From the Dust Returned

“But—” Cecy held on to her elbows, touched her own chin, her mouth, her brow, inside which four live ghosts wrestled for room. “But—what’ll I do with them?” Her eyes searched all those faces below in the yard. “My cousins can’t stay! They can’t stand around in my head!”

What she cried after that, or what the cousins babbled, crammed like pebbles under her tongue, or what the Family said, running like burned chickens in the yard, was lost.

With Judgment Day thunders, the rest of the barn fell.

With a vast whisper the ashes blew away in an October wind that leaned this way and that on the attic roof.

“It seems to me,” said Father.

“Not seems, but is!” said Cecy, eyes shut.

“We must farm the cousins out. Find temporary hospices until such time as we can cull new bodies—”

“The quicker the better,” said four voices from Cecy’s mouth, now high, now low, now two gradations between.

Father continued in darkness. “There must be someone in the Family with a small room in the backside of their cerebellum! Volunteers!”

The Family sucked in an icy breath and stayed silent. Great Grandmère, far above in her own attic place, suddenly whispered: “I hereby solicit, name, and nominate the oldest of the old!”

As if their heads were on a single string, everyone turned to blink at a far corner where their ancient Nile River Grandpère leaned like a dry bundle of two-millennia-before-Christ wheat.

The Nile ancestor husked, “No!”

“Yes!” Grandmère shut her sand-slit eyes, folded her brittle arms over her tomb-painted bosom. “You have all the time in the world.”

“Again, no!” The mortuary wheat rustled.

“This,” Grandmère murmured, “is the Family, all strange-fine. We walk nights, fly winds and airs, wander storms, read minds, work magic, live forever or a thousand years, whichever. In sum, we’re Family, to be leaned on, turned to, when—”

“No, no!”

“Hush.” One eye as large as the Star of India opened, burned, dimmed, died. “It’s not proper, four wild men in a slim girl’s head. And there’s much you can teach the cousins. You thrived long before Napoleon walked in and ran out of Russia, or Ben Franklin died of pox. Fine if the boys’ souls were lodged in your ear some while. It might straighten their spines. Would you deny this?”

The ancient ancestor from the White and Blue Niles gave only the faintest percussion of harvest wreaths.

“Well, then,” said the frail remembrance of Pharaoh’s daughter. “Children of the nigh, did you hear!?”

“We heard!” cried the ghosts from Cecy’s mouth.

“Move!” said the four-thousand-year-old mummification.

“We move!” said the four.

And since no one had bothered to say which cousin went first, there was a surge of phantom tissue, a tide-drift of storm on the unseen wind.

Four different expressions lit Grandpère’s harvest ancestor’s face. Four earthquakes shook his brittle frame. Four smiles ran scales along his yellow piano teeth. Before he could protest, at four different gaits and speeds, he was shambled from the house, across the lawn, and down the lost railroad tracks toward town, a mob of laughter in his cereal throat.

The Family leaned from the porch, staring after the rushing parade of one.

Cecy, deep asleep again, gaped her mouth to free the echoes of the mob.

At noon the next day the big, dull-blue iron engine panted into the railroad station to find the Family restless on the platform, the old harvest pharaoh supported in their midst. They not so much walked but carried him to the day coach, which smelled of fresh varnish and hot plush. Along the way, the Nile traveler, eyes shut, uttered curses in many voices that everyone ignored.

They propped him like an ancient corn-shock in his seat, fastened a hat on his head like putting a new roof on an old building, and addressed his wrinkled face.

“Grandpère, sit up. Grandpère, are you in there? Get out of the way, cousins, let the old one speak.”

“Here.” His dry mouth twitched and whistled. “And suffering their sins and misery! Oh, damn, damn!”