After the tornado hit, we thought we were lucky. Our family lived on the remnants of what had once been a farm, but over the generations, time and necessity had whittled down what had once been three hundred acres to less than thirty, our house, and an old barn that we used for junk and yard tools. When that twister cut through, it tore out half the barn, but it didn’t touch the house a hundred yards away and we all came through it fine.
The year the storm came, I was a senior in high school. My parents were still together. My little sister Hattie was still alive. Our lives were good, and had been good for…well, as long as I could remember.
Not that I saw it like that at the time. People are funny, and it’s hard to appreciate what you have until it’s gone. My mother once told me that everything looks prettier when you’re looking at it over your shoulder, and while I didn’t get it then, I do now. At the time, I felt sad about leaving high school, stressed about things with my friends and focused on the girl I was dating, and I didn’t feel particularly happy, lucky or satisfied. Looking back, I realize we had everything we could have wanted.
And then the storm came.
I still remember when the tornado was bearing down. All four of us and our cat Tico were huddled in the main hall of the house. Dad had Hattie in his arms, Mom held onto Tico, and I sat between them, feeling the fear radiating off our parents like heat. It was when I recognized that fear that I first felt really scared. Teen angst aside, I loved and respected my parents. Trusted them. They were a safety net for me and Hattie, and they would always have an answer or a way to make things right.
Except in that hallway, listening to the roar of the tornado as it bore down on us like God’s freight train, there weren’t any answers. No ways to outthink it or reason with it. Just hunkering down in the dark, the light through the windows growing a dingy yellow as the sound outside grew closer and closer. And Dad and Mom were afraid, understandably terrified, in the face of something we could never control or understand.
There were a terrible couple of minutes—it felt much longer, but I think it was only a couple—where the tornado was eating the front half of our barn. The sound, the terrible vibration of it, was the whole world, and we had no way of knowing that it wasn’t ripping the house apart instead, peeling away walls and roofs and floors like an onion until it got to us at the center.
But then the sound began to subside, and twenty minutes later, long after our father had stopped muttering prayers and our mother had quit repeating to us all that everything would be okay, we ventured out to see the path cut through our yard like the swing of a giant’s sword, a small furrow in the ground tracing a line through where part of the barn used to be.
In the days and weeks that followed, we went through the wreckage. To our surprise, there were several things scattered over the yard that didn’t belong to us at all. Part of a rusty bike. A new-looking blender that seemed intact and worked when we plugged it up. A car door, half painted with primer, sat gently propped up against an old oak tree as though a wandering mechanic had left it there. Half of what looked like a goat lay across the shattered roof of the barn.
That was sad and gross, but most of the things were just odd, or even kind of funny. We got into the routine of putting anything that didn’t seem to belong to us in a pile, with the smaller or more potentially valuable stuff getting moved into boxes inside as we had time. The idea was never to keep anything that someone claimed, and we actually had a couple of neighbors that eventually came by and retrieved items that had blown over to us. But I want to be clear that my parents, me and my sister, we were good and honest people. We were just holding onto things other people had lost, and if they ever came and asked for them, we always planned to give them back. All of us, even Hattie.
She was always honest, even if it got her in trouble. I don’t think it ever occurred to anybody that she had swiped something that didn’t belong to us or that she ever would do that. I have my own thoughts on why she did it. Why she couldn’t help but do it. But that doesn’t matter now, does it? Maybe it didn’t even matter back then, when that old woman came knocking at our door.
I was the first one to talk to her. My parents were at work, and Hattie was doing girl scouts back then, or Brownies or whatever it was called. I’d been watching t.v. when the doorbell rang. I didn’t normally answer the door unless I knew who it was, but when I looked out the window I saw a little old woman standing at the door, so delicate and frail she looked like she might blow away at the first strong breeze.
It’s funny now, but I was worried about her, y’know? I didn’t know if she’d broken down, or maybe she was confused and had wandered off from some place. What I did know was that we were twenty miles from town and I couldn’t just leave her out there without trying to help. So I went to the door and opened it, my breath catching in my throat as I looked down at her.
It was her eyes. Bright and shining and knowing, like two polished stones pressed into a setting of sharp features and wrinkled flesh. It should have made me feel better—there was no looking at those eyes and thinking this woman was helpless or addled. Instead, it made me feel nervous, even a little bit afraid, as I tried to smile and ask how I could help her.
“How polite, young fella. Yes, how can you help?”
