Keep in a Cold, Dark Place

by Michael Stewart

  “Oh,” Limpy cried.

  Wet with jelly from the egg, it seemed to be a scrawny baby mouse or owl. But its eyes were far too large and set to the sides of its head.

  “You’re so beautiful,” Limpy said. Fragile, with legs like twigs and already beginning to shudder. Limpy held it in her palms and blew warm air over its matted fuzz.

  When it sneezed Limpy fell totally in love. It was a gift. An answer to her deepest fears and frustrations. Something that needed her. Had called to her. Could share with her. Was wholly hers.

  And couldn’t possibly be evil.

  Chapter 6

  Light flickered between floorboards and through knotholes. Limpy cringed from the approaching glow, cupping the creature between her palms. Dust caught flares of light and wood creaked. The light steadied at the hole in the cellar ceiling. Limpy glanced down at her hands clasped together and quickly hid the creature behind her back.

  A head poked through the gap. Connor. But she’d already known it would be him, because Father snored and Dylan would have been shouting for her from the house. She wanted to tell Connor about her treasure, but hesitated. Aside from Ms. Summerfield, he was the only person in town who knew she’d applied to Hillcrest. He’d been present when she’d opened her acceptance letter, an expression both sad and proud crossing his usually impassive face. He’d kept that secret. But this wasn’t only about her now. If her father discovered the creature, he would see something he could sell or eat.

  There were two types of animals on their farm. Those that made food like the chickens and their eggs. And those that could fend for themselves like the cats, mousers that kept the rodent population down. There were no pets except Spud. No, even though Connor couldn’t speak, he might force her to show their father the box, the colored spheres, and her new pet. That she had sewn a box in place of the farm had been no coincidence. That she had been the one to find the box was no coincidence. She was duty-bound to protect her new friend.

  With the box safely stowed in the windowsill, she smiled up at her brother and said, “Coming, Connor.” When Connor’s head retracted, she brought the creature back around and, while there was still light, she stared again at the limp thing. What was it? Like a chick exhausted from the effort of hatching, down plastered its tiny limbs. But it wasn’t a chick. The too-big eyes at the sides of its head. Beakless, with a mouth like an “O” of surprise. She swiped the tip of her pinky along its spine and the fast breaths of the creature seemed to settle. Connor’s light jiggled impatiently. Shadows shifted.

  She slipped her tiny buddy into the pocket of her apron before wiping her hands clean. Her one fear, a fear not quite strong enough to surmount the maternal instinct which had sprung in her chest, was the answer to the question: What sort of creature would hatch in such a bitter, bleak place? What sort of creature would be buried under the ground?

  The walk from the barn to the house was, of course, quiet, and Limpy was both desperate that the creature remain silent and anxious to hear something from her pocket to confirm that it was alive. It was real. Connor walked in a manner that suggested he had to bring a lot of his brain power to bear in order to do so. His gaze focused on the ground ahead of him. Boots skimmed close enough to the path to raise dust. She had to restrain the joy that burgeoned in her chest at the tiny noises that came from her pocket.

  To cover it, Limpy chatted, “Connor, I’m so sorry. I was supposed to show you my homework today, wasn’t I?”

  Connor gave a slow shrug and grimaced as if to say, Who really cared? Connor didn’t go to school anymore, nor did Dylan, but Connor liked to learn about whatever she was working on. He needed help though, especially with math and English and history, most subjects.

  “Maybe tomorrow we’ll find time,” she said. It was an optimistic offer. Chickens needed to be fed, breakfasts cooked, and potatoes picked and bagged. Even on weekends her father was up before dawn and had the family in the field before the sun inched over the horizon. On school days the farm needed a full day’s work from her before the class bell sounded, and often it rang without her.

  “I need time to work on my artistic statement, and stitching. I only got a bit done today before Arnie and Emmanuel started bullying . . .”

  She watched Connor’s Adam’s apple bob up and down and he gave her a quick smile.

  “I have to tell Pops about the interview though. It’s Sunday. But how do I ask?”

  Connor nodded and smiled a little more encouragingly.

