Diamond Dust (13 page)

One of the most unsightly bits of the neighbourhood stood, shamefully, in their own yard, in the corner where the driveway curved away from the house and disappeared behind the lilac bushes that no one ever trimmed, so that it really was not visible to anyone else but to them, and then only if they happened to go past the garage and around the lilacs to the end of the drive. Normally it was only their father who went there, in winter when he was obliged by contract to ¿lear the driveway of snow, because at the end of the drive stood a two-roomed wooden cabin with a condemned porch and a sagging roof that had been let out to their tenant, Miss Mabel Dodd.

Of course the tenant herself was visible, when she drove off to work in the gauzy grey steam of early morning, in her beaten-up old maroon Dodge with the grey paint showing through and flaking off as it creaked past the lilacs, fell into and lifted itself out of the deep ruts outside their kitchen window, scraped by the low-hanging branches of a thicket of lugubrious larch and spruce trees, and then cautiously edged onto Route 2, pointing towards Amherst. It was usually already dark when she made her way back at the end of the day, the headlights of the Dodge dragging through the leaves and grasses, leaving behind shadows. The cabin itself could not be seen from the house. The tenant spoke to none of them unless absolutely necessary and greetings were not: the mother had discovered that when she tried to greet her on their occasional, inevitable meetings in the driveway and there would be no reply. The father claimed he had actually had some conversations with Miss Dodd regarding particularly heavy snowfalls and problems with heating, but the children had not witnessed them and suspected him of imagining a relationship that did not exist, even so minimally. He would do that, pretend to be sociable when he was not.

When she first took up occupancy, the children fantasised about her, made up stories about her secret life as a witch. The first Hallowe'en, they had even gone around wrapped in bedsheets and with baskets on their heads, to chant 'Trick-or-treat?' under her windows. She had simply not answered the door. The children persisted: the car stood outside, after all. They pressed their ears to the front door, listening for a sound—and heard creaks, cracks. They peered through the grimy windows to see if they could spy a shadow or a light, and Polly, peering through a slit in the sheet of grey plastic that hung over the window, thought she did see something pale, wedged into a tall-backed chair in the corner; it was certainly not a light. It had the substance of flesh, but without any variation, entirely pallid from top to toe—or at least as much of it as Polly could see. And a faint swirl of smoke wound around it, slowly floating in the dark. When the other children began to push at Polly and ask, 'Can you see? Can you see anything?' she turned and elbowed past them, then leapt off the porch, swearing, 'It's a ghost!' All of them echoed, 'It's — a — ghost!' and Polly could not explain that the ghost had not been light and afloat as it should have been, but solid and fleshy and dull.

It was easy to forget that Miss Dodd lived there at all. For long stretches, they did forget. They built themselves a tree house one summer and sat on its uneven planks, dangling their legs and looking out over the sagging, crumbling roof of shingles that seemed a natural outgrowth of the earth. It was a long time since the walls had been painted and it was impossible to tell what colour they had been. Now they were the colour of dried blood, a boring brown. There was nothing that could be called a garden or a yard around it; in fact, it was a wilderness of ivy and scrub and some peculiarly vigorous ferns.

Polly was still humming 'Pa-aint just what you-u dre-eam -' when she slipped out of the rubber tyre and slouched across the grass to where the jungle spread in order to examine those ferns; her painter's eye saw some promise in their furled and unfurled shapes and tightly wound, or else exuberantly unwound, clusters. There was something serpentine about them, something you might come across in a dream. She was barefoot, and cautious, as if she expected them to hiss and sway, and when she heard sounds behind her, she snapped her head around to look. But it was only Tom following, lifting up his knees and plonking down his feet like an intrepid explorer, a switch held in his fist in readiness.

Since the tenant was always out at that time of day, they could explore at leisure, and what they found surprised them: at the bottom of the mouldering backstairs that ended in a tumble of rhododendrons were a stone head, bald, blind, rising out of the ivy, its shoulders submerged in all the dark groundcover, and other bits of statuary—petrified hands and limbs pushing out of the soft mould like gravestones, or lying scattered under the branches of the spruce trees. They might have been the remains of a battle, or else ploughed up out of a graveyard.

