Matthew at the beach . . . actually his front yard during spring flooding of the Mississippi River in 1946 © Mathew Van Tassell
Matthew at the beach . . .actually his front yard during spring flooding of
the Mississippi River in 1946
© Mathew Van Tassell
Pig’s Eye Island owes its name to a nineteenth-
century trader, Pig’s Eye Parrant, who
sold liquor and guns along the Mississippi’s
watery highway. The nearby settlers took
his name for their growing town until they
decided the more mundane sobriquet Saint
Paul might lend more dignity to a territory
that was soon to become a state. Pig’s Eye
Island kept the rascal’s name because no one
gave a damn about a backwater stretch so
swampy and prone to flooding. Only individuals
too crazy to have any sense or too poor
to afford decent land would ever settle there.

Divorced geographically from the growing
settlement by a curve in the river’s
course and mentally from the attention of
the town’s more prosperous inhabitants, the island soon became
almost forgotten by all but the poor and the crazy. Or by the unfortunate
souls who might be both.

My brothers, sisters, and I were raised on Pig’s Eye Island in the
1940s. Situated about three miles south and downstream from
Saint Paul’s sewage disposal plant, we were in an ideal position
to retrieve any floating debris that might wash up on the island’s
shores during one of the annual floods. We were little pirates, constantly
searching for hidden treasure in the flotsam that found its
way to our private beach. There was all sorts of interesting booty:
furniture, parts of buildings, lanterns, old river buoys, toys. We
claimed them as our own.

Our house was a green tarpaper shack measuring about twenty
by thirty feet. There was a kitchen, the only entrance or exit door,
and a two-burner stove and icebox. Another item in the tiny room
was a slop pail. We kids used this as a toilet during the winter,
when it was too cold to make the frigid trek to the outhouse. Every
morning my father would take the bucket and empty its contents
into the two-holer some distance from our shack.

To the left of the kitchen, another room ran the length of the
house. There four of my brothers and sisters slept, along with my
mother and father. For some reason, possibly because I was first
born, I was privileged to have not-quite-sole possession of the
remaining room at the rear of the shack. I shared this space with
the oldest of my sisters, Joy, who slept in a crib near one of the
room’s two windows.

We had no electricity, and for water we had a pump outside that
we primed each time we used it. On its handle hung half a coconut
shell, used as a family drinking cup. Kerosene lamps provided dim
light at night. A battery-powered radio was the only concession to
the twentieth century in our nineteenth-century lives. It brought
the outside world into our consciousness. Shows like Inner Sanctum,
Grand Central Station, Jack Benny, Just Plain Bill, Fibber McGee and
Molly, Stella Dallas,
and The Shadow fueled our imaginations. In our
minds, we saw the scenes these shows thrust at us using only voices
and sound effects. Inner Sanctum, with its creaking door and sinister
voice “welcoming” us inside, could scare the bejeepers out of us.
One payday night, my father was entertaining himself at the
Hook ’Em Cow Bar. My mother and I were listening to Lights Out, a
show designed to cause nightmares. That night the story was about
an escaped homicidal maniac hiding in the woods in the dark of
night. Since it was black as pitch outside and we were sitting in the
middle of the island’s thick woods, it was not hard for us to conjure
the maniac’s murderously hostile eyes peering at us through
our lamplit window. My mother was as frightened as I was, which
served to scare me even more. Until my father came home late that
night, we were too petrified with fear to sleep.

This was the power the brown box could wield, and the writers
who wrote the stories engendering those reactions certainly
earned their pay. Without the crutch of television’s moving images,
our minds were free to manufacture their own, more frightening
pictures. Mom said she didn’t understand why they would broadcast
something that might scare someone in their audience to
death, yet the next time we heard that creaking door, there we
were, glued to the box, albeit with our feet off the floor.

One spring in the late 1940s, my father helped Richie Dufor
throw up a shack near our own. Dufor had just been paroled from
prison, had nowhere to live, and my dad felt sorry for him. Living
with Richie was a woman named Ciel and her son, Kenny. Richie
scared the daylights out of us kids. Often when he was drunk, he
would fly into rages. Sometimes we could hear Ciel crying, and
several times my father went down to their place and threatened
Richie to keep him from abusing her.

