Friday April 12, 1935
Wesley Sanders edged the drink onto the table.
“There ya’rl, Miss Nightingale. Iced lemonade, or as Momma’s prone to call it, sunlight in a glass.”
The eight year old grinned. His teeth were large and very white, as if slicked with whitewash like the exterior of the Grace Presbyterian Church. His cheeks were nut-brown apples.
Carrie-Anne leant forward in her rocker and put her toes to the floor. She smiled back. “Thank you, Wesley. Tell your momma, she sure does know how to soothe the spirit.”
Wesley bobbed his cap. He waltzed off down the porch, humming one of those slow sad negro church songs he was prone to. Even after he’d swung through the inner gauze and disappeared inside the house, Carrie-Anne could hear the tune. It seemed to nestle down inside the dry Oklahoma heat and stay there, whispering at her.
She picked up the lemonade, rested the sole of a bare foot against the table and rocked. Julie Sander’s eldest, Abraham, had painted the porch a light grey colour before he’d abandoned Bromide for Oklahoma City last fall. That afternoon, the paint shade complimented the troubled sky where blue and lavender clouds roiled.
A storm was coming. What kind, Carrie-Anne wasn’t sure. This time of year, it could be hail, could be lightning, could be a twister. But she welcomed it. The weather was unseasonably close. It licked at the nape of her neck where her shoulder-length hair clung, and at each underarm, leaving sweat stains on her new cotton dress. Everything induced slumber. Except the cold lemonade.
Carrie-Anne put the glass to her lips and sipped. She wanted to stay mindful. The back gate needed fixing; she’d set the new yardman on it with instructions to go about replacing the struts. One of her stockings had a run that wouldn’t darn itself. Plus the whole house needed airing.
She’d noticed as much that morning. Rising from her blankets at the tail end of night, she’d descended the stairs and glimpsed the place as with an outsider’s eye. Everything was layered with dust. She’d got a rag to it. But as she beat the motes, she’d felt a familiar, inexplicable crackling along her bare arms. Lips parted, she’d held up a hand to the window. In the first rays of dawn, the dust had appeared to dance near but never touch her skin, as if magnetically repelled...Seconds later, she’d heard footsteps on the stairs and Julie Sanders saying in her quiet way, “Sure is dusty, Miss Nightingale. I’ll light a flame under the coffee pot then get to helping ya.”
Carrie-Anne braced her foot against the table and stayed tipped back on the rockers. Having filled the role of nursery nurse ever since Carrie-Anne first arrived at Boar House, aged eight and orphaned, Julie was like family, as were her boys. Which was how the woman knew to fill the house with the clarifying aroma of coffee and just join in shaking out the dust that morning. Also how she knew to dispatch Wesley with cool lemonade when the gate was still broken, the stocking still torn, the house still dust-riddled.
All the same, Julie’s best efforts had failed. With the heat cooking in around her, Carrie-Anne found it impossible to rouse herself to any thought but one.
Where the hell were they?
Even wearing ear mufflers, he couldn’t escape the terrible clanking as fragments of rock in the sand ricocheted off the drill. The cockpit shuddered with each impact. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth to stop them jarring. The four-point Sutton harness rubbed the same sore spots it did every run; Virgil imagined Carrie-Anne slavering the blisters with peppered grease. Lust alleviated his discomfort. The excavations were pivotal to his work, but, Christ, he missed that gal. Her baby scent when she soaped the sweat offa her. Those frank blue eyes and wide mouth. He liked her off-beat beauty.
“Stop tugging your little john back there, Virgil, and crank the boiler. That last sheet of bedrock took the best of old Bessie’s heat.” Straining at the front harness, Josephine Splitz attempted to glare back over her shoulder.
Virgil knew he’d just be a blur at her peripheral vision. He crossed his arms over his crotch all the same.
“Sorry, Jos. Its hot’s all. Got me sweating like a hog ripe for slaughter.”
Grabbing a battered iron scoop off a hook overhead, he drove it through the coke trough that ran alongside his chair and used the other hand to open the iron flap in the Burrower’s wall. A tremendous gush of heat spilt into the cabin. He shook the coke down the shoot and shut the hatch.
“Another couple.”
If the old coot’d had eyes in the back of her head, Virgil guessed they’d have been lit up and smiling. Twice more he drove the scoop into the coke and threw the fodder down the boiler’s throat.
Reaching overhead, he took hold of a leather loop and tugged several times, feeling the papery air off the bellows feed the cabin and boiler simultaneously. Glancing past Josephine’s shoulder, Virgil saw the needles creep up in the rack of brass and glass gauges. The steering wheel juddered under the old girl’s hands, and he thought he heard her wince despite the wads of muslin she’d taped around the triangulated steel bar. Any other octogenarian shoehorned into the cramped quarters of the Burrower would’ve screamed for death’s release long ago. But Josephine was a wizen fruit, long past the point of any residual softness. She reminded Virgil of a small hunched Asian man in her navy-blue mandarin jacket, loose pants and soft cloth hat, except her fierce single-mindedness was peculiar to the matriarch.
“Got your mind up top too soon, Virgil Roberts. Long as we’re still beneath, we’re just one mistake away from being buried alive.” Jos’s voice got that molasses quality it always did when she wanted to aggravate him for kicks. “Nothing certain in love or geological exploration, I promise you. By the time we break surface, chances are Carrie-Anne will’ve hooked up with Preacher Richards’ son. Great strapping lad, all thighs and neck and buttocks like quartz boulders. Or Jeffrey’s boy. Part store keeper, part donkey.”
“In place of a lab rat that spends his time parked behind the arse of some old dame,” Virgil shot back. His mouth twisted. Jos sure liked to tease, but part of him guessed she might be right. Why was Carrie-Anne laying down with a freak like him? He’d spent so much time underground this past year. His eyes had a skim on them like spoilt milk. Likewise, his skin was colourless through lack of sunlight. Danger was, sooner or later, he’d fade right out.
Even without seeing his face, Jos was astute enough to know what he was thinking. “You’re okay, Virgil Roberts. Wouldn’t choose you for my bedfellow but Carrie-Anne’s got the right to.”
“It bother you if I said I wouldn’t choose you for a bedfellow either?”
The old gal snorted. Any retort was cut short by a tremendous scraping noise. The steel undercarriage bucked beneath their feet, the motion immediately offset by the concertinaing of the Burrower’s riveted steel roof plates. It was a filthy, stinking, terrifying ride, thought Virgil, but Jos’s design was immaculate. The torpedo-shaped main carriage had a dual layer of modular pneumatic tiles, or ‘scutes’ as Jos called them in homage to her greatest muse as a bioengineer, the horn-coated dermal bones of the Armadillo. As a geo-engineer, she’d applied similar tessellation logic to the rotating bit of the twelve foot Tungsten Carbide plated nose cone, likewise the corrugated neck frill that funnelled the spoil out behind as they pressed forward on sharpened steel tracks. The unstable nature of the terrace deposits was counteracted by gills in the outer walls that released a fine mist to solidify the sand. Hot, thin, rust-scented air was siphoned into the cabin from the tunnels. Water bladders were grouped at the backend of the machine like egg sacks.
The turbulence abated.
“Five minutes more. Just time enough to make yourself look pretty for my niece.” Jos adjusted in her seat. She handed a metal pot over her shoulder. “And to empty the piss pan.”
Carrie-Anne plunged forward in the rocking chair and stood up. She rested her hands against the corner strut of the porch then leant her whole body into it to better feel the vibrations. The keen of ruptured earth was just audible. Dust misted the field beyond the garden.
“Wesley!”
The boy was already at the swing door.
“Momma knows, Miss Valentine. Says she’s drawing Miss Splitz’s bath and fixing Mister Robert’s Gin Sour.”
“Good.” Carrie-Anne stared at the dry field, littered with entrance and exit wounds inflicted by the Burrower. “That’s good,” she repeated softly.
The ground shook. There came a sudden explosion of brilliance in the centre of the field as sunlight touched the tip of the emerging nose cone. A geyser of dark sand erupted. The cacophonic whirring of the engine ripped through the air. The Burrower wormed up from below like a giant silver maggot castor.
I shall not run to his side, not this time, thought Carrie-Anne. I will be the lady of the house, patiently waiting on the porch, lemonade glass in hand.
Though it was hard to stand still as the terrific machine sledged up into the air, slammed back down and coasted forward, its twin steel tracks sending up two great tides of dust. The engine sound changed to a discordant chug. Steam spurted from the side valves.
“Want me to run down to them, Miss Valentine?” Wesley stared up at her in round-eyed innocence.
“No, Wesley.” She stuck out a hand as though to brace his chest. “You know better than to get near Miss Splitz’s excavating machine so soon after surfacing. It’s a big old unpredictable cottonmouth ‘til it cools some. Look!” She felt a rush of longing as jets of steam escaped the rivets of the roof hatch. “Even those inside take their time when exiting,” she murmured.
The roof hatch cranked up. Aunt Josephine was first to emerge, un-crumpling herself as she went with all the decorum of a farm hand. She dropped heavily onto the ground, agitating the dust. For a brief moment, she applied her thumbs to her spine and arched backwards. Then she made for the front of the vehicle, kicking out stiff legs as she walked.
Carrie-Anne’s gaze returned to the roof hatch. He was visible now as a coil of flesh that stretched out to become a tall, thin figure. Her heart got hot at the sight of him. He raised a hand to wave.
There wasn’t chance to respond. Her aunt was shouting and gesticulating towards the huge steaming drill. Virgil answered her and threw an arm towards the house.
He’s waving her away, thought Carrie-Anne admiringly.
Sure enough, the old maid turned heel and began to stomp towards the house.
