Little Fears

A seemingly minor accident on a nighttime country road in March of 1921 marks the beginning of a series of events that will forever change the lives of the Grossman family.

***Content Warning: This episode deals with themes of racism toward Indigenous people, and contains some violence and gore. Lister discretion advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Episode Forty-Nine: Little Fears.

(Sounds of house finch song)

NARRATOR

Mina is woken by a loud thump and a jostling of the Model T. Her father curses loudly in the front seat, and her mother asks him shakily what that was. In a growl that fails to mask his own fear, he replies that he doesn’t know.

Mina sits up and peers out the back of the vehicle, but the wan moon and the red flash of the new electric tail lights are too dim for her to make out anything but the vague outlines of the narrow, pale road that cuts through the dark South Dakota prairie. But then she does see something, only for an instant – a brief flurry of motion, as something small stirs feebly on the road.

With a grunt of mild effort, her somewhat portly father, Mr. Grossman, shifts the car into park and opens the door, stepping out into the cool spring night and coaxing a flame from his Ronson lighter. He moves around the car, inspecting it for damage, then back along the road the way they have come. Mina watches him moving slowly until he reaches the place where she thought she saw movement, about six yard behind the Ford. The little flame of his lighter is not enough for her to make out any more clearly the small, dark shape which her father stoops ponderously to inspect, but he remains there for what seems to her like a very long while. Her mother opens her own door and calls back to him, asking if there is a problem, but he doesn’t respond.

Mrs. Grossman mutters under her breath about her husband having drunk too much at dinner with the Weatherleys, their nearest neighbors and family friends. Mina did not notice her father drinking all that much, though Mr. Weatherley was as rosy-cheeked and garrulous as he always is at Sunday dinner.

Another few minutes pass, and at last Mr. Grossman puts out his lighter and stands, walking slowly and somewhat dazedly back toward the car.

Again, Mrs. Grossman asks if there is something wrong as her husband settles back into the driver seat. With an unusually—even unnaturally—flat voice, he says that they just hit a jackrabbit. She asks him if he is sure, saying that it looked to her like a very small child, and he offers a mocking laugh that seems a little forced, asking with fathomless scorn what a small child would be doing this far out on the road at this hour. When she, somewhat chagrined, asks him what took him so long, he says that he was just making sure the poor jackrabbit was dead, that he didn’t need to put it out of its misery.

Mina is sure her father is lying. Her mother does not press the issue any further, and Mina doesn’t know whether this is because she believes him, or if she is simply too weary and too browbeaten to discuss it any further.

Mr. Grossman puts the car back into gear, and continues homeward. Mina notices that he drives a little more slowly now, just before she curls up again on the backseat and falls into slumber.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is much later when she wakes to the sound of the Model T’s engine firing again outside. She is in her bed, presumably having been carried there by one of her parents after their return home, but the starting of the car at what feels like a very late hour confuses her.

Mina gets out of bed and moves toward her window, peering out at the dark yard. By the wan light of the westering moon, she can make out the form of her father, moving away from the garden shed, some long implement resting on his shoulder – she has to stare a few moments to recognize it as a shovel. He stows this in the backseat, then climbs behind the wheel and drives slowly out of the yard.

For a long while afterward, she remains awake, standing by the window and waiting for any sign of her father’s return. At last, she grows sleepy again, and the sound of the rumbling engine melds with the edges of her dream.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The faint tapping upon the windowpane repeats several times before Mina rouses herself from her bed. The night without is pure darkness, the moon now gone, without any sign of stars beyond. She wonders at the hour, thinking that surely the first hints of dawn should be streaking the sky with blue-grey.

Then, somehow visible in the inky gloom, a small form materializes just beyond the glass, seemingly standing somehow on the narrow ledge of her windowsill. The man’s clothing is strange enough, a jacket and leggings of cured rabbit hide all dyed a bright red, but the man wearing it is like no one she has ever seen, standing no more than a foot and a half tall. His head, too, is bizarrely proportioned, far too large for the diminutive body, with oversized eyes like great moons and a very small mouth.

