page 3

 Eva wasn’t alone for too long. She knew that being a land-owning, single mother wouldn’t fly, and so she set out to marry the most passive, male creature she could find – even tempered – civic and pastoral – docile. She married Fred Wilson and with him she created her new persona, Eva Wilson. She became a local matriarch, grinding out ham salad for all Lutheran funerals, weaving every respectable rug in town with her loom, and parading her only son as the violin playing ghost of Pablo Sarasate. More notably, by 1933 she was running more illegal booze than Al Capone. According to the family, grandpa Wilson never knew about the still, rarely questioned the fur stoles and hardly forbid the cigarette smoking.

The pictures don’t lie.

But these were not the only players. The town of Milton had more characters than novels have pages. Seventeen miles away, on the wrong side of the township lived the Severance family. These folks were considered, trash. The house was is a area called Silver Creek and everyone knew the property was hocked to the rafters, legally condemned by the county and owned by a rabid dog named Sven Severance. The only things protecting the Swede from local disgust were the 700 Norway Pine trees (and the language barrier ) that blocked the view of his property from the main road, keeping the stories to imaginative speculation.

He was married three times before the fourth lived past the birth of a first child, and according to the mid-wife, she barely made it.) It was said that Sven had little sympathy for the delicate condition of his new brides. The fourth wife, however, was different and didn’t care much for consideration anyway. Brigid Severance was Irish, homely and (thankfully) illiterate so she rarely understood a single word coming out of her husband’s mangy mouth.