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.
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 colour of rust in the moonlight; he guessed it was copper. Nice choice of metal 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 rumour 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-coloured 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.
Dixon stroked his throat. One thing was for sure. Jos Splitz wasn’t feeling the effect of no drought. In fact, she was sucking up the juices of the land while the rest of the state died of thirst.
The question now was what to do with that knowledge.
He walked back around to the front of the workshop. The kerosene lamp gave out jaundiced twilight, and it occurred to him what a curious thing it was to find outside the workshop at that hour. The old gal was hee-hawing in her bed like a sun-baked mule; he’d heard the housemaid remark on it. So, some fool musta lit the thing for the ghosts, or more likely, as a deterrent against starving hobos, of which there were plenty.
One side of the double door’s latch wasn’t quite caught in its slot.
He was about to secure the door when it occurred to him that a late night check of the grounds, along with the investigation of any mysterious circumstances, might well fall within the duties of a yardman. He gave the door a gentle push and stepped inside.
Great black rafters overhung a room divided into two separate work areas by a mottled, semi-opaque glass sliding screen. Since this ‘wall’ was at most eight foot, he was able to see the upper section of the vast machine referred to as The Burrower at the far end of the workshop. Moonlight filtered in at high narrow windows, reflecting off the tip of a colossal metal bore like an exploding star.
Dixon tucked his arms in tight to his body. Either side of him were shelves laden with cartons, jars, bottles filled with some milky substance, balls of string, small plump sacks lined up like Humpty Dumpties, and boxes containing preserved weed, bark strips, tubers, cotton bolts, and all manner of weird in-between.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered, leaning in to study a jar. He wasn’t much for learning but his daddy had insisted on him getting his alphabet licked. “U... S... E. Use. A.T. At...” He spelt out the words phonetically. “M.I.D.N.I.G.H.T... Use at midnight?” Puzzlement wormed up at his brow. The contents looked like something scraped outta pig sty.
Dixon peered closer at the racks of jars. Seeds, burs, dried flowerheads... it hadda be a gardener’s store. Carrie-Anne liked to mix dirt, he thought, remembering how her cotton dress had scooped tight across her buttocks as she’d worked her trowel into a flower bed that afternoon. But no, that didn’t sit right somehow. Carrie-Anne was too refined to stock that queer larder. What he did suspect was that this corner of the workshop had been given over to the house negress who used it for potions and witchdoctoring.
His daddy’s words played over and over in his head. Dixon felt parched even as sweat glistened at his brow. Placing one foot carefully behind the other, he started to back off from that devil’s altar.
It was the small catch of breath which made him pause mid-step. He listened intently. There. A whisper of sound, girlish and sensual. Momentarily he was afraid that the housemaid’s brews had attracted some intoxicating spirit come to steer him to sin and feast on his soul. Then he heard a second murmur, a man’s baritone that was distinctly human and coming from the other side of the glass screen.
The baking heat crested and broke over him as, through the thick lichened glass of the sliding screen, he made out the outline of their rutting bodies. His nostrils flared. It hadda be the sorceress, squeezing the life from some poor soul between her flanks.
An old parlour chair rested on two legs against the screen. Dixon eased it back down, placed one boot on the seat and tried out his partial weight on it. Reassured the chair would hold him, he stepped up level with the top of the screen and tentatively peered over.
The air was torn from his lungs. In place of black flesh, he saw the bow of a pale breast, the crush and rise of white thighs, and unsoiled nails that cut in at a man’s spine, causing him to buckle and thrust harder. As moonshine spilt out into every corner of the workshop, revealing an ocean of dust motes, he saw Virgil Roberts with his pants down and Carrie-Anne Valentine’s angelic face twist in grotesque ecstasy.
There’d been many occasions in the past when Carrie-Anne and Julie had exchanged words. When she’d pulled the rags from her hair and worried out the ringlets an hour before Great Aunt Rita’s annual visit. Or when she’d cut down a bed of sweet potato fern to use as a posy for her ‘marriage’ to a five year old Ben Richards. Or when, more recently, she’d scolded Wesley for beating a carpet near the spot of lawn where she was resting. Listening in from the porch, Julie had puffed up like a prize-fighter and stomped on over. “Carrie-Anne Valentine!” she’d embarked with a shake in her voice. But even though Carrie-Anne demanded then cajoled then begged her to continue, Julie seemed to think better of her anger and just take herself back off inside the house. It was a different story yesterday afternoon. Then Julie had decided to stick around and say her piece... although, as it turned out, it was Carrie-Anne who dug up sentiments that should never have been voiced.
Arranging her gloves on her lap and leaning back against the hard pew, Carrie-Anne was haunted by Julie’s blank expression when told to remember her place. And it occurred to her that she had seen that look before, on the faces of the field Negroes who toiled and starved and hated their master.