Yet again, the figure taps at the window, and now at last Mina rises and moves toward it, inching it open carefully so as not to wake her parents. Despite the strangeness of her nocturnal visitor, she feels no fear, the thought of the little man posing a threat not even crossing her mind.

His small mouth splits in a smile as he bows through the gap she has made for him and steps into the room. In a surprisingly gravelly voice, he thanks her for letting him in out of the cold, and introduces himself as Sucwagan. His people live a little ways to the south, he says, on the big hill that can be seen for miles around.

Then he tells her that he is looking for a cousin of his, and that this cousin has gone missing. Sucwagan hides his face tearfully as he explains that he and his family are afraid that something terrible has befallen their missing family member, and that this cousin has always been one of his closest friends.

Timidly, Sucwagan asks Mina if she might have met any of his kind, might by some small miracle know of his cousin’s fate.

No, Mina begins to say, but then she thinks of that bump under her father’s car on their way home, of how he took so long in looking at whatever lay there in the dark road, of how he left in the dead of night with a shovel in the backseat. And though she says nothing, this pause is enough to still Sucwagan’s weeping and for him to look tentatively up at her. His large, bright eyes glisten in the moonlight, but she can see no sign of tears there.

You know, he says.

She shakes her head, but there is a tightening sensation in her chest, the one that always comes when she tries to tell a lie. Suddenly she feels certain that she does know, and that Sucwagan’s kinsman lies buried shallowly somewhere along that roadside.

The diminutive man flashes his teeth at her, a grin full of malice, and then she is lying awake in her bed, shivering and sweating as though in a fever. To her waking mind, the memory of the misshapen little face is utterly terrible, and all of the terror that was unnaturally absent in her dream paralyzes her, renders her completely incapable of turning to look at the window to make sure that nothing is really there.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The morning light fails to dispel the dread from her dream, as it always has before, and so too does the presence of her parents at the breakfast table. As her father reads the newspaper, munching on toast and slurping his coffee, she notices that his hands seem slightly unsteady, the broadsheet pages rhythmically rustling with his faint tremors.

For a moment, Mina considers asking her father about his second late-night drive, but she cannot summon the courage to risk his temper, intuitively sensing that his apparent distress will only render it more volatile.

So instead they pass the morning meal in silence, with her father leaving the house afterward to tend to the spring fields with his hired men, hoping to plant early this year with the exceptionally warm weather. As she helps her mother with the dishes and with preparing lunch, Mina asks her if she knows anything about the big hill to the south.

No, her mother replies, nothing in particular.

 After a few more minutes of working, Mina finally musters the courage to ask if her mother has ever heard of little men in red clothes. Her mother pauses in the middle of peeling potatoes, her eyes slightly widened with surprise, and then she laughs.

Of course, she says. Her own mother used to tell her tales about the little people of her old country, of the clurichaun and the fear dearg who are so prone to mischief. And so saying, her mother begins to share some of the old stories as she hazily recalls them. Some of them are rather grim, with the tricks the little people play on their larger, more mundane neighbors proving deadly, and her mother tells these tales with a gentle smile that tells Mina that she doesn’t believe any of what she is saying, that they are just stories to her. Even so, when her mother has finished speaking, Mina asks if there are any of the little people in America.

Her mother laughs softly, and says of course not, that there were never any in Ireland or anywhere else either, except in stories.

Mina says nothing, and when her mother, perceiving now her daughter’s distress, asks her if anything is wrong, Mina half-lies that she only had a bad dream last night. Finishing with the dishes, Mina goes outside to tend to the pigs and chickens as she does every morning. All the while, her eyes keep straying toward that bulging grey-green prominence on the southern horizon.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Slightly after noon, the three men return from the fields for the midday meal. Her father’s two hired men, Lou and Robert, could hardly be more different. Lou Hardie is a local man who fell on hard times after returning from the Great War. No matter how much he eats, he is always thin, and he seems anxious and fidgety even in his sleep. Robert Bourdon is always so calm that he seems on the edge of falling asleep, and he speaks slowly and kindly, when he speaks at all. For some reason, he has always seemed to like Mina, and has told her things about his early life on the reservation in Nebraska, about his wide travels and about all of the different things that he so likes to learn about through reading and conversations with people from all different walks of life, that she has never heard him speak about with anyone else from the Grossman farm. Of the three men, Mina cannot help but prefer his company, even over that of her brusque, stern father.

