Leavings

Returning home to deal with her estranged father's estate, a young woman discovers a strange survival.

***Content Warning: This episode deals with themes of parental abuse, familial estrangement, substance abuse, and hoarding, and contains explicit descriptions of decomposition. Listener discretion advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Episode Forty: Leavings.

(Sounds of black-billed magpie)

NARRATOR

The dust of the road drifts around the now-still car that stirred it, enveloping the little 2014 Elantra in a thin beige cloud. The young woman behind the steering wheel sits very still, staring ahead at the three acres of scrapheap nestled secretively within a screen of wildly proliferating sumac and chokecherry, and at the rusted and sagging trailer home that squats dourly in the midst of it all, its dark windows sullen and vapid like the eyes of an old drunkard king surveying his dismal domain.

Jaymie has dreaded this day for many years, since she hit her mid-twenties and the deeper realities of mortality truly sunk home – not those merely of the inevitability of death, but the bitter bureaucracy that follows for those whom the deceased leave behind. Her mother Senna, far away in her native Florida, has utterly removed herself from all the concerns of her father’s demise, as cleanly as she removed herself from their lives twelve years ago.

Jaymie hasn’t laid eyes on the house since the day that she turned eighteen, and hoped never to do so again. But now, there is no one else to deal with it; that, together with the nebulous prospect that there may, amongst all the assembled detritus, be something of real value, has brought her all the way from Nevada.

As the last of the disturbed dust settles with an almost inaudible whisper, she finally opens the Hyundai door and emerges, picking her way carefully through the weeds that grow unchecked between the ruins of old appliances, rusting vehicles on rotting tires, and long-unused farm equipment. When and how exactly her father’s compulsive collection of the unused and unusable began, she does not know. Sometimes Glenn spoke of the things he accumulated as though he might repair them, or as if they held some hidden value that only he perceived and would one day bring him great profit, but never once did she know him to accomplish either. And the collection has only swollen and spread over the little property in the years since Jaymie left, like a strange and unnatural contagion.

Seeing the extent of it before her now, her resolve flags. The prospect of staying in her dead father’s home as she’d planned, not really able to afford the one hotel in the nearby town, is utterly depressing, let alone the sheer amount of emotional, mental, and physical effort that sorting through these sprawling remnants of a disordered life promises. Halfway to the trailer house, Jaymie feels nearly overcome by an impulse to turn and flee back to her car, to drive down the road and leave this place behind once more and for good. She almost succumbs, but the thought of how she would feel when she returned home—like a complete coward—holds her, and after a few deep breaths, she continues forward, climbs the splintering steps and enters the dark trailer. The air within is foul, and she is unsure whether it is the brimming garbage cans in the kitchen, or the residue of her father’s lonely passing, and the four days’ worth of decomposition that preceded his discovery. That thought is so horrible that Jaymie must retreat outside, both for fresher air and to escape the grim suggestions of the cloying darkness.

As she struggles with a wave of nausea that threatens to become something more, a pickup truck turns from the road nearby and rolls slowly into the dirt driveway. Jaymie doesn’t recognize the vehicle, but when the aging farmer climbs out, she knows him at once. Alwin Sykes was her father’s most consistent employer for the past three decades, more willing to tolerate Glenn’s mood swings and periodic benders than most, and he was also the man who found the body after a longer than usual failure to either report for work or even explain his absence. Yet despite this apparent beneficence, Jaymie was never able to like him—even as a child, something in his presence made her feel ill at ease. The years have intensified rather than lessened that effect, and she does her best not to openly grimace as he approaches, his pace even slower than it was when she knew him.

His words of greeting, though friendly enough, are untouched by any real warmth, and he does not smile. As he always did, Alwin refuses to use her name, instead calling her sweetheart when he offers his tepid words of condolence. She replies as tersely as possible, barely maintaining even the bare minimum of civility, but he seems wholly unaware of her mounting discomfort, and lingers as the sky turns orange with the approach of the early evening, asking unwelcome questions about her personal life and about the future of her father’s meager estate. Then he offers, unbidden, a detail about her father’s corpse on the day of discovery: about how he lay sprawled upon the kitchen floor, a look of sheer terror still plain upon his bloated and leaking face. Alwin even expresses skepticism about the officially determined cause of death, saying that he doubts a blood clot would ever leave a man in such a state, and then begins to muse about all the people that pass by so close on the road at all hours of the day, both locals and strangers, and how you can never really know what business brings them or where they are bound.

