A House, Not a Home

CW (Content Warning): Violence, physical abuse, mental abuse, child trafficking, kidnapping, mental health

My parents have warned me since childhood to be wary of the supernatural, ghosts, and all the like. They could never come to grips with the disappearance of their first son, Grant, and the screams Pop thought he could still hear every night. They never understood why they couldn’t come to terms with the phantom truck that clouded Pop’s nightmares. How had something taken him in broad daylight when we’d been going through the same routine for ten years – for as long as my brother had been able to walk.

They would wake us all up thirty minutes before the rooster cawed, assign Grant his chores, pick take me out of my crib, and carry me around the house while Ma did her own chores: sorting vegetables for sale in the town market for Pop to transport during harvesting season, or busying herself around the house as Pop worked outside with Grant. Sometimes they’d come in together laughing – joking about a rutabaga with a curvy waistline or some country bumpkin wandering up and down the road till dusk, I remembered as I’d turned five, oblivious to their expletives; only grinning to my mother on how I made half a jar of jam and finished the schoolwork she’d assigned me, all before dinner. We’d eat together, carry out our chores, and respective roles around the farm, lest my father bring out the belt to anyone who’d disrespect him by talking back.

He was a sweet man, though tough love was a constant in his vocabulary. I loved him; I was a daddy’s girl. When he’d come home after a long day ploughing the land, mud scuffed under his boots, tracking the dirt and grime into the house until Ma nagged him to keep them in the mudroom; I’d run up to him, smiling, and ask about his day. He’d look at me with a tired smile on his face, and animatedly retell the ventures of the farm as best he could while my brother ran to Ma asking what was for dinner.

They retell what happened five years ago weekly, if not daily, like it’s a way to

relive the event and make sure it never happens again. They go into excruciating detail, retelling their checking of his empty room just after noon, when Pop had told him to finish up the crop planting by the road. It was the second time he’d lent Grant his modified “Do-it-All” tractor, as he liked to call it, that would plough, sow, and water the crops, and was feeling very proud of his son at 11, for handling such heavy farming equipment so young. Checking up on him an hour later had Pop surveying the farm after seeing the tractor sitting by the road, rows still unplanted. Checking inside, he asked Ma where their boy was, and she looked up from her pot, saying she’d been busy too; she’d just put me to bed for naptime. He looked at her sternly but said nothing as he climbed the stairs to my brother’s room. Pop would give him an earful for skipping out on work again – he’d done this once before to meet with a girl he’d seen from a neighboring farm down the road. She’d been travelling into town to deliver her farm’s produce since her dad had gotten sick, and caught her on her tractor, chatted it up with her, and asked to see her again. He did, a week later, when he snuck off during the manure phase of the season to visit, and was stuck under Pop’s thumb for a week, fertilizing the farm by himself. This was mid-May, readying the crops took longer, and they barely made it in time before the asparagus heads had started sprouting but Pop made sure Grant learned his lesson.

Pop would recall remembering this as he stomped, heavy-footed up the stairs, swinging the door open to his room, waiting to see an empty bed. He did, and Grant’s fate was sealed for the next month in Pop’s eyes; almost half a year later and he still hadn’t learned his lesson. Fertilizing would be his life for the next four weeks, maybe more; he’d make sure the girl would never approach him without smelling him first, and Ma recalled Pop mumbling while snapping his belt. Something about how he’d make sure the fertilizer was extra fertile by the time their son got to spreading it.

He waited for him to come home that night and grew more venomous with each hour that passed without Grant coming home. By the time the rooster was cawing for the next morning, Pop was shifting between nodding off and waking with a seething rage, but by the time noon came around, he looked at the blazing sun in the middle of the sky, and started counting the minutes. I came down at some point, wondering why they were so tense, but they directed me to my usual chores, even as I hugged Pop and asked what was wrong. He only looked at me sternly and told me to wash the dishes, and at six years old, I decided it was better than talking back, seeing the belt by his shoe. By the next day, my parents were sick with worry and visited the neighboring farm, knocking restlessly. The girl my brother had snuck off to came to the door with a somber presence, announced her father had passed on, that she hadn’t seen Grant since the day he snuck off, and shut the door. Riding back on the tractor, my parents sat in a heavy silence, eyes looking resolutely ahead, as if they’d see him on the way home. They didn’t, and every day after, until the season for fertilizing had passed, and the time to harvest and deliver produce to the town came and went.

