The Cannibal History
On the morning of December 18th, the residents of Fallview, Oregon (not 30 minutes south of Portland) woke to find their homeless problem indisputably solved
or, Fat and Ash
On the morning of December 18th, the residents of Fallview, Oregon (not 30 minutes south of Portland) woke to find their homeless problem indisputably solved. Sometime in the night, between the moment when the last Fallview homeowner nodded off and the first awakened, every single member of the homeless population—estimated at more than 400—vanished. Thin air, to a man.
In their absence, they left 400 sets of clothes strewn along the sidewalks, streets, and alleys. “If I were a foolish man,” said Herb Morris, CPA, 47, 8212 Astoria Circuit, “I’d say they plum evaporated.”Fallview, Oregon is not a large town. Before the homeless and immediately after, the population numbered thirty-two-thousand, four-hundred-nine. “Before the homeless,” Janet Arrow, 76, unemployed, soap heiress, liked to say, “there was no poverty in Fallview.” Its residents like to call it a “bedroom community,” but it is also a community of grand ballrooms, private libraries, foyers of all sizes. It is a community where no child is ever without a swimming pool, no teen without a pool house; where none of the adults have ever touched a pool cue.
But it’s a place where you can come and carve out a life. A beautiful place. Beautiful life, too. Who could ask for more than Fallview?It has an excellent prep school (“Number 11 in the whole state,” headmaster Frank Mills would like to remind you), six fine dining options in the downtown strip (the duck orégonaise at Marc’s is of particular note), and a botanical garden that makes the whole East End smell like lilacs in the spring. “We’re proud of our little town,” Mayor Barbara Holland, 42, dynast, told Oregon magazine a year before the disappearance. “It’s not perfect, not by any means. But it’s a place where you can come and carve out a life. A beautiful place. Beautiful life, too. Who could ask for more than Fallview?”
Fallview is green. Posters in the schoolrooms, in city hall proclaim this. “It’s an important initiative we all must undertake,” said Barbara Holland, mayor, when it began. “Together we can cut emissions. We can save the planet, us, right here in Fallview.” Fallview couldn’t be greener if it tried—and it doesn’t, not really. The spruces make up for what man cannot, the silver pines too, all the conifer family. Second oldest spruce in America, Ol’ Greeney, right there in McLoughlin Park (“There’s really no way to verify that,” Fallview Director of Parks and Rec Ernie Dale admits. “But who’s gonna take the sign down? You?”). Beyond the town, the forest. Ancient ocean, very green indeed. On all sides, the forest, always, yesterday, tomorrow and forever. The forest wears Fallview like a sparkling crown.
On the night of the disappearance, the weatherpersons called for a hard freeze. Sandra Orr, WBAR, best hair in the business, called it “the first, worst weather of the year.” Max Hostis, WLFM, better-rated, said “Now would be the time to bring in all your pets and ferns, and as many kids as you can catch.” And they were brought in. All across Fallview, homeowners hunkered down, pulled out their thickest afghans. They snuggled cozy, heat blasting. Mayor Barbara Holland, dynast, meanwhile, recorded a short video. “Today we will be launching what we’ve long been calling Operation: Comfort Level.”—here she smiled, trying and failing to laugh—“The PD will be handing out heavy coats to all of the homeless in town. Thanks to everyone who donated money and clothing for this endeavor. Remember, you’re helping make Fallview a better place.” The video was posted on YouTube and received 147 views and 12 likes before it too vanished.
Who knows where all they came from? Who knows how strong they numbered, exactly? They are silent, they are gone. Al Guinness, 50, owner of the Lyceum Cineplex, remembered one of them fondly. “Always smiling, always, even in the goddamn rain. ‘I’m right as rain,’ he would say, sitting in it. Out on the stoop there. Told the ushers not to bother him. Chris was his name—or maybe Craig? Real young. Stocking cap.” Janet Arrow, 76, soap heiress, had no such reminiscence. “They were a flood. Or like those terrible zombies all the children love. Out in the streets all over, shouting. I can’t tell you how often they stepped out in front of my car, shouting. Almost gave me a heart attack. At my age!”
