I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SKATING POLLY featuring LOUISE POST & NINA GORDON OF VERUCA SALT-New Trick EP (2017).

So Kelli (17) and Peyton (21) have added their brother Kurtis (20) on drums which allows the grrrls to focus on guitars and bass.  This EP, as the name states, was co-written with Louise and Nina of Veruca Salt

“Louder in Outer Space” is the catchiest thing they’ve done by far.  The harmonies are great and the chorus (and even the verse) has the clear impact of Veruca Salt.  The co-songwriting has upped their game in a number of ways too with interesting vocal harmonies.

“Hail Mary” has a real Nirvana feel in the chord choices and in Kelli’s vocal delivery.  The addition of Peyton’s backing vocals in the chorus are a wonderful detail.

There’s a simple bass and drum set up on “Black Sky.”  But when it gets going, it’s the most Veruca Salt of the three songs. It’s even more so when the song pauses and someone (even their voices intertwine) sings “the monster of a sky.”  Then end the song with the following section, the way the vocals (all four of them, I assume) swirl around is really great.  It’s such a terrifically catchy song.  And a dynamite EP.

[READ: December 17, 2017] “Lynch Law”

This story was constructed around what I assumed was a fabricated title but which is very much real: Mounted Police Life in Canada, A Record of Thirty-One Years’ Service by Superintendent Richard Burton Deane (you can see the whole book here).  I was willing to accept the “truth” of the book even if it was made up, but knowing that it was real makes this a more interesting (but not more enjoyable) story.

Basically what we have is Deane’s official transcript of events and then a woman’s explanation of the story from her point of view.

The story begins with quotes from the manuscript:

 On the evening of February 13, 1895, it was reported to me at Lethbridge that a man named Willis had blown his brains out. I went to his house and found the report in no way exaggerated, as brains were scattered all over one of the walls. He had put the muzzle of a Winchester rifle into his mouth and pressed the trigger with his great toe. The deceased, whom I had known for some years, had had good situations, but had lost them through drink, and he had been steadily going down the hill for some time, his earnings being very precarious.

After this introduction, the story is written from the point of view of a woman who had arrived in Lethbridge to be married in 19890.  She met Willis at the train and despite her instincts she stayed with him.

At this time Willis was out of work and the wolf was at his door. The household was kept going by a lodger named James Ronald. “But for him,” Mrs. Willis said on one occasion, “we should have had nothing to eat.” Willis had, however, frequently complained to various people of the undue intimacy between his lodger and his wife—and not a little indignation had been aroused by the treatment which the husband complained of having received.

She retorts: But I had not. James was a soft baby, hardly a man at all, tuft-bearded, lip-dangling.  It was not like that between us.

On one occasion when Willis arrived at home somewhat the worse for liquor he found his wife sitting in the lodger’s lap. When he remonstrated with them, the lodger put him quietly but firmly out of the house, shut the door and turned the key in the lock.

It was not like the report.  She explains that she and Willis “had not done the marriage act in many months.”  He told her he preferred less abundance of the bosom.  Although he did like her company and sitting near her.

James Ronald went away from Lethbridge for a time, but returned, and it is no disregard of the obligation de mortuis to say that when Willis readmitted Ronald to his household he knew what his past experience had been.

Ronald’s father has sent him back, basically telling him to be a man.  And to check up on his younger brother, Maxwell, then living in a tar-paper shack on the edge of town.

She says though, that one night Willis was so agitated with her that he knocked her out.  Jamie tended to her wounds and stanched the blood.  She fully believes he would have treated Willis the same if he were the injured party.  He himself had been treated badly and was a gentle soul.  Willis came back to get some money, but when he saw what he had done to her, that’s when he took the rifle to himself.

The story doesn’t end there, though.  When people heard what happened to Willis, a lynch mob went after Jamie at his brother’s house.

James was pulled out of bed, tarred, feathered, and led with a rope round his neck by a half-mile route to the front door of the Lethbridge House, the principal hotel in the town. He was pushed into the hall, the door was temporarily fastened from without, and the masked gang rapidly and quietly dispersed. James Ronald was then at liberty to make his way home without molestation. It was rather a stormy night, with drifting snow; a night on which few people would be about the streets, and no noise was made.

She had seen feathers on a man’s rifle.  It was Sergeant Phair–he was part of the lynch mob.  She told Maxwell to inform Deane.  Was it likely that Deane would turn in one of his own men?  And even if the Sergeant is brought to justice, what does that leave a woman in these circumstances.

I found this story to be a bit slow and hard to follow–but I think that’s mostly because there seemed to be a lot of characters all with similar names.  It is fascinating though that in real life someone was tarred and feathered in a community.