As the moon bathed the southern landscape in a pallid glow, old cottonwood trees whispered secrets to the wind. Their shadows stretched across the expansive porch where Marigold Davenport paced anxiously, rubber gloves in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She looked toward the peeling white paint of her antebellum house, sighing at the magnitude of dust and neglect she had yet to tame, her well-worn gloves testimony to her persistence.
“Lawd, Mari,” hollered her neighbor, Roy Tucker, from his side of the fence. “You got plans to scrub the world clean, or just this haunted mansion?”
“Keeping busy, Roy. Keeping busy,” Marigold replied, casting the gloves down on the railing like an old flag of surrender. The gloves seemed to deflate, lying there solemn in the ghostly light.
Roy leaned closer, his wiry frame lit by the single bulb above Marigold’s door. “Ain’t just the dust you’re fighting, is it?”
She offered Roy a rueful smile, rich with the irony of folks who spoke too much but said nothing. Data from simpler days barely cocooned the horror that lingered at the edges of her family home. “Ever feel the past’s got a grip on you, Roy?”
Roy chuckled, the sound tumbling like gravel. “Oh, reckon that’s why I don’t dwell where ghosts like to linger.”
Marigold tamped out her cigarette, glancing at the inert gloves. “These things saved me from more than grime,” she mused, her voice barely above a whisper. She thought of how they protected her when she discovered the cellar’s secret, the bones of kin long forgotten, their stories twisted with their own skeletal humor.
“What’s them gloves ever done for you?” Roy pried, curiosity brewing.
“Nothin’ but work,” she quipped, her eyes gleaming with a sardonic light. She slipped them on, snapping the fit with deliberate emphasis. “But maybe they’d like to do a little speaking now.”
Roy raised an eyebrow, unconvinced but amused. “You sure they know what they’re sayin’?”
“They’re just my hands, Roy,” she laughed. “Only difference is they won’t stain if they do some mischief.”
Her words danced between them, a dark jest threatening to become something fuller, more sinister. In her mind, the apparition of Great Uncle Bo’s sardonic expression loomed, as if daring her to dig deeper into Dartmouth’s insidious lineage.
“Well, marvels never cease,” Roy added, tipping his hat. “Make sure those diligent fellas don’t go digging up no more trouble, ya hear, Mari?”
She nodded but sensed the gloves themselves twitch, echoing the creeping dread beneath their mahogany house. When Roy departed, she descended into the cellar, the soft rubbery patter of her industrious gloves loud against the subterranean silence.
As Marigold turned over crumbling keepsakes, the gloves danced a macabre minuet, fingering fragments untold. Her hands, relentless as they pulled mystery from the mold, heard distant echoes of a family joke—a hidden fortune, humor drenched in decay, woven through the bones of ancestors.
“You’d think buried treasure’d be marked better, wouldn’t ya boys?” she laughed into the depths. Her gloves flexed, the mansion chuckling back its response—a creak, a sigh, and finally a damp whisper from the earth, “Keep digging.”
At dawn, the mystery resolved itself in a sorry sack of Confederate bills, useless yet rife with insult. The gloves, now muddy, fluttered in frustration, until Marigold peeled them back, smiling at their dedication to an empty promise.
“Well, ain’t that the South for you?” she smirked, setting the laborers of latex down. The industrious gloves lay idle, awaiting the next relic of fantasy to buff and brush off, the industrious champions in their Southern Gothic comedy—a black humor farewell to a dry, dusty past.