The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  He is coming.

  The thought sent only the slightest ripple across her calm. He was the last wrinkle to be smoothed away.

  She closed the door. She walked to the dance hall threshold and looked in at the roaring assembly. The Three Summers folks hadn’t dressed up for the occasion. She was glad. They were comfortable in their shorts and sandals and T-shirts, sipping drinks in red plastic cups and eating food off paper plates.

  Irons cut through the crowd in his conspicuous white suit and struck up a conversation with Abe Daleder, the problem man. Quickly, she averted her eyes. Instead, she watched a group of men with brass and a bass set up beside the piano and begin to plunk out the jazz tune “What a Little Moonlight Can Do.”

  The men who worked at the mine invited the women who worked in the town to dance. The hall became a hive of motion. The chandelier reflected in the—at last—spotless floor. Missy let her head prop against the door facing. She bathed her eyes in the grandeur of that cut-crystal fixture and the myriad slivers of motion it reflected.

  Almost perfect. Almost home.

  She left the door and stole quietly up the hall, past the kitchen, to the back door. Crossing the screened porch, she descended to the yard. There she found a shovel propped against the steps. She hefted it and walked on.

  The garden beds were in sad shape. The liners had been scattered, and weeds had flooded in to choke the flowers. Her next challenge would be to refurbish this area: turn it into a real garden again.

  Despite the bedlam, she was able to discern the original layout. A circle of outer beds ringing a larger central one. She waded into the central bed and planted the shovel against the dirt. How long since she had dug in the ground? Not since that night twelve years ago.

  Always graves. It would be nice when she could plant flowers instead. A hint of yellow perfume rose out of the weeds. Narrowing her eyes, she discovered, crushed among the weeds, the dying stems and flabby trumpets of some daffodils. The last survivors from early summer.

  Placing her foot on the blade, she bore down. The dryness persisted in her mouth as she dug a shallow trench. The earth was soft, parting easily before the probing shovel blade as she widened and deepened the hole. It rolled off the dress fabric without leaving a mark. As she worked, the sound of piano and brass came through the windows.

  Once she was waist-deep, she decided the hole was deep enough. All the dirt had been piled on one side for easy replacement. Climbing out, she stabbed the shovel into the top of the heap. Then she went back up to the porch and through the back door.

  In the empty kitchen, she washed her hands and sponged her damp forehead. As she passed back down the hall to the front of the house, a frantic knock leapt from the basement door. A muffled voice followed. Someone yelling, words distorted—by a gag, perhaps? Yes, gags were very unpleasant. Irons had been swift with him. She wondered if Dalaeer had scratched Irons like the cat had.

  At the entrance to the dance hall, she paused again, examining the gathering. The eating was over. Couples swayed to the music. By the fireplace, Mr. Irons was speaking with the woman with drizzling black hair who had carried Roy’s body. He glanced toward her, and a slightly pained expression crossed his face.

  Yes, she thought. Another problem. But it must be done if we’re to have any kind of peace.

  A quick, brief rap came at the front door.

  And here’s the last one.

  She went and opened the door. Walt stood there, carefully suited and shaved, mustache sharp. He looked her over. Taking his glasses off, he put them in his jacket, then placed a hand against the doorframe, as if bracing himself.

  “Well, don’t get all settled, darlin’,” Missy said softly. “Come on in.”

  41

  As I was lifted into the air, I saw an angel in a white garment step from the twilight. She held a gun.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  The gunshot jolted Brad from his delirium.

  The tension on the rope released. His elbows hit the roots bordering the chasm. His fingers closed even as pain reverberated up his arms. Lungs airless, he kicked at the wall of the pit, his legs flailing above the drop. How far down did it go? What lay at the bottom? Adrenaline fired through his veins. Arms heaving, he scrambled out over the root.

  For a moment he lay wheezing. His nails felt bent from clawing. His neck burned from the rope. His stomach churned. He peeled the noose over his head and sat up.

  Then he remembered. He was on his feet, searching the glen for the figure in white.

  Sorrel lay twenty feet off at the base of the old oak. Brad approached cautiously.