Every word out of his mouth has increased Jaymie’s dislike of the man, and she has finally reached her limit. She tells him very bluntly that she has too much to do and no time to talk, then turns around and marches back into the house. As the door is closing behind her, Alwin shouts a final question, asking her if she needs any help cleaning up the mess inside. Jaymie lets the door slam shut without offering any reply, and then stands motionless in the rancid dark, waiting to hear any sound of either departure or approach by Alwin. For a long time, it is almost preternaturally still, but finally there comes the plaintive grumble of the pickup engine, then a slow receding out of the drive and down the road.

Jaymie heaves a sigh of relief, but the squalid gloom of the house interior soon sours any sense of reprieve. Knowing that she will never be able to sleep there, she steps carefully over the stains in the living room carpet and around the assorted and unmarked boxes scattered through the house, into Glenn’s cramped bedroom. The mattress is bare and stained and the room reeks of sour sweat, cheap cigarettes, and cheaper beer. Feeling more contaminated with every step, Jaymie moves toward the dresser and the familiar brown Wolverine boots box atop it. She remembers the first time she reached for it innocently as a little girl, and winces with the attendant memory of her father’s hard hand wrenching her arm away.

She opens it and gingerly extracts the Colt Trooper revolver within, then stuffs the half-filled box of cartridges into her jeans pocket and moves back through to the front door. The murk in the trailer house is now almost complete, and as she glances incidentally into the kitchen, she has a horrible moment of vivid imagination, seeing in perfect clarity her father’s swollen corpse lying there, his face frozen in a rictus of purest fear.

Turning quickly, she leaves the house, walking toward her car through into the light of the failing day. Taking the blanket from her car’s homemade emergency kit, she settles into the backseat to pass a very uncomfortable night, tucking the revolver into the car seat pocket within easy reach. Nevertheless, she remains awake long after full dark has fallen outside: stressed from the enormity of the task before her and haunted by recurring thoughts of her father’s lonesome death. This last surprises her, since she has worked very hard to think as little about the man as possible for many years.

At 10:37, she is ripped from the embryonic fabric of a dream by a sudden metallic clattering outside, as of something upsetting or scrabbling over some piece of rubbish in the yard. She tries to tell herself it is only a raccoon, hardly the first such nocturnal stirrings she has heard tonight, but she cannot quite shake the impression that there was a suggestion of much greater size. After a few moments, she sits up and peers out into the darkness, but with the single yard light beside the house having long since burnt out, she can discern very little aside from the stars overhead and the deep black silhouettes of the trees around the property.

After five minutes of silence, she settles back into her makeshift bed and finally drifts into true slumber. When the sound is repeated past midnight and followed by a muted, snuffling chirrup, she doesn’t even stir in her sleep.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Grasshopper nymphs leap underfoot, and a bumblebee drones lazily overhead as Jaymie paces distractedly though the weeds, her thumb poised hesitantly over the call button. The hot late morning sun has drawn out a thin layer of sweat on her forehead and neck, but despite the heat, she has refused to set foot again inside the trailer house. The morning has passed mostly fruitlessly – since she awoke in the grey dawn a little before six o’clock, she has accomplished little more than wandering around the unsanctioned junkyard, trying to mentally catalogue its contents and becoming ever more overwhelmed by the sheer scope and futility of doing so. Not a single thing within the whole mess, she thinks, can be worth anything more than its sale value as scrap metal, which she knows is not particularly high. And even if she can get rid of it all as such, that still leaves the problem of clearing out and cleaning the house – not the least consideration of which is how to clean the foul-smelling patch of kitchen where her father was found.

It is all too much for her alone, she thinks for the hundredth time, and her thumb presses down on the digital button, dialing the long-unused contact. It rings six times before her mother finally picks up, answering with a quizzical hello that tells Jaymie that she doesn’t even recognize the caller number, has never bothered to enter Jaymie’s contact information on her current phone.