Carrie-Anne watched Virgil slide down off the Burrower’s roof. With his shirt sleeves rolled and one suspender dangling loose from his waist, he strode up to the drill and dipped under it, one arm raised as a shield against the heat. Virgil’s in-depth mechanical knowledge made Carrie-Anne aware of her own internal workings; he seemed to grasp them too. And while she wanted to keep her eyes on him, her aunt was already at the garden gate.
“...peach of a ride ‘til we hit that friggin’ boulder. Now the damn drill’s breached. Virgil best check the depth of those gorges good and proper else I’ll be roastin’ his sweet cherry ass on old Bessie.” Aunt Josephine plonked down on the porch steps, untied her boots and kicked them off. She didn’t falter in her monologue. “...not like we weren’t prepared. Hit wet sand and Virgil was gonna switch from steam to soot mix, gloop the walls to stop them caving in. But we didn’t find one patch of moisture. ‘Course it’s bone dry up here on the surface. Just the same, no water bodies, not even fifty foot below? It’s strange. Not strange, it’s unnatural.”
The old woman stopped prattling suddenly. Her hooded gaze fell on Wesley.
“Help your momma black the stove?”
Wesley sucked his lip and nodded.
“Kept the dirt from growin’ between them fat little toes?”
The kid caught a foot up in a hand and used his fingers to scoop between the toes.
“Am all clean, Miss Splitz.”
The old woman gurned at him and he giggled.
“Here.” She held out a fist.
Wesley dropped his foot. He ran over, offering up cupped hands, and Aunt Josephine opened her fist over them.
“Thank you, Miss Splitz.” The boy eyed his prize then pocketed it.
Carrie-Anne smiled; she knew the ritual. The treasure was a mundane stone recovered from several miles below ground. Wesley would add it to his collection.
Hand on the stair rail, Aunt Josephine levered herself up. Stalking over to the front door, she paused to cut her eye at Carrie-Anne.
“Told lover boy you’d’ve shacked up with a new fella by now.” She slung her gaze over to the field where Virgil had shifted his attention to the cooling engine.
Carrie-Anne felt panic worm between her eyes.
Her aunt must’ve noticed.
“He missed you,” she relented, and shouldered the flyscreen door and disappeared inside. Wesley followed after like a child bound to a witch by invisible silken thread.
Carrie-Anne rested her forehead against the corner strut. Eyelids lulling, she watched the ghost of a man at work out in the field. Minutes passed. He became less and less solid. Late afternoon ebbed and swelled around her. A cicada soloed ahead of the insect symphony at sundown. Through the open bathroom window, she could hear Aunt Josephine’s prattle and the slow pour from a water jug as Julie endeavoured to clean up her mistress. Wood creaked; to Carrie-Anne, it was the sound of the house groaning under the weight of memories impregnating its walls. She listened past the familiar sounds of her environment, out to the dusting plateau of farmland and the drone of nothingness.
Her flesh crackled. Her eyes shot wide.
Virgil stood on the porch a couple of paces away.
Carrie-Anne’s first reaction was indignation at his materialising like that when she expected to watch him approach from the distance of the field, to get used to him closing in. Her anger was blunted by the sight of him, hands and forearms etched in coke dust, shirt savaged at the neck. Lifting her eyes, she saw a death mask of skin so terribly white and dried to the bone. He went against what common decency said a man should look like. Yet his was a salt-preserved masculinity which made her drip away from herself.
Carrie-Anne let go of the strut and wrapped her arms around her waist. Virgil kept on staring. She felt transparent.
“Lose your tongue as well as your mind this trip, Virgil Roberts?”
He smiled and the death aspect was replaced by tangible sensuality. Now she saw a slender man with well-worked shoulders, high cheekbones and generous lips in need of moisture. Only his eyes remained strange with their misted irises and pupils gone over from black to lead grey.
“I was drinking you in, Carrie-Anne Valentine,” he said quietly.
The gauze door yawned on its hinges and Wesley emerged from the house.
“Yu Gin Sour, Mister Roberts.”
The glass was offered up. Virgil gulped from it, his gaze on Carrie-Anne. She felt his stare graze her flesh like a steam burn.
Bromide had been parched for months now, and in spite of its draw as a spa town not fifteen years past when the railroad carved through the district and millionaire, Robert Galbreath, found a hole into which to sink his oil money. Back then the town supported three general stores, two drugstores, a bank, a meat market, two hardware stores, two restaurants, a blacksmith’s and a dry goods. Four grand hotels wined, dined and bed-timed. A public bath house doused and rinsed. Meanwhile, Bromide’s unique geology gave rise to a cotton gin and yard, a rock crusher and quarry, a wagon maker, a sawmill, a gristmill, and even a bottler who shipped out the medicinal waters.
But fame is nothing if not fickle. Come 1930, folk moved further afield. As quickly as it was raised, the town was brought to the ground. The excursion trains were cancelled, the bank closed, the hotels emptied. Five years more and Bromide looked set to simply blow away like a handful of dust.
Knees in the dirt, Reg Wilhoit wondered which piece of his town’s history he worked up beneath his fingernails. Not much left to see of old Bromide now. Just slim pickings like the Baptist Church, a double-doored cattle barn of a place built of the usual dreary stone whose pews were regularly buffed, as if that would be enough to wipe the grime offa the place. There was the shack of the Post Office, which stank of old maid and kerosene given Mrs Johnson’s partiality to warm her knees by a stove. And there were another forty or so dwellings still bothered by human breath. Mostly though, ruins scattered a three mile radius, like markers to a ghost town.
“Ya need a hand there, Mister Wilhoit?”
The old man shone his eyes up. Preacher Richards’ boy blocked out the sun.
Reg could guess how he looked to the kid. Seat of his pants patched. White cotton candy hair around a craggy face. Bent over like that. A marionette cut from its strings.
“Them calipers giving you gyp? Come on.” Ben stuck out a hand the size of a rib steak. “Let’s be havin’ you.”
“I’m fine, I tell ya.”
Reg tossed out a fistful of dirt; luckily for Ben, no wind meant it sifted back down to the ground rather than flick up into his eyes. Not that the kid noticed.
But he wouldn’t, mused Reg. Nice boy like that would’ve been raised with Preacher Richards’ good grace. Yet sometimes manners got in the way. He wished to hell the kid’d kept on walking and not had to go and play Samaritan.
“Move it along, kiddo. Got a cramp in this knee’s all.” Sidewaysing onto his ass, Reg rapped one of the steel side bars of his left leg brace.
The Preacher’s son offered him a big dumb smile. But there was a wary glint to the eye.
“Alright then, Mister Wilhoit. I’ll just be at the store getting’ Momma her sewing notions. Hollerin’ distance if you need me.” Ben pointed to the far end of Main. Reg squinted over at the rubble shack of the General Store, one of a handful of buildings to survive fire or abandonment and keep on serving what was left of the community. Same way it always had.
The old man said nothing, just stayed still as a tombstone, ass in the dirt.
“Alright then,” repeated the lad. He tipped his cap and set off, letting the sunlight back in like a holy blaze.
Reg watched him go. Then he bent forward and dug his fingers into the dry dirt again.
Virgil drove his knife through the pork. Eying the mashed potatoes, gravy, black-eyed peas, and collard greens, he pressed a little of everything onto his fork.
“Fine pork shoulder, Julie,” he announced as the maid re-entered the room carrying a jug of iced water. “You get it from Bobby Buford’s farm?”
Julie flashed her generous smile. “Bobby Buford’s, Mister Roberts. Quality hogs he’s got penned. Decent price he charges too, ‘cept we always exchange goods of course. Mister Bulford, he’s all gone on my cornbread and fresh picked tomatoes. It’s so warm, see. I got to planting unseasonably early.”
“Sure is a helluva dry spell. Not that visitors to Boar House would notice with a garden this lush.” Virgil leant in on his elbows, knife and fork laid over one another like a silver cross. “How’d you do it, Julie? How’d you grow vegetables and herbs like you do when the field opposite is shredding its epidermis quicker than a rattlesnake?”
“’Cause I designed the best irrigation system in the state. And ‘cause Julie gets a big ole milk churn and hauls ass to the well night and day to keep the system’s water butts topped up.” Jos jammed her own elbows onto the table. “Sissy boy like you’d struggle to lift that churn five yards.”
“Better a sissy boy than a bad-tempered gasbag,” shot Virgil from the opposite end of the table.
Jos got a sour twist to her mouth. “Better a bad-tempered gasbag than an incompetent navigator.”
“Oh, come on now!” Virgil was peppered on the inside. His skin got some colour to it. “Much as I’d love to look into a crystal ball and know what’s gonna hit before we get there, you know as well as me we can hit waterlogged sand or a boulder anytime underground. Because of water pockets, we got the soot mix, and as backup, the tar tap. Because of boulders, we got a Tungsten Carbide drill bit.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you need an early night, Jos? All this hard work and staying up late is bound to make an old crone cranky.”
Jos stabbed at her greens. She ladled in a mouthful and chewed it up into one cheek. “It’s your job to survey the route. Establish the orientation of bedding planes and steer us clear of joints in the rock,” she insisted, adding aside, “Julie, you go get your supper now.” Her gaze cut back to Virgil. She swallowed the mouthful. “We hit that last stretch of gravel hard and we hit it clumsy. Now we gotta pray there ain’t a hairline fracture in the bit.”
Virgil dug in fingers at his hairline. “And if there is, it’ll blow itself and us to kingdom come.” He dragged his hands back over his scalp. “I got my nose into every inch of the Burrower this afternoon. Like the one who built her, she’s a tough old bird.”
He allowed himself a smile. Sure, he was smarting that Jos felt the need to pin the blame on him – and maybe if he’d surveyed the field’s surface for the thousandth time, he’d have guessed at that curl of gravel a few hundred yards below. But, no... Virgil kept his smile in place. Deep down, he knew there was no magic way to see exactly what lay in the Burrower’s path, only estimations based on months’ worth of surveys of the rock formations up top. He also knew that while Jos’d take a bullet before she’d admit it, they were both dog tired – which was why their usual banter had a caustic edge.
