Planters Moon
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I should have thought about it. Crops that grow above ground and lie upon it, like watermelons or pumpkins grow best if you plant on a planter’s moon - on the waxing moon, the night before the full moon. Above ground they grow. I should never have buried Lionel Palin on that night.

It was just that I needed to dispose of the body, and there was light enough to dig, but not enough light to be seen digging. I found a place where the moonlight cut through and the ground was open, but there was no path or trail. The night was so still you could hear a beetle in the leaf litter.

The soil was soft and rich. The kind soil that makes dry seeds come alive, but I was not thinking of it that way. I wanted it to be soft enough to dig deep, so that the earth would swallow up the proof of my crime. Only then could I be free of the awful thing that I had done.

Lionel Palin was my partner in our business. We sold and serviced farm machinery. I had been making and repairing things made of steel since I was a boy, and I had a small shop of a sort, at my father’s farm. But Lionel had money and a head for business, and he was setting up in town with or without me. He just said that he needed somebody who knew the equipment better than he did.

I may work with my hands, but that does not make me stupid. I know the power of money. He could find another like me, but I proposed a merger, or that is what I called it. He agreed, so long as the money was his loan to the business, and his to manage. It seemed fair. He looked after sales and I dealt with installation, operating instructions, serving and repairs. It worked well, right up until the invention.

The soil around our parts was good but the flats near the river were stony. I had modified a few seed drills to improve planting, and over time I had decided to build a new machine from scratch, in my spare time. Lionel Palin decided that my “planter” might be something that could be commercially developed, and before I knew it, he had shipped off my prototype and 5 copies of it had appeared in the sales room less than a year later.

“Don’t worry, I have sorted out the patent,” he said. He had indeed – it was in his name.

I consider myself to be a hard worker and a logical person – a self-taught engineer. Engineers solve problems, rather than complain about them. Solutions never come from impulse, but from measured thought. So, my reaction was not of my nature. I prefer to think of it as an explosion in my brain, like one of those burst blood vessels that can kill a fit man stone dead. It can happen to anybody, and something like that happened to me. Lionel Palin lay in front of me, stone dead.

Here was a new problem, and I needed to put aside all feelings of remorse or guilt and deal with what I had. I needed to dispose of the body first, then explain his absence.

“Yes, these are the new seed drills that Lionel has had built by one of our key suppliers,” I explained to all who came by. “Lionel has become totally absorbed by these new machines and is out of town building a network to supply these all over the country, where agriculture has a need of them.”

It was a good story. People knew Lionel Palin was a man who would follow money, and leave others behind. I was just one of those others. He would be doing well, and I had to look after sales as well, and do my best with the paperwork.

But my peace did not last very long.

“I am sorry to disturb you this late at night,” said Sheriff McHale. “But I found this young lady hanging around your workplace.”

He stepped back and there she was, standing on my porch. She was wearing a silver-grey dress that looked like what a woman might wear to a ball or some east coast soiree. Her hair was a bright red, partly pinned up and partly loose down her back with strands across her shoulder. Her face was pale and beautiful, almost other-worldly, as they say. It was a blank expression – one of puzzlement. It was hard to see the color of her eyes in that light – pale green - but they looked somehow familiar.

The sheriff must have seen me buckle at the knees because he reached a handout to steady me. But the door jamb was there and just as well, because the woman I was looking at had the face of Lionel Palin.

It was a woman’s face to be sure, and a pretty one, so not like Lionel in that way. But it was him alright. Him risen from the dead in the form of a woman. I felt as if my heart had stopped and that I could not breathe. The sheriff was watching me. I needed to speak.

“I am sorry, I don’t react well to being raised at this hour, Sheriff.” It was the best I could do. I was staring at her, and she was now looking back at me, or was it right through me?

“It looks like you might know her,” the Sheriff said.

“Actually, I think that I do, Sheriff,” I said. “I think that she might be Lionel Palin’s niece.” “I can see the family likeness,” the Sheriff said. He could see it too! He turned to her - “Are you related to Mr. Palin? We haven’t seen him in quite a while, have we?” The second question was posed to me, and for a moment it seemed like an accusation. But it wasn’t. At least there was the comfort in knowing that Sheriff McHale was as dumb as a board.

She just looked at him blankly, then at me in much the same way.

“Why don’t you leave her with me for a bit,” I suggested. “As I mentioned to you the other day, Lionel is away for an extended period…”. I had not mentioned it to the Sheriff, but I had to almost everybody from the time his blood was spilled all over me. His disappearance needed to be explained. Even now all the washing of my hands and body seemed unable to shift the stain or the smell of blood.

