by Sean Wallace
“It ain’t up to us to tell grown folk what to do in their own time on their own land, Reg,” he said quietly. “Just as no one had the right to warn you off working them machines before they decided to take a piece of you?”
“Thought I was helping Jos mine for new branches off Bromide Spring,” Reg embarked, deaf or bloody-minded. “Ten years ago, folk thought we could breathe new life into this town’s dry and weary bones and tempt the visitors back. Least that’s the way I saw it. ’Course it wasn’t me that got to go underground in a giant metal worm.”
“That the problem, Reg?” Samuel’s tone stayed gentle. His words were more caustic. “You jealous some outta towner gotta ride in the big machines?”
“And lose my life, not just a pair of useful legs? No thanks, Sammy. I got crushed enough under that iron hoisting crane ten years ago. Just as well too. I’ve learnt to stand back and see Jos Splitz for what she really is.”
Dixon wore a sly look. “Miss Splitz, hey? Well, what’d ya know? Seems even old folk gotta get their kicks.” He let his mouth hang open.
“Mind outa the gutter, Dixon Goodwin. I’ll tell ya what Jos Splitz is. She’s a conjuress! A leech!” A fleck of spit escaped Reg’s sunken mouth. Shifting his balance awkwardly, he cast wild eyes about the group. “Not one of ya’s got the first clue what that dame’s doing over at Boar House.”
“I know plenty,” cut in Dixon with a grimace that suggested it was his time to talk and weren’t no cripple gonna shake him off his perch. “I know Miss Splitz is spitting mad at Virgil ’cause he might’ve broke something on her burrowing machine. Heard her riding him for it when I went to the kitchen last night to get a glass of lemonade offa their house Negro. I know Miss Spitz calls us farming folk a bunch of shitting pigs, blames us for killing off the land and leaving ourselves with nothing but dust.”
Dixon wove his words well. There wasn’t a man present who didn’t tuck a frown into their face or sheesh through their teeth or curse a dry old coot who’d got no right to judge.
Reg rounded on the group, dragged feet drawing snake-coils in the dirt. “There was nothing natural about the way that big old crane unpinned from its earth footings to come crashing down on me . . .”
“We gotta go there again, Reg?” It was the turn of George, ex-pharmacist, failed farmer, to roll his eyes.
Reg rolled his own back. “I know, it’s the word of a mad old cripple against those respectable whores at Boar House.”
“Shut your mouth, Reg. There’s an awful bad smell coming out of it.” Samuel threw out his arms. “Wasn’t a soul near you when the accident happened. Said so yourself all them years ago.” His stance was reinforced by mutterings from the quarry boys. Miss Splitz could go hang, but no one badmouthed a doll like Carrie-Anne. Not when there were so few young and single women left in Bromide for a fella to set his hat at.
“Yup, I sure did say as much.” Reg drawled his words. He seemed to burrow into himself. “But there is change afoot and Miss Splitz and her apprentice are at the heart of it. I feel them breaking through the earth beneath our feet more often these days. Vibrations offa those great tunneling machines work their way up through the flesh and the metal and make my legs cramp.”
“What they burrowing for anyways?” said a quarry boy.
“My daddy says they are investigating why the land’s gotten so barren in these parts. And, yeah, you’re right about hunting out more branches of the Bromide Spring, Reg, but way I heard it, Miss Splitz’s thinking is to siphon water from deep below ground and find a way to feed it in beneath the crops since surface spray’d evaporate too quick.” Ben realized the entire group was fixated on what he had to say. He faltered. “Well, it goes something like that.”
Reg scrubbed at his cotton hair with two hands. “Except maybe it’s Miss Splitz’s mining activities which drained the land in the first place. Ever think of that?”
Over by the store, the women were creating their very own storybook, layering it with soft tones and sudden laughter. The children had sticks and were offering up war cries. Reg’s inconstant eyes flicked about the now-hushed menfolk.
“Nah, you didn’t think of that, hey?” He nodded sagely. “As I said, a conjuress and a leech.”
The garden at Boar House was as sweet-smelling and fertile as any botanical institute. Either side the lawn was a great spread of Indian blanket, hundreds of small pink suns tipped with gold. The leafy vines of morning glory tendriled the wooden fence, flowers peeping out like midnight-colored eyes. Potato ferns filled eight large beds. Peppers and egg plant gave off their grassy, sap-like scent.
