Keep in a Cold, Dark Place

by Michael Stewart

  The sign read: “Foreclosure. Bank Sale.”

  “Two weeks to pay up, O’Malley.” Mr. Sotheby didn’t meet her father’s burning eyes. “Sorry, but hobby farms are big these days and the head office wants its money.”

  “Potato farming’s no hobby,” her father replied. “I’m feeding more families than just me own.”

  “Sorry, I really am.” The banker glanced up, flinched from the heat of her father’s stare, and then paused at Limpy’s expression. She’d been trying to keep the burgeoning excitement from showing. She hated the farm. Farm chores never ended. Chores kept her from studying, from her art, from a future. The sale of the farm might be the end of her father’s dreams, but it would be the beginning of hers. Without the farm her father would have no choice but to allow her to go to Hillcrest, if she won the scholarship.

  The back tire skidded as she turned down the drive. The dried tread of the tractor wheels jarred her hands as she struggled to keep the bicycle within the deep ruts of the tracks. In the front yard, she braked, let the bike fall where she stopped, and huffed to the door.

  Around the table sat her father and her two brothers. Before them were plates and a large earthenware bowl of potatoes. The bowl brimmed with muddy, bruised taters. Her youngest brother, Dylan, squinted with eyesight so sharp that, with his rifle, he could take the eye out of a sparrow at a hundred paces. Seeing her, he stuffed a baby potato up his nose, plugged the free nostril and shot the potato so that it hit her chest.

  They’d waited for her to return to make a point. Each of them took a tater from the bowl, salted it, peppered it, and then crunched into it, staring at her with each bite of the raw spud.

  She heard the soil in the grinding of their teeth. The boys deserve their cookup, Limphetta.

  Connor, the eldest, flat faced and as mute as Arnie was mean, ate without complaint. Her father hulked in his chair. Before his plate was a can of Coke; each night he allowed himself a single can and hoarded his supply as if it were Irish gold. His shaggy, black hair failed to hide his scowl. He scowled constantly, but never more so than when he was eating dirty, raw potatoes. The locals called him Black Irish, and the internet suggested he was a descendant of a castaway crew member of a sunken Spanish Armada ship. Limpy liked the romance of that. His dark hair and complexion were closest to Limpy’s own, his eyes sharp like Dylan’s, and the great black moustache reminded her of a conquistador. If only he’d been mute like Connor.

  “Would you look at the state o’ you?” he said with an Irish lilt that would mark him forever. Sweat poured down Limpy’s face, and she wiped it dry with her apron.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. “Lost track of time. I’ll get cooking.” She started into the kitchen.

  “Don’t be acting the maggot,” her father said. “You’re to move the potato sacks from one side to the next.”

  This was the worst of punishments. Hours of backbreaking work shifting twenty-pound potato sacks from one side of the barn cellar to the other to ensure that they sold the oldest potatoes first. She might have preferred the strap.

  “I said I was sorry, Pops,” she said, stopping in the doorframe.

  “No excuses. Your brothers have been digging for hours. And you’re to do your chores,” he added. “Now. Until it’s done.”

  Her fingers balled into fists. “Why bother, Pops? Why? So the bank can sell the potatoes too?”

  “Lady Luck doesn’t reward quitters, lass. She kicks ’em while they’re down,” he said, taking up another potato, crumbs of it raining from his mouth as he continued, “Besides, the bank can take the taters in the ground, but not the ones in me belly or me cellar.”

  As she slumped through the kitchen to the back door, a potato struck the back of her head.

  “And no free time tomorrow,” her father shouted. “It’s your hands that need working, not your head.”

  She struggled to bury her pain until she reached the yard, but burst into tears at the screen door.

  Her father called again, “Come now, Limpy, you’ll never move the bags turning them over in your mind. Show me you’re not just a sack yourself. You have to learn to respect your family. Off with you.”

  “Off with you,” Dylan agreed with a clap of his hands.

  Despite never having heard Connor say a single word, Limpy always hoped he’d speak when she really needed him. His silence now burned.

  As the door slammed, her fists shook. She was angry with herself. Angry that she had allowed herself a sliver of hope. Had allowed herself to believe that just maybe she could have a new life. Dreams for Limpy could only ever end in disappointment. Quit your dreams, her mother whispered, off with you.