“Why don’t you step inside my Dear,” I said to her. She did just that, without any reluctance.

“I will bid you goodnight, then,” said Sheriff McHale, raising his hat to me and my guest, and stepping off into the darkness. He was small town law enforcement and keen to resolve one mater and move on.

As I closed the door, I suddenly remembered that it was all soul’s eve that very night. It is said by some that dead souls come to life on that night. But I looked at this woman casually examining items on my mantlepiece, and she was not dead. She had not dug herself out of the ground – her dress was clean and pale, the color of … I realized that it was the color of a French pumpkin. And her hair was the color of the flesh of the same pumpkin – a fiery orange.

This is something that grows above the ground and lays upon it and is best planted on the night of a planter’s moon. The pumpkin. The magical pumpkin, from which the mysterious princess alights to steal hearts … or perhaps haunt the wicked.

“Who are you?” I said to her, in the hope that she might give me a reply that would settle the feelings of dread within me.

A rational person, such as I thought myself to be, would perhaps think that this was the sister of Lionel Palin come looking for him, and having lost her way, sought out his partner in business. But the dress? And the hair? And those eyes that were his – like the ones that stared dead into space as he lay dead in front of me, but now alive in this pretty feminine face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I woke up in the woods, but I seemed to know the path to where I was found.”

“Do you know who I am?” I asked. If I was right and his was a creature of vengeance, she would name me and point an accusing finger.

“No,” she said. “But you strike me as a good man. A kind and simple man. I think that I have no reason to fear you – am I right?”

His dead eyes seemed to have asked me that same question – the night he died. ‘You are a decent person. You may be angry because you don’t understand why I did what I did, but you will not kill me.” He never said those words. He had no time. His dead eyes carried that message. But he was wrong about those last words – I did kill him.

“But you must be related to Lionel Palin? Do you know that name?” I asked.

Her eyes were staring at me blankly. There she stood, in that silver grey dress, that orange hair tumbling down, with makeup around her eyes, as if she had just stepped off the dance floor. She was a woman, and a very attractive one.

“Never mind,” I said. “Would you like something to eat? I have a spare room, if it is needed. Clearly you have suffered some trauma and have a momentary lapse of memory. I am sure that it will return by the morning.”

But what memory? I realized that it was in my interests that she remain under my roof. The circumstances of her arrival that night was a mystery and perhaps even supernatural, but she had sparked in me the guilt that I thought I had buried, along with Lionel Palin.

I have pondered since that even if this was the soul of my victim returned to haunt me, who would believe her? Did I have any reason to fear her words? If I did, then perhaps I could kill again? Was it really as easy as it had seemed at the time? The fact was that it was a fit of rage – done without thought, I would like to say. Rather, it was not plotted, but everything I did since, had been.

But the thought of killing her did not enter my head that night. I suppose that it was fascination at first, perhaps tinged with fear – the fear of ghosts or the undead. And then there is the fact that she was beautiful, and I was a man who admired beautiful women, even from afar.

She had stepped into my home as few women had, and even then, she seemed ready to make it her home. It made no sense to me then, but perhaps now I understand.

I had a period of peace straight after the death of Lionel Palin. Once he was buried and I had washed the soil from my hands and my shoes, he was gone and so was his memory. I simply spoke of his disappearance with townsfolk as if sharing the mystery of it, with some quiet satisfaction.

But then she arrived, and she has not left since. Ever since my peace has ended. Every morning, I look across the breakfast table and I see her smiling face and I return the smile, but then I see her eyes and think of what I have done.

The worst part of it is that I adore her. With her in my house I have seen more of her body than perhaps I should, and even the thought of that arouses me regularly. But se is bright and sunny and would be a pleasure to have around but for the fact that her purpose must be to haunt me.

Because she is that, I can never give physical force to my desires. Instead, she must seek the attention of men elsewhere to my eternal frustration. I have become a father figure – the man who has taken in a cared for a young woman who has lost her memory. But it seems that none of her sexual partners are to become permanent and take her away from me. How could they? Her purpose is to stay with me and torment me for the wrong that I have done.

What better form could the instrument of the vengeance of the dead take? Here is a woman who is the stuff of dreams, but with those pale green eyes to remind me that she is my nightmare.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2024
2160

Author’s Note: Erin gave me that seed for this story and the name, some time back – “Planter's Moon is about a guy burying a body, but the dead man comes back years later as a woman and has her vengeance.” I returned to the idea for the Halloween contest