Deviant (4 page)

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Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State

“
City people, attracted by the cheap price of land, came out seeking new opportunity…. When they arrived, they found, instead of the pastoral life they had envisioned, merely interminable, unclocked labor, logging, stumping, stoning, draining, fencing, and breaking ground. The region demands a toll of at least one failure for each piece of land successfully brought to cultivation; of the relatively poor land left, much could be sold and resold, and ruin settler after settler, without ever becoming more productive than a sand dune
. ”

B
y the time Eddie was seven, Augusta had become the uncontested head of the family—its driving force and decision maker—and in 1913, she decided that the Geins would become farmers. Her hard years of labor in the store, toiling day and night and keeping a close eye on every penny, had paid off. She had managed to accumulate enough money for a modest farm. The Geins would become landowners, people of means. There was a good living to be made from dairy cows and rye. And she had another motive, too: she would be getting herself and her family, particularly little Eddie, far away from the evil influences of the city.

Late that year, the Geins moved to a small dairy farm in the lowlands near Camp Douglas, forty miles east of La Crosse. For unknown reasons, they remained there for less than a year. Perhaps Augusta, always on the lookout for a way to improve the family’s fortunes, saw an opportunity to purchase an even larger piece of land. Or perhaps she felt that even at that distance, they were still living too close to La Crosse, which, in her burgeoning religious mania, she had come to regard as a latter-day Sodom.

Whatever the case, in 1914, the Gein family made the second— and final—move, to a one-hundred-ninety-five-acre farm in Plainfield known to the locals as the old John Greenfield place. At a time when property ownership was almost entirely in the hands of men, land records show that the Plainfield farm was purchased by and deeded to, not George, but Augusta Gein.

Augusta was happy with the new homestead, and, in truth, it was a substantial place, particularly by the standards of that underprivileged area. The house itself was a trim two-story affair, an L-shaped white frame building with a parlor, a kitchen, and a pair of bedrooms on the first floor and five more rooms upstairs. The outbuildings included a fair-sized barn, a chicken coop, and an equipment shack. There was also a shedlike summer kitchen that had been built onto one end of the house, with a connecting door opening into the regular kitchen.

Augusta promptly set about arranging the rooms with the sparse but solid furnishings she had gradually acquired during the years of her marriage. The best pieces were reserved for the parlor, which contained a handsome cherry bureau, its breakfront decorated with a simple leaf design; a stout wooden rocker with elaborately carved arm supports; a small pine bookcase, its five narrow shelves neatly stacked with leather-bound volumes; a large Oriental carpet, slightly threadbare but with a rich geometric pattern; and a number of pictures on the walls, including family portraits in heavy gilded frames and (Augusta’s favorite) a reproduction painting of Christ gazing skyward at an angel.

Augusta was, of course, a fastidious homemaker who insisted that her house be kept, as she put it, “as neat as a pin.” She was fiercely proud of her perfectionism. There might be richer people in the world but none who maintained a tidier place. The Gein home wasn’t a mansion, but it would never look anything less than absolutely clean and orderly—not, at any rate, as long as Augusta was alive.

There was another feature of their new homestead that Augusta grew to appreciate as the Geins settled into their new lives: its extreme isolation. The farm was situated six miles west of Plainfield village, a significant distance in the days of dirt roads and wagon travel, when farmers rarely ventured from home and the monthly trip to the general store in town was a major event. Their nearest neighbors were the Johnson family, whose farmhouse was located a little less than a quarter-mile down the road. Otherwise, the Geins were surrounded by nothing but meadows, marshland, scattered clumps of trees, and acre upon acre of pale, sandy soil.

The remoteness of her farm suited Augusta just fine. It hadn’t taken her long to conclude that the religious and moral standards of Plainfield were scandalously low. In her increasingly warped vision, the decent, hard-working, God-fearing townsfolk were a disreputable and untrustworthy lot. Augusta felt herself far too good for them. The less she had to do with them, the better. Since Plainfield boasted a Catholic, a Methodist, and a Baptist—but no Lutheran—church, there was even less reason to mingle with her neighbors. She herself would handle her sons’ moral and religious training. On those rare occasions when she was compelled to travel to town, she could feel the resentment emanating from the merchants she had to deal with and the people she passed on the street. Perhaps they could sense her superiority simply from the way she bore herself. Or perhaps, having ridden by her farm, they were envious of how well-cared-for it was.

Augusta didn’t mind being shunned by the people of Plainfield. Indeed, she wanted no part of such a backslidden, vice-prone community. Her boys provided all the companionship she needed. The farm would be her own self-contained little world.

Much as she might have liked to, Augusta couldn’t keep her sons entirely cut off from the world. When Eddie was eight, he began attending the Roche-a-Cri grade school, a tiny one-room building with a dozen students altogether. Later, Roche-a-Cri merged with another country school, the White School, and it was there that Eddie Gein completed his formal education at age sixteen after graduating from the eighth grade. Eddie was a capable if unexceptional student, who managed well enough in all his subjects. (Years later, in the early days of his notoriety, when he was placed under intense psychiatric scrutiny and subjected to a battery of tests, his I.Q. would be recorded as average.) He was a particularly good reader. Indeed, throughout his life, he busied himself with books and magazines on varied and, at times, quite unusual subjects.

Books were a good way to relax, he believed. And you could learn lots of things from them, too.

