Ah, yes. The Dominskis. An interesting story. You wouldn’t know it, to see them the way they are now, but…the stuff of legend, that family. For lack of a better way to put it. Not a legend on its own, quite, since no two people could agree on the details. But the stuff of it, certainly. Their story — stories — had that quality of belonging to everyone. Belonging to the entire town.

The way I have heard it…well, it is a difficult account to bring entirely into focus. I came to Sheridan long after the twins had died, and by then, most of the stories began with “they say that.” As stories like theirs come to do, and much like mine has…but the way I have heard it, there is a curse involved. Was a curse involved. The twins…there are many things they don’t seem to understand, and the curse not least among them. So, they aren’t much help with that aspect of it, but as I said, the story was everywhere. Any conversation could take you right to it.

I heard it from Mr. Bricker the very night I arrived in Sheridan. He turned the cart up Hilltop Road, known as The Kenner Hill Road then, and he pointed down the road to a big green house. The house had every light on in the windows, which Mr. Bricker carefully pointed out to me, in a way that recommends that you ask why…so I asked why. Old Cross Dominski lived there by himself, Mr. Bricker told me. Blind as a bat; light or no light, it made no difference. But after his daughters died, he left the lamps burning morning, noon, and all the night. I played my part — and how had the daughters died, then? Now, that was a story, Mr. Bricker said. A handsome soldier had come to call on the young ladies one afternoon. How this came to pass is lost to us now, but Lizzie took quite a fancy to Corporal Evelle…while the corporal took quite a fancy to Minnie.

There you have it. Tears. Recriminations. The customary early-Victorian swooning, of course, and then, just after things appeared to have settled down…a proposal of marriage. But Lizzie seemed to take the news quite well. She went so far as to invite Corporal Evelle and Minnie for a picnic, to celebrate. Yes…the infamous picnic. A spring afternoon, a gentle breeze, and a pitcher of lemonade shot through with prussic acid. She poisoned them, and herself. As I said before, you would never guess it of either of them, certainly not of Lizzie…and I still don’t think I quite see how she got Minnie to drink the entire glass. Perhaps her lemonade had always tasted that dreadful. Who knows. But that is how the story was known.

It came down to my time as a children’s hopscotch song. Tutoring the Brickers’ children, I heard it many times. “Black, black, black as night, Cross, Cross, leave on the light,” and also a line about the faces of the three of them all dark with ants.

The curse itself, where that came from…a more obscure verse, not often sung. Cross Dominski traveled to the territories as a campaigner, and he returned with a wife who had the most remarkable black hair — “black black hair, black as a gypsy’s heart,” as it was chanted by the little girls, or “black black as Robeson’s pond.” A great beauty, but born of the murderous Comanche, or at least with Comanche blood, and she had married Cross against the wishes of her family. Her grandmother cursed her for leaving them behind — cursed her hair, in fact, cursed it so dark that it would catch light and throw it back, blinding the innocent with its reflection, and the children born to her would carry the dark hair and its curse. And the children born to her children, and so on.

The truth…again…who knows. It seems she didn’t go about much, but whether she feared that her hair would blind the passersby…everyone called her “the half-breed” in town. That may have kept her away, or that she didn’t speak the language. No one seemed to remember that part of it. She died after giving birth to the twins, that much is true. In the tale, when she saw their black black hair, her heart broke, but probably she died just from giving birth. Not uncommon at that time. Stories went around about Cross keeping the girls out of the sun, never lighting the chandelier, that sort of thing, but the stories aren’t about what might have happened. The stories are about light and dark. The stories are about Sheridan, the stories are about…themselves. When a thing is larger than one story, and the story can’t contain it.

The twins were the end of the Dominski line. The curse, if there was a curse, died with them, and the story of the curse is nearly dead, too. If you don’t count my telling it, I suppose it is dead. “Cross, Cross, bury your girls, Cross, Cross, alone in the world.” It seems like a shame, that it’s left for the historical society…like the old fire wagons that look so quaint in photographs. You look at them, and you forget that we expected them to save our lives.

My name is Hugh Hammersley. I died of cirrhosis of the liver March 30, 1920.

May 19, 2003

Share!