Jaymie answers briefly, trying to maintain a neutral and even reasonable tone. She asks, even pleads, for Senna to come and help her sort out the mess Glenn has left behind. Her mother answers coolly that she has no interest in that, that Jaymie can do whatever she wants with it. The bitter resentment which Jaymie thought she had fully contained broils and bursts.

Sure, leave it all to me, she is saying before she even realizes it. Just like you always have.

There is silence on the line for a long moment, and finally Senna quietly wishes her daughter the best of luck, and ends the call.

Hot tears of hurt and frustration roll down Jaymie’s cheeks, and she turns and casts her eyes hopelessly over the assortment of rubbish and the squalid mobile home. She jams her phone into her pocket and sits awkwardly on the nearest available space, an old dryer lying upon its back. Cradling her head in her hands, she lets the tears flow freely, murmuring fuck, fuck, fuck until it has become a mindless, meaningless repetition of syllables, the purest expression of her desperately overwhelmed solitude.

When there is nothing left in her and her face feels puffy and salt-stained from crying, she stands and moves wearily toward the standpipe hydrant that once served the now-covered lawn, coaxing forth cool water and washing her face in its flow. Then she takes a long drink, savoring the sweet taste of the clean groundwater and recalling unbidden memories of playing in the sprinkler on the lawn during long summer days. She was too young in those days to see the shadow that hung over her house, between the mother and father who should never have married and who were never equipped for the responsibilities of parenthood.

Thinking of this makes her want to start crying again, but her tears are spent, and she feels simply drained. She turns off the hydrant and walks back toward her Elantra, needing somewhere cool and quiet and most of all, not there, to think.

Turning the engine over, she drives away from the dismal little tract, without even considering her destination.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Sitting at a grungy booth in the little burger and ice cream joint in town – which was always called Dane’s Creamery when Jaymie lived here, but has apparently since been renamed Buckin’ Burgers – she eats a tasty if not altogether healthy meal that puts a bigger dent in her cash than she really cares to consider. Still, Jaymie cannot bring herself to regret coming here – the dim lighting, air conditioning, and the chocolate shake that came with her mushroom Swiss burger and fries providing a welcome relief from the early summer heat.

For the most part, she has the dining room to herself, with only one older couple in the opposite corner enjoying an early lunch. Just as she has finished eating and is working on the last half of the shake, the front door opens, revealing a familiar face.

Trudy Hoske was her best friend in high school, a thin and dark-haired girl with large glasses and a timid smile that masked her wickedly insightful sense of humor. Together, they had managed to survive the turbulence of adolescence, avoiding the worst that people from less-than-respected families can expect in rural communities, being made mostly the butt of mean-spirited jokes rather than the target of more physical cruelties. But Jaymie’s temper combined with Trudy’s cunning had ensured that they had their fair share of vengeance upon their malefactors.

Trudy is no longer thin, and her features have a sleep-deprived quality that is new to Jaymie, but the smile of recognition she offers is the same as ever. It is only after Trudy begins to walk toward Jaymie’s booth that Jaymie sees the little girl that toddles behind her, with a face reminiscent of the grown woman’s except for the blue eyes and blondish hair.

Hey there, stranger, Trudy says softly as she and the girl take the bench opposite Jaymie. Long time, no see.

She offers brief condolences about Glenn, using a gentle tone that suggests she guesses at the complicated tangle of feelings with which Jaymie grapples. Jaymie thanks her, and only a few moments of awkwardness pass between them before Trudy smiles again and says that Jaymie hasn’t changed a bit. Within a few moments, they are enmeshed in conversation, and for a moment it feels like the intervening years since their last have evaporated, and that they are seventeen once more. Then Trudy begins to talk about her husband and the struggles of raising a child in this economy, about how her man has had such trouble finding work. Jaymie listens sympathetically until Trudy begins to rail about how immigrants have ruined the country, and then starts talking about how a white genocide is slowly being perpetrated all over the world.

Jaymie feels suddenly very cold and very tired. She remembers how Trudy’s first boyfriend was Miguel Arcidez, a quiet and kindly boy over whom Trudy obsessed for a full year before finally asking him out to the now-defunct movie theatre, and how Trudy once got kicked out of American history because she challenged Mr. Beckman’s assertion that Southern plantation owners never really beat their slaves, even bringing up photographic evidence from their textbooks.