‘Like a flood,’ Janet Arrow keeps saying, ‘like the rush of waters.’“They were a challenge, I’ll admit,” Mayor Barbara Holland admitted in a CNN interview two days after the disappearance. “But let me be the first to express profound sorrow at the way this ended. Sorrow and confusion, Anderson.” To hear Fallview residents tell it, the homeless came out of nowhere. (“Like a flood,” Janet Arrow keeps saying, “like the rush of waters.”) One day they weren’t, one day they were. And then, once again, they weren’t. And the police picked up all their shoes off the streets.
“The police, the mayor, the fire department: everyone. Everyone in the Fallview municipal government was complicit. They’d have to be,” Esmeralda Smits, 26, Director and Digital Manager of the Oregon Collective for Homeless Relief Endeavor (OCHRE) tells everyone who will listen. Since the disappearance, more people have started doing just that. “How else can an estimated four-to-five-hundred people mysteriously disappear, Anderson? It would take a massive conspiracy.” “Well, I would like to say again,” the mayor said again, to an audience of 20-million Americans, “I have no idea how we got to this point.” And Barbara Holland—her hair and makeup well-sculpted, her suit a fabulous teal—cried on television.
People love a good mystery, but that doesn’t mean everyone always makes it to the end.Not 24 hours, and the media descended on Fallview. Pulitzer-winners on every street-corner, narrating the clean-up of heavy coats and natty jeans. In the sky, helicopters. They circled Fallview like a flock of vultures, looking for some sign of the missing. Herb Morris called the whole thing “[a]n invasion of privacy. What good’s a fence if you can just fly over it?” His home at 8212 Astoria Circuit had a huge cream-coloured stucco wall around it. “Moroccan style,” he called it, though he had never been to that country, and had never even seen real pictures. “The point is, yes, this is tragic, yes. We owe it to these people to do something. But those of us still here have our lives to live, don’t we?” America tuned in to Fallview, the whole country, or near enough. There was a senior in Iowa who never changed the channel, not for a whole month, missed all her soaps. A Mississippi junior who flunked his entire slate of finals after dreaming that he, too, had disappeared. And a hard-working woman up by Washington, D.C., who, as she watched the news, felt a sharp and uncharacteristic pain in the pit of her stomach. Ignoring it didn’t help; night and day, she felt her stomach sinking; it was always sinking. It is always sinking, the news, and rising. It moves in waves, in cycles. A month after the disappearance, a famous soprano took her life. Barbiturates. Next, a royal wedding. A war. “Thank God for war,” remarked Mayor Barbara Holland, 42, thumbs at her temples. People love a good mystery, but that doesn’t mean everyone always makes it to the end. The media, grown fat and cynical on earthquake relief efforts, Balkan conflicts, and nuclear fiasco, knew that even the miraculous tragedy in Fallview could only captivate their audience for so long. And with no resolution in sight, they abandoned one mystery for a half-dozen others.
“But where did they all go?” asks Esmeralda Smits. “We’ve listened time and again to gray-haired bureaucrats drone on about how they aren’t responsible, how they didn’t create this. Well, fine, that remains to be seen, but fine—but where are they? It’s a question nobody seems to be asking. No one but OCHRE.” Masterfully, Esmeralda Smits attracts men and women by the hundreds to listen to her ask the question. They crowd musty speaking venues in The Dalles, Portland city parks, college campuses in Corvallis and Eugene. They march on the capitol in Salem, on the rainiest Tuesday of the year, demanding someone, somewhere, answer their question. They get drenched.
But the crowd never makes it to Fallview. Mayor Barbara Holland, 42, calls in every favour to prevent it.Esmeralda Smits keens into a yellow loudspeaker. “This state owes us answers, about its grievous human rights record, about the callous disregard for people literally starving in the street, about history, and most importantly, about the disappeared. And we owe it to humanity not to disappear ourselves before we have those answers.” But the crowd never makes it to Fallview. Mayor Barbara Holland, 42, calls in every favor to prevent it. Their permit to gather in McLoughlin Park is rejected. Jesus Episcopal and Christ Lutheran don’t return their calls. The Orphée Concert Hall doesn’t do “political stuff, agitation stuff.” “OCHRE will fight this conspiracy, and every other,” vows Esmeralda Smits, but despite this the crowd disappears.