Luckily, there was Carrie-Anne to agitate the atmosphere.
“You know, Aunt Josephine, there hasn’t been a scrap of wind these past four days you and Virgil have been down under. Not a scrap. Still the dust creeps in under the doors and windows. I was up before cockcrow this morning. When I saw a fresh layer over this place, my first thought was how come there’s any ground left for the Burrower to dig through?” Carrie-Anne threw out her hands to indicate the panelled dining room, and, presumably, the whole house. “Julie and I spend our days sweeping it up.”
Glancing at Virgil, she rubbed one side of her nose with her knuckles as if to rub away a soot smear. He recognised the gesture as slight embarrassment and he understood. Carrie-Anne wasn’t really one for words. Not that she couldn’t hold a conversation if she wanted. Just she was a girl who spoke with her eyes, or a wisp of laughter, or the sorcery of her tongue at his navel.
Jos was talking now. Thanks to Carrie-Anne, the old gal had been lulled into a softer frame of mind. Conducting a symphony of science with her cutlery, she appeared intent on using her niece as a sounding board for the plethora of geological theories Virgil had helped her construct.
“...over-intensive arable farming methods. I told Bobby Buford so two years ago when he still had land worth ploughing and hadn’t pigs shitting over every inch of it. Drain the land of mineral, strip it of ground cover, and you’re gonna get a wind tunnel. All’s needed was a turn up in temperature and lack of rain, and, hell, I told them!” Jos screwed up her face, itself parched of moisture.
“But as I said, Aunt Josephine, there’s been no wind. Just this thick baking in.”
Carrie-Anne’s gaze shifted towards him as she spoke. Virgil felt the same mix of emotion he’d felt when he’d stood on the porch a couple of hours earlier and soaked her in. Everything had misted into the background except Carrie-Anne. The only thing worth seeing. After so many hours spent in twilight underground, he’d fed on the colours offa her. Then Wesley had stepped out onto the porch, and the mist and colours evaporated like a broken spell. Only Carrie-Anne’s tangibility had remained. He’d longed to mould her with his hands like wet sand.
“The wind will come,” he said softly. He carved at the lump of roast pig on his plate again.
“And when it does, we’ll all be blown away like stupid shitting pigs in straw houses,” cut in Jos. She scraped back her chair. “Now I’ve a mind to get Julie to cut me a slice of that pie I smelt baking earlier.”
Passing Virgil, she put a hand to his shoulder. “You want?”
It was as close to an apology as he’d get from Josephine Splitz.
Virgil glanced sideways, his mouth softened. “No. No thank you, Jos.”
He dared believe she might disappear into the kitchen and stay there, stuffing her face with pie, while he and Carrie-Anne got to sit together and talk some. But then Jos paused in the doorway.
“Go to the workshop and get all maps sketched in the last two months, Virgil. We musta missed that seam of gravel somewhere. And no...” She raised a hand to block his objection. “Tomorrow won’t do. We ain’t seeing the warmth of our beds ‘til I’m satisfied we’re not gonna drill a goddamn minefield in two days time.”
“Two days? But that’s a Sunday?”
Virgil could see Carrie-Anne turning her mind inside out in search of arguments against.
“I promised we’d all be at chapel Palm Sunday. Our attendance – or lack of it – has been noted, and not just by Preacher Richards. Folk talk, Aunt Josephine, and talk leads to trouble.”
“That it does, Carrie-Anne, and it’s gonna lead you into a great deal of it right now if you don’t stop gassing and get yourself to bed.” Jos’s eyes shone out like coal chips.
Virgil watched Carrie-Anne intently. His gal would never show that dry old coot what she felt on the inside. Oh no, she’d keep it stitched into the flesh lining over her heart and ribs.
He, on the other hand, knew no such restraint. But just as he would’ve happily strangled Jos on the spot, the old woman let her shoulders stoop. She looked incredibly tired all of a sudden.
“Please, Carrie-Anne. We’re out to save lives here. And that includes protecting our own.”
Saturday April 13, 1935
Saturday. Town Day. Once upon a time, Main Street would’ve thrummed with the footfall of folk who’d journeyed to Bromide to trade, swap and stockpile. The Ice Man would have busied his pick. The Blacksmith would have chipped at his anvil. The pharmacist would have returned a whisper across the counter and deposited some bottle or canister of powder into a bag which he’d carefully fold over. The girl at the Dry Goods store would have dragged the fabric bundle off the shelf and measured, snipped and ripped. In every store and business premises, proprietors and staff would have busied themselves to satisfy Saturday’s rush. Meanwhile, townsfolk and families from surroundings farmsteads would have gathered to speculate, commiserate, and nose into one another’s business. Once upon a time.
But Bromide had gone from riches to rags. All that remained of Town Day were a series of ‘How’d you do’s, ‘See you around’s, and all the idle talk in-between. Womenfolk ooed and arred in the shade of the porch belonging to the solitary general store. Children chased each other like hot-footed hens or formed puddles of lilting conversation. The menfolk, meanwhile, kicked up dust out on the road, swigged Coca-Cola or root beer, and smoked and talked in the hazy, drawn-out way men are prone to.
“Johnson said his cattle went on and ate the grass despite the dust. Lost half the herd to mud balls in their stomachs,” said George West, a pharmacist who’d stayed on after the drug store closed to farm his own patch of land before the drought hit.
Ben nodded. “Franklin Herby had the same, ‘cept he bailed a month ago. Packed Rita and the boys up in that old cart that was his daddy’s, hitched a nag to it, and moseyed on out. Rumour is he got a great aunt owns a fruit farm in California. So I’m guessin’ he’s all made up now.”
“Don’t you be so sure, Ben. I’m inclined to believe the news on the radio and as far as folk makin’ their fortunes out west, yeah, they get work on the fruit farms but they don’t make enough offa it to keep a bag-a-bones donkey in feed.” Quarry worker, Samuel O’Ryan, eyed the preacher’s son. It hadda be nice to still have the shine of youth on you, he thought to himself. All that belief life’s gonna come good in the end. All that gullibility.
“Yeah, I guess.” Ben bowed his head. But something must have itched at him and he added, “Ask me, folk should have more faith.”
“Easy for you to say when your daddy’s the preacher. Come judgement day, you and your daddy’ll be sitting pretty on the right hand of the lord. Rest of us, well, we’ll starve to death and find ourselves looking up at ya from the pit of Hell,” hollered Dixon Goodwin, tinker and sometime yard’s man, who had the devil’s gift for saying exactly what would stir a man.
“Pit of Hell? Ain’t we there already?” Samuel beat his hands. His laughter had a sour note, but was echoed by the harrumphs of the others.
Drawing on his cigarette, eyes pinched against the smoke, Dixon kept on staring at the preacher’s son.
“Can’t but wonder though, Ben. While the rest of us are working the scrap of land we got left, or raising swine on soap weed, or fixin’ to leave the only home we’ve ever known, how’d you and your daddy manage to keep your shoes so nicely shined and sweet potatoes on the table? No, no, now...” Dixon raised his hands against an undercurrent of complaint. “I ain’t criticising Preacher Richards. He’s a man of the lord. I’m just interested to know if the preacher’s boy thinks he suffers like the rest of us.”
Ben eased back ox shoulders. “Me and my daddy seen suffering aplenty, Dixon. We take relief supplies to farmsteads as far out as the abandoned Indian academy. We’re the ones that dig a hole for them that have died of the dust pneumonia, who say a prayer o’er them. As for our shoes being shined, I was raised to mind what my neighbour thinks of me. As for sweet potato...”
“Why’re you picking on Ben here? Flea biting your ass?” shot Samuel, who apparently saw no good reason why Ben should explain what food ended up on his father’s table. The quarry man added, “You know darn well if there’s any fresh vegetables to be had around here, they’re from Miss Splitz’s homestead.”
George and a couple of others nodded.
Dixon hacked and spat into the dust. “Just ‘cause I got a spot as the new yard man out at old woman’s Splitz’s place, you think I’m in the know?”
“Aren’t ya?” shot one of six quarry lads sat in the road.
“Aren’t I what?”
“Aren’t you the one to fill us in on the place?”
“Whadaya wanna know?” Dixon kept a smile behind his teeth. No harm in splashing out a little gold dust about Boar House and its residents. He plumped out his chest. “The old gal’s machines? They’re helluva big, I tell ya. Steam-breathing hogs the lot. She’s got ‘em holed up in a workshop out back. As I heard it from their last yardman, place is lined with tools plus a whole host of thingamajigs Miss Splitz engineered alongside the hired help – guy called Virgil Roberts?” Dixon weighted his voice just right. Outsiders were the worst sort of intrusion when folk were down on their luck.
“This... Virgil. He a relation?” piped up another quarry lad.
Dixon ground his smoke under a boot heel. He breathed in slow and took his time. Wasn’t often folk listened without him having to shove his opinion up under their noses.
“No relation,” he confided.
The men hushed. Dixon could hear the womenfolk over at the store, their soft laughter alongside the chirruping of children.
“Josephine Splitz hired him in from some big college outta state,” he said to the men surrounding him. “Place called Stanford.”
The quarry boys kept on chewing their tobacco like calves on the cud. Only Ben got a knowing look. Dixon paid him no mind.
“Anyways. Pair of ‘em have butchered the field in front of Boar House good and proper with a great big drilling machine. The Burrower they call it. This Virgil and Miss Splitz, they climb inside and drive it underground for days, leaving Miss Nightingale to keep house.”
One mention of Miss Nightingale and he’d really got their attention now, these men with unsatisfied needs and empty pockets.
Not everyone was seduced though. Dixon dragged the back of his hand across his nose and got a whiff of disproval off Ben, Samuel and George.
