by Noah Broyles
“Oh, I don’t think we should,” she said to his proffered hand. “I’m pretty dirty.”
“I don’t mind.”
The palm that hugged hers was pleasantly arid. It stayed a little too long, though, and squeezed a little too tight, as if trying to extract something. Quickly, under its heat, she became aware of the gritty itch of residual dirt on her skin.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, backing up a bit.
“Do some wading?”
He smells me.
“No. Tripped. Down by the dock.”
“Yeah, folks have commented on the soil in our part of the county. Kinda silty and unstable in places. Great for gardening, though, despite what you’d think. Don’t suppose you care for gardening?”
“I . . . I’ve never really had the opportunity.”
“Well, you will if you decide to stay. In the past, that garden behind the house has been full of the prettiest daffodils.”
“I hate—” Her hands balled together. “I hate to say it, but I think I’ll head back up to the house. Kinda want to get cleaned up.”
“Let me give you a ride.”
Her fiancé jumped in. “No need. We wouldn’t want to get dirt in your car.”
“It’s just right up the road,” Missy added. “Y’all stay and talk.”
“In that case, it was a pleasure meeting you, Missy.”
“Likewise, Sheriff.”
“Ezra.”
“Ezra.”
“I’ll be right along,” her fiancé said, and she nodded and slipped off into the dark.
The skin between her fingers was itching from the dirt and from his handshake. But she couldn’t rub it out because her fingers were still locked fists.
The daffodil in the dance hall this afternoon—he had placed it there. He had come in and stuck it in the floorboards. He had left it where he knew she would find it. It meant her fiancé was innocent; that was a relief. But it also meant a stranger knew something. A sliver of darkness from more than a decade ago.
How?
He was a backwater lawman hundreds of miles from where she had grown up. No. Her fiancé didn’t know, and he didn’t know. Missy quickened her pace and soon reached the drive. As the house appeared through the bending oaks, her footsteps slowed. It was now fully night, and they had left no lights on inside.
Someone had placed the flower in there. A reminder of her wretchedness.
7
This night’s activities had been caged in my mind for the past two weeks, clawing to get out.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
Light came through from the central hallway behind her. It stretched Missy’s shadow out long and black as she stood before the dining room table. But it did not erase the thing lying in the murk of her silhouette.
She had noticed it first just before dinner, and then again while they ate. Maybe it was just the slant of the light, she had thought. But it remained after the light was gone. It lay there now. A human shape, five feet long, buried in the surface of the wood.
Not a shape. A stain.
Not a dust stain. She had already tried wiping the table down earlier. But perhaps something had been spilled on it at some point, removing the finish.
She looked down at the items in her hands and found them trembling, just a bit. The buzz from the riverbank lingered in her fingertips. She set the things on the table: a butter knife, an old can of varnish from beneath the sink, and a dry washrag.
Using the knife, she pried the lid off the can. As she had guessed from its weight, it was empty.
Still, some residue clung in the seam at the bottom. Scraping it up with the rag, Missy leaned out and smeared the varnish across the wood.
She was so intent on the scrubbing, her ears so filled by the hiss of the cloth, that she didn’t notice when her shadow on the table changed. Swelled. Reached for her.
“Working kinda late, huh?” Hands crawled up her back.
She jerked up and turned. “Oh. Didn’t hear you come in.”
“Been upstairs and took a bath already.” He was close, wearing his cobalt bathrobe. His wet hair was combed straight back. “What’s going on?”
Reaching back, she pressed on the base of her spine to relieve the throb from crouching. “I wanted to . . . work on the table.”
He took the rag from her and tossed it away, then clasped her hands. “I admire your dedication, but it’s enough for today. You haven’t even seen the bedroom yet.”
She watched him examine her fingertips. “They feel funny. Since I fell at the riverbank.”
“Funny?”
“Like . . . ants crawling all over them.”
“Just tired, I bet.” He massaged her knuckles.
“I wonder if there was something in the dirt by the water. Acid or something.”
“But you washed them off. Though not the rest of you.” He came in even closer, and she leaned back on the edge of the table as he kissed just below her ear.
“No, I’m dirty.”
“I like it. You still smell like the river.”
The odor of her soiled clothes mixing with the crisp scent of his aftershave churned her stomach.
Missy blinked as he touched her lips, tracing them into a smile. Their faces drifted nearer. Lips chanced together, then fused. He tasted warm and bland, like bathwater.
At the Club, she’d done enough kissing to perform the act with oblivion, and so she was aware of being nudged farther back until she was sitting on the table. Her right hand left his neck to grip the table’s edge, preventing any farther movement toward the center.
Toward the shape.
When he moved from her lips to her neck, she let her other hand slip off his shoulder onto the edge, holding herself up, head back, giving him clear access as he unbuttoned the top of her blouse.