But although Eddie did passably well in his studies, his school years were not a particularly happy time. He felt overwhelmingly alone, hopelessly cut off from his classmates. They related to each other so easily—griping about their chores, exchanging scraps of local gossip they had picked up at the dinner table, talking excitedly about the big fire down at Conover’s Warehouse or the upcoming Donkey Derby at Plainfield Auditorium. Eager to be accepted, he watched how they acted and tried to imitate their behavior. But somehow he could never fit in.

On a few occasions during his childhood and adolescence, he seemed to be coming close to making a real connection. But as soon as he would return home and tell his mother about his newfound friend, she would immediately begin raising objections. The boy’s family had a bad reputation. There were dark rumors about the father’s past, and the mother was known to be a woman of questionable virtue. Augusta wouldn’t have a son of hers associating with people like that. How could Eddie behave in such a way? By now, her voice would have risen to a scream. Was she raising a fool?

Eddie would begin to blubber and retreat to his room. The next day, he would go to school and avoid even looking at the other boy.

From the point of view of his peers, there was definitely something a little different about Eddie Gein. At no point in his life—not, at any rate, until his simmering psychosis erupted into full-blown dementia—did anyone perceive that he might be a dangerously disturbed individual. And, in fact, it would have taken a fairly sophisticated eye to see in young Eddie’s behavior—his social incompetence, for example, and increasing isolation—the signs of incipient madness. But there were things about Eddie that certainly struck his schoolmates as peculiar—the way his eyes kept shifting around whenever he tried to talk to you; the odd, lopsided grin he always wore, even when the conversation had to do with the deer-hunting accident that killed Eugene Johnson or old man Beckley’s heart attack; his habit of laughing at weirdly inappropriate times, as though he were listening to some strange, private joke that no one else could hear.

Sometimes, one of the girls would turn around in her seat and catch him staring at her with a look of such peculiar intensity that, even at that early age, she would feel vaguely unclean—violated. And there were times when a few of the boys would be huddled together, whispering about sex. Eddie, approaching the group and overhearing the talk, would blush furiously and back away as fast as he could.

That was another thing about Eddie that his schoolmates of both sexes recognized from an early age. He didn’t seem to be like other boys. There was something about his mannerisms—the softness of his voice, the meekness of his posture, the nervous fluttering motions his hands made when he talked—that struck them as distinctly girlish. He had another effeminate trait, too. He cried very easily. He certainly couldn’t take a joke. They remembered the time Eddie got teased about his eye. He had a fat, fleshy growth on the corner of his left eyelid. It wasn’t really disfiguring, but it made his eyelid droop. Once, one of the boys made a comment about it—not anything mean, really, just a joke about Eddie’s “saggy-baggy eye.” Eddie’s shit-eating grin had instantly dissolved, and, in front of all of them, he began to sob like a little girl.

As far as Eddie was concerned, all these things about his schoolmates—their teasing, their insensitivity, and especially their dirty talk—only confirmed his mother’s omniscience. She was right about everything. Outside the close confines of the family, the world was a hard and wicked place.

Not that conditions within the Gein family were any less difficult. No matter how doggedly they worked it, their hardscrabble farm yielded barely enough food to provide for the family’s subsistence. The fruitless struggle with the soil was a backbreaking job, particularly since George could no longer be counted on to do his share of work. By the time Eddie was a teenager, his father’s main occupations seemed to be loafing, liquor consumption, and abusing his wife and children. He had often whipped the boys when he got drunk. By now—though both Eddie and Henry were small, slightly built young men—they were too big to be beaten. But George could still rant and rave. During one of his alcoholic rampages, he had even accused his wife of adultery. Considering the pathological prudishness of Augusta’s sexual attitudes—not to mention her refusal to associate with any of her neighbors—it seems clear that George’s mental condition was, by this point, no more stable than his wife’s.

Even had she been so inclined, Augusta would scarcely have had the time to indulge in infidelity, since, besides her housework, she now had to take on some of the chores that her husband would no longer deign to do. Indeed, now that the boys were grown up enough to travel into town and buy the monthly provisions, she never left the farm at all. Life in Plainfield had turned out to be a brutal business, but Augusta refused to abandon it. Divorce was unthinkable, a fundamental violation of her religious beliefs. If the Lord had meant to burden her with a bestial husband and a life of unrelenting labor, then she would not set herself against His will.

Cut off from all social contacts, completely separated from the life of the community, condemned to an existence of crushing poverty in a remote and desolate region with two tormented and inimical parents, Eddie—never emotionally strong to begin with—was retreating farther and farther into a private world of fantasy. The Gein farm may not have been productive, but it was proving to be a fertile breeding ground for madness.

As Eddie and Henry grew to manhood and George sank ever deeper into the black pit of his melancholia, Augusta took to harping, with increasing and obsessive frequency, on a single, strident theme: the wickedness of modern women. From newspaper photos and magazine illustrations, she knew the way they dressed, with their short skirts, powders, and lipstick. They were tainted, fallen creatures, and the women of Plainfield, she would admonish her sons, were the worst.

When heavy rains fell and outdoor work was impossible, she would settle into her rocker in the damp, dimly lit parlor and, with the boys at her feet, tell them the story of Noah, prophesying the coming of another flood to wash away women’s sins. Or, reaching for the heavy family Bible, she would rest it on her lap, open it to the
Book of Revelations
, and read:

So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, “
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
.”