Since when does brick dust fall out of a plaster-and-lath wall?
This was a question I asked myself repeatedly while growing up.
This is the wall that prompted the question. It was painted sky blue way back then, and, during grade school, all I could think was how ugly the red brick dust looked against the blue wall. It wasn’t there all the time, you know - apparently at random, and sometimes in such quantity that it lay in piles on the baseboard and spilled to the tile floor.
I rarely spoke to my parents about the dust, assuming it was just an oddity of our old house, but – again, how did one get brick dust from plaster? As far as I knew, there never had been a chimney in that spot, though there had been one nearby. Yet, my siblings and I all saw the dust, and my mother remembers vacuuming it up more than once.
Make haste to the year 2004, when my sister and I began painting the mural on the stairwell wall downstairs. All went beautifully, until we discovered that the mural told a far bloodier story than we had planned, and that the brickdust was part of that story.
Through God’s promptings, and through words and pictures which He sent us, here’s what we discovered:
Indeed, one does not get brick dust from plaster; one gets it from bricks. (Aha!) The brick that produced the familiar dust had been thrown against the wall in my childhood bedroom, by an angry hand.
But I am ahead of myself. Allow me to tell you first how I met Marla, the woman who whispered of curses, standing next to my shoulder while I painted.
The Trysting Windmill
When I was in high school, Dad had moved a water-pumping windmill from a neighboring farm to our yard. Ever since he had got it set back up and back in operation, I had seen Marla betimes, beneath it. Don’t ask how I knew her name; she never told me, only I knew.
She appeared like the disheveled, mad wife in Jane Eyre, as she stood in the night-time wind, her white nightgown billowing, when I returned from my moonlit rambles. She did this for three years, prior to my sister and I beginning to paint the wall.
The windmill as it stands now.
Marla and her lover, Roland, had often trysted there, I knew. But not since his death.
“Who killed him?” I had asked her one night. Her answer was evasive and tedious, full of rage against his murderers.
I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, not even as I prepared for bed that night after we spoke - only that it was another unsolved mystery, belonging to this “parallel universe” of a farm. There were many such here.
At the time, I hadn’t planned on solving it, believing it was a thing in the past, and could not be helped.
To be continued…
Part 8
Part 9
