The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

Ever since she died people have been calling up at the house and asking whether they ought to send flowers or make a donation to cancer research, and Leigh and me—whoever answered the phone—would say, ‘Oh, send flowers, Mama didn’t care anything about charity, but she always said that when she died, she hoped there would be a churchful of flowers.

The drawing was in red pencil on the back of a sheet of graph paper—an oddly formal construction, a picture of a fat woman with a saturnine face sitting stiffly in a chair that was invisible beneath her great bulk. She wore a dress with a tight bodice and an enormously wide skirt. Her arms were outstretched before her. “What is she holding, India?” “I didn’t draw it,” said India. “I guess they’re dolls. They’re hideous, aren’t they? They look like wax dolls that were left out in the sun too long—all melted and deformed.

The picture, faded but still clear, was of a great fat woman with a crimped fringe of hair, wearing a hooped dress widely bordered in black along the skirt and sleeves. She was seated in a chair that was invisible beneath her great bulk. In her outstretched hands she held two little heaps of misshapen flesh that were not, after all, dolls. “It’s my great-great-grandmother,” said Dauphin. “The babies were twins, and they were stillborn. She had the picture taken before they were buried. They were both boys, and their names were Darnley and Dauphin.”

The Alabama panhandle, which consists only of Mobile and Baldwin counties, is shaped rather like a heavily abscessed tooth. Mobile Bay represents the large element of decay that separates the halves, and at their northern extremities the counties are further divided by a complex system of meandering rivers and marsh.

“It’ll be worse for you than for me”—she shrugged—“at least I’m not old enough to get horny . . .”

“Why did you stop inviting people?” “Oh, we just realized that guests—that people not in the family—didn’t really take to Beldame.”

India had previously entertained no sympathy for the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude.

The very air was soporific, the food swung in the belly like ballast from meal to meal, the furniture seemed specifically designed to accommodate the human form in sleep.

To them all, Beldame represented the fair and possible reward for distress, misfortune, and labor in this world—it was to them a heaven on earth, and resembled the other, preached-of heaven in that it was bright, remote, timeless, and empty.

India had always thought of herself as politically liberal—as Luker was—and with that liberalism came a discomfort with servants.

But servants walked and talked and had feelings and yet weren’t equal, and India thought that to deal with them was a practical impossibility.

I think she wanted to fire Odessa except that Marian Savage wasn’t the kind of woman to drop your acquaintance just because she hated your fucking guts.

It was unspeakably hot all over Alabama that day, but nowhere was the heat more intense than in Baldwin County; and in Baldwin County no worse than at Gulf Shores; and at Gulf Shores no more extreme than at the little green concrete building that housed the post office and the Laundromat. A thermometer on a shaded wall read 107 degrees.

“All right then,” said Odessa, “long as she didn’t mean it, I guess it’s all right.”

It showed, India considered perversely, the black woman’s superiority: anyone who could perform menial tasks in a menial’s capacity without loss of dignity was someone to be admired and wondered at.

and all this business about Elementals and “eat my eyes”—whatever that meant—was a lot of confused hocus-pocus. Odessa couldn’t help it. What with segregation and an illiberal state legislature, she had never had the educational benefits that India herself had enjoyed; it was even possible, she considered with a shudder, that Odessa had not finished high school.