The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  They knew how easy it was to forget Beldame, whose chief attraction was its very emptiness. In Mobile one was caught up by excitement, by the demands of friends and business and checking accounts, and one forgot how pleasant the days had been and peaceful the nights. The constant lassitude and indulgent laziness would no longer seem a thing to be desired.

  Though no one dared mention it, it was also possible that in future years there would be no Beldame to return to. Dauphin had given his assurance that he would not sell the place, but not one of the family underestimated Lawton McCray’s powers of persuasion or his underhandedness.

  It was a sickening thought: Beldame in the hands of the oil companies. The houses demolished, St. Elmo’s Lagoon slicked over in oil, the porpoises in the Gulf shredded by the propellers of motorboats—what horrors did they not imagine?

  The five days were permeated with nostalgia; nostalgia for what Beldame had always been, for their scant month together, for the times there that they might now never know. And that last week of June was the hottest that anyone could remember; even Odessa was brought to say that she could not recall any time at Beldame that was more uncomfortable. These were the longest days of the year: each morning the sun rose early and bright in a cloudless sky. A thermometer was nailed outside the Savage kitchen window, and by eight o’clock each morning it read above ninety degrees. Ten o’clock was appreciably warmer, and no one could step outside between eleven and four.

  In the morning they put on bathing suits and did not take them off again. Odessa’s cotton print dress was stained with perspiration from breakfast on, and she must wash it out each night. No one wanted to eat for all food tasted spoiled. No one wanted to read or work puzzles or even talk. They crept into shaded corners in the interior rooms, and strung hammocks inside for maximal circulation of air around their bodies. And as much as they could, they slept through the daylight hours. Sleep at night was impossible, and they turned, sweating, on top of the sheets. There were no breezes then. Sometimes India and Luker snuck naked out of the house past midnight and swam for a hour in the Gulf, hoping for relief from the heat, but even this late the water temperature was above 80 degrees. Big Barbara stuck an oscillating fan on a straight-backed chair, and it blew over her all night long. She would try to kick off stifling covers that weren’t there. Leigh and Dauphin slept at opposite edges of their double bed, fearful of touching one another, their bodies were so hot.

  And through all this—the straining heat and the worrisome uneasiness over the fate of Beldame—they forgot about the third house. When nothing distracted them—and God knew there were few enough distractions at Beldame in general—the third house was a lowering, sullen, potent presence; but the sun and the sun’s heat that persisted from nightfall to dawn burned away their thoughts and if there was any fear it was the fear of losing Beldame altogether.

  India, invariably the last to be served breakfast, was alone with Odessa in the kitchen on the second of the five mornings left to them. She asked the black woman if she had ever known the like weather before, and Odessa replied, “No, never did. And it means something too, child.”

  “Means what?” asked India curiously.

  “Means something’s gone happen.”

  “Like what? A tornado you mean? Or a hurricane?”

  Odessa shook her head slowly, and turned away.

  “You mean,” said India carefully, for she had learned that in Alabama a direct question is not always the best way of obtaining an answer, “we have to be careful.”

  Odessa nodded. “That’s right, child. We have to be careful . . .”

  “About things . . .” said India, prodding.

  “That’s right, child. About things.”

  Odessa had taken a baking pan from a cabinet next to the sink.

  “Odessa, you’re not going to bake anything, are you? Can you imagine what this room would be like if you turned on the oven!”

  “I’m not gone bake, child.” Odessa sat beside her at the kitchen table. “Ever’body’s in the other house, ain’t they?”

  India nodded. “Just you and me here,” she said. Odessa said nothing then, and India went on cautiously, “Are you going to tell me how to be careful?”

  Odessa pushed the baking pan, old and dented and rusted, a few inches toward India.

  India placed a finger in the corner of it and pulled it nearer. “What do I do with it?”

  “Go outside,” whispered Odessa, “and go round to the other side of the third house—don’t let ’em see you, ’cause they’ll stop you. Go round there and fill this up with sand and bring it back in here to me.”

  India’s brows contracted, and something welled in her of old systems of rationality. What Odessa asked her to do made no sense.

  “You sure this is—”

  Odessa slapped the pan away. It slid to the edge of the table then dropped onto the floor with a clatter. “Get on out of here, child, if you’re not gone believe what I say to you!”

  With hands sweaty not only with the heat but her chagrin at having offended the black woman, India leaned down and picked up the pan. “Odessa,” she said, “please let me go. If you say we have to be careful, then I know we do. You know what I saw in the third house, don’t you? You know who’s in there, don’t you? And that’s why you won’t go, isn’t it?” India expected Odessa to try to stop her mouth again, but Odessa only stared steadfastly into her face.

  “Martha-Ann’s in the third house,” whispered India. “I saw her crawl out of the sand.”

