Murder in Little Egypt (3 page)

Peck Cavaness knew and worried about the beatings. If he could not tell Noma how to be a mother, he knew he would have to help his son become a man. One afternoon when he was off work from the railroad, Peck stood in the backyard near the run where he kept his two hunting dogs and watched Dale come home from the sixth grade. Up the graveled alley he saw his son running from a crowd of bigger boys who shouted after him and chased him until they noticed his father and retreated.

“Don’t you ever let me catch you running away like that again,” Peck told Dale. “The next time that happens, you stand your ground, hear?”

Peck let his son know about the time a couple of old boys from the Charlie Birger gang had tried to intimidate him. Peck had been standing on the Eldorado platform waiting for Noma to return from visiting relatives. These gangsters had ordered him to move on. They said they were clearing the platform for somebody important. Peck told them they could go to hell, there wasn’t anybody more important than his wife. One of them started to reach inside his coat for his pistol, but Peck decked him with a quick right cross. While the other one stood there like a dummy, stunned for a moment, Peck lit out, ran·home, and fetched his shotgun. When he made it back to the station, the gangsters were gone and Noma was waiting for him, wondering why he had shown up to meet her carrying his gun.

“I wasn’t about to let some two-bit gangsters push me around,” Peck said, “and they knew it. You stand and fight or don’t bother coming home.”

For the rest of his life Dale spoke of that moment as a turning point. The next day he faced his tormentors and fought. He found that he could fight like hell. He was a small boy but he used his feet as well as his fists and, when he had to, his teeth. The word got around that if you got into a scrap with Curly Cavaness, as he was called, you remembered it. He could pick his own opponents and found that he could take punishment without giving ground, could enuure pain, and that not giving up and not caring if you got hurt meant more than how big you were.

The knickerbockers gave way to jeans. The violin was left behind. He kept up with his studies, but he began spending more time on sports, and Noma had to relent when her boy came home as dirty as the next kid.

Dale had not really needed the knickers to know that he and his family were better off than most of the people in Eldorado. Throughout the Depression, six out of ten men were out of work and on relief in Little Egypt. Few could pay taxes, and running water was cut off in most towns by 1932. People dug wells in their yards and reverted to outdoor privies. Many lost their electricity and saw their houses fall apart for lack of paint and other maintenance.

Southern Illinois depended on coal, and the mines shut down one after another. In 1925, twenty-five mines in Saline County had been operating; by 1939 the number was down to ten, some of these strip mines requiring few workers. In Eldorado—called one of
Seven Stranded Coal Towns
in a report by the Works Projects Administration—the typical family of four, taking into account all available forms of relief, averaged about forty dollars a month in income. Half of this went for food. People ate a lot of water gravy—bacon dripping, flour, salt, and water, poured over bread if they had it. When lodges and churches distributed surplus government food, people lined up for it, humiliated but starving. In the hot summers, if a family had a nickel to spare, they could make a twelve-and-a-half-pound block of precious ice, wrapped in rags and stowed under the house, last for three or four days, meaning the magic of iced tea and lemonade. A man might find a day’s work now and then in a mine, if he could get transportation to the job. He could pick peaches for a few days a year, getting paid mostly in fruit. He could collect scrap metal and coat hangers, make flower pots out of tin cans, or clean tombstones in an effort to create goods and services no one wanted or could afford.

Through all these years Peck Cavaness was able to bring home his paycheck, and Noma kept house meticulously and could afford the materials to do so. Her hardwood floors shone; her pots and pans gleamed; no cobweb lasted through a day. It was a modest, white frame house, two bedrooms and a porch; but Peck and Noma cared for it religiously. Peck could repair just about anything, and if he wanted a rest, he could get the whole house painted for five dollars, with scores of men desperate for the work.

On December 3, 1932, Dale wrote a letter:

Dear Santa Clause,

I have been a fairly good boy. . . .

