman—a bunch as wild and disreputable as the deceased—had promised to lynch the killer if he ever came back to Waushara County. Ignoring the threat, Cartwright returned to his home. On the second night following his arrival, Firman’s cronies attempted to make good on their word and broke into Cartwright’s house. Cartwright, armed with a rifle, stationed himself in the attic, his weapon leveled at the ladder. The first of the mob to show his head above the floor was shot and killed instantly. The crowd hurriedly withdrew from the house and held a parley. Deciding to burn Cartwright out, they began to kindle a fire at one corner of his house. Cartwright immediately poked his rifle through a chink in the logs and felled another of the party.

  Again, the lynch mob pulled back, held a hurried conference, and this time concocted a devious plan. One of their members, a constable, was dispatched to the home of a judge named Walker, who resided in Plainfield. Walker was roused from his bed and apprised of the situation. The treacherous constable then presented Walker with a seemingly reasonable offer. If the judge would persuade Cartwright to turn himself over to the constable, the lynch mob would disperse. Cartwright would be escorted, under the constable’s protection, to the Oshkosh jail, where he would remain until he could be tried for Firman’s murder. The unsuspecting Walker agreed to do what he could and proceeded to Cartwright’s home. The beleaguered man listened to the judge, agreed to the terms, bid farewell to his wife and children, and started from his home.

  A nineteenth-century history book describes the “dread culmination of the tragedy.” Cartwright, Walker, and the constable “had not proceeded twenty yards from the house when they were surrounded by the mob. Cartwright was taken from the constable, who made no resistance, put into a sleigh by the crowd, and driven rapidly to Plainfield, where a pole was run out of the upper story of the hay barn belonging to the tavern. A rope was attached thereto and several bunches of shingles were piled up for Cartwright to stand on. Walker, who had followed and was appealing to the mob to desist, was told that if he did not leave he would be hanged with Cartwright.

  “The rope was noosed about Cartwright’s neck, the shingles were pushed from under him, and he was left hanging until he was dead. Then the rope was untied from the pole and attached to the rear of the sleigh, and Cartwright’s body was dragged behind the sleigh to his home and thrown into his house, where his horror-stricken wife and children had been wondering at his fate.

  “To the shame of the good name of Waushara County, the human fiends who participated in this murderous outrage against law and right were never punished nor even prosecuted, though many if not all of them were known.”

  * * *

  The story of Firman and Cartwright and the “dread culmination” of their feud remained, for many years, the most sensational episode in the history of Plainfield. To many of the townspeople, it seemed woefully unfair that their honest little village should be associated with such an infamous event.

  How could they have known that living in their midst was a “human fiend” immeasurably more depraved than any nineteenth-century lynch mob, a man who would (to the enduring dismay of its inhabitants) make the name of Plainfield, Wisconsin, forever synonymous with darkness, insanity, and unimaginable horror?

  2

  SILVANO ARIETI, Interpretation of Schizophrenia

  “Although it is the mother who contributes mostly in producing the conditions which we are going to describe, we usually find in the history of schizophrenics that both parents have failed the child, often for different reasons. Frequently the combination is as follows: A domineering, nagging, and hostile mother, who gives the child no chance to assert himself, is married to a dependent, weak man, too weak to help the child. A father who dares not protect the child … because he is not able to oppose her strong personality is just as crippling to the child as the mother is. ”

  From the very beginning, it was a family that fate seemed to have singled out for tragedy.

  The first struck in 1879, the kind of calamity that can blight a man’s life, poison his future, and, indeed, leave its ruinous mark on the destiny of his children.

  At the time, George Gein’s family was living on a farm in Coon Valley, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles outside of La Crosse. One overcast morning, George’s mother, father, and older sister climbed into the buckboard and set off for town on an errand.

  They never returned.

  The Mississippi River was at high water, and the wagon was caught in a flash flood. The elder Gein, his wife, and his firstborn child drowned in the dark, bitter torrent, and George was left orphaned and alone. He was three years old.

  His maternal grandparents, stern, Scottish immigrants who lived on a nearby farm, took him into their home. There are few available details about this or any other stage of George Gein’s life. He was, after all, just an obscure Midwestern provincial, unluckier than most, whom history has no reason at all to remember, except as the father of an authentic American monster. Indeed, the most notable fact about George Gein’s life is how utterly insignificant, how much of a nonentity, he appeared to be, even (perhaps especially) in the eyes of the family he later established.

  Following his elementary-school education, George Gein apprenticed himself to a local blacksmith. He spent several years laboring over the anvil and forge. And then one day during his early twenties, he left his grandparents’ farm for good and, like so many country people before and after him, headed off for the nearest city.

