Guns, Balls, & Love — part 3

For Charles Verner, today was the day. He simply knew it, could feel it in his exhausted bones. He had been unable to drown its growing voice in his head with his counter-measure of choice: whiskey. He’d lost the battle. It was Friday, November 8th, 1912. This early decade of the 20th century, soon to give birth to The War to End All Wars, which, in turn, would bring about a wave of revolutions in Western Europe, Russia, and beyond, had begun in misery and desperation for Charles.

He had tried to follow in his father’s footsteps. He’d become a farmer, and in 1897, at the age of 28, had married 19 year old Sarah Elizabeth Seitz (known as Elizabeth), bringing her into the farmstead home he still shared with his father, William, and his younger sister, Elfie, now with a child of her own.

Charles and Elizabeth proved a fertile couple, and produced children at a steady pace, almost metronome-like for its regularity, mostly girls.

I found an interesting incident in the newspaper archives; a possible early sign of Charles’s subsequent troubles? In the summer of 1899, The Decatur Herald ran a small story titled “Piatt Farmer Disappears,” with the subhead “Charles Verner Went to the Monticello Fair and Did Not Return.” He was gone for over a week, seemingly without a word to his wife or father.

Where did he go? Had he begun drinking already, and sought to escape the judging eye of his father to partake in a “bender”? He and his new bride already had one child and another on the way. Had he felt the shadow of his future tragedy fall upon his heart? Could he already glimpse, hazy and indistinct, somewhere in the years to come, the wave of despair that would build and build and, thirteen years later, come crashing down upon him and his family? Or is there a simpler, more mundane explanation? An accident or an injury?

At any rate, on this Friday near the end of 1912, the Thanksgiving holiday just three weeks away, certain things seem clear. His marriage with Elizabeth was broken. He was drinking regularly. Things had deteriorated to the point that she had consulted a lawyer seeking a separation. Charles, recognizing the looming end of his marriage and most likely his farm, might have even begun selling off equipment for cash. He and Elizabeth had eight children, ranging in age from eighteen months to 14 years. My grandmother, Rachel, their second-to-youngest, would turn four that December.

As they faced each other in the kitchen at approximately 9 a.m. that morning, Charles and Elizabeth fully understood that their life together was at an end. What Elizabeth didn’t know, but would soon find out, was how irrevocable that end was to be.

According to one newspaper report, Charles told her, “Today is our last day of grace.”

Elizabeth had most likely been appealing to her husband to come to a formal agreement on what should become of the children, of the farm, distribution of assets, etc. That morning he claimed he was ready “to fix things” and asked her if she could forgive him for all he had done. She agreed, and asked the same of him. Upon receiving his assent, Elizabeth went into the next room to fetch pen and paper to begin formally settling the details. Charles, meanwhile, picked up his shotgun. (Was it kept loaded over the kitchen door, the rear exit of the house, for protection?) In the room with them, helping her mother do the laundry, and witness to her parents’ final exchange, had been 11 year old Dorothy Pauline (Polly). Sensing her father’s dire intentions as he raised his weapon, she rushed instinctively to push the weapon away. (Another newspaper report: “Don’t you shoot Mama!”) It discharged into the ceiling above the doorway to the dining room.

Elizabeth, on the verge of reentering the room when the blast occurred, screamed and fled past Charles and Polly, out the kitchen and into the yard behind the house. Charles followed and shot her from behind, the blast catching her in the neck. She fell into the grass.

The newspaper reports on what happened next are conflicting, somewhat. No doubt due to the lack of any direct witness, as Polly (and the rest of the children, if they were present in the house at the time) having fled in terror. Charles reloaded his shotgun, went back into the house and proceeded — with grisly determination, if not great effectiveness — to kill himself. He shot himself in the gut, drank carbolic acid, and used his straight razor to slash his own throat, but in which order is not clear. One report claims that he first tried to shoot himself under the chin, but flinching, succeeded only in taking half his face off. It was then that he drank the carbolic acid, slashed at his throat, then finally shot himself in the stomach. Despite all this, he clung to life for over 12 more hours, dying around 11 p.m. that night.

Separate funeral services were held. Elizabeth’s was on the following Sunday in the Church of the Brethren in La Place, where the attending crowd was so large — (Decatur Daily Herald: “It was one of the largest funeral services ever held in this part of the country.”) — that the church itself could only accommodate half the attendees, the rest standing outside. Charles’s presumably much more modest services were held in their home on Monday.

Charles Verner was a tenant farmer in an area known as Burrowsville, just west of Hammond. As one newspaper recounted it, after seeing her mother gunned down, 11 year old Polly had fled to the neighbor’s house, but the men there were afraid to confront Charles directly. Instead, they sought out his father, William, in Hammond, and brought him to the scene. It was William that led the party that would recover Elizabeth’s body approximately an hour after she had been shot.

In 1912, William Verner would have been 72 years old. He had seen his children grow up, marry, and have children of their own. He had no doubt witnessed the sad, downward trajectory of his middle son, Charles. William had served in battle, had seen his fellows struck down around him, had experienced first-hand the chaos and cruelty of war. How must he have felt, advancing toward the slain body of his daughter-in-law, lying in a bloody pool on the grass, knowing that his own flesh and blood was responsible?

Did he spend any time at the bedside of his lingering son that day? Did he attempt to speak to Charles, to ask him for some kind of explanation? Or did he know, intuitively, that there was no explanation to be had, at least none that would make any sense. Did he grieve for the eight children left behind? Did he comfort them? Did he know how?

While my brain, as usual, frantically spins scenarios in an attempt to understand Charles’s state-of-mind both on that day, and in the weeks, months, and years leading up to it, I keep returning to William. The taciturn, strict father. The Civil War veteran who exhorted his sons, regularly, to avoid drink and debt. The newlywed Charles and Elizabeth had lived with him on his own farm in Hammond for the first several years of their marriage. Had William helped secure the tenant-farmer situation Charles would later assume? Had he checked in regularly on his son and his rapidly growing family, or had he seen some evidence that Charles was not meant to become the kind of son William would hope for?

What did William make of Charles’s disappearance in 1899? How long had it lasted? What story did Charles offer for his whereabouts, what reason did he provide for his absence? Did William listen sternly but silently? Or did he lose his temper? What was the relationship like between father and son?

All of these questions and so many more swirl through my head whenever I try to confront these events. And though, as I stated in my opening essay, I don’t consider myself a violent person, I’ve come to see that there are many forms of violence that can be perpetrated by a man on a woman. While no guns were fired, I, too, have torn a family apart. I, too, have ended a relationship unilaterally, with no prospect or plan for recovery. I, too, have turned my back on small children, both my own and others.

I’ve come to see myself as no less a force of destruction than Charles, in my own way.