This is a continuation of a story I began telling last week as The Strange Case of Mrs. Alice Faulkner. There’s been a slight delay in production on account of what I guess must have been COVID, which I’d cunningly managed to sidestep these last few years. This distinction I can no longer claim, having fulfilled all the requirements for the badge. I’m surprised at how little I miss my sense of smell, which was never acute in the first place, nor do I much mind that everything I eat now smacks of tin. Nothing mutes an appetite more than the guarantee that all grub will taste like salted metal shavings; I’m saving a bundle on groceries, and my waist is recovering its once-upon-a-time waspishness. So, bonus!
Before I resuscitate the narrative, a word of thanks to everyone who subscribed; I’m grateful to those of you who indicated you’d be willing to be inhabit the paid column of the register. I’m not clear as to what prompt you followed in making so generous, if precipitate, an offer; there must have been a nudge in that direction, some cup rattling or collection plate passing on the part of Substack. Rest assured, it didn’t come at my request. Here, as with the Mavis Gallant writing from last year, I’m doing nothing more than fanning my plumage, scratching an itch, indecorously, in public. My sense of this place — Substack, I mean, and this derives from not having given it much more than a quick up and down — is that it’s a crowded tract where tens of thousands of writers, mostly at loose ends, some of us more washed up than others, are doing exactly what I’m doing, which is pumping up the tires of vanity projects. That’s a much as I know. It’s a platform about which otherwise I understand nothing, and probably it’s irresponsible of me to engage with it, given that I have no grasp of, nor much interest in, what it is, what it does, or what claims it might be exerting on my behalf, i.e. “Bill wants your money!”
Friends, I’m just goofing around. I’ve never given any thought to enrichment, or to monetizing via this means. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not made of the gauze of good intentions, I don’t live on light and air and the gentle brush of angel lips, I need me some dough just like everyone else, but it’s never occurred to me that this would be the place to come to rake it in. Your kind vote of confidence, and your show of support, means more than I can tell you — so flattering, an honour — but no, not now. In a couple of months, if whatever it is I’m writing here seems to have found legs, I’ll open up the subscription portal for anyone who has the will or means or the aim to toss in the occasional fish in exchange for barking and balancing a ball on my nose. For now, let it be free, and free-ranging. I don’t even know what I have to sell at this early stage of the game, and I wouldn’t feel right foisting on you a horse with no name that might or might not be an able companion in the desert. Your time and patience are already a pretty price for me to ask. Reading me is like watching someone proceed in shaky fashion down a freeway, changing lanes willy-nilly, taking an exit out of the blue, deciding that was a mistake, making a bad job of negotiating roundabouts to get back to the point he left off, then finding himself on the highway but going in the wrong direction from the one he intended, and against the flow of traffic. For such a Keystone Cops ride, who’d pay?
Slapdash navigation, my specialty, is how we got to where we are. It was never my intention to dally in the precincts of turn-of-the-last-century, semi-rural Indiana. I got stuck here on my way to mid-century Manhattan. My intention had been to investigate an inscription, a gift dedication in a second-hand book I acquired via the post, Edith Sitwell’s 1950 anthology, “A Book of The Winter,”
This is the entree to a complicated, fascinating and well-connected circle of friends, as well as the key to three fabulous apartments in two legendary NewYork City buildings, the Dakota and the Osborne. That was where I was bound, and it remains my destination. I somehow got sidelined en route, paused at a truckstop for coffee, and got drawn in by whispers, by a few strange things I saw or heard hinted at. I was enticed, seduced. And now, as noted, I presume on your patience.
To recap, the story thus far told of how Alice Faulkner, identified in some news sources as Alice Forkner, brought rape charges against two men in Anderson, Indiana, in 1898. The men were John Armstrong, first identified in the local press as “Jack,” and his co-accused, first name Fred, upon whose surname no one could agree. Wermer. Werthner. Wenthner. Werther. All were offered as possibilities. The case against the men was prosecuted within a month. At the trial, in September, Mrs. Faulkner / Forkner told a compelling story of her assault. Then, during a pause in the proceedings, a lunch break, she disappeared, along with her younger sister, Bertha Collis, also named as Bertha Callis, who was the prosecution’s principal witness. They took a powder, never returned to pick up the narrative where it had been left off. Had it all been too much for Alice, reliving the trauma? Apparently not. It was revealed, in quite short order, that someone had paid Alice and Bertha off. Ten dollars was all it took to persuade the ladies to skip; ten dollars which, even by the standards of rural Indiana in 1898, no one would ever call “a lot of money.” In short order they were found and frog-marched back to court. Their credibility, however, was in tatters; the case did not proceed. The two men, John and Fred, were fined, released. It was generally understood — the speculation in this regard was part of the coverage of the case — that it was Mrs. Armstrong, John’s wife, who had bankrolled the escapade. Did she do this of her own volition, or was it at John’s urging or insistence? Impossible to say. She was never compelled to answer the charge as part of a legal proceeding, and she never publicly confessed to it. Bottom line, the game was up, the men left jail, the women went back to their lives, the story petered out. In the fullness of time, as always happens, everyone died.
