Tragedy in small town New Sweden

There comes a turning point in any tragedy when the full horror of a situation hits home and heartbreak sets in where shock left off. That happened for me Wednesday night when our beloved village of New Sweden became the focus of a story on CBS Evening News.

To hear Dan Rather introduce a national news item which asked the question of whether someone may have planned to poison 15 members of our community at a church social, left me no choice but to consider this terrible truth.

For days we have been wandering around, first believing it could have been accidental food poisoning, then wondering if it could have been the water, then speculating over the possibility of residue from a cleaning solution left in the coffee urn and finally surmising that it must have been added to the coffee before it left the factory.

But Wednesday night, when Dan Rather mentioned the word “murder” and when it was announced that a container that had held arsenic had been discovered at the church, we were forced to consider the absolute worst. This may have been foul play and not of a foreign kind but of a type committed by a member of our very own community.

This realization is as dismaying as it is dumbfounding. Surely not here in New Sweden. It just can’t be true. It’s like a terrible nightmare and I keep hoping I will wake up tomorrow morning and discover it was all an awful dream.

But the questions I encounter throughout the day at my job in nearby Caribou, the regular news reports on the latest developments, the frequent phone calls back and forth as friends, neighbors and relatives compare theories and stories – make it impossible to avoid reality.

And so the sorrow has set in: grief for the loss of a dear friend and neighbor, Reid Morrill, who had survived heart surgery this winter only to be killed off by a cup of coffee this spring; sadness at the critical condition of Ralph Ostlund, a champion cross country skier who, at nearly 80, had recently won a gold medal yet again in the Henry Anderson Ski Race, but who now lies in an intensive-care unit in Bangor; gloom over those recalled to Cary Medical Center to undergo days of antidote for poisoning and who may face unknown health problems in the future.

But most of all, I am grieving over the loss of the town we once knew – an idyllic, unspoiled Swedish village nestled in the rolling hills of central Aroostook. This town, which looks more like a plantation than a village with its whitewashed churches, potato farms and forests, was “dry” up until the late 1970s and is as straightlaced as a pair of ladies high lace shoes.

And that’s where the worrying associations begin. I can’t help but think of “Arsenic And Old Lace” and of Agatha Christie and “whodunnit” as I contemplate how out of character this incident is for a town like this.

And that’s what makes this event so shocking and compelling that we find ourselves under the microscope of Rather’s CBS Evening News. No one would expect so unseemly an incident to occur in an innocent small town like this one and certainly not in church and surely not drinking coffee!

Our church life is the hub of social life here and coffee is what binds it together – at church suppers, at Swedish Club, after church on a Sunday morning, at bake sales, at birthday parties.

There are no bars or pubs in New Sweden. Everything is centered around church. And when the sanctity of that domain is defiled by poison in our coffee, it shakes the very roots of our sense of community.

How can we trust? Who can we trust? When can we trust? There are so many unanswered questions. Rumors are rife. All we can do is hope and pray that those who are ill will recover and that the authorities will hurry up and find out whodunnit and tell us how on earth this happened to us.

Until then, we are like characters meandering around in a murder mystery not knowing quite what will happen next. If and when the culprit is apprehended, it won’t bring back to life our neighbor Reid Morrill and it won’t erase the damage done by the arsenic, but it will start to give us back our precious New Sweden and the comfort and calm this charming country town has brought to so many of us.

Brenda Nasberg Jepson is a film maker who met her husband, Alan, 10 years ago at the parsonage of the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church in New Sweden, now the site of a homicide investigation. She has made documentaries about New Sweden including “The Coming of the Swedes,” shown last year on Maine Public Television. She lives with Alan, a New Sweden native, in Maine’s Swedish Colony.