It’s impossible to know what makes us stand out in a sea of similarities. We can say that it’s our differences that make us distinct, but even those don’t necessarily garner real attention from others; in a sea of different we quickly become boring and unnoticeable. Some people manage to be seen, some people can’t keep eyes off of themselves, and I figure it’s because some people are impactful and must be noticed by as many other people as possible, if only to inspire opposition against a particular way of life or set of values.
Vances Carlton was not one of those people, neither luminary nor villain. She described herself as a seat filler when we talked recently at the library. I decided to give my Saturdays to the public library as a volunteer and when I finally tracked her down, I asked Vances to meet me there to talk.
“I’m surprised you found me,’ she said when we sat. She was an average-sized woman and attractive. She’d graduated from Ladoga High and knew my older cousin; they’d graduated about ten years before me.
“You must have talked to a lot of people.”
I had. In my quest to uncover the source behind Ladoga’s underground magazine known as This and Other Things (TAOT) — the enigmatic V.I.V., that no one else was clever or interested enough to find — I turned into an amature detective.
Mr. Smith asked me to meet him at the coffee shop in Ladoga about a month ago. “I’ve been keeping an eye out since you told me about the magazine,” he said, “and I managed to get my hands on some back issues. I have to say, this V.I.V. reminds me of my first wife’s grandmother, Eunice.”
He fished through the rectangular, leather bag that he had with him, a bag that I associate with all learned men of a certain mettle; intellectual liberals like Mr. Smith. He’d managed to gather issues of the magazine that I had seen before, others that I hadn’t.
“These are all from the past couple of years. This one, ‘Dying of a Broken Heart’ is from last year. There were four deaths at the retirement home in west Ladoga that were reported as suspicious in the Daily. They almost lost a lot of credibility because people assumed the worst of the staff. But apparently the first woman died of natural causes, she was well into her nineties. And the eighty year old man that died after her had fallen in love with her over the years they had lived there together. He said the old woman reminded him of his wife and maybe it hurts so much to lose the love of your life twice that your heart can’t take it, because he died the next day of a heart attack. The man had a best friend there that he’d known his entire life in Ladoga and the best friend was found dead with a smile on his face the next day. He had an ongoing game of chess with another resident who only moved for his game of chess and reruns of Law and Order, and the chess man died the day after the best friend.”
I flipped through the issue that was very well used and brown from time and dirt. All of the articles were by V.I.V. in that issue.
“Look at the fourth page,” Mr. Smith said.
It was the Local Folklore section where V.I.V. featured stories that most Ladogans had heard in one form or another. That issue had a tragic story that my dad would tell me and my brother when we were young and didn’t get along; a homegrown Cain and Abel story. It didn’t really fit though; Ladoga Cain kills Ladoga Abel because he was doing the will of his God. And apparently this Eunice that Mr. Smith knew, was their great grandmother.
“Eunice told me that one of her grandkids had a house in east Ladoga,” Mr. Smith said. “He moved there with his wife and they had two son. They were very religious, they went to that church that started and was shut down in the north east in the late nineties. Most people in Ladoga thought that church was too strict and they let any adult in the church discipline their kids because they loved the idea of the community raising the children. Eunice’s grandson and his wife both died in a car accident after their oldest son went off to the military. The youngest son went wild on his own, wouldn’t let any of his relatives take care of him. His big brother heard about the sin his brother was living in, came back to town, killed him and buried him in the graveyard himself. He told the police he was just sending his brother to heaven to be with their parents before he did something so bad he wouldn’t be allowed in.”
There is another very similar story that I have heard from friends over the years in other parts of the city. It starts the same, a couple lived on the edge of Ladoga and had two sons who grew into good looking men. The older boy was less attractive than his younger brother, but the younger was impulsive and often made bad decisions. The older brother eventually meets a girl, the two fall in love, have a kid. They say the younger brother turned out to be the father of the baby and the older brother disowns his younger brother. Years later when the older brother says he’s ready to reconcile, he hits the younger brother with his car, parks on his legs and stays there until he admits that he was a bad person for stealing his girlfriend. Only the younger brother dies swearing that he never wanted to steal his girlfriend — they had only been together once and he didn’t even enjoy it all that much. The older brother tried to hide the evidence by burying the body with other dead bodies in the graveyard, but the groundskeeper noticed the fresh mound with no tombstone and called the police.