He asked for a football and a bathrobe, a desk and a watch. His mother, he told Santa Claus, wanted a dress and a new floor lamp. His daddy wanted a billfold, a new tie, and a bird dog. That was quite a Christmas list for any Eldorado family that year, when the last thing most local men needed was a new billfold. A typical Christmas present was a pair of those overalls from Sears, and many families saved every penny they had for the spring, when they could buy some chicks from the Otis Carter Hatchery at a dollar apiece. A few White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds in your yard meant eggs and the occasional fryer throughout the year. Every morning at six A.M. over station WEBQ in Harrisburg, Otis Carter broadcast the virtues of his chicks “direct by remote control” from his Eldorado hatchery on a country-music program which was followed at seven by
The Baptist Hour
. Carter’s sales took off, chickens being about the only thriving business in Egypt then.

If Peck Cavaness had been a religious man, which he was not, leaving the praying to his wife, he would have thanked the Lord at grace before Sunday dinner of chicken or pork roast. He was grateful that he and his family were spared the hunger and misery so many of their neighbors were suffering. The Cavanesses had many other advantages. Because Peck had a car and could afford gasoline, he was able to take his son fishing and hunting all over Egypt. By the time Dale was twelve they would head for the woods on a free autumn Saturday to get some quail, which Noma would fry up with her special brown gravy rich with pan juices. Dale quickly became an ace with a shotgun. He learned from his father how to imagine an invisible line between the gunsight and the target, and he had terrific eyesight and reflexes. He went after birds like a soldier stalking the enemy. Before long he had his own gun and was outshooting his dad.

Dale wanted to win at everything. When there was no one around, he practiced sports by himself, shooting baskets and throwing balls and running wind sprints to improve speed and stamina. He would challenge anybody to a race and was always surprising boys bigger and supposedly faster than he by beating them in the last few steps.

In the summers he and his dad, sometimes with a couple of Dale’s schoolmates along, would take drives together, expeditions over to Shawneetown to swim off the levee and eat fried catfish, or to one of the county fairs. Peck would point out places of interest. Along Route 13 near Crab Orchard, Peck would stop to explore the burned-out shell of Charlie Birger’s cabin, Shady Rest. Men still gathered in a clearing in the woods behind the cabin to throw dice, stage cockfights and reminisce about the famous gangster. It was fun to search for spent cartridges buried under leaves or in the earth and imagine what gangster or lawman had been the target of the bullet.

There was so much in Little Egypt to appeal to the contrary in a boy, enough story, myth, legend, and history to inspire a Huck Finn or a Dracula. Everybody knew about Mike Fink the river rat who was so tough that he called himself half man and half alligator. Down at Cave-in-Rock you could play at river pirates and search for bloodstains left by the outlaws on thé walls of the big cavern. There were bloodstains too at the Old Slave House off the Harrisburg-Shawneetown road, a colonial mansion on a hill where runaway slaves had been held for resale before the Emancipation Proclamation. Under the eaves on the third floor, tiny cells with wooden bunks, chain anchors embedded in the floor, bars on the doorframes, and a torture rack made of rough timbers evoked the pro-slavery sentiments of Egypt and the peculiarly legal presence of slaves in this southeastern corner of the supposedly free state of Illinois. At the rear of the house a double-door carriage entrance permitted a cargo of runaways to be delivered discreetly, unloaded out of sight, and hurried up a winding stair to the prison above. The owner, John Crenshaw, an Englishman, entertained grandly on the ground floor with profits from his upstairs trade and from the nearby salt works, manned by slaves brought in under a special loophole enacted by the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1819. It was said that after dark at the Old Slave House you could hear strange cries emanating from the upper rooms and the mournful strains of spirituals.

Until 1938 Potts’ Inn still stood on a hill between Cave-in-Rock and Shawneetown. More bloodstains there, more nightmares. Everyone knew its grisly story, and it remained a popular spot to visit after the original building was torn down. There in the 1830s Billy Potts and his wife had kept a tavern. They were in league with James Ford, called Satan’s Ferryman, who either robbed and murdered travelers crossing the Ohio or sent them along Ford’s Ferry Road to Potts’ Inn. Mr. and Mrs. Potts would feed their guests and fill them with drink and then slice them up in their beds or stab them in the back as they stooped to drink from a clear spring on the hill. At first light they chopped their victims into pieces and buried them in the yard.

