The Brass Basket

The first thing I remember about my great-uncle Elias is the smell of his workshop—sawdust and tung oil—and the way he’d lift me onto his workbench to watch him carve wooden animals. I don’t recall his face, just his large, calloused hands and the rhythmic scrape of his knife. He lived alone in a crumbling farmhouse on the edge of a pine forest, where the wind never stopped moaning through the gaps in the clapboard. My family visited every other Sunday, and I’d spend hours in the dusty yard, kicking a worn red rubber ball against the side of the barn while the adults drank bitter coffee inside.

My great-uncle died in late autumn, when the firs had turned heavy with frost. I was six, and I didn’t understand why everyone wore black or why my mother kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. What I did understand was that we drove to his house the day after he died, and I was told to stay in the parlor with my cousins, who were older and ignored me. The house smelled of mothballs and burnt toast. I wandered away, looking for the red ball I’d left under the porch swing the last time we visited. It wasn’t there, so I checked the kitchen drawer where Elias kept loose nails and a brass hand bell. The drawer held only a spool of twine and a rusted key.

I remember feeling a draft from the hallway, even though all the windows were sealed. The draft carried a faint odor of sawdust, and beneath that, something sweet, like rotting fruit. I followed the draft to the pantry, where the door stood ajar. Inside, the shelves were empty except for a single brass basket, the kind used for holding kindling, but it was filled with small, white objects—shapes I didn’t recognize. I reached in and touched one. It was smooth and cool, like polished bone. When I pulled my hand back, the object came with it. It was a tooth—a front tooth, with a tiny root. I dropped it, and the basket clattered to the floor, scattering teeth across the linoleum.

I heard footsteps behind me. My great-uncle stood there, but not as I’d seen him last—alive and smiling with his missing front tooth (he’d lost it to a stubborn knot of wood). Now, his mouth was full of teeth, too many to fit, and they jutted at odd angles. His skin was gray, like ash, and his eyes were the color of the pine needles outside. He didn’t speak. He just pointed to the basket. I screamed, and when my mother found me, I was curled in the corner, sobbing about the teeth and the man. She said I’d imagined it. She said the pantry was empty. When I looked again, the basket was gone, but on the floor lay one tooth—the one I’d picked up. My mother swept it into the trash without a word.

We never returned to that house. It was sold, and I grew up, but the tooth stayed in my mind. Years later, when I inherited a small box of Elias’s belongings from my father, I found the brass basket wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a note, written in shaky pencil: ‘For the boy who took my tooth. Return it, or I’ll take one of his.’ I haven’t slept well since. Last week, I felt a loose tooth on my own tongue, though my dentist says I have perfect teeth. And last night, I saw a figure at the foot of my bed—gray, with too many teeth, pointing at a drawer where I’d kept the basket. I threw it away the next morning, but when I opened the drawer again, it was back, filled with teeth, and one of them was gold—the same as my great-uncle’s crown, which he’d gotten after the accident. He always said that crown was the last thing he’d ever part with. Now I know he meant it literally.