“Then we’re gonna haul anchor and get ourselves a sample of that pretty wet stuff, my boy.” Jos half-leant back, her vinegar features squeezed up in an attempt to express happiness.
It was Jos’s job to steer the Burrower, as it was to dig the twin steel sleds at the undercarriage into whatever matter lay beneath in an effort to slow then cease their motion. Virgil watched her leathered hands punch, skip and tug their way around switches, wheels, plungers, knobs, gears and levers, and the rest of the coke-dusted motorisation bank.
“Keep an eye on those whiskers.”
Jos eased off on the steam release and drew the Burrower to a juddering halt.
The engine wheezed noisily then idled. A faint sensation of crushing in threatened to overwhelm Virgil. He pushed that to the back of his mind. It was just his imagination... or an innate knowledge of how preternatural the circumstances were that had brought him below ground. Somehow it was more eerie to be at a standstill in that freshly-cut tunnel, the illumination from the floodlights spilling either side of the colossal bore. All that lay ahead and behind was tight-aired darkness, hence the detection of any faults in the tunnel walls being left to a backend full of softly sprung copper spines, or ‘whiskers’ as Jos was prone to call them. If matter sifted down too heavily, the weight of it would trigger a kick-back action in the spine, and, with it, a clockwise shift of the farthermost dial in the rack above his head.
All was still for now.
“Dig your little horn into the belly of this beast, Jos,” he said softly, doing a mental check of the fill level of the coke channel to his right.
Jos worked a small fly wheel in the ceiling 45 degrees right. There was the slightest rocking motion as the sample needle took its two foot worth of rock sample then withdrew. Jos rewound the lever in the opposite direction.
“Wet sand... No time to shake hands on it now, Virgil Roberts,” she tossed over a shoulder, and in a tone which implied he had attempted to. “We’re only a couple of lengths below the surface. Best get you back to that strawberry of a niece of mine. You sure do seem to like the taste of her.” The old gal snorted, like a smaller version of her vast grunting machines. “Lets shake free of this sand and haul on up.”
It was difficult not to wipe his glad, tired eyes, not to pat the whorled dragon on her shoulder and say, ‘Well done, Jos. Well done you wise old dear’, not to dream of ice chips pressed to Carrie-Anne’s lips, her jugular, her glistening sternum, not to just sit and sigh and sleep.
Instead, Virgil dove the scoop hard through the coke, ripped open the iron flap in the wall and shook off the fuel, feeling his skin flush and hurt with the heat. The engine bubbled under, then roared in its gullet as Jos manoeuvred the twin steel tracks free of their footings and the tremendous hammer of a machine thrust forward and up.
“Tell you one thing, Virgil. That water gotta come from someplace. Don’t know if you been over the way of the old Indian Academy recently?” Jos made a sound like spit had caught up in her throat and spun there. “Now there’s some suffering. I’ve been hiking up there with a backseat of beet and sweet potato and the rest whenever I get a minute. ‘Cept what do you do? Help the few or try to fix the root problem? That’s what we’re aiming at, ain’t we, Virgil, boy? Let’s hope we gotta a break through, hey?”
Jos Splitz. A devil of a woman on her dried up exterior. A polished silver heart on the inside. Virgil broke out a smile.
It was such a small, simple instance of happiness – snatched away the very next second. A noise, like the scream of a great wind buffeting a hide of metal scales. The Burrower shuddered and the whole cabin seemed to tear forwards an inch then sling back several feet. Virgil heard the wind cut from Jos’s throat; the old gal caught it badly, sucking and choking to guzzle down air.
“You alright, Jos. You alright, girl?”
What the hell had they hit? A sheet of bedrock? Wasn’t possible at that angle. He’d surveyed that stretch of land like a mother knowing every inch of her baby’s skin. Wouldn’t do to risk that nosecone on a more difficult stretch. Something was hard up against them though.
“Jos? You gonna answer me there?”
Unclipping his harness, Virgil manhandled himself up to lean a short way over the front seat. Jos’s head lolled towards him as he dug a hand into the metal boning of her chair, eyes closed so that she looked like a husk of a woman whose clockwork had just run out.
No chance to move her. Never was. The notion of a stalemate underground was something they’d both signed up to. He had no choice then but to attempt to work the motorisation bank by stretching his limbs at grotesque angles. The pain cut at his mind like a lash, but he succeeded in engaging the gears and driving the Burrower hard forward. At impact, his ribs jolted against the driveshaft that fed the lights, plunging the cabin into darkness.
Virgil gulped down the baking air and tried to calm himself. He’d promised Carrie-Anne they’d surface by midday, that she would have her afternoon of shared breath underneath a ripe gold sun. If Jos would just wake up. If the Burrower could just work its way home.
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
