The Sorry Fate of Mary Daily

Note: The following is sourced from the incredible, RARE book Play the Yellow Tape by Bobbi Lee (self-published, 2007)

***

The Reader can well imagine the scene. The family surrounds the shrouded form on the bed nervously. A shadow play of light and gloom peers from dark figures projected against the wall. There is grief here, but only to a limited degree. Almost all of it is reserved for those who are in and out of the room, occasionally evincing a twitch or shudder of nervous anxiety. perhaps the stepmother might wipe a few tears from the side of her ample, puffy, swollen cheeks. Suddenly, the entire clan jumps as there is a knock at the door. In strides the local undertaker, who has been summoned to retrieve the body of a young woman. The father goes back with him, leading him to the spare bedroom. The body is wrapped in winding cloth.

"Please don't remove it," says the father, to the undertaker's befuddlement. "She would have wanted it this way."

***

One must consider why, specifically, God sends certain souls into the world seemingly only to suffer. Consider the sad, tragic case of Mary Daily.

She was considered, in the politically-incorrect jargon of the day, mentally "feeble." She had previously given birth to two children, neither one of whom had lived. But, it was her death, her body wrapped in a winding sheet, that rose the suspicion that the luckless, misfortunate Mary had not ended this life in a way any more congenial than how she had lived it. If her days had been punishing, her last day must have been doubly more so.

She was, at least by her own family, considered a rather unappealing stain. When the undertaker of Zanesville, Indiana was thus called to retrieve her body--which, by the way, was wrapped in an old, winding sheet, he was, oddly, instructed NOT to remove it. Dismissing the family under some pretext, he did so and was horrified to see a filthy body, with all the earmarks of abuse.

But he said nothing, instead taking the body with him and burying it at a secret location at the edge of town. (The spot, incidentally, was said by Bobbie Lee to be "just beyond the Huntington County Line".)

It must have been an eerie sight when, by torchlight, the man returned later with the county Sherriff and they dug up the foul remains. A more thorough examination led to the arrest of the entire Daily family the next day: the father, the stepmother, and four step-siblings, two boys, and two girls.

Neighbors were interviewed, all of which insisted that the unfortunate, dwarfish Mary had been ill-treated by her father and stepmother. Made to do the hardest and most unpleasant chores, her clothing was often dirty, threadbare, and ragged, as compared to the clothing of her step-brothers and sisters, which was adequate if not fancy. She was abused as the butt of their joking and forced to sleep in a drafty attic room.

It was this last fact that served the stepmother as a feeble defense. Mary, it seemed (0r so the stepmother claimed) had "dropsy," and was given to taking spells of "faintness." It was during one of these spells that Mary slipped from the ladder leading to her stark attic room, falling and killing herself in the process.

But no one believed that.

Instead, it seemed to have been the accumulated years of abuse that had killed poor, dwarfish Mary Daily, she of the hard existence, who had been seemingly sent into the world to suffer and die in a most inauspicious manner. The family, on trial for their lives, was thusly acquitted; no one could reason out how Mary Daily had been murdered, although everyone knew that she had been.

(The Reader will be outraged. The Reader should remember that this is an unfair world, and that, often, the innocent are made to suffer while the guilty go free. Even, as Sade suggested, often seem to prosper despite or even because of the depth of their transgressions and infamies. C'est la vie.)

Mary Daily was buried in the same spot where the undertaker had hidden the body before, right across the Huntington County Line. And, as far as God or anyone else knows, that is where she remains.