The room was dusky enough that the green walls were gray and the yellow drapes were green. She imagined it bright, for some reason. Searing. The roof gone and sun dumping in. As her hands skated back and forth on the table edge, she imagined the skin flaking away. The muscles and tendons drying up. Her hands shriveling like root clumps pulled from the dirt. Nothing but bone below the wrist where the muck had touched her.
The ground is cursed, Grandmama had said. The ground is cursed. Cain shoulda known that.
“Cain,” she whispered.
“What?”
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. She opened her eyes and felt his kisses evaporating off her neck. “Cain,” she repeated. “Cain was cursed.”
Straightening, he combed back her hair. “What are you saying?”
“Cain and Abel. You went to church when you were little.”
“What about it?”
“Cain wanted to sacrifice vegetables to God, but he was rejected. And then he was cursed. Sent away like he was nothing. He could never escape the curse no matter where he went in the entire empty world. He was marked. I always felt sorry for him.”
“Where’d you get that? Did you read that in the encyclopedia?”
“My grandmama.”
“Well, no one feels sorry for Cain. He was a real bastard.” He unfastened the last button and cool air touched her belly as he pulled her blouse apart.
“But it wasn’t fair.”
A single finger climbed her navel. “It was the first and fairest trial ever.”
“But it was God’s fault the ground was cursed, so he shouldn’t have rejected Cain.”
The finger stopped below her bra. His drying hair had fallen around his temples. “God cursed the ground, but he didn’t curse Cain for bringing fruit to offer. He told him he could do better. Cain’s response? Murdered his brother so he wouldn’t have to live with a reminder of his failure. And then the earth opened her mouth to recei
ve his brother’s blood. That means Cain buried him in the same ground his crops grew from. God’s response? He didn’t kill Cain; he exiled him. Pretty lenient, if you ask me.”
“But he was marked.” She could feel heat balling up in her throat. That feeling that would come right before Grandmama would call her petulant, a real chore. “The Mark of Cain. So everyone would know what he did. So it would stick to him always. Follow him. No peace.”
Her fiancé smiled plastically, then shrugged. “I’m sorry you don’t like the house.”
“What?”
“It’s simple. You’ve found something about this place you don’t like and connected it to having the Mark of Cain.”
“And you don’t think something’s going on? Why you’re here is because something is going on!”
“And why are you here? Because you wanted more than what we had in Nashville.”
“Because I wanted you. There, you were always going off. Coming around every few days: ‘Time to let the dog out; gotta water the plant.’”
Something simmering moved in his eyes. “Well, here I am. God knows why you want me, but here I am.”
Her breath hitched. “Back up.”
Incredulous, he moved away. She slid off the table and walked down the length of it, then turned, flexing her finger once to ease the pressure before pointing. “Right there. See it?”
“See what?”
“The discoloration. See how the wood is grayer? Before dinner, I wiped the table down, but not all the dust would come off. While we were eating, I noticed the leftover stuff formed a pattern. I thought it was just the light, but then I polished it and it’s still there.”
He squinted. “Someone spilled something that removed the finish.”
“No, it’s part of the table.” She bent out, scraping at the wood. “It’s like a body. Like someone lying there on their back.”
He was unfazed. His expression remained the same.
She straightened. “You don’t care. You just came down here to lay me on this table.”
He walked toward her, hand brushing the tops of the chairs as he passed them. When he reached her, he leaned in close, but then picked up his glasses where he had left them at dinner. “I just came for these.” He put them on.
Deflated, she battled on. “Someone came in here earlier. While we were both upstairs, moving your desk. I found a flower right in there, right on the floor.” She pointed to the dark dance hall doorway. “It had just been cut.”
“I’ll talk to the sheriff.”
“You don’t believe me.”
He smiled ruefully at her, like she was a picture that each day hung obstinately crooked. “I do. This house was important to the community. Folks might poke around. But I don’t want you alarmed.” Nimbly, he buttoned up her blouse.
When he fastened the last button, he took her hands. “If you’re concerned there may have been something in the river soil, I would in all seriousness recommend a bath. I left the tub full.” He kissed her forehead lightly, tenderly. “I’ll be in the study for a few hours. Don’t wait up.”
She drew breath to reply, but then swallowed it. She listened as he washed his hands in the kitchen. He was finished with her for the night. As his measured steps creaked up the stairs, she dug the tattered gum pack from her pocket and sucked the last piece from its wrapper, chewing it hard.
When his footsteps were gone, she followed their echoes down the hall. A switch by the staircase shut off the ceiling lights, casting the lower floor in darkness. A thrill she had felt when she was little, running from the bathroom to her bed to avoid the demons, brushed against her now. She didn’t run.
Everyone thinks the same thing when they’re little, Grandmama had told her tiredly.
And I thought I was so special, Missy thought to herself now as she steadily climbed the stairs, her palm skimming the rail, the slim scratches in the wood evoking the tingle of the river mud.
A bath wasn’t a bad idea.
