Of all the stories my father used to tell before he left us, my favorite was the one about the molasses flood that killed my great-great-grandmother’s entire family in 1919.
An unseasonable heat wave hit Boston in January of that year, causing a storage tank to explode and sending over two million tons of molasses out into the streets. On this particular day, my thrice-great-grandfather, a Dutchman named Saaltink, was counting bales in his cotton warehouse while his wife and youngest daughter were tending their dry-goods store—Saaltink Dry Goods, my father would say proudly, as if the idea of it were enough to make a true legacy.
If not for that fateful torrent of molasses from the warehouse only yards away, the Saaltink dry goods empire might have been bigger than Wal-Mart.
My adolescent mind tried to wrap itself around that idea every time, and every time it failed. It was a dizzying and impossible boast to make in Overton, Illinois, in 1981, when a trip to the Sam Walton’s house of wonders in our aged white station wagon was a trek through never-ending aisles stacked to the ceiling with anything, everything, you could possibly want or need. Stores didn’t come bigger than Wal-Mart.
But the molasses did come, in a wave five feet high and rising even as it took out both warehouse and store within a few shared moments. At this crescendo, my father would pause, looking into my eyes to see the excitement and suspense shining there—and those things were always there, when I was young—before imagining for me their last moments on earth, all three Saaltinks as they died: mother and daughter suffocating, thinking of Father, thanking God he was not there to share their fate, while not 100 yards away, the man himself was drowning, thinking of his wife and remaining daughter, hoping they were safe.
This part of the story got me every time, and my father—blessed with the instincts of a carnival barker—knew it. As I got older and the tale more complicated, he would add in tragic details. A locket with miniatures of the lost family, a small dog that would wait forever to see his masters again. A flower pressed flat, carried as a keepsake in a pocket and in turn pressed against dying lips. His flair for the dramatic was almost Victorian, an uncanny match for my own adolescent fascination with death in all its forms.
I especially loved it when one of his details would provoke my mother. Any particularly gruesome bit that would make me gasp would inevitably draw a disgusted, “Jesus Christ, Frank,” from the kitchen or the bedroom of our Monroe Street house, and my mother would emerge from whatever task to glare at him with tired eyes, a stream of cigarette smoke issuing from pursed lips.
We laughed at her squeamishness, giving each other knowing looks, and then he continued on about how the citizens of Boston had to chisel the family’s bodies from the hardened molasses once the temperature returned to normal.
But no matter how much they chiseled or reheated or picked away, there was no way to truly rid the bodies of all traces of the murderer. To this day, he maintained, the Saaltink corner of some forgotten Boston graveyard still smells as sweet as molasses candy. And when the wind blows just right on a hot day, they can catch the scent throughout all of Boston.
At the payoff, I would shudder and press my hand to my mouth, giggling at the tragedy of it all. With an arm slung over my shoulder, the dank smell of his after-work six-pack under his smile, he would waggle his eyebrows at me.
“You go on outside and play, now, Janie girl, and don’t bother your momma.” I would slide away toward the front porch, slamming the screen door on his final admonition, “And be good!”
In the stories are my best memories of my father, sitting first on his lap and later by his side, absorbing every detail of the rhythm of the words, inhaling when he inhaled to avoid the tastes of the beer fumes and cigarette smoke that surrounded him as securely as his Old Spice aftershave.
He had many tales to tell, some better than others, but my favorites were the ones about our ancestors and how they lived and died. Especially how they died. It was compelling television at a time when we couldn’t afford even basic cable.
And I believed every word, despite the fact that, even then, I suspected there was something fundamentally wrong with a true story that changed every time it was told.
I was certain at that time that my father and I understood each other in a way that my mother, with her impatience and intolerance for our eccentricities, never could. Even before he left, her smiles were never as easy, as readily accessible, as his. In photographs from those years on Monroe Street—what few now remain—she is always smiling for the camera with the rest of us, posed and overly bright, a stranger with brittle good humor and the remnants of bouffant high-school hair that had yet to fully give way to the long feathered style more familiar to me.