Polly and Tom said nothing to each other, but breathed hard and noisily as they turned over and kicked at various bits of stone and clay and plaster—mostly human shapes, thick and clumsy, and some abstract ones that could not be called squares or circles or anything at all, just contortions, blunted ones. There was something disquieting about these ugly, abandoned pieces that appeared to have been flung out of the windows of the cabin, only one, the bald head, evidently planted. The children, unnerved, were silent, as if they had walked into an invisible spiderweb in a forest or come upon bones in the wilds.

Polly thought of the yellow stack of
National Geographic
magazines piled up beside the sofa in the den, with photographs of steaming jungles, vast ruins, ancient idols tumbled from their pedestals and lying prone on the forest floor. She caught a wisp of her hair between her teeth and chewed on it. 'Miss Abigail at the camp was a sculptress,' she said. 'She made a ballerina out of plaster. She said she'd help me if I wanted to try. It was real pretty. Not like this stuff—' and she kicked at it, but not hard, being barefoot.

'But that ole Miss Dodd didn't
make
this stuff, did she?' Tom said, striking out with his switch at a flattened nose. 'Bet she got it from somewhere—some witch doctor, maybe. Maybe she does voodoo,' he growled; he'd looked through the
National Geographies
too.

'Voo-doo!' Polly echoed him, in an even deeper voice. They began making spitting sounds of condemnation. There was an unpleasant smell about the place too. As they came around the back of the cabin, they saw the cause of it: under the kitchen window lay a pile of refuse, household garbage, kitchen waste, simply tossed out and lying in a heap, some brown, some black, some wet, some solid.

'Ugh! Did you
see
that?'

'Gross!'

'Diss-gust-ing!'

'We better tell Dad!'

That evening they did and he allowed some wrinkles to work their way through his forehead, but only said, 'Guess the raccoons'll eat it up,' and went back to staring at the TV screen in the den: a sign he did not mean to get up and get involved.

For a while their mother did her best to make him do something about it. 'Think of the flies,' she urged. 'It's a health hazard.'

'Christ,' he said, turning red—he'd been looking forward all week to this match. 'I've put two garbage cans outside her door—what "more am I supposed to do? Clean her yard for her? With the rent she's paying us, it's not worth it.' The ball game was coming to an end in a frenzy of waving flags and blowing whistles. Frustrated, he got up. 'And that cabin isn't worth more than the rent she's paying—we're lucky she wants it,' he added. That was that, he implied, switching off the television.

But their mother would not let it drop: the thought of flies, and disease, was something she would not tolerate in her own backyard. Finally she brought out an unopened box of garbage bags and handed them to him, ordering him to take them across to her. 'If she won't come out, leave them on her porch. She'll have to get the message.'

He went off grumbling and they waited for him to come back and report. He returned with a hurried gait, his head lowered, and still clutching the garbage bags.

'Didn't you give them to her? She's there—her car's there—I saw it,' began the mother, but he flung them onto the table, muttering something about, 'You can't just go bursting in on people like that,' and disappeared into the den.

'What do you mean?' the mother demanded, following him. She stood in the doorway, questioningly. The children could not see him, he had sunk onto the sofa, and it was difficult to hear what he said since he had switched on the television again, but they were almost certain—later, when they discussed it, they found their certainties matched—that he'd said, 'What was I supposed to
do
? She
was
there, she opened the door—nekkid as the day that she was born. Stark nekkid. Not a stitch. What was I to do—hand over the garbage bags for her to dress in?' The mother quickly shut the door to the den. Polly and Tom stared at each other till sputters of laughter began to erupt from them. Tom's sputters turned to spit. Then Polly's did. They dribbled their laughter till it ran.

By what had to be an odd coincidence, the next Sunday morning they looked up from their breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup, and saw the maroon Dodge come bumping slowly over the ruts past their kitchen window, then turn around the lilacs and disappear: their tenant had already been out that sleepy summer Sunday morning and was already back, this time bringing with her a visitor. She had never been known to have a visitor before. That he was a black youth whose upright, only slightly inclined head they had briefly glimpsed was equally extraordinary—in their neighbourhood.

