His stomach crunched around a sickening mess of feelings. The pitch black thrummed.
I ain’t never seen a glimpse of Hell on Earth like it. Rolling in it was, from the direction of the old Indian academy out north, a great black cloud, thick as flies swarming. How far it stretched I ain’t sure, but miles it was. A mouth that yawned back on its jaw and scooped in everything in sight. And the scream, like demons loose upon the land.
“We’ve got to get back,” Miss Carrie-Anne said. “Let’s go now, while they’ve no time to intervene.” And she steered me outta the chapel and into Mister Roberts’ automobile. Plopping Wesley on my knee, she got that engine whipped up and we were back out on the road in no time, the darkness snapping at our heels.
“It’s a good thing Miss Josephine and Mister Roberts planned a short trip. They’ll be back up top now. Sat on the porch worrying themselves sick I shouldn’t wonder, and who can blame them. Dust cloud like that on the horizon...”
I kept on yapping like a screech owl because Carrie-Anne, she got that soulless look like I’d seen whenever her strangeness came over her, alongside which, the talking helped trample down the fear that burned inside ‘a me like a brand. Wasn’t the way of things for a coloured woman to be accused of devilling and not end up as some sorta strange fruit hanging offa tree. Not that that stopped a man from attacking a person any way he found how if he got a mind to.
My thoughts were softened by the sense that Wesley’d got a fever to him. I felt his shakes above the jitterbug of the engine and turned my chatter to a lullaby. That soothed them both, Wesley going soft as a raggedy-anne and aslumber while Carrie-Anne took up her own hum of a song.
She stopped though. Her face turned to mine.
“I’m sorry, Julie. Seems I don’t get far into a day anymore without stirring up pain in one person or another.”
I saw tears fall like longed-for rain, and I noticed the way the silvered dust in the air danced about her head like a halo.
“Hush, chile. Ain’t no bother.”
“I made the dirt keep the Burrower below,” she exclaimed, wild about the eye. “I wanted to keep them safe.” She glanced deliberately at the rear-view mirror, and I went the way of her eyes to see for myself the great stain on the summer sky.
“What if I can’t get it to let them go?” she sobbed.
There’d always been peculiar ways to the girl. Ever since she was a child, I’d seen how the light would get supped up then spill out from her with one glance. How the lay of dust would alter when she tried to sink her duster in amongst it. How the dirt would mix its own swirls when she skipped by. But what of it? I’d got nothin’ to teach the girl about the Lord’s good brown earth in that way. Raising crops, I knew a good fix or two, since taking care of Boar House garden was kinda like it was my own bit of freedom. Might never be more than a maid in the kitchen, but when I grew them crops, it seemed as if I was master at last.
But Carrie-Anne, perhaps them folks weren’t broad of it. She had a way for rearranging the flow of things. I’d witnessed as much the day I saw Reg Wilhoit lay his hands on her ten year old bones, all up over her he was, and I wanted to make some commotion but didn’t know the best way how. It was then that the earth shifted, and that great iron crane swooped down on Reg and crushed the juice from his limbs.
Yes indeed, Carrie-Anne Valentine had a gift. But no matter what folk’d said in chapel, there weren’t no spells or hocus-pocus. If there hadda been, I might’a known how to ease her now and bring back the sun.
Somehow the girl managed to steer us home. As the motor cut, I scooped Wesley up into my arms and put a shoulder to the door. The wind was awful strong now and battering at the long-dead prairie. Birds tried to fly ahead of it; the pull of that great black mouth was too strong. I hadn’t got the wings to take flight, but Boar House would do for me and mine like a wall of stone.
“Gotta get inside now, Miss Carrie-Anne.”
The girl, though, was rooted, hand on the open driver door, her stare taking in the empty porch.
“Why haven’t they surfaced by now? The danger’s passed. They should be surfaced.”
The words seemed to bite into her flesh, and she was gone suddenly, striding out towards the field.
“Miss Carrie-Anne! Miss Carrie-Anne!”
The dust was too thick to see past my own hand. A mighty cold swept in. Wesley was a tugging piglet at my neck and shivering so. With backwards glances, I fought my way up the steps to the porch, burst in past the gauze, got a grip on the front door and shut the howling out.
It was the blinding mercury where the sun’s glow hit the nosecone which drew Ben Richards to gather up a few of Bromide’s best men and take them out into the field. For the breadth of an afternoon, the men toiled against the welts of the dust dunes. Long into the amber eye of the evening, they worked to expose the Burrower’s cockpit. It took the quarry worker, Samuel O’Ryan, twenty minutes more to put a crack in the toughened glass hub.
When they’d laid the bodies of Virgil Roberts and Jos Splitz on the ground, those men found space in their lives to stand and stare a moment, and wonder who else among them would have travelled far below the ground in that steaming dragon. Some wondered if the two dead had indeed tunnelled in search of life-giving water. A few feared a modicum of truth in Dixon’s tale of draining the land. One wondered if the field of bore holes had contributed to the death of Oklahoma’s farming land, its seas of dust. Ben Richard, whose face was etched with the rawness of the storm like a charcoal map. Across the field and the churned garden, he saw Miss Splitz’s housemaid and her boy stood still as waxworks at the carnival and just watching.
He strode on over.
Shreds of Indian Blanket flowers carpeted the porch steps, which creaked a little as he climbed as if weary.
“Julie Sanders?”
Keeping her hand on her boy’s shoulder, the negress turned her face towards him. She was a living well of emotion. Fear and loss flowed and ebbed across her face.
She struggled to keep the boy back but he broke away.
“Yu need take these back, Sir?” The kid held out a palm with five small pebbles in it. “Miss Splitz. She found them underground.”
Ben squinted down. “Nah, boy. Keep ‘em.”
He dipped his head and peered over at the housemaid.
“Ain’t no sign of Carrie-Anne, but we’ll keep on looking.”
“I reckon she’s gone, Mister Richards. Back to the dirt from which she came.”
“Well, we can hope she didn’t suffer.” Ben tucked back the bob of pain in his throat. “Meantime, my daddy says how’s about you and Wesley settle yourselves with us for a while. You can always come right on back at the first sign of Carrie-Anne.”
The housemaid tucked her son back in under her arm. “Yes, Sir. We’ll pack a few things and say our farewell to Boar House. But first, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just watch a while longer.”
“‘Course, Julie. Take your time.”
The Preacher’s boy strode off down the porch steps and through the tangled remains of the garden. Dust lay over everything as if the garden and house had been asleep for a thousand years. There was no bird song, no evening insect chorus. Only the distant voices of the men and the emptiness of the clean-swept plains.
Author’s Acknowledgements
For every circus there must exist a ringmaster, someone to shape the weird and colourful chaos of acts into a plausible show. For me, that person is my husband, Del Lakin-Smith. Words of thanks can never begin to repay his unconditional love and support. Oh no, for that Jack Daniels is required!