So when her mother begins to speak of Mina’s earlier line of questioning over roast beef and vegetables and mashed potatoes, Mina cannot help but feel dismay and embarrassment, sure that all three of the men will think her a fool. And indeed, Lou gives only a nervous laugh, while her father scowls with irritated dismissal. Robert, on the other hand, gives her a long, studious look that she cannot quite read.

He lingers a little over his lunch, which is not unusual for him, as his habit is to eat slowly and even a little daintily. After the other two men have settled in for a brief noontide nap before returning to the fields for the rest of the day, and Mrs. Grossman has begun to put away the leftovers and wash the dishes, Robert turns to Mina and asks quietly what has prompted these questions.

Mina tells him the same that she told her mother, that she had a bad dream last night, but to Robert she divulges just a little more, telling him about the strangely dressed little man, and how she had not been afraid of him until after she woke up. Though the men in the living room have already begun to snore gently, she cannot quite bring herself to speak of the accident on the way home from the Weatherleys, or of her father’s later trip with the shovel, and what her dreaming self inferred was the dark truth behind it all.

Robert, however, seems to guess that there is more to the explanation than she has told him. After a moment’s pause, in which he seems to be deliberating over some unspoken question of his own, he asks her if she has ever been close to the big hill about three miles to the south of the farm.

No, she says, never. But then she considers it again, and amends her answer, saying that she has only gone past it in the car with her parents. On the word car, her voice falters, as she is suddenly and viscerally reminded of that unpleasant thumping sensation that woke her in the backseat, and she realizes that the road they drove the night before does indeed lead past the high hill.

Robert lapses into contemplative quiet again, and then he tells her that there are old stories about that hill, and that it is a place to be avoided. His eyes grow more somber than Mina has ever seen them, and lowering his voice a little further, he says that her mother is wrong – that not all stories are just stories, that people the world over used to pass down their living knowledge through tales, rather than entombing it in books.

And, he says, there are stories from many peoples and many lands about the little folk. There are differences from one to another, but the one thing all such tales have in common is that the little folk are not to be transgressed against.

A sudden chill grips the nape of Mina’s neck, and she shudders violently. Then she asks him if there is any way to stop the little folk from hurting them. A sad expression passes over Robert’s face before he says slowly that the only way he knows is to never draw their attention in the first place.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

At first, it is only little things that disappear: a piece of silverware, or a pair of socks, or a jar of nails. But when it becomes more than that – an entire set of tools from the barn, Mr. Grossman’s heirloom Swiss pocket watch, the small bundle of cash that he and his wife kept hidden in their bedroom – Mr. Grossman’s temper, always short, becomes truly tempestuous. He begins to blame it on both the hands, and on his wife and daughter too, admonishing them harshly for forgetfulness and irresponsibility, even stupidity. More than one meal is ruined by his increasingly overt implications that Robert, who has never given them any cause to doubt his honesty, has been stealing. Even Lou, despite his timid nature, tries anxiously to deflect the accusations against his fellow farmhand, but when Mr. Grossman at last openly demands over dinner one night that Robert return everything immediately or leave the farm, Robert looks his employer squarely in the face with open anger that he has never shown before.

Carefully setting down his mismatched knife and fork, Robert says that he has taken nothing, and therefore can return nothing, but that he will not stay under a roof where he must endure such treatment. Standing, he adds that Mr. Grossman should think about being a little more honest with himself, and consider that maybe his own actions are to blame for any trouble he might suffer. Without another word, he walks toward the door, pausing only long enough to cast a now-sorrowful look at Mina and her mother before stepping out into the night, walking toward the tiny bunkhouse he shares with Lou to collect his meager belongings.

