Mama grounded us for a week and made us pack up the holes. Didn’t we know the horses and cows could break their legs in one of them? Later that night, when tucking us in, Daddy told us the key belonged to her mother’s jewelry box. Mama, he said, had found it in the ashes of the house fire that killed her parents. At that time, Sadie and I had only a fuzzy understanding of Mama’s past. Still, neither of us really believed Daddy’s explanation. Why would she wear a reminder of something that hurt so much?
I was struck by a pungent fragrance the second we stepped inside the house.
Familiar.
Unsettling.
“Do you smell that?” I asked.
Sadie turned. “What? Good smell or something-is-dead-in-the-walls smell?”
“Lavender. It smells like lavender. The bouquets that Mama used to place around the house. And I don’t remember opening those blinds this morning.”
“Tommie, are you sure you’re OK?” Sadie studied my face. “We can do this later. Or tomorrow.”
“I don’t smell anything, Aunt Tommie.” Maddie was giving every corner of the room a vigorous sniff.
“Here, give me the key,” Sadie said, deciding. “Let’s get this over with, Tommie.” Her hand rested on my arm. “Are you coming?”
“Yes,” I said, forcing a smile. “Let’s do it.”
Maddie grasped my hand with her small sweaty one, still gritty from playing in the gravel. When we reached the desk, she broke away and ran her fingers over the see-no-evil monkey carved into the drawer, the one that had so fascinated Sadie and me as kids.
“Is that monkey peeking?” Sadie teased, hoping to lighten things up, as she turned the key. Maddie rolled her eyes, too old for the game.
But nothing happened.
“It’s stuck,” Sadie reported. “Maddie, get the WD-40 under the kitchen sink.”
That or a little spit had been my Daddy’s answer to fixing most of the things that were injured on the ranch. But WD-40 didn’t help. Neither did Maddie spitting into the lock. This wasn’t the right key. I let out my breath. It couldn’t be simple.
“A sign that Daddy wasn’t lying about the key,” Sadie said, “which is almost worse.”
In the end, it wasn’t Encyclopedia Brown but Grandaddy who taught me to pick locks. I’d never had much occasion to use the skill, except for once or twice. Or maybe five times.
I pulled a pin from my hair and went to work. The lock sprung easily and I tugged on the small, shallow drawer, which fell neatly into my hand. I saw what it held and my heart dropped.
“It’s just an old deck of cards,” Maddie said with disappointment. A deck of cards imprinted with two faded swans, snapped together with a pink rubber band, the kind that used to wrap around rolled newspapers that landed on the stoop.
But Sadie and I knew these were not ordinary cards. Reluctantly, I picked them up. They seemed hot to my fingers, alive with their own heat. The cards weren’t a good sign. It was Maddie who saw it first, who said excitedly: “Look!”
Taped to the back of the deck, to the four of hearts, was another key, this one modern and efficient-looking, stamped with a number.
The key to a safe deposit box.
Sadie and I never really believed these cards still existed. Our second cousin Bobby had embellished their place in McCloud lore, along with a lot of other things.
As kids, Bobby persuaded Sadie and me that aliens left crop circles behind the barn (Bobby was van Gogh with a tractor), that an ancient monster lived in one of the creeks on the property (it turned out to be a pregnant beaver), and that Dr Pepper’s secret formula contained prune juice (that may be true). A boy of many strange talents, he walked around in the summer with a plastic Baggie full of dying flies, which he caught with his bare hand in mid-air.
Mama told us that didn’t mean he would grow up to be a serial killer and asked us to be patient because his Daddy was mean. She didn’t put it that way, but we knew. We’d seen the marks on Bobby’s legs, a telltale sign of parents who still thought it was OK to pull switches off trees and use them on little boys against the will of nature.
When someone asked me a few years ago why I chose to work with kids on a rough emotional path, I’d surprised myself and said, “Bobby.”
One Saturday afternoon when I was in middle school, Mama dragged us to watch Bobby pitch a Little League game in 110-degree heat, and for once, he couldn’t get the ball to fly over the plate. His dad yelled from the stands: “You piece of puke!” and stomped off, abandoning Bobby to gut it out on the mound with no ride home. Bobby struck out the next three batters. Later, his dad took the credit for firing him up.
But on the day Bobby talked about Tuck and those cards, the adults had exiled us to the orchards, ordering us to pick up at least seventy-five peaches apiece. If we threw even a single peach at each other, Granny warned we’d be forced into summer slavery making jam-hot, steamy work, and I never failed to burn myself on the sterilizing pan.
Bobby, however, provided all the entertainment Sadie and I needed by immediately falling face-first into a trail of fresh cow patties. He was about ten at the time, too cool to cry and desperate to save face.
“Hey, I heard a story about your brother the other day,” he said, as the three of us walked toward a cement pond where he could wash up.
“Don’t talk about our brother.” Sadie gave him a small punch in the arm. “It’s disrespectful to the dead. It’s not your business. God, you stink.”
“Don’t say ‘God’ like that,” I said automatically.
“I swear, I think you’ll want to hear this. It’s spooky. My mom told me. Come on. It’s firsthand.”
Sadie and I shrugged. Everything Bobby recounted was “firsthand.” But we yearned for any details about Tuck, whose face was dissolving like a photograph under water. He’d died when I was six and Sadie was two.
Mama was at fault for that. She never spoke of our brother. She had erased all signs of his existence, removing every picture from the house with Tuck in it.
We sat Bobby out to dry on a patch of dry ground a smell-proof distance from us.
“Go ahead,” I commanded.
“My mom says your Granny is a good Baptist, but she does a lot of battle with the spirits. They come to see her at night in her dreams. Even a psychic at the Texas State Fair told your Granny she was one of them, but even more powerful. Did you know your Granny could tell the future with cards? Mama said she can tell when a tornado is whippin’ up.”
Bobby watched for shock on our faces, but Sadie and I already knew this part of the story. We were familiar with Granny’s “feelings,” because they sometimes prevented us from leaving the house. We both knew she could do a lot more than predict the weather.
Because of that, we often begged her to read our fortunes, but Granny had to be in just the right mood. If she wasn’t, she’d usually shoo us away and say gently, “Life is meant to be a surprise.”
Bobby caught a fly in his hand, generously set it free, and continued. “Well, the night that your brother, um, died, it was his eighteenth birthday. And your Granny was going to give him a special birthday reading. So your Granny laid the cards, and all these dark cards began to turn up.”
Bobby was clearly enjoying himself, and he could tell he had us. His voice lowered an octave, and he crept closer. I still remember the stench of cow dung and rancid creek water that clung to both him and his words.
“So your Granny snaps up those cards in a rubber band and refuses to read them. Tuck just laughs, kisses everybody goodbye, and heads out to ride around and do some celebratin’. Around midnight, he dropped off a friend and headed home. He took a shortcut on some back roads. They say he was goin’ fast. That big eighteen-wheeler was sittin’ with the lights off smack in the middle of a farm road, the driver drunk off his butt and asleep. Tuck was under it before he even knew it.”