“Of course we welcome the FBI’s help in this matter.” Police Chief Dan Sexton, 44, mustachioed, was very vocal about this point. “Fallview’s boys in blue are the finest in the Northwest, trust me. Portland, Seattle, Oregon City—can’t hold a card. But this is a doozy of a case, so of course we welcome any help.” A day into the investigation, junior agent Rita Fisk called her girlfriend to say that Chief Sexton was “[t]he worst person in Oregon. These rent-a-cops have bungled the investigation on every front. 400 missing—we’re not even sure that’s an accurate count, because they mixed all the clothes up in garbage bags, for chrissakes—and they didn’t even dredge the water. Comb the woods. They act like nothing important happened.” She slapped the particle-board desk the Motel 12 had furnished her, then yipped like a dog. “400 people just vanished, and no one is going to find them.” “Rita, calm down,” said an angel-voice, three time zones east of the Rockies. “You’re the FBI. You’re going to find—well, something. 400 people can’t just vanish.” “Obviously, they can.” “But not for long! Not forever. You’ll find something, I know. Just be patient, honey.” And Rita Fisk, 30, no longer crying or laughing, in fact feeling emptied of all her emotions, except perhaps dread, said, “Whatever we find here, it won’t bring me any comfort.” “I know, honey,” said the woman in D.C. “That’s my job. Bringing you comfort.” But Rita only felt her dread more keenly.
Three weeks after the disappearance of the homeless, one week before the disappearance of the media, a month before the disappearance of all—even state-level—interest, the FBI finished dredging the local waters. Snaky branches of the Willamette, scattered swamps and ponds, everything but the swimming pools. Not one body floated to the surface. Algae and lost bikes. Beaver dams. The forest and hills yielded only moss. “Local law enforcement is working around the clock with federal investigators and state and local government,” Mayor Barbara Holland assured the press. “Be as vague as possible, Barbara,” her media advisor, Stephanie Heitz, 37, $90 an hour, had told her just the other day. “Vague but reassuring.” “We are doing all we can,” the mayor stressed to every outlet. Meanwhile, tickets to the Lyceum Cineplex and the botanical garden were selling like mad, and the restaurants downtown had to hire more waiters from South Portland to keep up with demand.
... it was a ‘damn strange thing how business could be booming at a time like this. Rubberneckers, I guess.’Marcus Mann, owner of Marc’s restaurant, 48 and wearing a gray suit, told his wife Lizzie it was a “damn strange thing how business could be booming at a time like this. Rubberneckers, I guess.” And Lizzie, mother of two, 43, said, “Shame this can’t happen every year.” They laughed, and then felt very guilty with one another. But Marcus cooked a fine meal that night, and their eldest was reading The Grapes of Wrath at school and could speak eloquently about it, and by the end of the day, they had forgotten any awkwardness.
The pioneers who named the town were terribly literal. It is hard to go anywhere in Fallview and not view any waterfalls. There are more than four dozen of them, some no more than a trickle, others a grand cascade. The streams they leave in their wake unite the city as much as they divide it. “Live by the water, die by the water,” the town’s oldest resident, Mitchell Hamson, 98, retired, was always fond of saying. “That’s the Fallview way.” And where does the water come from? The Willamette, of course, and the grey heavens ultimately. Closer to home: deep-eddied swamps and dark pools, hidden in the forest, swirling night and day.