Mrs. Grossman brushes her husband’s shoulder, telling him that they can’t afford to lose Robert, that he has to make amends and smooth things over. Mr. Grossman violently knocks her hand away from him, roaring that he has nothing to apologize for, and that he won’t have any goddamn lying, thieving Indians in his house.

Mrs. Grossman draws back, tears of shock and hurt gathering in her eyes, and then she flees from the table toward their bedroom, knocking over her chair in her haste. Lou mutters something about needing a walk and a smoke, and strides awkwardly for the door, leaving the red-faced father and his bewildered daughter alone over a cooling dinner.

When Mina begins to cry silently, her father tells her sternly to stop. He’s tired of being the only man on the place, he says, tired of having no one to rely on, and he won’t stand for any more crying and whining and lying. The reality of Robert, whom she always thought of as the sort of uncle she’s never had, leaving forever fills Mina with such fury that she cannot hold back the words that come spilling out her, words far more barbed than any she has dared to utter to her father before. She tells him that he knows he is wrong, and that he is the only one lying.

You killed one of them, she says coldly, and now they are getting their revenge.

Instead of the wrathful and possibly violent response she expects, her father blanches, seemingly cowed for a moment by this outburst from his usually meek daughter. After a few moments, he says thickly that she doesn’t know what she is talking about, but there is no real heat in his voice any longer, no conviction.

After a few moments, he rises, following the other two men outside and somehow seeming physically diminished, smaller and frailer than he was just a few moments prior. Though he moves toward the bunkhouse, Mina knows with unaccountable certainty that he is too late, that Robert has already gone and will never return.

And somehow, she feels certain that it is the first change that is truly irrevocable, but that it will certainly not be the last.

(Subtle, bleak music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Over the next three days, a new sort of silence descends over the Grossman home, making the house seem cold to Mina despite the warm spring. Her parents do not speak to each other, spend as little time as possible even in the same room together. Lou does not enter the house except to eat, and even then wolfs down his meals as quickly and uncharacteristically quietly as possible before returning to his work or to the bunkhouse, foregoing even the customary nooning nap.

Meanwhile, things continue to go missing: spare change, pieces of farming implements, even the paper shells for the double-barreled shotgun Mr. Grossman keeps on a rack hung beside the back door.

When Mrs. Grossman reluctantly asks one evening what her husband wants her to make for Sunday dinner with the Weatherleys, he responds that they won’t be going this week, maybe not for a while. He does not explain this, and the dark tone in his voice convinces his wife that she does not wish to ask for any explanation.

That third afternoon, Mr. Grossman is awoken from his own restless nooning by a scream that cuts through the roar of the Fordson tractor. The Grossman women too are startled by this, Mina even dropping a plate she is in the middle of drying. Instead of scolding her for her carelessness, her parents both hurry out of the house, peering toward the south field that Lou has been harrowing all day.

Mrs. Grossman lets out a choked cry as she realizes what has happened, and her heavyset husband begins wordlessly to run toward the riderless tractor and the prone form beneath it. Mina comes out to stand beside her mother, who seizes her shoulders and hurriedly turns her away from the sight, burying her daughter’s face in her apron. In the brief moment beforehand, Mina is able to make out only a vague image: that the figure writhing weakly upon the ground is Lou, and that there seems to be a lot of blood.

Mina remembers little of what follows, aside from the panic of her parents, and the pained groans of the pale and sweating Lou as they gingerly lift him and move him into the back of the car, his ravaged legs dangling limp and bloody beneath him, barely intact beneath the leather belts acting as improvised tourniquets. Mina feels faint upon looking at Lou’s legs and their exposed inner workings, and has to turn away.

