Shred of Evidence

I never slept much as a little girl. To this day, I’m not sure why, but I think it had to do with the silence. It had its own peculiar sound, something I was first aware of around the age of four. A soft humming that I could ignore all day when I was playing outside with my little brother Johnny or visiting with the horses and cows and dogs that lived on the farm with us. But at night, after my mother tucked me in and sang lullabies to me by my bed, the sound would take over. I tried to make it go away, tried to make myself sleep.

I never could.

One time, after my mother sang to me for two hours straight before finally kissing me good night, I closed my eyes and lay very still, praying I wouldn’t stay awake. I tossed and turned and tried to fall asleep, and I think I did for a little while, but the humming noise came back.

Then I heard the sound of a shovel.

My room was right near the field where my daddy grew vegetables; he told me he wanted to make “the most beautiful and abundant vegetable patch in all of Iowa,” which made me happy even though I didn’t know what most of those big words meant. I got out of bed, went to the window, and saw my daddy digging a hole, putting the shovel in, taking dirt out, and doing it over again.

I never saw my daddy much. He’d moved us to the farm three years before because he loved it so, but his job kept him away on business a lot. Until I watched him outside in the field, I hadn’t seen him for three days. I was so happy when I did. I left my room and rushed out to the back door, which led outside to the field. I only needed to take a few steps to find the spot where my daddy was digging the hole.

“Daddy!” I cried.

He looked up at me and stopped what he was doing, then gave me a huge smile and put down the shovel.

“Well hey there, sugar, what are you doing out here so late at night?”

There was a big burlap sack lying next to the hole. My daddy stood on it with one foot, keeping the other one on the ground.

“I couldn’t sleep again, and I heard shoveling and saw you. I missed you!”

He stepped off the sack and came over to where I stood. Hugging me tight, he said, “You really should be asleep, young lady.”

I hugged him back. “What are you doing? What’s in the bag?”

He gently took my arms off of his waist and looked at me in the most curious way. Then he smiled again, more quietly this time.

“That bag over there? Why, it’s filled with potatoes. Magic potatoes, you know.”

My eyes widened. Last year, we tried so hard to grow potatoes on the farm, but we were never able to. One of our neighbors had grown gigantic potatoes which he tried to sell to daddy, who refused, saying he could very well grow his own, thank you very much. Except he never could, and mommy said because of that, “times were really hard” this year.

“Potatoes,” I cried, “But daddy, why are you putting them in a hole if they are already grown? Don’t you mean potato seeds?”

“Well, that’s why they are magic, Amy. I got these potatoes from a special place, a special person, who told me that if I planted them, they’d grow up into the biggest, most wonderful potatoes a person ever could see.”

I was thrilled. Maybe times wouldn’t be so “hard” this year after all.

“Oh, that’s wonderful! But when will they grow up into potatoes we can eat and sell?”

My daddy got really quiet then, and I thought I had said something wrong. Then I saw the twinkle in his eye, and realized I hadn’t at all. There were times he would come home in a black mood and get mad at mommy, or even me. But the moods never lasted very long, and afterwards he cheered right up and acted nice and wonderful like he usually did.

“That’s the thing, sweetheart. They take a long, long time to grow bigger and bigger. Six months, I reckon. Maybe a whole year.”

“That long! But why?”

“Magic takes a long time to take hold, Amy. So be patient. But it’ll be sooner than you think.”

He picked up the shovel again.

“Please, daddy, can I help you put the potato sack in the hole?”

He shook his head. “Best you get back to sleep, Amy. And one more thing: please don’t tell your mother. I want to keep this a surprise for her, all right?”

I nodded. He leaned over and ruffled my hair. “That’s a good girl.” Then he turned away and stuck the shovel into the ground, starting over again.

I went back to the house. For the first time in months, I slept through the night, the rhythmic sounds of shoveling lulling me to sleep.