Armstrong was a usual name in those parts and at that time, and John is, you know, John. Several John Armstrongs find their way into the Madison / Grant County Indiana public record in the waning years of the 19th century, as do their wives. I can say with certainty that the John Armstrong who was confined to the city jail in Anderson, accused of the attempted rape of Alice Faulkner / Forkner was not the same John Armstrong whose spouse was running wild and who took her own life by self-administering an overdose of morphine; that John Armstrong wasn’t a widower long, he died in the same way a few weeks later. I’m not one hundred per cent sure that the Mr. and Mrs. John L. Armstrong pictured above — lying together in the cemetery at Fairmount beneath a marble slab decorated with finials that look to have been prised from some monumental bannister’s newel posts — are the couple who figure so prominently in the strange case of Mrs. Alice Faulkner / Forkner, one as assailant, the other as briber. If I think it’s likely that this is, in fact, the case — and I do — then this surmise rests on a piece of evidence that, while circumstantial and fragile, is just odd and unlikely enough to be, if not compelling, then spooky, which is nearly as good in the courts of law where I hang out.
Let’s give our attention over to John Armstrong’s co-accused, he of the many aliases, Fred W_____. It’s striking that in the reporting of the assault, nothing is said of the men beyond the recording — in Fred’s case, inaccurately — of their names. Only once, briefly, in all the reports I’ve read is there a qualifier attached to either of the accused, and that was when Armstrong was pegged as coming from “a good family.” Otherwise, his relatives, connections, profession, habits are undescribed, presumably because there was no need. Presumably, it was understood that everyone reading these small-town papers would simply be in the know, wouldn’t require the outline coloured in. No one took into account the puerile requirements of a nosey parker in another country, in another century that wasn’t even the twentieth. I am assuming that this John Armstrong is the same John Armstrong, sometimes identified as John L. Armstrong, who had a sizeable farm north of town, who was the object of a peace bond when he threatened to shoot oil and gas workers who tried to come onto his property to attend to a well there, who was sued by a man he roughed up in a grocery store, and who suffered facial lacerations when he was struck in the face by a flying cuspidor during a bar fight. That John, no one nicknamed “lamby;” that John had a temper on him, for sure.
But what about Fred? Does it not strike you as odd — for so I am struck — that no one would be able to get his name right? Of course, there are all kinds of reasons for slip-ups in reporting; they can happen at so many stages of the game. Maybe the typesetters were coming back from a liquid lunch, maybe the reporter was taking shorthand notes in a courtroom, and couldn’t make out a name as it was read, maybe an editor was asleep at the switch. That such an error might insinuate its way into the public record once or twice makes perfect sense, but given that there are fully five variant spellings of Fred’s surname, it makes me wonder if perhaps they didn’t know him, that there was no shared knowledge of an established spelling, that he was come-from-away, not a local.
All that said, if you look closely enough you’ll find that, eventually, the Elwood Free Press, the Indianapolis Journal, and the Indianapolis News did manage to reach, on the surname question, an orthographic consensus: Fred Wertner is how he’s identified in those papers, clearly and consistently, if only eventually. So, let’s assume, or at least allow for the possibility, that Wertner is accurate. Excavate a little, and you’ll find that there lived, at just this time, in California, in Pleasant Valley, near the community of Winters, which is to the north and east of Napa, halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, a Mr. Fred (F. N.) Wertner. He was in the fruit business, an orchardist.
About Fred I know not much. He’s long dead, exited this life in 1916, and is buried, under a simple stone, in the cemetery in Winters. Over a period of about 20 years, his name would appear, four or five times annually, in local papers, or in Sacramento, or San Francisco, or, as above, in Los Angeles. Most often, it’s attached to brief stories pertaining to the fruit harvest. He’s selling the first figs of the year, or is sending apricots to Chicago for the World Fair, or is being named the Winters representative to the National Fruits Growers’ Association. Now and again, he’s included in a social note. He and his wife are rusticating in the mountains, they’ve taken a two week trip here or there, usually by buggy, they’ve enjoyed a fine Thanksgiving feast.
Absolutely nothing I’ve read about Fred Wertner sends up a flag of warning emblazoned with the word “Rapist.” He does seem to be a mild magnet for chaos, however. A bridge gives way as he’s driving a horse and cart across it. He’s standing on a barn roof watching a nearby fire rage and is nearly taken out by shrapnel from an exploding oil barrel. In 1891, 15-year old Jessie Anderson, a young woman visiting the Wertner home, is seized by fit of uncontrollable vomiting, hemorrhages, and dies. Fred had a brother, Benjamin, who, later in life, married a woman named Nellie Simmons. Nellie proved to be a bit of an adventurer, a launcher of legal actions. She brings to her landlady’s doorstep a $20,000 defamation suit after a perceived slight and impugning of character. She leads a kind of class action on behalf of 10 assorted cousins to address their exclusion from the will of a wealthy relative, a sea captain. That was settled in their favour in 1916, the year Fred died, and the year Nellie died, too, as it turns out, stomach cancer.
