I.     Donald Grimes

My decision to return home to Mound City was hardly inevitable—don’t think that for a minute. Nor, by a long shot, was it my only option. By then I’d found considerable success in an industry where I could have gone anywhere in the country and found a job—probably the first position I applied for, too. And no doubt at a higher salary than I’d been earning, which was already respectable and more than Dad ever made, I promise you. I was barely forty and at the peak of my managerial skills, and the only reason I had remained working for the Haase family in Calvert so long was because I liked them personally. That and the obvious fact that they needed me—I’m not one to cut and run where I’m needed. They were simple people, now into their eighties, and had long since lost whatever business edge they once had, if they’d ever had any at all, which I doubt. They were beyond a point where they could do much hands-on micromanaging and left me to run the business as I thought best.

Not that there’s ever been a need to micromanage me, of course. I’d made them plenty of money over the past twenty years. I saw it as my duty. I’d been born with a knack for dealing with the public—more than they had, for sure—and my looks were an admitted asset in most of my encounters with both customers and subordinates.

That’s not meant to sound like bragging, mind you—I’m going to try and be as honest here as I can be. I’ve always been considered ‘a looker’—even my sisters will admit that. At forty, I carry the same 160 lbs. as I did in my senior year at Mound City High School, and as an adult, nature seems to have taken the exaggerated weirdness of my dad’s face—his sharp, oversized nose and pointed, dog-snout chin—and my mother’s pasty Midwestern-girl blandness, and combined them to make my own ‘look’ both rugged and gentle. I have a handsome face: At least, that’s what my sisters and other girls I’ve known have told me. Not that I am ungrateful for my parents’ quirks; I studied them closely while growing up and made a pact to remain vigilant with my own attitudes and to extinguish any traces of quirks should they pop up, the same way you’d take Round-Up to weeds growing around your storefront.

No, my decision to return to Mound City was not one of necessity, and I hope I’ve made that clear. It was (in part) to repair a family rift, and where better to do that than within the family home? After all, it was standing empty. It was that, but it was also because I’d simply earned the break. I’d been grinding my keister off for John and Mildred Haase for half my lifetime now—sometimes sixty hours a week without complaint, never taking a sick day and only a couple of vacations during which I still phoned in a dozen times a week to find out how things were going.

Why? Because that’s who I am. That’s how I am hardwired.

That’s not how I was raised, of course. Dad used to develop migraines if he had to put in more than half a dozen hours in a work-week, and any money my parents had was the result of my mother’s work ethic, which was in her DNA: She was a Blank. The Blanks—I always thought it was funny that Mom’s maiden name was ‘Blank’, because her expression was generally pretty blank—had been prosperous farmers in the first part of the twentieth century, and at one time, they owned half of Calhoun County.

As I have heard the story, as told by the few remaining Mound City people who remember or record such things, back in the 1940s, the most prosperous Blank—my great uncle Alva—had enlisted in the Air Force to help liberate Eastern Europe. Something he saw overseas re-focused him, and as soon as he returned from the war, he quit farming, sold off his acres and used the proceeds of the sale to build a sprawling mansion out on Littlefarm Road a few miles beyond Mound City limits.

Uncle Alva was a legend throughout the county—not just because of his crazy house, which should have been listed in a national oddball directory for the floor plan alone, where there are tiny rooms with multiple doors and halls and staircases that lead into solid walls—but also for his ultimate fate, which was intimately connected to the nasty history of Littlefarm Road itself.

Actually, the house has the makings of a tourist attraction, since there are plenty of sicko creeps in love with the macabre, but as far as I know, it’s an angle that nobody has ever thought to pursue.

Now, take from this what you will, but since I was a child I’ve been told that from the neck up, I’m a physical ringer for Uncle Alva. The only photo I’ve seen of him shows a scowling little shrimp leaning up against a hitching post outside the post office. As it happens, that post still exists and I’ve taken a tape measure to it and I wouldn’t have placed Uncle Alva at much more than 5’2. Me, I topped out at 5’10 ½, and I am by far the tallest person in my family. Dad was only 5’8, and Mom barely hit five feet. My sister Mary is 5’2, and overweight by seventy pounds—she looks like a bowling ball. My other sister Dale is slim like me, though not nearly as tall: 5’9. She’s gangly and wears her hair ridiculously short hair, like a man—she looks like a pin to match the bowling ball. No, I am the tallest person in my family by far and personally, I don’t see the slightest resemblance between me and Crazy Uncle Alva, and for that, I thank God.

But there is one thing I can tell you about Alva Blank, and in fact, am here to tell you: Despite his tiny size and his agricultural background and despite the name of the road where he built the house and despite the crap that the local losers have been spreading about him and my family for generations, Uncle Alva was not ‘The Little Farmer’. Old gossips may sniff at the truth, and the modern kids raised on Freddy Krueger movies may think that urban legend is more fun than facts, but thanks to my profession I tend to be a little worldlier than them and I use my wits to problem solve—along with my looks, that makes me an effective manager. I did a little basic research and quickly concluded that the violence that happened along Littlefarm Road back in the 1940s was none of my great uncle’s doing, and that any involvement he might have had would have been strictly peripheral.

And guess what! If the time is ever right, I may reveal to the world the actual identity of real killer, but in the meantime—if nothing else—I am happy to have cleared up any horse-pucky rumors about Uncle Alva.

So, as I said, my intention in moving back to Mound City was to mend family bridges, and as soon as I had made my decision (and while I was still bleeding out my security deposit in the apartment in Calvert), I sent emails to both Mary and Dale and informed them that I was moving back into our family’s home and invited them both to come live with me.

Although at the time Dale was married and living in Tennessee, I assumed that she’d consider her immediate family—Mary and I—more important than some silly job with the Lutheran Council school system, especially if it meant re-establishing a sibling bond that we hadn’t had shared since I was six and she was twelve, babysitting me while mom went to work and Dad was on the hammock with a migraine. No chance, though: She wrote back asking me if I was off my medications and, in my opinion, she was unnecessarily terse for a born-again Christian. She told me that she knew why I’d lost my job in Calvert and asked me to leave her alone.

Mary and I were only a year apart, and much closer friends than Dale and I had ever been, so although her response was equally blunt, I could recognize in it more confusion than anger. I’m good at reading folks that way, which is why I have been able to find success as a ‘people person.’ Mary reminded me that the family house had been sold right before Mom and Dad moved in with Dale and her husband in Knoxville.

I replied by reminding her that Mom and Dad had passed away and had nothing to do with it.

“I’m not talking about our old house on Leland, Mary. I wouldn’t go back to live in that flea-infested pile of bad memories for all the gold in Fort Knox. I’m talking about our real home, the one where we used to play when we were children. I’m talking about Uncle Alva’s place. I want you and Dale to come live with me at Littlefarm.”