The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  When the figure was complete the sand was still again, breathlessly still. Amazed, India raised her camera and focused it on the mirror in the chifforobe; she even remembered to adjust for the discrepancy of reflected distance.

  She looked through the viewer and framed the shot.

  As she pressed the shutter, the prone figure of sand sat suddenly up. The sand on her breast and head fell quickly away. It was a little grinning black girl whose short hair had been carefully divided into eight squares, braided and ribboned. Her dress was red, ill-made, and coarsely textured—the cloth seemed exactly the same as that of the bedspread, even to a fringed hem around the bottom.

  India stood at the window, the camera dangling against her beating breast. The heat of the sun tore at her uncovered head.

  The black child crawled toward the window and the sand spilled off her as she came, every second revealing more blackness of her skin, more redness of her stiff red dress. India made herself look down through the panes.

  The Negro child pawed up the dune to the window and lifted her black face to stare into India’s. Sand welled in the corners of her white-pupilled black eyes. She opened her mouth to laugh, but no sound, only a long ribbon of white dry sand spilled out of it.

  CHAPTER 12

  India never told what she had seen. She scrambled and slid down the dune, raced around to the front of the McCray house, and fled upstairs to her own room. A stultifying weariness overcame her, and she fell immediately asleep crossways on the bed, her father’s Nikon still hanging around her neck. Grain by grain two small mounds of sand were formed beneath her dangling feet.

  When Luker awakened her hours later, he declared that she had suffered sunstroke. Long-sleeved clothing and hats were not going to be enough until she could get used to the Alabama sun: she must stay in-of-doors during the worst of the day’s heat. Early morning and late afternoon she might walk about or swim in the Gulf, though for no more than fifteen minutes at the time. “Too much sun,” he warned her, “is a kind of poison, especially for someone who’s as fair-skinned as you.”

  “Does it cause hallucinations?” India wanted to know.

  Luker, pointedly not demanding why she should ask so leading a question, replied merely, “Sometimes . . .” and told her she ought to get ready for supper.

  And in the days that followed, the overwhelming stately routine of Beldame buried everything, even fear. At the end of her first week there, India understood how Luker and Dauphin and Odessa could contemplate returning to the place, when they were evidently very much afraid of the third house and whatever inhabited it. Days at Beldame were so exquisitely dull and stuffy, so brightly illumined and so hot to the touch, that the quivers and fretwork of emotion were quite burned away.

  India had previously entertained no sympathy for the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude. She had always wanted to punch it into shape, to make it sit up straight and say what it meant—but Beldame proved too much for her. She was bewitched, as surely as Merlin by Nimue. By afternoon her physical indolence was such that she could scarcely raise her arm, and ten minutes’ consideration was hardly enough to decide whether to move from the swing on the McCray verandah to the glider on the Savage porch. It was probably a good thing that she had unpacked in the first minutes of her arrival at Beldame, for had she put it off, it might not have been accomplished yet. The very air was soporific, the food swung in the belly like ballast from meal to meal, the furniture seemed specifically designed to accommodate the human form in sleep. There was nothing sharp at Beldame, even the corners of the houses seemed rounded off. There were no sudden or shrill noises, for the surf never left off its masking roar. Worry, clever thought, conversation all were crushed by the weight of the atmosphere.

  Days and nights were dull, but they were never tedious. The autumn before, India and Luker had gone to England together, and ridden the train from London to Glasgow. The Midlands were stupidly industrial, the Lake Country magnificent, but it was the unending monotonous barren hills of southwestern Scotland that most intrigued India and her father. There was grandeur in a vista that was wholly and even aggressively uninteresting. So it was with Beldame: nothing happened there, nothing could happen there. Days were entirely characterized by the weather: it was a hot day, or it was a day that wasn’t so very hot; it rained, or it looked as if it might rain; or it had rained yesterday but would probably be only hot today. India had quickly lost the flow of the days of the week: time divided itself into brief arbitrary runs of hot days and rainy days. The words yesterday and tomorrow might have been excised from their vocabulary: for yesterday had entertained nothing that was worth today’s speech, and tomorrow could promise no change from today. Transfixed, as out of a train window, India stared at life at Beldame.

