Midnight Grinding

by Ronald Kelly

  Is this what Grandma had used to poison poor Buster? Or was poison too kind a word for what had been done? And where had she gotten the elixir? The stuff was absolutely ancient.

  In the muted glow of the flashlight, the dark liquid seemed to shift and swirl of its own accord. It almost appeared to change colors somehow, from pitch black to blood red to pond scum green, then black again.

  In the darkness of the pantry, something moved. A mouse scavenging for crumbs perhaps. Or perhaps not.

  Hurriedly, I corked the bottle and slid it to the back of the shelf where I had found it.

  Back in bed, I lay there for a very long time before sleep finally claimed me. And, even then, it was not an easy one.

  ***

  The next time Grandma showed her true nature, I was a sophomore in high school.

  Our next door neighbors, the Masons, had suffered a very bad year. Bob and Betty Mason’s daughter, Judy, had endured a long bout with cancer and had passed away the previous week. I was pretty depressed about her death. I’d had a crush on Judy since sixth grade. I had even asked her out to a school dance the previous year, but she had turned me down. Grandma had watched the whole thing from her kitchen window and I think it made her mad, but she hadn’t said anything.

  It wasn’t long afterward that Judy Mason was diagnosed with leukemia.

  I had just stepped off the school bus a few houses down, when I saw Grandma standing at the Mason’s door, holding a plate wrapped in aluminum foil in her hands. I couldn’t help but smile to myself. The Cookie Patrol was on the roll again.

  As I made my way down the sidewalk toward our house, I could hear Grandma talking to Betty Mason at the doorway. “Things will be better,” Grandma told her in comforting tones. “All we can do is pray to the good Lord for strength through this difficult time.”

  Mrs. Mason nodded sadly and smiled. “We appreciate your concern, Miss Sarah. And thank you for the dessert. You know how Bob loves your sweets.”

  “It’s not much,” Grandma told her. “But perhaps it’ll provide a small bit of comfort to you during your time of need.”

  Betty Mason thanked her again and closed the door. I was nearly to the gate of the Masons’ picket fence, when Grandma turned around. That small, gentle smile crossed her lips, the same smile I’d seen a thousand times at hospital visitations and charity bazaars, and at church as she played her favorite hymns on the organ she mastered so well.

  It was her eyes that disturbed me. They held none of the benevolence that the rest of her face showed. They were hard, hate-filled eyes, peering from behind her horn-rimmed glasses like tiny black stones. Then, when she saw me approaching, they changed. They once again became the warm lights of Christian kindness that I was so accustomed to.

  “Home a little early, aren’t you?” she said. “Well, come on to the kitchen. I’ve got a fresh apple crumb cake cooling on the counter. I just took it out of the oven.”

  As I sat in Grandma’s kitchen that afternoon, eating my second slice of cake, I couldn’t have imagined that Bob and Betty Mason would be dead within a week. The following Thursday, their car had veered unexpectedly across the grass median of the interstate and plowed, head-on, into a tractor-trailer truck. Both had died upon impact.

  ***

  On the night following the Masons’ funeral, I had the strangest dream. One in which I was not a participant, but a spectator.

  I was in an old farmhouse. In one room a baby cried. In the other a frail woman wailed mournfully.

  I stood in a doorway between kitchen and bedroom. As the woman vented her grief, two neighboring women were silently at work. Lying across the eating table were the bodies of three children, two boys and a girl. All were dead, being prepared for burial.

  A man paced around the room like a bobcat on the prowl. His eyes burned with a rage only a father can feel at the loss of his children.

  I turned and looked into the bedroom. A baby—perhaps two or three months old—wept loudly from a hand-made cradle. Feeding time had passed, but the infant had been forgotten. And there was another child. A four-year-old girl who sat cross-legged in the center of a big brass bed. The girl didn’t seem in the least disturbed by the events that were taking place around her. Her eyes were focused on an object that stood on a cherrywood bureau across the room.

