The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

By noon the whole township was talking. By the following Sunday there wasn’t a family in our fellowship who hadn’t heard some version of it, and every version was worse than the truth. Some said we’d run off owing money we could never pay. Some said something darker had happened out on that ridge road and my father’s death wasn’t the accident the sheriff had ruled it. A few of the older women, kind as they meant to be, started a quiet fund at meeting in case we turned up somewhere needing help, as though we were lost instead of simply gone to my aunt’s house forty miles off with a wagon and a letter of introduction.

Nobody came looking in the one direction that would have found us in an afternoon. Nobody asked Nora. It never crossed their minds that a widow might leave a haunted house on her own two feet and her own good sense, rather than disappear into it.

The sheriff did come out, once, a week or so after we’d gone, at the urging of a few of the more worried women from meeting. He walked the barn, the springhouse, the fence rows down toward the creek, and found exactly what my mother had left him to find: a tidy, empty house with no sign of trouble in it. He wrote in his report that the family had “apparently relocated of their own accord,” which was the plain truth, but plain truth travels slower than a good rumor, and by then half the county had already decided something stranger had happened to the Lattimores. I have thought since that my mother would have set it right in an hour if she’d known how much noise her leaving would make. She hadn’t left to become a mystery. She’d left to survive one.