The Elementals (29 page)

“We cain’t, it’s getting to be high tide,” said Dauphin. “It won’t be low tide till almost morning.”

“
Then
we’re going for sure,” said Leigh. “I’m not waiting round here to get covered up with sand in my bed, buried alive under a dune.”

There was unanimity: they would leave at dawn, when the channel was sufficiently shallow for the two vehicles to get across.

“I hate this,” whispered Leigh as they turned all to go into the McCray house. “I don’t understand why it had to happen all of a sudden-like when we were just sitting there talking at the supper table.”

“I think this is Lawton’s doing,” said Luker. “It’s like him. Destroy the houses so that we
have
to sell the place.”

“Luker!” exclaimed Big Barbara. “What are you saying? Are you saying that your father is sitting up on the roof with a pail and a shovel, pouring down sand on us? Is that what you’re saying?”

Luker shook his head. “No, no—it’s just that it’s
like
something he’d do.” He looked back sadly at the Savage house from the safety of McCray porch. “It took the sand twenty years to get at the third house, and this one’s going to be gone in a single night. Dauphin,” he said, turning to his brother-in-law, “maybe . . .”

Dauphin shook his head: there was no question but that the house had been usurped forever, and that for that loss there was no comfort.

Luker was the first inside the McCray house; he immediately started to lower all the windows in the house, and Dauphin followed him room to room, checking for accumulations of sand in the corners and along the baseboards. Odessa was the last; she looked once to the Savage house and attended to its sibilant destruction. She glanced at the lowering presence of the third house, an undifferentiated square façade of black against a black sky, stepped inside and locked the door.

Chapter
30

“I’m not going to bed,” said Big Barbara. “I have no intention of lying down tonight. I’m gone sit right here on this sofa and wait for the sun and I would very much appreciate it if one or two of you would sit up with me.”

They all would, they declared. No one could imagine sleeping. Big Barbara and Luker and India had packed their things, and brought down their suitcases and put them beside the kitchen door. Except for what was in Leigh’s bag that she rescued from the Savage house, everything else there was abandoned. They sat at the Gulf end of the living room, and drew the curtains across the windows that looked out on the Savage house—though it was impossible to see what was happening there in the black night.

They simply waited, and when they talked it was not of Big Barbara’s divorce or Leigh’s pregnancy, but simply of the sand. In the silences they listened for the soft hissing fall that they feared would start up around them here. Odessa, after having set up several kerosene lamps against the possibility of electrical shortage here as well, sat a little apart, with her chin on the back of her fisted hand.

At midnight Luker said quietly, “We all saw what happened across the way and we all know what happened wasn’t natural and cain’t be explained. It wasn’t the wind because there wasn’t any wind. And it wasn’t just sand that had always been caught in the timbers because why would it have all come out at once? And how did it get into things that were tight closed? Odessa said it even got in the boxes of food that we brought with us from Mobile yesterday.”

“What are you saying to us?” asked Dauphin.

“I’m saying what happened wasn’t natural.”

“Good lord, Luker!” cried Leigh. “Don’t you think we know that! Whoever heard of sand falling out of the ceiling?”

“But even if it wasn’t natural,” Luker went on, “I think something caused it, isn’t that right, Odessa?”

Odessa raised her fist and that nodded her head.

“Now y’all,” said Luker, reverting into a Southern accent to a degree that India had never before heard, “the night ’fore we left here to go back to Mobile, India and Odessa went in the third house—”

Here came exclamations of wonder and surprise from Big Barbara, Dauphin, and Leigh.

“—and fools they were to do it!” judged Luker.

“Out of their minds!” cried Big Barbara.

“Crazy!” said Leigh.

“—but they did,” said Luker. “And there was something there. There was something upstairs and there was something downstairs and something grabbed India’s leg. Show ’em your leg, India.”

India raised her pants’ leg and exhibited her ankle, which still was not quite healed.

“What was it?” demanded Dauphin. “Maybe it was some kind of animal that was living in the sand. Maybe it was a mole or a ’coon or something like that. Maybe it was a big crab—”

“It pushed over a table,” said India calmly, “and then it reached out and it wrapped its fingers around my leg, and if Odessa hadn’t been there it would have pulled me under.”

“Now Odessa, is this true?” said Big Barbara, though she didn’t for a minute doubt her granddaughter’s word in this matter.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Odessa.