Samuel beat his big hands again. This time the gesture was threatening. “I ain’t interested. Folks’ business is their own.”
“Unless it has a bearin’ on others!”
Reg Wilhoit made his way into the group with that stiff-legged, foot-scrapping motion of his. He halted, one hip at an awkward angle. “Jos should be forced to stop with the crazy machines. Liable to get someone killed.”
The quarry boys had sense enough to hunch their shoulders and look away. Samuel swallowed the last of his soda, eyes scrunched shut against the sun’s glare, then peered on over at the newcomer.
“It ain’t up to us to tell grown folk what to do in their own time on their own land, Reg,” he said quietly. “Just as no one had the right to warn you off working them machines before they decided to take a piece of you?”
“Thought I was helping Jos mine for new branches off Bromide Spring,” Reg embarked, deaf or bloody-minded. “Ten years ago, folk thought we could breathe new life into this town’s dry and weary bones and tempt the visitors back. Least that’s the way I saw it. ‘Course it wasn’t me that got to go underground in a giant metal worm.”
“That the problem, Reg?” Samuel’s tone stayed gentle. His words were more caustic. “You jealous some outta towner gotta ride in the big machines?”
“And lose my life, not just a pair of useful legs? No thanks, Sammy. I got crushed enough under that iron hoisting crane ten years ago. Just as well too. I’ve learnt to stand back and see Jos Splitz for what she really is.”
Dixon wore a sly look. “Miss Splitz, hey? Well, what’d ya know. Seems even old folk gotta get their kicks.” He let his mouth hang open.
“Mind outa the gutter, Dixon Goodwin. I’ll tell ya what Jos Splitz is. She’s a conjuress! A leech!” A fleck of spit escaped Reg’s sunken mouth. Shifting his balance awkwardly, he cast wild eyes about the group. “Not one of ya’s got the first clue what that dame’s doing over at Boar House.”
“I know plenty,” cut in Dixon with a grimace that suggested it was his time to talk and weren’t no cripple gonna shake him off his perch. “I know Miss Splitz is spitting mad at Virgil ‘cause he might’ve broke something on her burrowing machine. Heard her riding him for it when I went to the kitchen last night to get a glass of lemonade offa their house negro. I know Miss Spitz calls us farming folk a bunch of shitting pigs, blames us for killing off the land and leaving ourselves with nothing but dust.”
Dixon wove his words well. There wasn’t a man present who didn’t tuck a frown into their face or sheesh through their teeth or curse a dry old coot who’d got no right to judge.
Reg rounded on the group, dragged feet drawing snake-coils in the dirt. “There was nothing natural about the way that big old crane unpinned from its earth footings to come crashing down on me...”
“We gotta go there again, Reg?” It was the turn of George, ex-pharmacist, failed farmer, to roll his eyes.
Reg rolled his own back. “I know, it’s the word of a mad old cripple against those respectable whores at Boar House.”
“Shut your mouth, Reg. There’s an awful bad smell coming out of it.” Samuel threw out his arms. “Wasn’t a soul near you when the accident happened. Said so yourself all them years ago.” His stance was reinforced by mutterings from the quarry boys. Miss Splitz could go hang, but no one badmouthed a doll like Carrie-Anne. Not when there were so few young and single women left in Bromide for a fella to set his hat at.
“Yup, I sure did say as much.” Reg drawled his words. He seemed to burrow into himself. “But there is change afoot and Miss Splitz and her apprentice are at the heart of it. I feel them breaking through the earth beneath our feet more often these days. Vibrations offa those great tunnelling machines work their way up through the flesh and the metal and make my legs cramp.”
“What they burrowing for anyways?” said a quarry boy.
“My daddy says they are investigating why the land’s gotten so barren in these parts. And, yeah, you’re right about hunting out more branches of the Bromide Spring, Reg, but way I heard it, Miss Splitz’s thinking is to siphon water from deep below ground and find a way to feed it in beneath the crops since surface spray ‘d evaporate too quick.” Ben realised the entire group was fixated on what he had to say. He faltered. “Well, it goes something like that.”
Reg scrubbed at his cotton hair with two hands. “Except maybe it’s Miss Splitz’s mining activities which drained the land in the first place. Ever think of that?”
Over by the store, the women were creating their very own storybook, layering it with soft tones and sudden laughter. The children had sticks and were offering up war cries. Reg’s inconstant eyes flicked about the now-hushed menfolk.
“Nah, you didn’t think of that, hey?” He nodded sagely. “As I said, a conjuress and a leech.”
The garden at Boar House was as sweet-smelling and fertile as any botanical institute. Either side the lawn was a great spread of Indian Blanket, hundreds of small pink suns tipped with gold. The leafy vines of Morning Glory tendrilled the wooden fence, flowers peeping out like midnight-coloured eyes. Potato ferns filled eight large beds. Peppers and egg plant gave off their grassy, sap-like scent.
While the rest of the panhandle was barren, Boar House garden flourished for two reasons, the first of which was Josephine Splitz’s patented sprinkler tripod and underground irrigation system of interlocking copper tubes fed from giant water butts, and the second being that, when it came to dirt and what grew in it, Julie Sanders had the Midas touch.
“Tastes like the blood of summer.” Carrie-Anne manipulated what was left of the tomato with her tongue.
“Here.” Julie dug a hand through the vines and snapped off another. She offered it. “A fresh sacrifice?”
Carrie-Anne put the fruit to her nose. It smelt of the rich red dirt of her childhood, when the plains of wheat and prairie grass were flowing.
“They’re going under again. Virgil and Aunt Josephine, I mean.” She kept the tomato under her nose like smelling salts. “I asked them not to since it’s Palm Sunday tomorrow. Their absence from church’ll be even more marked than usual. Folk are already noticing.”
“Then folk should learn to mind their own!” Julie snapped. She stared over at Carrie-Anne and added blankly, “Yeah, I see the glint of disapproval in your eye. A housemaid shouldn’t talk so about good white folk as fix their hair and attend the preacher’s sermon every Sunday.”
Carrie-Anne frowned. “I didn’t mean that, Julie.” She cupped the tomato in a palm. “You surprised me was all. Most days, you’re a ball of hot roast sunshine. It’s odd to see you in shadow.”
Julie raised her large bovine eyes to the endless blue overhead. “I apologise, Carrie-Anne. Something’s hunkered down in the air these last few days, niggling at me. Might just be a woman’s flush? Might be the dry heat?” She lowered her gaze to Carrie-Anne, who felt its touch like a mother’s hand. “What I do know, chile, is we can’t take much more. A storm’s needed. Even hail’d be better than this devil’s blanket we’re under!”
Carrie-Anne popped the tomato into her mouth and chewed. Following Julie to the nearest vegetable bed, she knelt alongside to help shovel dark composted manure around the bean poles and fledgling sunflowers.
“Remember those great rocks of ice that came slamming down in March? The tale of Nancy West’s little girl run ragged trying to keep the chicks from being crushed out in the yard. They lost half the poor mites in one storm.” She indicated the plants with her trowel. “Don’t reckon this crop’d survive either.”
Julie sat back on her heels stiffly and used the corner of her apron to dab at her temples. “This crop, no. But we’d start again. Trade what we did have for what we didn’t.”
Perhaps noticing Carrie-Anne’s muddled look, she chuckled all of a sudden. “Chile, I’m playing with you. I don’t take one inch of this land for granted, nor the good Lord blessing me with the knowhow to raise crops on it.” Julie got a fresh trowel-full of manure and leant in to the plants.
“You know all about the way dirt beds in around Boar House,” Carrie-Anne said softly.
“Well, I ain’t alone there.” Julie kept on working. Sunlight rained over her skin like a downpour of black diamonds.
Carrie-Anne pinched up her eyes. She didn’t want to dig inside herself, was afraid to, and instead rocked back on her heels and moved to the neighbouring bed, umbrellaed with the pinnate leaves of the Mississippi peanut. Bending down, she trailed a finger along a leaf coated with blown-in dust. The particles expelled to either side of the leaf at her touch.
“Watch you don’t step in grasshopper poison.” Julie stood up, supporting her lower spine with her hands as she unfolded. “Mix of molasses, bran and lemons I scattered at nightfall couple of evenings back.”
Gazing at the ground, Carrie-Anne noticed wads of vegetable matter distributed between the rows of peanuts. “Say a spell too?” she teased.
Julie tucked a smile into a corner of her mouth. “Carrie-Anne Nightingale. I worry about your soul.”
“Well, there is some sort of magic at work in this garden, Julie. Beyond the boundary of this fence, I’ve seen field peas and tomatoes blighted by the wind, potatoes like coyote dung half-cooked in dry dirt. But here, all is plump and ripe and perfumed. You’re a weaver of dreams, Julie.” She gestured to the nearest clump of grasshopper poison. “A potions mistress.”
Julie snorted. “Gotta keep Miss Splitz in fried okra and cornbread’s all. Then there’s the extras we trade for canned goods at the store. You know how partial Miss Splitz is to pineapple chunks. She always saves the juice for Wesley. Soft old thing.”
Carrie-Anne didn’t contradict. Aunt Josephine was as much of a dragon as any giant machine birthed from her workshop. But she did occasionally expose a chink of humanity, such as the stones she brought back for Wesley from below the surface, or her reserving pineapple juice for the boy, eying him as he supped as if she was a kid herself feeding treats to a puppy.
The wizen old prune also had an acid way with words which Virgil thankfully seemed to relish where his predecessors had been burnt.
“My aunt’s certainly got her own brand of kindness. I wonder if she always appreciates Virgil’s worth though. He’s one of the state’s top geological surveyors, you know.” Carrie-Anne got a shine to her. “He’s got the papers to prove it.”
