by KIM HAYS

He left you a box,” my mother says.

“. . . who?” I’m outside my college dorm room in pajamas.

“Your grandfather, Riley,” she says. “Who do you think? He left a thousand dollars to a church he never attended and a small wooden box for you. That’s it.”

“What’s inside?” It’s been a few years since I’ve seen him.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I tried to see, but it has a special seal…just for you. The next time you’re home, go to the lawyer’s office in town.”

She hangs up.

June 1989

I am seven and the smell of alfalfa clings to my grandfather and the entire farm from the morning cuttings. We walk up a long dirt road to retrieve the mail and give my mother time to cool off.

As the farmhouse gets smaller behind us, I begin to panic. My mother seems to have shrunk away, along with the house. He takes my hand.

From inside his front pocket, I hear a bullfrog croaking.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a magic frog.”

“Can I see him?” I ask.

“No, but you can touch him.”

We stop in the middle of the hot gravel.

“Reach inside my pocket,” he says.

I slide my hand inside the front of his coveralls, checking his eyes to make sure it’s not one of those tricks adults like to play. As I go in deeper, my fingertips strike something sharp. I pull my hand back.

“It bit me.”

He doubles over with laughter. His ginger hair pushes out from his corn seed cap. From his pocket, he pulls out a long metal hair comb and shows me how to flick the tines in a special way to make the noise of a frog.

On the car ride home, I tell my mother about the magic frog in grandfather’s pocket. We don’t see him again for many years.

Item no. 1 in the box—a silver-plated hair comb.

October 1998

By now my father has fled our house, leaving me alone with my mother. From my bedroom, I hear her screaming into the rotary phone in the kitchen, “She just learned to drive Chet, and you know I won’t ever get on a tractor again.”

Chet is her older brother who lives in California. I’ve never met him. He and my mother don’t get along because a diamond ring went missing after their mother’s funeral. I see my mother wear the ring on special nights out. I find out my grandfather is sick and what is to be his last corn harvest is going rot in the fields.

We make the four-hour drive on two-laned roads to New Hope, Missouri. My mother’s cheeks flush from the wine in her travel mug. She spits fire about my grandfather as we go down the highway,

“…and he’s still ruining my life at forty-six,” she shouts.

I know I shouldn’t, but I need to know,

“Mom, how is helping your father…ruining your life?”

Her eyes go small. She cranks the wheel to the right and takes aim at a tree on the side of the road. I hang on tight to the sides of the seat. The clay dirt is softer than expected and we slide off the shoulder, spin tires, and come to rest on a slope.

“You need to shut your mouth about things a sixteen-year-old can’t know.”

When we arrive at the farmhouse, the windows are dark. We find my grandfather bent over the kitchen countertop eating chicken soup. Coughing after each bite.

Early the next morning, he promises my mother he will show me how to work the tractor and get me started. We both squeeze tight into the cab of an old red combine. He stands next to me, leans his sharp shoulder into mine. His reflection in the windshield is gray and drawn. I crunch the first few gears and lurch the tractor down one of the rows.

As we chug away in the field, we watch the harvester in front of us make the corn disappear. I keep the combine straight. His sun-cracked forearm lies touching mine on the steering wheel. Just below his left wrist is a deep oval scar in the shape of an egg. He catches me looking at it and speaks close to my ear,

“German mortar landed ten feet from us in a field in France. It was so quiet one moment I could hear bird songs from the hedges. Then so loud everything went dark. I came awake looking at my buddy Cooper’s forehead split in two pieces. Lucky.” My grandfather turns his arm away from me.

I keep focus on the rows ahead and the wide turn I have to make in a hundred yards. Nobody told me Grandpa was in the war. Was he? Or was this one of his “exaggerations” my mother always talks about?

He shows me how to dump the corn into the grain truck, and I drop him off back at the house. I watch him, thin as a cattle rod, climb back down the iron ladder.

Item no. 2 in the box—a WWII purple heart.

The third and final object in the box is problematic. It’s a key to a safety deposit box at the local bank in town.

I follow the teller down a red-carpeted hallway to a room in the back of the building. She puts a long gray strongbox on a metal table and leaves me alone.

I stand for long time in front of the box rubbing the little key between my fingers. The key makes a snap in the lock that echoes in the small space. I raise the lid and find a cashier’s check made out to my name for $800,000. Underneath the check, there’s a small handwritten note: Forgive us.

Ω

Kim Hays teaches English in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has published works in The Mid-Rivers Review, The Green Fuse Literary Journal and upcoming Fall issues of BODY and Line of Action. She is a veteran of the U.S. Army.

Rebecca Dietrich is a photographer from Woodbine, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in Welter, Seaside Gothic, Third Street Review, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Noyes Museum of Art, where two of her photographs were featured in the exhibit Homegrown Expressions: Art Members Unveiled. Rebecca holds a BA from Stockton University and is currently pursuing an MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts. You can follow her on Instagram @limericks_and_asphodels