Keep in a Cold, Dark Place

by Michael Stewart

  KEEP IN A COLD, DARK PLACE

  By Michael F. Stewart

  Copyright 2017 Michael F. Stewart

  Cover Art by Martin Stiff

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form.

  www.michaelfstewart.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living, dead or virtual, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  In Flesherton’s tiny school library, Limpy O’Malley sewed a tapestry made of old potato bags. It was to be her submission to Hillcrest School for the Art’s Scholarship Committee, a special school in the city, away from the farm, and Limpy’s golden ticket to a better life. If only she could finish her application in time to win the scholarship.

  The folds of Limpy’s art threatened to smother her. Sketched in twine on a blanket of burlap were serpentine roads and trees scraggly with winter’s approach. The tapestry spread over the table, over the sides of a plastic chair, and crept along her knees and up Limpy’s chest toward her throat. Her fingers ached from stitching the town shapes.

  She sewed the family farm now. Or not so much the farm, but her symbol for it, a box, a replica of the golden box that shone from the computer screen.

  “French fry.” The voice came from behind her.

  Limpy brushed lank hair across her face, staring through the greasy strands at the computer screen and then down at the coarse thread. She tried to ignore the teasing, pulling and pushing the thick needle through burlap, tugging at the twine as the box took shape.

  “B-B-Baked.” The second boy stuttered.

  “Yeah, good one. Scalloped,” blurted the first.

  Behind her, the boys, Arnie and Emmanuel, snickered on beanbag chairs. She loved those chairs. They weren’t full of Styrofoam balls like new ones. They contained beans, real beans. Limpy imagined that if she dug a great hole and dropped the bags inside, up would sprout a beanstalk more magnificent than Jack’s. Up she could climb, up beyond the borders of her town, and the ring of thorns that encircled her potato bag tapestry.

  A bean skittered across the burlap until it planted itself beside the box coalescing in thread beneath her fingertips.

  “Mashed,” Emmanuel said. “What are you making anyway?”

  Arnie struggled out of his beanbag. Stubbly-cheeked and with the deep, red skin of someone who spent his evenings hunched over a tractor, and deer-sick from school during hunting season, he loomed over Limpy’s work of “artistic merit.” The reek of teenage boy and beef jerky assaulted her.

  “She’s making a giant potato sack,” Arnie said and sniggered. “To put herself in.”

  “Big enough to put her whole family in, more like it,” Emmanuel said.

  “It’s not a sack,” Limpy said. “It’ll be the town. When it’s done.”

  Two dozen potato sacks cut open and sewn together formed the canvas. Rough stitches sketched in the town’s design: Main Street and its stores, the water tower, The Restaurant, the church, nearby homes and the surrounding fields. Only Hillcrest School, outside the thorns, had progressed further than an outline and was nearly done. She was just starting on the arduous process of embroidering the rest of the scenes. But she needed more time.

  Limpy had one hour in the school library, one hour to seek the world beyond the eighty-four acres of her father’s potato farm. One hour to work on her art.

  Arnie leaned closer, his dull eyes widening. “Is that supposed to be Emmanuel’s store then, tater-pop?”

  “I’m not done,” she said.

  “Duh, it doesn’t even have the sign.”

  “It’s called the General Store. Doesn’t need a sign.”

  “W-W-We don’t sell much soup,” Emmanuel said.

  Limpy had taken a symbolic approach to the town buildings. All around the edge of the burlap was the wall of thorns. The Restaurant was a fork and knife, The Bar a glass, the General Store a can of soup, the Church a cross, and her farm a box.

  Emmanuel looked hurt, and Limpy didn’t know why. His bullying surprised her, even if he did it stammering and red faced. He was smarter than the other boys, and she didn’t understand why he needed to hang around with the likes of Arnie.

  “If my store’s a can, why isn’t your farm a potato?” Emmanuel asked. “Yours looks like a treasure chest.”

  Arnie said, “My dad says he’ll never eat a potato from your farm. The curse makes him sick.”

  Limpy struggled to keep stitching. It wasn’t a treasure chest. It was Pandora’s box, but Arnie was closer to the truth. On the computer screen was a painting of a beautiful Greek woman named Pandora, opening a golden box—a cursed box—a box that held all the evil in the world. That was what she stitched in place of her father’s farm.

  “Curse isn’t real,” Emmanuel said.

  “Then why won’t your dad let you go near her farm?” Arnie asked. “You ever eat one of their potatoes?”

  Limpy looked up and Emmanuel flushed. She’d never known. She’d always wondered why he’d never been by, or why Emmanuel’s father refused to stock any of their potato bags, but she hadn’t thought it due to the curse.

  None of that mattered. What mattered was that she finish her art, win the scholarship, and flee Flesherton forever.

  “Leave me alone,” Limpy told them. They’d see. The tapestry would come alive. It had to.

  “Emmanuel shouldn’t be stuck with a can of soup,” Arnie said. “They sell more bullets for hunting than soup, don’t you?”

  With a wink at Emmanuel and a glance through the bookshelves to see if Ms. Summerfield, their librarian and teacher, was watching, Arnie yanked six inches of gleaming hunting knife from a sheath. “Emmanuel doesn’t want you sewing his store.”

