The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  The town sheriff, an antagonistic man who dressed in black, arrived at the house soon after I did, but in the company of a true doctor. Upon the pronouncement of death and the departure of the doctor, it was decided that my vehicle should act as hearse to the woman’s body. My decision to linger had resulted in more than I had bargained for: and that excited me. So, I acquiesced, and we placed the body in the car.

  After crossing the clay-stained bridge, the darkness in the tunnel of trees was made heavier by the approaching storm. I switched on the headlights and discovered dozens of cars parked along both sides of the road, sitting crookedly in the depression edging the woods. Under the passing headlight beams, solemn, staring faces faded in and out of existence behind the windshield of each vehicle. The people of Three Summers had come to pay their respects.

  “We’ve been expecting this,” the man in black said by way of explanation.

  “Why didn’t they come to the house?” I asked.

  “That island was her ground,” he replied. “Invitation only.”

  The sheriff refused to tell me the woman’s name but seemed interested in my own romantic status. So, I mentioned Jennifer.

  The community followed in procession through miles of road and rain to a shaggy graveyard on the banks of the river, near a kudzu-wrapped white church. I noticed that as the body was buried, the locals sank into a peculiar reverie. When I approached the grave, I also noticed that the woman had been laid in the ground without a coffin, and as I stared at her I imagined for an instant that her eyes opened, and she stared back.

  This oddity only added to the intrigue of the place. I called Jennifer and asked her to come live with me there—please. For the summer, at least.

  When I called Heather in May, asking for money and promising a blockbuster, it took an hour to convince her. I told her the story of a strange town in which the kudzu came only for the church. I painted a picture of decay, of rot. Of our times. In the end, it was reminiscing about my very first article that won her over. My fiancée took even more convincing. The prospect of a secluded life in western Tennessee did not initially appeal to her. But the financial and emotional extremes we were facing finally convinced her that a strategic withdrawal from the world might do us both good.

  So on the first Saturday in May, we exited the I-40 ramp, she in her Chevy pickup and I in my Accord. We followed the curvy single-lane road from the state highway to Three Summers, and then the tree tunnel road from Three Summers to the island that Sorrel called Angel’s Landing. It was a very quiet two o’clock when we passed beneath the live oaks along the drive. It only occurred to me then that the trees were hundreds of miles beyond their natural coastal habitat.

  The house’s layout was fairly simple. Both floors were split down the middle by high-ceilinged hallways. Rooms opened off these halls, ribs branching from a spine. On the first floor, as you crossed the threshold, the doorway to the dance hall stood to the left and the parlor to the right.

  Down the first-floor hall, the staircase, ornately carved, rose like a cornucopia toward the second floor. Past that, doorways let off to the wide kitchen and the dining room, the latter of which connected back to the dance hall.

  That first afternoon, I found Jennifer lying in there, curled in on herself. She was fine, she assured me. Fine.

  Upstairs, a bathroom and three quiet bedrooms lined the western wing. The master bedroom and connecting master bathroom sprawled with royal abandon down the eastern side, capped near the front of the residence by a musty study and library. I set up base here, in the companionship of such titles as The Coming Race, Justine, and Éloa.

  I waited out the afternoon eagerly anticipating darkness. This night’s activities had been caged in my mind for the past two weeks, clawing to get out. Whether or not the move had been worth it, whether or not I had a story, whether or not I needed to even stay alive depended on what I found tonight.

  I had, of course, conducted as much supplemental research as possible in the week before our arrival. It didn’t result in much. No internet sites made reference to the town or the house. I located the practice of the doctor who had come to the house and pronounced the woman dead, but he refused to sway from the verdict. I also consulted the Register of Deeds at 17 Monroe Street in the county seat of Lexington. The last registered house owners were a couple named John and Ellen King, who purchased the property in 1946. After their abrupt demise, with no heirs and accumulating taxes due, the place fell to ownership by the town of Three Summers.

  Finally, I went to the library in Lexington and asked for local records and writings about the community. But again, nothing was available. The woman who helped me, Brooke Carney, struck me as uncomfortable and slightly evasive. I left her my card and asked her to call should anything become available.

  Thus, my initial knowledge was mainly geographical.

  Three Summers lies a hundred miles west of Nashville, in the northwestern corner of Henderson County, lost amid the woodlands bordering State Route 104. At a width of approximately eight hundred feet, the Locust River flows flat and green past the settlement on its way toward the Mississippi. Due to the abundant distribution of sandy clay and gravelly silt loams, Henderson County has been described as inconducive to crop growth. This makes the plantation at Three Summers remarkable, not least because the quality of the soil is not discernibly superior to that of the surrounding county. On the contrary, it is gritty, crumbly, and quite gray in color.

  After finding dirt in the master bedroom, in the bed, I was inspired to search the internet for a word I’d discovered in an old notebook lying in the basement of the house: Adamah. It was Hebrew for earth. Or dust.

  The house was still when I finally departed, and midnight was approaching.

  The graveyard by the Locust River was milky with moonlight and drenched in the smell of walnuts. As I dug down, shivers touched me, like fingers from the earth. And those same fingers, it seemed, had ground the woman to powder: I found no body. For a long moment, I crouched there. All around me in the churchyard the dead lay coldly, their presence seeping through the crumbling grave walls.