  The sheriff was sprawled on his back. There was a hole through his green shirt, the fabric rapidly staining darker just below his ribs. The rope had slipped from his hand and dangled above his body.

  Brad turned slowly. Who would . . . ?

  Jennifer stood at the edge of the glen, gripping a revolver. She wore the old woman’s white dress. It fits her so well, he thought strangely. Her face was clean of dirt and her blond hair hung loose. Her gaze moved up from Sorrel’s body.

  “I’m glad you came back, Brad.” She said it brightly, in a voice he’d never heard before. A twangy, childish voice that might have been hers in the years before addiction drowned her family. A calm voice.

  “You’re all right now,” he said hoarsely. He staggered toward her, relief flooding through him.

  “I know.” The gun was pointed at Sorrel. “You’re strong enough to carry him, you think?”

  “Jennifer, what’s—happening?”

  “He’s still breathing.” She sighed. “We should hurry. Pick him up and follow me.”

  Fingering his throat, Brad studied the man for a second. Dizziness swayed him. There was the sheriff, bleeding out on the ground, bony face stretching as he struggled to drag in air. Why had he changed? Attacked him? What was it he had said? The reason he had given? No more monuments to—

  “Brad!”

  Nodding, he stumbled down beside the man. Her sudden appearance had somehow reduced the pulsating pain in the side of his head. He slid his hands under the man’s back and bent, bracing to lift him. Wet, broken words came through the man’s yellowed teeth.

  “Brad, don’t—touch. Don’t move me. Leave me.”

  “You’re shot. I’ll take you inside.” Brad’s knees were watery as he tried to stand.

  “No!” Panic sharpened the sheriff’s voice. “Don’t let her get to me. Don’t let her put me in the ground!”

  “She won’t. We’re going to help you.”

  Shaking, he stood.

  Sorrel twitched but could not resist. His head wobbled as he tried to lift it. Their faces came into proximity, and Brad watched as life dimmed in his enlarged pupils. “No, Brad. You gotta run. I shoulda stopped you sooner. Shoulda . . . shoulda followed those tracks. Shoulda followed them and found my brother, Roy. Shoulda escaped like he did. ’Cause you can’t fix it. Don’t try to fix it. Don’t publish it. It’s in too deep. You gotta escape. I shoulda, like Roy did.”

  The eyes rolled back, exposing the whites, and his neck went lax.

  Holding him close, Brad walked unsteadily toward Jennifer.

  “We need to hurry.” She led him back through the thicket to the gravel clearing. He was weak after the days in the hospital bed. He nearly fell while climbing the front porch steps. But she was safe, at least. In fact, she seemed totally composed.

  It’s inside her now.

  He looked at the sheriff’s lolling head, then at his fiancée.

  Jennifer held open the door and nodded for him to enter. Just inside the vestibule, he stopped. She had transformed the old house into a palace. The floor shone. Light filtered cleanly through the ornate ceiling fixtures. The freshly polished banister of the great staircase glistened.

 
; He wished now for a camera to capture the transformation. But his phone lay broken back among the trees. No way to call for help.

  Music came from the door to his left. Unwittingly, he approached the dance hall.

  “Don’t go in there, Brad,” Jennifer warned.

  He stopped at the threshold. The weight of the man in his arms seemed to double.

  Bodies were strewn across the floor. They wore Sunday clothes and writhed and twisted and arched against the boards, flopping like fish drowning in fresh air. Even Harlow was there, her long body arched, feet at one end, head of loose pale hair at the other, drilling her skull into the floor. Others he had seen—at the funeral, in the town, at the church—all tumbling, flipping over and over as if they were falling.

  And Jezebel Irons was there, sunken on the bench before the piano, clumsily brushing the keys, her nose nearly touching them.

  A blow to his shoulder made him jerk.

  Turning, he found it hadn’t been a blow at all. Jennifer had touched him lightly. “Come away, Brad.” She stepped farther up the hall.

  “Wait.”

  She looked back. Her eyes were far too reflective. As if the transparent membrane had been removed and the soft jelly inside were still hovering in place, ready to spill out. His hope that the sheriff might have been wrong began to dwindle.

  It’s inside her now.