One day their son, Billy junior, returned home after a long absence. His parents did not know him with his long black beard, and he delighted in fooling them. They fed him and got him drunk. At midnight as the young man bent over the spring to drink, Billy Potts stabbed his son in the back, the spring ran red with his blood, and Mrs. Potts cut him into pieces and buried him.

In the morning Billy junior’s friends came looking for him. Mr. and Mrs. Potts said no man of that description had visited the inn. They had not seen their son for ten years, they said. But when the friends left, Billy Potts and his wife dug up the remains. Under a shoulder blade, beside the fatal wound, they saw their son’s black birthmark, shaped like a four-leaf clover.

On Potts’ Hill, near the spring that runs clear again, a sign stands to remind the visitor of the boy who was marked for death and of the father who killed his son.

3

IF VINCE LOMBARDI HAD NOT SAID THAT WINNING ISN’T everything, it’s the only thing, Dale Cavaness might have said it; he certainly believed it. By the time he entered Eldorado Township High School in 1939, Dale was what sportswriters used to call a real scrapper. Winning by intimidation was another phrase he might have coined, making up for what he lacked in height and weight with a fierce aggressiveness. He would challenge anybody to arm wrestle or Indian wrestle, the veins standing out on his temples and neck, breaking the other fellow down by force of will. Strong arms and shoulders made him more powerful than he appeared. He worked on building up his strength. At home he did push-ups and chinned himself from a doorsill every morning and evening.

He also made a lot of noise. In a different environment Dale would have been called a loudmouth, but the rugged atmosphere of southern Illinois, where most men earned their living through their sweat, suited his style. “Hey, Rudie!” Dale would shout to a buddy, or, “Let’s get all the Rudies together and have a game!” It was a term he had picked up from a carney at a county fair. Nobody knew exactly what a Rudie was, but the name conveyed what Dale liked best, rough-and-tumble, rowdy times with plenty of shouting and shoving and competition.

Dale was a great one for practical jokes, the thumbtack left on the chair seat or pennies rolled down the classroom aisle to drive the teacher to distraction. Once in a while somebody would think that Dale had gone too far, as when he asked to see a girl’s new watch and then dropped it and stepped on it accidentally on purpose. He made himself a lifelong enemy with that one. The laughter he provoked could quickly sour into a fistfight; but as a good student and a school leader he was above suspicion from authorities and could get away with pranks other boys could not afford to dare, making him of the crowd and yet above it.

He was always near the top of his class in grades, science and mathematics coming most easily to him. In his senior year he earned a certificate of merit as one of the fifteen best students in a class of a hundred and nineteen. Other students sought his help, which he willingly gave, unless the fellow having trouble was too thick to understand. Dale did not mind telling the slow-witted not to waste his time. Only his history teacher seemed indifferent to his brilliance, giving him consistent B’s and earning Dale’s resentment. Dale publicly vowed revenge.

The other students admired him enough to elect him president of the Latin Club and president of the Hi-Y, a service club sponsored by the YMCA and stressing leadership and clean, Christian virtues. He became sophomore-class president and then junior-class president. No other student during his time at Eldorado High School quite matched his combination of brains, popularity, and athletic accomplishment.

As a junior in the fall of 1941, Dale made the varsity football squad. Since he weighed only about a hundred and thirty-five pounds and was barely five feet five, he did not see much action that year. That winter and spring, however, he lettered in basketball as a guard and as a miler led the track team to an undefeated conference record. “Dale ‘Curly’ Cavaness was impressive with his 4:42.5 mile,” the Eldorado
Daily Journal
commented after the Eagles had defeated Carrier Mills and Vienna (pronounced Vyanna) in a triangular meet. Timed on his own, he was less impressive; against competition he managed the final kick to win.

In April Dale and two other Eagles, a discus thrower and a low hurdler, entered the southern-Illinois invitational at Cairo to compete against entrants from thirty-four other high schools. Winners would go on to the state championships. Dale’s Eldorado teammates did not place, and his own grit was not enough for him to win; but he finished third in the mile, twenty-five yards behind the winner, who was clocked at 4:37. (The best mile in the state that year was run by an Urbana boy at 4:28.8, twelve seconds better than Dale’s best time.) Dale’s coach told his teammates that they should look to Cavaness as an example of someone who was making the best of his ability. It was effort like his that would take a boy far in life.