Granny's in the Cellar

 

            Grandma had always been such a help around the house when she visited; especially in the fall of the year.  At harvest time, she was a cyclone of activity around the old kitchen helping Mom get everything into mason jars.  She was odd just the same.  Even though no one liked them, she insisted on preserving such strange things as miniature cobs of corn, and she especially had a thing about canning plums.  Now plums are great, but canned?  Yuck!  I’m sure that those things sat for year gathering dust on the shelves of our cellar.

          But then when I was about ten years old, we kids became less interested in walking the half mile down the road to visit her at her own place.  She was quickly going senile. With each passing month she became more and more the stranger.  It was particularly disturbing to hear a good Christian woman using such profanity.  She was constantly cursing anyone who made an effort to visit her.  It wasn’t just us kids either.  She shrieked at Mom and Pop, and all the aunts and uncles too, who were trying to take care of her.  It wasn’t long before we weren’t allowed to visit at all.  Mom and Pop didn’t want us to be left with such bad memories of a once noble lady.  That was fine with us.  The memories had already been ruined, and being kids, we sadly focused only on the belligerent woman that was not Grandma.

          The harvest that year got placed on a temporary hold to make time for the funeral.  Everyone agreed that it was a blessing.  Now Grandma was at peace.  But rural life, being what it was in the 1930’s, we had to get back to the frenzy of the harvest.  Even school was out for a month, not that that made up for anything.  The work was hard.  After just the first day of the harvest, we longed for the monotony of the classroom.

          Between the spud harvest and getting in the sugar beets, Mom put us to work with the garden and orchard.  Both, unfortunately, yielded an excellent harvest that year, which added to our misery. It could have been worse though.  At least we didn’t have to preserve stuff like plums, which had always been grandma’s obsession during the previous years.  Still, it was horrible.  We picked and dug and husked and shelled until our closed eyes were haunted by the phantom image of intruding vegetables and fruit.

          We kids had a moment of hope when we saw that Mom’s arsenal of mason jars was at an end.  We were so stupid.  We thought that we’d just have to let the rest of the produce rot.  Like we cared.  Pop walked in to see our dilemma/salvation.  “Well,” he said, “I guess I can take the Ford into town and get you another few cases of jars.

          We drew a breath as we looked to see Mom’s reaction.  “Hmmm,” she considered.  “No, I guess we really don’t need them after all.”

          We kids did a joyful dance.  It was finally over.

          “No,” said Mom.  “I’ll just put these kids to work cleaning out all of those jars with plums and such in the cellar.  That should give us plenty.”

          Parents are cruel.  I bet Mom and Pop had their exchange planned all along.  We looked at them, hoping that maybe it was a joke.  They couldn’t really be serious.  Well it was a joke.  Parent humor.  Mom snapped her fingers and pointed in the direction of the cellar. 

          We never liked to go in the cellar.  It was filled with cobwebs, dust and irony.  The light switch was temperamental.  It liked to wait until we got all the way down before it went out, and we had to fumble our way up that gosh-awful old staircase.  And even when the light didn’t go out, the stairs alone were a nightmare.  They were incredibly steep and precariously constructed so they hinted that they might collapse at any moment.  And worse of all, there were no vertical boards to fill the gaps between each horizontal step.  Any child would know that there had to be something living in the darkness underneath, ready to reach out a blackened claw for some tender young ankle.

          With multiple levels of apprehension, we lifted the cellar trapdoor, which made up a portion of the floor in our back room.  I told my little brother, Fred, to turn on the light.  He told me to go suck an egg.  I was stuck doing it again myself.  I took the first two steps into the void before I could easily reach the little black knob of the light switch.  It rotated clockwise to turn on, and another half rotation to turn off.  I knew to twist it a little past its first click and gently push to the left to keep it from immediately going out.  I also knew not to get my fingers too close to the two bare electric wires.

          Over the next hour, we carefully remove all of the recently-placed mason jars and set them aside to access the old stuff consigned to the shelf’s rear purgatory.  My siblings looked to me to be the one to reach back into the dusty darkness.  I hated being the oldest.  Each jar I pulled out had varying growths of dusty fuzz.  The interior of each bottle was often hard to identify.  I wiped the layers off one particularly dark jar and held it up to the dangling light bulb.  Something moved inside.  .  .

          I dropped the jar as I recoiled in shock.  The jar shattered on the dirt floor.  Plums.  Just plums, in a dark purple juice.  My brothers complemented me on my grace.  I prepared to kick each plum into the corner and scuff dirt to cover the juice. 