Then her father is driving the injured man to town, leaving the Grossman women alone on the farm. As Mina watches the little Model T fade into the dusty distance, its trajectory unstable with its twenty-horsepower engine pushed to its absolute limits, she wonders which pair of the now-split Grossman household are more in danger.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

For a full day after his return, Mr. Grossman refuses to speak about Lou, much to his wife’s visibly increasing outrage. When finally he does tell them over a cheerless breakfast, Mina finds herself unexpectedly crying at the news that neither of Lou’s legs could be saved, both having to be removed because there was so little left that could be effectively treated. Worse still, what her father seems most troubled about is the medical cost that he felt obliged to pay, and the added strain of losing another farmhand. His murmured assent when Mrs. Grossman expresses sympathy for the now disabled Lou seems reflexive and absent, without any genuine feeling behind it, and Mina for the first consciously considers whether her father is a good person.

Beyond saying that something went wrong when Lou started the tractor, Mr. Grossman never explains what happened, or alludes to what might become of Lou now.

After that day, aside from worrying about money and the increasingly cumbersome workload, Mr. Grossman seems ever more anxious, almost as though he is in a constant state of alertness. He pauses often in his work, which Mina is now obliged to share a much greater share of despite her mere eight years and smallish, fragile frame, and during these pauses he slowly turns to survey all of his surroundings, his head cocked with an attitude of intense listening. Whenever she asks him if something is wrong, he only shushes her, and after a few moments of vigilance, tells her to get back to work.

He teaches her to run the Fordson tractor, his only concession to safety after Lou’s accident being an insistence on always starting the tractor himself. Mina hates the dust that harrowing the field kicks up and the way it coats her skin, hates the way the flies and sweat bees follow the tractor to feed upon the salt in her itchy perspiration.

Most of all, she hates that her gaze keeps drifting, against her conscious volition, toward the looming slope south of the field. And sometimes she thinks that her father, during his moments of watching and listening, also allows his attention to linger upon the hill.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

A week after Lou’s accident, Mina dreams again of Sucwagan. This time, a paralyzing sense of terror overwhelms her as soon as the first rap sounds upon the pane, and the leering, malformed face forms in the inky blackness without. Seemingly of its own accord, the window slides upward in its frame, and Sucwagan steps through. She sees now that his long-fingered hands are stained a dark red, glistening slightly, and he points a wet forefinger at her as he tells her that the miseries of her household are only beginning.

She tries to speak, tries to ask him what he wants, and why he is punishing those who have done him and his kind no harm, but her mouth is frozen shut with wild fear. Still, he smiles, revealing small teeth that seem both too numerous and too sharp, and as though he has heard her unspoken questions, he says that she and her family have all wronged him, by not offering up the blood of the wrongdoer.

The stain of innocent blood, he laughs shrilly, can only be washed away with the blood of the killer.

Then he opens his mouth wide, and vomits forth the severed head of her father, whose own mouth gasps and gapes noiselessly like that of a waterless fish. Seizing it by its damp, thinning hair, Sucwagan holds it aloft and throws it at her, and Mina wakes just as the bloody stump of the neck makes contact with her face.

For hours afterward, she lies crying into her pillow.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Her father’s distraction continues to worsen, and he begins to leave her alone in the fields, making unexplained odd trips into town and returning with crates and sacks and metal boxes that clink as he carries them into the barn. When once Mrs. Grossman ventures to ask over dinner what he is spending so much money on, money they can little afford, he says that he is buying machinery to make their lives a little easier, now that they have no more farmhands to keep up with all of the work. Mina knows he is lying, and possibly her mother does as well, because she presses him further, asking what kind of machinery.

Mr. Grossman’s face flushes red, and he yells at her to stop questioning him. Everything he has done, he fumes, has been to safeguard their future.

Then he turns on his heel and walks out of the house, stalking across the yard toward the barn. Mrs. Grossman simply stares at the door he slammed behind him, stunned and lost. Mina quietly finishes her dinner, clears the table and washes the dishes, then goes to bed early, feeling swallowed by the expansive silence of the farmhouse.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After another week, Mina and her mother find themselves performing all of the labors to keep the farm at least minimally functional, barely managing to both care for the animals and finish preparing the fields for planting. Mr. Grossman has retreated completely into the barn, and refuses to let either of them inside. Sometimes they can hear the sounds of work within, but more often, there is only appalling silence, and Mina imagines him sitting alone in the dark, staring at the floor and listening for things that he cannot name.