  And off Limpy went.

  Chapter 4

  After Limpy stopped crying, she drew calming breaths. Despite it being twenty years since fire had engulfed the stables, a hint of charcoal still lingered. The stables had burned to the ground the same year Limpy’s parents had reached port from Ireland and not long after Emmanuel’s father, Emmanuel José Sr., had arrived in town from Puerto Rico, his wife at his side.

  The bones of the structure lay jumbled and splintered opposite a smaller barn where Limpy’s family stored the tractor and cellared the potato sacks. Most locals didn’t like to talk about what had happened here. Limpy only knew bits and pieces of the story. That the property had gone to the bank after the owners had doused the stables in gasoline and set it ablaze, killing all the animals inside. The owners had claimed it wasn’t them, that their dreams had died with their prize horses. Her father had never seen the point in clearing the debris. There was enough to do on a farm besides.

  She shambled the short distance from the house. The barn was built of wide, gray planks and thick timbers cut centuries before. Round stones, picked from the fields, formed a foundation made firm originally with mortar, and more recently, patches of drab concrete. Although they had never farmed hay, the barn held a musty, nutty scent that made Limpy sneeze as she stepped over the threshold. The door creaked shut behind her. The last of the evening light gleamed over the farm equipment, all sharp edges and spines. A four-year-old wouldn’t last five minutes in the barn, not without cutting off a limb.

  The grading machine filled a quarter of the first floor, a conveyor that separated the potatoes by size and gave Limpy time to pluck out the rotten ones before bagging. A tractor and various attachments for tilling and harvesting fields occupied another half and a collection of old wood bristling with rusty nails, topped with rolls of chicken wire, crammed the rest. Some of the wood they’d scrounged from the debris of the stables and the reek of ashes remained even here.

  A ladder climbed into the loft where Connor sometimes slept on a nest of old burlap potato sacks, when Father’s snoring shook dust from the farmhouse rafters. Another ladder descended through a hatch into the basement where the only light filtered through a grimy, narrow window. There, in the cool cellar, were the bagged potatoes. It was harvest season and the cellar was already nearly a third full with hundreds of bags. Two tons she’d lift before the night was through.

  Limpy sighed. As her father had said, the sacks wouldn’t be moving themselves.

  Limpy herself weighed the same as four potato bags. Sometimes she wondered if she were worth four bags to her father. Twenty dollars. After all, she had cost him his wife and the boys their mother. Each time she grasped a sack by the corners—the ears, she called them—Limpy felt like she gripped herself. Splay-legged and hugging her hateful self, Limpy would waddle to the opposite side of the cellar to thump herself into a new pile.

  She couldn’t read in the dark, but written on every bag, like some ancient law, was “Keep in a cold, dark place.” She could move ten or eleven Limpys an hour, but this usually slowed to eight or nine by the time she finished. In four to five hours, she would move a pile of forty or so Limpy’s worth of potatoes.

  Her stomach rumbled.

  Time enough for eating when you deserve it, Mother said. Limpy hunched under th
e weight of the words and the pluck of a ghostly harp string. She grabbed a sack by the ears and heaved.

  Soon sweat beaded her forehead and the familiar, musty smell of rotting potatoes and earth clogged her nostrils. The daylight failed. She worked by feel, grabbing ears and hugging bags in the dark. The farm cats gathered to watch. Where potatoes rotted, mice nested. Limpy liked the company of the cats, particularly Spud, an ancient tabby marbled with orange and white like a cheese-filled, baked potato.

  “Get yourself a mouse, Jupiter,” she urged the big black whose eyes flashed green in the darkness. About her swarmed five such cats, pouncing and skittering with each bag thrown. “Good eating, Athena, don’t let the Romans have all the fun.” Aside from Spud, she had named each of the cats after her favorite gods and goddesses and sometimes imagined the competing pantheons doing battle. Her mother had named Spud, which was probably why it was Limpy’s favorite and the only cat her father let into the house. Spud was getting old, very old for a farm cat who faced dangers like coyotes, foxes and owls.