While the rest of the panhandle was barren, Boar House garden flourished for two reasons, the first of which was Josephine Splitz’s patented sprinkler tripod and underground irrigation system of interlocking copper tubes fed from giant water butts, and the second being that, when it came to dirt and what grew in it, Julie Sanders had the Midas touch.
“Tastes like the blood of summer.” Carrie-Anne manipulated what was left of the tomato with her tongue.
“Here.” Julie dug a hand through the vines and snapped off another. She offered it. “A fresh sacrifice?”
Carrie-Anne put the fruit to her nose. It smelt of the rich, red dirt of her childhood, when the plains of wheat and prairie grass were flowing.
“They’re going under again. Virgil and Aunt Josephine, I mean.” She kept the tomato under her nose like smelling salts. “I asked them not to since it’s Palm Sunday tomorrow. Their absence from church’ll be even more marked than usual. Folk are already noticing.”
“Then folk should learn to mind their own!” Julie snapped. She stared over at Carrie-Anne and added blankly, “Yeah, I see the glint of disapproval in your eye. A housemaid shouldn’t talk so about good white folk as fix their hair and attend the preacher’s sermon every Sunday.”
Carrie-Anne frowned. “I didn’t mean that, Julie.” She cupped the tomato in a palm. “You surprised me was all. Most days, you’re a ball of hot roast sunshine. It’s odd to see you in shadow.”
Julie raised her large bovine eyes to the endless blue overhead. “I apologize, Carrie-Anne. Something’s hunkered down in the air these last few days, niggling at me. Might just be a woman’s flush? Might be the dry heat?” She lowered her gaze to Carrie-Anne, who felt its touch like a mother’s hand. “What I do know, chile, is we can’t take much more. A storm’s needed. Even hail’d be better than this devil’s blanket we’re under!”
Carrie-Anne popped the tomato into her mouth and chewed. Following Julie to the nearest vegetable bed, she knelt alongside to help shovel dark composted manure around the bean poles and fledgling sunflowers.
“Remember those great rocks of ice that came slamming down in March? The tale of Nancy West’s little girl run ragged trying to keep the chicks from being crushed out in the yard. They lost half the poor mites in one storm.” She indicated the plants with her trowel. “Don’t reckon this crop’d survive either.”
Julie sat back on her heels stiffly and used the corner of her apron to dab at her temples. “This crop, no. But we’d start again. Trade what we did have for what we didn’t.”
Perhaps noticing Carrie-Anne’s muddled look, she chuckled all of a sudden. “Chile, I’m playing with you. I don’t take one inch of this land for granted, nor the good Lord blessing me with the knowhow to raise crops on it.” Julie got a fresh trowelful of manure and leant in to the plants.
“You know all about the way dirt beds in around Boar House,” Carrie-Anne said softly.
“Well, I ain’t alone there.” Julie kept on working. Sunlight rained over her skin like a downpour of black diamonds.
Carrie-Anne pinched up her eyes. She didn’t want to dig inside herself, was afraid to, and instead rocked back on her heels and moved to the neighboring bed, umbrellaed with the pinnate leaves of the Mississippi peanut. Bending down, she trailed a finger along a leaf coated with blown-in dust. The particles expelled to either side of the leaf at her touch.
“Watch you don’t step in grasshopper poison.” Julie stood up, supporting her lower spine with her hands as she unfolded. “Mix of molasses, bran and lemons I scattered at nightfall couple of evenings back.”
Gazing at the ground, Carrie-Anne noticed wads of vegetable matter distributed between the rows of peanuts. “Say a spell too?” she teased.
Julie tucked a smile into a corner of her mouth. “Carrie-Anne Nightingale. I worry about your soul.”
“Well, there is some sort of magic at work in this garden, Julie. Beyond the boundary of this fence, I’ve seen field peas and tomatoes blighted by the wind, potatoes like coyote dung half-cooked in dry dirt. But here, all is plump and ripe and perfumed. You’re a weaver of dreams, Julie.” She gestured to the nearest clump of grasshopper poison. “A potions mistress.”
Julie snorted. “Gotta keep Miss Splitz in fried okra and corn-bread’s all. Then there’s the extras we trade for canned goods at the store. You know how partial Miss Splitz is to pineapple chunks. She always saves the juice for Wesley. Soft old thing.”
