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CHAPTER 1

This Awful Thing

I hated to admit, even to myself, that I was excited by the I prospect of interviewing Lewis Everett Peck, an Exeter, Rhode Island, farmer and descendent of Mercy Brown, who was probably the last person exhumed as a vampire in America. By 1981, I had been a folklorist for more than a decade and had hundreds of interviews under my belt, but no one had ever told me a vampire story based on personal experience. Of course, like most modern Americans, I have a familiar, comfortable relationship with vampires — but these are fictional vampires. Their existence requires us to suspend our disbelief, whether we're watching a movie, reading a book or looking at an ad for beer or batteries. Peck was going to tell me about a vampire who actually existed — a relation, no less — not some cardboard cutout, B-movie actor, or figment of an author's imagination.

Exeter is only a thirty minute drive from my home base of Providence; it seems light years removed culturally. Halfway into this short ride, I left Interstate 95 and began to notice the rubble stone walls stretching for miles in every direction. Overgrown and seemingly in the middle of nowhere, they are a silent reminder of the once-prosperous farms — true plantations, really, relying on the labor of black slaves and indentured Indians — that began to fade after the American Revolution.

Exeter is a wide town, bumping against Connecticut on its western edge and stretching eastward almost to Narragansett Bay. Its northern border slices off the lower third of Rhode Island, identified as Washington County on maps but known by everyone as South County. In colonial times this "Narragansett Country" was a no-man's-land fought over by Rhode Island and Connecticut. When Rhode Island eventually gained control by royal edict, the colony gratefully named it King's Province, which yielded to King's County. Washington replaced King after the break with England, but the area was — and still is — called South County by the locals.

South County's climate is harsh but, moderated by the waters of Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, conducive to good farming. Its rocky soil is among the most fertile in New England. Plantations that began to bloom in the late 1600s reached their zenith by the mid 1700s, occupying anywhere from 500 acres to twenty square miles each. The "Narragansett Planters"— gentlemen owners including the Hazards, Robinsons, Gardiners, Reynolds, and Congdons — grew crops of corn and hay for their large stocks of dairy cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses, all under the direction of a tenant "husband man" and his crew of paid laborers, indentured servants, and slaves. A typical agreement between owner and tenant might stipulate that ten acres be cleared for meadow each year and that stone walls be constructed.

On the same land that supported gentlemen farmers who bred the famous Narragansett Pacer — a marvelously light-footed saddle horse with an easy gait, extinct by 1800 because the breeding stock was sold to meet the overwhelming demand — isolated "Swamp Yankees" literally carved out their homesteads by hand. Stones that could be moved were hauled, with the assistance of animal power, to the perimeter of the field where they were eventually transformed into a dry (unmortared) rubble wall. Larger rock outcroppings remained, forcing the neat, straight rows of corn to temporarily break apart and coalesce on the other side, their undulations a visible reminder that nature can never be totally subdued. This fragmented landscape of fields framed by meandering stone walls emerged from the interaction between unrelenting natural forces and the tenacious Swamp Yankee. The man I'm going to interview, known as Everett to friends and neighbors, is one of these tough, hard scrabble farmers whose work never seems to end. What they lack in formal education is more than offset by resourcefulness and plain common sense.

Like his South County ancestors, Everett is independent and self-sufficient, raising much of his own food. He has a large garden (which provides vegetables for canning), makes his own apple cider vinegar and elderberry wine, raises pigs (his brother slaughters them, he makes the sausage) and wild turkeys, and still uses many home remedies passed down from older generations.

As I pulled into the dirt driveway of Everett's isolated farm at the end of Sodom Trail, four St. Bernards greeted me, leaping and slobbering on my small car. I rolled down the window just far enough to ask if it was safe to get out. A middle-aged man of medium build, dressed in gray cotton work shirt and pants, pointed to one of the dogs and said, "Well, better let me get this one here." I was relieved when Everett put all four in the pen.

He led me into a cozy living room heated by the wood stove in the adjoining kitchen, much appreciated since it was chilly for mid–November. He motioned for me to sit on the couch, then eased himself down next to me. On a small table was a pile of clippings and other documents. Everett pulled out a yellowed clipping, containing printed text, photographs, and a map, and handed it to me, asking, "Can you find where you are?"

Why did I have the feeling that I was back in third-grade geography? My eye was attracted to a road outlined in red. "Is this Sodom Trail, down here?" I asked.

"Sodom? Oh, I got that in red? Yeah. What's it say there?" he asked, pointing at a photo caption.

I read from the clipping, "Half a mile from here, in a locality called Sodom, is the site of what is claimed to have been among the first cotton or woolen mills established in this state. Structures now as seen in the past. Only two families reside in the hamlet."

