The Lie That Saved the Well Covers of Peoria

It was near the beginning of September 1962, and our family was about to spend nine months living in two different states. My dad, David F. Shaner, was an enlisted Navy Petty Officer who had received orders to report to the Naval Air Station Memphis in Millington, Tennessee, now known as Naval Support Activity Mid-South. He was being sent there for additional training before his next assignment and, hopefully, a promotion. The training was supposed to last only nine months, but my parents had a practical problem to solve before Dad could even report for duty.

We had just moved from Brunswick, Maine, where my parents still owned our house—and still had a mortgage. The house hadn't sold before we had to leave, and they certainly didn't want to pay rent for another house while continuing to make mortgage payments on the one in Maine. So, my parents asked my grandparents, Claude and Mattie Hines, if my mom and the then four kids could live with them in Peoria, Illinois while Dad completed his training in Millington. They agreed.
 
The plan was for Dad to stay in the barracks on the naval base during the week, where his room didn't cost him anything, and then hitchhike from Millington to Peoria on the weekends so he could be with the family. It wasn't exactly the typical picture of family life, but it was a practical solution for a young Navy family trying to make ends meet. It sounded like a workable plan.
 
My older brother, David Wayne—who was just one year older than me and whom we simply called Wayne—and I were typical boys. We were outside in our grandparents' backyard, looking for something to do. And we did something that every child is eventually told, in no uncertain terms, NOT TO DO. We played with matches. Yes. Real matches. The kind that make fire.
 
Our little experiment was taking place in the backyard while my mom and Grandma Hines were inside doing all the things mothers and grandmothers did in those days—cooking, cleaning and doing laundry with a ringer washer. My dad had arrived in the middle of the night after hitchhiking from Millington and was taking a nap. So, as far as we were concerned, the adults were occupied. We had an opportunity. We had matches. And we had paper. What could possibly go wrong? Our game was simple. We'd light one corner of a sheet of paper and wave it around until the flame went out. Then we'd do it again. And again.
 
Soon we had a growing pile of crispy, burned scraps of paper. It was fun—until we realized someone might find the evidence. We looked at each other. We had a problem. We needed to get rid of the burned paper. We were eight and nine years old, but apparently old enough to understand the basic principles of criminal evidence disposal.
 
That's when we noticed something in the backyard that we hadn't paid much attention to before: a manhole cover. We had no idea exactly what it was covering, but we soon discovered it was part of some kind of city water or sewer line. As we approached it, a thought occurred to us: What better place to dispose of our burned paper? We wrestled with the heavy cover and managed to slide it far enough to peek underneath. There was water down there. A lot of water. It was perfect. Not only could we hide the evidence, we reasoned, but the water would destroy it. Brilliant. At least that's what two boys with singed pieces of paper and limited life experience thought. We slid the cover about halfway across the opening. Then, for reasons I still don't understand, Wayne stepped on it. The cover moved. Wayne moved. And then he disappeared. GABOOSH! He had fallen straight into the water. For a second, I just stood there in shock. I looked down into the opening. I could hear him splashing. I tried to slide the cover farther over the opening, but I couldn't reach him. I was eight years old. My brother was somewhere down in a hole full of water and sewer. And suddenly, the burned paper didn't seem very important anymore.
 
Apparently, my sister Brenda also saw what happened. She ran to the front porch, to get our grandfather, where he often sat in his rocking chair drinking coffee. I turned and ran as fast as my little legs could carry me up the back steps, across the porch and into the kitchen. I threw open the screen door and screamed at the top of my lungs, “WAYNE HAS FALLEN INTO THE WELL!”
 
For one brief moment, everything stopped. It seemed like an eternity. It was probably less than a nano-second. Grandma was standing at the kitchen sink. She wiped her hands on her apron. Mom walked away from the laundry she was feeding through the ringer washer. There was Grandpa sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with a newspaper in front of him. Everybody dropped whatever they were doing. Then they ran. I turned around and sprinted back toward the well. My grandfather was right behind me. Then Grandma. Then Mom. But I don't think Mom stayed behind them for long. By the time we were about twenty-five yards from the back door, she had passed everybody. She was running and screaming. Brenda and I just stood there watching the whole thing unfold.
 
They immediately began asking me what had happened. “How did this happen?” I just looked at them. I was horrified. “I don't know!” Mom told me, “Go get your dad!”
 
Grandpa didn't wait. He was already down on his stomach beside the opening, reaching into the well, trying desperately to get hold of Wayne.
 
