Chapter 4: Death Beneath the Old House

My aunt fainted twice, crying outside the yard.

“You heartless man, tell me, what in the old house was worth dying for? How are the two of us supposed to live now?”

Her voice was raw, echoing across the frosty yard. For as long as I could remember, my aunt had taken plenty of beatings from my uncle.

I used to joke with friends that if my uncle ever died, she’d be the first to set off fireworks in celebration.

But thinking about it now, my cousin is slow, and only my uncle brought in money. Now that he’s gone, it’s like their whole world fell apart.

My mom couldn’t stand it and tugged my sleeve:

“Eli, did your grandpa really only leave one gold nugget?”

She whispered it, eyes darting to the window. I rolled my eyes, about to answer.

When something else happened.

When the villagers dug my uncle’s body out from the old house ruins, they found another skeleton.

The sheriff was called. Flashing lights painted the old house in red and blue. The older folks in the village suddenly remembered something.

“More than twenty years ago, old Carter took in a drifter from another town.”

“Did anyone ever see him leave?” There was a hush.

My dad remembered.

He rubbed his hands together, voice low. Back then, not many people left to work elsewhere; most stuck to their own small plots of land.

One year, there was a nasty drought.

Afraid the crops would die, my dad and Grandpa hauled water all night to irrigate the fields and found a man collapsed in their corn.

He was under thirty, badly injured, and refused to go to the clinic no matter what.

People like that were usually trouble. That’s just how it was.

Grandpa didn’t want any trouble, so he told my dad not to mention it. If anyone asked, just say he was a stranger passing through for the night.

But the next day, the man was gone. Grandpa said he left before dawn.

It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.

But now that the villagers brought it up, Dad started to panic.

After he went to look at the skeleton and came back, his face looked even worse.

“I just remembered something: that man was missing a finger on both hands.”

“Looking at the skeleton… it’s the same.” For a second, nobody said a word.

My mom grabbed my arm, her grip tightening.

She squeezed so hard my fingers tingled. I don’t know how Grandpa managed to hide a body in the old house for over twenty years without anyone noticing.

Thinking about how much I used to play in that house as a kid, I felt a chill run down my spine.

All those games of hide-and-seek, all those times I curled up with a book in the corner. But now, all that seemed minor. Compared to this, it was nothing.

The village called the police, who set up yellow tape and reassembled the skeleton.

It would probably take a while to figure out who it was.

But what our family had to deal with right away was my uncle’s funeral.

Ever since the county passed new burial laws, the village watched everyone closely—no more burying folks on your own land.

When Grandpa died, he passed in the afternoon, and we secretly buried him in the field that night. Not daring to let anyone know.

If the neighbors reported you, they might even make you dig the body back up.

The threat was real—there’d been stories about families forced to exhume loved ones. I shuddered just thinking about it. “How about having the funeral home take him for cremation?”

The minute my uncle suggested it, my aunt jumped up:

“Big brother, didn’t you say before that cremation’s for strangers, and we’re supposed to honor our roots? Why is it, now that it’s your own brother, you want to send him off to be burned?”

“I think you just can’t stand to lose that piece of land—not even for your own brother!”

The Carter brothers had split the land; my uncle got the best, his field was the richest, and my dad’s was the worst, plus a patch where nothing would grow.

And the family grave was on my uncle’s land.

Burying one more person meant one less patch to plant. That was the truth.

Called out by my aunt, my uncle turned red and had to agree.

Even if I wanted to say something, I couldn’t—youngest in the family and all.

To avoid trouble, Dad and the uncles decided to bury him in the field that night.