She rises and says that she has to leave, waving goodbye to the little girl and rushing through Trudy’s surprised farewell. Taking the unfinished shake with her, Jaymie makes her way out to her car, feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness at how her friend has changed and wondering what has made her this way. As she settles behind her driver seat, she glances back toward the dining room and sees the little blonde girl, whose name she has already forgotten, pressing her nose to the glass and staring out at her for a moment before her mother pulls her away.

Jaymie starts up the engine and drives slowly down Main Street, thinking bleakly that life slowly carves away all that is good and loveable, until only ugliness and corruption remains. And once more the image, the vivid impression of something which she never actually saw, materializes behind her eyelids – that of her father’s discolored and disfigured face, bruised by the gaseous expansions of rot, staring in sightless terror at the blank, water-stained ceiling.

(Ominous music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

She drives to the Drummond Reservoir, which was once the local fishing and swimming hole of choice, but which is now mostly dried up, with only about a quarter of its former expanse filled with dark, muddy, mostly stagnant waters. Parking in a turnout, she wanders for a while in the shadows of the thirsty cottonwoods, trying to think of the rank fishy smell that fills her nostrils as something other than unpleasant. The reservoir sits silently, no boaters or swimmers calling to one another, not even a single glimpse of an obstinate angler on the bank. Only a few RVs sit on the rented lots that once were fully occupied for most of the summer.

Her mood sinking still lower, Jaymie makes her way back to the car and turns back toward her father’s house, not wanting to see anyone she knows now, not wanting to be bogged down in any conversation and the unwelcome surprises that are likely to accompany it. As she nears the erstwhile home, Jaymie cannot help but ruminate further on the filth of its interior, on the unspeakable stains on the kitchen linoleum, and she wonders what potentially dangerous microbes may be breeding within even now. There must be people who are qualified to clean such things, she thinks, but she has no idea how to even start finding them in a community that still relies more on established reputation and word of mouth than internet presence.

When she pulls into the little driveway, she rolls down the window and kills the engine, relishing the relatively cool shade and the faint breeze, sweet with the greenery of the sumacs and chokecherries. There is nothing, she thinks, that she can do today, even if she wanted to. So she sits, feeling numb and trying to clear her mind of all her troubles, all the disappointments of the day.

As the golden afternoon waxes and wanes and finally gives way to the blue of eventide, she stares over the property, not really seeing it, not really present at all. Something strange has come over her, a sense that everything will be okay as long as she simply does not move, does not speak, does not try to do anything at all.

Something moves in the gathering gloom, loping from the corroded shell of an ancient school bus toward a gateless horse trailer partially sunken into the soil. It moves so quickly that it is hardly more than a sense of motion, but Jaymie starts and stares at the space where it disappeared from view, her vision fuzzy in the dimming twilight. It was large, she is certain, at least the size of a large dog or a deer, and there was a curious quality to her motion that makes her consider the disturbing possibility that her visitor is human.

But why, why, she asks herself, would anyone be out here in the dark, sneaking around a junky property like this?

Unwantedly, old farmer Alwin’s words run through her mind, that no one can ever really know what traffic passes during strange hours, and on what strange errands.

Hardly daring to turn her gaze for even an instant, she turns and reaches over the seat, extracting the revolver from its resting place where it lay, forgotten, even while she ate in town. She holds it carefully, almost gingerly, keenly aware of how many firearm injuries are self-inflicted.

Feeling a little safer with the weapon in hand, she turns back to stare out into the falling night, cursing herself now for not thinking of buying a replacement bulb for the yard light. For the first time since she arrived, she truly considers sleeping in the trailer home, but the memory of its clutter and uncleanliness is simply more than she can handle.

So, once more, she settles in for a long and uncomfortable night in the car, this time fearing that it will also be utterly sleepless. True night comes, and in the faint light of the rising crescent moon, she wonders what she ever could have thought she would find here, how she could be so foolish as to think there would be any real benefit to returning. Her father never did anything but take and destroy – giving, nurturing, were not in his nature, or had been drummed out of it long before Jaymie was born.

