Cruel Harvest (27 page)

The baby started to cry, and the sound scared me. Maybe it was the acoustics of the tight space of the car, but his wails sounded hollow and empty. My thoughts returned to another night long before, when my new baby sister cried out in the same way. Mary Anne and I huddled together, and I shivered, giving her what warmth I could.

Daddy pulled off the highway and down a two-lane road. The arch of his headlights passed over what looked like an abandoned shack tucked some distance off the road, behind a copse of trees and at the top of a snow-covered hill. A narrow path led up to the shack.

Daddy saw it and veered the car off the road. By the light of the high beams, the entire area took on a bluish tinge and the trees became an army of shadowy soldiers flanking the hill. Something about the sight made me afraid, but I was so cold that I ignored the feeling in hopes that we would find warmth inside.

The path up to the shack was about three hundred feet off the highway and had not been cleared. A layer of hard snow, maybe six inches deep, ran up to the front porch. Daddy tried to get the car to drive up the hill. He mashed the accelerator, but the tires dug deeper into the snow. He cursed and tried again, but it was clear we were going nowhere.

“Okay, everybody out. We're gonna walk,” he said.

Millie bundled up her son and stepped out onto the snow. I opened the back door, and Mary Anne grabbed hold of my hand. Together we started across the ice and snow. Before getting out of the car, Millie gave me a diaper to tie around Mary Anne's head like a scarf. None of us had hats, and our coats were thin and tattered. Mary Anne's teeth rattled, and I tried to keep her warm, but it was no use. Instead, I focused on getting us up to that house. Nellie followed behind us, complaining loudly. For once Daddy ignored her, probably because she was so far behind him and he was freezing. Our destination appeared to be an abandoned old hunting shack, long deserted and left to decay. The front porch sagged and threatened to crash down at any second. Leafless vines grew up one side and disappeared through a broken window into the dark interior. The full moon shone through the windows, giving a little light.

“I'm cold,” Mary Anne whimpered.

“It's okay. We'll be warm inside.”

The snow softened the closer we got to the house. Mary Anne struggled to walk, sinking in the snow up to her knees. I held her tight and tried to follow the steps Daddy and Millie had left on their way up. An eerie silence pervaded; the only sounds were our heavy breathing and the crunching of the snow under our feet.

We made our way onto the porch decking, picked our way around large holes, and went through an open front door that dangled on one hinge. Inside, I could see the white snow through more holes in the flooring and through jagged breaks in the outer wall. It was a little warmer in there, but not much.

“We need a fire,” Daddy said.

He trudged back to the car, leaving us inside. Mary Anne followed me as I walked around the cabin. In the full moonlight reflected off the snow outside, I could see pretty well. The cabin had three rooms. Two were completely empty of furniture, and a single, sturdy wooden table sat in the middle of the main room.

“I'm cold,” Mary Anne cried again.

I tried to comfort her but couldn't do much. It was freezing in that house, and I felt as though we would never be warm again. Daddy pulled an old rusted-metal dishpan into the middle of the room and poured gasoline he'd siphoned from the car into it. Then he dropped a lit match inside. I flinched, expecting an explosion, but instead, a layer of flames danced atop the liquid, casting waving shadows across the room.

As I stood mesmerized by the flames, my hands started to ache. That fire warmed the shack quickly, and our frozen skin began to thaw. Even the baby quieted down, and Mary Anne let go of my hand and found a place on the floor to play.

Daddy went back out to the car and brought in a pile of blankets and clothing. He threw them on the floor. I inched away from him, my stomach turning as it always did at the sight of those blankets. At the same time, the chill was leaving my body, and I felt better than I had all day. Daddy and Millie started talking, and I dragged a blanket to a corner as far away as I could and lay back, watching the light play off the shadows under the sagging roof.