The agents interviewed the townsfolk in shifts. Five Tuesdays after the disappearance, and Rita Fisk, Philadelphia-born, Georgetown-educated, pixie-cut, was still spending her afternoons and nights in the back of the Fallview police station, asking the tough questions. “What do you know about the disappearance of the 400 homeless?” “Absolutely tragic,” said Janet Arrow, soap heiress. “I tell everyone that. Something simply must be done, you know?” “I think it’s a conspiracy,” said Harriet Ollister, 58, breeder of innovative hybrid collies, “to besmirch our good town. Really, I blame Democrats. They have those crisis actors, you know?” “I don’t know a damn thing,” said Herb Morris, CPA, 8212 Astoria Circuit. More than anyone, Rita thought he looked sad—no, confused by the whole ordeal. But he didn’t have any information. “Just looked to me like they evaporated. Into fog. Mist.” That night, she called her girl back home. “I don’t think they’ll ever let me leave,” she said.“400 people are missing, and there’s no evidence, and we’re never going to find them, and they won’t call the whole thing off, and I can’t leave.” She had thought she was complaining, but by the end, it sounded like a joke. Her girl even laughed; it startled Rita. “Well, maybe you need me on the case. I could fly to Portland, and you—” “No,” Rita said. She looked at the ceiling. Popcorn-roof. Asbestos. “Oh?” “I’m worried you might transform into a thin mist.” More laughter. Rita curled her nose and looked at the ceiling.
Valentine’s Day was time for the annual Fallview Festival of Hearts in McLoughlin Park. The fine fellows at Parks and Rec came down the afternoon before and dropped a special dye—non-toxic, of course, of course—into all nine fountains. Turned the water pink. All the kids got the day off from school to hang red and white paper streamers from the pine boughs. The little ones exchanged candies by Kettle Lake. The high schoolers fought over the rose bushes; a very large one, high on Mother Hill, concealed a shady spot which was prime baby-making territory. And the mothers. Moms Aghast at Drinking and Driving held a bake-sale. Fondant masterpieces, castles with moats and balconies. The mothers of the PTA patrolled the rose bushes every so often.
The mothers all were daydreaming about their sons and daughters and the mistakes they had yet to make—and about their own mistakes, about the lives they never lived.“Oh, this is my favourite time of year,” said Barbara Holland, mayor, 42, 112 new gray hairs. She stood center on the bandstand and read from a speech that’d taken her 15 minutes to write. “The flowers are fully in bloom, the leaves are green, and all our Fallview cheeks are fresh. In spring, it seems everything is returning to us.” In the crowd, not a soul was listening. The mothers all were daydreaming about their sons and daughters and the mistakes they had yet to make—and about their own mistakes, about the lives they never lived. Over in the sandbox, children giggled. In the rosebushes, children giggled. Under her breath, Mrs. Erica Hanson, homemaker, 39, asked, “Can this please be over?” “Spring is a precious gift we all deserve,” Barbara Holland continued, not looking up from her paper. Later that evening, as on all evenings, she would take a long soak. “Let us remember, at winter’s end, how much we’ve done to earn it.” Then, from the dreaming crowd, the question. “Where are the bodies, Barbara?” And Barbara Holland, 42, choked on the word “revitalize” and quickly looked up, meeting the deep blue eyes of Esmeralda Smits, Director and Digital Manager of the Oregon Collective for Homeless Relief Endeavor (OCHRE). Barbara said, “Christ.” No one in the crowd was dreaming now. “400 missing. The Fallview police have all their clothes, but where are the bodies, Barbara? What have you done with them?” The heart of Barbara Holland, Fallview mayor, dynast, palpitated. “Spring is in full blast,” she told her microphone. “Have a bloom!” She stumbled backward on the stage and vanished in the wings. “Don’t run away from me,” Esmeralda called. “The people of Oregon have questions and you—” The Fallview police were already on her. Dan Sexton, chief, and Johnny Lawson, cadet, carried her off by her armpits. Later, Johnny would chant the words “disturbance of the peace, unlawful protest, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct” like a mantra as he typed up the police report. Johnny, 22, BA in anthropology, told his mother that night how proud he was to make that first arrest; she told him he couldn’t be as proud as her. The whole town saw her boy getting on! At last. The whole town saw. Herb and Al and Charlotte Greaves, Marcus, Crystal Maurer, Big Tony Hodges and, under the eaves of a dark and towering pine, Special Agent Rita Fisk, 30, shadow on her heart, Frappuccino at her lips.