“Don’t need to persuade me Virgil’s worth something, Carrie-Anne. He wrote the letter of recommendation that got Abraham a teaching post at Douglass High in Bricktown, Oklahoma City.” Julie picked up the wicker basket she used for cut flowers and fresh vegetables, and deposited her trowel in it. She started back towards the house; Carrie-Anne watched the peculiar twist to her hips as she walked. Julie was arthritic. She was also a polio survivor.
Carrie-Anne followed after.
“I love him, you know!” She blurted out the words, afraid they’d drive tiny hooks into her tongue and stick there.
Julie swung around. In place of shock or elation, she simply jutted her chin as if to say ‘that so.’ Then she turned heel and started again with that jarring gait.
“Is that it?” Carrie-Anne flushed. She’d built up to the revelation, weighing her options in terms of who to confide in before settling on her old nursemaid who was sure to have grace enough to understand. Why was Julie acting so?
“I don’t get it.” She ran alongside. “It’s not like we’re hurting you, or Wesley, or even Aunt Josephine.” Julie didn’t stop marching and Carrie-Anne was forced into a sideways polka as she spoke. “He’s a good man and he’s got my heart taped up. No escape for me from this one, Julie. But what’s so terrible about me and Virgil Roberts anyway? You know his worth. Said so just now.”
Reaching the foot of the porch steps, Julie stopped suddenly, mouth parted as she tugged air into her lungs. “I gotta spell it out for you, chile? Well okay. You mix your environment according to your mood. Move one speck o’ dust from this spot to that. Shake it all up any which way you feel.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about!” spat Carrie-Anne. Her chest ached.
A flame was struck in each of Julie’s beautiful bovine eyes. “You could cause real damage, chile. I’m just not sure how the dust’ll settle on this one.”
“Think I’m playing with Virgil, don’t you?” Carrie-Anne felt the insinuation bite at her on the inside as if she’d swallowed live termites. “Good Lord, Julie. You raised me!”
“That’s not what I meant...”
“Whatever else could you mean except to suggest I’d go all blue-eyed and brainless on Virgil, get him hooked then look for something, for someone better. How dare you, Julie! After the kindness my aunt has shown you and your boys. After her treating you like a family member and not the slave that you really are.”
Her words were as violent as if she’d lashed Julie round the jaw. Carrie-Anne knew it, felt the poison seeping in as the housemaid she loved like her own flesh and blood got cold in the eyes.
“Yes, mam,” said Julie evenly. She turned away and climbed the steps to the porch, where she pulled open the inner gauze on complaining hinges and disappeared inside the house.
Carrie-Anne stood alone in the garden. A light breeze brought in dust from the field which danced about her ankles.
Cicadas droned in the long grass outside the workshop. A moth performed its tortured tarantella around a kerosene lamp hooked on a nail to one side of double doors. The sun had left its heat on the place like a layer of hot grease.
Inside the workshop, nothing moved except the dust motes. Chisels, mallets, pliers, hammers, and wrenches lined the walls like a field surgeon’s medical kit. A large scarred workbench held a mechanical arsenal: grimy gears, cami-leathers like stomach linings, chipped china cups full of nails and nuts and bolts, bushels of wire, wirewool, chainlink, hose, valves and fuses. The floorboards were strewn with the lost limbs of iron smoke stacks, greased levers, punctured flotation balloons, sled tracks, even a pair of outsized bellows like an ogre’s shoehorn.
Grease and metal filings perfumed the air. All was still but for dust fall.
Virgil had his hand at her throat. Time drew out like a strand of spun sugar. His eyeballs flickered. Blood drove inside his ears.
Slowly, he eased his hips against hers. A welt of heat spread through his groin as she rose up onto tiptoe. Her flesh glistened. He leant in, bruised his lips against her fragile jaw and found the soft wet sacramental hollow of her mouth. It wasn’t enough. He wanted to get past the physical, the hindrance of blood and cartilage, skeleton and skin. Raking his hands through her hair, nails digging in at the baby softness of her skull, he meshed his lips against hers until she gasped.
It was her tongue’s touch which quietened him, its curl of motion at the sliver of skin connecting his upper lip and gum. He felt tethered, and a new depth of need as she worked his shirt free of his pants and imprinted his spine with her fingertips. His own hands were awkward extractions of flesh; he fumbled with the buttons of her dress as she moulded his shoulder blades under her palms. Sweat soaked in at his shirt collar. Her dress fell away.
He stepped back to gaze at her every niche and curve. Her breasts were white fruit burred with damson-coloured seedheads. The pour of flesh to her hips was slight. A half-moon of tiny brown freckles arched above her belly button. Soft brown down spread out from the cleft between her legs.
Dragging his shirt up and over his head, Virgil bundled it into the hollow of her lower back as she drew him back against her. The sour tang of sweat worked up between them; she dragged her tongue along the underside of his chin like a saltlick.
He drove his head down and she curved her spine, offering each breast to the ebb and flow of his mouth. At the same time, her hands cupped his ears so that he was back in the dark with the iron drone of the Burrower. With one difference. Here above ground, the heat was breaking out of him as much as it was tunnelling in.
She moved her hands away and his lips found her throat again. It was a small bewitchment, a brush of mouth against skin which always made her fold herself into him. He flung his shirt aside. His fingers skimmed the rough warm wood of the workbench and spooned her buttocks which tensed at his touch. She carved at his hipbones, digging her fingernails in ever so slightly at the underside of his belt before dragging them diagonally down in a tingling swipe. His gasp was a thin dry reed of air.
Dixon Goodwin stared down at the patch of ground and clucked his tongue. The pipework he’d exposed was the colour of rust in the moonlight; he guessed it was copper. Nice choice of metal for water transportation, even if it was an expensive material to sink below ground. Of course, the old gal, Jos Splitz, belonged to one of Oklahoma’s oldest, richest bloodlines. A few lengths of copper boring wasn’t about to see her bare-handed, even when her fellow Okies were sell-their-mother desperate.
So, the secret to Boar House’s fertile ground was an irrigation system? Dixon kept hold of the trowel he’d found in a basket outside the kitchen, twirling the handle between two palms. There hadda be, what, a couple of acres of garden tucked around the house, every bit of it fed by those underground pipes? It was a helluva thing, and not just to afford the raw materials but to engineer and physically locate them. He shook his head like a fly-bothered mare. Jos Splitz was a withered old gourd, but she’d the wherewithal to keep herself afloat while all around were going under.
But who’d got the muscle to install that rig? There was this Virgil character, this brain from outta town. Vampire morelike by the look of him, Dixon snorted to himself. And Boar House had its slaves, though rumour was Jos Splitz behaved like an old witch in her professional capacity, but she was a pussycat in terms of how she ran her household.
Dixon twisted his mouth aside and spat. What good was kindness to the sow or the rooster? Didn’t fatten them beasts any faster. Sameways with the black man; kindness only made a slave waste time on smiling. His daddy had taught him that much. Few folk wielded a lash as neatly and as effectively as Dixon Goodwin Senior.
But whether them soft-handled Negroes installed it or the ghost face Virgil, all that was of interest was that Jos Splitz had gotten herself a means to pump water into dirt. Except, where’d the water come from?
The night had stitched itself in around him but there was a weak glow coming off a kerosene lamp over by the workshop. Dixon narrowed his eyes, noticing a ridge of earth running parallel to the brick path. He dragged a forearm over his forehead. He mightn’t be worth much to folk in Bromide, but he’d a tendency to work things out.
Walking slowly along the path, his footfall soft, he traced the ridge to the far side of the workshop, where it broke ground to emerge as a series of the rust-coloured pipes. These plumbed into two vast water butts located side by side and interlinked by a vertical winch system hooked up to five large buckets.
Dixon stroked his throat. One thing was for sure. Jos Splitz wasn’t feeling the effect of no drought. In fact, she was sucking up the juices of the land while the rest of the state died of thirst.
The question now was what to do with that knowledge.
He walked back around to the front of the workshop. The kerosene lamp gave out jaundiced twilight, and it occurred to him what a curious thing it was to find outside the workshop at that hour. The old gal was hee-hawing in her bed like a sun-baked mule; he’d heard the housemaid remark on it. So, some fool musta lit the thing for the ghosts, or more likely, as a deterrent against starving hobos, of which there were plenty.
One side of the double door’s latch wasn’t quite caught in its slot. Careless keepers make for loser-weepers, Dixon thought acidly.
He was about to secure the door when it occurred to him that a late night check of the grounds, along with the investigation of any mysterious circumstances, might well fall within the duties of a yardman. He gave the door a gentle push and stepped inside.
Great black rafters overhung a room divided into two separate work areas by a mottled, semi-opaque glass sliding screen. Since this ‘wall’ was at most eight foot, he was able to see the upper section of the vast machine referred to as The Burrower at the far end of the workshop. Moonlight filtered in at high narrow windows, reflecting off the tip of a colossal metal bore like an exploding star.
Dixon tucked his arms in tight to his body. Either side of him were shelves laden with cartons, jars, bottles filled with some milky substance, balls of string, small plump sacks lined up like Humpty Dumpties, and boxes containing preserved weed, bark strips, tubers, cotton bolts, and all manner of weird in-between.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered, leaning in to study a jar. He wasn’t much for learning but his daddy had insisted on him getting his alphabet licked. “U... S... E. Use. A.T. At...” He spelt out the words phonetically. “M.I.D.N.I.G.H.T... Use at midnight?” Puzzlement wormed up at his brow. The contents looked like something scraped outta pig sty.
Dixon peered closer at the racks of jars. Seeds, burs, dried flowerheads... it hadda be a gardener’s store. Carrie-Anne liked to mix dirt, he thought, remembering how her cotton dress had scooped tight across her buttocks as she’d worked her trowel into a flower bed that afternoon. But no, that didn’t sit right somehow. Carrie-Anne was too refined to stock that queer larder. What he did suspect was that this corner of the workshop had been given over to the house negress who used it for potions and witchdoctoring.