  There was no surprise on Odessa’s face. “Wasn’t Martha-Ann,” she said after a few moments. “Just something pretending to be Martha-Ann. Something that wanted to fool you.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” said India, glad that she could not see the third house from the kitchen window. “When I saw that little girl come up out of the sand—and it was horrible!—I had never even heard of Martha-Ann. I didn’t even know that she had drowned in the lagoon. So it had to be the ghost of Martha-Ann in there. It couldn’t have been out of my own imagination because why would I dream about somebody I never even heard of?”

  “What’s in that house, child, knows more than you know. What’s in that house don’t come out of your mind. It don’t have to worry ’bout rules and behaving like a spirit ought to behave. It does what it does to fool you, it wants to trick you into believing what’s not right. It’s got no truth to it. What it did last week it’s not gone be doing today. You see something in there, it wasn’t there yesterday, it’s not gone be there tomorrow. You stand at one of them doors thinking something’s behind it—nothing’s behind it. It’s waiting for you upstairs, it’s waiting for you downstairs. It’s standing behind you. You think it’s buried in the sand, why then, it’s gone be standing behind that door after all! And you don’t ever know what it is you looking for. You don’t ever know what it is you gone see! Wasn’t no ghost you saw, wasn’t Martha-Ann.”

  “Then I don’t understand—”

  Odessa rattled the pan on the tabletop. India understood and rose immediately. “Go out the front,” said Odessa, “don’t let ’em see you.”

  India crept through the house, holding the pan behind her back, and went out the front door of the Savage house. St. Elmo’s Lagoon was a blinding mirror laid in a frame of blinding white sand. After making sure no one was on the verandah of the McCray house, she ran along the edge of the lagoon and around to the end of the spit. The third house stared down at her from over the top of the dune.

  She plunged the pan into the dune and buried it; then she drew it out again and leveled the heap of white sand off the top. It was pure sand and purely white: without darker grains, without impurities, without insects or the remains of plants or crushed seashells. And it was remarkably heavy.

  She walked slowly back to the house, staring down at the pan all the while, careful not to spill any of what she had taken away. She felt as if she were being watched from the third house; without looking up,
she could even tell from which window she was observed: the side window of the back right bedroom. She dared not look up, certain that she would see Martha-Ann there—or whatever pretended to be the drowned girl.

  Odessa pointed to the table, and India put the pan down between them. From the pocket of her dress, Odessa took a letter envelope bearing a stamp that was at least twenty years old, and held open the slit top for India to look inside.

  It contained seeds. She poured them out into India’s cupped hands.

  “You can’t grow anything in sand,” said India. “Nothing will grow in this. It doesn’t have any nutrients. Water goes right through, that’s—”

  Odessa’s gaze silenced her, and India sprinkled the seeds over the surface of the sand. “Should I cover them up?” India asked meekly.

  Odessa shook her head. She rose and from the drawer beside the sink fetched a paring knife. Holding her left hand over the tray, Odessa deliberately sliced open her thumb. Thick red blood welled out of the top joint and dripped into the sand. Odessa ignored India’s protest and methodically drenched the seeds. The blood sank quickly into the sand, leaving little more than a thin brown crust atop.

  A corner of the pan she left untouched, and dapped her uninjured hand over the cut thumb to stanch the bleeding. She looked steadily at India.

  “Here,” said India quietly, holding her own thumb over the white corner, “but you have to do it, I’m squeamish.”

  Odessa nicked the girl’s finger, and guided the flow of blood.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” said India. “We’re both out of our minds for doing something like this.”

  “You put a Band-aid on that,” said Odessa, pushing her hand away. “Then come back in here. I don’t care how hot it is, you and me got to do a little baking today.”

  It was a simple white-bread dough that Odessa prepared, and it was with such perfect unconcern that she went about the task that India became convinced it had nothing to do with the baking pan, the sand, the seeds, and the blood. At noon Big Barbara, Luker, Leigh and Dauphin trooped over from the McCray house for a lunch of hamburgers, and just the burners on top of the stove made the kitchen nearly unbearable.

  After lunch, India declared that she would stay over and help Odessa with the dishes. When the others had gone, Odessa took out the bowl of dough, which in only an hour and a half had risen to almost triple its original bulk. She gave it to India to knead, and told her it must be a quarter-hour by the clock, and not a minute less.

  “Odessa, I just don’t understand how you can think of lighting the oven on a day like this. It’s just impossible that—”

  From the pantry Odessa brought out the baking pan. The seeds had sprouted and grown, flowered and fruited—all in the space of two hours. The tray supported a little field of wheatlike plants: pale green and sickly, it was true, but each stalk bore a little run of small black seeds, just like those India had seen in the envelope.

  India hurried over to look but Odessa waved her back. “Don’t stop!” she cried. “Keep going!”

  India returned to her kneading, but repeated under her breath, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!”

  Odessa sat at the table and patiently harvested that unnatural crop, carefully stripping the plants and spilling the seeds into a bowl.