Esmeralda Smits said, “I’ve never had someone post bail for me before.” Rita Fisk said, “I don’t believe that.” They were far away from the police station now, at Shakey’s Full-Service, the only gas station the zoning board would allow. It was on the edge of town, the woods tall and looming behind them. “Charming.” Esmeralda looked at the waxing moon, then at Jim Shakey pumping gas into a Hyundai, still full of service at 67, then back at the moon. “Well, not that I don’t appreciate it, or enjoy spending time with a lovely personality such as yourself—but are we getting gas, or what?” “No. Had to go somewhere private.” Esmeralda stared at the moon, trying to make it brighter through sheer force of will. “You’re going to get in trouble, huh? Busting me loose?” “Tons.” “Why do it then?” “Maybe I was looking for trouble.” Esmeralda rolled her eyes, and Rita leered back. They looked at each other then, four eyes, blue as the hovering spruce. “Week from now, and boys are shutting this operation down,” Rita explained. “No leads, no hope.” “No bodies.” “No good. That’s no good.” Rita shook her head, squeezed the hands in her pockets into fists. “They can let this go, but I can’t. I can’t go back to pretending this didn’t happen, back to living like normal.” She felt like crying, but didn’t. The moon again now. Esmeralda asked, “Why? Why so high and mighty all of a sudden? Why the rule-breaker now?” Rita, who went to Georgetown, then Quantico, who had a mortgage in Franconia and a steady girl besides, examined her heart. “I just feel so sick.” Her stomach moved. “Feel it in the pit of me.” Esmeralda nodded. Jim Shakey, 67, hung the gas nozzle back on the hook. Mayor Barbara Holland took a long hot soak in a very white room. Gently, the trees in McLoughlin Park swayed with the wind. “I can help you get into trouble, sure.”
“Fun fact: Fallview is home to the only instance of Oregon Trail pioneer cannibalism to actually take place in Oregon.” This actually was the funnest fact that local historian and Ursula LeGuin Middle social studies teacher David Gooderson knew. It also wasn’t true. David Gooderson, 29, balding fiercely, with just two cats to keep him company, would never learn the many secrets that the high desert of Oregon held tight against her scorching breast. Nor could he read what is written only in stone and blood throughout the snowy canyons of the great Cascades.
And the whole congregation ate, and the next morning they found their way to the Willamette, and no one ever spoke of it again ...“Two children—Clara Rodgers, 3; Daniel Ebbet, 2—were roasted alive and eaten by a party of Methodists who had journeyed west to baptize the Modocs. They’d gotten lost in the eastern juniper groves, spent days there somehow, never saw another living thing, nor heard any birdsong.” David told all his classes this, from world geography to Medieval history. “Daniel and Clara’s parent were the ones to suggest it. Took their little babies out into the wildwood and bashed their brains out and cut the meat from the bones. And the whole congregation ate, and the next morning they found their way to the Willamette, and no one ever spoke of it again, except for Clara’s brother Horace, dying, aged 96. He would not allow the reverend to lay hands on him, and he died cursing hungry bellies and hungrier gods.” David Gooderson, who believed in God and who was working up the courage to shoot himself in his shiny left temple, had that part of the story right at least.
“Where are you taking me?” asked Rita, even though she was the one driving. “Just follow this road.” Esmeralda was still looking at the moon. Here in the forest, miles away from Fallview, that was all there was to see. That and the sea of trees. “It’s a place?” “Isn’t it always?” “How do you know about it?” “Anonymous tip. Given to OCHRE back before they all stopped caring.” “So we’re headed into a trap, then?” Georgetown, Quantico. “I was headed there anyway. You just offered to drive.” Esmeralda pressed her nose tip to the cold window. The moon was definitely bigger now. “I think I’ve always been headed there.” Rita had no idea where she was headed. “So jail was what, a detour?” Esmeralda turned to Rita, for the second time since she posted bail. “Would you believe I can’t help speaking truth to power?” “Mmm. Bit of a stretch.” They began to laugh.