Carrie-Anne didn’t contradict. Aunt Josephine was as much of a dragon as any giant machine birthed from her workshop. But she did occasionally expose a chink of humanity, such as the stones she brought back for Wesley from below the surface, or her reserving pineapple juice for the boy, eyeing him as he supped as if she was a kid herself feeding treats to a puppy.
The wizened old prune also had an acid way with words which Virgil thankfully seemed to relish where his predecessors had been burnt.
“My aunt’s certainly got her own brand of kindness. I wonder if she always appreciates Virgil’s worth though. He’s one of the state’s top geological surveyors, you know.” Carrie-Anne got a shine to her. “He’s got the papers to prove it.”
“Don’t need to persuade me Virgil’s worth something, Carrie-Anne. He wrote the letter of recommendation that got Abraham a teaching post at Douglass High in Bricktown, Oklahoma City.” Julie picked up the wicker basket she used for cut flowers and fresh vegetables, and deposited her trowel in it. She started back toward the house; Carrie-Anne watched the peculiar twist to her hips as she walked. Julie was arthritic. She was also a polio survivor.
Carrie-Anne followed after.
“I love him, you know!” She blurted out the words, afraid they’d drive tiny hooks into her tongue and stick there.
Julie swung around. In place of shock or elation, she simply jutted her chin as if to say “that so”. Then she turned heel and started again with that jarring gait.
“Is that it?” Carrie-Anne flushed. She’d built up to the revelation, weighing her options in terms of who to confide in before settling on her old nursemaid who was sure to have grace enough to understand. Why was Julie acting so?
“I don’t get it.” She ran alongside. “It’s not like we’re hurting you, or Wesley, or even Aunt Josephine.” Julie didn’t stop marching and Carrie-Anne was forced into a sideways polka as she spoke. “He’s a good man and he’s got my heart taped up. No escape for me from this one, Julie. But what’s so terrible about me and Virgil Roberts anyway? You know his worth. Said so just now.”
Reaching the foot of the porch steps, Julie stopped suddenly, mouth parted as she tugged air into her lungs. “I gotta spell it out for you, chile? Well okay. You mix your environment according to your mood. Move one speck o’ dust from this spot to that. Shake it all up any which way you feel.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about!” spat Carrie-Anne. Her chest ached.
A flame was struck in each of Julie’s beautiful bovine eyes. “You could cause real damage, chile. I’m just not sure how the dust’ll settle on this one.”
“Think I’m playing with Virgil, don’t you?” Carrie-Anne felt the insinuation bite at her on the inside as if she’d swallowed live termites. “Good Lord, Julie. You raised me!”
“That’s not what I meant . . .”
“Whatever else could you mean except to suggest I’d go all blue-eyed and brainless on Virgil, get him hooked then look for something, for someone better? How dare you, Julie! After the kindness my aunt has shown you and your boys. After her treating you like a family member and not the slave that you really are.”
Her words were as violent as if she’d lashed Julie round the jaw. Carrie-Anne knew it, felt the poison seeping in as the housemaid she loved like her own flesh and blood got cold in the eyes.
“Yes, mam,” said Julie evenly. She turned away and climbed the steps to the porch, where she pulled open the inner gauze on complaining hinges and disappeared inside the house.
Carrie-Anne stood alone in the garden. A light breeze brought in dust from the field which danced about her ankles.
Cicadas droned in the long grass outside the workshop. A moth performed its tortured tarantella around a kerosene lamp hooked on a nail to one side of double doors. The sun had left its heat on the place like a layer of hot grease.
Inside the workshop, nothing moved except the dust motes. Chisels, mallets, pliers, hammers, and wrenches lined the walls like a field surgeon’s medical kit. A large scarred workbench held a mechanical arsenal: grimy gears, chamois-leathers like stomach linings, chipped china cups full of nails and nuts and bolts, bushels of wire, wire wool, chain-link, hose, valves, and fuses. The floorboards were strewn with the lost limbs of iron smoke stacks, greased levers, punctured flotation balloons, sled tracks, even a pair of outsized bellows like an ogre’s shoehorn.
Grease and metal filings perfumed the air. All was still but for dust fall.