  She was done before India had finished her kneading. “I want to look at those plants,” said India. “What are they? What are they called?”

  Odessa went to the back door, kicked it open and spilled out the pan of sand and spent plants. Returning to the table, she put a handful of seeds back into the envelope she had preserved, and the rest she scattered over a cookie sheet. She lighted the oven and toasted them for ten minutes.

  The kitchen became so hot that she and India were forced out; the perspiration dripped from both to such an extent that it formed wet circles around them on the floor, where they stood silent in the dining room.

  That night, with dinner—sirloin steaks grilled outside, with crab and butter beans on the side—Odessa served homemade rolls.

  “Odessa,” cried Big Barbara, “you and India were crazy out of your minds to be baking in that kitchen today! But these are delicious, and I’m not gone complain too much because there is nothing in the world I like better than a poppy-seed roll.”

  “They’s two dozen,” said Odessa, with a look at India, “and that’s four apiece for ever’body. India and me are gone be real upset if ever’body don’t eat ’em all up.”

  India knew that the seeds on top of the rolls were not poppy, but she said nothing. In the failing afternoon light, when no one was looking, she stooped beside the back door of the Savage house and examined the refuse of the baking pan, where Odessa had thrown it out. The dried blood was flaked and black, and the sudden harvest was already black and rotted.

  Odessa came and stood behind the screen door. India looked up at her. “Are we protected now?” she asked.

  “We done all we could,” said Odessa, and went away again.

  CHAPTER 19

  The morning of the day before they were to leave for Mobile broke hottest of all. The sun rose impossibly bright that morning. They woke—or rather rose, for no one had slept—with the certainty that this was to prove the worst of the days they had suffered through. The Gulf tide withdrew sluggishly and St. Elmo’s Lagoon seemed pressed solid into its bed. The air was heavy with moisture that collected on everything but the white sand itself.

  Breakfast was a hopeless formality; no one could think of food and their coffee was taken iced. They all had hoped for a pleasant last day, but the heat was so oppressive that they hadn’t even the stamina to suffer disappointment. They merely suffered.

  No one talked. Big Barbara and Leigh swung on the verandah of the Savage house, which was away from the sun, and fanned themselves incessantly. India languished on the windowsill in her room, sewing a couple of embroidery stitches every minute and brushing away the gauze curtains that continually blew in her face. Dauphin and Luker sat in the McCray living room, guzzling iced tea and working a jigsaw puzzle of the moon landing. Odessa took her time making the beds of the two houses. But no one said a word: the discomfort of the heat had pushed them past speech.

  Toward noon, Odessa arrived at last in India’s bedroom. The girl looked up and nodded to Odessa; she had come to understand that Odessa’s making the beds in the morning was no chore, but a thing in which she took pride. It was indicative of their altered relationship that India now allowed the black woman, without demur, to wait on her. It showed, India considered perversely, the black woman’s superiority: anyone who could perform menial tasks in a menial’s capacity without loss of dignity was someone to be admired and wondered at.

  When she was finished with the bed, Odessa came to the window. She looked past India’s shoulder to the third house.

  “Nothing is going to happen today,” said India; her voice cracked on the first words she had spoken that morning. “Nothing’s going to happen,” she repeated, when there was no response from Odessa. “It’s much too hot for anything to happen . . .”

  “Spirits live in hell,” said Odessa. “Spirits living in hell don’t feel the heat. It’s spirits living in hell that causes heat like this, that’s what it is. Cain’t you feel ’em, child?” she whispered, nodding toward the third house.

  “Did you see something inside?” cried India, straining against the glare, for the noontime sun beat directly against the back of the third house and bleached it.

  “Listen,” said India, no longer annoyed by Odessa’s habit of not answering questions that were put to her directly, “if something happens, will everybody see it? I mean, if everybody sees it, we’ll know that it’s really real, if you know what I mean.”

  When Odessa left the room India remained at the window, her embroidery laid aside. Intently she watched the third house, but knew that the changes she saw in the windows were attributable only to the movement of the sun across the sky. Nothing would happe
n today, she told herself. How could anything important happen, when their consciousnesses were occluded with this infernal heat?

  No one could eat lunch. Odessa had prepared cold-cut sandwiches, but only Dauphin had the stomach to take more than a few bites, and those he declared made him quite sick. But three great pitchers of iced tea were consumed, and the only reason that they didn’t start on a fourth was that there was no more ice.

  The heat, which had been terrible so early in the morning, had only increased with the hours. No cloud hid the sun; it was low tide and they were the hotter for the increased yardage of sand to reflect the light. Vapor steamed off St. Elmo’s Lagoon in such density that it obscured the peninsular mainland. Big Barbara went to her room and lay down with the fan blowing directly in her face; but soon enough she turned her face away, because it blew only hot air. For the first time, in her weakness, she wept for wanting a drink.