I ran into the house and burst into the bedroom where my dad was sleeping. “Dad! Dad! Wayne fell in the well!” He jumped out of bed and ran with me toward the backyard. I can still remember something about that moment that seems almost funny now. Dad came running out of the house wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. At the time, of course, there was absolutely nothing funny about the situation.
 
By the time we reached the well, Grandpa Hines had managed to reach down far enough to grab Wayne by the fingertips and then the hands. With one enormous effort, he pulled my brother up and out of that hole.
 
Wayne was alive. He was soaked. He was exhausted. And he was covered with the contents of the sewer. Yuck! But he was safe. Then the whole family seemed to erupt at once. There were shouts of joy, huge sighs of relief, crying, wailing and more than a little emotional chaos. The crisis was over—or at least the worst of it was.
 
Then came the inevitable question. Everyone looked at me. “What happened?” This time, I knew there was no point in trying to invent a story. So, I told the truth. “We were playing with matches,” I said, “and we were throwing the burned paper down the well.” There was a moment of silence. At least I had finally confessed. Everyone was incredibly relieved that Wayne was okay, and I knew that, sooner or later, the subject of the matches was going to come back up.
 
Wayne, meanwhile, was dripping wet and covered with sewer muck, so Grandma Hines took him straight to the bathtub and gave him a good scrubbing. Wayne distinctly remembers that even soap and water weren't enough to get all the grime off. Grandma eventually resorted to using lighter fluid to clean some of the dirt and muck from his skin.
 
Just when we thought the excitement was over, the fire department arrived. And, of course, whenever a fire truck shows up in a neighborhood, everybody comes outside to see what's happening. The firefighters came to the house, and somehow the story that emerged was that Wayne had simply been playing in the backyard, stepped on the well cover, and accidentally fell in when the cover flipped up. In other words, there was now a perfectly reasonable explanation for what had happened—and it had absolutely nothing to do with two little boys playing with matches and trying to dispose of the evidence.
 
Later, a reporter from the Peoria Journal showed up at the house. After Wayne had been cleaned up and dressed, he apparently told the reporter the same basic story: He had been playing in the backyard, stepped on the well cover, and somehow slipped into the well. The story made the newspaper and, as I remember it, even appeared on the front page. The incident caused enough concern that the mayor of Peoria ordered an inspection of well covers throughout the city.
 
Suddenly, my brother's near disaster had become a legitimate civic issue. Of course, there was one small problem with the story.
 
It wasn't the truth.
 
Brenda and I knew what really happened. Wayne knew what really happened. Other than me telling my mom the truth that afternoon, the subject of the matches was never mentioned again. We simply allowed everyone else to believe the story that Wayne told.
 
As Numbers 32:23 in the Bible says, “…you may be sure that your sin will find you out.
 
We never told the city. We never corrected the newspaper story. As far as I know, those well covers were inspected because everybody thought an innocent little boy had accidentally fallen through one.
 
Nobody ever knew that the real story involved two boys, a box of matches, a pile of burned paper, a sewer well and what we thought was a brilliant plan for destroying the evidence.
 
Later that day, after things had calmed down, I expected my mother to be furious. And she probably had every right to be. But my mother had always had a difficult time staying angry with us for very long. Maybe she was simply too relieved. Maybe she was exhausted. Or maybe that is just what mothers do.
 
Even though I was only eight years old, she pulled me up into her lap and sat with me in the rocking chair. She rocked me, and I cried. Not the little-boy kind of crying where you squeeze out a few tears because you've been caught doing something you shouldn't. I mean I really cried. I think I was finally realizing what could have happened to me and my brother. The fear I had felt when I heard him splash into that well came rushing back. And as my mother rocked me, I cried just as hard as everybody else had cried in the backyard.
 
I don't remember what she said to me that day. I don't remember whether I was punished for playing with matches. But I remember that rocking chair. I remember being eight years old. And I remember being held by my mother after nearly losing my brother. That's what has stayed with me for more than sixty years.
 
Funny how memory works. You may forget the details of the punishment. You may even forget exactly what started the trouble. But you don't forget the feeling of being safe again. And somewhere in my family's history, there is also the unforgettable fact that two little boys once thought a city sewer well was an excellent place to dispose of the evidence.
 
We were wrong about that.  Very, very wrong.
 
And apparently, we weren't very good at keeping family secrets, either. It only took us almost sixty five years to tell this story.