  Within a short time of his arrival in La Crosse, he seems to have established a pattern of drifting from one occupation to another. He sold insurance for a while, tried his hand at carpentry, and worked in a tannery, at the city power plant, and on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. Perhaps his difficulty in holding down a job had something to do with his growing attachment to the bottle. Increasingly, George would repair to a saloon after work and drink up much of his pay. Red-eyed and befuddled, he would sink into black moods of anger and self-pity, brooding on the rotten hand life had dealt him. The world was against him. He’d been made into an orphan when he was just a baby and brought up in a grim and loveless home. It was enough to make a man lose faith in the goodness of God. At other times, he would lapse into bitter self-recrimination. His misfortunes were his own fault. He would never amount to anything. He was worthless, incompetent, a complete and hopeless failure—as a worker, a provider, and a man.

  Given the genuine hardships he’d had to deal with from the time he was a toddler, most people would have regarded George Gein’s low opinion of himself as far too harsh a judgment. But in this respect—as in so many other
s—George Gein’s wife was not like most people.

  Her name was Augusta, and she came from a large and industrious family whose dour, demanding patriarch had emigrated from Germany in 1870 and settled in La Crosse. George Gein was twenty-four when he met her; Augusta was nineteen. Even then, she was a person to be reckoned with—a thickset, buxom woman with a broad, coarse-featured face permanently fixed in a look of fierce determination and complete self-assurance. Devoutly—even fanatically—religious, she had been brought up to obey a rigid code of conduct, which her father had not hesitated to reinforce with regular beatings. Augusta was continuously outraged by the flagrant immorality of the modern world. Wherever she looked, she saw a looseness of behavior that seemed shockingly, sinfully at variance with the strict Old World values of her household. Life, she knew, was serious business—a matter of endless hard work, unwavering thrift, and extreme self-denial.

  She was, in the end, her father’s daughter—a stern disciplinarian, self-righteous, domineering, and inflexible, who never doubted for a moment the absolute correctness of her beliefs or her right to impose them, by whatever means possible, on the people around her.

  What she and George saw in each other is mostly a matter of conjecture. George would have been marrying into a large and, in many ways, close-knit family. Augusta had half a dozen siblings at home, with other relatives living nearby, including a cousin named Fred who was a coworker of George’s at the David, Medary & Platz Tannery. To a man who had been bereft of his own family at such an early age, there must have been something powerfully appealing about becoming a member of so sizable a clan. And George could hardly have helped being impressed by Augusta’s imposing personality, her formidable energies, and her evident capabilities in practical affairs.

  For her part, Augusta, who had never been besieged by suitors, may well have been taken by George’s prepossessing appearance. He was a strong, straight man with a reserved, even dignified, manner. Indeed, later in life, his neighbors would take him for a retired minister. And, like Augusta, he was a practicing Lutheran (though of a decidedly less fervid stripe). From his rather formal bearing and quiet behavior, she would have had no way of knowing about his growing alcoholism or about those deeper, unhealed wounds that would increasingly incapacitate him. Or perhaps his fundamental weaknesses were, in fact, evident to her and only served to make him more attractive. From all accounts, she was a woman who may well have preferred the kind of husband she could bend easily to her own will.

  They were wed on December 4, 1899. Like almost everything else in the lives of these ill-fated people, their marriage, from all available evidence, had the quality of a particularly lacerating nightmare.

  In charge of her own household and joined to a man of feckless and increasingly unreliable character, Augusta quickly assumed the role of domestic tyrant. Her own deformities of character—her harshness, rigidity, and fierce intolerance—became ever more pronounced. Her husband was worthless, good for nothing. She sneered at him openly, called him a lazy dog and worse. In spite of his broad back and blacksmith’s muscles, he was a weakling, afraid of hard work. It was she who possessed all the strength. He had no spirit, no ambition. Worst of all, he could not seem to hold on to a job. And when she discovered, as she quickly did, how much of his meager earnings disappeared inside the local taverns, her fury—inflamed even more by her religious beliefs—was immeasurable. Her husband became an object unworthy of even her contempt.

  George responded to his wife’s undisguised hatred by withdrawing more deeply into himself. He refused to speak. When Augusta was not ordering him about or deriding his inadequacies, a poisonous silence prevailed in their house. Occasionally, however, after returning from the tavern and being greeted with an especially vicious tongue-lashing, he would lose control and flail out at Augusta’s face, hitting her open-handed again and again. Augusta would sink to the floor, wailing and shouting insults. Afterward, she would draw herself to her knees and pray fervently for her husband’s death.

  Perhaps, she thought, a child would comfort her in her trials, even serve as an ally in her struggles with George. About sexual matters, Augusta’s views were characteristically extreme. Sex unsanctified by marriage was an unpardonable sin, an abomination. Between husband and wife, carnal relations were a loathsome duty to be tolerated for the sake of procreation. She was revolted by the very thought of the act. Increasingly, Augusta’s perceptions were becoming warped into something very much like madness. The world was a sink of corruption, La Crosse a city of Babylonian excess. The women she saw on the streets, with their brazen airs and shameless smiles, were no better than harlots. Still, she craved the solace of a child. And so she allowed her despised husband to come to her bed.