  It was a bottle. A tall, skinny bottle with a cork in the top. The label read DR. AUGUSTUS LEECH’S PATENTED ELIXIR.

  The little girl smiled. She was quite fond of Augustus Leech, the medicine show man who had driven his horsedrawn wagon into town and stirred things up a bit. She had watched, enthralled, as he performed incredible feats of magic, picked a few tunes on a five-string banjo, and touted his patented elixir as the “Cure-All of the Ages.”

  And, when her father wasn’t looking, he had slipped her a prize. A playing card with a picture of a fairy princess on the face.

  She had placed that card beneath her pillow last night and dreamed that she was in an enchanted kingdom full of ogres, dragons, and wizards. A place more real to her than the drab town of Harmony had ever been.

  Her baby sister continued to cry. Slowly, the girl left the bed and took the skinny bottle from the bureau. She knelt beside the cradle.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  The baby continued to wail.

  She uncorked the bottle and unleashed a single drop. The infant rolled the dark liquid around on her tiny, pink tongue for a moment. Then grew silent.

  No more middle child, the girl thought. Only me.

  She smiled a curl of a thin-lipped smile…that girl with my grandmother’s eyes.

  ***

  I woke up in the darkness, my heart pounding. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs…to the pantry.

  The bottle was still there, even after all these years. But it was only a quarter of the way full now.

  A cold feeling threatened to overcome me. I began to recall bits and pieces of conflicts during my childhood. Conflicts that didn’t involve me directly, but were always between my parents and my grandmother, my grandmother and friends and neighbors. An accusation of infidelity toward my grandfather. A heated argument over meddling interference with my father. A petty grudge between my mother and Grandma that echoed from years before I was born. Hurt feelings and imagined wrongs done to the matriarch of the Plummer family by townfolk and neighbors. But the dust had always settled and peace was always made.

  And, afterwards, there had always been sweets from Grandma’s kitchen.

  Followed by death.

  I began to wonder if she was responsible. That maybe she was poisoning folks with that ancient elixir that sat on the pantry shelf. But my mind couldn’t comprehend such a thing. The Masons had died in an unfortunate accident, like my father. A ninety-six-year-old woman can’t condemn someone to cancer or a fatal car crash by baking them a lemon meringue pie.

  I left the kitchen pantry that night, telling myself that I was being foolish, that my kindly grandmother had nothing to do with the misfortunes of the citizens of Harmony. But I could never erase that dream from my thoughts. And that little girl with the wicked grin on her face.

  ***

  Several days ago, everything just sort of fell apart for me and Grandma.

  It happened on Sunday morning. I was back home from college for the weekend, sitting in a right-hand pew of the sanctuary. Church service was proceeding as it normally did at Harmony Holiness. Jill Thompson, the pianist, and Grandma Plummer at her organ, were playing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” flawlessly. Then, before they had finished, Pastor Alfred Wilkes rose to his feet prematurely.

  The ladies stopped their playing. The entire congregation froze. Everyone was already on edge, as it was. Bad things had been taking place at the church in the wee hours of the night. Vandalism and desecration.

  It had begun two weeks ago. Someone had thrown rocks through three of the stained-glass windows. Then, later, an intruder had stolen the church’s 180-year-old King James Bible from
a display case in the foyer and set fire to it on the stoop outside.

  But the last blasphemous act had been the worst. Someone had defecated on the altar.

  Pastor Wilkes’ face was long and mournful as his huge hands gripped both sides of the podium. “The Devil has been testing us lately, my friends,” he said in that deep baritone of his. “At first I just thought it was some disrespectful kids. But after the second incident, I realized that it was something much more serious. It is not an outsider who has committed these sinful acts, but someone in our own midst.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A member of the congregation had done those horrible things? A nervous sensation of cold dread began to form in the pit of my stomach, although I wasn’t sure why.

  “Following the burning of the Bible, the deacons and I discussed the matter and came to a decision,” he told us. A grim smile crossed his face. “It’s amazing what you can buy at Radio Shack these days.”