  The Savage house rose early, and the McCray house rose late; and the time of everyone’s rising, that never varied more than a quarter of an hour, constituted the length and breadth of the morning’s conversation. Odessa stood in the kitchen and prepared a succession of breakfasts. Late in the morning, everyone but India and Odessa lay upon the beach for an hour or so, and it was rare that they did not all fall directly asleep again. At noontime when the sun was so strong that not even Luker could abide it, everyone came inside and worked crossword puzzles, or read paperback books someone had bought in Mobile fifteen years before, or worked one of the great jigsaw puzzles that was always laid out on the McCrays’ dining room table. At one o’clock, by which time breakfast had been sufficiently digested, they sat down to lunch; and after lunch, they returned to their frivolous occupations for half an hour before they began to yawn, stretching out on gliders or climbing unsteadily into hammocks to sleep. During all the long afternoon, Odessa sat and worked at the jigsaw. It infuriated India that the black woman’s proficiency was never augmented by her long hours at the puzzle; she remained abysmally slow at it always.

  If food or other supplies were wanted or laundry needed to be done, Luker or Leigh or Dauphin drove over to Gulf Shores at low tide, when the channel was clear. India, not having completely excised the notion that Beldame was a place to escape from, had gone along on the first couple of these small expeditions; but she found that after Beldame, Gulf Shores was but a tawdry, cramped place. The people she saw there were not the kind to excite her imagination: in fact they were of the sort actually to depress her, possessing money certainly but not enough taste to hang around their necks on a string. It was the Redneck Riviera indeed. So after those first two trips India let the others go to Gulf Shores alone, and herself treasured an even more deserted Beldame.

  In the late afternoon when the sun had abated its strength, everyone went back out onto the beach, and even India allowed herself a little time in the waves. The water on the Gulf side was always bright and clean, and even the scant seaweed there looked as if it had been fresh-washed. India, not used to swimming in the sea, had asked if she might not go in the calmer St. Elmo’s Lagoon, but Leigh had told her that no one swam there since Odessa’s little girl Martha-Ann had drowned eleven years before.

  “Oh,” cried India, “I didn’t even know that Odessa was married!”

  “She isn’t,” said Big Barbara, “and it’s a good thing too, considering what Martha-Ann’s father is like. Johnny Red gardened for us one year, and he stole my best azaleas!”

  India’s favorite spot was the little course through which St. Elmo’s Lagoon and the Gulf were connected twice a day. It was about thirty feet wide, dry at low tide, and about three feet deep at high. Despite this shallowness, Luker warned her not to wade across it when it was full, and when she asked the reason for the caution, he was annoyingly vague. But at high tide, when the water of the Gulf rushed across and made of Beldame an island, India and Big Barbara sat at the edge of the channel and fished for crab with cane poles and minnows that India had captured with a large strainer. It was a homely occupation that brought grandmother and granddaugh
ter closer than a hundred intimate conversations could have done.

  These attenuated afternoons were an exquisite time, warm but not hot, with golden, lambent light, lasting always a little longer than they imagined it would, slipping suddenly into night. When the sun touched the horizon, they came in off the beach—waving and snapping their towels in the air, as if in ritualized farewell to the day—rolled out of the hammock and wandered inside the house, or trekked slowly back along St. Elmo’s Lagoon to watch the evening phosphorescence rise.

  Supper was usually no more than a potful of boiled crab; and the taste was so sweet and fresh that they never grew tired of it. Evenings at Beldame passed with surprising swiftness. There was no television, and the single transistor radio was reserved for emergencies or terrible weather. They worked on the puzzle or played cards or word games or Scrabble and Parcheesi. India did her needlework and Odessa, sitting in the most distant corner, read the Bible. At ten o’clock, or a little later, everyone went to bed and immediately fell asleep, as if exhausted by a day of emotional frenzy or unceasing labor.