  Limpy’s knees ached. The bags rubbed at her chin. Her stomach cramped with hunger, but she dared not steal a potato, not until she was done.

  The last bags were the worst. The last bags were the rotten ones. The ones in which potatoes grew pink stalks from their eyes. In the darkness, she felt about until her hand reached soft, gooey porridge or an eye-stalk, before knowing for sure that a bag was rotten. These sacks she bent to heave on her shoulder, climbed the ladder, and slid them onto the plank boards above. Later she’d pick through the bags and use the salvageable potatoes for family meals.

  By the tickle on her cheeks, she knew cobwebs hung from her hair. She took a moment to run her fingers from her nose across her temples and ears to the back of her head, gathering up the worst of the strands and scraping them onto a ladder rung. She didn’t dare think about the spiders that made the webs. Only a few more bags remained. The gooiest, mustiest bags with eyestalks like periscopes. But Limpy smiled, happy to be nearly done.

  “Good for you, Spud.” She patted the cat, from whose mouth dangled a mouse tail.

  With the rotten bags cleared, Limpy only needed to scrape the guck off the dirt floor. A shovel with a heart-shaped spade rested against the crumbling stone wall near a stack of burlap sacks and several balls of stitching twine. The skin of Limpy’s hands had roughened with her frequent use of shovels and needles.

  Tough hands are an honest life’s work, Mother said in the darkness.

  “Yes, Ma,” Limpy muttered, and she struggled to hold back sudden tears. If her hands were so calloused now at thirteen, how would they be at twenty, or forty, or sixty? Her father’s fingers were like the rock outcroppings that studded the hills along one side of the farm. Would she ever be free of the farm? How? When? Who would ever buy a cursed farm? Her art would never be good enough for a Hillcrest scholarship. Her fears choked her. They overwhelmed. She hung over the shovel handle and drew deep breaths.

  Something rattled in the blackness. Limpy froze, breath held tight in her chest. She listened, trying to hear past the throbbing of blood in her ears.

  She scanned for the source of the sound, but found nothing. It hadn’t been a cat. She’d felt the rattle in her toes. And she couldn’t shake the weird thought that something had responded to her fears. The rattle didn’t come again and she finally returned to her shoveling, and to the roughening of her palms.

  Thin moonlight eased through the window now as she filled an empty potato sack with the gross earth. She dug until the blade chipped into hard clay. Over the nearly two decades her father had owned the land, the family had carved the cellar floor a good six feet lower, raising the ceiling and requiring an ever-lengthening ladder. Sometimes her father would say, go get us a little closer to China, and she knew he was talking about potato bag moving. Every time she moved the bags she dug the cellar another inch deeper. Maybe in another dozen years she could reach China, digging a tunnel like a prisoner digs under the prison wall—and escape.

  The shovel chinked on stone. She worked around the rock until the shovel struck again, this time setting off a spark. She blinked in the afterglow. It wasn’t a stone as she had first thought. Whatever it was had a sharp corner, like a box. But that made as much sense as digging to China.

  Just then her brother hollered.

  The deep, bone-aching fatigue that killed her will to study, to read, to create, drew her step over step up the ladder. When she reached the top, she heard another rattle. A something-against-wood kind of rattle.

  She paused and stared back down.

  In the slender rectangle of moonlight, the box corner protruded from the earth. It shook. Somewhere a door slammed. Her brothers and father were off to bed. And already her father’s snores accompanied the cicadae.

  She was alone.

  With the rattling.

  Chapter 5

  Balanced on the top rung of the ladder and bone-weary, Limpy hesitated. In the dim light her imagination followed the line of the box lid. A long rectangle, the shape of a coffin, but much smaller—cat sized. The top was a scrollwork of runes and symbols. A tiny sarcophagus, but whatever lay inside didn’t seem very dead. She shuddered.

  Tomorrow the potato harvest would continue, bringing more potato bags. Dozens of them. All piled on top of whatever lay in the box. The weight of potatoes might crush the lid, or her brothers might discover it.

  Limpy climbed back down the ladder. If it wasn’t for the moonlight filtering through the window, the darkness would have been complete. Only her breathing broke the silence. No insects chittered. No distant clucking came from the henhouse. The cats had fled. Only the rattling interrupted the quiet. Something like shaking marbles in a wooden box. Or perhaps bones.