Coloureds know no betta than to side with the devil. Their womenfolk’ll entice ya and ride ya with all kinda words and intoxications. Sap the spirit from your manhood and leave ya outta dry.
His daddy’s words played over and over in his head. Dixon felt parched even as sweat glistened at his brow. Placing one foot carefully behind the other, he started to back off from that devil’s altar.
It was the small catch of breath which made him pause mid-step. He listened intently. There. A whisper of sound, girlish and sensual. Momentarily he was afraid that the housemaid’s brews had attracted some intoxicating spirit come to steer him to sin and feast on his soul. Then he heard a second murmur, a man’s baritone that was distinctly human and coming from the other side of the glass screen.
The baking heat crested and broke over him as, through the thick lichened glass of the sliding screen, he made out the outline of their rutting bodies. His nostrils flared. It hadda be the sorceress, squeezing the life from some poor soul between her flanks.
An old parlour chair rested on two legs against the screen. Dixon eased it back down, placed one boot on the seat and tried out his partial weight on it. Reassured the chair would hold him, he stepped up level with the top of the screen and tentatively peered over.
The air was torn from his lungs. In place of black flesh, he saw the bow of a pale breast, the crush and rise of white thighs, and unsoiled nails that cut in at a man’s spine, causing him to buckle and thrust harder. As moonshine spilt out into every corner of the workshop, revealing an ocean of dust motes, he saw Virgil Roberts with his pants down and Carrie-Anne Valentine’s angelic face twist in grotesque ecstasy.
Sunday April 14, 1935
There’d been many occasions in the past when Carrie-Anne and Julie had exchanged words. When she’d pulled the rags from her hair and worried out the ringlets an hour before Great Aunt Rita’s annual visit. Or when she’d cut down a bed of sweet potato fern to use as a posy for her ‘marriage’ to a five year old Ben Richards. Or when, more recently, she’d scolded Wesley for beating a carpet near the spot of lawn where she was resting. Listening in from the porch, Julie had puffed up like a prize-fighter and stomped on over. “Carrie-Anne Valentine!” she’d embarked with a shake in her voice. But even though Carrie-Anne demanded then cajoled then begged her to continue, Julie seemed to think better of her anger and just take herself back off inside the house. It was a different story yesterday afternoon. Then Julie had decided to stick around and say her piece... although, as it turned out, it was Carrie-Anne who dug up sentiments that should never have been voiced.
Arranging her gloves on her lap and leaning back against the hard pew, Carrie-Anne was haunted by Julie’s blank expression when told to remember her place. And it occurred to her that she had seen that look before, on the faces of the field Negroes who toiled and starved and hated their master.
The thought festered. Boxed in on either side by Mrs Lisa Goodwin’s plump respectability and old Mrs Johnson’s hoary bones, Carrie-Anne felt jostled into a slot that didn’t fit. Somewhere at the back of that dull stone coffin of a chapel, Julie and Wesley were amongst the other coloureds standing because the lord’s house didn’t see fit to offer them a chair.
“Your aunt is not with you,” shot Lisa Goodwin suddenly. Her tone sat the wrong side of polite.
Carrie-Anne watched Preacher Richards lean in to discuss the sheet music with his wife, the organist, and willed him to start his sermon.
Old Mrs Johnson peered over her. “Josephine Splitz? Ain’t she dead?”
Lisa Goodwin bundled her arms beneath wasteful breasts. Her eyes betrayed a mind full of nasty. “Word is she’s alive but no one’s seen hide nor hair of her at chapel for three months. What do you say, Carrie-Anne? Is your aunt still with us?”
Carrie-Anne sensed the weight of her respectable gloves on her lap. Humming lightly, she rocked forward onto her toes and back.
“Is she dumb?” Mrs Johnson squirted sideways, sucking her bottom lip like a teat. “You dumb, girl?”
“Dumb, no. Ignorant maybe.” Lisa Goodwin’s hot fat fingers branded Carrie-Anne’s arm. “Your coltish act don’t work with me, girl. Just like your aunt, think you’re better than the rest of us. In her case, because she got brains and money. In yours, because you’ve got beauty and you know how to spread it.”
A mind full of nasty, thought Carrie-Anne. She kept humming, imagining the tune dispersing through her like sunlight.
There was an undercurrent in the chapel that morning, half-whispers that left a shadow on the glorious day outside. Young men, who usually snatched off their caps and shuffled whenever she walked by, had watched her with a new, hawkish intensity. One even spat on the floor. Everywhere she’d looked, she’d seen the folk of Bromide grouped about the chapel walls like a swarm; they’d stung her a hundred times with their barely disguised distaste.
Let them judge, she decided, stilling herself as the Preacher took to his pulpit. They’d find fresh meat inside the month. What’s more, she couldn’t help agreeing with them in part. Aunt Jos should’ve honoured Palm Sunday, should’ve cared enough about events on the surface to let alone what lay below. But instead, at 6.00am that morning, the Burrower had lowered its nose and descended with a tremendous roar of grit and steam. And she’d been left to drape herself in fresh cotton, put a tea rose behind her ear, meet Julie’s stone-faced silence and come alone into the lion’s den.
It’s a dark spell, Carrie-Anne thought to herself. Virgil’s fresh absence so soon after the last, Julie’s cold-shouldering, the hungry, bored minds of the townsfolk. A dark spell. But soon the clouds will pass.
She fixated on a shaft of sunlight streaming in at the nearest chapel window. Dust whirled in its soft golden element. She could hear the preacher’s voice as from a distance, and for a moment she imagined that she was back on the porch again, head resting against the corner strut, listening to the stillness of the plains. Virgil had come to her then... just as he came to her now as a memory of tenderly bruising lips and franticness. She smiled secretly.
“Smears up her mouth even now,” hollered a male voice, piercing the illusion so that she refocused to find a sea of eyes turned towards her.
“What’s that?” Her voice sounded set adrift.
“Dixon, please.” Preacher Richards gripped the lectern, his face lined with irritation. “This sermon is about aiding your fellow man not abusing him. If there is tension in our community, let us resolve it at an appropriate time and without resorting to verbal attacks.” After a brief pause, the preacher held his arms out from his sides. “My words are a lesson in scripture. They illustrate that...”
“‘Their god is their stomach... their mind is on earthly things.’ Ain’t that what you read out just now, Preacher Richards?” Dixon Goodwin rose up out of his seat on the far side of his mother and stared over at Carrie-Anne, an angry crease between his eyes. “Some folk fatten themselves like hogs while the rest don’t have a bean.”
“Need I remind you this is a house of God, Dixon, not a two buck brawl pit?” said Preacher Richards in the deep voice he reserved for children who couldn’t sit still in the pews. There was a waver in his tone though. Anger at the interruption or something else? Something like fear he could not control his flock?
Carrie-Anne wanted to start humming her song again. She wiped her gloves between her palms. Heat pawed at her.
“You better sit your backside down, son,” said Lisa Goodwin quietly. Carrie-Anne detected a trace of indifference, pride even. Yes, I have raised my son well. He takes a stand when no other will. He is the rock all others hide behind.
“Sure, Momma. Just as soon as I get the measure of what Preacher’s teaching. ‘Their god is their stomach?’ Well, I’m here to tell ya there’s one home near Bromide where that sure does apply. Boar House. Seen it with my own eyes. I work there as a yard man...”
Not anymore. Carrie-Anne dabbed the moist hollow of her throat with the gloves. Not content to pour his eyes over her – oh yes, she’d felt their weight, familiar, uncomfortable, and a sensation she’d laboured under before several years ago – it appeared that Dixon wanted to invent some hocus-pocus about those she held dear.
Go on then, she urged. Expose the darkness in the hearts of Boar House’s occupants. Tell these good folk all the horrors you have witnessed.
“Take a seat or leave, Dixon.” Preacher Richards was flushed. His son, Ben, got to his feet at the fore of the congregation – Carrie-Anne marvelled at the height of him and thought again of the potato fern posy she’d picked as a child. Had time ebbed so quickly that Ben Richards was now built like a quarterback while a squirt of a kid could evolve into a creep like Dixon Goodwin?
“All I’m saying is there’s a reason why they’re growing crops while the rest of us are struggling to harvest soap weed. More than that, ain’t we preaching abstinence from earthy things?” Dixon jabbed two fingers at his eyes. “Out there, I seen filth. I seen fornication. I seen witchcraft.”
A few folk gasped audibly. Carrie-Anne felt a squeezing tight up inside. She resisted twisting about in her seat and staring at the back of the chapel; best thing she could do in that moment was sit soldier-straight and offer no emotion.
“Witchcraft?” Preacher Richards’s eyes appeared to supplicate his wife from her seat in the organ pew. Whatever he saw there must have reassured his indignation because he rose up out of the girdle of his hips and asserted, “A vicious accusation, Dixon, and not one that we abide inside the lord’s house. I repeat, I must ask you to leave. Mr and Mrs Goodwin...”
The preacher would not win over Lisa and Dixon Senior. They rose to stand alongside their son, oozing superiority and righteousness.
“Preacher, my son’s got news about Josephine Splitz and her kin which is of interest to this congregation,” said Dixon Goodwin Senior, a barrel-bellied man with a circlet of white hair and the same bristled baby face as his son. He planted his hands on his hips and revolved at the waist. “So I ask ya, folks. If my boy says what he’s got to tell ya is in keeping with the preacher’s sermon, shouldn’t the rest of us rightly hear it?”
“This is not the time or place to discuss disputes between individuals,” embarked Preacher Richards. He was immediately shot down.
“...Ain’t no matter between individuals. This is town talk.” Dixon Senior thrust a finger towards the back of the chapel. “This is about one of ‘em negresses and her pantry of potions in Jos Splitz’s workshop!”
