Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them

The Devil in Cross Village

the devil in cross village eileen pollack Whenever my partner, Marian, and I eat dinner at the Legs Inn, a famous Polish restaurant in Cross Village, Michigan, we walk off the potato pancakes, bigos, and nalesniki by visiting the crypt of Father Weikamp, a pierogi’s throw from the entrance . The crypt, a white clapboard building the dimensions of a garden shed, has a window in either side, and when Marian started taking me to Cross Village, you could push a button beneath the sill and cause a light in the crypt to light up, allowing you to make out the artifacts on the shelf above Father Weikamp’s tomb. If you cricked your neck and peered in the mirror angled against one wall, you could glimpse Father Weikamp’s coffin. 01 Text.indd 165 8/19/11 8:16 AM eileen pollack  See the skulls? Marian would say, pointing to a tapered black board painted with ghostly white skulls, the fattest skull at the bottom and the smallest skull on top, like the cairns in Roman catacombs or the killing fields of Cambodia. Father Weikamp was a Satanist, he would explain. At which I would say, Come on, what does that mean, a Satanist? Did he worship the Devil? Did he lead midnight bacchanals in which he and his Indian congregants cavorted naked around a fire, chanting whatever spells might bring Beelzebub and his minions flying in to join them? At which Marian would shrug and ask, What else would you call a priest who carried on bizarre non-Catholic rituals, spent hours in this crypt, and liked sleeping in his grave? Oh, pooh, I said. Lots of European priests liked sleeping in their coffins. It reminded them of their mortality. But Marian insisted that Father Weikamp wasn’t your average priest. For one thing, he showed up in Cross Village under cloudy circumstances—someone had set fire to his church in Chicago. As to the convent he founded in Cross Village—Marian pointed to the row of modest crosses, each with a sister’s name, to one side of the crypt—instead of building separate dormitories for the monks and nuns, Father Weikamp designed a convent in which everyone lived together. Great, I said, now you have the monks and nuns carrying on orgies in the convent. That’s just anti-Catholic slander. Given that Marian is a Catholic and I’m a Jew, my defense of Father Weikamp might seem unexpected. But people born into a religion can be readier to believe the worst about its holy men than outsiders who romanticize the same. Father Weikamp’s purpose in settling in northwest Michigan was to convert the Indians, and Marian is conditioned to think the worst of colonizers and imperialists. A Pole whose homeland was invaded first by Nazis, then by Communists, he was born 01 Text.indd 166 8/19/11 8:16 AM the devil in cross village  in Munich after World War II, his parents having walked out of Poland carrying nothing but a suitcase. Deeply scarred by the massacres, suicides, and betrayals they had witnessed, they made it to Detroit, where they worked hard to create a life for Marian and his siblings, only to watch their adopted city go up in flames. So Marian can’t help but be drawn to graves. No matter where we go, he seeks out the cemeteries, ruins, battlegrounds , concentration camps, the sites of mass murders and executions, and soaks up the horrors that took place there. You can almost see the blood seeping up to stain his shoes, the way water at the shore rises to fill your footprints. I see history as bloody, too. What Jew doesn’t? But I try not to seek out the gallows and crematoria. None of my immediate relatives perished in the Holocaust, as Marian’s family did. And I am wary of defining my religion in relation to the genocidal hatred of a mad man. To me, Cross Village is a vacation spot and nothing more. At least, that used to be the case. When Marian started taking me to spend time at his parents’ cabin, I loved waking up late, enjoying breakfast on the sunlit deck, taking a walk along the shore, going for a swim, finding a sheltered spot in the dunes and reading. In the evenings, Marian and I would drive through the Tunnel...