“I did.”
“And he’s dead now?”
“You know he is. No innocent is ever completely free of guilt, Rose.”
“So you’ve said.”
“But with those four men, I never should have gone back to them and flipped the coin, like I was playing the role of God or something. Even then I had a notion of what could happen.” He thought back to William Worst, but didn’t tell her about it. “Part of me regrets that to this day.”
“And the other part?”
“The other part needed to know.”
“Know what, Jeremiah?”
“If I was flipping the coin, or if it was flipping me?”
“Like the coin was fate?”
He shrugged, then tugged on his left shirtsleeve again.
She leaned back, let out a tired breath, but then the smile returned. “You said something on the stand about releasing the pressure that builds up inside you. What pressure?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me about your nightmare.”
“No.”
“Why did you make that one cut on the body, Jeremiah?” She spoke like the boy was too jingled to listen, but Jeremiah could tell he was hanging on every word and they shouldn’t be discussing these things in front of him.
“Why did I cut that body?”
“Yes.”
“Same reason I cut William Worst ten years ago.”
Shock splintered her steely resolve. “Who is William Worst?”
“He used to live in this house.”
“And what happened to him?”
Jeremiah stood. “I need some more coffee.”
She followed him into the kitchen. “What happened to William Worst, Jeremiah?”
He stopped to face her. “He was my first, Rose.”
A shiver ran through him. He’d never admitted that to anyone, although he suspected Josiah knew. And maybe Ellen, the way both of them had looked at him on the day it had happened. Some kind of bond had been forged between those two that day.
“Your first what?”
“My first victim,” Jeremiah said, his chin sinking toward his chest. “The first victim of the country’s infamous Coin-Flip Killer.”
He lifted the pot from the stove and filled his mug. She followed him back into the dining room.
Peter watched them.
Rose reached out and grabbed Jeremiah’s arm, a move that in the past had caused too many saloon fights to count. You didn’t grab Jeremiah Goodbye and get away with it. But now, after a beat, he turned toward her and lifted her chin so that they stared into each other’s eyes.
And then he kissed her right on those red lips. Kissed her for ten seconds, and after five he felt her arms around him, her hands and fingers splayed out across his back.
Suddenly she pushed him away. “Why’d you do that?”
“To see what you’d do?”
She wiped her mouth. Her chest was heaving; her neckline flushed nearly the color of her dress. For the first time since he’d met her, she seemed vulnerable.
“Well, don’t do that again.”
“You sure about that?”
“Not really.”
“Well, okay then.”
“Tell me about William Worst.”
“Tell me why you haven’t found a man who’d marry you? You’re pretty good at doing what we just did.”
Her cheeks went red. “There’ve been plenty of men who’ve asked for my hand.”
“And?”
“And I just haven’t found the right one.”
“Yet.”
She grabbed his left arm, where the sleeve was still buttoned at the wrist. “It’s nearly summer, and the temperature is rising.”
“So?”
“So why do you keep your cuffs buttoned when I noticed all these other farmers rolling them to their elbows.”
“Just the way I do it.”
Before he could make a move to stop her, she ripped at the cuff, and the button popped free. And then just as quickly, she’d pushed his sleeve halfway up his forearm. He pulled his arm from her and turned away, lowering the sleeve back down.
“Where’d those scars come from?” she asked. “I noticed them at the trial. I was watching you. When you’d shift a certain way in your chair, your sleeve would push up and I could see the lowest one there on your forearm.”
He reached for the doorknob. “I think you should go.”
She didn’t move.
Peter had gotten up from the table, though, and was staring out the window. He’d gotten so close to the sill that when he started pointing his finger touched glass.
Sunlight cut a diagonal line across the room, and slowly that line got swallowed up by shade. And then the room turned dark. Jeremiah looked out the open door and then closed it.
“What is it?” Rose asked.
“Another duster. A big one.” Jeremiah and Peter moved with purpose from room to room, wetting down sheets and hanging them from every window and door as dust started to tap against the house siding and rooftop.
Rose asked what she could do and proved helpful in securing the house, not at all panicked like Jeremiah had thought she might be. Perhaps it wasn’t her first duster. More likely, though, as a reporter, she couldn’t wait to witness what the plains had suffered darn near daily for three or four years now. She probably hoped it would be another Black Sunday so she could snap her pictures and do her writing.
He looked for some fear in her, hoped for it, really, just to answer some of the doubt he still carried about her objectives here in Nowhere. And when one of the living room windows shattered and glass blew inward against the sheet, he saw it. Her hand went to her chest and her eyes jumped. He took her by the arm and led her to the dining room table, where Peter was draping a damp sheet like a curtain. The three of them ducked underneath. Dust spun against the floor. Peter lit a candle, and a minute later it blew out. He then calmed himself like he always did, by punching keys on that typewriter.