I felt sleep coming close. The longer I looked, the stranger the dark lines on the wall and ceiling seemed to me. It was as if they skittered across the roof beams and trailed down the walls toward the floor. I blinked, trying to clear away the discomfort I felt on seeing that movement, but it only made it clearer. It was as if the walls had legs, lots of legs!

Something large crawled out of a hole in the floor right beside my hand. It was an enormous, hairy black spider! I screamed and pushed myself away from the hole.

That's when I noticed the others. Spiders were everywhere—on the walls, ceiling, floor—and they kept pouring into the shack from every direction. I jumped up, barely avoiding another one that was an inch from crawling onto my leg. I screamed again when I saw the red hourglass on the back of that spider. Black widows! Hundreds of them!

Mary Anne, either reacting to me or the spiders, joined in the screaming. She was latched onto my leg in a matter of seconds. I tried to get her loose, eyeing what looked like a big Missouri tarantula racing toward my feet.

I had one thought:
Get up on that table!
I lunged for one of the sturdy legs and yanked Mary Anne off the ground, pushing her up and climbing behind her. Nellie was already on top of the table and was screaming and dancing up and down, tears rolling down her face.

From up high, I could see just how bad it was. The spiders must have been hibernating in the cold, nesting in the floors, ceiling, and walls. They seemed to be drawn in by the heat and were coming in from every hole or opening in the cabin. Millie stood in place, jumping up and down and screaming like a wild woman. She snatched her son up and shook him in the air as if trying to shake unseen spiders from him. I saw one of them rising over the edge of the table. I kicked at it and sent the thing flying through the air.

As we screamed, Daddy grabbed an old rag of clothing, wrapped it around a log, and rushed to the fire. He set the edge aflame and whipped that torch back and forth like a sword, burning up spiders. When he whipped it toward the ceiling, spiders rained down on us. One landed on my head. I whipped my hair around like mad, screaming until it dropped off. Little Mary Anne was hysterical, but I was busy slapping spiders off the table—our only refuge in the house. The revulsion I felt was overwhelming, and I felt sick to my stomach from the fear. Time lost its meaning as we floated in a living nightmare that I thought I might never wake up from.

“They're dead,” Daddy finally announced. But I did not believe him. I could still see spiders all over the floor, thousands of legs twitching.

“Get off the table, now,” he ordered.

We were all too afraid to move. I looked at Nellie and Mary Anne, not wanting to be the first one down.

“Get down from there,” he growled, this time angry.

There was no arguing. We were just as frightened of his anger as we were of the spiders. As I climbed down, I saw that the spiders that remained were all singed or stomped to death. The smell of burning hair filled the cabin. Daddy told us to get to sleep. He may as well have told me to sprout wings and fly. When I did close my eyes, all I could see were squirming, wriggling spiders. I sat up until dawn, that scent filling my nose and the nightmare etching an indelible fear into my mind.

Chapter 24
Mr. Spencer

I often wonder
if the fear of spiders stuck with Nellie as it did with me. I am still deathly afraid of them. But Nellie was strong and tough, more like Daddy than any of us. Although he had us all cowed down, she had a shell around her, a hard determination that seemed to keep her from feeling too deeply. At least that is how she appeared to me. Memories of that night flooded my mind as I sat in my home, years later, with Wayne.

As if sensing my thoughts, Wayne came and sat beside me on the couch, wrapping an arm around me. He had continued a valiant search for my family members even as my relationship with Jimmy grew. I had been told that Nellie had died long ago. Wayne knew this but never believed it. He always told me that he felt in his heart that she was not dead.

One day early in the spring, a few months after we found Jimmy, Wayne came home with a phone number. It was for one of Nellie's daughters. It took courage, but I dialed the number. Nellie's daughter told me that my sister was very much alive and gave me her contact information. I reached out to her that same day. We spoke, and it was as though we had not missed a day. She was as easy to talk to as she'd ever been, and her voice even had the same sound as it had when we were kids. At the end of the conversation, I knew that all the pieces were coming together.