  The fruit of that loveless union was a robust boy, Henry, born on January 17, 1902. His life would be hard and isolated, and his death, forty years later, in the prime of his manhood, would be only one of the many dark mysteries that would come to surround the offspring of George and Augusta Gein.

  Once again, George found himself out of a job. Augusta decided that there was only one possible solution, one chance for the family to avert economic disaster—George must work for himself. Two of her brothers were successful merchants in La Crosse, purveyors of “staple and fancy groceries.” Business increased every year, and the city could easily accommodate another such store. In 1909, George Gein became proprietor of a small meat and grocery shop at 914 Caledonia Street.

  It didn’t take long, however, for problems to manifest themselves. George clearly could not make it on his own. Augusta knew what had to be done. She already had complete charge of their domestic life. Now she must take total control of their business affairs as well. The entries in the 1909 and 1911 La Crosse City Directories speak volumes, not only about George’s increasingly pitiable position in the world but also about the nature of his and Augusta’s relationship. In the earlier volume, George Gein is listed as the owner of the store. Two years later, Augusta is named as the proprietor. The entry for George Gein reads “clerk.”

  In the meantime, they had had another child. Though Augusta did not feel especially close to her firstborn, she attributed her detachment to the child’s gender. It was, after all, a boy. Things would be different with a daughter. And so she clenched her teeth and allowed her husband to commit the foul deed upon her again. During the weeks that followed, she prayed every night for the Lord to bless her with a baby girl.

  On August 27, 1906, Augusta gave birth to her second child. He was a boy, and they named him Edward Theodore. When Augusta first heard she had delivered a second male child, she felt bitter, betrayed. But Augusta was not the kind to give in to despair. She was made of stronger stuff. And so she took the swaddled newborn in her arms and made a sacred vow.

  This one would not grow up to be like all the rest of them. Men. Those lustful, sweating, foul-mouthed creatures who made use of women’s bodies in such filthy ways. This one, she promised, would be different.

  Augusta would see to that.

  3

  NORMAN BATES, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

  “A boy’s best friend is his mother. ”

  Years later, he would be asked the same question, time and again: “Tell us something about her, Eddie. What was your mother like?”

  As soon as he started to think about her, his eyes would fill with tears and his throat grow so swollen that he’d have trouble swallowing. She was pure goodness, he’d finally say. Not like the others. They got what was coming to them. But she didn’t deserve so much suffering.

  All her life, she had slaved and prayed and struggled to save him from the evils of the world. And he had tried to be as good as possible. But somehow, he always seemed to fail her.

  He remembered the time she had put a few coins in his hand and instructed him to go to the German bakery a block from their home to buy a loaf of bread. They were still living in La Crosse, so he couldn’t have been more than seven. Somehow, by the time he reached t
he shop, the coins were gone. For a long time, he stood on the street corner, fighting back tears, terrified to go home. When he finally did find the courage to return and confess, his voice convulsed by sobs, she looked down at him with that mixture of bitterness and sorrow that never failed to fill him with the deepest self-hatred. “You dreadful child,” she had said in a quiet, heartbroken voice more awful than any scream. “Only a mother could love you.”

  She would never have made such a stupid, unforgivable mistake. Whatever needed to be done, Augusta Gein could always be counted on to do it right, without foul-ups or complaints. She was, by far, the ablest one in the family. And the strongest.

  When he thought back to his childhood, he usually pictured her standing in their old grocery shop, an immense, looming presence who did nearly all the work—waited on the customers, handled the cash register, kept the books. Meanwhile, her poor excuse of a husband—his father—shuffled about the store in that shrunken, defeated way of his, rearranging the goods on the shelves according to her directions and occasionally delivering groceries.

  If Augusta had any flaws, her younger son wasn’t aware of them. He knew that it might be a sacrilege even to think it, but in his eyes she was no less infallible than God. He recalled a time (it was, in fact, his earliest memory of her) when he was just a toddler. He was standing at the top of the staircase in their old house on Gould Street. Somehow, he lost his balance and felt himself being pulled—or pushed?—down the steep flight of wooden steps by a powerful force. Panic turned his insides to ice. Suddenly, he felt a crushing grip close around his right arm. His mother was behind him, a wild look on her face, shaking him, shouting at him. He burst into clamorous tears, overcome by a rush of violently conflicting emotions—fright, relief, guilt. Why was she so angry with him? He had no idea, but he knew he must have done something terrible to make her so furious. Misery washed over him. It was all his fault.