Any sign of fear had left Rose. She hunkered like Jeremiah, although not as far because she was at least ten inches shorter than him. Gradually their eyes adjusted to the dark. He let her push his sleeve up to the elbow. A shiver swept through him when she did it, and when she ran the tip of her finger with a gentleness only a mother could give over the patchwork of scars he had there, the hairs on his arm stood on end. The only other person ever to touch him there was Ellen, but it hadn’t felt like this—like static electricity might feel like if you walked right through one of the strikes. Deep inside he smiled, knowing it was the first hint that what he’d done years ago in regard to leaving Ellen to Josiah was in fact the right thing to do.
“The coin never lies.”
“What’s that?” Rose asked.
“Nothing.” As he reminisced, he suddenly felt the urge to hold Ellen. He hoped Josiah was doing just that, but something told him he wasn’t. Maybe that’s why he felt the urge now to do what his twin no longer would.
Dust filtered in under the sheet-curtain. He handed damp rags to Peter and Rose and told them both to keep their mouths and noses covered. Peter did what he was told with the one hand and continued to type with the other.
Rose ran her fingers over the fifty-odd half-inch scars on the underside of his forearm, running from an inch below the wrist to where his arm would bend.
“It didn’t take much,” said Jeremiah.
“Much to do what?”
“To let it out. The pressure. Those images I’d see. I’d cut myself to let it out.”
“And you’d bleed?” She traced her finger across the scars again, and his heart sped up.
“Yes, I’d bleed.” He rolled his sleeve back down.
“You say that with relief.”
“Always felt that way. Seeing the blood reminded me I was real. I tried cutting that one body. It wasn’t widely known that I’d done that.”
“I’ve done my homework.”
“I was crazed whe
n I did it. Just a little nick before my mind cried out, what are you doing?”
“What were you doing, Jeremiah? What were you trying to see?”
“What evil looked like on the inside.”
FIFTEEN
No one spoke in the Goodbye household. Coughing and hacking were the only sounds of the day.
Ellen had started a croupy cough of her own that rivaled her son’s. In her mind she’d begun to count the days she had left—she felt certain now the dust would eventually kill them all.
Hurry up, then, and get it over with.
She sat at the dining room table by herself. Josiah and Wilmington were in the kitchen, sitting across from each other but not talking. Just staring.
James hadn’t slept at all the night before, which meant that Ellen hadn’t slept either, and her eyelids grew heavier by the minute. James had finally cried himself to sleep ten minutes ago. Ellen was fighting it, afraid that if she nodded off now she wouldn’t sleep during the night, and last night had been horrible. All that crying and coughing had sent her mind wandering to places it only went when hope was gone.
She and Orion had been the only ones in town still clinging to it. Josiah had lost it weeks ago. Wilmington’s hope had begun to dwindle the day Jeremiah was taken away. But that big duster, the one that occurred on the day they now called Black Sunday, had buried any hope that remained. The hole was too dark and deep now, and there were no more rungs on that ladder. “No use climbing anymore,” she said aloud.
Black Sunday had ruined them, entering their brains like a disease, mean and ugly. The things they’d all said to each other made her sick to her stomach, and it wasn’t just those who’d gathered in the Bentley or who lived in Nowhere. Rumor said it was widespread. Folks were acting strange in Guymon to the southwest, and also up north in Liberal, just across the Kansas border. That Black Sunday dust had combed across the plains, churning like the fancy end of a tractor, tilling up dust and slamming it down with a force never seen before, leaving nothing but brain-dead survivors in its wake.
Just about everybody had lost their filters and turned mean and ugly, speaking their minds without any thought of the repercussions. And now everyone had gone quiet, weighed down by all that dust, and no one seemed to have the energy to try anymore.
No one, that is, except Jeremiah and that boy, Peter, the smiler who never said boo. A boy she loved like her own but had only recently met. Come to think of it, Nicholas Draper still managed a smile. Probably had something to do with how Jeremiah had covered him up during all that darkness. That ugly dust had never got to him, and somehow it had never touched Jeremiah. He’d probably spent so many nights under the weight of those nightmares that it had made him somehow immune.
Or maybe it was the five seconds he’d spent in that electric chair.
Yesterday evening she’d gone over to the Bentley to check on Orion. Nicholas Draper had been outside clearing his porch. Other than Jeremiah and Peter, he was the only one digging out after last evening’s duster. And that reporter woman too. She’d gotten dusted in with Jeremiah and Peter inside the Worst house and had grabbed a broom to help them clean up five minutes after the duster moved on.
What does she really want with Jeremiah? What were they doing in that house?
That thought was what had kept Ellen up all last night, wishing more than once that the woman would have gotten lost in the storm. That was a mean ol’ nasty thought to have, but truth be told it felt good to have it, like it was all part of the process. What process? She stood from the table and walked into the kitchen, where her husband and father-in-law sat like human statues, one dumb-looking as the other. The process Black Sunday started. The one that turned everybody mean, speaking their minds with reckless abandon, and then turned them quiet. And then what?
Part of her couldn’t wait to know. The other part, well, maybe there was a smidge of something left in her, a little pinprick of light in all the darkness.
When she’d checked on Orion yesterday, she’d found him behind the bar, despondent. He’d stayed clammed up even when she asked him questions. His eyes had been open, but there’d been no light on in there. She recalled hoping that reporter woman would come out of her room, but she never had. Ellen had heard her in there typing though, like Peter, except there was probably paper and a ribbon in her machine and actual words to accompany the clacking.
