What Is It, Mother?
by Dylan Lee Henderson
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Dust storms had stripped the house of most of its shingles and many of its clapboards, and even in the reddish darkness that prevailed west of the frontier, I could see jagged holes in what remained of the roof and black spots, like infected sores, in the rust-stained walls.
My father, the gun still in his hand, forced the three of us inside and shut the door. Outside, the roar of the wind changed pitch and then, after one last icy howl, died away, and a brooding silence, intensified by the cold and the darkness, settled over the house. My father didn’t move or say anything, but I could hear him breathing in the gloom.
Kepler’s presence I could feel. “We can’t stop,” he said, his voice low, hard, and dry. “If they find us here, we’ll be trapped.”
Roland, who was crouching in the dust beside the door, stopped coughing and, pawing at my arm, began to moan.
“They won’t,” my father said. “We’re too far from the frontier.” He lit a match and, pushing past me, led the way into the kitchen. Kepler glared at him, the expression on his ugly face frightening, but after a moment’s hesitation, he followed, and so did I.
In the kitchen, part of the ceiling had collapsed, and a thick layer of reddish dust, entering the house through the broken windows, had coated everything and erased every color other than black and red. Bits of glass, tile, and plaster covered the sagging floor and bit into the worn soles of my shoes.
A single icicle, as long and thin as my arm, glinted evilly in the flickering light, its icy nail pointing towards the floor. In the corner was a pile of rags or a dead animal of some sort, a coyote perhaps or a feral dog that had become lost and disoriented. The stale, gritty air in that place, which tasted of iron, was painful to breathe.
There was another smell, subtle but foul, which felt warm and slightly oily in the nostrils. I saw Roland’s lip curl as he sniffed at the unclean air, but he said nothing, and I knew better than to disturb my father.
He was sitting alone at the kitchen table, the gun that had killed the old man, Gerber, lying in front of him next to a broken cup, the inside of which had been stained black by old coffee. Slowly, as if unconcerned, he lit a cigarette and, inhaling the acrid smoke, motioned toward the shadows.
“Find us some candles,” he said. “We need some light in here.”
After a brief search, I found half a dozen in a box beneath the sink, and my father lit one and, holding it over his head, inspected the downstairs bedroom.
“We’ll sleep here tonight,” he said, poking at the dust-strewn mattress with the toe of his boot, “all of us. We stay together.”
Roland nodded and, brushing the plaster from an armchair onto the floor, sat down in the corner. Behind him a patch of mold, as large as a panther, hovered over him. He was a small, thin man, not much bigger than I was, and I knew he wouldn’t challenge my father, but I feared the man we called Kepler, who had killed children before.
At that moment, he was standing in the doorway, outside the circle of light cast by the candle, his back to the hall. The only part of him that I could see was the tip of his cigarette, which glowed a sickly red, but I knew that he was watching us.
Earlier, I had found some food. The cabinets had been full of it, though the bread and cheese had become hard like coal, and the apples, pears, and tomatoes had dissolved into slime. Father distributed the canned food, and we ate in silence, all of us listening, I think, for the sound of dogs.
When Kepler spoke, his voice, never much above a whisper, seemed to come from inside my own mind. “They won’t turn back at the border,” he said, his cigarette glowing softly, “not after what we did to their father. We need to keep moving.”
My father continued to eat. I could hear his spoon clattering angrily against the inside of the can.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” he said firmly. “We need to rest. In a few hours, there’ll be some light. Then we’ll go.”
No one said a word, and in the silence that followed, the wet, dirty smell waxed, as if a bladder filled with filth had ruptured. My heart was beating loudly in my ears, but there was another sound, too, as if someone very far away was slowly beating a drum.
Roland whimpered in the darkness. I could hear his thin legs shaking.
“It ain’t safe,” he murmured. He leaned forward, a pleading look in his large, watery eyes. “Bruce, there are worse things in the wilderness than Indians and Gerber’s boys. They’ve found cities out here, you know, beneath the sand. Other things, too.”
My father didn’t answer. He dropped the can of peaches he had been eating, and I heard the empty can strike the pinewood floor and roll beneath the bed.
“That’s bullshit,” he said softly. “There’s nothing out here but dust.” His eyes, small and dark, flashed in Kepler’s direction, and I swallowed nervously. In my mind, I made myself very small, as small as a bird or a gnat. I could see myself flying about the room and then out the broken window, into the darkness.
Kepler said nothing. He just stood in the doorway and smoked, and after a minute or two had passed, my father handed me the candle and told me to look around for some blankets. I found some, neatly folded and covered in dead spiders, in a wardrobe.
I also found a small, leather-bound notebook, which I slipped into my pocket, and a lace nightgown, which, at one time, must have been a bluish green. Its silky folds, so out of place in that dark and icy hole, felt almost warm between my fingers.
When I returned with the blankets, my father was still sitting on the edge of the bed. He was inspecting a gold watch, a relic from the Old World, which he must have taken from the dead man before his sons returned. My father showed it to me, a look of pride on his broad face, and I smiled and, taking it in my hands, inspected it in the dim light. I thought I could hear it ticking, but its spidery hands, which looked as if they had been wrenched out of place, didn’t move.