           Even as my birthday passed, I watched Pop grow more and more irritable, and Ma more neglectful in her teachings to me, so I had to learn on my own. And as money grew tighter within a few months of Grant’s disappearance, our meals got thinner, and Pop considered leaving the farm for the first time in his generation of farmers. He ended up trading the tractor for a used 2002 Ford Taurus after another sleepless night left him wandering by the road, and thinking he heard his son’s screaming from the back of a rusty pick-up truck slugging down the road, got in his tractor and chased it down until he caught up with it when it fell into a ditch. Looking in it, he saw no one inside, and drove his tractor back home.

When he retells the story to us, he swears that when he looked back it disappeared, and that’s when he’d finally had enough of the paranoia that haunted him when he slept in our handed-down farmhouse he once cherished as a family heirloom. This was nearly four months after Grant had vanished and Pop had been having constant nightmares and depression, while Ma had become nonresponsive and submissive. The night they told me Grant had gone missing, I became a void; I’d always been closer to Ma and Pop, but I loved and looked up to my brother. Hearing he was gone created a rift in me that grew deeper the longer my parents grew distant.

We drove the beat-up car with a leaky gasket all the way down the interstate from Michigan, with its engine wheezing down the highway as we’d reach I-95. Pop wanted to move to a major city like Miami, Florida, where things like ghosts can’t exist in the absence of hustle and bustle, but the car sputtered to a stop in Richmond, Virginia; and we decided to make camp there. Pop got a job at a historical museum as the manager where they mistook his standoffishness for a leader, so we took permanent residence in our car in Richmond.

A year after staying in the car, when Pop had made enough to buy a tiny house right off the interstate, Ma and Pop sent me to Mary Munford Elementary School, and I was enrolled in first grade since Ma had neglected my teaching since the incident. Life became monotonous, as I missed the peaceful air of the farm and my brother. Every day I’d trace the interstate, walking the same route home, and watch the cars speed by as I wonder how one of them could’ve been driven by a ghost that had taken my brother. And every day as I arrive home, I’m always greeted first by Ma’s back as she stays in the kitchen all day, wiping away imaginary grime from the counter until she heads upstairs aimlessly in a trance, not speaking a word to me. Pop comes home daily from his job, aggravated from overwork his first year, and grumbling under his breath about “no-good kids with no common sense”, refusing to look either of us in the eye unless we somehow slighted him by blinking wrong or speaking too loudly. To this, Pop would claim being reminded of his son screaming in the back of that pick-up truck he saw six years ago, retelling it through a drunken stupor like a man possessed. That would end in more mental pain for him, and physical for me and Ma when money was tight, and shifts were scarce. Grant was Ma’s joy; she didn’t have any motivation or experience to work after what happened, and I was a child, so I guess his view of us changed too when he'd take out his anger.

How either of them could make sense of the incident since then, I don’t know. But maybe it showed in their aversion to me going out at night, constant reminders of child abductions when I’d come home, or stereotypical overprotective nature that would end in ears ringing, phone calls, and ice packs. Most days, I was stuck in my room with nothing to do, other than when Pop would call me down to help him fix something up, then send me back when I couldn’t get it right or fix it as fast as he thought my brother would. At eight, all I could do was do my best not to aggravate him further, and make sure Ma was eating enough. Sometimes she’d glance at me with a distant look in her eyes, and it’d look like they’d well up in their blank stare, but she’d just go back into her trance when I’d say something or when Pop would come home.

A constant paranoia plagued me whenever I was alone as to whether I’d be alive if I stepped outside for more than five minutes, or if I’d be whisked away by something unknown to me, helpless to something I couldn’t see, or think to understand. I was too lost in my head to engage with any of the kids at school, and the teachers would try to help, and I wouldn’t want them to call home to worry Ma or Pop, so I’d go along with it till they left me alone. Throughout that school year, I felt myself missing life back home, and with no one to talk to, it felt incredibly lonely the longer I stayed silent. Watching the other kids talk and play and laugh day after day made something twist inside of me, like an unbreakable knot in my throat tying my vocal cords shut. I couldn’t stand it; I had to say something. I’d stare at the kids on the playground a little longer than normal, go up to one of them on the slide, then act like I was looking at the mulch on the ground. I’d try to smile at the teachers during homeroom, or go outside in the sun, but every day when I walked home, always following the interstate, it was like everything I’d done had reset, and I was back to being nothing.

