Prologue: A Fair Warning

You are born with a mother and a father, always in a place. The place is part of you, as inescapable as a fingerprint. Where are you from? In your heart, you know the truth. You are from the place you were born. I am from a town in Nebraska once known as Miagrammesto Station. I have never truly lived anywhere else. I never will. You are new here. Welcome. You are about to meet a great many people, too many to keep track of at first. Don’t worry. You needn’t remember them all. Some will become friends, others mere acquaintances. You’ll forget a few that matter, hang onto a few that don’t. Our little place includes a man unable to discern the difference between destiny and storm warnings, one with religion but no faith, one with faith but no religion, a kid known as Samson the Methodist, and a quartet of confused lovers. Here’s a tip: among the folks inhabiting these pages are a librarian, a con man, an enchantress, and a skeleton. Keep your eye on them. They will help answer the question of how a place called Miagrammesto Station became home to the long-lost Oracle of Delphi.

My name is Peter Goodfellow—Delphic Oracle, Nebraska city manager and inmate at the Luther Burbank Correctional Facility. I’m also the parish priest at St. Mary’s—Father Peter—but don’t be put off. It’s a job, so these pages will not narrate a religious fable, but the stories of three families: the Goodfellows, the Penrods, and the Thorntons. Some of what I’ll tell you was acquired as a boy at the knee of my great-grandmother, Willa Louise Goodfellow. She was born when our town was known as Miagrammesto Station and died at one hundred years and six days old after it had become Delphic Oracle. Grammie Willa knew everything about this little settlement just north of the Platte River, including the story of Maggie Westinghouse and the notorious July Pennybaker. “In a time when Delphic Oracle was known as Miagrammesto Station, a fox named July Pennybaker came to town,” Grammie Willa claimed. “The fox was sly, but he chose to pursue a clever hen. Bent on chicanery, he ended up seeking redemption.”

Peter Goodfellow
July 3, 2015

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Chapter One: Miagrammesto Station

“It began in 1919 after a frigid and gray winter was followed by a windy, unpredictable spring,” Grammie Willa always began her story. Fortunately, the end of May welcomed a fruitful summer and long, warm autumn. It made Miagrammesto Station a hospitable place far into October, its residents quick to welcome Maggie Westinghouse and her mother after the travel-weary pair stepped off the afternoon train about a week before Halloween. The two wore thin coats and told the story of a courageous husband and father, allegedly killed in the final days of the The War To End All Wars, leaving behind his lovely wife and a daughter, then eleven years old.

All over the country the boys who had survived the Major’s war had been home for months and the raging Spanish flu pandemic was on the wane. Meanwhile, the withering drought and unforgiving winds that sent many a farm swirling into the white-hot Midwestern sky were more than a decade off. Miagrammesto Station was a bustling county seat serving the dozens of farms dotting the valley—a place boasting two doctors, three car dealerships, and eight thriving religious denominations. As the new decade of the 1920s approached, most horse-drawn wagons had been replaced by Fords or Chevys, but radio had yet to take over the evenings, leaving people free to sit on their porches with glasses of lemonade, making fun of the frenetic and decadent city folk who gambled for a living at that faraway and profligate casino called Wall Street.

Like Major Westinghouse, the town’s dentist, Doctor Plutarch Roberts, had also served during The War To End All Wars, although the closest he came to the trenches in Europe was a converted supply shed at Fort Benning where he spent the war rummaging through the mouths of stateside officers and the petticoats of their wives. Unblemished by combat, the unctuously handsome Doctor Roberts hired Maggie’s mother as his assistant, providing a small stipend and the apartment above his office. With his encouragement, the community embraced the young widow even though visitors to their tiny flat discovered not a single photograph of brave Major Westinghouse. Even more curious, broodingly beautiful little Maggie bore a remarkable resemblance not only to silent film vamp Theda Bara but to the landlord, as well.

Maggie and her mother settled in. Maggie enrolled at the South Ward School, proving to be as clever as she was beautiful, while her mother remained ostensibly steadfast to the elusive memory of her gallant Major. A delicate woman with the singing voice of an angel, Mrs. Westinghouse slowly overcame the waggling tongues. Likewise, the perplexing history and provocative resemblance her daughter shared with Doctor Roberts was eventually overlooked, although the unveiled sniping of Violet Roberts, the dentist’s thin-lipped, aspish wife, eventually forced Maggie and her mother from the unadorned pews of St. Luke’s Methodist Church and into the open arms of the Episcopalians.

