Slaughter House on HWY 122. Chapter One

The window was covered with a thin layer of red silt from the drive in, but I could still make out the sign across the top of the building. Although years of heavy snowfall and harsh weather had turned it into a dismal outline I could still read it. KING PLANT SAUSAGE AND MEAT.

             It was hard to believe it was all mine. It gave me such mixed feelings. As a true animal lover it was hard to picture all the lives lost here, but it was all I had left of a family that I had known so little about.

            The slaughterhouse had belonged to my dad’s grandparents, people I never met and never heard stories about. It was strange how secretive my dad had always been about his life. The only thing he ever told me was, his dad and grandparents had to leave in a real hurry. Leave in a real hurry from where, I always asked. But he walked away every time with out so much as a word parting his lips.

            Sitting there in my truck on the very land they had owned made me wonder if it was this place they left in a hurry. It did have a feel to it that made the hairs on my neck rise. Maybe something strange or weird happened here, or maybe it was just me and my wild imagination talking again.  I was after all somewhat of conspirator, always pretending to be the best mystery writer Wisconsin had breed. But, this time it was more than just my vast imagination, it was also the words my father had told me.

            This place was haunting. Deserted for years and left to rot into the land, it seemed to have such life to it, as if there were people still occupying the grounds. I was happy I had my dog Sam with me (even though he was less than a furious lab) other wise I might chicken out and turn around and head for the highway without ever looking back.

            But, I figured I had drove five hours to see the place, I best get out and see what I all had here. I grabbed the cold handle of my truck and popped open the door. Before I even had a chance to get one leg out of the cab, Sam leaped over me and onto the tall grass that engulfed my vehicle.

            “Stick close boy,” I hollered as I got myself out of the truck. Sam listened well, but not great. I did see his ears perk up as I called him, but he ran off just the same. No, matter I thought, nowhere to run too but the woods around here.

            The land I had inherited was right on the edge of Michigan, about as far north as one could get without actually being a Yupper. It was in Saxon, right off Hwy 122 and surrounded with the thick north woods that wolfs and bears used as their home.

            Although a lot of the woods had been clear-cut to make room for the slaughterhouse, a large line of old pines still framed in the buildings. Probably the original trees I thought. I could tell where the new saplings had formed from the old ones dropping their seeds. A small fresh batch covered the base of the entire line. No doubt the babies of the originals.

            Although spooky the place was beautiful, hard to imagine why it had been abandoned. I learned that from my dad the day he passed. Weakened by cancer from years of smoking my dad died last month at the tender age of fifty-nine. (Hence the reason I now owned the land.)

            The day the good lord took him he held my hand and told me his family had to leave there home and in a hurry. He said no one had had ever gone back and the place was left to the land, abandoned like some sort of ghost town. I pressed him for more, knowing it was my last chance to learn any shred about my family. My mother, who I never met, died in car accident when I was only three and I have no brothers and sisters, so this was it, my last opportunity to know why he never spoke of his families past.

            I felt him tighten his grip to the point that made my hand feel like it was loosing blood, then with eyes that held a dark secret he gazed at me, like a man I did not know.

I remember feeling like I was in the wrong room at the hospital, this could not be my father, not with eyes like that, it was like being in the presence of a stranger.

            But, it was no stranger; it was just a man on his deathbed holding onto a secret that he had held onto for his entire life. Now, moments away from death, the fear of what he had been hiding was boiling over, and he felt the urge to clear his conscious            “Jennifer, stay away from the past, it has badness all around it, promise me you’ll listen and never go there, promise me Jennifer.”

Those were the last words my dad ever spoke to me, he died that day and was buried the following.