What Blooms from Dust

by James Markert

  ACCLAIM FOR JAMES MARKERT

  “Markert’s unusual story line and compelling characters offer a fresh perspective. Verdict: Readers looking for lighter horror will enjoy.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL STARRED REVIEW OF ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND STRANGE

  “Markert’s latest supernatural novel is captivating from the beginning . . . Readers of Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker will love Markert’s newest release.”

  —RT BOOK REVIEWS, 4 STARS ON ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND STRANGE

  “Screenwriter Markert (The Angel’s Share) conjures an apocalyptic page-turner that blends Frank Peretti-style supernatural elements with the fine detail of historical novels.”

  —PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY ON ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND STRANGE

  “A haunting tale of love, loss, and redemption.”

  —BOOKLIST ON ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND STRANGE

  “. . . this magical novel warns us to be careful what we wish for. We may get it.”

  —BOOKPAGE ON ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND STRANGE

  “In All Things Bright and Strange, James Markert melds the ordinary and the extraordinary to create a compelling tale. Can miracles be trusted? Are the dead really gone? Can we be undone by what we wish for most? The citizens of Markert’s Bellhaven must confront these questions and more, with their fates and the existence of their entire town at stake.”

  — GREER MACALLISTER, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE MAGICIAN’S LIE AND GIRL IN DISGUISE

  “Mysterious, gritty and a bit mystical, Markert’s entertaining new novel inspires the question of ‘What if?’ Many characters are nicely multilayered, providing a good balance of intrigue and realism. The fascinating glimpse into the process of distilling bourbon—and the effect of the Prohibition on Kentucky and its bourbon families—adds another layer to the story.”

  —RT BOOK REVIEWS, 3 STARS ON THE ANGELS’ SHARE

  “Folksy charm, an undercurrent of menace, and an aura of hope permeate this ultimately inspirational tale.”

  —BOOKLIST ON THE ANGELS’ SHARE

  “Distinguished by complex ideas and a foreboding tone, Markert’s enthralling novel (A White Wind Blew) captures a dark time and a people desperate for hope.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Markert displays great imagination in describing the rivalries, friendships, and intense relationships among the often quirky and cranky terminally ill, and the way that a diagnosis, or even a cure, can upset delicate dynamics.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ON A WHITE WIND BLEW

  “The author’s ability to weigh competing views against each other, and the all-too-real human complications are presented with a remarkable understanding of conflicting ideas that makes even villains human eventually. The author writes well and reads easily; you’ll finish this book in a day or two and wish for a sequel.”

  —BOOKPAGE ON A WHITE WIND BLEW

  “A tuberculosis epidemic, as seen through the eyes of a sanatorium doctor driven by his love of God and music.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS ON A WHITE WIND BLEW

  “[Markert’s] debut novel, A White Wind Blew is set in Waverly Hills, that massive Gothic structure that is said to be one of the most haunted places on earth.”

  —RONNA KAPLAN FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST

  “The book is at its best when Pike, McVain and their eclectic band of musicians are beating the odds, whether against tuberculosis or against stifling institutional mores.”

  — CHERYL TRUMAN, KENTUCKY HERALD-LEADER

  “Markert has interwoven three seemingly unrelated subjects—tuberculosis, music, and racism—into a hauntingly lyrical narrative with operatic overtones.”

  —BOOKLIST ON A WHITE WIND BLEW

  ALSO BY JAMES MARKERT

  All Things Bright and Strange

  The Angels’ Share

  A White Wind Blew

  What Blooms from Dust

  © 2018 by James Markert

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Epub Edition MAY 2018 9780785217428

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Markert, James, 1974- author.

  Title: What blooms from dust / James Markert.

  Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Thomas Nelson, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017051228 | ISBN 9780785217411 (trade paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A75379 W46 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051228

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 19 20 21 22 / LSC / 5 4 3 2 1

  For David, Joseph, and Michelle.

  This one is for all three of you.

  As siblings go, I do believe I struck gold.

  The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  CONTENTS

  Before

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  After

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BEFORE

  1908

  SOUTHERN PLAINS

  The train ride out west was free.

  Paid in full by the brand-new state of Oklahoma in hopes of encouraging settlement in the land once occupied by bison and Indians. Wilmington Goodbye knew the truth of it. They’d been killed off—the bison, for sure, and too many of the Indians to count. Those that survived the cowboys and Rangers got squeezed together into reservations. The state had earmarked the rest of the land for homesteading. And no place looked more promising than Majestic, Oklahoma.

  Wilmington studied the pamphlet for the tenth time in the last hour—glorious pictures of elegant buildings, paved roads edged by flowers, show houses where finely dressed couples wandered about. And that fountain in the town center looked majestic in itself.