  Lady Luck doesn’t favor quitters. If the farm sold he’d have no reason to keep her. They might even move to the city. Besides, her luck seemed to be changing.

  The hens in their coop had resumed clucking and the crickets their song. It covered the quiet mewling creature as they walked. The question of how to ask her father seemed to hang ominously in front of Limpy, plain as the moon in the sky. Her hand swung to clasp her brother’s and she held it in a tight, desperate grip. Chill air wicked away the sweat from her clothes, causing her to shake.

  At the back door to the farmhouse, Connor gave her a pat on the head before he opened it and wandered into his room. Limpy wasn’t sleepy.

  Nothing in the farmhouse had changed since her mother’s death except for the accumulation of pictures. Dozens of pictures. Photographs of her mother graced every wall, mantel, windowsill and countertop. Lights ringed a particularly large photo as if she were the star of a Broadway hit. Over time, like everything else, it had yellowed and faded.

  The farmhouse had a single story with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living and dining area. The only oddity was the small room tacked onto the side of the house, a purpose-built addition to give their mother a place to sit and strum her harp. The harp still rested in the corner of that room, which now served as a shrine to her memory. But most disturbing was the poster of her head wrapped around a potato sack stuffed with straw. Limpy avoided looking at it now. Her father had hidden something hard and heavy within the straw. He refused to talk about what he’d stored there, saying only that Limpy needed to keep her ma close to her heart. The potato-sack-mom adorned Ma’s once-favorite rocking chair. Her sea-foam Irish eyes stared through the doorway at anyone seated on the living room couch.

  For the farm, time had stopped thirteen years ago with Limpy’s first cries and her mother’s last breath. The only change was that her brothers and father shared the room her mom and dad had occupied together. Limpy had the only other bedroom. It was the one luxury her father afforded Limpy, and her brothers were none too pleased with the arrangement.

  She crept from the living room into the kitchen, stopping to smile when she found a plate on the counter. Connor had washed, chopped, and salted a potato for her dinner. There was even a rare dollop of ketchup. Perhaps it was for Connor that she hadn’t run away from the farm long ago.

  The creature in her pocket wriggled. She dug for it with her fingertips. If she hadn’t known it was there, she might have mistaken it for some wet lint or a twist of yarn. It weighed no more than a baby potato. She placed it in her palm, releasing a breath when its little limbs pricked at her like a cat primping a place to sleep.

  When the tap ran in a steady stream of warm water, she washed the slime from its fur. Big, wide, black eyes gazed up at her. It emitted a soft chup, chup. Then it waggled like a bird having a bath, shaking from its ear tufts to a stubby tail. Limpy’s heart nearly burst. Love glistened in its eyes. A love like she could never know from her mother and had never known from her father.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll keep you safe. Never fear, Chup. Never fear.”

  Nothing would touch her Chup. Not ever, she vowed. She would show it the love that she herself so missed. She made a nest for it in the chest at the foot of her bed. The chest had been her hope chest, fashioned by her father at the request of her mother who, had she lived, might have filled it with delicate linens, lace and quilts. It had been left empty for several years before being filled with woolen blankets, rather than hop
es and dreams.

  With Chup tucked safely inside, Limpy dared to believe her luck was finally about to change. At the bottom of the chest, beneath all of the blankets, was Limpy’s letter of acceptance from Hillcrest School of the Arts. It meant little without a scholarship and her father’s agreement to let her go, but it was something. And the time had come to ask her pops about going. It was time for Limpy to shine. She pulled her tapestry from her knapsack, pinned it onto the wall for all to see, and set to work.

  Chapter 7

  That night, Limpy dreamed of long stalks the color of pale flesh, peering at her through her bedroom window. Her mother’s harp sang shrill and high. Above Limpy’s head, her mother’s fingers, massive and pocked from the grave, held a needle the size of a scythe blade threaded by a length of rope. In and out of the walls and ceiling of the bedroom her mother sewed, except they weren’t the ceiling and walls of Limpy’s room, but rather the coarse burlap of potato sacks, every inch of it embroidered to reveal the town beyond.