During that time, he only emerges once, when Mr. Weatherley drives up to the farm to inquire about their unexplained absences for their usual shared dinners, and to ask if they are in any trouble and need any help. The Grossman women watch the two men’s exchange, which is brief and seems to quickly become unpleasant, from the kitchen window, and it ends with Mr. Weatherley returning to his Corbitt Model D truck with an alarmed and furious expression on his face. Not once does he even glance at the house as he starts up the pickup and drives away.

When Mr. Grossman finally leaves the barn, three days later, it is with a wheelbarrow full of foothold traps, a new bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder and a Smith and Wesson revolver hanging from his belt. Telling Mina and her mother to stay inside for the remainder of the day and ignoring his wife’s alarmed protest, he moves around the property, carefully setting traps at seemingly random intervals. Mina and Mrs. Grossman watch him from the windows, the woman voicing aloud her doubts about the man’s sanity while the girl wonders how they are supposed to care for the animals if they cannot leave the house.

When the wheelbarrow is emptied, he returns to the barn, and about ten minutes later emerges with dozens of new traps heaped within. At this sight, Mrs. Grossman begins to sob, and kneeling, takes Mina into her arms and holds her tight. She begins to whisper that Mina’s father is not well, and that they may have to leave soon without him.

Mina nods, saying nothing.

When he returns to the house in the evening, he is carrying a long canvas sack, which he sets upon the dining room table and opens. Within are three rifles, two pump shotguns, four revolvers, and many boxes of ammunition. As Mina and her mother eat a cold dinner of bread, butter, cheese, and canned tomatoes, he methodically loads each of the new firearms, and at length he laconically indicates that the two smaller revolvers are meant for them, if he cannot protect them.

When his wife asks what he intends to protect them from, he does not answer, except to slowly push a revolver across the table toward her.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

As Mr. Grossman fills a kerosene lantern, preparing to “patrol” the farm periodically throughout the night for whatever unnamed threat he perceives, Mrs. Grossman tucks Mina in for the first time in years. She takes the snub-nosed revolver that her husband pressed into Mina’s hands. Mina has never before fired a gun, and her mother insists that it is her job to protect her daughter, though Mina can tell by the way that she says it that she only perceives a threat in Mr. Grossman.

With her mother watching over her, Mina falls asleep more quickly that she has for weeks, and her sleep is deep and untroubled.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They pass two nights that way, and despite the growing desperation in her mother about the deteriorating state of the untended farm, Mina begins to feel a faint hope that perhaps Sucwagan’s threats will go unfulfilled now, that maybe even her earlier fears and her troubling dreams were mere childish fears after all.

During the day, her father sleeps fitfully in his armchair downstairs, starting awake every couple of hours and reaching for one of the new guns that is always near to hand, then rising and pacing through the whole house to peer through all the windows before finally settling back into his chair for another brief period of rest. He has stopped shaving or changing his clothes, forgetting even to eat regularly, and a faint sour smell of stale sweat and sickness acccompanies his presence.

During his rest, Mrs. Grossman carefully collects a few necessary and prized belongings, packing them into a large trunk which she has squirreled away in Mina’s small closet, where Mr. Grossman is unlikely to look.

On the third night of these strange watches, Mina is woken by a throaty and awful scream outside, which she at once recognizes as her father’s voice despite never having heard it reach such a pitch or timbre before. Her mother starts awake in the chair she has placed at Mina’s bedside, knocking a book from her lap. Mina hears the woman reach for the kerosene lamp beside the bed, fumble with the globe and the wick before striking a match and throwing light upon the little bedroom.

There comes a second scream then, even more terrible than the first, which is cut suddenly short. Mrs. Grossman sets the lamp carefully back down on the night table, then moves to the window at looks out at the darkened yard, trembling slightly.