  “I actually don’t care,” Emmanuel said.

  Limpy gasped at the knife, gathering the folds of her art to her chest, but Arnie had gotten a grip on the burlap.

  “Come on,” Emmanuel said. “Don’t be dumb.”

  “The only one dumb in this town is Limpy’s brother.” Arnie shook his head. “If that’s your dad’s store, then we can cut it out if we want to.”

  From behind Arnie, Emmanuel gave Limpy a pained look of apology and then hauled on the arm brandishing the knife.

  “Don’t even think about it, Arnie,” Limpy said. “You don’t understand.” Fear brimmed in her eyes, but not of the knife, rather the loss of time.

  Arnie shrugged Emmanuel off and brought the knife-tip down to the fabric, nudging up a loop of twine. If he damaged the tapestry, she’d never fini
sh it. Fatigue dragged at her shoulders. The ache in her thumb had spread to her hands and wrists. She expected this kind of teasing from her brothers. From her father, too. But the school library was her safe place. A place that allowed her to reach beyond the town’s bank of thorns, a place that held her fear for the future at bay, and fanned a spark of hope. Limpy squeezed back tears, and slowly stood, shaking and russet red.

  “You know,” she said, forcing a smile. “I’m pretty good at cutting out eyes.” From the depths of her apron she pulled a paring knife. “I can peel skin good, too.”

  She was, of course, referring to potato eyes and potato skin, but she wasn’t about to explain that. She thumbed the blade.

  Arnie sliced through a row of stitches, splitting them.

  Emmanuel shouted for him to stop.

  The swish of Ms. Summerfield’s pants rustled between shelves.

  “Come on.” Emmanuel pulled Arnie toward the library exit.

  “Limpy,” Arnie mumbled.

  “Get out of here,” Limpy whispered after them, as the two boys fast-walked out of the library and into the school hall. The hunting blade was hidden by the time Ms. Summerfield’s narrow nose poked past the rack of books. Limpy’s hand quaked as she shoved her paring knife back into her apron pocket. The handle was sticky with potato starch, and she swiped her palms clean.

  Limpy had thirty more minutes and, although she mourned the loss of time, she didn’t dwell on it. She went right back to her stitching. Ms. Summerfield stopped to marvel at the scope of Limpy’s work and then drifted away. If there was one thing Limpy’s father had taught her, it was never to waste anything. Not a thing. Most of all, she feared she was doing exactly that. Having wasted the thirteen years since her birth, now she was wasting the rest of her life in a cold, dark place.

  Chapter 2

  By the time Ms. Summerfield announced the library was closing, Limpy’s thumb bled. She jerked upright with such force that the librarian came to ask if she was okay.

  “I’m late,” Limpy said. Her father had told her never to be late. Dinner must be on the table by sundown. No excuses.

  Through the window, the sun hunkered below the horizon, tanning the sky the same color Limpy feared her buttocks would soon be if her father took his strap to them.

  Ms. Summerfield touched the burlap as if testing it. “Limphetta . . . I worry that it’s too much to take on.” At Limpy’s drooping expression Ms. Summerfield continued in a rush, “I know you can do it, but the submission is due next Thursday—that’s only six days away. Maybe you should consider something . . . smaller.”

  Limpy stared at the upper right panel of the tapestry. Outside of the thorns, Hillcrest School for the Arts stood like a castle, guarded by a twine dragon.

  The rest of it . . . as Arnie and Emmanuel said . . . it still looked like a giant potato sack big enough for her whole family to climb into.

  “But it must be of artistic merit, Ms. Summerfield,” Limpy said. “I need to make the deadline, but I also need it to win or I can’t go.” Deep down, Limpy had a hard time believing anything made from potato sacks and twine could be deemed art at all, let alone merit a scholarship, but she had few choices.

  Ms. Summerfield’s flat expression suggested Limpy was right. “It’s harvest time, I know, but maybe your father could give you more free time?” Ms. Summerfield didn’t know Limpy’s dream was still a secret from her family. She hadn’t told her father that her application to the school had been accepted, since acceptance without the scholarship meant nothing, because otherwise Limpy couldn’t afford to go. And he believed that grading, cleaning, bagging, chopping, cooking, and eating potatoes was all the schooling she’d ever need. Both her brothers had dropped out of high school at sixteen. The only thing more important to her father than the farming of potatoes was the selling of potatoes.

  “Maybe,” Limpy said.

  “Would you like me to talk to him?” Ms. Summerfield asked.

  Limpy’s head shook so hard she worried it might fly off. But her father would need to know soon. The interview was this Sunday—at the farm.

  “Limphetta?” Ms. Summerfield leaned down so that her nose and clear gray eyes drilled toward Limpy. “I can call him right now.”

  “No, please no, Ms. Summerfield.”

  Ms. Summerfield bumped her fingertips along Limpy’s intricately embroidered backpack, which was also made from an old potato bag. Some kids doodled in class. Limpy stitched. The whorls of twine and staccato dot patterns tattooed on her backpack had introduced Ms. Summerfield to Limpy’s art. The librarian said, “I know you can do it. Your art is amazing.”

