A Hint of Lavender

It was the barn of my dreams. Vast and old, the scent of hay and horses lingered in the air. I loved to visit it when we were in Kansas seeing my grandfather. The man was an old hat at farming, but none of his five children or grandchildren ever picked it up. But that didn't stop us from visiting every summer to help him with the same harvest he’d tended to alone for decades, never complaining, always working.

I was a bit young to play on the large machinery, but I didn’t care to anyway. I liked to mosey my tiny frame through the vegetable crops instead. My grandfather had a strawberry patch that was interloping on his neighbors land but grew through the fence and was free game for a precocious 9 year old girl.

An apron full of wild strawberries and the whim to do whatever I pleased was the order of the day. My feet were bare, the grass tickling my toes, dirt creasing my sole, but the feel of it was perfect as I snuck away to eat my contraband in the safety of the old barn.

Grandfather didn’t use it much, it sat quietly on the back of the property line. I remembered the story of it being the first thing they built when they bought the land. The barn was a sense of pride. It didn’t look like much any more, but the fact that it still stood proud against the Kansas landscape meant courage to my family.

As I played in the back corner of an old horse stall, I tripped on a shovel handle and spilled the contents of my apron on the decrepit barn floor. The delicious strawberries tumbled free and bounced away from me as I gasped a childish ‘Nooooo!’ and scrambled for them. Most stayed close, but one found its way through a gap in the boards and fell through.

Not interested in losing a single berry, I gathered the others up and went for the missing fruit. My hands were just small enough to reach through, and I groped for the strawberry until my fingers felt something hard, wooden. Too dark to see through the slats, I closed my eyes and tried to picture what my fingers were feeling until I noticed that the object moved like a handle. I held my breath to hear the faint squeaking of old hinges as I moved the object back and forth in my tiny grasp.

‘It’s a treasure chest! It has to be!’ I thought whimsically to myself. ‘I can’t tell my parents about it, they won’t let me keep it. And I can’t tell my brother either, he’ll punch me in the arm until I give it to him, cause he’s a frickin’ jerk. I’ll have to come back, late at night, with a flashlight when everyone’s sleeping, yeah!’

I stood, dusted off my hands, and started heading for the barn door when a sudden cold breeze stopped me in my tracks. This wasn’t just a quick, come and go, Kansas breeze, one that pushes away the heat for just a moment; this was something different, something that lingered longer than I cared for it to. It made the hair at my neck tingle and every inch of my back prickle as if I was leaning against tiny needles.

I was too scared to turn around, but thankfully the soft wind was gone and replaced by the stifling heat of the barn once again. I took off running from the barn and didn’t stop until I reached the house. I didn’t realize I’d been gripping my apron front so tightly that I’d squished all but one strawberry and caused a large red stain on the front of my dress. I dumped the now forgotten fruit into a pail by the door and blasted my way inside, the screen door slamming behind me.

My poor mother gasped. “My goodness Lennie! What on earth….” she stammered as her eyes drifted to my apron, smeared with what looked like blood. “Are you alright?!”

“What? Yes, sorry Mama, I went berry picking and I must’ve squished some,” I calmly replied.

“Oh, thank goodness! Pop upstairs and change, bring me down your dirty clothes so I can soak them,” she said as she turned back to the counter to finish making the sandwiches that would be our lunch.

I ran upstairs, the shivering breeze from the barn forgotten as I started to plan my nighttime rendezvous with the treasure just waiting to be plucked from its hiding spot. I decided on jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, tall socks, and my best running shoes. I pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail, balled up my strawberry-stained clothes, and headed back downstairs, just as the guys were coming in from the fields to eat.

I don’t remember much of the conversations during lunch, my mind was all over the place with thoughts of buried treasure and pirate ships sailing the seven seas. Never once did I consider why (or how) pirate treasure would be in the middle of a field in the boonies of Kansas, none of that mattered to me.

The rest of my day slugged along slowly. I was sent to the vegetable patch to pull up carrots and with every heave of the green stalks, I pictured strands of diamonds. The next row I pulled happened to be pearls as I gently loaded the basket with my bounty. I didn’t realize I was grinning to myself until I saw my mother glancing in my direction with a grin of her own. I blushed and looked back down at the carrots.

Dinner was an uninteresting bowl of stew and the men started their yawning pretty early. I feigned tiredness and asked to be excused for bed, and was waved off with a smile and a wink from my mother as I dashed upstairs.