After a moment, she returns to the bedside and takes up the lamp once more. Stowing one of the revolvers in her nightgown, she hesitates a moment as she contemplates the other, before leaving it and moving toward the door. With her hand on the doorknob, she looks at Mina and tells her daughter to remain in bed while she goes to see what has happened.

Mina nods meekly, the thought of leaving this room and venturing out into the dark completely intolerable. And yet, as soon as her mother’s footsteps have receded down the hall and then the stairs, Mina is seized with an acute sense of how isolated she is, how anything at all could happen to her in the space of time her mother is gone. Hardly daring to move or even breathe, she has to steel her nerves for a full twenty seconds before she can even reach out to snatch the remaining handgun from the little nightstand by her bed. Clutching it to her chest, she cowers in the corner of the bed with her back to the wall and her eyes darting between the closed door and the window for what feels like an hour.

There is a crashing sound from downstairs, and Mina involuntarily lets a whimpering cry escape from her throat as light, quick footfalls tap up the stairs and toward her door. When the door flies open, it is her mother who looks in at her, her face seeming an unnatural pallid yellow underlit by the lamp in her hand.

Shakily and breathlessly, she says that something awful has happened to Mina’s father, and that she will have to drive to town to fetch a doctor, having no phone in the house. For a moment, Mrs. Grossman hesitates, as though unsure of something, and then she tells Mina to put on a coat and shoes and come with her.

A few minutes later, as they step out into the dark, Mina’s gaze begins to drift in the direction from which she judged the earlier cries to emanate, but her mother hurriedly turns her away, telling her not to look and bundling her into the front passenger seat, in which Mina has seldom gotten to ride. As her mother steps in front of the car, turning the Model T’s hand crank laboriously to start the engine, Mina disobeys her mother by turning in her seat to peer across the shadow-swallowed yard. At first she can see nothing, but then she thinks she can pick out the faint outline of a prone form at the far southern edge of the yard. Staring at it, she can pick out no sign of movement there, and a queasy heaviness descends into the pit of her stomach.

Then the engine is starting, and Mrs. Grossman is returning to the driver seat. Mina hurriedly looks away, wishing that she had listened to her mother. The Model T begins to roll down the road, the body swaying and swerving dangerously as her mother presses it to a speed of almost forty miles an hour.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They reach town in less than twenty minutes, far faster than they ever have before, and the doctor answers Mrs. Grossman’s urgent knocking within the first minute, taking only a few moments to dress and gather the tools of his trade before joining them in the car. He insists on driving the way back, taking the roads at even greater speed just as Mr. Grossman did when taking poor wounded Lou to visit the very same doctor.

Nevertheless, they are far too late in returning to the once-proud farm. Mrs. Grossman holds Mina back as the doctor inspects the fallen man, whose right ankle is mangled by one of his own traps. More horrible than that is the patch of bloody dust under the second trap, which has clamped over the man’s head, crushing his skull and detaching much of his face.

Likely, the doctor says later when he comes to speak with the Grossman women, Mr. Grossman died almost instantly, falling after the first trap took his foot right into the second.

And even as he says it, Mina thinks that this cannot be true, remembering the two awful screams that prompted her mother’s discovery of this supposed accident. She looks up to her mother to see a similar doubt reflected in her eyes, and yet her mother says nothing to contradict the doctor.

When, upon a second observation, the doctor finds a long, straight sharpened stick embedded in the dead man’s leg, he attributes it to Mr. Grossman’s sudden obsession with laying traps all over his property, which Mrs. Grossman had told him about on the ride back. He proposes that Mr. Grossman may have planted many such small homemade stakes, as well as mechanical traps, to injure trespassers.

He offers his condolences, both for the death and for what preceded it, which he describes as an acute neurosis on her late husband’s part. Of course, he adds, he will have to inform the law, and they may very well choose to follow up on the matter for the sake of legalistic propriety, but there is nothing further to be done for Mr. Grossman other than to arrange a funeral.