“So what I think,” said Luker after a moment, “is that whatever was in the third house and tried to get India is what’s causing the sand in the Savage house. That’s what I think.”

“Whatever was in the third house has now got in my house,” said Dauphin. “That’s what you think?”

Luker nodded, and so did Odessa.

“Yes,” said Leigh, “I think so too. I didn’t say anything about it, but the other day I was over there lying down in the hammock all by myself and I heard these footsteps upstairs and I thought it was Odessa making the beds. I went upstairs and it wasn’t Odessa and it wasn’t even our bedroom, the footsteps were in that bedroom that nobody ever goes in, except the floor was covered with sand and nobody had been in there for five years. I guess that’s when they got in. That’s why I wouldn’t sleep over there that last night. I don’t know
why
we came back here. You’d think we’d have more sense . . .”

“Yeah, you’d think . . .” agreed Dauphin with a confused shake of his head.

“So what do we do now?” said Big Barbara.

“Just what we planned,” replied Luker. “Get out of here soon as the tide goes out. Get out of here and never come back. Odessa, you think it’ll ever be safe to come back to Beldame?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her mouth was set and her hands gesticulated helplessly. Then she spoke at surprising length: “I don’t know why y’all all the time coming to me with questions when I don’t know much more than any of y’all. When I knew something was gone happen I did what I could to protect us. I gave us special things to eat—India helped me there. Those rolls I made one day, those were s’posed to protect us, but they didn’t do no good. Then I went and locked doors, and I’m staying up half the night looking out the window and watching ’gainst anything happening, and it don’t do no good. I keep on thinking, ‘They in the third house, they not go bother us long as we keep out of the way,’ but that’s not how they thinking about things. Un-unh. They do what they want. They filling up the Savage house with sand, maybe they want the Savage house to live in. Maybe they got more of ’em and they need the room, maybe they’s only one of ’em and always been just one, and he done got tired of the third house and wants to move. Maybe they’s three and maybe they’s seven, and maybe they’s upstairs in
this
house right now. I’m tired of trying to think ’em out and I’m not no good at it anyway. Maybe they want revenge, ’cept nobody’s done ’em no harm. Probably they just mean. Probably that’s it, they just mean and want to cause grief.”

“Are they gone let us out of here?” asked Big Barbara softly.

“Miz Barbara, I just got through saying I didn’t know nothing! If I knew something to keep us safe, don’t you think I’d be doing it right now? I used to think I knew what would keep us safe, but I don’t any more. One time they gone see a cross and they gone back off, and next time they just gone laugh and make you feel like a fool. That’s
real
meanness in a spirit. And I tell you, they laughing now, they laughing real hard.”

Despite general agreement that it was high tide, Luker tried to persuade Dauphin to walk with him to the channel—perhaps they would find that it was shallow enough still to get across. But Leigh would not hear of Dauphin’s leaving her, and Dauphin felt such pride in being wanted by his wife that he couldn’t be persuaded. India couldn’t be parted from Odessa, and finally it was Big Barbara who accompanied Luker.

They went out the front of the house and walked along the Gulf; they could not see the Savage house except as a piece of blackness that blocked out the phosphorescence of St. Elmo’s Lagoon, and the noise of the breakers covered the sound of the falling sand. In less than ten minutes they had reached the channel and found that it flowed deep and swift from the Gulf into the lagoon. With the moon still beneath clouds, the night was intensely dark and even the Gulf white-caps scarcely showed. There was only the shining green surface of the lagoon. “Maybe we can wade across,” said Luker.

“No!” cried Big Barbara, and tugged at her son’s hand. “Luker, you know what that channel’s like—drag you under, drag you out! Remember what happened to poor old Martha-Ann!”

“Martha-Ann didn’t die in the channel.”

“Luker, you been coming to Beldame for thirty years, and you ought to know enough by now to know you cain’t cross the channel ’cept when it’s low tide.”

“No, I don’t know that, all I know is everybody
says
you cain’t.”

“There’s reasons.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but Luker, things are going wrong right and left out here, and now is not the time to start making ’speriments.”

Luker pulled his mother closer to the channel. “Let me just stick my foot in, see how swift the water is—” He plunged his foot into the water, screamed, and fell back on to the ground. He pushed his foot beneath the sand.