  India, rather to Luker’s surprise, had taken immediately to Beldame, rarely spoke of New York, and never expressed the wish to return there speedily. She said, in fact, that she would be content to remain on the Gulf until Labor Day, the Wednesday after which she must begin school. Luker himself, who had long subsisted on late evenings and a wide acquaintance, had expected to chafe in the solitude of Beldame as much as his daughter. But he adapted as readily, reconstructing other indolent summers spent there. He did nothing, he thought of nothing; he didn’t even bother to feel guilty that he was not working. When Big Barbara asked him if he could afford to take so long a time off, he replied: “Oh, hell, the day before I leave, I’ll take a couple of rolls of pictures; and then the whole trip can come off of my taxes.”

  “But you’re not earning anything while you’re here.”

  “I could stand to be in a lower bracket this year.” He shrugged. “Don’t worry about me, Barbara. If I lack in September, I’ll come begging.”

  Leigh had always been happy at Beldame—Leigh was happy anywhere, and under all circumstances. But this for her was one of the most pleasant interludes, following so closely as it did on the death of her mother-in-law. Against Marian Savage, Leigh spoke not a word now; after all, the woman was dead and could never defeat her again.

  Dauphin perhaps benefited most from the seclusion of Beldame: away from his business, away from the Great House, away from friends’ clumsy ministrations to his grief. Marian Savage was truly mourned by only one person: her son, although he had little cause to love her as he did. Sister Mary-Scot had never made a pretense of affection for Marian Savage, and had at thirteen made a vow to God that if she were not married by the time she finished college, she would go into a convent. She refused two proposals in her junior year, and took her final vows on her twenty-third birthday.

  Luker wondered that Beldame didn’t remind Dauphin as much of Marian Savage as had the Great House in Mobile, but to this Leigh replied, “There were times that Dauphin came here without her, and I have the feeling that he believes she’s still alive back in Mobile and that he’s just enjoying a little vacation away from her. You’ll notice that he didn’t bring Nails. Nails would have been too much of a reminder that Marian was dead.” But whatever Dauphin’s thoughts and motives, his spirit improved markedly over the weeks and something like cheer was added to his equable temperament and gentleness.

  It was only Big Barbara who suffered in any degree, and that was because of the alcohol deprivation. She did not go into fits, but sometimes in the late afternoon she had urges to spin right down into the sand like a dervish or to scrape her skin with broken shells because of the impossibility of getting a drink. In her rare moments of anger she was more sullen and louder than was usual with her. She was irritable, impatient, restless, and always hungry. And it was only grudgingly she admitted that she felt a good deal better than she had in some months. In a particularly weak moment she promised that when they opened the cage and let her fly back to Mobile, she would continue her abstinence, “Though I know everybody in town is gone be saying I went to Houston to get Dr. DeBakey to remove that glass from my hand . . .”

  Odessa was Odessa, and day in and day out voiced neither wish nor complaint but was at all times content and placid.

  CHAPTER 13

  In fact, Beldame as a whole for these weeks was content and placid, but the inhabitants realized this only when it abruptly ceased to be so, one Thursday morning late in June. It was then, just at the time that India was having her first cup of coffee, that Lawton McCray appeared in their midst, having arrived not in a jeep or a Scout, but in a small boat that he had rented in Gulf Shores. With him he brought a tall fat man who wore large glasses and a rumpled seersucker suit. Lawton was greeted with mild surprise, for his visit had not been at all anticipated; and his companion was treated with offhanded politeness, except by Dauphin, who was sincerely cordial to everyone.

  And it was Dauphin whom they had come to see; and Dauphin, Lawton and the man in the rumpled suit—whose name was Sonny Joe Black—forthwith closeted themselves in the Savage living room.

  “Lawton’s funds must be running low,” said Luker to his mother on the verandah of the McCray house. “Leigh,” he said, talking over his shoulder to his sister, “you ought to tell Dauphin not to give Lawton a penny. It’ll be down the tubes if he does.”

