Fingers in a Jar/Taking Twins From Their Mother

     A reason I added administration to humanities teaching was to get closer to families, to help children and parents sort out problems and, together, plan futures. On occasion it meant my serving as a catalyst in a family break-up. In this one case (and I’m pleased to say only in this case, and perhaps one other) I was instrumental in separating two teenage twin girls from their mom, permanently. Given the circumstances, I’d do it again.

     Among the least pleasant and at the same time one of the most critical aspects of my work was when I partnered with state social workers. Often that was the surest path toward justice for hurting kids that we could take. In rural Vermont, I worked with them on numbers of cases. The strangest case a social worker and I worked on together started, as many do, as a result of extended truancy.

     Our high school housed grades 7-12 and served five towns though that’s misleading because we welcomed children who lived in places unrecognizable as towns. Farm lands and mountainsides may be legally parts of towns but they don’t feel as if they are. Our school took children from one solidly middle class village and town, where our school was located, and several outlying ones, up to twenty miles from campus, all distinctly less wealthy. The town of Cavendish was economically depressed and had been for some time. The numbers of cars and pickups you’d see from main streets up on cinder blocks in drives were many but well outnumbered by those out-of-sight, off on decrepit properties on windy secondary asphalt and then, dirt, roads. Roofs and porches were continually in disrepair on many of these roads; plots and yards were continually uneven and overgrown. Sad poverty was always on display even as the town sent many very fine kids to us every year.

     Perhaps a third of our kids came to us from Cavendish and in the fall of 1988 so did Marlee and Donna Rayburn, fourteen. When they enrolled in our seventh grade their transcripts were in order. They had attended Cavendish Elementary School for six years. No one at that school had recorded a single truancy report. Their official attendance rates were within normal range.

     The twins attended our school without incident for three weeks or so, then stopped. By the end of the first week in October, my calls to the home were not returned. My calls to their elementary school resulted in no help and I got a clear impression from the school nurse that she was well pleased to have been rid of the Rayburn girls and had no interest in discussing them. Same reaction from the Principal. She did tell me that there had been no father in the house for some time but just how long she couldn’t recall. I let the new district superintendent know what was up and that I felt I was being stonewalled by the kids’ former school.

     I called Ben Deutsch, a state social worker with whom I’d worked before and we drove out to the home on the second weekend without contact.

     By the time we’d found it at dusk, off a tangle of dirt roads, the beaten, old, four-story Victorian looked, I have to say, Poe-spooky. Framed by huge wind-blown maples, its mien nearly dissuaded us from stepping from the car. I shied at the porch steps but I remembered that Boo Radley’s house, though smaller, presented a similar daunting challenge to Atticus Finch’s Scout…and that, in the end, Miss Scout was brave and Boo Radley a harmless, angelic hero. The idea of a six-year old, even a fictional six-year old, having more stuff than I had, struck me as absurd.

     Ben Deutsch said, “We’re here. Might as well see who’s home.”    

     The house lights were off. We went to the door. Ben pushed a ringer; nothing. My knock opened the door. Nothing but wind. My thoughts leapt crazily from To Kill A Mockingbird to, of all things, Moe, Larry, and Curly realizing that they’re talking to The Living Dead.

     We should have left for home straight away; instead, I went to the car and got a high-intensity flashlight. As I shone the light into what once had been intended as a living room, we saw clutter, more clutter in one room than I know I’d ever seen in one space. And dozens and dozens of wax candles in various stages of use. I called out a hello to no response. I was about to shut the door and turn back to the car when Ben stepped inside. I shone the light for him and followed.

      We saw it at once.

     On a high mantle above a hearth was a large, glass, cork-stoppered jar filled with liquid and what looked like a human hand. Intrepid-Ben climbed over small tables, garbage, books, dead candles, supermarket newspaper inserts. When Ben brought it down it was clear that the jar also held fingers, children’s and those of small animals.

     There was no one at that house, not an adult, not a child. And this was the late eighties; neither of us had a cell phone. Ben looked at me and said he could legally take the jar. I had no idea if that were true. He placed it in the trunk and we drove it to Ben’s office. He made the right contacts and gave over the jar to the authorities next morning. I kept in touch with Ben and the state policewoman who had been assigned to investigate. She, as we did, wanted to find those kids.

     Two weeks later she did. Marlee and Donna Rayburn showed to school. They appeared thinner than I’d remembered them but seemed otherwise in reasonably good health. Their blonde hair also seemed thinner. They said they’d been in New Hampshire visiting ill relatives. Truth was they’d been in Maine attending what Ben found out later were a series of religious rituals. Their mother, Elaine, told us a week later that she, Elaine, would educate her daughters. They’d be trained as priestesses. I didn’t even want to know in what religion. Mickey Rourke’s and Robert De Niro’s magnificent and terrifying Angel Heart with Charlotte Rampling as a voodoo priestess did horrid dances in my head. That film had already kept me up nights.

     A month or so later Social Services moved to take Marlee and Donna Rayburn. The hearing was held three months after that, in late January. In the interim the girls attended school sporadically. They grew thinner and paler each time I saw them. At the hearing I was asked to describe the girls’ attendance record: they had, to date, been truant well over 85% of the term. I was asked to say how they appeared to me, physically, as compared to most young, teenage girls at our school. I testified that the girls looked increasingly thinner but that I was no expert on nutrition or malnourishment. I did say I’d worked in schools since the late 1960s and that these two looked pretty pale and pretty thin.

     Ben and I described what we found at the house, its general condition and, of course, the jar and its contents. Subsequent social services and police investigation found cultic religious paraphenalia and some evidence of small-animal sacrifice. The mother was indicted, tried, and convicted on a number of counts of animal cruelty. The girls were taken by social services, by Ben and a woman, Lena Johnson, over their and their mother’s screams (I was told), and a week or so later were with a family up north. Ben, later, said they were attending school regularly. I was given no further information.

     I never learned whose hand, whose fingers, were in that jar though those twins, and that jar, linger here.