There was a second expulsion of air from listeners’ lips. Ugly words were spoken under breath.
Dixon Senior rubbed a hand around his bald spot. “You seen it, ain’t you, son? And that ain’t all he seen? Tell ‘em about the giant maggot, a burrowing machine that sucks up all the water.”
Was she labouring under a brain-fever or were folk speaking in tongues? Carrie-Anne glanced back at Julie; the woman had the look of a startled jack rabbit and was working hard to push Wesley away. Carrie-Anne recognised why; when coloured folk were accused of something, only way to protect those they loved was by disassociation. Wesley didn’t get a bit of it though and kept wriggling his head up under his mother’s arm, all the while nervously flashing that broad smile of his as if he’d found it got him fuss before and he figured it might work now.
Carrie-Anne stood, her upper body bathed in the rich sunlight so that she was forced to squint against its brilliance. She tried to speak. Her throat clamped around her vocal cords.
“I am in no way a scientist, Mr and Mrs Goodwin, Dixon.” She nodded at each. “But it is my understanding that my aunt and her assistant, Mister Virgil Roberts, have been excavating below ground in a bid to find water and to understand what it is about the land beneath our feet which has left us in such dire straits.”
“Except, you ain’t in dire straights, are you, Miss Valentine? Not only have you water to feed the soil where you wanna, but a sorceress to raise them crops up with spilt rooster blood, devil’s weeds and every other kinda wickedness. ‘Use at midnight.’ That’s what I read, Miss Valentine. Written stark clear on a label it was. Use at the devil’s hour!”
Dixon’s expression was seven ways of wrong. And he wasn’t alone. More voices were cutting in.
“What a slave doin’ with her own store while we’re left to scrape around for seed and other provisions?”
“Always said Jos Splitz was lead-lined.”
“Heart of stone, that one.”
“Except when it comes to coloureds. Then she’s soft as marshmallow.”
“Coloureds with the know-how to mix magic? That’s a straight up sin. Ain’t no defending that.”
The eyes moved from Carrie-Anne to Julie. There was fragility in the air. One audible breath and the line between peace and pandemonium would be muddied.
“Exodus 22:18. Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,” said Lisa Goodwin, soft as the wind.
Carrie-Anne felt as if she was suffocating. So much white flesh crushed in around her like pulped pages from a bible.
“Enough with your accusations!” she spat. Her heart pulsed violently. Forcing her way past old Mrs Johnson, who shrunk into her desiccated bones, Carrie-Anne strode to the back of the chapel. Twice, a figure stepped into her way. Twice a voice told them to let her be. Through the smear of angry human shapes, she made out Samuel O’Ryan and George West. Good, honest men in a town awash with hokum.
She found Julie, fear and unshakeable knowledge etched into the lines of her face. Wesley was a phantom limb at his mother’s hip, arms encircling her.
Carrie-Anne reached out. The air inside the chapel turned shroud grey; she parted it with her hands like scissors slipping through silk. When her fingertips made contact with Julie’s wrist, she felt the housemaid shiver in spite of the tumbling waves of heat.
“Let’s go home, Julie.”
Out the corner of an eye, she saw a figure lurch from the back pew in a jilting motion. Cold dread poured down the inside of her ribs. She would not meet that vile stare. She would gather up Julie and Wesley to her side and she would walk with them out of chapel that day and deliver them safely home.
“Know what else I saw?” continued Dixon, a serpent at her back. “Last night, I was checking the grounds as is my employment when I find the workshop unlocked. Lotta fancy engine gear in that shack. This day and age, lotta folk in need of stealing such. So I slip inside. And I hear this ruckus. Any idea what I’m talking about, Miss Valentine?”
Eyes swirled towards her from every angle. The sun went in.
As Dixon went on with his sordid description, Carrie-Anne sensed the young men of Bromide wipe her from their palms like chaff. In a barren town, she had been the one sweet-smelling flower they could admire and dream of owning. Except now she was gone over. Another clean thing corrupted.
Their agitation was immediate. No insult was spared inside those hallowed walls. She was Jezebel, Salome, the Babylonian whore, and every other breed of temptress. But their anger was good. Anything to deflect attention from Julie.
Carrie-Anne made her way to the chapel door, Julie’s blistering handhold in hers, Wesley bundled into Julie’s folds... Only to find the exit was guarded by its own gargoyle of hunched flesh and mangled bone.
“About time the witches of Boar House paid their dues,” said Reg Wilhoit. His voice was a tar scrape, thickened over time. Hands that used to twist up inside her blouse and maul at her unformed breasts were pressing into and over one another, moulding the situation into his preferred shape.
“Move aside, Reg.” She concentrated her revulsion, taking strength from it.
“Time to pay, little lady.” A foul whisper. A forward shuffle on crumpled limbs.
“Stand away from the door.” Her eyesight blurred as a great hollow wind seemed to drag itself up beneath the underside of the chapel door and shriek past her ears. The sky is darkening, she thought, where I dreamt only of light. Far below the surface, her aunt and Virgil were crushing through the sand and rock in an effort to find fresh reserves of water, in an effort to save the lives of these nasty, vicious souls who would dig them out like louse and burn them for trying. Keep them below, she implored the subterranean world under their feet.
Reg teetered. He kept his sneer stitched in place.
Beneath her fingertips, in the creases of her palms, at the tender flesh of her lips, the baking air reverberated. Dust drifted out the corners and alcoves where it slept, leaving a soft grey charge in the atmosphere. Heat surged in at every chink in the chapel walls, gushing and churning and soaring all around her. Sweat bled from Carrie-Anne’s temples, and the dust, so much dust, roared like the battle cry of an archangel.
The latch snapped up on the chapel door suddenly. Someone pushed it open and Reg was elbowed aside in a rush of zigzagging steps.
A young man’s face appeared, cherry-toned by the midday heat.
“Preacher Richards!”
Carrie-Anne heard the preacher’s sombre acknowledgement, and through her black rage, the man’s hesitant explanation.
“Preacher, I hate to interrupt service but my daddy says I gotta tell ya there’s a dust cloud growing out to north and it’s a fierce un. Bigger than anything my daddy ever seen. Folk might need to get off home now, tie down what they need, forget what they don’t. There’s a helluva storm coming.”
“Drag on that soot mixer, Virgil Roberts!” came the shout from up front of the Burrower. “You feel it, you Mary-Anne? We’ve gone and hit wet sand.”
Scooping his fingers around a small leather loop that hung alongside the larger one linked to the air duct, Virgil hauled down on it. As he did so, he tucked his head into his right shoulder and tried to peer past Jos’s front seat. The view was limited, but he got an idea that the soot mix was piping through the gills either side of the main hub thanks to the black spray coating the viewing pane.
“Lights... Hit the lights! Christ, man, if you ain’t gonna cease daydreaming over Carrie-Anne, I’m gonna pack her off to Michigan. She’s got a bitch of an Aunt Rita out there. Nibbling little ferret who’d have Carrie-Anne married off to some rich bilious bastard quick smart, I can tell ya.”
Virgil paid Jos no mind. He felt to the left of his chair for a triangular brass panel containing one squat flip-switch. It was an awkward location for a seemingly essential mechanism, except, as Jos has instilled in him a thousand times over when he had first started working for her, what real need was there for light when the bore that went before them was as blind as a mole. Best to feel their way through the earth’s materials, acclimatise themselves to the rat-tat-tat of sand, the plug and crack of rock, the lumber through shale-sounding gravel. But, on occasion, even Jos’s curiosity could not be contained, and that’s when she called for him to fumble for the switch and flood their murky world with light.
A blaze of illumination accompanied his tug on the switch. Virgil blinked wildly against its burn.
Jos, on the other hand, seemed insusceptible to alterations in light and dark. Yet clearly she benefitted from the refreshed view.
“There. Sand, And wet sand too. How’s the tunnel bearing up?”
Virgil revolved a polished wooden handle to crank the drive shaft that ran up the back of Jos’s seat. The whir of clockwork was just audible over the grind and sluice of the Burrower in motion. Lanterns affixed to the roof of the cabin as well as a number of spots integrated into the corrugated iron floor flickered then strengthened. Virgil stared at a rack of dials above his head. Indigo and ruby glass shields protected fine spindles which twitched or held firm.
“Whiskers say we’re okay for now,” he stated in the loud clear voice Jos had beaten out of him. “A little fallout to the right of that rock gorge few moments back.”
“Then we’re gonna haul anchor and get ourselves a sample of that pretty wet stuff, my boy.” Jos half-leant back, her vinegar features squeezed up in an attempt to express happiness.
It was Jos’s job to steer the Burrower, as it was to dig the twin steel sleds at the undercarriage into whatever matter lay beneath in an effort to slow then cease their motion. Virgil watched her leathered hands punch, skip and tug their way around switches, wheels, plungers, knobs, gears and levers, and the rest of the coke-dusted motorisation bank.
“Keep an eye on those whiskers.”
Jos eased off on the steam release and drew the Burrower to a juddering halt.
The engine wheezed noisily then idled. A faint sensation of crushing in threatened to overwhelm Virgil. He pushed that to the back of his mind. It was just his imagination... or an innate knowledge of how preternatural the circumstances were that had brought him below ground. Somehow it was more eerie to be at a standstill in that freshly-cut tunnel, the illumination from the floodlights spilling either side of the colossal bore. All that lay ahead and behind was tight-aired darkness, hence the detection of any faults in the tunnel walls being left to a backend full of softly sprung copper spines, or ‘whiskers’ as Jos was prone to call them. If matter sifted down too heavily, the weight of it would trigger a kick-back action in the spine, and, with it, a clockwise shift of the farthermost dial in the rack above his head.
All was still for now.
“Dig your little horn into the belly of this beast, Jos,” he said softly, doing a mental check of the fill level of the coke channel to his right.