The bed springs squeaked softly as I plopped myself in the middle of the bed, fully clothed, and pulled the soft blanket to my neck. The minutes ticked by on the bedside clock as the sun started to dip lower on the horizon. I could barely wait. My eyes were heavy from want of sleep, but my entire body was buzzing with excitement.

When the sounds from downstairs ceased, I rolled myself off the bed and grabbed my flashlight. I knew the squeaks of the floor and the stairs, staying as stealth as possible. The back door was unlocked as always and I slipped through the screen door without a peep.

The mad dash to the barn was easy in the darkness, and the moon was spectacularly full, guiding my way unencumbered to the treasure I sought. I made it to the barn door in record time and paused only momentarily to catch my breath before I became the richest 9 year old girl in the world.

The barn was slightly colder at night, dingy and almost eerily calm, but I barely noticed. I grabbed the same shovel I’d tripped over earlier in the day and made my way to the corner of the stall. I forced the handle through the large slats in the floor and leveled my tiny frame against the spade until the boards snapped and popped free.

Dust speckled the air around my flashlight as I leaned forward to receive my prize. But it wasn’t a treasure chest, just an old suitcase, and I struggled to free it from the many layers of dust. The latches were rusted and released easily as I lifted the old lid to the sound of aching hinges. My eyes were closed with anticipation as I steadied my breathing and waited for the smell of gold to hit my nostrils. Instead I smelled flowers, lavender in particular. I looked down into the suitcase and saw nothing but old lady clothes.

‘What?! There must be more than this!’ I scrambled over to the newly opened hole and shined my light back inside. I reached in and started pushing away layers of dirt, searching for more, anything! ‘I’ll take a small bag of gold, something other than old clothes!’

My fingers swiped across something cold, something that felt like the root of a tree. Looking down, it was bright white and pointing up at me…

My blood ran cold. I felt every ounce of color seep from my face and leak out of my toes. I couldn’t even remember how to breathe, and my eyes did not move from the sight of the skeletal finger reaching from the dirt as I scrambled on my hands and knees to get away from it.

“I wish you wouldn’t have found that,” the booming voice echoed through the barn and startled me.

I spun around to see the massive, hulking frame of my grandfather silhouetted in the opening of the barn door. My flashlight shook horribly in my hand as I shone the light on him, the twitching of the beam made his face, usually calm and serene, now horrifyingly sinister.

“Who is that Grandpa?” I asked with a shaky voice. I didn’t want to know the answer because I’d already felt it in my soul.

“Doesn’t matter Lennie,” he replied. “Now I gotta fix this too.” He stepped inside the barn towards me.

Never in my life had I feared this man, not until this very moment. I knew I couldn’t get past him and that if I shouted nobody would hear me. The last thing I thought of was my mother and how she would miss me.

I raised my tiny hand and uttered one little, soft word, “please”.

I don’t know where the wind came from, but it was bitingly cold and blew through me. I remember seeing a look of pure horror flash across the face of my grandfather as he stopped dead in his tracks. The beam of my flashlight began to flicker and I could see my breath as it whooshed out of my lungs.

A dark mass surrounded the both of us and I could feel the icy whisper push me back and I stumbled to the ground. I slammed my hands over my ears because now the only thing I could hear was the shrieking of my grandfather. I watched as he clawed at his neck as the mass swirled around his enormous frame, his eyes bulging from his head as he gasped for air.

I could barely make out another face in the darkness, beautiful but angry, her mouth twisted in a vengeful sneer as she knotted herself around my panicked grandfather. He only managed one word as the mass dropped him to his knees.

“Lenore…” was the last thing he said before his heart gave out.

The darkness lifted and in its place a soft glow. I could smell the lavender again. I couldn’t see the face anymore but I felt a hand upon my shoulder to steady the shaking of my body. It was peaceful now and I fell backwards into unconsciousness.

My mother found me at first light, frantic with worry and screaming my name. I called to her from the spot I lay and she hugged herself around me and lifted me into her arms.

“What happened Lennie?! What happened to my father?!” she stammered the questions as I could only point to the suitcase in the corner.

She stepped closer, immediately recognizing the clothes spilling from the suitcase as her own mother’s. She gasped and I could feel her chest heaving with halting sobs.

“She….she didn’t leave us. He killed her, didn’t he?”

I could only nod yes, squeezing my tiny frame to hers as she shook with anger and fear.

“I think it’s time we leave this barn, little Lenore. Did I ever tell you that was my mother’s name too? I’m sure she would have loved you dearly.”