The Strangeness of Eva Hatu
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A delightful micro on a public easement along a dead end road. At all times, but particularly in winter and adverse weather, use caution in going down the hill back to the highway after you are done.
It happened sometime after the first snow, according to the elder residents here. The old Hadley place, long abandoned since the tragic deaths of Elmer and Sarah during threshing season, was suddenly occupied. Lights shown from the windows, piercing the cool, still nights atop this rise, along a road to nowhere. The old brick chimney - constructed by hand with bricks made in the nearby west Davenport foundry - breathed forth enormous amounts of steam for hours at a time.
While we in the country feel a certain unspoken security of neighbors, this neighbor raised instead numerous questions that bespoke anything but security and certainty.
Well, let us start with what is known about the woman, Eva Hatu. Although the day is not known, it was near the end of 1918 that she arrived. It was assumed that she came with the swelling tide of immigrants who flowed out of Eastern Europe as WWI began to grow. What country is not known, and those who happened to be close enough to hear when she called after her midnight-toned cat, were unable to discern what guttual, consonant-filled tongue it was that she spoke. And, the purple, always the purple - long, rough woolen articles of clothing, and the babushka, holding back her long, wayward hair for the cooking and baking - all of it, one shade or another of purple. It was almost as if her personal decor was in sympathy with the intricately-decorated Easter eggs that one person who had actually been in the house claimed to have seen behind the glassed-in confines of a curio in the parlor.
And yet, there were the smells, they were so different and enticing that they seemed to put a finish of sweetness atop the aura of unnerving silent tension that seemed to surround her and her dwelling. The sweets she produced began to show up at the riverfront bakery on Front St., in nearby Buffalo, the oldest town in Scott County. They were as delightful to the eye as they were to the palate! Unable to spell the name she gave these flavorful pastries when selling them to Mr. Hacker, he placed a handwritten card next to them in the case that was variously lettered "kolache," "kolach" or "kolatchky." It was tradition that dictated the three fillings used - apricot, walnut and prune. Occasionally, several marvelously twisted loaves of dark, rich, round bread also appeared, reflecting the overhead lights of the bakery in their slick, egg white-brushed surfaces.
The neighbors who cared to pay heed, say that as time went on, the lights and the smoke emitting from the house on the hill lasted longer and longer into the night. They didn't know why, and they didn't inquire. Folks around here no doubt would agree with the words to be penned years hence by the scribe just across the Mississippi, Galesburg poet, Carl Sandburg, when he opined that "Good fences make good neighbors."
Well, lightning strikes then and lightning strikes today, are all pretty much the same in their terrible beauty and in their teriffic, in the original sense, like the word "horiffic," in their teriffic effect, and were the end of the homestead one storm-riven night. And, perhaps, the end of Eva Hatu herself.
Nevertheless, the story has been handed down within area families - the story of the woman in purple and her marvelous, frenzied, frenetic spells of baking far into the night, with the residual of that transforming energy of the hearth painting the nocturnal sky.
I vowed "no more PTCs" - Pine Tree Caches, so it was with joy that I found these large, long stretches of cedar trees! If you dare, and if the air is cool, particularly as the sun descends into its home for the evening, journey just a little further, several hundred feet down the road to the metal gate on the left. If you relax the focus of your eyes, and if you squint just a little, and are willing to suspend belief, resting the rational side of your mind, you will cast your gaze forward about 100 yards. If you are lucky, and you say quietly to yourself, "I do believe," perhaps, just perhaps, you may see the billowing, bounding steam pouring forth at great rapidity from the site of that old house occupied by an old Eastern European woman, and you will then know the strangeness of Eva Hatu.
Have fun!
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