The Vanishing House

“Come on, Dani. It’s getting late. I’ve got to get some sleep. School in the morning. You have class tomorrow too, remember?”

She turned to face me. Purple mascara tracked down her cheeks. “But what if she wakes up, and we’re not here?” Guilt was eating away at my younger sister’s heart.

Nana’s first night in the nursing home. The decision to put her here had been Dani’s and mine, since Mom passed away five years ago. We were the only ones left to care for Nana. And we had failed miserably.

After her first stroke, she went through physical therapy and made it back home. But Dani and I were never around. We couldn’t prevent the second stroke, or get to her in time to stop it from worsening.

Now Nana couldn’t take care of herself, and we were too busy with our own lives to take care of her. So, nursing home it was. The money left to her by my grandfather and her own family fortune would more than cover the bills for a few years. After that, we would figure something else out.

But my sister didn’t care about the money. She couldn’t stand the idea of Nana being surrounded by a bunch of strangers. Or worse. Being left in this room to die alone.

“She’s not going to wake up until the morning. This place is crawling with nurses and aides. They’ll be in to check on her. I’ll make sure of that before we leave. Okay?” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Now, come on. You’ve got anatomy and physiology at nine A.M.”

She dabbed at her face with a balled-up tissue. “Okay. But I don’t like it.”

I nodded. “Duly noted.” I led her out to my car.

Winter would soon be upon us. The sun had set hours earlier, and I braced myself against the chill.

Dani shivered as she adjusted her seatbelt in the passenger seat. She sniffled softly into her used tissue, but she stayed silent on the drive back to Nana’s house.

When we got to the gravel road leading back to the newer brick house on the site of an old farm owned by generations of our family, Dani gasped. Her gaze fixed on a thick grouping of trees that belied the fact the ground had once been covered by hundreds of acres of corn, wheat, and tobacco crops.

I screeched the car to a halt and turned to look at what she stared at. The only thing I saw besides the trees was the dilapidated old barn our great-great-grandfather had built a century ago during the Prohibition Era. He painted it green. The light of the full moon overhead illuminated a hint of the past color, although time and Mother Nature had stripped much away. Now the whole structure looked like it would give way under the pressure of having to outstay its welcome.

The relic of a bygone era. No one had used this land for farming since my great-grandfather died, over twenty years ago. Dani and I were just little kids, so we barely remembered him.

Nana joked that his daddy hid his moonshine in that green barn. That’s why he painted it green, so no one would miss it. Everybody would know where they could find their booze. I always wondered if that was a good idea. If everybody in the community knew, then surely the local law enforcement knew too.

I asked Nana about this once.

She shrugged. “Granddaddy made so much money with the booze, he could buy anybody off. And he did.”

Now, looking at the old barn with the tainted history, sitting forlornly on the property that once teemed with life, I wondered at my sister’s terror-stricken face. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t you see it?” She pointed to the left of the barn, where an old foundation from the previous farmhouse that had burned down in 1936 stood as a reminder of the people and things that had once existed on this land.

I squinted. “Yes, the foundation of the old house is right where it’s always been.”

She shook her head, her red curls bouncing on her shoulders. “No, not the foundation. A house. The old house, Jo. I recognize it from Nana’s old photo albums.”

My shoulders tensed. What was she talking about? “There’s no house, Dani.”

She got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. She whirled and glared at me. “You know there is. It’s wooden and blue, with a screened-in porch in the front, like Nana showed us. The one that burned down back during her granddaddy’s moonshining days.”

I faked a yawn to hide the frown that curled the corners of my lips. “I’m beat. Let’s go to bed and talk about this more in the morning.”

She reluctantly followed me inside, but her eyes stayed fixed on the spot where the old farmhouse once stood. And apparently still stood, in Dani’s imagination.

*****

Dani and I didn’t talk about her vision again in the morning. We ate hurriedly, dashed out the door, and spent all day in our respective classes, me teaching and her studying biology. We agreed to meet at the nursing home to spend some time with Nana before dinner.

I got there first.

She sat propped up in bed, watching Judge Judy.

I grimaced and grabbed the remote, muting the volume.

“How was your day, Joanna?” Nana’s voice was raspy, her smile weak. But she still cared more about how things were going for me than she did about her own plight.

I sat down in the hard wooden visitor’s chair with the red pleather cushion. “Oh, the usual. Nothing really special happened. The weird thing happened last night.”

Nana frowned. “What weird thing?”

“Dani went a little crazy, seeing things. I think she must have just been really tired or something.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What did she see?”

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, clasping my hands in front of me. “She said she saw your granddaddy’s old house.”