  “Jen, what’s going on here?”

  “Looks to me like they’re settling in for a nap.” The drawl that she had spoken with when they met, that she had worked so hard to lose during nursing school, was back.

  “Now let’s get him settled.”

  The lacquer smell of fresh paint pummeled him as he struggled up the hall behind her.

  “Shouldn’t we lay him down?”

  “We are.” She went to the back door. “Out here.”

  “Jen, he’s bleeding a lot.”

  “So come on, huh?” She held the door wide. A hollow groan escaped Sorrel’s lips as Brad maneuvered onto the porch.

  Three men were slumped in wicker chairs, eyes closed. Air whistled dryly between their lips. Their skin clung closely to their bones. In the steamy evening light, they appeared almost skeletal.

  Jennifer opened the screen door on the far side of the porch, pushing back a horde of mosquitoes. He kept his eyes on the steps as he descended, then followed his fiancée into the garden.

  The grass had been recently cut. The dirt was churned up at the center of several beds, leaving a trampled outer ring of plants. Still stranger were the yellow blossoms rising from the large central bed, softening the air.

  Daffodils don’t flower this deep into summer.

  “All right, lay him down,” Jennifer said.

  Brad slumped to his knees and rolled Sorrel in the grass beside the railroad ties bordering the bed. He stayed down, panting, recovering his strength.

  “His breathing’s really shallow, Jennifer.”

  Without responding, Jennifer stepped into the flower bed. At its center, she knelt.

  For an instant, he saw the old woman lying there, earth raked up around her motionless body. He saw Hettinga in the backyard in Atlanta, mouth full of dirt.

  It dragged them down. Now it’s dragging her down.

  “What are you doing, Jennifer?”

  Jennifer stood up again. She held a shovel in her right hand.

  “Here.” She tossed it at him. He lurched away to avoid being hit. It fell across Sorrel, who twitched. “You strong enough to dig?”

  “What are you doing?” he said again.

  She shrugged, easy, casual.

  “Helping people, like I promised. Now pick up that shovel and dig a hole for me right here in the middle. Don’t worry, it’s not for you.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Her fingers twitched, and then the gun came up.

  “Come on, Brad.”

  “Jennifer.” Cautiously, he sat up straighter on his knees. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  Her reply was a kiddish grin.

  42

  Jennifer would never kill me. But the Queen of Hearts would.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  “Welcome home, baby,” Missy said.

  She shut the door and smoothed the dress around her hips, her eyes climbing up him. “I see that gun under your jacket. And that collar looks awfully tight.” Stepping toward him, she lifted her face. “What? No kiss?”

  Walt’s neck strained back, eyes darting around the hall.

  “New varnish, new paint. Old place cleans up pretty nice, doesn’t she?” Missy said. “And I know you always thought I was dirty, so I took a bath, too. Here, smell my hair.”

  He looked toward the dance hall. “What in God’s name is going on in there?”

  “Oh, that. You remember my silly idea of inviting folks over? Here they are. And you’ll remember I wanted to make this hall a nice soft yellow. I think it turned out pretty good.”

  She tried to touch him, but his shoulder convulsed before her fingers could even brush the cloth. With long, scraping steps, he backed away. His eyes looked into hers and turned murky, trying to tease and taunt her in the way that used to make her laugh. He wanted her to smile and be silly, but her lips stayed flat as she slowly followed him.

  A clunk came from farther up the hall, followed by a muted scream. Walt spun around, hand diving inside his jacket. They both watched as Mr. Irons appeared from behind the stairwell, dragging a bound, kicking figure toward the back door. Ezra’s man, Abe Daleder.

  The bouncy stream of jazz and the hum of conversation from the parlor and the dance hall were surprisingly effective in muting the struggle as the back door opened. They disappeared into the night. Going to the garden.

  The vast calmness cloaking Missy remained even as Walt’s hand reemerged with his snub-nosed .38. He didn’t point it at anything. Instead, he turned back and said, “What are you doing?”

  Studying her dusty toes on the clean floor, Missy wove toward him.

  “That discoloration on your ring finger . . . you move fast. Or had you been seein’ her while we were in Nashville?”