Had she been writing about Jeremiah or the town?
It was the next day, and Ellen still didn’t have an answer to that. She padded barefoot across the dusty kitchen floor. There was a pitcher of water next to the sink. She poured some into a coffee mug, and it came out muddy. They’d forgotten to cover it before yesterday’s duster. They hadn’t covered the windows either, which was why there were drifts in some of the corners of the room and dust atop the table and counters. Dust filtered down from the hole in the ceiling, and her two men paid it no attention whatever.
Ellen put the mug down hard enough to crack and neither Josiah nor Wilmington flinched. She turned toward the table, leaning with her rear end against the counter, and clapped once. They didn’t react to that either. Might as well be drooling in the madhouse, both of them. They seemed to be in a more advanced stage than she was. Then again, they’d either dished out or been the brunt of more ugly talk than she had. Josiah, especially, being told to his face by his own father that his twin was the favored one.
“That must have been like a dagger cut,” she said out loud. “You know it, Josiah? Like one of those cuts where the knife turns.”
Josiah flicked at the tabletop dust in front of him but said nothing.
She wasn’t even sure why she’d just said that. Maybe she was still in that mean stage and had some more to say before she’d go quiet like the others.
“And what was that hug about, Wilmington? Hugging that reporter woman last night like she was some prodigal returned. Hugged her just like you did Jeremiah. Now that’s not right, you hear me? Neither was all that mean talk you shoveled on Orion.”
Wilmington blinked, but his eyes stayed focused on the tabletop.
“Did you ever have relations with my mother, Wilmington?”
Nothing.
She folded her arms and thought of Jeremiah. Tried to think of their good times, but all that flashed was the day before he’d been taken away on the paddy wagon. The day he’d held both her hands in his own and looked down into her eyes like he was fixing to plant one on her.
She’d had a notion he would ask for her hand in marriage that day, just like Josiah had gotten down on his knee and done one week prior, right there in the lobby of the Bentley Hotel with half the town watching. She’d told Josiah she’d have to think about it, whispering in his ear so as not to embarrass him.
“What’s there to think about?” Josiah had asked, leading her outside to the sunlight.
“What’s there not to think about, Josiah? It’s the rest of our lives we’re talking about.”
“You love me, don’t you?”
“’Course I do.”
“Then what’s holding you back?” He’d said it like he already knew.
“Just need time to think about it is all.”
“How long?”
“A week.” She wasn’t sure why she’d said that, but at the time she’d just needed space.
And then, six days later, Jeremiah had taken her behind the barn, where they’d spent so much time together, sneaking like they always did. Her father, when he was alive, had never approved of Jeremiah like he did Josiah.
“He’s got a temper, Ellen. He drinks too much. And the way he’s always flipping that coin—I just don’t like it.”
“But Daddy, he’s also got more good than most people I know. It’s just that the good keeps getting overshadowed.”
Jeremiah hadn’t kissed her that afternoon behind the barn, at least not in the context she’d hoped. And he hadn’t gotten down on one knee and asked her for marriage either. In fact, he’d about done the opposit
e.
“I can’t marry you, Ellen.”
The tears had been immediate, and she’d been too choked up to talk at first.
“You accept that offer from my brother. He’s a good man.”
“But he’s not you, Jeremiah.”
“And that’s a good thing, Ellen. I’ve done some bad things. I feel a storm coming, and not the kind from the sky.”
“What kind then, Jeremiah?”
“The kind that comes with badges and guns.”
She’d covered her mouth and then slapped his chest because she couldn’t bring herself to slap his face. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know for sure. My mind’s been muddled, and I’ve done some things without the advantage of thinking.”
“It’s all that drinking,” she said. “I’ll help you get over that.”
“There is no getting over what I’ve got, Ellen. That’s a train track that has no ending.” He’d grabbed her arms so she wouldn’t hit him again. “Now I know you have feelings for Josiah. Strong ones. And me and you can’t be.”
“How do you know that? How can you be so sure?”
“I just am, Ellen. You’ll have to trust me.”
He’d kissed her that day behind the barn, but it had been full of finality, with no hint of future in it. The next day the authorities had dug up four bodies from the grain silo and dragged Jeremiah away in shackles just as a thunderboomer was rolling in.
Even now, as the memory trickled distant, Ellen felt a lump in her throat. Too bad the drought and dust had dried up her tears. Might have been a good remedy right about now.
She lifted her mug of muddy water and hurled it across the room, aiming for the far wall because she just felt like seeing something break, but the mug went off target and hit Josiah on the right cheekbone. The mug clunked to the floor. Muddy water splashed in a line like a mountain ridge as it mixed with dust.
Josiah turned his head toward her slowly, like the blood now meandering down the cut she’d just put in his cheek. Apparently the drought hadn’t dried up his tears—something still resided in there—and they mixed with the blood and dripped together down his cheek to the tabletop.
She looked away, turned toward the window over the sink.
What Blooms from Dust Page 15