Heredity

He wasn’t the most reliable of narrators. I listened from across the table with a growing sense of unease and skepticism as the story, and his telling of it, grew more and more unbelievable.

“I don’t know how I did it,” he said, “But I made it across the barn, hand over hand through the rafters, while the hay burned below me. I swear, I thought I was going to...”

On and on. He had the humble brag down cold, and was using it like a mechanic who’d just learned about wrenches; I smiled and nodded, taking regular sips of my drink, listening to a new perspective on a story I must have heard a thousand times.

The story of the night the barn burned, of the end of the family farm, of my Grandfather’s disappearance, was one that got told every year at Christmas; it was a story I’d grown up with. The version I was familiar with was a great mystery: the late-night visitor, the sound of heated argument, the sudden blaze of light, and in the morning the animals gone, the barn gone, the tractor gone, the car gone.

The move to the city, Grandmother’s career as a switch-board operator... 

And sitting across from me, by a random twist of OK Cupid’s algorithm, was this dashing old man, seasoned world-traveling adventurer, who was telling me my own story.

Except that in his version, he was a driver stuck on the road, knocking on a door in the middle of the night looking for help with a broken-down car, and Grandfather was the psychopathic farmer who gradually revealed himself as he showed the late-night guest to a spot in the barn where he could sleep, then hit him from behind, imperfectly knocking him out, imperfectly binding him... the escape, the struggle, the lantern knocked over in the hay. 

The farmer, my Grandfather, standing among the flames like some dark god, cursing the man across the table from me even as he burned. Escape in the old pickup truck; decision to just keep going, rather than seek help...

I needed to go home. To sleep. It was late, and I had work in he morning. I didn’t need to be wondering about the implications of my Grandfather’s being revealed as a psychopath preying on the helpless and...

Excuses flowed easily: not feeling well, another time... of course it wasn’t him, I was just tired... 

Instead of home, I drove south, out of town, along the old canal road; left at the crossroads... the familiar landmarks of childhood drives out to the old farmhouse, treated as a vacation home, a weekend escape an hour from the the city.

Less than an hour, now, the city having oozed out toward it.

The back wall still stood; not exactly structurally sound, but more trouble to knock down than it was worth, and when it fell it wouldn’t hit anything. It made it easy to mentally mark out the perimeter of the old barn in my mind, to mentally check the story the man in the bar had told.

Obviously it was ridiculous, the idea that he’d been paired with me by accident. Some sort of... I don’t know, hacking or manipulation... he was looking for something. Something I knew where to find. I paced around the perimeter of the old place, looking for... I didn’t know what. Somehow I came to the idea of buried treasure: something that my Grandfather had been supposed to split with this... this supposed traveler, something they’d fought over...

There was a picture of the farmhouse in my Grandmother’s apartment, and I pictured it as I paced around, thinking about which part of the barn would be logical to dig in.

It seems... insane, I know, out there in the middle of the night wandering around with a shovel and a flashlight, but at the time it felt like I’d figured it all out. Like the great central mystery of my family had been laid out for me, the pieces finally in place...

I found the first of the bones maybe two feet down, in what had been the back corner of the barn. I thought they were just animal bones -- it had been a working farm, after all -- until I found the skull.

The first skull. 

My sanity slipped a little, that night. I know that that’s true. I should have called someone, should have... I don’t know. I shouldn’t have simply filled the hole in and gone home.

When I read, weeks later, about the missing man -- world traveler, well-respected retired professor of something or other -- I should have come forward, but I was afraid that... well. I wasn’t thinking clearly, obviously. When they found his body in a shallow grave in the old barn... I ran away.  After all, they’d find my fingerprints on a shovel out there, freshly dug... You see how it is. Nobody would ever have believed me.

Belize is nice, anyway.