“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 neighbouring 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 cornbread’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, eying him as he supped as if she was a kid herself feeding treats to a puppy.
The wizen 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 towards 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 arsenaclass="underline" grimy gears, cami-leathers like stomach linings, chipped china cups full of nails and nuts and bolts, bushels of wire, wirewool, chainlink, 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 tiptoe. 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 moulded 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-coloured seedheads. 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 tunnelling in.