Everett broke in, "Yeah, and I'm one. Now, this is when?"

Locating the date at the top of the clipping, I answered, "1896."

"Well, in 1981, I happen to be the only one left," Everett said. He laughed and I felt I had just passed a test.

Everett's speech is forthright, with a snap and edge to it. Hearing him talk is the auditory equivalent of biting into a crisp, cold Macintosh apple. As I was soon to learn, he is also a wonderful raconteur, steeped in local history, with a repertoire that includes personal experiences and anecdotes, family tales, and local legends. Everett describes himself as a Swamp Yankee and jack-of-all-trades. I found out that Everett is a master of understatement — and as shrewd as any Yankee ever was.

What does he do besides farm? "Anything!" he exclaimed. "I hunt up boundaries. And boundary disputes — I got a couple lawyers I do research work for. Done it all my life! Write deeds myself. I'm a notary and everything. Done it ever since I was twenty years old, at least."

As far as Everett is concerned, he is simply carrying on with his family's traditions. He said: "We were a poor family. My family were farmers. That was the source of their income. But they also did logging and wooding. You had to get your money 'cause things was needed. For an example, water power ran the mills around here. But if it had a dry spell — no water — you didn't work in the mill. So you went out and picked blueberries or you did something else. Same with the whole family. We were farmers. But we did logging. We did woodwork. And we sold wood. And we cut posts. And we had cattle. And we had horses. We had everything. We were just regular New England farming, country people. On one side of my family they had a little money. On the other side they had nothing. And they all worked together."

This cooperative self-reliance extended to medicine, too. "If we had poison ivy, we got a herb, indigo. We steeped, we bathed in it. Or, if you cut your foot on a piece of tin or a piece of glass —'cause we were barefooted — you made a poultice. You didn't go down to the doctor and get a tetanus shot, or whatever they got down there to give, an antibiotic of some nature. We made poultices. Sometimes it was bread and sugar."

As an aside, Everett explained: "Today's bread won't do it. You've got too many chemicals in it," before continuing with his contrast between then and now. "Sometimes they used salt pork. Wrapped a finger up. Salt pork and bread on it and it draws. We did our own medication, lots of times. And they did the same. They were experimentin' — same thing. Today everybody goes to a center somewhere, or they all got doctors. Everything is done, today, differently than it was then."

Swamp Yankee. Like other regional, racial, or ethnic labels, Swamp Yankee suggests a bundle of stereotypical traits: shrewd, penurious, independent, imaginative (often to the point of exaggeration), approachable, but curt and cantankerous. Playing it close to the vest, a Swamp Yankee overstates the mundane and downplays the extraordinary. Although a person like Everett may use the term to refer to himself or his family, and wear it proudly, he may resent its use by outsiders.

Theories about how the term came into use have faded into legend, varying from place to place. It has been suggested that Swamp Yankee is New England's equivalent of the Western "Squaw Man"— an insulting reference to a man who married a Native American or lived among them. Another supposition is that those addicted to drink had to pursue their vice outside the respectable confines of town, so they took to the swamps to indulge themselves. Their straight-laced and sober neighbors began calling them "Swamp Yankees." One explanatory story substitutes the weakness of fear for the vice of drink. In Thompson, Connecticut — or New York City, depending on which version you accept — several townspeople fled to the outlying swamps to avoid the invading British during the Revolutionary War. When they returned, the folks who stayed behind chided them as being "Swamp Yankees." The term followed these newly designated Swamp Yankees as they migrated to other parts of southeastern New England.

Some of the family stories shared by Everett are remarkably similar to these Swamp Yankee tales. "There's a place over here in Exeter," Everett began, pronouncing it 'Egster', "we call Ephraim's Bedroom. I had a relative — and I can't truthfully tell you his last name, it could'a been Reynolds, but I don't know — but his first name was Ephraim, and he didn't want to go to war, so he hid. And he went up in the cave and he stayed there until the war was over. And his girlfriend would sneak him food, and he had a spring right there by the cave. And they've called it, in the family, Ephraim's Bedroom ever since."

I asked Everett which war Ephraim was hiding from and he responded, "What was it that was between the states here?"

"The Civil War?" I suggested.

"Civil War, yeah."

Everett's tag to the story also connects it to the drinking associated with Swamp Yankees: "The last thing that lived there, probably thirty years ago, was this great big bird. He had a wing spread about ten feet. Yup. And this great big bird ... he laid this egg. And, of course, my people drink a little, you know. [So they] giggled and laughed about it and finally my old man went up and shot it. And he had it tacked up, with wings spread, on the barn door there for a while, and then they took pictures of it. I don't know where in the hell the pictures are."