In the long, shameful, cannibal history of Oregon, no one ever went looking for those children’s bones. No one raised a marker. Some questions, no one asks. Some answers only the forest knows.
In the Twenties, the Thirties, for years after the depression, Arrow brand soap was ubiquitous in the Northwest, and as far east as the Dakotas. The smooth pink cakes dissolved in every bathtub, vanished into water. Like all things, the brand suffered an inevitable decline. And now, in the forest south of Fallview, the old Arrow Soap Factory stands crumbling and forgotten, eerie and abandoned. And now in the forest Rita and Esmeralda stand solemn before it. They felt like worshippers at a tomb, though neither of them had words to describe it like that. Before any words came to them, they stood and stared. “We’re in the wrong place,” Rita said at last. “Yes.” “And what will we find here?” “I was told: answers.” Rita almost asked, “Do you always do as you are told?” But now wasn’t the time for—well, whatever that was. Instead, she looked ahead at the old factory, its corrugated roof red and mealy from 40 years of rain, and said, “I believe it.” “You’re sure you brought your gun?” “Mmm.” Neither of them wanted to take that first, faltering step forward.
In the days before Dove and Dial and Prell, before regular baths, back through Semmelweis and Zosimus, soap was not made from chemicals, no. Before glycerine and sulfide, there was fat and ash.
The lye came from ash, and the ash came from wood and garbage and the bits of animal that were good for nothing but kindling. That were just going to rot.An animal, typically a hog, or else a fatted calf, would be slaughtered, its meat and hide put to the usual purposes. But some of the fat would be set aside to mix with lye for soap. The lye came from ash, and the ash came from wood and garbage and the bits of animal that were good for nothing but kindling. That were just going to rot. There were of course variations, among the Chinese, the Celts. But that was the pith of it, fat and ash. That was the recipe. The pioneers took it West with them, along the Oregon Trail.
It was wonderful and disgusting and impossible to fathom. It was in pyramids, the smooth pink soap. It smelled clean. Neither of them thought it would smell clean. The vats were clean, the floor was thoroughly scrubbed. The soap was in a corner, tucked beneath an ancient tarp. But it was new. It looked so soft. “Here,” said Rita, “answers. Questions, too.” Esmeralda made a noise that was kitten-quiet. They stuffed their pockets full of soap, hurrying. When they stepped back out into the night, they did not seem to be alone. The trees around them were all moving slightly.
“The question you should be asking is what did the heavy coats have to do with it? Who carried the bodies? Who masterminded the whole ordeal?” These and other questions were put to Esmeralda Smits, mere days before she herself disappeared. Though the voice was grainy, Esmeralda was certain it was a woman on the phone. She wondered. “How did you get this number?” she’d asked. “Ahh,” said the voice, “finally, you’re asking the right questions.”
Like soap into water, the pain dissolved, even in her stomach, which sank away at last to nothingness. Rita Fisk, Quantico grad, cold and bleeding, thought, Is this what had me scared? This? She allowed herself to disappear.
The spruces stood, the pines and junipers and maples too. Like the town of Fallview and the hills beneath it, everything is still standing, more or less. The secrets still stand, and in the woods, a factory. Old, old. Come June, Barbara Holland, mayor, dynast, won reelection handily. She ran unopposed. Nine months after the Festival of Hearts, not one single teenager in all of Fallview had carried a baby to term. Somewhere in Franconia, outside Washington D.C., a girl cried and moped and questioned the meaning of her life, until she didn’t anymore. Years later, on a dusty forum or else perhaps a podcast, someone asked, “Do you think a whole town, if it’s full of millionaire bitches, could just, like, will the poor people out of existence? Like, by force of will?” CPA Herb Morris went to his grave swearing, “They plum evaporated.” Eventually, by whatever means, everyone who didn’t belong in Fallview disappeared. And Janet Arrow, soap heiress, was heard by friends to say, “Good riddance to the lot.”