After breakfast, the children edged out into the backyard before they could be caught up in any busy activity their parents might think up for them. They made for the maple tree and took turns at swinging in the tyre seat, then climbed into the branches to see if anything remained of their tree house. That was what they told each other—'D'you think there's anything left of it?' 'Can't see.' 'Let's go look.'

There was still the platform although the roof and walls had blown down in the previous winter's storms and snowfalls, and from it they could look across the yard and over the lilacs to/the cabin. What they saw there was the black youth, in oversized jeans and a military-looking shirt hanging out below his hips, wearing a baseball cap turned backwards, sweeping up the porch with a broom, then coming down the rotten steps to sweep that area. Then he returned to the house and they saw his head at the kitchen window, bent over what must have been the sink and taps.

It was mysterious, and unsettling. Had she heard them, somehow, discuss the filthy state of her house? How? She would have had to be a witch, hovering in the air above them, invisibly. And who was the youth? A guest? But no one had a black boy for a guest. Had she employed him as a cleaner? What was going on? Was he going to stay?

The last question was soon answered: before noon they saw the car going up the driveway and edging onto Route 2, the tenant with her great flabby jaw sunk upon her chest as she drove, and the youth on the front seat beside her, also in a sunken posture. There was no explanation for this unusual visit, this departure from habit—none at all.

And it was repeated the next Sunday, so that it seemed to be a new habit. Quite failing to keep their curiosity to themselves, the children disengaged themselves from the rubber tyre and the maple tree—Polly had also quietly abandoned the paint pots in the attic—and found games to play on the gravel of the driveway in front of the battered old cabin. Hopscotch—something they hadn't played in years. The black youth, coming down the steps with a broom and a rag, unexpectedly stuck out his tongue, then grinned at them. He started to sweep the dust and cobwebs off the walls and from under the eaves where they hung in swags, then started to wipe the windows, so long obscured by dirt as to make them opaque. Turning around suddenly, he caught them gaping at him. 'Dirty, ain't it?' he said conversationally. 'Ugly, too.'

They did not know how to reply. Ugly it was, and dirty too, but it was theirs. Was it a comment on them, and their lives, and status? Certainly the facts were undeniable and they said, uneasily, 'Yeah,' and 'Guess so.'

'Y'know what,' he added, 't'owner's ugly, too. An' dirty as hell.'

They retreated, shocked. The boy and his efforts at cleaning up the slovenly shack became even more mysterious. He was not a guest, then. So what was he—to their sullen, black-browed tenant?

'Oh, a cleaner, I guess,' their mother said when they told her of this exchange. 'She must have hired a cleaner. High time, too. Never thought she'd do it.'

'D'you think she heard us? She'd have to be a witch!'

But their father only said, 'Good, place getting cleaned up at last,' with as much satisfaction as if it were his own achievement.

Instead, a shocking event took place that did not result in cleanliness at all. School had reopened by then, and the children had forgotten such trivial moments of their summer. Tom was launched on his project of getting into the swimming team but finding it far from easy, and Polly was struggling to maintain her identity as an artist (she had taken her roll of paintings to show the school art teacher who had looked at them down her nose and said, 'Yes, well, we're going to be doing pencil sketches and still lifes this term'). The routine of catching the school bus, going off every morning, bringing back homework, was settling into its usual monotony. It was early fall, the leaves grey and tinged with yellow, like the beard of an old man, when one morning Miss Mabel Dodd arrived at their back door and stood, in her heavy boots, her battered jacket, her hands in her pockets, and her chin sunk into her collar, addressing their father. Their mother, when summoned, went at once to see what it was about. So did the children, at risk of missing the school bus, and there in the drive stood the tenant's car, at which she was gesturing. It was scrawled all over with what was obviously excrement, since it stank, and in excrement someone had written the word PIG across the front and rear window. Some of it had been smeared over the hood, and over the trunk. When they tore their eyes away from this mound of desecration, they went out, walked around the lilacs and saw the cabin with bags of garbage strewn all around it, across the steps and over the porch. Miss Mabel Dodd stood with them, huddled into her jacket—worn, they saw, over a pair of faded flannel pyjamas—surveying it with them. Here finally was something she wished to share.