  The sound the stitching made was a lot like the noise of the farm tractor when it ran the potato grader. Fwit fwoo fwit fwoo it pumped with each spin of the wheel turning the conveyor. Fwit fwoo her mother sewed, in and out, until finally she stopped and gathered the rope ends and wrapped them about her fingers.

  With a final fwoo her mother pulled and everything, Limpy’s dresser of rough-hewn wood, the chest full of blankets where she’d hidden Chup, her bed and Limpy inside it, all were drawn up as if the room were a giant potato bag now sewn tight.

  Keep in a cold, dark place, her mother hissed.

  Limpy woke, sitting forward in bed and sweating through her nightshirt. No mother, no room-sack, no rope. But the fwit fwoo of the tractor cut through the window with the flush of dawn. Her fingers ached at the sight of her tapestry filling an entire wall. The box and farm were done now, and Limp had begun to work on the road into town. The other walls of the room were plastered with pages from the Flesherton Herald, an old newspaper now long defunct.

  After running her hands through her hair and pulling it away from her face, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and opened the lid of the hope chest. There, with a collection of cedar chips to keep away moths, lay Chup. The night had dried its fur which sprang out at all angles, doubling its size, the fuzz making Chup appear like a yellow owl chick and cuter than ever. Only short legs and tiny forelimbs protruded from the fuzz. Black orbs stared sadly up at her. The terror of the dream faded.

  Chup, it said.

  “Ohh,” she cooed. “How’s my little buddy?”

  It looked ready to burst into tears.

  Chup. Chup.

  “You hungry? I’ll find you something to eat.” Limpy fetched a washed baby potato. “You eat this, I have to go to work.” But she didn’t go. She waited, watching, hoping that the little being would eat the breakfast. But it didn’t. In fact, it barely moved. She nudged it with her finger and it nuzzled her fingernail. Perhaps, it needed more sleep.

  Limpy pulled a pair of coveralls from her drawers. No one had ever purchased girl clothes for Limpy, and she still wore the same pants and shirts that Connor and Dylan had once worn. But since the boys were stocky, she wore the clothes they had worn at six years old. The sleeves and pant legs never came down quite far enough and the prints of cars and trucks on the T-shirts embarrassed her whenever she wore them into town or school, so she always wore her apron overtop. Everything had been mended at least once. Limpy could sew in the dark and sometimes, when she was so tired that she collapsed to sleep, she would wake in the morning to discover it all done, leaving her to wonder if a leprechaun had finished her work. But she knew leprechauns weren’t the shoemakers of folktales, they were the sons of evil sprites, degenerate faeries with a lust for gold.

  “Are you a good little leprechaun?” she asked her animated pom-pom.

  Her father roared for her, and it pained her to lower the lid slowly on the creature.

  In the kitchen, on the stovetop, burned an iron pan dotted with dark brown bits of potato. Here and there flecks of onion remained. She scraped it all onto a plate and left the pan to soak in the sink. Today was Saturday, a potato grading day, and she’d need every bit of energy. She ate the leftovers from her family’s breakfast before setting lunch to boil. With the next meal prepped and a final glance in on Chup, she went out into the bright sunshine of morning.

  In the fields, her brothers bent over their trowels, digging up the potatoes. Her father hunched over the grader.

  Fwit fwoo chugged the tractor. The clattering of the potatoes as they dropped through the sizing mesh reminded her of the box still in the barn and her attention drifted to the basement window. Grime-coated, she couldn’t see through the film of dirt, but she had the uncanny feeling that she was being watched.

  “Did the work wake the potato princess?” her father demanded as he rubbed the base of his spine. “Might be that there’s a potato beneath your mattress and you didn’t sleep so well?”

  He wasn’t in the right mood to discuss the arts school, she decided.

  Limpy hung her head and took her place at the end of the conveyor, picking out the bug-ridden potatoes or those blighted, moldy, scabbed, mildewed, warted, blotched, pitted or rusted. These they’d save for themselves.