  With each choof of the train, Wilmington and his pregnant wife, Amanda, inched closer to becoming landowners, with fresh soil to plow up and a fortune to be made in a state just one year old.

  He folded the pamphlet and slid it back into his suit pocket. He teased the corners of his mustache and straightened the fresh rose he’d pinned to his lapel that morning.

  “Health, wealth, and
opportunity, love.”

  Amanda was bathed in sunlight nearly the color of her hair. She smiled. They’d repeated the slogan often enough, as had the rest of the men and women on the train. He’d met half of them already and was proud to call them future neighbors.

  Citizens of Majestic.

  He had a notion to look at the pamphlet again but resisted. Instead he watched his wife as miles of grassland flashed in the background. The doctor back east said the air would be better for her out here, away from the city pollution. Her breathing had already become less labored. The swell of her belly pressed tight against her blue dress. She has to have an entire brood in there. She’d laughed the idea off at first, but had recently admitted she felt more than one baby kicking around.

  Tall prairie grass swayed alongside the speeding train. Miles of velvety blades, moving like something Wilmington couldn’t quite put a finger on. Ocean waves, maybe. They had to be getting close. But where were the buildings? Where were the roads? And that town center? Shouldn’t they see it over the horizon?

  Two minutes later the train slowed and then screeched to a halt.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked a man Wilmington now knew as Orion Bentley, a fancy gentleman in a suit as sharp as his wit and a bowler hat straight from the newest catalogues. They’d befriended each other minutes after boarding the train and had engaged in meaningful, optimistic dialogue for much of the trip.

  “Must be something on the tracks,” said Wilmington.

  Everyone crowded near the windows. A man in a brown suit and matching hat stood in the shin-high grass holding a clipboard and pen. The doors opened. People hesitated, but then, beckoned by the man’s hand gesture, they exited the train.

  There were twenty-two of them in all, dressed to the nines in their Sunday best—long, colorful dresses, pressed suits, and polished shoes for the special occasion.

  Wilmington stepped in front of the group and faced the suited man. “What’s the meaning of this? We’re supposed to be escorted to Majestic, Oklahoma.” He removed the pamphlet from his coat, as most of the others had already done. “See? Right here.” Only then did he notice the rippling white flags spaced out across the prairie land, staked like the homesteading of virgin land instead of one already expertly developed.

  The suited man said, “I’m sorry, sir. But there is no Majestic, Oklahoma.”

  Wilmington showed him the pamphlet, pointed hard enough to crinkle the paper. “There sure is. It has paved roads and buildings and plots of land to grow wheat on.”

  “Well.” The man chuckled. “The land we got.” He reached his hand out for a shake, but Wilmington didn’t bother. “My name is Donald Dupree. I work for the state government. I’m sorry to say, folks, but you’ve been swindled, same as the folks just west of here, in what was supposed to be Boise City. Except it looks much like this.”

  Wilmington pointed to the pamphlet again, this time with a little defeat. “The buildings? The town fountain . . . with all that marble.”

  “All made up, sir. A horrible fiction, I’m afraid. But I’m happy to say the developers who conned you have been arrested and will be held in Leavenworth until their trial.”

  The newcomers eyed one another. Tears mingled with the wind. Husbands held their wives as prairie grass whipped to a frenzy around ankles and knees. All those white flags. Miles upon miles of desolation cut by a blazing sun. The orange sky looked to be bleeding in places, swirling just along the horizon.

  Grass as far as the eye could see.

  “We want to help right this wrong,” said Donald. “We’ve staked the land, and we’re prepared to sell it for next to nothing.” He forced a smile, the tips of his mustache fluttering. “Health, wealth, and opportunity. Right at your fingertips.”

  Wilmington studied the land, inhaled the air, and turned to where Amanda and his new friend Orion stood. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

  The two men locked eyes. Amanda looked from one to the other and knew.

  “We’re not going back, are we?”

  ONE

  APRIL 1935

  OKLAHOMA PLAINS

  Old Sparky was supposed to have killed Jeremiah Goodbye.

  But here he stood squinting against the hard sun in the middle of the Oklahoma panhandle, at a fork in the road marked by two signs nearly buried in the same dust that covered everything. Mounds of it. Drifts sculpted into hurricane waves, as far as the eye could see. Dust in the air. Dust in his eyes. The dust in his mouth crunched when he’d grind his teeth, and he had no Vaseline to coat his nostrils from the abrasive grit.

  When the wind blew, dust stung like bees.

  Roads were buried by dust, although there were tire tracks from those who’d recently risked it, braved it as he’d done before the Model T he’d taken back in Guthrie choked out on dust two towns east of where he now stood—back in Woodward, or maybe it was Enid. One town looked like the other—all covered in dust, homes and fences buried.