  “But what if Lawton wins!” cried Big Barbara.

  “Then Dauphin will just have to learn to live with the guilt of having helped to elect such a man to national office,” replied Luker.

  Half an hour later, Lawton McCray ambled across the yard alone. A light rain was falling so that even the bristling white sand, pockmarked and shelled, seemed to take on the grayness of the sky. He sat on the swing next to his wife.

  “Lawton,” remarked Big Barbara, “we had no idea to expect you today!”

  “If y’all would get a telephone put in here I could have called. They got phones in Gasque, they could have ’em out here.”

  “Dauphin doesn’t want to ruin the view with telephone poles,” said Leigh, “and I agree with him. We’ve never had a telephone out here, and we can get along all right a while longer I guess.”

  “Barbara,” said her husband, “how you doing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “How’s she doing?” asked Lawton of his son.

  “She’s just fine,” replied Luker sullenly. Lawton always spoiled Luker’s day.

  “She’s just fine!” cried Leigh and India together, before they had to be asked.

  “Who’s that man you brought out here?” demanded Luker. “What’s he want with Dauphin?”

  “Oh, you know,” said Lawton McCray, “talking business—just talking business.”

  “What kind of business, Daddy?” asked Leigh.

  Lawton McCray slowly shrugged his wide soft shoulders, and instead of answering his daughter’s question, he said, “I wanted to talk to y’all ’bout something for a few minutes. Now I can pretty much tell that all of you are having just about the time of your lives down here”—he glanced around the gray rainy vista that Beldame afforded that afternoon—“but it sure would be a favor to me if y’all would just think about coming back to Mobile for a few days around the Fourth. There’s gone be meetings and parties and all like that and it wouldn’t do me a bit of harm in the world, Barbara, if you went to a couple of ’em with me.”

  “You sure you trust me to get through it all right? You not afraid I’m gone throw up on the after-dinner speaker?”

  “I can tell, Barbara, you’re doing just real good down here. Luker and Leigh—they’ve been taking good care of you. It’s made a difference. If you would, I’d appreciate it if you’d come back for a few days—Fourth’s on Tuesday, I could use you ’bout Saturday to Wednesday, I s’pose. Some of those things you can go to with me, and some of ’em you can go to by yourself.”

&nbs
p; “Oh, Lawton,” smiled Big Barbara, with shy gratitude creeping into her voice, “ ’course I’ll come up. You want Leigh and Dauphin too?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt. Never hurts to have Dauphin round—everybody thinks so high of Dauphin. And Leigh too. Nobody in Mobile got as much money and respect as Dauphin. You two doing all right since Marian died, aren’t you?” he asked his daughter.

  “We’re okay,” said Leigh.

  “When’s the money coming through?”

  “Don’t know yet,” replied Leigh. “Dauphin’s got to go up in a few days and see about the will.”

  “Don’t you want Luker and me to represent you too?” asked India blandly.

  “Yeah,” laughed Luker, “India and I’ll give your campaign a little New York class. How’s that?”

  “Thank you, Luker,” replied Lawton heavily. “’Preciate it, India. I’m glad to get anybody’s support, but I tell you, if y’all had rather just hang on here at Beldame, I’m not gone beg you away. I know y’all don’t get down here too often, and there’s no reason for y’all to have to mix in an election that y’all don’t really have much to do with . . .”

  “I tell you what, Lawton,” said Luker, “one afternoon we’ll ride over to Belforest, and I’ll take a publicity photo of you standing on a pile of fertilizer.”

  “Really do ’preciate it, Luker,” said Lawton gravely. “We’ll see about it.” He pulled at the sleeve of his shirt, which was damp with water that had fallen from the roof and splashed on the porch railing. “Well, y’all, I am about to be drowned out here. I am going inside and wait for Sonny Joe to get finished talking to Dauphin. Barbara, you want to come inside and talk to me for a couple of minutes?”

  A little nervously, Big Barbara assented and followed her husband into the house.