Real smiles came harder to my mother, and later in life. But that’s another story, and it wants its own page.
Not all the Saaltinks perished in that tragic, long-ago molasses flood. If they had, my father would chuckle, shaking a Doral cigarette loose from the soft pack he kept in his shirt pocket, there would be no one to tell the story. The oldest daughter, Sarah—after whom I would name my own daughter—survived, having only weeks earlier run off to the wilds of Illinois with a brash Scottish con man named Benjamin Campbell.
The romance of this was the clincher for me: young lovers, refusing to allow God, circumstance, or my great-great-great-grandfather to keep them apart, leaving all they knew to make a new life for themselves together. My father’s details for this part of the story were sketchy at best—his romantic sensibilities were also Victorian in nature, ending somewhere around the ankles and the wrists—but I filled in the blanks on my own time as I got older and my preoccupation with the mysteries of death began to defer to the mysteries of my own burgeoning teenage-hood.
That was my tale to tell, I figured, thinking it would delight him to hear one that wasn’t his, using all the details he knew and I knew. I practiced the romantic tale of Sarah and Benjamin on my younger sister, although as an audience she was sadly lacking, with her constantly running nose and her eight-year-old’s impatience, always ruining my momentum by asking why there weren’t pictures with this story.
“Because this isn’t from a book, stupid,” I said scornfully, sitting cross-legged on the floor in our room and watching her comb the ratted hair of scarred Barbies that had been new when they were mine. “This is a true story. Shut up and just listen.”
But by the time I hit puberty and the story got really good, my father was already living in a neighboring town and my mother had forbidden me to speak any of the story in her presence, the law written and delivered down from on high one day by an openhanded slap.
I ran to my room and wept at her cruelty, my cheek burning, and when I called my father that night, I planned to tell them I wanted to come live with him. He didn’t pick up, however, and by the next time I saw him again, three months later, I no longer wanted to tell stories.
It should end there, I suppose, but it hasn’t. The roots go deep, and my father’s stories will come back to me at odd moments, bubbling up from the well of my mind in random bursts of memory. Especially the molasses flood, which has stayed with me as securely as it haunts that long-forgotten, probably fictional Boston graveyard.
I’ve grown far more accustomed to death in the quarter-century since that time, both real and fictional. But even with a 24-hour news cycle and the Darwinian exploits of click-bait like Florida Man, for me, no fate has ever matched that of the Saaltinks. Whether it was true or not, no matter how it was told or what details were included or what they really were thinking in those moments before death, this was the disaster that contained my first glimpse of the kind of senseless cruelties life could dish out. There was a truth there that went beyond reality—even as a child, I think I recognized that, although I couldn’t have explained it then.
Sometimes when I’m lying awake in bed and my thoughts wander the wide world, I think about the Saaltinks, even now. I’ve imagined what their deaths must have been like many times in the years since, so many times it almost seems like it happened to me once, a long time ago. Drowning, scalding, in mass quantities of molasses: it would be a horrific surprise attack from the wheel of fortune, as unexpected as Mrs. Butterworth coming to life on the breakfast table like she did on the commercial, only to crush your windpipe with brown-glass hands.
And the last thing you see as you gasp for air, crippled with pain and the knowledge that your life is ending in just a few seconds, is her smooth, blank face, watching you die without even a touch of recognition, the same way my father might have glanced over a stranger’s obituary in his morning paper before turning to the comics page.
Mary Morris’s work has previously appeared in Carve, Gastronomica, Booth, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Mom Egg Review; her first novel, Mirror Witch (an urban-fantasy romance co-written under the pen name Phoebe Walker), is forthcoming in spring 2023 from City Owl Press. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and ghostwrites for Scribe Media in addition to editing for Ibis Editorial and Design. She lives in the wilds of southeastern Illinois with her husband, her children, and miscellaneous cats, but you can find her on Twitter @Mary_Morris_3 and online at www.marymorris- writer.com.