Her mother begins to cry softly, and draws Mina close, but for her own part, Mina finds her eyes unexpectedly tearless. All she can think as she hides this by burying her face in her mother’s coat is that maybe now, at last, they will be safe from Sucwagan and his people.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

A formal inquest into the death of Mr. Grossman does indeed follow, with the aging Sheriff, a man named Kempker, visiting the farm several times and asking both Mina and her mother many, many questions. In particular, he is interested in the provenance of the sharpened stick extracted from the dead man’s right leg, and why, if it was something that Mr. Grossman set himself, there is no sign of it having been embedded in the earth, and why there are no others of its like around the property. He also wonders why there are certain drag marks that indicate the fatal second trap was dragged from its original placement prior to the accident.

Her mother, of course, cannot offer any explanation, and at last the sheriff seems to accept this the morning of his last visit, three days after Mr. Grossman’s funeral, as they are seated around the table over coffee. Mina, on the other hand, tired of answering the same questions again and again and tired too of having to keep her own suspicions to herself, finally tells him that the little folk must have done it.

Kempker frowns when she says this, asking then who exactly she means.

The little folk, she replies, pointing southward, that live on the big hill.

Then come more questions, and she ends up telling him everything: about the night her father claimed to run over a jackrabbit, about her dreams, about her mother’s tales from the old country and Robert’s vague fears drawn from years of traveling and learning all that he could. She tells him about all of the little things that went missing around the farm, which caused so much strife in their home, and about Robert’s departure and Lou’s accident, her father’s deteriorating state of mind that preceded his final fate.

All of this, she tells him, is the work of the little folk. Her father, she insists, killed one of them that night, then concealed the little body, and all of the misfortune on the Grossman farm since has been their slow, inevitable vengeance.

 The sheriff listens to all of this with extreme patience, his face schooled and impenetrable, yet she can see plainly enough at the end that what he is trying to mask is disbelief – that he only wanted her to speak through what he must consider childish fantasy in case it might reveal some hidden grain of truth. Her mother beside her, hearing all of her daughter’s thoughts laid bare at last, shifts uncomfortably in her seat, her untouched cup of coffee slowly cooling on the table before her.

Sheriff Kempker leans back heavily in his own seat, letting out a long sigh. He turns and looks out the south-facing window, at the looming hill, and is silent for a long while.

At last, he turns back to them and says that sometimes, a strange accident is just a strange accident, and that as far as he can tell, there is no justice that can be found or dealt here. Rising, he tips his hat to the widow, thanking her for the coffee and for her time, and offering his condolences for her loss. Excusing himself, he lumbers out of the house and toward the barn, where the saddled mare that he still prefers over automobiles stands tethered, mounts up, and rides away toward town.

The Grossman women linger at the table after he is gone, and after an oppressive silence settles over the farmhouse, aside from its faint creaking in the rising spring wind, the mother slowly asks her daughter if all she has said is true.

Yes, Mina replies simply, giving a single, earnest nod.

Mrs. Grossman sits still, then drains her cup of its cold, bitter contents. After sitting a few more moments, staring through the same window that the sheriff did mere minutes prior, she rises and climbs the stairs, returning in a few moments with the heavy trunk that has for days lain hidden in Mina’s bedroom closet. Coming to the table, she tells Mina that she thinks there is little left for them here, and that she has family back east who would be willing to take them in for a time. They can sell the farm to Lou and Robert, she says, as a sort of belated compensation for the injustices and injuries they suffered here, asking for only a fraction of its true value – just enough to get them on the road and sustain them for a while, until they find something better.

Pausing, she takes a deep breath, and asks Mina what she thinks.

Mina, finding at last the tears that have never come since her father’s death, says that she is ready to leave too.

Her mother takes her by the hand, and together, they walk out of the house.

As they drive away in the lightly loaded Model T, Mina turns from gazing toward the great mound of the little folk to look at her mother, who suddenly seems so much younger. For the first time in weeks, Mina offers her mother a shy and hopeful smile.

(Hopeful 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 for only three dollars a month. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]