CHAPTER ELEVEN
Albert Jr.
Albert Gates Jr. found a young woman by the name of Sissy Cowan and he married her. He fathered Abigail first, Albert III a year later. His family lived in the old Gates house while his father lived in the new log cabin. The one which sat on top of that place.
Albert Sr. still dug with Albert Jr. right beside him and the hole never produced so much as a drop of water. Its contents changed from sand to something thicker, something that didn’t fill in as they went. On its edges, they found a layer of rock and it was six feet from the earth on its inside to the sand on its outside. The rock chimney guided them down.
They dug through the day and into the evening most every night, stopping to eat and spelling one another. They built more lifts and hung more lamps. Vagrants helped, lured by the promise of food. They came and worked with uneasy breathing and protest. They said they couldn’t take it anymore. They said the work or the place made them sick, that it darkened their souls. They said they had nightmares, even when they were awake. They had unexplained pain, bouts of sadness, violent outbursts. The Alberts forced them to work until they could work no longer. The vagrants would pray before entering the dig site, work wide-eyed and pray again as soon as they were clear of that cursed place.
In the summer of 1839. Albert Jr. met two men outside of a tavern and offered them food for work. After buying the men a round of beers, they followed. One of the men, called Jackson, was from Texas. The other, Wills, came from Nebraska. They met in Kentucky working a farm in ’37 and had traveled together as a team, living off the land and working odd jobs. After a hearty meal prepared by Sissy and only two hours’ work, Jackson threw down his shovel and scrambled to escape. Albert Sr. followed him. “You ate our food, you owe me work,” he growled.
“No sir. I can’t. I’ll pay you back. I will work somewhere else. Just not here. Please not here,” the man said in a sobbing Texas drawl. Albert Jr. and Mr. Wills followed.
Albert Sr. stabbed him in the throat while the others watched. His son stared with fascination while his father grinned and lit a cigarette through blood soaked fingers. Wills shouted curses and struggled to get past them and up the rudimentary steps, but Albert Jr. caught him near the pit’s mouth. He shoved Wills just before he reached the final lift, tossing him down the steep incline where his neck, and several other bones, snapped like dry twigs. Afterward, both Gates men smoked, drank whiskey and laughed into the night. The digging had stopped, but the blood seemed to appease the hole and whatever dark magic it held. At dawn, Sissy came to the hole with breakfast, as she often did out of love for her husband. She had no love for that place. She screamed at the sight of the blood that covered her father-in-law.
“They were getting in the way of progress,” Albert Sr. explained. He and his son sat on the front porch of the log home.
“Who? What happened?”
Albert fixed her with a stare. He clenched his teeth as he spoke. “As I said, they were in the way.”
Sissy gasped and put a hand to her chest. Tears fell from her eyes.
“What did you do to those poor men?”
Albert Sr. grunted. Sissy turned to her husband who was grinning. “Albert, this isn’t right. None of this is right. God judges those who…”
He smacked his wife hard across the face. She screamed at him out of rage and fear and while his father watched, he beat Sissy bloody and bruised assuring she would never cross him again. Albert Sr. opened the basket of breakfast and began to eat, still covered in the dried blood of Mr. Jackson.
Albert Jr. dragged Sissy back to their house and dumped her at the front door. She cried in a heap until the children were at her side. He left her there and went back to his father. The two men dragged the bodies from the pit, out of the house and to a sandy clearing where they lay them in a large mound of fire ants. They watched as the tiny insects covered the bodies, and over the next twelve hours, devoured their flesh.
Albert Jr. and Sissy raised Abigail and Albert III. Sissy never complained outwardly, although she prayed for strength and that she might keep healthy, compassionate children. She prayed for her husband and for her father-in-law. The more she prayed, the bigger the rift between her and Albert Jr. grew.
By the time he was six years old, Albert the third had proven a worthy helper and was welcomed by the other two generations of Gates men into their madness. He helped work the land, and with various repairs and construction on the old Gates home. Eventually, he was curious about where his father and grandfather were going each evening.
“Momma, where does poppa go?” he had asked since he could speak.
“Work,” was her standard response.
“What work does he do?”
“He is a fisherman,” she said. It was a lie. Once he was a fisherman, but he had only been going to that awful place—the death hole she had taken to calling it when she prayed.
It was when he started asking if he could go with his father that Sissy became scared for her son. “No,” she said. “He is busy and it is very hard work.”
Albert III was a curious boy, an active boy, and he disregarded his mother’s words as children often do. He asked his father at a rare family dinner, “Where do you go when you work?”
Sissy tried to stifle the boy, to distract the older men, but it was too late. Father and Grandfather looked at one another and an agreement passed between them. Sissy’s face lost all of its color, but she dared not argue for fear Albert Jr. might lay hands on her again, or worse, on the children. The boy learned the family business and grew strong.
Some months later, Abigail died. The story that was told around town involved fever and disease. Sissy dissented, blaming the men, blaming the devil, blaming the hole. She was seen around town in tattered clothing and raving like a lunatic. Albert Jr. would go to town and collect her and take her home. Once he grew tired of tracking her down, Sissy disappeared as well.
Later that year, Albert Sr. died. Albert Jr. found his father slumped inside the pit with a pick in his hand. He left him on the tunnel floor to rot. When Albert III was near forty years old, he found his father the same way.
Albert III grew and married and had a son named James who grew and married and had a son named Robert who grew, married and had a son named Robert Jr. Robert Jr. and his wife’s first son died. They then had another son who died followed by a daughter who lived. In the summer of 1941 Loretta Elizabeth Gates was born to Robert Jr. and his wife. She was a daddy’s girl, and even in his maniacal state, he doted on her. His wife was unable to bear any more children and when she couldn’t provide him a son, and was of no more use to him, he killed her and left her in the pit. Loretta never knew what happened to her mother.
Robert Jr. spent the next ten years running electricity down into the hole. Electrical cable, and hundreds of light bulbs were hooked into the chimney walls. When the hole went beyond the reach of electricity, he used oil lamps and eventually lamps that ran on battery power.
After his wife disappeared, Robert was cautious. Most of his public time was spent with Loretta. New women came eventually from as far as Raleigh to the north, Charleston to the south. Dozens of them over the years fell for his charms or for various false promises. Some were willing, some were prostitutes, some he kidnapped and raped, but all were taken to the terrible place only to find it was Robert Jr.’s shortcoming and not the women. He was no longer able to bear children.
He tried hiring help and in moments of desperation, he kidnapped a male child, anyone who might carry on after his death, but the child was weak and homesick and terrified and didn’t survive. There was one constant in all of this. Loretta.
He put the work on Loretta and found she was physically and mentally capable. She worked alongside him after school and on the weekends. After high school graduation, she worked her shift at the textile mill followed by her shift in the hole. When Robert Jr. died, she continued that schedule up until she herself retired and worked on the property during
the day, weeding and planting and doing general maintenance—keeping up appearances. Townsfolk thought she was crazy. None of them knew her, but the label was assured by her grandfather and her father.
When problems arose in the house, she solved them and never used outside help. She never brought men home. She never faltered from her plan, even without knowing its outcome. It was just her life. What Robert Gates Jr. didn’t know was that Loretta would never have a husband. He didn’t know she would never have children. He didn’t know that the job—passed down for seven generations—would end with her.
Loretta didn’t care what the people of Smithville thought about her or her family. She only knew what she had to do. She had to have order. She had to maintain her property…
…And at night she had to dig.