  Limpy nodded as she folded the tapestry into a neat bundle and stuffed it into her knapsack. Leaving the books she’d gathered to research Pandora’s box on the desk, she left the library.

  Six days. Limpy’s heart skipped a few beats at the thought of such an important deadline. Was it really possible? Would the school really want Limpy-Limphetta so much that they’d let her go for free? Would her father allow it?

  Outside, she unsnapped the bike lock and shook off the chill evening air. Pedaling furiously down Main Street, she buzzed past the General Store—where Emmanuel lived with his father—the Community Hall, the Church, The Restaurant, The Bar, and The Laundry (which had gone out of business)—no one had bothered to come up with good business names that might lend the small town a little appeal. It was a town without imagination. Flesherton hadn’t always been so dull. It had once boasted over a thousand homes. Still small, but a lot bigger than it was now.

  Marcel Flesh had founded the village in 1868 and, for most his life, had been the mayor, the leader of its militia, ran the grocery, the mill, and the post office. All the while, he’d tried to lure other people into bringing their livelihoods to the fledgling community. Some poor souls he convinced, but most of them favored the city of Train Stop, about a thirty-minute car drive away, because it was on the railway. The extra distance meant that everything cost more in Flesherton, even if Mr. Flesh sold the land for cheap.

  To compete, Mr. Flesh had ruled that every business in town needed to state its purpose and no more, thinking that’s what had given Train Stop its unique distinction. So the Andersons had started The Bar, and the Kiebers opened The Laundry, and the Bartholomews made a go at The Restaurant.

  Later, the mill and surrounding land had been bought by Arnie’s ma and pop, after the rest of the Flesh family had long moved on.

  Limpy’s ride home usually took eight minutes. But today she needed to set a record. Her jeans burned her thighs as she pumped the pedals. Her handlebars jerked left and right. Her lungs ached. The road soon turned from pavement into gravel, and the outskirts of Flesherton changed into fields.

  Most people in the county farmed cattle, some sheep, goats, or chickens. Everyone despised Burt, the pig farmer, when the wind blew the wrong way—the man couldn’t smell anything, just like the way Nate, the chicken farmer, couldn’t hear. But few crops were grown other than the hay and corn needed to feed all the animals. The soil was sandy, the landscape warty with stony crags and grassy hillocks that no tractor could efficiently till. The land wasn’t meant for cash crops.

  But her father had told everyone who would listen that potatoes were Heaven’s gift. Arriving from Ireland, he had only been able to afford land nobody else wanted. Cursed, the locals had said. But Limpy’s father, Patrick O’Malley, had gone against the grain, so to speak, and with his wife heavy with child at the time, purchased the land. He cut open the bag of potatoes he’d stubbornly lugged from halfway across the world and planted them in the infertile, cursed soil.

  For over two decades the sandy ground had given up golden-fleshed tatters. His wife provided two children before dying in her bed giving birth to a third—Limpy, coming into the world in her father’s arms. Not long after that talk of curses resumed. Limpy had begun washing and grading potatoes as soon as she knew rotten from not. And when she could lift twenty pounds, she began to bag the
m.

  It was probably then that Limpy had been doomed, if not cursed herself. After her mother died, it had only ever been a matter of time before the mewling babe grew old enough to take over everything her mother had done before her. Every day since, Limpy struggled to keep up with the work of her mother’s ghost. She even heard her sometimes. Up, my Limphetta, she’d say. Quit your dreams. Be a help and not a hindrance, there’s work to finish.

  Even now, as Limpy rode her bicycle at breakneck speed, her mother urged her on once more, blowing wind at her back. Hurry, my Limphetta, the boys deserve their cookup. There’s my good potato. And with the echo of her words came a plaintive tune played on a discordant harp—her mother’s favorite instrument.

  Chapter 3

  “Potatoes this-o-way” a sign read, and Limpy followed its direction.

  Ahead, the small, covered “Tater Hut” from which she sold bags of potatoes had three sacks for sale. There’d been four when she’d left for school. She hoped that someone had placed a five-dollar bill in the tin as payment. But she didn’t have time to stop and check. Beside the hut, a sign announced the sale of the farm. A familiar twinge of guilt-ridden joy lanced through her at the sight. She recalled the morning last week when the banker, Mr. Sotheby, had arrived with the sign in hand.

  Limphetta stood more upright with each bang of Mr. Sotheby’s hammer as he drove the sign into the earth. The blows cracked like gunshots. Echoing across the little farm to the craggy hills and back. The bank manager pounded the post a foot into the sandy soil while her family stared on. For every inch the sign sank, Limpy grew an inch taller.

  Crack.

  “Sorry, Pops,” she had said between hits. With each strike, her father’s dream of a life on the farm shattered. By the time Mr. Sotheby’s hammer rested on the ground, and he wiped sweat from his high brow, her father’s dream had been squashed like a rotten potato.

  He scowled at the sign as if he might make it burst into flame by sheer force of his will. “You won’t be taking me farm,” he said.