Fred’s own health is occasionally noteworthy, probably only on very slow news days.
Here we have one of my translucent shreds of evidence to suggest that Fred Wertner, of Winters, California, whose bout with la grippe was getting in the way of the melon harvest in 1896, might possibly be the same Fred Wertner — unlike “John Armstrong,” NOT a common name — who landed in jail in Anderson, Indiana, in 1898. John Armstrong, i.e. John L. Armstrong, was known as “The Melon King of East Indiana.” Watermelon, and its various sugary, watery, rind-girded cousins, were John Armstrong’s game. It could, of course, be entirely coincidental that the two men arrested for the assault perpetrated against Alice Faulkner / Forkner shared, by sheer dint of chance, the names of two other men with a professional interest in melon husbandry. But then again…
There’s something else about Fred. He’s mentioned in passing, just once, in a local history, Winters, by Dorothy M. O’Neill, published in 2009. Fred’s name appears in the caption to a photo from round about 1900 of “The Parker and Wertner Hardware and Harness Shop.” You can just make out the figure of a woman seated in a buggy; she’s identified as Mrs. Fred Wertner, Margaret. Margaret was, in fact, Fred’s mother; she could have been Mrs. Fred Wertner were our Fred named for his father, but to this fact of parentage I can’t speak. Margaret died in 1904, in San Francisco, to which city Fred was native. The person who most reliably would have answered to the call of “Mrs. Fred Wertner,” in Winters, in 1900, was the woman to whom Fred was, in fact, married, Celestia Jane Austin Parker Wertner, 1844 - 1927.
The hardware and harness shop where the photo was taken, with her mother-in-law in the carriage, would have been a business Celestia owned in association with her son, T. H. Parker, 1863 - 1944. Gilbert Parker, father of T.H., was Celestia’s first husband; he died in 1877. Fred was husband number two. Now, if there was an obituary for Fred Wertner, I haven’t been able to find it. He falls away from the news, or it falls away from him, round about 1912, and his death, in 1916, excited not a murmur. Celestia, however, was much fussed over.
I am writing this on Friday, January 13, and I note, with interest, that it was on this very day, a Thursday, in 1927, that her obituary appeared on the front page of The Woodland Daily Democrat. (FYI, “Yolomatron” isn’t an endearment that’s passed out of style, it’s an example of a spacer omitted by a headline writer. Yolo is the county wherein Winters lies.)
I draw your attention to the interesting — interesting, at least, for the argument I’m making — fact that Celestia’s family came from eastern Indiana, the same precinct where John Armstrong held the title of Melon King.
So — how could it have happened? Did Fred and Celestina decide, in 1898, to travel to Indiana on a family visit? Did Mrs. Wertner want to kick over some old traces, revisit her past? Might she have been acquainted, from girlhood, with May Armstrong, nee Whitney, married to John; May, mother to many, whose brother made a fortune in the drain tile business in Indianapolis? Did it happen that Wertner, the Californian, and Armstrong, the Hoosier, met via their spouses? Or was there possibly a fruit growers’ convention where they collided at some session pertaining to acreage and yield, and recognized in one another kindred spirits, and whooped it up, and went on the prowl in the streets of Anderson, looking for action which they found in the unwilling person of Mrs. Alice Faulkner? These scenarios are speculative to the extent of being ridiculous, far-fetched, but hardly more so than the off-chance that in that cell in Anderson, on that charge, would be two men who just happen to share the names of men who happen to be involved in the melon industry, albeit in different parts of the country.
The past is its own tide. It’s always going to take more than it gives, and it doesn’t matter how much you fight or struggle against it or try to plead or exert your own will, it’s always going to follow its own mind, its own schedule, and it’s never leave you quite enough to work with. Was Fred Wertner Fred Wertner? Was John Armstrong John Armstrong? Damned if I know. But there’s someone whose name is inscribed on that stone who’d be the perfect person to ask. Her story, next time.
So. A few points:
1. re Yolomatron. The demands of right and left justification In newspapers and magazines leads to infelicities in spacing or hyphenation. I’m a ragged right fan as a result, but so far New Yorker and Globe and Mail don’t agree. Neatness is all.
2. Reading this entry took me back to Sunday afternoon in my grandparents’ living room where my sister and I sat on the floor playing snakes and ladders while the great aunts and uncles chatted about the secrets of our small southwestern Ontario town and who accused whom of what and how it was all swept under the carpet. We were waiting for the chicken to roast and my mother and grandmother to mash the potatoes, make the gravy and get dinner on the table. We hoped there would be pie.
Then the women did the dishes while the men smoked cigars and played cribbage.
And now on a Sunday afternoon fascinated by your sleuthing, and probably the age of those elderly raconteurs back in Petrolia, I’m wondering why I didn’t listen more carefully.
Thank doG you are back!