Virgil had his hand at her throat. Time drew out like a strand of spun sugar. His eyeballs flickered. Blood drove inside his ears.
Slowly, he eased his hips against hers. A welt of heat spread through his groin as she rose up onto tiptoes. Her flesh glistened. He leant in, bruised his lips against her fragile jaw and found the soft wet sacramental hollow of her mouth. It wasn’t enough. He wanted to get past the physical, the hindrance of blood and cartilage, skeleton and skin. Raking his hands through her hair, nails digging in at the baby softness of her skull, he meshed his lips against hers until she gasped.
It was her tongue’s touch which quietened him, its curl of motion at the sliver of skin connecting his upper lip and gum. He felt tethered, and a new depth of need as she worked his shirt free of his pants and imprinted his spine with her fingertips. His own hands were awkward extractions of flesh; he fumbled with the buttons of her dress as she molded his shoulder blades under her palms. Sweat soaked in at his shirt collar. Her dress fell away.
He stepped back to gaze at her every niche and curve. Her breasts were white fruit burred with damson-colored seed heads. The pour of flesh to her hips was slight. A half-moon of tiny brown freckles arched above her belly button. Soft brown down spread out from the cleft between her legs.
Dragging his shirt up and over his head, Virgil bundled it into the hollow of her lower back as she drew him back against her. The sour tang of sweat worked up between them; she dragged her tongue along the underside of his chin like a saltlick.
He drove his head down and she curved her spine, offering each breast to the ebb and flow of his mouth. At the same time, her hands cupped his ears so that he was back in the dark with the iron drone of the Burrower. With one difference. Here above ground, the heat was breaking out of him as much as it was tunneling in.
She moved her hands away and his lips found her throat again. It was a small bewitchment, a brush of mouth against skin which always made her fold herself into him. He flung his shirt aside. His fingers skimmed the rough warm wood of the workbench and spooned her buttocks which tensed at his touch. She carved at his hipbones, digging her fingernails in ever so slightly at the underside of his belt before dragging them diagonally down in a tingling swipe. His gasp was a thin dry reed of air.
Dixon Goodwin stared down at the patch of ground and clucked his tongue. The pipework he’d exposed was the color of rust in the moonlight; he guessed it was copper. Nice choice of m
etal for water transportation, even if it was an expensive material to sink below ground. Of course, the old gal, Jos Splitz, belonged to one of Oklahoma’s oldest, richest bloodlines. A few lengths of copper boring wasn’t about to see her bare-handed, even when her fellow Okies were sell-their-mother desperate.
So, the secret to Boar House’s fertile ground was an irrigation system? Dixon kept hold of the trowel he’d found in a basket outside the kitchen, twirling the handle between two palms. There hadda be, what, a couple of acres of garden tucked around the house, every bit of it fed by those underground pipes? It was a helluva thing, and not just to afford the raw materials but to engineer and physically locate them. He shook his head like a fly-bothered mare. Jos Splitz was a withered old gourd, but she’d the wherewithal to keep herself afloat while all around were going under.
But who’d got the muscle to install that rig? There was this Virgil character, this brain from outta town. Vampire morelike by the look of him, Dixon snorted to himself. And Boar House had its slaves, though rumor was Jos Splitz behaved like an old witch in her professional capacity, but she was a pussycat in terms of how she ran her household.
Dixon twisted his mouth aside and spat. What good was kindness to the sow or the rooster? Didn’t fatten them beasts any faster. Sameways with the black man; kindness only made a slave waste time on smiling. His daddy had taught him that much. Few folk wielded a lash as neatly and as effectively as Dixon Goodwin, Senior.
But whether them soft-handled Negroes installed it or the ghost face Virgil, all that was of interest was that Jos Splitz had gotten herself a means to pump water into dirt. Except, where’d the water come from?
The night had stitched itself in around him but there was a weak glow coming off a kerosene lamp over by the workshop. Dixon narrowed his eyes, noticing a ridge of earth running parallel to the brick path. He dragged a forearm over his forehead. He mightn’t be worth much to folk in Bromide, but he’d a tendency to work things out.
Walking slowly along the path, his footfall soft, he traced the ridge to the far side of the workshop, where it broke ground to emerge as a series of the rust-colored pipes. These plumbed into two vast water butts located side by side and interlinked by a vertical winch system hooked up to five large buckets.