Walking home every day, I’d look at the cars passing by so quickly, wondering if one would whisk me away, and when one did stop in front of me on the side of the road, I was ecstatic. It looked like the beat-up car Ma and Pop drove us down here with! They’d finally gotten it fixed and could drive me home from school now; something was changing, I was sure of it. I hopped in and couldn’t wait to start asking about it – I forgot the knot in my throat and chattered away as we drove and drove and drove and drove. We drove to a house that wasn’t mine. One that wasn’t overlooking the highway and didn’t look like the cars driving past would cause it to shake and wobble with unsteadiness. Actually, it didn’t look anywhere close to civilization; Pop looked so tall and confident as I tried glancing his way for a clue; he hadn’t said a word since driving us here. I was nervous, but I didn’t want to talk back or look him in the eye. He held out his hand and I took it. Walking into the isolated house with him, I felt strange as he led me down, down, down. Strange as my eyes adjusted to the darkness but didn’t dare to look at him; Pop always wore a belt, so when he wasn’t, something was wrong.

He let go of my hand and placed some mush and water in a bowl. I recalled dogs brought during show and tell being fed similarly; I didn’t understand. I heard a voice that didn’t sound like Pop instructing something to the corner and heard whimpering from it. As my eyes adjusted more from the darkness, and as the light from the door leading here shut, I could make out shapes of people. Bones. Ghosts. The man who led me down here seemed very real though; he felt real. They scampered toward us, and I fell in horror, clutching to the strange man’s hand; they’d begun eating from the bowls. He let go of my hand while I sat in shock, shut the door and clicked it. My parents always warned me of ghosts and now it was just them and me in the dark.

My mind grew hazy as what I thought were weeks slugged by. Hearing the door opening and closing became a terror for me; when the man would come in one of the ghosts would leave with him, and I’d feel myself sinking deeper into their huddle in the corner as the ghost would come back limping and pained in the cracked door’s dim light. One day he came and picked me. He took me outside and I squinted at the ground when the daylight hit my eyes. My foggy mind couldn’t comprehend the words he was saying to me, but he got me back in the now-unfamiliar car, drove us a while to a small building, and lead us down, down, down again. This time I was blank – he dressed me and led me onto a stage where the hot lights beamed down at me as I comprehended the rows of figures in the audience. We were lined up in a row, all shaking and overwhelmed by the lights and people; we all looked like ghosts.

I felt a twisting feeling in my chest that travelled up my spine to my skull where a throbbing began. I stared down at my feet and wasn’t sure what it was but for a second, I couldn’t see or think or breathe. I felt a numbing spread afterward when I wondered where my brother was and a wave of homesickness for our farm wash over me. I accepted every wave of emotion washing over me until I felt I had nothing left. I accepted no one would come for me. I accepted my fear. I accepted all of it. And as the announcer moved down the line of us, I watched him as if we were all underwater and watched the jolly smile on his face thicken slowly as he annunciated competing prices and final winnings of each kid to an audience member – all to be designated as theirs before the end of the night, and felt my brain shift to a halt. This was it. I felt nothing. He reached me, fourth to last, and aimlessly like I’d watched Ma every day, I smiled at the audience who clapped for me, thought of Pop’s blank face and resolve, and screamed “I’m free!”, thinking of my brother for the last time. The auctioneer smiled at me and carried on. My fate was sealed.

Important note: Child trafficking is a real, pressing issue in the world; to report a missing child, call 800-843-5678; the national human sex trafficking line is 888-373-7888; and for more information on sex trafficking visit https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-Trafficking/Human-Trafficking.html

Author’s note: As children, we’re often warned of cases like these in child trafficking, and I wanted to spread some awareness on the issue, especially since it’s still happening in the world today. Additionally, I wanted to shed light on toxic families and households, as it can feel scary and alone in them, and you can have your mind warped and perspective skewed while being trapped in one. A household can be toxic on any end of the spectrum, and trafficking and kidnapping are things to be wary of, be safe, and thank you for reading.