At eighty-seven years old, Sister Muriel isn’t one for niceties. But I have little doubt that she was always a straight shooter. She worked at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage for fifty years, until its doors shut for good. Budget cuts, Muriel says. A few of the other nuns were moved to Wooded Nook with her, but they have since passed on. She misses them, she says, as well as her time at the orphanage.
But not Amos Flesher. Him she does not miss one bit.
“He poked kids until they bled,” she tells me. “We had a ward full of boys and girls who were soft-headed. Our Children of God. The purest, most open smiles. We put Amos in charge of them during naptime. Amos was old enough; he ought to sing for his supper, we figured. Well, he stuck those poor kids. With a darning needle or a big pin. Most of them were restrained; it’s terrible, but it was for their own good. I started to see blood on their jammies. Their bums, their thighs. First I thought it was bedbugs. But it went on a while. I never caught him doing it. Amos was a sly boy. I don’t know that I’d call him smart—cunning is the word I’d use. Why would he want to hurt those poor children?” She shook her head. “When I heard about what happened out in the woods, I thought: Amos Flesher went and got himself a whole camp full of soft-brains so he could stick them all with pins. He was bloody-minded, Amos Flesher was. Bloody as anyone I’ve known.”
Bloody-minded. It would seem so. In the three years that have passed since the Little Heaven fire (it is properly known as the Black Lands fire, but hardly anyone refers to it by that name), precious little is known about the circumstances preceding it. No adult from Little Heaven lived to tell the tale, including Amos Flesher himself; the children who survived can recall very little of their experience. By the time I was able to arrange interviews with some of them—navigating a web of protective caretakers and foster parents and aunts and uncles—their stories held little in common. It would seem that their minds have embarked on a purposeful act of erasure. They can remember almost nothing, which is likely for the best.
About all that links their stories is a thread of stark, almost unimaginable terror. They talk about seeing their parents covered in blood—flashbulb memories, these searing mental images—though they can no longer recall how that happened. They’ve surrendered the connective tissue between these vivid recollections, the necessary bridgework. One girl talked about “a dark place where a dead baby wouldn’t stop crying.” Noises in the woods. A ghostly giant with the black eyes of a doll. The stuff of childhood nightmares, all of it. The kids’ minds and memories seem to be playing tricks on them, putting the faces of imaginary boogeymen on horrors too real to cope with—the evil of men. The evil of their own mothers and fathers, just maybe.
Survivor trauma, the shrinks call it.
Fire is the grand reducer. The heat of a forest fire can reach 2,672 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt carbon steel. Little Heaven disappeared in the most conclusive way: it burned, carbonized, and drifted away on the wind. Every structure, every body, everything. Gone. There is no way to sift the leavings and make much sense of what happened there. Only questions remain. Were they all dead already when the fire swept over the hillside? If so, how? If not, why didn’t they flee when the fire began to burn down upon them? They would have had time to abandon everything and run. They might have even made it out at a brisk walk, had they seen the fire early enough.
But that didn’t happen. Every adult died—or if not, they are nowhere to be found. They have not resurfaced anywhere and have yet to reclaim their children. The only sane reasoning is that they are gone. The hows and whys may never be known.
“I hope he’s burning in hell,” Sister Muriel says when I ask after the fate of Reverend Amos Flesher. She has a highly developed sense of divine retribution, and she lets it be known that God would not have it any other way. “Sure as I have breath in my body, that boy is roasting in the fiery pit. I hope the Devil gives him a few extra pokes with his pitchfork for me. Evil little bastard. The dirty fiddler.”
Letter postmarked June 8, 1969. Girdler, Kentucky:
Dear Slimeball
So. I guess I’m glad you’re not dead. Congratulations on living.
2
MICAH FOUND ELLEN AGAIN, just as he said he would. And she was sure he’d come, though it took longer than she would have liked. She had made him a new eye by then, which was good, because he showed up wearing that ratty old patch.
“You’d go to pieces without me” was the first thing she said to him.
It became a familiar refrain. You’d go to pieces. In time, it proved to be true. A man can go his whole life never needing anyone. But when he finally finds the one, he can’t live without her.
Ellen had been living with Nate in the town nearest her sister’s jail. By then, Ellen had put it all out in the open to her nephew. Ellen was his aunt. She had been sent by Nate’s mother to check in on Nate at Little Heaven. Ellen had hired Micah and the other two.
Nate took it all pretty well. Kids didn’t suffer so much with cognitive dissonance. He missed his father, despite how badly Reggie had unraveled in his final days. It wasn’t his fault, Nate reasoned privately to himself. It was a lot to ask, and more than his father had been fit to bear. Nate wished his last memories of his father weren’t so negative. He wished he hadn’t seen his body on the grass in front of the chapel, his forehead… He wished he hadn’t seen that, but he knew, having seen it, that he always would.
He went back to school. His teachers remarked on what a pleasant, thoughtful boy Nate was—though they might have said in the privacy of the teacher’s lounge, over a quickly puffed cigarette, that he was more remote and somehow harder than a boy his age ought to be. As if Nate had suffered extreme pressures that had diamondized him. And those sparkling, diamond-like aspects of Nate were just a little off-putting. They made a person feel nervous, even when the boy gave you no good reason to feel that way in his presence.
Micah rented a room in the same town. Nobody there knew their histories.
At one point, a reporter came rolling in. Fussy guy with a Virginian accent, always wore a crisp vanilla-white suit. With one of the big-city dailies, he said. Had a hot tip that one or more of the survivors of the Little Heaven fire might be living right here. Well, that put a bug up the town’s collective ass. But Micah was glad that the reporter wasn’t much good at his job, and that he went away empty-handed to pursue some story about astronauts.
The three of them spent every waking minute together. Before long Ellen’s sister earned an early parole, time served for good behavior. Ellen helped her get reacquainted with life outside the walls. Then Nate moved back in with his mother. After that, it was time to go. Ellen had a new life to get on with. One that now included Micah.
For Micah’s part, he left it all behind. The gun-for-hire work. He had no other skills, but he was willing to learn. They got married in a small chapel in Santa Cruz. They bought a ranch and settled down. Micah wasn’t much of a herdsman or a farmer, but still, things had a way of working out. Money flowed to him, easy as water. Some said he had the devil’s own luck. If they only knew.
They were never far from the black rock. At first, they saw themselves as guardians of a sort. Sentinels. It was only a matter of hours to reach it, though neither of them had the smallest desire to make that journey. That place lived deep inside their minds, implacable as a pebble in their shoes. In time, though, they forgot about the rock—their conscious minds did, anyway. But it twisted away in their under-brains, as such things are wont to.