Roland was already asleep. I could see his thin chest rising and falling beneath his shirt. I covered him with one of the wool blankets and gave another to Kepler, who took it without a word and, sitting down with his back against the door, covered himself.
He made no sound, and when my father extinguished the candle with his thumb and forefinger, I couldn’t tell if the man were asleep or awake. He might sit there for a long time, pretending to sleep, and then, when we finally dozed off, rise and, taking the knife from his pocket, quietly approach the bed.
“You’ll need to watch,” my father said, his voice coming to me out of the darkness. “You can sleep a little in the morning.”
He said nothing else, and I felt the mattress sag beneath his weight. His breathing slowed, and within a few minutes, he was asleep. I sat there, shivering in the cold air that blew through the shattered window, and stared into the abyss before me.
Aside from the house itself, whose bones creaked painfully in the wind, there were no sounds, not even the dismal hooting of an owl or bark of a coyote, but now and then, the smell that wafted through the house would wax, swelling until it became almost intolerable.
Toward dawn, when I was absolutely certain that the other three were all asleep, I rose and, wandering blindly through the house, came to a stop in front of a narrow door beneath the stairs. Through its rotting panels seeped the familiar odor, and when I pressed my ear against the oak, I thought I could hear the faint, muffled sound of a beating heart.
* * *
The sun did not rise in the morning, but the long night gradually yielded to a weak, gray light, which seeped, like fog, through the broken windows and the holes in the roof and walls.
During the night, the men had slept poorly. Roland complained of bad dreams and, in the wan light, my father’s handsome face looked old and pale. Even Kepler, whose expression I could never read, seemed troubled. The smell had grown worse, they said, and Roland, who coughed continuously, could barely breathe.
Both Kepler and Roland wanted to press on, and I heard them arguing in the next room with my father. I knew he would, if forced, kill them both, but whether or not he would stay with me, if his own life were in danger, I did not know.
After breakfast, in any case, he came into the bedroom and, sitting down on the edge of the bed, covered me with a dusty quilt that he had found.
“What do you think happened,” I asked slowly, careful not to upset him, “to the family who lived here?”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “Drought,” he said, his small eyes devoid of emotion. “Water ran out, and dust overtook the farm. They left.”
I had heard before, when I was still in school, that every summer the desert expanded a little, blighting the farms and towns on its borders and claiming the once-fertile land for its own, but I wanted my father to deny it, to reject the idea as fanciful, childish even.
“Do you think they died?” I asked quietly.
My father sighed. Such talk irritated him. “No,” he said, “they would’ve left when the crops started to fail. It would’ve taken years.”
The notion didn’t seem to bother him. Perhaps he even found it somehow satisfying. If the territory were to fail, if the deserts were to reclaim what the original settlers had struggled so hard to win, it didn’t really matter what he, or anyone else, did. He was free.
“A woman lived here,” I said, thinking of the nightgown and the notebook still in my pocket. “She left her things. They all did.”
My father looked at me, his eyes hard like marbles. Then he rose, the bedframe creaking beneath him, and crossed the room. “Get some sleep,” he said, closing the door behind him.
I lay there for a long time, listening to the steady drip of melting ice that came from somewhere inside the house. Every now and then, I would hear the sound of Roland’s dry cough or the angry stamp of my father’s heavy boots. Outside the window, a loose shutter swung on its remaining hinge, its broken slats clattering against the side of the house, and the dead trees in the yard creaked stiffly in the wind.
I tried to picture our old house on the outskirts of town, but I could only see bits and pieces: the blue tile in the bathroom, the stray cats that played in the garden and on top of the toolshed, the row of bottles that stood in front of the dining-room window and, like magic, turned the golden sunlight green and brown.
I was sitting on the floor, eating a sandwich, a pack of blank cards scattered on the rug in front of me, when I heard my mother calling. I could tell by the sound of her voice that she wasn’t angry, that she wasn’t mad at me or at anyone, and I rose excitedly and hurried toward her room.
But the hallway was dark and horribly cold, and I stumbled and fell and cut my hand on an exposed nail. I could feel the warm, wet blood running down my arm, and I began to shake with fear. There was no light coming through the windows, which looked as if they had been coated in thick sheets of black paper.
Somewhere out there, several dogs were barking and growling, their jaws snapping at the air. Even louder was my mother’s voice but. when I tried to listen, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. The words were garbled, distorted, like the speech of a drunk. I crawled to her door and, holding onto the frame, pulled myself up. In the dark room that she shared with my father was a dresser, a small table with two chairs, a lamp dimmed by the red shawl that covered it, and a large canopy bed enclosed in thick, velvet curtains.
The room was still, and when I called my mother’s name, she didn’t answer, though I could feel her trembling with anticipation. Slowly, my heart pounding, I approached the bed and its wet, crimson curtains, which shimmered in the blood-red light. Touching them as little as I could, I pulled the curtains back, exposing a tangled mass of bedsheets stained with what looked like black ink. Above them, as big as the mattress itself, hung a four-legged spider, which twittered softly as it climbed down one of the columns onto the bed.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Dylan Lee Henderson