Late one night, while my father was gone celebrating payday,
and after Richie and Ciel had been living near us for several months,
my mother woke me. “Look out the window,” she commanded in
a whisper as she roused me from sleep. Her tone communicated
urgency combined with fear, and I was instantly awake. I heard
animal-like noises coming from outside, and my heart began to
beat fast as I imagined all kinds of reasons for the horrific howling
coming from the direction of Richie and Ciel’s shack.

Mathew’s early practice as a carpenter in front of the family home on Pig’s Eye Island © Mathew Van Tassell
Mathew’s early practice as a carpenter in front of the family home on Pig’s Eye Island
© Mathew Van Tassell
“Come here, quick.” She was at the window now, and I could
see an orange glow through the white curtain. I untangled myself
from my blanket and hurried to her side. “Look at their house.” I
looked and saw flames roaring from the windows and door of the
black tarpaper structure. Backlit by fire, the shack looked spooky.
I crouched by the window, my mother close beside me, watching
the terrible show. From somewhere I heard myself say, “Isn’t that a
shame,” and felt, rather than saw, my mother look at me.
Outside, Richie screamed and laughed as he prowled the dark,
away from the area lit by the fire. It was him I heard howling when I
awakened. Sometimes his voice trailed off into soft, crooning cries
of “Ciel, Ciel,” her name drawn out long and mournfully, like the wail
of the steam locomotives we heard in the night. Horrified, I wondered
if Kenny and his mother might still be in the blazing shack.

My mother left my side and went to the door. Taking one of our
kitchen chairs, she wedged it beneath the knob. Seconds later, we
heard Richie at the front of our house.
“Phyllis. Hey, Phyllis.” His voice had changed to
a harsh whisper as he called through the door. We
heard him on the wooden step outside as he shifted
his weight. The nails creaked. “Hey, Phyllis. I got
those canned tomatoes of yours.”

My mother motioned me not to make a sound,
but she needn’t have bothered. My throat was paralyzed.
I crept closer to her as she reached into the
corner where Dad kept his rifle.

“That’s all right, Richie,” she called out. “I gave them to Ciel
to keep.” As she unwrapped the oily rag my dad kept around the
weapon, she motioned for me to hand her the box of cartridges sitting
on the cupboard top.

“No, Phyllis. Ciel said she wanted me to give them back to you.
We won’t be needing them. Come on. Open the door and I’ll set
them inside for you.” His voice was calm and persuasive. I looked at
my mother to make sure she wasn’t falling for it.
She was loading the rifle.

“Thanks, Richie,” she said through the door as she slid the rifle’s
bolt home. “You keep them. I think you’d better get away from the
house now.”

There was silence for several seconds on the other side of the
door. The smooth metallic noise made by the gun’s bolt seemed to
serve as final punctuation to my mother and Richie’s conversation.
The step creaked as a weight was removed from it. We moved to
the window and saw Richie’s silhouette outlined in flames as he ran
past the pyre that had been his home. We heard the grind of his
car’s starter, and then he roared past our house, heading up the
road with his lights off.

My mother sat in a chair by the table with Dad’s rifle across her
lap. I looked out the window at what was left of the shack. The fire
had nearly gone out, for there was almost nothing left to burn.
Red-hot embers outlined its perimeter. Here and there, stubborn
little flames worked on something that had not burned, but nothing
remained above the height of the long grass in the yard.

We didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, and at dawn all there
was to show that we once had had neighbors was a pile of smoking
ashes. When Dad came home, we told him what had happened and
the way Richie had tried to get Mom to open the door. Dad unloaded
the rifle and rewrapped it in the cloth. He told Mom even if she had
never learned to drive, he was glad she had paid attention when he
taught her about guns.

Later we learned that Ciel had taken Kenny and left after becoming
fed up with Richie’s abuse. Richie went berserk when he found
them gone, and that was what had led to their house’s cremation.
That Richie was a dangerous man when crossed no one doubted.
But until that night, none of the adults who knew him realized to
what lengths he would go to prove just how crazy he really was.