  Two days he’d been walking. If only he had a light for the hand-rolled cigarette in his pocket, it could take his mind off the fact that he hadn’t eaten all day. Even the tumbleweeds the Russians brought to the plains years ago looked appetizing. Too many recipes included them now, or so he’d heard.

  Russian thistle made into edible gunk.

  He’d found the car abandoned alongside the road, probably shorted out on the electric sparks that often accompanied the black dusters. Lucky enough the gas tank had been half-full. That’s how he looked at things now—half-full instead of half-empty. That jolt of electricity he’d taken during his short affair with Old Sparky hadn’t killed him as the warden had said, but it had joggled something loose.

  For the first time since he could remember, his nights hadn’t been plagued by those night scares—the whirlwind struggle for his life, the dusty figure like a shadow, and then the spot of light that always led to him waking up and gasping for air.

  Half-full or not, this wasn’t the Oklahoma he remembered. It looked like the end of the world had come and a desert had swallowed what remained. The flat prairie land of his younger days was long gone, the buffalo grass buried under drifts made by drought after the great plow-up of the land.

  Land that wasn’t meant to be plowed in the first place. Jeremiah covered his mouth with his shirt collar. Sodbusters getting rich off the wheat boom and never stopping to consider the repercussions. He had warned them all, having digested the fears of many of the local cowboys dead set against the homesteading. But did the sodbusters listen?

  Earth moved over the horizon. Another duster.

  He tilted his black Stetson against the wind, low over his brow to protect his eyes. It wasn’t a duster after all. The low rumble gave it away, grew louder as it approached.

  Jackrabbits.

  A thousand of them at least, down from the hills, scrounging for food, starving like everything else. They paid him no never mind, scampering past, kicking up dust in pursuit of the unattainable. The sheer force of them wobbled him in his stance. One stopped atop a dust mound to nibble the prong of a fence poking through. Another scratched at a roof shingle visible from where a dugout wasn’t quite buried. A cluster scratched and clawed over a thicket of tumbleweeds. One nibbled on his boot and moved on— too scrawny to cook up and eat even if Jeremiah had the notion.

  A minute later the jacks were gone, kicking up dust and heading for Texas.

  They’d have no better luck there, unless they struck some oil. There were more ways than one to rape the land.

  The air cleared. Blue sky returned like a pot of gold. Until the next black blizzard. Best head on, but this was why he’d stopped in the first place.

  Decision time.

  Two signs faced him, one pointing south toward Guymon, the other north toward Nowhere.

  He reached into his pocket and felt the quarter between his thumb and index finger.

  The same quarter he’d taken from the pocket of the prison guard he’d found buried in the rubble
. Probably Officer Jefferson, by the look of those boots. Big as boats—the man was tall as a lamppost.

  He’d liked Jefferson, who was one of the few guards willing to sneak him off the row every so often for a smoke under the stars. If he’d been right of mind he would’ve moved some smashed cinder blocks and buried him proper. But with how that thunderboomer had quickly spun into a twister, collapsing the back wall of the execution room five seconds into that first jolt of 2,500 volts, he couldn’t expect to be immediately clearheaded. Those were five seconds of his life he’d like to forget. But at least he had two feet to stand on and an unfamiliar warmth in his heart that might could even be described as hope.

  He’d thanked the dead Jefferson for the cigarette he’d found in his trouser pocket.

  The warden had been buried too. Last Jeremiah had seen him was when he stepped behind the curtain to crank down that lever, triggering something that sounded like a hammer on an anvil just before Jeremiah’s body started to dance.

  Jeremiah pulled the quarter from his pocket and approached the fork in the road.

  Guymon or Nowhere?

  For the first time ever the quarter felt like a boulder in his hand, instead of that smooth skipping rock, and he hesitated in the flipping of it.

  Blamed that on Old Sparky too.

  The Coin-Flip Killer was what the ink-pages had named Jeremiah, and ink stains, once settled, can’t be so readily wiped off. He wasn’t too sure if the name fit or not. Kinda fuzzy in his mind, those days, everything going down about the same time the earth started peeling off with the wind.

  He assumed his daddy was still alive back in Nowhere. He hadn’t heard anything to the contrary. But Wilmington Goodbye had a bullet lodged in his head, just over the left ear, a ricochet shot from the day of Jeremiah’s arrest, when the badges clopped into town on horseback, flashing tin with their rifles loaded. The shoot-out was unnecessary. He would have come out willingly, but once bullets started flying he had to defend himself. He’d like to think it wasn’t one of his bullets that found his daddy’s head, but something told him otherwise.