Nana inhaled sharply. That obviously meant more to her than it did to me.

“What is it, Nana? What’s wrong?”

“The curse.”

I blinked. “The curse?”

She inclined her head as much as the immobility from the stroke would allow. “Your great-great-granddaddy was a rum runner.”

“Yes, of course. You told me that was why he painted the barn green.”

“Well, Granddaddy trafficked in more than just moonshine.”

My blood ran cold. “What do you mean, Nana?”

“Girls. Young farm girls from the community. Even some of Daddy’s sisters, he said. His daddy raped them, broke them, and sold them to anyone who had the money and the bent inclination to buy. Pure evil.”

I gripped the arms of the chair, willing it to continue to hold me up since it felt like the floor was slipping away beneath me. “I had no idea.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, whether from stroke-weakened signals or wry humor, I couldn’t tell. “Not something we broadcast, Joanna. A terrible dark secret I hoped would be dead and buried with the man who created it. Unfortunately, that is not what happened.”

“You said there was a curse.”

She waved a weak hand. “I’m getting to that. Lavinia Mochrie, the sheriff’s wife, put the curse on our family when she died. She found out what my granddaddy was doing, and she tried to stop him. Why she came to the farm that night in 1936 without her husband, I’ll never understand. But she did, and Granddaddy caught her, and he raped and murdered her. With her dying breath, she cursed him and his descendants. Every twenty years, there would be a death. And every person in the family marked by death would see the old farmhouse. He set it on fire with her body inside to hide the fact he murdered her. They never caught him.”

“Then how do you know all this?”

She pointed to the bedside table.

I stood and opened the drawer. An old leather-bound journal rested inside. I opened the cover and read, “Final thoughts and confession of Osiah Henderson, 1956.” Twenty years after he killed the sheriff’s wife. “He was the first victim of the curse.”

Nana raised a finger. “That’s right. He was the first. My baby brother, Bobby, was the second. Killed in a motorcycle accident in 1976. My father died in 1996. We thought old age at the time, but who knows? He did mention seeing the old house before he died. We thought he was just delirious.”

“And Mom died of cancer in 2016. When did she see the old house?”

“I don’t know, child.”

“Dani’s already seen the house, but her death is fifteen years away. What if that’s a sign that this is the generation that’s supposed to break the curse?” Hope warmed my heart, and I flipped through the pages of my great-great-grandfather’s confession. On the last page, he wrote:

I hid the old ledger under a floorboard.

I can’t remember which one now.

Her wrath might not be satisfied until every trace of those girls and my crimes is given a decent burial.

As I closed the journal, Dani walked into the room. I stood and hurried to the door, pulling her out with me.

“Hey, Jo! What are you doing? I haven’t even said hello to Nana yet!”

“You can say hello to her later. There’s something we need to take care of first.”

I filled her in on our family’s sordid history on the way back to the farm. Although Dani’s impending death was fifteen years away, an unexplainable urgency pierced my heart.

Back at the farm, I pulled a few regular hammers and a sledgehammer from Granddaddy’s old toolbox and met Dani in the old green barn. I handed her a hammer, and we set to work tearing up the floorboards.

In what seemed like an eternity, but was probably more like an hour, I yanked up a board by the front door and found an old ledger book wedged underneath. I held the book above my head and cried out triumphantly. “Here it is!”

We grabbed some picks and shovels and started digging next to the old foundation. When we had a hole about three feet deep, we dropped the ledger book and the confessional journal in and filled it in again.

“Goodbye, poor victims of my grandfather. Rest well. Goodbye, Mrs. Mochrie. I’m sorry for what my great-great-grandfather did to you all. It wasn’t right. Or fair. We acknowledge that, and we vow to do better. Please forgive us. Please remove the curse. Let my sister live.”

There was one more thing I wanted to do. One final bit of closure. I grabbed a gas can sitting in one corner of the green barn and jostled it. It still had gas in it. No telling how old, but it was still liquid. Maybe flammable. I had to take that chance.

I turned to Dani. “Get some matches from the kitchen.”

She nodded and ran for the house.

While she did that, I set to work pouring gasoline on whatever I thought would catch fire. By the time I finished, she had returned with the matches.

She struck one and handed it to me.

I threw it against a gasoline-soaked board laid up against the wall, which ignited immediately.

I ran back and joined Dani on the porch of the house to watch the old barn burn.

She trembled next to me. “The house isn’t there anymore.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Good.”

“What do we do now?”

I scuffed the toe of my shoe across the porch, creating an arc in the dust. “We wait till 2036 to see if the curse is broken.”