* * *

As I grew up, times on the farm got worse and worse, and my father was at home less and less. He and my mother often argued about whether we should keep the farm. She longed to return to the city where she was raised, but my father insisted we stay, even though with each year, our fortunes worsened. We had to sell off a cow here, a horse there. Money was tight.I went to school, and made new friends. I spent less time with my father, and I can’t say I knew him too well. He was a cipher; a man occasionally around for meals or family functions, who was quiet except for the occasional heated argument. But every June—the anniversary of the planting—I asked him the same question, for his ears only, making sure to do it when my mother was out in the field or out with her friends:

“Daddy, whatever happened to the magic potatoes?”

At five years old, he told me they just weren’t ready yet. I believed him. When I was six, he said he might have to go and plant them again. I believed him once more, especially because a couple of times that year I heard him shoveling in the field late in the night. Maybe he was digging in a new spot, putting more magic potatoes in the new holes.

The year after that, he ignored the question, and after asking two more times, I finally gave up.

There would be no magic potatoes.

My mother’s arguments with my father escalated. She tried to keep it from us at first, but eventually she stopped, and afterwards they fought openly in front of Johnny and me.

“Why don’t you do anything with the farm? If we’re going to stay in this wretched place, at least do something!”

But he never wavered and stood firm. “It’s my father’s land, and his father’s before that,” he declared, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t. I tried to stay away from the farm as much as possible, staying after school late or sleeping over at friends’ houses in the city. My father went on more business trips. Once, when I asked my mother about his increasingly long absences, her answer confused me: she began laughing, the sound harsh and hoarse.

“Who the hell knows when he’ll be back,” she said.

My insomnia returned, and once again, I couldn’t stand the sound of silence. A couple of months after my thirteenth birthday, I lay in bed, wishing I could sleep but dreading it because nightmares now plagued me, the same one each time: I’d hear the sound of a shovel, then look down a hole to find nothing except a never ending blackness. And then a scream would well up inside me and I’d wake up.

I had almost fallen asleep when I heard a loud bang. I got up and opened the door, ran out, and saw my mother in the hallway. Her eyes were wild, her hair unkempt, her clothes disheveled.

She grabbed me and hugged me tightly, sobbing and screaming that it was too late. I didn’t understand, but I cried with her. I knew something was lost and that we’d never be the same.

* * *

If there was a note, I never saw it. Perhaps my mother threw it away, or decided that Johnny and I shouldn’t see it. In any event, a week after my father’s death, she announced we’d be moving to the city and the farm would be sold.While the farm was on the market, we stayed temporarily with my mother’s cousin Alma, who often talked with my mother long into the night.

“You’re well rid of the place. Why’d he make you all live there, Eileen?”

“I wish I knew; I really did. I argued, time after time, that it was better for the kids to live in the city, be close to where they went to school. Every time, he refused, and I couldn’t convince him.” She paused meaningfully, and the way Alma nodded, she must have understood what my mother had just said.

One time Alma asked, “Did you love him?”

My mother shrugged. “Sometimes. Most of the time, I wanted to know how I could. He never let me in. Always said he had to be out somewhere, to make it better for us and to keep the farm going.”

“And you never asked what he did?”

“Sure I did, but it didn’t matter,” my mother answered ruefully. “He always had an answer, whether in words or actions.”

After that their voices dropped too low for me to hear. I buried my face in my pillow, forcing myself to sleep, to think of what was to come, not what had just happened.

After two weeks at Alma’s, my mother finally found an apartment she liked, and we moved in a week later. Three days later, two police officers showed up at the door. Both my mother and I rushed to answer the bell at the same time.

“Mrs. Kepler?” one cop asked.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “I’m Ms. Lowry now.”

“I see.” The other cop looked down nervously, then back up at my mother. “Do you have a few minutes? We really need to sit down and talk with you. It’s about the farm.”

My mother’s eyes darted to and fro, resting finally on the first officer. “What do you mean? I just sold it. Free and clear.”

“Yes, we know, but the new owner discovered something and we need to speak with you further about it.”