  He then picked up a manila envelope that was lying atop the podium and unfastened the clasp of the flap. “I really hate to show you this,” he said, “but God has compelled me to do so.”

  Pastor Wilkes then pulled an 8x10 photograph from the envelope and held it at arm’s length for all to see. The congregation gasped as one. The nervous ball of dread deep down in my belly suddenly turned into a cold, hard stone.

  Pictured there in the dimly-lit sanctuary, with her granny panties and support hose pooled around her ankles, was my grandmother…smearing her feces across the front of the pulpit.

  I groaned involuntarily, as though someone had just sucker punched me in the gut. I heard someone clear her throat haughtily from the pew behind me. It was Naomi Saunders, the church busybody. I could feel her hot, self-righteous eyes burning into the back of my neck.

  An uneasy silence hung heavily in the sanctuary for a long moment. Then Pastor Wilkes turned and regarded the elderly woman sitting at the church organ. “It grieves me in my heart to do this, Miss Sarah, but I must ask you to leave us now.”

  I watched as my grandmother primly turned off her organ and, for the very last time, left the spot she had occupied for countless Sunday mornings. With her head held high, she walked down the center aisle, enduring the stares of shock and disgust that etched the faces of the congregation.

  As she reached the rear doorway, I shakily stood to my feet. I couldn’t believe the pastor had handled my grandmother’s comeuppance in such a callous and tactless manner.

  Why couldn’t he and the deacons have confronted her privately? Standing there, I stared the preacher square in the face. “This isn’t right,” I told him in front of everyone.

  I looked for some sign of satisfaction in his face, but there was none. “No,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t.”

  Outside in the parking lot, we sat in the car. “Why, Grandma?” I asked her. “Can you give me a reason?”

  She was silent.

  “Was it because you wanted the church to buy that new organ last month and the budget committee voted it down?”

  She said absolutely nothing in her defense. She simply sat there in the passenger seat, head bowed as if in prayer…but eyes wide open.

  ***

  I found Grandma dead the following Monday morning.

  She lay there peacefully in her bed, wrinkled hands folded across her chest, a tiny curl of a smile upon her thin lips.

  The cause of her death was undeniable. Sitting on her nightstand was a tall, skinny bottle. The stained cork sat neatly next to it.

  “Aw, Grandma,” I sighed as I picked up the bottle. It was completely empty. “You drank it all.” It had only been a quarter full the last time I had seen it, but apparently that had been enough.

  The next two days were a blur to me. There was so much to attend to. The proper arrangements were made at the local funeral home: the casket, the vault, the times of visitation and, of course, the funeral itself. After the preparations, I went back to that empty little house on Mulberry Street. The place was a wreck. Along with her will to live, Grandma had apparently lost her will to clean. I made the four-poster bed she had died in, then moved on to the rest of the house. There were dirty dishes in the sink and damp towels strewn across the bathroom floor.

  The following day, Grandma was stately and dignified in her burnished, rose-hued casket, wearing a dress she had worn at many a Sunday service. The chapel was decorated with a forest of flower arrangements, ceramic angel figurines, and matted pictures of Thomas Kinkade churches that played “Amazing Grace” when you wound a music box on the back.

  The funeral was almost unbearably long, populated by the folks of Harmony, as well as the congregation that had ousted her from their midst only a couple of days before. As Pastor Wilkes droned on and on about what a faithful, God-fearing woman she had been, I sat there on the front pew and tried to imagine Grandma in heaven. But I couldn’t. It simply wouldn’t come to me. Trying to picture her in such a celestial setting was like staring at a blank canvas.

  After the graveside service, everyone met back at the church fellowship hall for a lunch of covered dishes and desserts. I wasn’t very hungry. I just wanted to accept my share of condolences and get out of there. I had much to deal with that afternoon…mostly the nagging question of exactly why my last living relative had done the terrible things she had.