She stopped there, just watching me, her smile strange and almost mocking as we stood across the threshold from each other, the awkward silence spooling out until I asked again what she needed help with.
Chuckling, she nodded. “Well, I lost something. Or rather I had something taken from me.” The woman hooked a gnarled thumb over her shoulder at our ruined barn. “Seems like the same thing took from you as well.”
I didn’t want to meet her eyes again, so I just kept looking at the barn as though in deep contemplation. “Yes, yes ma’am. We were lucky, but we definitely lost some stuff when the tornado came through.” I saw out of the edge of my vision that she was nodding again, and that’s when it struck me why she was there. “Oh! Did you think maybe something you lost blew through here?”
She tapped the side of her head as she gave me a wink. “A smart boy too. Smart and handsome boys are rare finds these days.”
Swallowing, I took a step back before I realized it. “Um, yeah, I think my mom has a list here. She made a list…you know, of things we found that don’t belong to us. I can get it and check if we found anything of yours if you want.”
Her weathered face split into a broad grin, crooked yellow teeth turned at different angles between dark, leathery lips. “That would be very nice, yes.”
“Sure…sure thing. Just a sec.”
I turned to go get the notebook Mom had started keeping near the boxes of stuff in the dining room when I hesitated. Should I shut the door or ask her to stay outside? But what did it matter? It would only take a second, and it wasn’t like I was worried about her overpowering me. I was eighteen and she had to be pushing eighty. Fighting the urge to glance back at her, I ran into the dining room and grabbed the notebook off the boxes in the corner. When I stepped back into the hall, I saw the old woman had moved inside, her eyes roaming around as her nostrils twitched. It was so weird. Like a deer or an elk sniffing the air.
Trying to keep my voice even, I forced myself a little closer. “Let’s see. What was it you’re missing?” Wanting to get her back out of the house, I added hopefully. “If it’s something big, all that stuff is under a tarp behind the barn, or what’s left of it. We can go…”
“Oh no.” She cut me off with a gesture as she continued to turn and look and take in deep breaths through her long, crooked nose. “It’s not that big. The size of a large jewelry box, as that’s exactly what it is.”
Flipping open the notebook, I started looking down the list. I didn’t remember anything like that, and by the time I got to the bottom of the third page, I hadn’t found any boxes like that described in my mother’s neat handwriting either. I forced myself to look up at the woman. “Sorry, I don’t see anything like that on the list, and my Mom is pretty good about keeping this up-to-date.”
The woman’s eyebrows furrowed as she make a clicking noise in the back of her throat. “I’m sure she is. All the same, since I came all this way, can I look through those items you have in here?”
I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t seem to make myself. Some of that was just engrained politeness, but I have to admit part of it was fear. There was something wrong with this woman. An anger or dangerousness underneath this…mask. I recoiled slightly at the thought. Where was all this coming from? She’d done nothing wrong other that maybe being pushy, and again, she was just a little old woman. Forcing a smile, I told her I’d be glad to have her check the dining room just in case Mom had missed something.
She followed close behind, and when we reached the boxes, she paused expectantly as though waiting for me to start going through them for her. Knowing that the sooner I got it done the quicker I could get her out of the house, I opened the first box and started rifling through it. She came and stood next to me, the smell of dead flowers wafting from her as the stiff fabric of her floral print dress brushed against my elbow. I tried not to look at her, but I could still see her in my peripheral vision, bent over and peering into the first box as I went through it.
“Um, nothing like a jewelry box in here.” I paused. “You do mean like a big wooden box, right? My mom has a big wooden box with silver forks and stuff in it. Is it like that?”
She chuckled, the noise sounding wet in her throat. “Something like that. Smaller. But, no, it’s not in this one.”
Sliding that box aside, I opened the second one. Again, nothing like she described. When I was to the bottom of the third and last box, I glanced over at her. “Still nothing. I don’t think we have it.”
She was smiling at me again, her eyes sparkling. “Are you sure? Nothing else squirreled away? I really feel like it’s here somewhere…”
I realized then that her hand was on my leg, rubbing softly as it traveled up my inner thigh. Letting out a startled yelp, I jumped back. “What the fuck, lady? No. We don’t have your box. Please leave.”
She turned on me, her expression hard now. “Where is it? I know it’s here.”
I felt a combination of fear and anger boiling in my chest, but I held her gaze. “No, it’s not. Now get the fuck out or I’m calling the cops.”
