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(What We Saw)

Every summer my Mom would drive me down to Jasperton, Kentucky, to visit our kin there. Sometimes my Dad would come along, sometimes he'd have to work, sometimes he'd join us in the middle of the stay or come with us but have to leave early. But almost every summer, except for one, I would go for a two-week stay at my granny's house. I knew most of my extended family, or at least met them a couple times. I was the "Northerner" of the family, hailing from Illinois. This did not mean I was an outcast or even that much different. I was kin, and that's all that mattered.

It was during these visits I got to know my two favorite cousins, Todd and Bernadette. Todd was like me, a semi-permanent member of the family. Todd had been born and raised in Atlanta but, like me, visited the family every summer. The difference was that he spent his whole summers in Kentucky, while I just had my precious two weeks. He's my second cousin once removed through my grandpa's brother's daughter. My cousin Bernadette, on the other hand, had lived her whole life in Jasperton and was pretty much stuck there. She's related to me through my granny's mother's sister's son's daughter. If you have the miraculous ability to understand that, you might come to the logical conclusion that Bernadette and Todd aren't kin, but in fact Todd's father is the cousin of Bernadette's father through the Stevenson line, making them second cousins, but not through either connection to me. I am related to the Stevenson line three or four times through marriage, but not by anything biological as far as I know.

The official relations do not matter; only that Todd, Bernadette and I were best friends and I would yearn the whole year just for those two sweet weeks in summer I got to spend time with them.

This story begins in the summer after I turned twelve. To be honest, it actually starts decades before, but I'm just telling what I saw with my own two eyes. The previous summer my Dad took us to California to spend the summer with his folks. So this summer had a special relish for me, Man in the Ice Box excluded. Todd and I were twelve; Bernadette had her thirteenth birthday in May.

On third day there, Bernadette briefed Todd and me about all the things she wanted to show or do with us those three weeks. One third of the list were things we had meant to do the previous summer but had run out of time or had been unable to. Another third were new things we actually did get around to, and the last third were new things we were going to end up putting off until next summer.

The previous night Bernadette, Todd and I had spent half the night on a blanket in my granny's backyard stargazing. Todd pointed out constellations and telling us the myths behind them before we all got bored and just making up stuff. To this day I don't see the constellation Cassiopeia; I see the constellation Whatama, the tragic letter of the alphabet that got ran over by a bus days before its first appearance on Sesame Street. Its identical but daftly named cousin, 'dubba-yew' had to fill in, and that's how it got its start in the English language.

And yeah, we caught fireflies.

The next day I woke up at eleven and waited with Todd (who was also staying at Granny's) in the kitchen. Bernadette lived a fifteen minute walk down the road, and we would wait for her. Around noon, she came bringing with her three peaches picked off a tree in her neighbor's backyard. We all sat on the swinging chair on my granny's porch and I had my first fresh peach. (I can't eat anything in a can or jar anymore after that; it has to be fresh.) We tried to go to a matinee movie, but nothing good was on (at least nothing we would have been let into) so we went to a pond by my Granny's house and went swimming instead.

Somewhere mid afternoon we all were sitting outside a Sonic Drive in eating lunch when Bernadette announced she was going to take me to see the Man in the Ice Box. At first I didn't understand. Bernadette said that her Uncle (and by extension, my uncle, or possible cousin) Boyd kept a dead man's body in a freezer. She happened to say this as I had taken sip of soda and I learned the painful experience of having it come out my nose.

"What?" I remembered a couple times I had heard my aunts and uncles joke about the body in Boyd's basement, but never thought it was true. Barring

"Uncle Boyd has a freezer in his basement where he keeps a body," Bernadette repeated.

"You can't keep a dead body in a freezer. The police will come and arrest you for that!" I exclaimed.

"Not if they don't know about it," Bernadette said simply.

"So, what, he just keeps it in the freezer?"

"Yep. He charges kids five dollars to look at it. We're kin though, so he'll let us in to look at it free."

I paused a moment. "Have you seen it?"

"Yep."

I turned to Todd and asked him the same question.