  The autumn sun was hot. Limpy soon grew dizzy. In his beaten straw hat, her father bagged the baby potatoes, which customers paid extra for, and ensured that the tubs of freshly harvested potatoes lugged by the brothers made it evenly onto the conveyor. Every half hour, the fwit fwoo stopped and father and daughter would each haul a full bag of potatoes from the end of the sorting line into the barn to await Limpy’s stitching, which would begin in the afternoon. But already Limpy yearned to return to Chup.

  After a dozen bags, they paused for lunch, just long enough to drain a glass of water and eat the potatoes Limpy had boiled on the stove. Limpy preferred hers with a dash of salt and a splodge of butter. Her father nearly covered his in black pepper and Connor did the same, but added ketchup too. No one had the energy to talk, but Dylan flicked a grub he found in his meal at Limpy.

  “The only thing worse than finding a worm in me tater . . . ,” her father said, “. . . is finding half a worm in me tater.”

  Dylan laughed and Limpy rolled her eyes. But it was a moment of humor in an otherwise sour morning, and Limpy saw her chance. “Daddy?” she asked, wringing her hands as he dusted another potato with pepper. He grunted and didn’t glance her way to catch the flutter of her eyelashes. “You know the arts high school? The one in the city?”

  He paused mid-chew. “The fancy school for all them rich kiddies? Yeah. I knows it.”

  Limpy swallowed. For rich kiddies. Not for Limpy. “I was wondering if—”

  Dylan began to snort.

  “—wondering if I might see if—” she rushed.

  Bits of potato sprayed over the table as Dylan guffawed. Realization dawned on her father’s face. “You wanna go to artsy fartsy school? Ain’t that grand? You?” her father managed between choking laughs.

  “But, I could try. I have to create an art piece and there’s an interview this Sun—”

  “And all the while you’re sewing your art and doing your talking, who is doing the cooking, bagging and stitching of taters?” her father broke in.

  Dylan answered for her. “Me, that’s who. Besides, potatoes are Heaven’s gift.”

  “Don’t waste our time or the poor school’s time,” her father said.

  “But the interview tomorrow—just let me try.”

  Dylan and her father were laughing again. Connor opened his mouth as if he had something to say and then shut it again like he thought better of it.

  Her father’s brow furrowed with sudden sympathy. “Oh, Limphetta, you dunna want to go to that fancy-pants place? Besides, it’s too far away and costs more bags of potatoes than we can grow in a field. I never finished high school and look at me.”

  “Just the interview to see?” she ask
ed, and there must have been something in her face that convinced him, because he shrugged.

  “Sunday?” he asked and she nodded. “I don’t see why you’d spend time meeting someone to talk about stuff you can’t never do, but if you get on with all of your chores . . .”

  Limpy was about to exclaim her joy when her father leapt out of his chair and ran his sleeve across his mouth. “Someone’s snooping about our taters,” he said with a stare as sharp as pitchfork tines.

  Through the window they watched Mr. Sotheby tour a man about the farm. The man wore heeled dress shoes and seemed more concerned with keeping them clean than whatever the banker was jawing on about.

  To his reflection in the window her father said, “No one’s stealing me farm.”

  They followed him outside, Dylan grabbing a handful of boiled potato on the way. Limpy trailed after, suddenly panicked about preparations for her interview. It all seemed real again. How would it look if her father didn’t even want her to go? But at least she could meet the interviewer. That was something. Her father hadn’t said no.

  With her father distracted, Limpy took the opportunity to peek in on Chup, who slept soundly—a baseball of fuzziness. Then she rushed back outside.

  “Hiya, Pete.” Her dad waved at Mr. Sotheby, whose face fell when he caught sight of them flooding from the farmhouse.

  “Nice day, ain’t it,” Mr. Sotheby replied. “I’ll be two shakes and then out of your potato-grading hair.”

  “No bother,” her father said. “No one better to show someone around than the farmer his self.” Mr. Sotheby looked as though he’d swallowed a hot pepper the wrong way. “Unless you want to be hiding a few things—I can understand that.”

  The man’s interest turned from his shoes to the dark eyes the hulking Irishman aimed at him. Limpy had watched her father do this to the last potential buyers. Telling them about the curse of the farm, pointing out the wreckage of the stables and the mold under the eaves of the farmhouse.