Requiem [COMPLETED]

Snooping is Not Nearly as Satisfying as One might Think

Why didn't I bring gloves? I thought, prying off the lid and getting my hands more covered in the I-don't-want-to-know substance. Inside was clean and fairly dry. And there lay the journals I had once seen and paged through briefly, before they disappeared. Sven had packed mothballs around them and the odor was off putting. I went outside and scrubbed my hands in a dirty puddle and wiped them on my jeans before handling the journals. The top one turned out to be the earliest; it had a note from Sven on the inside cover:

If you find this, don't believe anything bad of me. I saw you had found them. I didn't want you to know back then. You can be mad all you want at me. You were happy not knowing anything and you were safer. But if I'm not around anymore, it's better for you to know the truth. This is only part of it—or have you already pieced more of the story together and I just never saw? Either way, just keep this to yourself. If it's hard to believe, just remember: you know me. You can trust that I wouldn't lie to you.

Do I really know you? Why the secretiveness and the elusive noncommittal comments that imply but don't state anything? I felt like I was being watched, like something lurked invisible. I got up and checked that no one was in the clearing or around the house; no pickup at the farm or anywhere to be seen on the road. I checked the watch in my pocket (grandpa's extra one) and saw it had only been about an hour. No reason to rush. My heart kept thumping erratically as I went back inside and carefully sat down. My first impulse was to bring them back to the farmhouse, but Sven had them out here for a reason, I told myself. Keep it to yourself, he'd said.

I breathed slowly, in, out. I have plenty of time. I can come back out here as much as I want; I can come read as much as I need to. I don't have to rush. Yet I found myself skimming through, devouring as much as possible. They weren't Sven's journals, any of them. I didn't want to call them worrying, so I told myself they were just interesting. Curious.

The diaries began with an unusually long entry:

November 14th Severn miscalculated the price of sugar at the elevator. Saved up enough to buy the smallest pocket-journal—it fits into the pocket I've made on the inside of my dress. I can't afford to keep paying the mortgage on my parents' farm, and can't possibly work all the fields alone, so I have taken to work for Severn Trosvig, who is getting too arthritic to do much other than complain. I wish I didn't have to, but it is what it is. Her son is nicer, but he unnerves me sometimes. Per stares so; but, I know he's had a hard life and just hasn't been brought up in society. His brothers are awful to him; I remember they used to beat him, for what reason I couldn't imagine. He says things to his mother that I never should have, but he is always pleasant to me. It disturbs me though; they both have something in their eyes at times that gives me a chill.

I've never had a journal before, but now that I feel so cut off from my friends in town I need someone to tell things to. Since pa got killed everything fell apart. Mother wouldn't or couldn't figure out how to go on without him. I can still remember her eyes when she told me "I have seen enough death. Without him there is only more." I cried and cried, but she wouldn't take it back. I still don't know how she did it-- she ate and slept as far as I could see, but she seemed to will herself to death, and it made me more depressed than anything in my whole life. And everybody stood by—but then why would most of those people help when they're the reason...I shouldn't say such things.

Then I was alone on the farm, and how lonely it was, even with my girlfriends visiting on a Sunday. And then the man came out from the bank, and I gave him money. And then another man came out from the bank, and I said "I already gave you the money for the mortgage this year," and he said that no man had been sent, that he was the only man the bank ever set out. So who knows where the money went.