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boys would be huddled together, whispering about sex. Eddie, approaching the group and overhearing the talk, would blush furiously and back away as fast as he could.
    That was another thing about Eddie that his schoolmates of both sexes recognized from an early age. He didn’t seem to be like other boys. There was something about his mannerisms—the softness of his voice, the meekness of his posture, the nervous fluttering motions his hands made when he talked—that struck them as distinctly girlish. He had another effeminate trait, too. He cried very easily. He certainly couldn’t take a joke. They remembered the time Eddie got teased about his eye. He had a fat, fleshy growth on the corner of his left eyelid. It wasn’t really disfiguring, but it made his eyelid droop. Once, one of the boys made a comment about it—not anything mean, really, just a joke about Eddie’s “saggy-baggy eye.” Eddie’s shit-eating grin had instantly dissolved, and, in front of all of them, he began to sob like a little girl.
    As far as Eddie was concerned, all these things about his schoolmates—their teasing, their insensitivity, and especially their dirty talk—only confirmed his mother’s omniscience. She was right about everything. Outside the close confines of the family, the world was a hard and wicked place.
    Not that conditions within the Gein family were any less difficult. No matter how doggedly they worked it, their hardscrabble farm yielded barely enough food to provide for the family’s subsistence. The fruitless struggle with the soil was a backbreaking job, particularly since George could no longer be counted on to do his share of work. By the time Eddie was a teenager, his father’s main occupations seemed to be loafing, liquor consumption, and abusing his wife and children. He had often whipped the boys when he got drunk. By now—though both Eddie and Henry were small, slightly built young men—they were too big to be beaten. But George could still rant and rave. During one of his alcoholic rampages, he had even accused his wife of adultery. Considering the pathological prudishness of Augusta’s sexual attitudes—not to mention her refusal to associate with any of her neighbors—it seems clear that George’s mental condition was, by this point, no more stable than his wife’s.
    Even had she been so inclined, Augusta would scarcely have had the time to indulge in infidelity, since, besides her housework, she now had to take on some of the chores that her husband would no longer deign to do. Indeed, now that the boys were grown up enough to travel into town and buy the monthly provisions, she never left the farm at all. Life in Plainfield had turned out to be a brutal business, but Augusta refused to abandon it. Divorce was unthinkable, a fundamental violation of her religious beliefs. If the Lord had meant to burden her with a bestial husband and a life of unrelenting labor, then she would not set herself against His will.
    Cut off from all social contacts, completely separated from the life of the community, condemned to an existence of crushing poverty in a remote and desolate region with two tormented and inimical parents, Eddie—never emotionally strong to begin with—was retreating farther and farther into a private world of fantasy. The Gein farm may not have been productive, but it was proving to be a fertile breeding ground for madness.
    As Eddie and Henry grew to manhood and George sank ever deeper into the black pit of his melancholia, Augusta took to harping, with increasing and obsessive frequency, on a single, strident theme: the wickedness of modern women. From newspaper photos and magazine illustrations, she knew the way they dressed, with their short skirts, powders, and lipstick. They were tainted, fallen creatures, and the women of Plainfield, she would admonish her sons, were the worst.
    When heavy rains fell and outdoor work was impossible, she would settle into her rocker in the damp,