  A huff. “I didn’t come here to wrangle with you, Missy.”

  “Really? Then why did you? To use that, maybe?” Her gaze angled on the gun. “Don’t act surprised. You already struck a deal once to get me put in the ground. I’m sure you’d be plenty capable of doing it yourself this time.”

  “I came because of your letter.”

  “Because it meant I’m alive. That annoying thing is still alive.”

  He gestured with the gun. “Why’d you send it? What do you want?”

  “You know already. I’ve never hid it.”

  “And you know how things are. You’re not stupid, Missy.”

  “Oh, I am. Or I was. Because I didn’t know how things were. I thought I’d found someone who would stay with me. I thought if I were quirky and silly and interesting enough, you might feel something for me besides . . . But what ambitious man wants to be anchored to a former whore and her bastard child?”

  The flush left his flustered face. “Dear God,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not yours.” A tiny bit of triumph in that, at least. “Doesn’t a pregnant woman count as double homicide?”

  “I didn’t come to kill you, Missy.”

  They were close. She reached for the gun. It came up in a heartbeat and coldly kissed her left temple.

  “But if you try anything, I’ll blow your brains out.”

  She could feel her arteries throbbing against the muzzle. Throbbing with the sinking sense of tranquility bleeding up from the boards and drowning her mind. The music and voices in the adjacent rooms were slurring. The whole community packed inside the house was flowing rapidly toward the precipi
ce of sleep. Mr. Irons must be doing his work in the garden.

  Blinking, she found the metal had already warmed against her skin. She leaned her head against it, sniffing the nasal thrill of his fine cologne.

  “We used to have such fun, didn’t we? You said you could have no peace without me. And maybe that’s true in reverse, too.”

  She tried to sway even as the gun bored against her skull.

  “Hear that music, Walt? I wanted so much for me and you to be in there on that big open floor with all the people watching. When we came here I dreamed it. But we can dance out here.”

  “No, Missy.”

  Movement stirred near the top of the stairs.

  Roy’s pinched face withdrawing from between the leaf-work balusters. His tiny footsteps retreated to the upper floor. Leaving her.

  “Please?” She let her eyes drift shut. “You’re gonna have to shoot me, Walt. ’Cause you can’t risk me writing pesky letters to other people. You’ll have to shoot. So let’s just dance for a bit first.”

  She moved gently, and he loosened just enough that they could sway in place, the pistol connecting them.

  “In a few months, you’ll marry that girl you’re wearing the ring for,” Missy murmured. “You’ll start a little family together, and you’ll be happy for a while. You’ll become a DA, then state congressman, and you’ll get to live in Nashville permanently. Sit in the fancy capital building and make laws. But you’ll get tired of that. Eventually, you’ll run for the big boys congress and go up to Washington. But that won’t be enough. There’s always a better club to join, isn’t there? So, you’ll come back home and campaign for senate. But something will happen. Your rival will find pictures from your old trips with me, and he’ll say, Hey! Anyone know who this girl is? And someone else will say, Hey! I found she used to work at a place near Atlanta called the Back Creek Club. Well, that’s bad, but maybe folks would understand.”

  Her feet were warm, her hands tingling. Their watercolor reflections moved on the gleaming floor.

  “Political rivals, though—they would say, Why not try to find that girl? She’s probably livin’ in a trailer park somewhere. Bet she could say some nasty things about him and maybe do some damage. But they’d never find me. My body would have been dumped out in the river or thrown in the woods someplace. It would have rotted away long since. They’d never find any bills of sale or rent for this house, because you cleaned those out. But they would still ask questions. Too many questions. He was with a prostitute? He went on vacation with her to Mobile? Later she disappeared? No trace? And all while he was state prosecutor? Can he explain? You’d try. But they’d take a closer look at the mine case. Maybe ask more about all the people who supposedly died in there. You’d stay in the race, Walt, because a man like you doesn’t quit. But you’d lose. And then it would all fall apart. Divorced by your wife, maybe estranged from your kids. Marked by the public like Cain was marked by God. You’d have to go back to the clubs to find company, back to those filthy places. And when you crept home before light, it would be to a quiet house full of dust.”