"Nope," he answered. "Heard about it though."

"So," said Bernadette, "you want to see it?"

I didn't say anything for a second, but my gaze passed from Bernadette to Todd back to her. "Yes."

We rode our bikes (Todd rode his own, Bernadette borrowed one of her older brother's, and I took one from granny's basement that had belonged my late uncle Harold). We peddled for a half hour, following Bernadette who seemed to know the way on the dry dirt roads.

I had never met my Uncle Boyd before and only scant heard of him. Todd had met him a few times and I sensed a sort of bated tension from him as we rode towards Boyd's house. Only Bernadette, who claimed not only to know Boyd but the illegal contents of his basement, seemed sure of herself.

Boyd's house was located at the end of a long stretch of dirt road surrounded by untamed willow trees. The house had once been painted white, but who knows how many years had come and gone since then and most of the paint was peeling. Long strips of chipped paint lay about the unmowed yard. A chained bulldog barked as menacingly as it could, but Bernadette was unperturbed/ I moved to the other side of her, away from the bulldog.

"Doesn't anybody tell the police that he's supposed to have a body in there?" I asked Bernadette as we abandoned our bikes and walked to the front porch.

"Probably," she shrugged, ignoring the dog straining from its leash to try to bite her ankles. "But most people don't really believe it. Ones who do are too afraid to come down and see. 'Cept for teenagers, and if they tell, the police probably just think they're making it up. Boyd might be 'timidating to look at, but he wouldn't hurt a soul."

We reached the front door and Bernadette knocked. After a minute a figure approached. Even through the screen door I could see that Bernadette was right: Boyd was intimidating as hell.

He was a tall, fat man. I thought he was about my grandpa's age, though I suppose he could have been younger and just looked like he was grandpa's age. He was wearing overalls. No shirt, no shoes, just the overalls. He was bald but had a dirty grey beard and I noticed his fingernails were all yellow.

"Who's thar?" he shouted.

"It's Bernadette!"

When Boyd recognized her he beamed. I could see that the few teeth left in his head were assortment of yellow and black.

"Who's this here widja?" Boyd asked. "Todd?"

"Yep," answered Bernadette, "and this is my cousin Vin, came all the way down from Illinois."

"Vin? Millie's Vin?" He opened the screen door and we all entered.

"Yessir," I said while thinking of how strongly Boyd reminded me of killers in horror films I watch on TV while my parents were asleep.

"Well, I'll be. Last time I saw you you was still in your mama's belly." I know what he meant, but that sentence left me with disturbing mental image.

"Boyd, can we see the body you have downstairs?" Bernadette inquired.

"Sure, y'all come on in!"

We are led though Boyd's old house down a path of rickety stairs to a basement possibly usable in slasher films.

Boyd walked to the middle of the room to pull the chain that turned on the room's single yellowed light bulb, and I gagged a little in my mouth when I saw the place. There was the usual basement stuff, boxes and old bicycles and an old phonograph, and then there were…other things. There was a cache of shotguns and ammo in one corner, and some of those guns looked older than Boyd. There were mounted animals and trophy deer heads. One wall was full of shelves of different sizes, all filled jars containing things I don't want to think about. (Though in retrospect, that one pickled pig fetus was kind of neat looking.)

Against the wall closest to the door sat an ancient freezer. Its outer casing was a yellowish brown, its original color lost. Boyd led us over to it, and pulled out a set of keys out of his pocket and began examining them, one by one. When he found the right key, he unlocked the padlock on the freezer, and opened it. Boyd stepped aside to give us three a better view of the contents.

Well, it was exactly what I was told, but I still wasn't expecting it. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see. Maybe a skeleton, a fakey looking one you buy from a costume shop or Wal-Mart at Halloween. Maybe something like those mummies they used to make in the Andes that you see on covers of National Geographic. But the body I saw in that freezer looked fresh, like he had died only that morning or hours before. Or minutes before.