She should leave, she tells herself. Still, her hand does not move toward the ignition. If nothing else, she is too stubborn, too embittered, to simply surrender her claim to what is hers by right, even if it is meager and unwanted.

About an hour and a half into her uneasy vigil, she does begin to doze off, despite herself. The beginnings of a dream coalesce into the strange image of her father, rotting and yet somehow still alive, crawling like a spider through the maze of scrapped vehicles and appliances, hunting for some unknown prize. When she slips back into aching wakefulness, it takes her a few seconds to realize that the pallid, lanky thing in the moonlight is not a remnant of that dream.

For a moment, she is certain she is looking at a naked man standing inexplicably upon her father’s property, but then she sees the shape of the head, long and needle-shaped, like a jackal’s stripped of both ears and hair. And the eyes gleam preternaturally in the dark, as though reflecting the wash of the headlights she has not turned on.

The thing grins at her, and a long grey tongue lolls between its oversized fangs, calling to mind both putrefied carrion and the things that feed upon it. A sharp pain spikes in Jaymie’s chest, something she has never known before, even during her father’s most lurid drunken rages.

Go, go, go! Her mind screams at her, but her body is frozen. The thing stares at her, offers a low, wet snuffle through its hairless snout, then turns and lopes back into the scrapyard, its stooped posture neither fully human nor fully animal.

As if unlocked by the breaking of the thing’s gaze, Jaymie’s muscles at last jerk into action, her hands feeling the seat beside her for the Colt Trooper and, reassured that it is still within a moment’s reach, turning the key in the ignition. As the headlights wash the metal-strewn boneyard before her, she thinks, but cannot be sure, that she glimpses for a second the twin reflections of those awful eyes from the distant shadow of the ruined bus, and then she is backing out onto the road without even properly checking for an oncoming vehicle, roaring down the dirt roads without any clear thought of where she is headed.

Only upon reaching the orange streetlights of town does she feel safe enough to pull into a deserted Lutheran church parking lot, and stop to think. Her chest still aches, and that ache has begun to creep up her neck and into her skull; her pulse pounds in her wrists and fingers.

Trying to calm herself, Jaymie runs over the possibilities mentally: maybe it was only a mange-ridden coyote, or maybe it was a person, and her weary and stressed mind turned what she saw into something else entirely. Or maybe this theoretical person, for some strange and possibly sinister reason, had been wearing a mask that her terror had made more convincing than it should have been. She thinks of old Alwin, who always made her so uneasy, and how he seemed so comfortable intruding upon her father’s property.

But the image of the naked and hairless thing, standing upon two long, lean legs, leering with those baleful eyes and that necrophagous mouth, is too stark for any of these rationalizations to dispel. And now she wonders if maybe she is not the first to see it, if maybe her father’s final moments were marked by a similar pain in his chest, a clot knocked loose by the sheer rush of adrenaline that an awful grin through the window precipitated.

Once more, she reaches into the seat beside her and touches the revolver, almost caressingly now. She thinks that this is her only real inheritance, and is surprised to find she is satisfied with it, relieved that she need never return to the trailer house, never look again upon that blighted, shadowed lot.

Her heartrate gradually slows, and the tension in her muscles subsides. Turning her car back onto the street, she drives through town, toward the highway that will, after forty minutes, take her to the interstate.

It feels good to leave the town, the putrid trailer and its garden of decay, behind her for a final time. When she reaches home, maybe she will do some research, call a local real estate attorney or a realtor to deal with the property. Or maybe she will do nothing, and leave the property abandoned to its dreadful and nameless inhabitant.

Either way, she is certain that it will never trouble her. Glancing toward the Trooper that gleams in the seat beside her, she laughs aloud as her Elantra cuts through the night, and all the tension that has gathered in her mind and body shatters like so much spun glass.

Rolling down the window, she basks in the cool night breeze, and laughs once more, feeling lighter and more unburdened than she ever has.

(Uplifting music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. If you’re feeling particularly generous, you can support the show on our Patreon page or at darkerpastures.buzzsprout.com, and unlock special subscriber-only content. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]