Everett also shared some family information that completed his connection to all three speculations concerning the origin of Swamp Yankee. Late in our conversation, when we were discussing Native American sites in the town, Everett interjected: "Now! Be honest with ya, I'm part Indian. Not from here. Don't know. Couldn't tell ya. No way a findin' out. My great-grandmother was a full-blooded Indian. ... You know, back when we were kids, if you had any Indian you weren't recognized too good, you know. People'd bother you. You didn't tell nobody you had Indian blood in you." Laughing, Everett matter-of-factly observed: "That's the way it was when we were little. They didn't like you too well."

One of Everett's anecdotes, which he shared after I had turned off the tape recorder, summed up his Swamp Yankee heritage. During the blizzard of '78, when Everett was serving as vice president of the town council, he learned that other members of the council, presumably vying for his position, were gaining favor with local voters by riding on the town snow plows. Being snowed in, Everett couldn't take advantage of this publicity stunt, so he devised an alternate plan. Phoning people in town and asking them if the snow plow had been by yet, Everett was able to plot each plow's progress. Then he would phone people on the next road, informing them that the plow was on its way.

"They thought I'd sent it over. Never said I did — never said I didn't, neither," Everett explained. His smile and sparkling blue eyes showed he still relished the memory of how he claimed the other council members' share of goodwill as his own.

Everett thumbed through the pile of clippings next to the couch, pulled one out and handed it to me. A two-part headline topped the article, which had appeared in a local newspaper the week of Halloween two years before. The smaller type read: "They burned her heart ..." and underneath, in large bold letters, was the question: "Was Mercy Brown a vampire?" Flanking the article was a photograph of Everett in his work clothes standing next to Mercy's gravestone, looking at the camera and pointing to his left. The caption reported: "LEWIS PECK of Sodom Trail, Exeter, stands at the grave of Mercy Brown (left) in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, Exeter, pointing to the rock where the corpse's heart was burned in 1892. Ancestor's [sic] of Peck's performed the hideous act to rid the body of what they believed was a vampire." The caption reading "Lewis" instead of "Everett" revealed that its author was an outsider.

In a polished, self-assured performance that suggested he had told this tale many times, Everett began to tell me the story of Mercy Brown. "Mercy Brown was a relative. I can't tell you right now how we're related, but we are related. My mother's mother was a Brown. And it was told to me as a kid, you know, from my mother. Uh, Decoration Day was one of the big days, and Children's Day was one of our big days around here."

Everett, sitting next to me on the couch, turned his head toward me — an outsider — to explain how anyone could be enthusiastic over some minor holiday. "You didn't go very far around here, you know." On Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day, children accompanied their parents to the cemetery behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church to place flowers on the graves of their relatives.

"The Brown cemetery is at what we call Shrub Hill — Chestnut Hill, used to be. All the family is buried there, practically. And at that place there is the church and a Grange Hall. In them days, we had one-room schoolhouses. Graduation was called Children's Day at the Grange Hall. The various school districts, single-room schools, would meet in June for graduation, and it was called Children's Day. When we went to Children's Day, or when we went to any celebration there, we were instructed by our parents — mother — when we were playing, 'Don't go over the wall and don't go where that rock is. Stay away from there. Don't you touch it, now, because of this awful thing that took place years ago.' "

Everett paused — I think he was checking to see if he had my undivided attention, which he did — then continued: "So, anyway, over there was this stone and there'd been several in the family, they had, uh, come down with some disease. Young and old! All of a sudden! And anything that they did didn't seem to stop it. Even those that didn't even live here, as far away as Ohio!"

"In the same family?" I asked.

"In the same family. Brother! Was comin' down with the same sickness. So, there was twelve men, as it's told to me, of the family that was left. They got together and they figured it was all their turn. This is it! And they got together and they took a vote, what to do. And they dug up one grave, not several. They dug up Mercy. For some reason they picked her, because there was something there that led it to that. Then, they dug her up and she had turned over in the grave."

With his characteristic soft-spoken understatement, Everett interjected, "Well, right away, there's a lot of problems there," before continuing. "So they took her out and they cut her heart out. There was blood in the heart. Well, they decided they had to kill it, so they started a fire, not far from the grave — there was this rock here — and they burnt the heart, took the ashes and done something with 'em. I don't remember that stuff there. Them rocks there is what I was told — and my brothers and sisters — don't go over there and play around. Stay away from there. Stay away from the whole thing! That was the attitude of my mother, bringing us children up. But anyway, it seems as if that's what took care of it."

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Excerpted from "Food for the Dead"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Michael E. Bell.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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