She looked at me. “Go to your room, Amy.”

“What—”

“You heard what I said. Go to your room. Now.”

I did. I stayed there for an hour, wishing badly that I could hear what the police officers were saying to my mother, but secretly glad I could not. After a time, my mother knocked on the door and asked to come in.

Somehow she’d aged at least twenty years in the last two hours. She usually stood up straight and tall; now she did not. Her eyes were red, her lips swollen.

I ran to hug her. “Mom, what happened?”

She sobbed on my shoulder, just like she had after my father had killed himself. Then, I hadn’t understood. But I’d grown up a lot in the last month and a half, and a seed of recognition had been planted.

She didn’t tell me then. It took her the entire night and the next morning to work up the courage to talk about it to me and Johnny over lunch. And at first, we didn’t believe her.

But the following day, reporters started camping out on our doorstep, yelling questions if we entered or exited the house. I’d go to school and hear the whispers. People I thought were friends dropped me, and those I’d never cared much for anyway showed their dislike for me openly. Even the teachers began to pretend I was invisible. I’d sit in class with my hand raised to answer a question, but I was never called upon. One teacher, Mrs. McDaniel, made a point never to look at me, even if I stared her straight in the face.

I was forever branded.

For a long time, I couldn’t read a newspaper. I had a hard time watching television, because for a year afterwards, I couldn’t get away from the constant coverage. The talking heads wanting to know why it happened, how we—my family—could have been so blind.

When I was eighteen, having somehow endured high school in the same town, I asked my mother whether she’d known all along.

She raised her hand as if to hit me, but caught herself in time. “How could you ask me that, Amy? How could you even think that? I never knew. I live with that every single day, wondering how I didn’t know.”

We’d never been big talkers, our family, but the rifts became more permanent as both Johnny and I grew up into sullen, silent teenagers. Eventually, we both took off for universities thousands of miles away, putting as much distance as we could between ourselves and our mother.

I never told anyone for the longest time, changing my last name right before I started school. But even so, I couldn’t outrun my past. The truth caught up with me in the guise of a nice young man named Peter Armitage. A few years after I graduated, now firmly ensconced in an East Village apartment trying to make something of myself as an investment banker, I got a phone call. He was very sweet on the phone, very courteous. And very direct.

He wanted my story. It was for a book he was writing, one that would attempt to answer the question that eluded all those talking heads and reporters: why.

Maybe I was ready. Maybe I finally wanted to talk. So I did. For hours on end, telling Peter my life story as I knew it. He filled in the gaps that for years I had refused to even think about, spouting detail after detail, showing me his timeline and chronology.

In a way, it was therapy. And a lot more: we got married a few years ago.

But before then, just after he proposed, he told me some news: a friend of his had bought the farm.

“Why would he do that? How?” I was genuinely stunned.

“He wanted a place to live, and it’s beautiful. I’ve been out there a couple of times, and maybe it’s finally time to create some good memories out of the bad ones.”

After so many years, I returned to the place of my birth. One night, with the stars out in full force, Peter and I ventured out in the field, to the spot I directed him to.

I stared down at the sunken earth, the spot where my daddy had been digging. And I heard his voice again, so full with love for me as he told the story of the sack of potatoes.

It had been such a wonderful story, a fable that had calmed a young girl and allowed her to sleep peacefully again. Perhaps, in spite of what had happened afterwards, it was my father’s greatest gift to me.

I took Peter’s hand in mine. I remembered our long conversations, my crying jags, and his shocked admission one day that he had feelings for me. And everything else that had followed.

I turned to him. “I think I finally know why,” I whispered.

Peter squeezed my hand. We slowly walked back to the farm together, our steps in tune.

I often think about that sack of potatoes, and my father. There was no magic; nothing grew from them. My nightmare had been correct, because the only thing in that hole was an unending sea of blackness. Sometimes I could outrun it. Sometimes I could ignore it and build a life by myself, with Peter, and with our children. But it was always there, a part of me. And it always would be.