There’s no reason to doubt that this story is any less true than the Ladoga Cain and Abel, only, when I heard it the first time, I didn’t believe it and assumed someone had heard the original story wrong. Or someone had deliberately changed it to make it their own. Maybe it was Eunice herself, attempting to erase the blind, religious zealotry of her descendants; or maybe all stories get that treatment as a testament to the fickle nature of the human memory.
Mr. Smith was also aware of both stories and he said that V.I.V. had recounted the distinctly northeast version.
“It plays well to her theme. The youngest son was obviously traumatized by the loss of his family and the older brother saw that his brother’s heart was broken and he put him out of his misery. It reminds me very much of what I used to hear from Eunice. So either Eunice is V.I.V. or it’s someone that knew her. And I’ll save you some time, it’s not me, though I’m a little disappointed in myself that it’s not.”
Mr. Smith told me that he was able to fill an entire book with stories that Eunice had told him. He fished a book out of his bag, the last thesis that he’d written as an academic that became his first published book. He told me that by the time he’d written it, he’d visited Ladoga on several occasions with his first wife, Cheryl, who was born there. They’d met when he made an appearance in Charleston, SC, back when he had a measure of celebrity thanks to the photography that he’d been working at since his youth. On his visits to Ladoga, he’d talk to Eunice, who was an old woman in her late seventies then and who had lost her husband to diabetes about a decade before. Mr. Smith described her as a very ominous old woman and he said she reminded him of the Gullah fortune tellers that he’d known when he was young in Charleston. “She could have been crazy, if I’m being honest, but I really don’t think she was.” He said that he got some of his best stories about Ladoga from that woman who had seen so much of the town’s history. “She had a very macabre view. Most all of her stories ended in death, and the one’s that didn’t usually started with it or had it thrown in somewhere. In her version of the Indian Chief, they cut off one of the Chief’s limbs everyday and leave them on the ground just to torture him. On the last day, the limbs animate, float into the sky and become the witches.”
“Is that the real version?” I asked.
“That was her version, no one else I ever talked to tells it that way. But I bet if you heard her tell it, you would think that it happened just that way. Sometimes when she told stories, it was like she was watching it and telling me what was happening. Very eerie woman. She also made the best biscuits I’ve ever had.”
Mr. Smith’s first book was called The Southern Macabre, gruesome tales that Cheryl’s grandmother had told him took place in and around Ladoga, between the late 1950’s to the early 90’s.
“Stories spread,” Mr. Smith said. “They’re like weeds; one pops up over there and before you know it, it’s sprouting up all over the place. People love a good story and I was able to trace some that I guarantee you started in that old woman’s living room and managed to meander up as far north as Roanoke Rapids, NC, and as far south as Charleston, SC. And I will tell you how I figured that out; the amount of overlapping details. The closer to the source of the story, the more similar various tellings become. There are exceptions of course, if people in a town tell a story over and over for years it can seem to have originated there. But in Eunice’s case, practically all of the versions of the most tragic, bloody stories that are told and retold in this region, become the most distinct and sharp with detail as one gets closer to the outskirts of East Ladoga.”
I wondered if the creator of TAOT could be one of Eunice’s relatives, a granddaughter maybe, but Mr. Smith didn’t think so. “From what I know of that family, I can’t imagine that any of them would make a newsletter, and for all these years.”
I figured that it must have been someone that knew Eunice well enough, that liked her enough to sit and listen to her tell stories. “She used to go to Edwards as often as she could,” Mr. Smith offered. “She worked there when she was younger, she’s like a legend over there.”
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