  Someone had taken her.

  Mind careening, I drove back to Three Summers and found the sheriff in a derelict cotton mill that haunted the edge of town, brooming water across the earthen floor by lantern light. I accompanied him back to the police station, a kudzu-swamped structure on the edge of a field where he evaded my questions. Instead, he asked after my own career. And to throw me off guard, he took me into a room at the rear of the building where a school lesson was taking place at 2:30 in the morning. The lights in the back half of the bleak room he led me to were burnt out. The walls were arrayed with posters of the state flag, state animal, state flower, and state motto; the floor was arrayed with school desks; the desks were arrayed with muddy-footed children. Under Sorrel’s prompting, I told them the story of Serene Flats (see Sep/Oct 2009 issue) while rain fell outside. It was one of the most surreal things I’ve experienced.

  I did not let this distract me, however. I had no doubt the body was still out there in some bedroom or basement or back-porch freezer. Stolen by some attendant of her curious funeral.

  This suspicion was confirmed by a discovery I made that same night after seeing a trash collection truck at the plantation house, driven by the woman who had directed me to the house that first day. Inside, buried in the basement floor, among the decaying glory of past generations, I found a festering amputated hand.

  The next day, I resolved to confront her, and drove the grisly package to town. Although I had taped wax paper around the hand, I had to stop halfway to town and wrap it in a Walgreens bag and put it in the trunk because of the smell.

  The woman’s name was Jezebel Irons, the proprietor of a waste disposal facility about five miles downriver, on the northern bank, at an abandoned mine facility: Adamah Mine.

  During our interview,
she confirmed her involvement with the hand, but deferred my questions on its significance, shutting down completely when I asked about two unusual titles I had become aware of in connection to the house: the name Adamah and the honorific “Queen of Hearts.”

  When I presented my findings to Sheriff Sorrel, his reaction was violent. When I pressed him about the connection of the house and the woman to the name Adamah, he dismissed it as angel worship gone awry. If I did not leave the town and its dealings alone, he threatened, I would be expelled from the house and my fiancée would suffer some nameless retribution.

  That made me back off. But I was onto something, I could tell.

  Something lay behind my simple dichotomy of whether the old woman had been loved or hated. Something that ran far deeper.

  Brooke Carney from the Lexington Library called me that afternoon, and I drove to meet her. New artifacts had been delivered since my first visit there a week before. I reviewed them with her in the children’s corner of the dim library. They revealed a rudimentary history of the house.

  It was built in the 1830s by a shipping magnate who fled his responsibilities in Charleston with an alleged witch named Martha. After establishing the town of Three Summers nearby with the construction of a cotton mill dedicated to a being called Adamah, the man was killed by his own slaves. His wife, however, apparently loved, managed the plantation shrewdly until her disappearance in a raid during the Civil War.

  In the late 1860s, a doctor named Jerimiah McCloud entered the region accompanied by a mute woman named Magdalene. He established a hospital in Three Summers, but was killed in 1877 by two patients on whom he was performing strange experiments: smearing mud across their bodies to heal their wounds and to contact the being called Adamah. His wife, Magdalene, survived until the First World War, when she vanished into the creek near the house.

  In the 1920s, a gypsy leader named Rex Emil married a survivor of the Party Field Massacre, an ownership dispute over the plantation grounds and house. Her name was Miriam. Emil built a theater to the honor of the being called Adamah, but was killed by one of his circus animals at its inauguration. Miriam lived until the late thirties. When she died, she allegedly decayed in one afternoon on the house’s dining room table.

  In the forties, things changed a bit. A couple named John and Ellen King came to the house. They built nothing. They lived there a short time, and Ellen died in the winter while giving birth. Her husband, some say at the behest of the local doctor, hung himself from a great oak tree before the house.

  Then in the early sixties, a couple named Missy Holiday and Walter Collins came. Walter, a state prosecutor, was investigating the recently constructed Adamah Mine for safety concerns. After swaying the case in the town’s favor in the summer of ’62, he disappeared. Missy stayed on and used the profits from the mine to fight legal ownership battles for decades. Missy, called Marilyn by some, was the one I found that day, the one I drove to her grave. She had occupied, it seemed, a role in the community called the “Queen of Hearts.”

  A different figure occupied my thoughts, one that was gradually emerging from the gloom. One that I could now give the name Adamah. For each building—the mill, the hospital, the theater—that had been built across the years, each was named for Adamah. It seemed to me then that if I understood what Adamah was, I would understand everything that sprung from this being. And so, initially, I paid little attention to the “Queen of Hearts” mythology. That was a mistake.

  The man who had delivered these artifacts to the library was named Richard Hettinga, a regular patron of the library. He had left for Atlanta during the previous week, but Brooke Carney was kind enough to give me his number, despite the fact that he hadn’t been answering her calls. In the car, I tried Richard Hettinga’s phone. It went to voicemail, so I left him one. Then I drove back.

  Adamah. That name. That thing that seemed to touch all the other things. That presence lurking around the house in symbols and clinging to Three Summers in street and building names. What was Adamah?

