The Mole Children

by Lloyd B. Abrams

If there were only one child, it would've been bad enough. But when four severely malnourished and pasty-white children - two boys and two girls - were found by state troopers, huddled together naked in a hidden basement under a dilapidated, seemingly-abandoned farm house, it made national headlines, caused a media frenzy, and bewildered the collective conscience.

The media quickly labeled them "the mole children," but when they dug around for the back story and for more "late-breaking news," they hit a wall of privacy, privileged information and "no further comment"s. Without anything additional to trumpet, the story died down as quickly as the consternation and indignation of the populace had arisen.

What was known was that troopers had driven out to the farmhouse after receiving an anonymous call from a Mobil station pay phone out at the interstate. One or more teenagers had admitted breaking into the farmhouse and then hearing faint noises below the kitchen. When the teenagers moved the kitchen table aside and rolled up the area rug, they found a trap door and steps leading to a basement. There, they found the four children cowering in a corner. Instead of rescuing them, they slammed down and fastened the trapdoor, gathered the little of value that they could carry away, and hightailed it out of there. Only somewhat later did they stop to make the call.

The children were taken to County General and kept isolated. Medical personnel estimated that the children were seven or eight years old. When doctors attempted to take each frail and emaciated child away to be individually examined, the other three raised such a ruckus that all four had to be sedated and restrained. It was determined early on that it would be in the children's best interest to keep them together.

The farmhouse was cordoned off and placed under twenty-four hour surveillance. Someone had to have been feeding them - empty food trays and plastic bottles were found scattered about - and someone had to have been cleaning up after them. Although the legal owner of the farmhouse had died almost ten years before under suspicious circumstances, tax and utility bills had been paid regularly by money order. There were no birth records, no school records, no trace of who the children were or where they had come from. Despite all the publicity, no one other than a few kooks came forward to claim the children. The official investigation led nowhere.

The children rapidly gained weight and learned to communicate with the medical staff with rudimentary grunts and gestures. With each other, though, they communicated with surprising fluency using subtle touches and complex vocalizations. They didn't respond to facial cues, which was not surprising, given their previous pitch-black environment.

They filled out and grew stronger as the weeks passed. A pre-school teacher had been brought in to teach them to speak. She used nursery rhymes for sounds and repetition and the children chose names for themselves from rhymes they had learned: Bobby (Shaftoe), Jack and Jill, and Little Polly (Flinders).

Eventually, a place had to be found for them outside the hospital. Dan and Marjorie Bruckner, a middle-aged couple who had long been part of the state's foster-care program, volunteered to take in all four of them. Their previous foster children had aged out, so they were enticed by the quadruple payments as well as a sense of gratification. The problem was solved and the children would have a good home. The nation's conscience had been salved.

Marjorie and Dan thought it was cute when the children snuggled up together in the same bed. But when Marjorie came into their bedroom and attempted to get them back into their own bunk beds, Jack and Bobby argued, best as they could, that they were all so cold and needed to huddle together to stay warm. Marjorie sensed there was something aberrant about this, but she went along with what she was told early on: that it was best to keep them together. In almost all cases, she took that edict literally.

Despite her noble intentions, she was becoming complacent because she had an additional worry: Dan, long suffering from emphysema, had just been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer - an inevitable complication from his lifelong habit of smoking unfiltered Camels.

After the summer, the children were enrolled in special education classes at Gleason Elementary, but the four were becoming unmanageable. "I can't believe what you're telling me," Marjorie always insisted. "They - we! - all get along so well at home." Left unsaid was but only if the children were getting their way. Alternate educational plans had to be instituted.

The school district, still under close scrutiny, was faced with the fiscal hardship of having to subsidize the children's education outside their district. When Marjorie offered to home-school the four, with supervision and assistance, of course, the district jumped at the chance. The district's superintendent and lawyer met with the Bruckners to sign the required documents, and they promised her all the help and supplies she would need. But with four rambunctious children to raise and educate, with assistants who did far too little, and with Dan on the decline, Marjorie was overmatched and overwhelmed.

Still, she continued to be amazed about how quickly the children progressed, and especially how they acted as one, with one mind, like a flock of birds abruptly changing direction or like a school of fish escaping a predator. They learned together, they ate together, they played together, they recited prayers together. To Marjorie, it was a wondrous thing - an awesome gift from God.

But when a neighborhood rottweiler ran snarling up to the children from behind a fence, he was later found bludgeoned. A calico cat who had scratched Little Polly was found eviscerated under a rhododendron bush with a paw cut off. After Marjorie had trouble dissuading a door-to-door chimney-cleaning salesman from pressing too hard for a sale, he was discovered that evening by a passing motorist bleeding next to his banged-up Explorer. His tongue had been sliced out. He didn't survive long enough to tell the police what happened.

Because of the proximity and the circumstances, it was suspected that the four children were somehow involved. But they were only children.

At bedtime Marjorie read them Bible stories as they lay on their adjoining bunk beds. Afterwards, she went downstairs. They heard her sobbing and then cursing God for making Dan suffer so much. They listened with tears in their eyes as she prayed for his misery to end.

The four children, in their own furtive language, made their decision to answer Marjorie's prayers.

Rev 3 / March 2, 2010

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March, 2010…Copyright © 2010, Lloyd B. Abrams