  I found myself standing next to the dessert table with Naomi Saunders. As the woman stuffed her face, she told me about how wonderful a woman Grandma had been and how they were all going to miss her dearly. I pretty much nodded my head solemnly and thought about how very delicious the cookie I was munching was, my second one, in fact.

  “These are pretty good,” I said. I took another bite and washed it down with sweet tea.

  “Snickerdoodles,” Naomi said with a smile. “She always said they were your favorite.”

  I stopped chewing. “Who made these?”

  “Your grandmother, apparently,” she told me. “We found them on that table when we came to set up this morning.”

  Dirty dishes in the sink. Coffee cups, supper plates, mixing bowls…

  “I guess it was one last, loving gesture…God bless her.” Naomi picked up a greeting card from off the table and handed it to me. “This was with it.”

  Numbly, I took it. The card face read, “From your Sister in Christ.” When I opened it I found there was no printed caption, only Grandma’s unmistakably floral penmanship. I barely took two breaths as I read the inscription.

  Farewell, my friends…May we meet again in the glorious hereafter…where the hearth fires shall crackle with warmth and we shall labor together in eternity. I shall see you there. Love, Sarah.

  “Sad, but sweet, wasn’t it?” said Naomi.

  I stared at the handwriting in the card. What had she been talking about? There were no hearth fires in heaven…no fire at all. And paradise was a place of rest, not a realm of endless labor…

  I looked down at the half-eaten cookie in my hand, then at the platter on the table. Only three cookies remained where there had been an even two dozen before.

  As I left the church, I wanted to puke…but I couldn’t. The poison was there to stay.

  When I had cleaned the house, I had made the bed…but had neglected to look beneath Grandma’s pillow. When I did look, I knew exactly what I would find.

  A yellowed playing card with a fairy princess on the face.

  Now I understood why I couldn’t picture Grandma in heaven. She was in a much more sinister place. A fiery realm full of ogres and dragons…and wizards named Leech.

  MIDNIGHT

  GRINDING

  The first half of this story is absolutely true. There really was a demented farmhand named Green Lee who terrorized the children of a Tennessee farm camp back in the early 1900s. One of those children was my late Grandmama Spicer, who would chill me to the bone with the deranged exploits of Green Lee and his back porch whetstone. I gave myself the creeps when I wrote this story and it still disturbs
me every time I read it. It was almost as though it was written by a hand other than my own. Perhaps even the bony claw of Green Lee himself.

  Which one must I kill first? Oh, sweet Lord in heaven, please tell me…which one must I kill first?”

  The first time Rebecca heard the voice of Green Lee it came rasping through the lush leaves of the tobacco rows like the coarse hide of a snake rubbing against dried corn husks. She and her brother, Ben, had been performing the chore that Papa had given them that day: picking off the plump, green worms that nibbled on the summer tobacco, and squashing them beneath the toes of their bare feet. But as they left one dense row and moved on to the next, the old man’s whispering plea echoed in the dusty afternoon air, curling through their youthful ears and stopping them dead in their tracks.

  Rebecca and Ben backed up a few steps, listening to the sinister words and watching for a sign of the one who uttered them. “Heavenly Father, Lord Almighty on high, please tell me…which one shall it be?”

  A rustling of tobacco leaves sounded from a few feet away, drawing the frightened eyes of the two children. And from within that dense patch of greenery crept a gnarled claw of stark white bone.

  The youngsters broke from their fearful paralysis. Screaming, they ran along the field rows, feet churning clouds of powdery clay dirt into the hot, still air of mid-July. They soon burst from the high tobacco, their cries rising shrilly as they crossed the barren road to the gathering of shabby tin and tarpaper shacks that made up the itinerant farm camp. They saw their mother sitting on the front porch of one such house, washing a few articles of clothing with a scrubboard and a bucket of sudsy, gray water.

  “Lordy Mercy!” said Sarah Benton, looking as drab and threadbare as the clothing she washed. “What’s the matter with you young’uns?”