The body was that a tall man. He lay in the freezer facing us with his keens folded just enough so that he fit inside. Lining the freezer was an ancient cloth tarp underneath was…something – because his back was propped up so it seemed like he was reclining. He was incredibly pale. Visible wisps of cold air danced around him as the sudden movement of the opened lid brought an influx of air. He was wearing a blue suit that hadn't faded or frayed in the years; I couldn't see his shoes. I looked at his face. It was a long face. Maybe he was handsome in life, but here he just looked strangely serene. I wondered what I would have thought had I known him when he was alive. The man though looked like he was sleeping, and I felt the sudden need to be quiet so I wouldn't accidentally wake him. Then I realized that was stupid.

"How'd he die?" I asked, curiosity overtaking fear.

"Now that thare's a story," chucked Boyd. He turned to face us.

"You never told it to me," said Bernadette.

"Didn't I?"

"Nope. Can you tell it now?"

"Sure can."

"Well, back when I was a boy, one day everyone in town got sick. Now near everyone. Even your grandpa and granny will remember being sick. Near everyone in the town was sick, except me and pa. Pa made a lot of money that summer, working for all the people too sick to. Then sudden-like, a man went missing. Then a girl 'bout my age. Just vanished from their homes.

"Well, then this here English feller came 'round and started asking 'bout the disappearing people, and took a look at the sick people and he said it looked like they was being poisoned. He had an eerie feelin' 'bout it. He was staying with us, and so it was me and Pa who helped him as he went searching 'round the county. Odd sort of feller, he was. Nice man, nothing but nice, but he was an odd sorta feller. Well Pa drove him down to the swamp, and I came along. Well, we went searching in the swamp an' I was the first to see it. It was like a dragon, like one of 'em Chinese dragons, with blue scales. That English feller, he said it was a monster, I don't know from where, but he said it was making all the folk sick and while everyone was too tired it would grab people out of their homes and eat 'em."

He smiled at that point, and I became a new kind of afraid. He continued.

"We drove back to the house and using parts from trucks he made this weapon he said could kill it, no use in trying to get others to help, they wouldn't believe it anyway. We didn't realize is that that waterbeast followed us back to the house and was crawlin' up on us while he was working on the machine. It attacked him as he finished it, then tried to grab me away. The English feller fired the gun on it. It sorta swerved away and the English feller ran forward to grab me away from it as it tumbled about dyin'. It scratched him on his arm, had some sorta poison in its claws. It died just after, Pa took its body and used to display it around town till it got too decayed to show and he just threw it in the back, not even the scales left now.

"The English feller, he didn't die straight away, took him a few minutes. He weren't too sound at the end, kept talking about freezing. Finally he just closed his eyes and stopped breathing. We wasn't too sure what he was talking about at first, but then we remembered that when we was bragging about our new freezer, he talked to us about some people who froze their bodies 'stead of being buried. We figured it was what he wanted. Pa thought it was only right thing to do, since he saved the town and all, and died savin' me. We took the new electric ice box to the cellar and put him in. And here he is, same as he was fifty years ago.

"He never did tells us his name, never could contact his family. Pa and me just kept him down here, and when Pa died I stayed. 'Course, aint the same freezer. Every twenty years or so I go down to town and buy me a new one and put him in it so it don't break and he thaws."

I just stared at him, that man in the freezer. I could see a tear in his sleeve, like Boyd said, but I couldn't see any wound. I don't suppose I would have wanted to.

Boyd turned to us. "So, y'all want some sweet tea?"

When we left the house a few minutes later. Boyd was standing on the porch waving goodbye to us. I waved back, but I didn't say anything. Todd, Bernadette and I biked back to town, back to granny's porch and we all sat on the swing chair.

"Well, what you think?" Bernadette asked.

I turned to her. I thought of that creepy basement, of all the dead stuffed animals on the walls and floors. I thought of the jars pickling items meant to be rotting in the earth. I thought of that uncle- that relation of mine straight out of a movie. I thought of that man in the blue suit saving the town from a tall tale. I thought of that locked freezer and how cold it would be inside.

Bernadette was looking at me with those gentle eyes.

"Cool," I said.

Because Bernadette was looking at me.