Jos worked a small fly wheel in the ceiling 45 degrees right. There was the slightest rocking motion as the sample needle took its two foot worth of rock sample then withdrew. Jos rewound the lever in the opposite direction.
“Wet sand... No time to shake hands on it now, Virgil Roberts,” she tossed over a shoulder, and in a tone which implied he had attempted to. “We’re only a couple of lengths below the surface. Best get you back to that strawberry of a niece of mine. You sure do seem to like the taste of her.” The old gal snorted, like a smaller version of her vast grunting machines. “Lets shake free of this sand and haul on up.”
It was difficult not to wipe his glad, tired eyes, not to pat the whorled dragon on her shoulder and say, ‘Well done, Jos. Well done you wise old dear’, not to dream of ice chips pressed to Carrie-Anne’s lips, her jugular, her glistening sternum, not to just sit and sigh and sleep.
Instead, Virgil dove the scoop hard through the coke, ripped open the iron flap in the wall and shook off the fuel, feeling his skin flush and hurt with the heat. The engine bubbled under, then roared in its gullet as Jos manoeuvred the twin steel tracks free of their footings and the tremendous hammer of a machine thrust forward and up.
“Tell you one thing, Virgil. That water gotta come from someplace. Don’t know if you been over the way of the old Indian Academy recently?” Jos made a sound like spit had caught up in her throat and spun there. “Now there’s some suffering. I’ve been hiking up there with a backseat of beet and sweet potato and the rest whenever I get a minute. ‘Cept what do you do? Help the few or try to fix the root problem? That’s what we’re aiming at, ain’t we, Virgil, boy? Let’s hope we gotta a break through, hey?”
Jos Splitz. A devil of a woman on her dried up exterior. A polished silver heart on the inside. Virgil broke out a smile.
It was such a small, simple instance of happiness – snatched away the very next second. A noise, like the scream of a great wind buffeting a hide of metal scales. The Burrower shuddered and the whole cabin seemed to tear forwards an inch then sling back several feet. Virgil heard the wind cut from Jos’s throat; the old gal caught it badly, sucking and choking to guzzle down air.
“You alright, Jos. You alright, girl?”
What the hell had they hit? A sheet of bedrock? Wasn’t possible at that angle. He’d surveyed that stretch of land like a mother knowing every inch of her baby’s skin. Wouldn’t do to risk that nosecone on a more difficult stretch. Something was hard up against them though.
“Jos? You gonna answer me there?”
Unclipping his harness, Virgil manhandled himself up to lean a short way over the front seat. Jos’s head lolled towards him as he dug a hand into the metal boning of her chair, eyes closed so that she looked like a husk of a woman whose clockwork had just run out.
No chance to move her. Never was. The notion of a stalemate underground was something they’d both signed up to. He had no choice then but to attempt to work the motorisation bank by stretching his limbs at grotesque angles. The pain cut at his mind like a lash, but he succeeded in engaging the gears and driving the Burrower hard forward. At impact, his ribs jolted against the driveshaft that fed the lights, plunging the cabin into darkness.
Virgil gulped down the baking air and tried to calm himself. He’d promised Carrie-Anne they’d surface by midday, that she would have her afternoon of shared breath underneath a ripe gold sun. If Jos would just wake up. If the Burrower could just work its way home.
His stomach crunched around a sickening mess of feelings. The pitch black thrummed.
I ain’t never seen a glimpse of Hell on Earth like it. Rolling in it was, from the direction of the old Indian academy out north, a great black cloud, thick as flies swarming. How far it stretched I ain’t sure, but miles it was. A mouth that yawned back on its jaw and scooped in everything in sight. And the scream, like demons loose upon the land.
“We’ve got to get back,” Miss Carrie-Anne said. “Let’s go now, while they’ve no time to intervene.” And she steered me outta the chapel and into Mister Roberts’ automobile. Plopping Wesley on my knee, she got that engine whipped up and we were back out on the road in no time, the darkness snapping at our heels.
“It’s a good thing Miss Josephine and Mister Roberts planned a short trip. They’ll be back up top now. Sat on the porch worrying themselves sick I shouldn’t wonder, and who can blame them. Dust cloud like that on the horizon...”
I kept on yapping like a screech owl because Carrie-Anne, she got that soulless look like I’d seen whenever her strangeness came over her, alongside which, the talking helped trample down the fear that burned inside ‘a me like a brand. Wasn’t the way of things for a coloured woman to be accused of devilling and not end up as some sorta strange fruit hanging offa tree. Not that that stopped a man from attacking a person any way he found how if he got a mind to.
My thoughts were softened by the sense that Wesley’d got a fever to him. I felt his shakes above the jitterbug of the engine and turned my chatter to a lullaby. That soothed them both, Wesley going soft as a raggedy-anne and aslumber while Carrie-Anne took up her own hum of a song.
She stopped though. Her face turned to mine.
“I’m sorry, Julie. Seems I don’t get far into a day anymore without stirring up pain in one person or another.”
I saw tears fall like longed-for rain, and I noticed the way the silvered dust in the air danced about her head like a halo.
“Hush, chile. Ain’t no bother.”
“I made the dirt keep the Burrower below,” she exclaimed, wild about the eye. “I wanted to keep them safe.” She glanced deliberately at the rear-view mirror, and I went the way of her eyes to see for myself the great stain on the summer sky.
“What if I can’t get it to let them go?” she sobbed.
There’d always been peculiar ways to the girl. Ever since she was a child, I’d seen how the light would get supped up then spill out from her with one glance. How the lay of dust would alter when she tried to sink her duster in amongst it. How the dirt would mix its own swirls when she skipped by. But what of it? I’d got nothin’ to teach the girl about the Lord’s good brown earth in that way. Raising crops, I knew a good fix or two, since taking care of Boar House garden was kinda like it was my own bit of freedom. Might never be more than a maid in the kitchen, but when I grew them crops, it seemed as if I was master at last.
But Carrie-Anne, perhaps them folks weren’t broad of it. She had a way for rearranging the flow of things. I’d witnessed as much the day I saw Reg Wilhoit lay his hands on her ten year old bones, all up over her he was, and I wanted to make some commotion but didn’t know the best way how. It was then that the earth shifted, and that great iron crane swooped down on Reg and crushed the juice from his limbs.
Yes indeed, Carrie-Anne Valentine had a gift. But no matter what folk’d said in chapel, there weren’t no spells or hocus-pocus. If there hadda been, I might’a known how to ease her now and bring back the sun.
Somehow the girl managed to steer us home. As the motor cut, I scooped Wesley up into my arms and put a shoulder to the door. The wind was awful strong now and battering at the long-dead prairie. Birds tried to fly ahead of it; the pull of that great black mouth was too strong. I hadn’t got the wings to take flight, but Boar House would do for me and mine like a wall of stone.
“Gotta get inside now, Miss Carrie-Anne.”
The girl, though, was rooted, hand on the open driver door, her stare taking in the empty porch.
“Why haven’t they surfaced by now? The danger’s passed. They should be surfaced.”
The words seemed to bite into her flesh, and she was gone suddenly, striding out towards the field.
“Miss Carrie-Anne! Miss Carrie-Anne!”
The dust was too thick to see past my own hand. A mighty cold swept in. Wesley was a tugging piglet at my neck and shivering so. With backwards glances, I fought my way up the steps to the porch, burst in past the gauze, got a grip on the front door and shut the howling out.
It was the blinding mercury where the sun’s glow hit the nosecone which drew Ben Richards to gather up a few of Bromide’s best men and take them out into the field. For the breadth of an afternoon, the men toiled against the welts of the dust dunes. Long into the amber eye of the evening, they worked to expose the Burrower’s cockpit. It took the quarry worker, Samuel O’Ryan, twenty minutes more to put a crack in the toughened glass hub.
When they’d laid the bodies of Virgil Roberts and Jos Splitz on the ground, those men found space in their lives to stand and stare a moment, and wonder who else among them would have travelled far below the ground in that steaming dragon. Some wondered if the two dead had indeed tunnelled in search of life-giving water. A few feared a modicum of truth in Dixon’s tale of draining the land. One wondered if the field of bore holes had contributed to the death of Oklahoma’s farming land, its seas of dust. Ben Richard, whose face was etched with the rawness of the storm like a charcoal map. Across the field and the churned garden, he saw Miss Splitz’s housemaid and her boy stood still as waxworks at the carnival and just watching.
He strode on over.
Shreds of Indian Blanket flowers carpeted the porch steps, which creaked a little as he climbed as if weary.
“Julie Sanders?”
Keeping her hand on her boy’s shoulder, the negress turned her face towards him. She was a living well of emotion. Fear and loss flowed and ebbed across her face.
She struggled to keep the boy back but he broke away.
“Yu need take these back, Sir?” The kid held out a palm with five small pebbles in it. “Miss Splitz. She found them underground.”
Ben squinted down. “Nah, boy. Keep ‘em.”
He dipped his head and peered over at the housemaid.
“Ain’t no sign of Carrie-Anne, but we’ll keep on looking.”
“I reckon she’s gone, Mister Richards. Back to the dirt from which she came.”
“Well, we can hope she didn’t suffer.” Ben tucked back the bob of pain in his throat. “Meantime, my daddy says how’s about you and Wesley settle yourselves with us for a while. You can always come right on back at the first sign of Carrie-Anne.”
The housemaid tucked her son back in under her arm. “Yes, Sir. We’ll pack a few things and say our farewell to Boar House. But first, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just watch a while longer.”
“‘Course, Julie. Take your time.”
The Preacher’s boy strode off down the porch steps and through the tangled remains of the garden. Dust lay over everything as if the garden and house had been asleep for a thousand years. There was no bird song, no evening insect chorus. Only the distant voices of the men and the emptiness of the clean-swept plains.