Sniffing again, I heard that same clicking sound deep in her throat. “Fine. I did try to be polite about it. Don’t say I didn’t try.” I thought she was going to say more, but then she turned on her heel and strode out, her gait and speed much different now than before, each angry footfall growing more steady and sure as she stepped outside and the door slammed behind her. I ran after, twisting the deadbolt before going to a window to see what she was doing.
But I didn’t see her out there at all.
I mentioned a weird old woman coming by to my parents that night, but I left out the details of her getting handsy with me. It was embarrassing, and I didn’t think it really mattered at the time. Just an creep we’d never see again.
It was the next week at dinner when Dad mentioned that an old woman had come by and asked for a jewelry box that had blown away in the storm. He figured it was the same lady, but he played along and let her check the list and the boxes again. Even carried her to look at the stuff behind the barn. He told us she was nice enough, but she might be dotty if she didn’t remember having already checked here before.
It was odd though. Even as he tried to laugh about it and play it off as a funny story, I could hear the tension in his voice. I didn’t think he liked her any better than I had, and he almost looked nervous when he was talking about it. Still, my focus wasn’t really on him. It was on Hattie. She had paled almost as soon as he started talking about the woman searching for her jewelry box, and by the time he was done, she looked sick and scared. My parents didn’t seem to notice, so I waited until after dinner and asked Hattie to come upstairs with me.
“Hat, what was that at dinner?”
She looked down at her feet. “What was what?”
I grimaced. “You know. You looked spooked when Dad started talking about the old woman coming by. Have you seen her too?”
She looked up at me, her eyes round as she shook her head. “Nuh-uh. I’d crap my pants.”
That startled a laugh out of me. “Well, I mean, I saw her too. She’s not that scary. Just weird.”
Hattie frowned. “You saw her? When?”
I realized I’d never mentioned it to her, and she hadn’t been in the room when I told my parents about it before. “It was last week. But if you didn’t know I saw her and you haven’t seen her either, why did you look so scared?”
Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes. “You’ll be mad.”
I smiled at her as my stomach began to knot. “I won’t. Promise. Just tell me what’s up.”
Glancing down the stairs, she waved for me to follow her. We went into her bedroom, and once there she dug out several stuffed animals from the bottom of her closet before sliding out the thing hidden beneath them.
It was a wooden box of black wood chased with gold and copper. On the front was a metal locking hasp, but I could see right away that the lock was broken. My eyes found Hattie’s mournful and frightened face. “Hattie! Where did you get it?”
She shrugged as she gave her sniffling response. “I…it was in the barn. No, that’s not true exactly. It was against the wall of the barn, in some of the junk from the roof.” Hattie shook her head slowly. “I was going to give it to Momma. I was. But it was heavy and neat and I wanted to see what was inside first. It was like a p-pirate chest.”
I sighed. “It’s okay. Just…so what happened to the lock?”
“It wouldn’t open at first. So I got one of Daddy’s drivers. I had to stick it in the crack and step on it, but it finally opened.” She glanced at me guiltily. “Broke the lock though.”
I crouched down next to her and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Hat. It’s not good that you kept it, or that you busted the lock, but we can get it fixed or pay for it or whatever. Let’s just…Let’s go get Mom and Dad and let them know what’s going on. They won’t be too mad.” I went to stand back up when I paused. “You didn’t take anything from the box, did you?”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “No. That’d be stealing. And it’s weird stuff in there anyway. I don’t like it.”
I frowned at her. “What kind of stuff?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. People’s stuff.”
Raising an eyebrow, I leaned forward to touch the box. The wood felt slick, almost greasy, to the touch, and when I went to lift the lid, I was surprised by how heavy it felt. Giving a grunt, I pushed it up as I looked inside.
At first it didn’t make any sense. There was some jewelry in there—wristwatches, rings, a couple of necklaces, all of different sizes and styles. But mixed into the jumble were also tied clumps of hair, several human-looking teeth, and at least one entire fingernail painted pink. At first I thought it was fake, but when I picked it up, I saw that no…it looked real. Real enough that I could see the unpainted ragged edge that had been hidden between a man’s watch and a pair of hoop earrings.
Instead of pink, that end of the nail was clear and then tipped with a bit of dark grey and red. Not nail polish—not even nail really. Touching it experimentally, I felt my gorge rise a little. It gave. Just a little, but it gave. Not like an old fingernail, but like what might come with one.
When it was ripped out by the root.