  The woman at the mine, Jezebel Irons, had said Adamah was an angel. Outside of this Southern backwater, though, I had never heard the name, and my acquaintance with the major religious texts was sufficient to know that they contained no record of such a being.

  This Adamah was depicted the same in all the artwork I came across: a human form with two legs and six arms spread-eagled. Masculine language was used in reference, but the figure had no sexually defining characteristics. And no face.

  For the next two days, I stayed in the study, patching together the scraps I had collected in a document titled, “The House of Dust.” On the third day, Wednesday, I rolled out a photocopy of the town map, took a pen, and drew a line across Three Summers, connecting the old mill at the eastern edge, the theater in the center of town, and the old hospital at its western edge. If I wanted to learn about Adamah, the obvious way was to explore the shrines dedicated to it.

  An exploration of Adamah Cotton Mill came first. Outside the great brick structure was a cornerstone, marking its completion date as 1842, and its builder as a man named Darrin DeWitt. Inside, a portion of the roof had fallen in, and clusters of human-size hollows pocked the dirt floor.

  As I was exploring, a girl named Harlow entered the ruin. I had encountered her briefly the night I met Sorrel in this place, but I had never seen her face. She had blinded herself by cutting out her eyelids. Unknowingly under my gaze, she poured water on a central section of the floor and began caressing the earth. Then I spoke to her, and after an initial shock, she willingly conversed, telling how her father was buried in this place.

  I drove away slightly enlightened on the town’s curious burial practices, but anger smoldered inside me over the girl who had blinded herself. It was one thing to travel the underside of the South and see abused adults: Hilary Wegner from Serene Flats with her broken mind, the Tampa University hiking party’s severed ears, even the burnt survivors of the New Horizon oil rig. But it was another thing to see a child in such condition. How had she been allowed to wander alone, to harm herself? I needed answers.

  So I drove to the church and consulted the aged clergyman, Pastor Mark Burger. He was convinced that all of the bizarre customs in the town could be attributed to cycles in which the occupant of the house exercised a soothing influence on behalf of the Adamah being, and outside of which the land was gripped by a restless malaise.

  Later, sitting at my desk in the house, I played the eyeless girl’s words back. Out of everything she’d said, one phrase burrowed into my mind and lodged there: shallow place. Shallowness conjured something subterranean; from shallow places you could reach into the depths. And the depths could reach back. The house, she’d said, was one of these places.

  Around midnight, Jennifer came into the study and asked if we could go for a walk. She hadn’t slept since Saturday night, when she dreamed about the girl coming out of her casket. It showed in her eyes and translucent skin and slouching gait. She was fighting slumber and losing. I wanted her to lose. Even so, I agreed.

  We went outside and down to the road. The cicada choruses rasped our ears as we walked up and down the island in the moonless night. I tried to speak about us. She cut me off: “Don’t, Brad. Things are fine until we try to talk about them.”

  Sometime around dawn, we returned to the house. I waited up with her throughout the morning, until around ten, when she sat down in a dining room chair and didn’t get up again. I carried her upstairs and put her in bed. Then I left. It was time to visit the second shrine.

  Amid still noon heat, I made a similar search of the empty structure on the west edge of town: the Angel Adamah Hospital, built by the man named Jerimiah McCloud. Here, in the oxidized file cabinets, I discovered records chronicling the deaths of dozens of workers at the local mine, many due to suffocation.

  On the second floor, something even more grisly: dozens of human bodies, coated
in clay, lying beneath the bedsheets. And one living among the dead: the girl named Harlow, whose acquaintance I had made at the mill, tied to a bed in the empty ward, screaming. Her behavior discomfited me enough that I did not release her, but I walked directly to the sheriff’s office to demand an explanation. He was not there. But as I stood irresolute, he called me on Jennifer’s phone. He told me to come back to the house.

  The cicadas were blaring when I leapt from my car in the house’s clearing, and in that instant a question and realization collided in my mind and shook me. Dr. McDowell on that first day had said he never heard the insects sing out here. They had started the night we moved in. I found Jennifer in the forest before the house. A deep pit nestled between the roots of a large tree, and she was asleep down there on its floor, murmuring that she needed to “get closer.” I feared that her remorse over the girl’s death had finally pushed her off the brink. But when she woke, she said she felt much better.

  Sorrel hung around to chastise me, to tell me to take better care of her. There was no need. I was shaken. And so, curiously enough, was he. He seemed deeply concerned with our relationship.

  I stayed with her for ten days.

  We went places in that time: down to Lexington, to the library, to eat at a little place called Dan’s Café, to visit Pinoak Lake. About the middle of the following week, the seventeenth, I think, we drove west for about seventy miles, following the course of the Locust River. While we were out and the signal was strong, I tried again to call Richard Hettinga, but he didn’t answer.

  Jennifer took everything in stride. She was very quiet, and would smile occasionally, but always seemed slightly anxious to return to the house. When I tried to speak of the past, though, I detected ripples. She had not completely healed. Deeper currents flowed beneath her placid face. And deeper currents flowed beneath the things I had discovered—a connection I could feel but not yet express.