She went down the hall and found the doorway to the main bedroom. She walked in and stood in the center of the room for a minute, turning, chewing her gum, examining the furnishings and drapes. It was grand, even compared to the rest of the house, and tidy, as if specially prepared for her. Well, tidy except for the two black circles painted over the hall doorway like eyes. Paint would solve that. And the canopy bed looked luxurious. She’d always wanted a canopy bed.
The doorway to the bathroom was dark and dreamy with steam. Floorboards murmured as she crossed toward it.
The white tile floor would glare, so she decided against turning on the lights. The yellow glow from the bedroom would do.
A hanger stood beside the tub, the gallows for a bathrobe. She hung her clothes on it and stepped into the water, pausing to tie up her thick hair. A brief, toppling sensation touched her as she sat down, just like the one she had felt that afternoon when she first entered the house.
An almost smile twitched her lips as she lay back. Since he always drew it scalding, the water was just now cooling to something comfortable. The dimness was nice, and she could feel a window in the wall behind her. The night breathed on her neck.
The earth has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood. She’d forgotten about that line until he’d referenced it. Now it returned, spoken in Grandmama’s tired voice. Missy always wondered how long the earth kept its mouth open, and why it wanted to drink blood.
Leaning her head back, she extended her legs into the water until her feet encountered a hard nub at the end of the tub. The plug. She closed her eyes and listened to the water lap against the sides.
8
The house was still when I finally departed, and midnight was approaching.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
Brad left the lights in the study on. If she woke up and cared where he was, she could look down the hall and think he was working.
Carrying his shoes, he slipped down the stairs. Each careful step elicited a half-asleep animal whine from the planks, and he shifted as much weight as possible to the railing. The railing’s strange scars pinched his palm, adding to the prickling sensation of the Prozac withdrawing from his body.
At the bottom of the stairs, his socked feet whispered across the floor to the front door. As he turned the lock, he noticed that the nose-parching smell of dust was gone, replaced by a thick, damp odor, like the underside of a rock.
Probably from the basement. It didn’t matter; the hour he’d spent all week waiting for had finally arrived.
Outside, he locked the door and put on his shoes. The scent of pine and the cautious er-ee, er-ee, er-ee from a small choir of cicadas occupied the clearing. He crossed the gravel to the dark hunk of his car and opened the trunk. Just to be sure.
His hand plowed through a jungle of empty drink bottles, fast-food bags, newspapers, and newspaper-wrapped artifacts. He recognized by touch the old Sony voice recorder he had bought off eBay to conduct his first interviews. The mysterious glass elephant figurines from his twelfth article. The bloodstained ball cap from the woods of south Georgia, a possession of one of the University of Tampa hikers who had been mutilated there in 2010. Things he should have given to the police. Relics of a clumsy career.
At the bottom of the mess, his grip closed around the item he’d been looking for. Lifting it out, he examined the shovel in the distant light that drifted down from the study windows. This had been his first purchase after witnessing the old woman’s burial. The barcode sticker still clung to the blade. He tore it off and tossed it in the trunk—just another useless bookmark, just another piece of detritus, like the rest of it. He examined the shovel again, feeling the weight. Then he put it in the trunk, too, and got in the car.
Briefly, he glanced at the house, at the bright study windows. What would happen if she came down the hall and foun
d he was not in the study? Not in the house. As if he didn’t care.
She knows I do.
He started the car and hurried it down the driveway, onto the nameless island road. The clay-stained bridge passed as a blur and a bump. The endless dark of the tree tunnel road swallowed him. His hands climbed unsteadily up and down the wheel, body still thirsty for the sedative.
She knows I need her. I know she needs me.
The headlights lit up the greens and browns of the forest canopy like daytime seen through dark glasses, unfolding into his untired, unblinking eyes, pushing him down the tunnel of memory to the night when he was fourteen and decided to stop taking the stuff. The night he told his mom the gecko was dead.
She’d hauled him down to PetSmart a month after he started on the drugs because his lethargy hadn’t lifted. He needed a spur. A spark. Taking care of something would teach him to take care of himself. But the tiny pale green creature just sat in its ceramic cave and never came out. It jumped off Brad’s unsteady hands when he tried to hold it.
So, he stopped holding it. He just dumped the bag of crickets his mom brought home each Friday into the tank and left it alone. The months passed, and its tail got thinner, and dead crickets carpeted the aquarium. And then it was dead.
She didn’t say anything at first. She went into the garage and got a hand shovel and held it out. “This is what happens, Brad, when you stop caring.”
It only took one scoop in the small backyard to make a grave. He hadn’t expected to cry when the lizard’s weightless form fell off his palm into the hole. But he did. Not because it was dead. Because he thought he was like the lizard, and she had stopped caring. She was feeding him pills and leaving him alone and waiting for him to die.
Brad’s hands locked in place on the steering wheel.
He glanced briefly in the rearview mirror at the small patch of pavement visible, lit scarlet by the brake lights, leading back to the island.