“Luker, what’s wrong!”

“It’s hot! It’s fucking hot! That’s what’s the matter, and I burned my fucking toes off. Goddamn . . .”

Big Barbara knelt at the edge of the channel; it was so dark she could not really see the surface of the water and lowered a single finger slowly. The tip of it touched scalding water, and she withdrew it precipitously.

“Well, I never!” she cried. “Gulf water never gets like this, Luker!”

“
’Course not!”

They were silent for a moment.

“Let’s try the Gulf,” said Big Barbara. Luker limped along on his scalded foot, and Big Barbara dragged him. They stood on the shore and the waves broke coolly against their legs. “Well this is all right,” she said. “I cain’t see it but I think the channel begins ’bout twenty yards down there. Why don’t we go down and see where the hot water begins, maybe we can get across there . . .”

Luker agreed, and they walked along through half a foot of water. As they went the Gulf grew appreciably warmer and by the time that they were perhaps five yards away from the place where the Gulf flowed across Beldame to St. Elmo’s Lagoon, their legs were beginning to burn. A wave broke high against them and the water was as hot as that with which Odessa washed dishes. They ran frantically for the shore.

When they had recovered a little, Big Barbara said, “Is there any point in going over to the lagoon?”

“No,” said Luker, “even I know enough not to go out in the lagoon. At night? And that truck—”

“Forgot about the truck,” sighed Big Barbara. “We’re gone be here all night, looks like.”

“Looks like.”

When they returned to the McCray house, they fashioned an excuse no one believed as to why their clothes were wet. It had seemed pointless to tell of the supernaturally heated water. Just that the channel was too high to be crossed—though this information came not unexpected—dragged on everyone’s spirit, and they sat for a long while without saying anything.

The hours would be long until morning. India fell asleep with her head in Luker’s lap, and he slept with his head tilted back against the sofa. Leigh and Big Barbara lay in the hammocks that were strung in the living room. Indicative of the severity of the night was the fact that Odessa went so far as to draw her rocking chair close beside Dauphin’s on the braided rug, and then they rocked together, in rhythm and in silence.

Chapter
31

They had waited in the dark. They had listened in the dark for the sound of sand falling in the house until at last sleep had overcome them. When India awakened it was to find the room still dark, and herself blind in that darkness. Her head still rested on Luker’s lap, and she felt rather than heard his breath. Behind the couch, she heard Big Barbara mumbling in the hammock—she dreamed, and not pleasantly. Leigh’s breathing was rough too.

When her eyes had accustomed to the lack of light, India saw that Dauphin still slept in the motionless rocker. His hand, which had held Odessa’s, dangled at the side. The black woman was not to be seen. India rose from the sofa without waking her father and went through the dining room into the kitchen. On the kitchen table were two of the three kerosene lamps which Odessa had prepared, set at lowest illumination. Through the panes of the back door India looked out at the Savage house.

The pallid light of the waning moon allowed her to make out the perfect cone of sand that had covered it—as if the house had been a tiny model at the bottom of an hourglass. India had seen such a figure in a museum of
curiosa
in the Catskills. The turrets over the verandah stuck out on the far side, the tops of the second floor gables were visible, and the third floor with the window of Odessa’s room were still uncovered. But everything else, including all the doors and first-floor windows, had been neatly, malevolently, expeditiously inhumed.

It was no dune that had enveloped the Savage house, for dunes are irregular things shaped by wind and tide; and this was a cold geometric figure that had chosen to manifest itself in the same space occupied by the Savage house. Its circumference precisely intersected the four corners of the building. The peak of the cone was invisible but was obviously set somewhere on the third floor: as if all these hundreds of tons of sand had spilled out from another dimension of space and through a single point in the air above Odessa’s bed.

“So that’s what they wanted,” India said in a whisper to herself, “all the time what they wanted was Dauphin’s house. Well, now they’ve got it! I just wish I had my camera . . .”

India cautiously opened the back door, pushed on the screen, and then stood on the back steps of the house. She peered into the blackness, hoping to find Odessa. Seeing no one, hearing nothing, she walked out into the yard, nearer to the Savage house. Now she could see that the cone of sand was still growing, most quickly where the sand spilled through the open windows of the house. Loose grains—millions altogether—tumbled silently from the top all the way down to the base.