“We should plan a reunion,” I told her. “I've been talking with Brenda and Jimmy and our cousins. We could gather all our families together, meet again, and catch up on our lives.”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Nellie said.

I felt like a marathon runner who sees the finish line less than a mile away. My soul stirred at the thought. My family was finally going to come back together! Even through the elation, my mind wandered back to how it had all ended, how I had lost every one of them and had been left behind, the last of us to escape Daddy's evil.

Needless to say,
we stayed but one night in that spider-infested shack. Daddy moved us on from there, heading north. We did not stop until we reached Niles, Michigan. There Daddy met a farm owner named Mr. Spencer. That meeting became the fuse that started the final dismantling of what was left of my family. Mr. Spencer also saved my life.

Mr. Spencer owned a farm covering hundreds of acres. He grew apples, grapes, and blueberries, as well as many other crops. During the prime harvest season, he employed dozens of workers. They lived in the twenty or more small cabins that he built on his land. He cared about his workers and treated them with fairness and honesty.

He was in his late forties and had married late in life. His wife, Jackie, was only twenty-six, and she had already been married and had three children. She and Mr. Spencer had one son of their own, whom Mr. Spencer adored. Farming was Mr. Spencer's life, and he was as childlike and trusting as a young boy. He often joked that before he'd met Jackie, his farmhands had been his family.

In addition to the smaller cabins, he built a nice little house that the foreman stayed in during the harvest. Thanks to Daddy's special arrangements, it was ours! The foreman's house had been neglected and needed much work, but it seemed a castle to me. It had three rooms aligned like train cars, including such luxuries as a small kitchen with a stove, a sink, and a table with chairs. It also had electricity and running water in the kitchen; a small pump was stationed at the sink. The kitchen door had a pane of glass that allowed the sunlight to brighten the room. I'd never been in a farm shack that let in so much light, especially one that had no holes in the walls. The middle room was used as the bedroom and opened into the front room with a solid door for the entrance.

It was such a nice place, compared to our usual living arrangements. At first, I thought we weren't supposed to be there. When we pulled into the camp, I could not believe it when Daddy passed the small cramped cabins and stopped in front of this little house. I stood by the car and stared at the slightly sagging tin roof and the large front porch with its loose floorboards, and it looked amazing to me. With the grapevines that spread out from one side of the house and the woods that shaded the other, it all looked so much like a home that it was hard to imagine being allowed to live there.

I was told to help carry our belongings inside, and the sense of being an intruder lessened. It felt good to be a part of a real house with electricity and even a stove that looked like what other people used to cook. At fourteen, I was beginning to notice things like that more often.

Daddy gathered Millie, Nellie, and me into a group.

“Mr. Spencer made an arrangement with me. We can stay here through the winter, in the foreman's house, if we help take care of the grapevines and I fix the place up. Don't you think you're gonna be shirking your work, you hear?”

After the shack with the spiders, this house was like heaven, and I was grateful to be allowed to stay. I had no argument with cutting back the grapevines and doing anything I could do in order to live in such a clean house with real furniture.

Not only did Mr. Spencer let us live in the foreman's house, but he also paid Daddy a salary for the work he did. For the first time that winter, we were warm and not as terribly hungry as we had been. Unfortunately, the extra money also gave Daddy the opportunity to take up his drinking again. We settled into the typical dance: him getting drunk, and me doing everything I could to avoid him and protect Mary Anne.

Mr. Spencer lived a few miles down the road from our new home. His two-story farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel drive. He lived there with Jackie and their four children, who were all much younger than me. I found myself over at their house helping with the children and housework on occasion, and I got to know them pretty well. I especially liked Jackie, who insisted we call her by her first name. Right away I realized they were different than most folks we'd come across in our travels. Jackie was very generous, and Mr. Spencer was eager to make our lives comfortable, offering an extra heater or a day off if the weather was very cold.