  She picked up the spade, nudged the box with its tip, and jumped back. Dirt shook from the lid, but on the corner glimmered a small brass fitting. The rattling stopped. Again with the shovel, she scraped at the dirt, exposing all four corners. Several inches of the wood below the lid were visible, dark and cracked. Along with a small lock, black with rust.

  All the evil in the world. She buried the thought. It was ridiculous. A locked box left deep under the earth could mean treasure—just the other day she’d read on the internet about someone out for a walk on their farm who came across a tin filled with rare old coins worth millions. Millions! With millions she could have new clothes—normal clothes. Her family could eat well. Imagine the art she could make! They could build a house. A mansion! And she could go to arts school. Maybe she’d even be sent away to college. She could leave. Her heart pounded. It was all too much to wish for.

  Wishes don’t put potatoes on plates, her mother whispered.

  And there was the rattling . . .

  Perhaps it was a coffin for a cherished pet. She’d read a story once of pets coming alive, rising from the ground of their pet cemetery. They must have rattled in their coffins at first, too. She shrugged off the creeping terror. But why bury a box so deep, and why here in the chill and shadow?

  Limpy thought back to the image of the woman on the internet opening Pandora’s box and freeing all the world’s evil. The god, Zeus, hadn’t punished her for doing so, had he? He had known she’d do it. The gods had also given Pandora the gift of curiosity. They had expected her to open the box.

  There’s nothing wrong with being curious. It’s only dangerous for cats.

  Cats and young ladies who have a full day’s work to ready for, her mother said. Tomorrow was the weekend, and the weekend meant chores.

  Limpy paused with the spade lifted high. Making up her mind, she jabbed downward. The tip of the spade caught the lock. It fell open. Limpy gasped. Still half-buried, the box lid vibrated, bouncing a little and shaking off more dirt. Nothing remained to be done now. Some small animal must have gotten inside, a mouse probably. Well, she didn’t like to see any animal suffer. She even refused to be the one to wring the chickens’ necks when the hens were done their laying. Luckily Dylan lik
ed the job.

  To remove the rest of the lock, she needed her fingers. On her knees, she breathed the rich scent of freshly turned clay and ran her fingertips over the carved surface of the lid. Words were inscribed there, but she couldn’t read in the dim light. The box must have once been finely crafted, the lid etched with deep engravings in the wood.

  Limpy vaguely heard the slam of the farmhouse door, but the box gripped her attention. The lock ground over the metal. She let it fall. Limpy crawled as far away from the box as she could and still reach it. Then, with one dirty fingernail, she lifted the clasp and flipped the lid open, jerking her arm away.

  Nothing leapt free.

  Inside were four balls, placed like eggs in a narrow carton except each egg was a different color: white, blue, red and yellow. The yellow ball trembled. So did Limpy’s hands. Gripping the edges of the box, she hefted it out of the hole, needing to strain under the weight despite its small size. She looked around for a place to put it. Filled potato bags leaned against the wall. If she climbed them, she’d be able to slide the box onto the windowsill and take a better look in the moonlight.

  Holding the box level, Limpy struggled over the potatoes. On her knees it was tough to climb knobbly bags, but soon she was near enough that she could stretch out and reach the light-filled niche. But before the box slid onto the sill, the bottom sagged like a too-wet paper bag. The yellow ball fell to the bags below. It wasn’t far, but Limpy had broken many hundreds of eggs. She knew the sound.

  She whined, but couldn’t drop the rest of the box, so carefully pushed it tight to the window before searching for the fallen ball. She traced a drizzle of wet, down the edge of the bag to where it disappeared amongst the corners of three other sacks. She pulled these apart. There lay the yellow ball. A fine crack zigzagged from the top nearly to the bottom.

  She cupped it in her hands and yellow goo oozed out of the crack. The ball shivered. A tiny trembling, but noticeable in her hands. She placed her thumbs on either side of the crack and, with her stomach clenched, slowly pulled the shell apart. It broke completely, the two halves falling to the side. A tiny creature squirmed in her palms.