     One of the plums blinked at me.  .  .  A second rolled by itself to join the other, making a pair of glazed eyes.

          Without any outside help, a second jar fell by itself from the shelf, smashing.  What appeared to be a small ear of corn curved into an arc, separated into two rows of teeth, hinged at opposite ends of the arc.  They chattered across the floor to join the eyes.  More jars fell.  .  . The light bulb went out.

          I don’t know who received the greatest injuries among my brothers as we launched in the direction that we knew must be the staircase.  I didn’t care.  I don’t believe the others did either.  We erupted out of the cellar, slamming the trap door shut.  It was hard to hear for the sound of additional jars breaking over the bellowing of our own breath.

          We looked wildly about, trying to think.  What do you do when something like that happens?  As our lungs calmed, I strained to hear any more activity below.  There weren’t any more jars breaking.  Instead, we heard a liquid sound that seemed to come with a series of thumps followed by a squishy sound.  It was coming up the stairs.  .  .

          I jumped onto the trap door, which immediately jolted up a few inches, knocking me backwards against the wall.  I threw myself back onto the door, grabbing Fred and Ray to join me for additional weight.  I screamed for my youngest brother Orville to get Pop.  A purple ooze began to seep around the gaps of the door.  I didn’t know whether to stay or run.  My brothers knew.  They ran.

          The door lurched again under me.  I screamed for someone to come.  Finally, Mom came, not Pop.  She immediately yelled at me for making such a mess and that I should get up off the floor and clean it up.  I was grateful to see Pop arrive behind her.  He was forever telling us supernatural yarns.  He would understand.  He sided with Mom of course. 

      From my prostrate position on the floor, I politely explained what was underneath me.  I knew it wouldn’t help, but my concise story ended with an additional jolt from the cellar door, which briefly levitated me.  That changed everything.  Pop wanted me to get off the door so he could have a closer look.  I tried to convince him that it might be more prudent to just trust me on this one and find some better way to brace the door rather than relying on a ten-year-old-kid-paperweight, but he wasn‘t convinced.

          “Yes, I understand what you‘re saying,“ he said to me in a strange, calm voice, “but Grant, I’ve got to see it for myself.” 

          I risked a little of the backtalk that was never tolerated in the least in our home.  “Dad you’re nuts!  Why can’t you just trust me!”

          For once, he ignored the disrespect.  He lifted me aside with his left hand, without any effort, while keeping his focus on the cellar door.  The shuddering and noise from below stopped, which heightened my terror.  I gained a new respect for my father as he lifted open the cellar door without hesitation.  I thought my heart would stop.  There was nothing there.

          “Oh, just great,” I thought.  “This is going to turn out to be one of those stories where the kids see something weird, but it vanishes the moment the grown-ups arrive.”  I was a reader, and I knew about such things.

          Pop took the first two steps down into the cellar and turned the light switch.  It went on without any difficulty, of course. 

          As he shifted to take his next step down, the lights went out and the vegetative monstrosity rocketed up the steps, knocking Pop backwards.  His upper body was on the wooden floor, but his legs were bicycling in the black gulf of the cellar.  Juicy convocations of fruits and vegetables grabbed at his body.  He lifted his legs out of reach and rolled to the side as I slammed the door shut.  More bubbling, purple liquid seeped through the cracks around the door.  Pop was immediately on his feet, across the room, and behind the large bank safe that he had acquired years before.  His powerful shoulder rammed the safe across the floor, while its iron casters screamed in protest.

          With the weight over the door, the cellar grew silent again.  One large bubble of juice expanded slowly and popped.  My unflappable mother shook her head, and said, “I’m not cleaning that up.”  She walked out the door.

          Pop returned later that afternoon with eight new crates of mason jars.  We kids gathered plums in bushel baskets, for the first time without complaint.  We preserved every fruit and every vegetable that the farm could produce with a new appreciation for nature and for our own heritage.  In the years to come, we made it a point to open at least one jar of canned fruit at every meal.

          On those rare occasions that we drifted back to our old eating habits, the cellar door would shudder, sending a vibration throughout the house.  We knew it was Grandma’s warning that we needed to bring up another jar of plums, place it on the dinner table and serve a token amount of the slimy things onto each plate. Each time I sliced my fork through the thick skin of one of those repulsive fruits, I knew I was doing my part to keep a magnificent and stubborn old gal content in the world beyond.