Five years later, in 1924, July Pennybaker appeared in Chicago with a reckless gash of a grin and a bagful of delectably outlandish claims. “He was an ace pilot in the war,” some said, while others were told the story of a financial wunderkind on Wall Street who’d abandoned riches to seek wisdom and tranquility in the monasteries of Tibet. July claimed to have visited mythical Shangri-La and trekked the Khyber Pass under the protection of the Crown Prince of Afghanistan. He described traveling by camel to Damascus on the legendary Silk Road, afterward making his way to Istanbul, and then taking the Orient Express to Vienna. Eventually, he ended up in Paris, consorting in the City of Light with Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and a boisterous writer named Hemingway. July Pennybaker claimed to have been a magician and a bartender and a barber—to have ridden with Pancho Villa, discoursed with an exiled pre-revolutionary Lenin, and walked along the Great Wall with Sun Yat-sen. He was handsome with an enviable head of hair, alarmingly blue eyes, the body of a trapeze artist, and the shameless charm of a chautauqua preacher.

Bugs Moran—a member of the North Side O’Banion mob—latched onto July, moving the flamboyant adventurer into his inner circle of thugs even though the fast-talking stranger seemed more interested in Moran’s accounting than his firearms. July soon had a closet-full of tailored suits that draped as easily over his athletic frame as the pretty girls who hung on his arm. He affected a Chicago accent, remembered the names of everyone he met, and tipped nearly as well as rival mobster Scarface Capone. Best of all he could sing like an Irish devil and soon became a favorite at McGovern’s Saloon. Bugs loved him. The rest of the O’Banion gang didn’t and it wasn’t long before Hymie Weiss and Schemer Drucci were in Bugs’s ear, pointing out that July Pennybaker always seemed to be missing when the bullets started flying. They convinced Bugs that their dashing colleague needed to make his bones or become a pile of them.

Not long thereafter—on a January day in 1925 with glacial wind shrieking off Lake Michigan and the sky drab with overcast—July waited with Bugs, Hymie, and Schemer outside rival mob boss Papa Johnny Torrio’s South Clyde Avenue apartment. Bugs, Hymie, and Schemer had their own guns. Bugs had loaned July a fully loaded .38. By the time Papa Johnny emerged, the shooters—alleged in the next day’s Chicago Tribune to include “…a fourth unknown assailant”— had been waiting for three hours. They were cold and impatient, three of the gunmen letting loose a torrent of bullets. Afterward, the assassins headed to McGovern’s to celebrate, tossing back one drink each and about to tip another, when news reached them that Torrio had survived. Bugs dispatched July to finish the job and the glib talker, without a single mob scalp to his credit, headed out. An hour passed, then two, then six. July did not return. Soon thereafter, Bugs discovered an empty space in his office safe where ten thousand dollars had resided.

Bugs was fond of July and willing to forgive his failure to put even one bullet into Papa Johnny. However, there wasn’t a man alive whose charms could compete with ten thousand dollars. Bugs raged for a while, kicking a hole in the wall of his office, throwing a paperweight through the window, and shooting out the streetlamp across the street. Afterward, he instructed Hymie and The Schemer to find July, get his money back, and then offer their former associate accommodations at the bottom of Lake Michigan. The two goons were delighted and rushed over to July’s apartment on North Dearborn. The flat was deserted save a dog-eared English translation of Parallel Lives on the bedside table and a phalanx of expensive suits in the armoire. The pockets in the suits were as empty as Bugs’s safe. July Pennybaker had skipped town.

The attempted hit on Papa Johnny enraged his second-in-command, Al Capone. The violent and impulsive gangster loved Torrio—a mentor since the old days in New York—and he put a bounty on the shooters. “I’m gonna personally put their god-damned brains on a baseball bat,” he vowed. Word crisscrossed the nation’s criminal underbelly, but six months after the hit on Papa Johnny, the whereabouts of Bugs Malone’s former favorite remained unknown.

The same year that July disappeared, Maggie Westinghouse was seventeen years old and had begun to suffer visions that visited her in a leisurely way, provoking laughter and mostly incoherent babbling. Always, they ended in a swoon and troubled sleep. She spoke while slumbering, describing exotic locales or carrying on spirited conversations with unseen beings, afterward waking with no memory of what had transpired. “Folks around town had always been a little cowed by Maggie,” Grammie Willa recollected. “She was beautiful and men made fools of themselves while a lot of women tried to even things out by whittling away at her reputation.” She spent a lot of time on her own, Grammie told me, taking long walks that took her to the edge of town and beyond. It was June, 1925, when Maggie walked along the tracks near the Miagrammesto Station fairgrounds and saw the door to a railroad switch-house propped open. Inside, she discovered a man asleep on a pile of gunnysacks.