Sacred Dust (14 page)

Indian summer had vanished in the night. There was ice in the rain that soaked through the blanket as he lay on the cot in the
freezing wind with fire in his joints. Far above in the white and gray marbled clouds, a dark winged figure followed. Hez tapped the rear window of the cab, asking them to let him ride up front. The driver didn’t turn his head. The passenger, a pimpled farm boy with buckteeth and pale gray eyes, glanced around at him and grinned. Then he looked away and switched on the radio.

White Christian choirboys. He hunkered down pressing his back into the cab. Turning the cot on its side to use it as a windshield, he wrapped the wet blanket around him. What would their German blond Jesus say to them about this?

There was nothing to do but go way away inside himself. He went back, down into South Carolina and into Florida. Back through those well-worn scenes on the turpentine farm and Grandfather’s temper and Beauty’s sermons and back to pink twilights on the porch with Beauty when she’d had enough corn liquor to face Alabama and it had seemed even then as long ago as Noah’s ark. It wasn’t the idea of a home place as much as the sudden tenderness, the tranquility that steadied her as she inhabited a lost moment, her calloused hands crossed over the end of the hoe as she paused in the garden and her bottom lip brushed a dry patch on the back of her hand and she licked it once or twice and a sudden cool trickled down her spine because the sun had dropped behind the April woods.

Later in the dark, his ears sandwiched in the feather pillow Beauty had made for the old white lady in the giant bed in the parlor of the house across the road, he would secretly drift across Alabama and sleep for a while in the warm purple grass behind the garden by the path that led down to the creek and back up the opposite bank into town.

He knew every rabbit hole and root in that field. He knew it in March when damp patches of burnt-orange earth showed through the brittle ivory stubble and there were green patches of daffodils and onion grass. He knew it on dry November evenings when the air was warm and the leaves crunched underfoot.

He had never seen it in late August.

He stood transfixed by fluttering clouds of white butterflies that
burst gold in the late afternoon sun over the tall, thick grasses. The woods on the far end of the field, he heard singing.

A little white girl was coming towards him. She had brown orange hair and orange freckles and pink eyelids over pale gray irises.

“You seen Moena?”

This was Eula. Beauty B. had said Moena and Eula Pearl were halves of each other.

He told her he hadn’t. He wondered if she knew he was Moena’s grown up son visiting his mother’s childhood. Eula Pearl seemed to understand a great deal. Beauty B. said a band of angels followed Eula Pearl everywhere she went. He could feel them. Did she see them? Yet Alabama before the Trouble wasn’t a place where a little girl was to be detained and subjected to superfluous questions by an interloper.

“She’s run off with my shoes and Mama’s fit. If Mama tells Beauty B., she’ll get a whipping for sure.”

She asked if he’d seen any snakes. He pointed out that it wasn’t likely in dry August this high above the creek. He knew where Moena would be. Beauty had taken him there to fetch her home many times. He had watched while Beauty rousted the sleeping child, placed her dolls into a cloth sack and hurried her home before the mosquitoes rose in the evening damp.

It was supposed to be Moena and Beauty’s secret place. He respected that. Alabama in August in Beauty B.’s memory was exalted as a realm where children’s secrets were held in regard.

Little Eula Pearl squinted into the ball of rust flame that sat on top of the trees at the bottom of the meadow.

“She’ll be stretched out with her dolls by the creek and you can’t come. It’s our secret place. It’s far and I have to get my shoes from Moena and be home before dark.” She ran across the field, leaping over patches of thistle and cow pies.

“Eula? Why didn’t she want me?”

His eyes burned with humiliation at his unwitting boldness. The question wasn’t hers to answer, but it invited further conversation.

“Did you hear about Rosa Lynn Brown?

“Beg pardon?”

“They found her beat up, half dead and worse.”

Under the yard pump with the water stinging his nose. Beauty B. shaking and drowning it into him.
Stoned, driven, ridden out … Rosa Lynn, Rosa Lynn, Rosa Lynn Brown
… So this dying afternoon would descend into that woeful night of madness. Except he was dreaming it. Better to wake in the freezing rain with the flames in his joints.

“Eula?”

“I’d best be on.”

“Eula, wait. Wait. Eula, is this a dream? Am I dreaming?”

She tossed her head to one side and flipped her hair with the back of her hand and she laughed. Then she bolted into the woods.

It was pitch black and he couldn’t find Beauty B. and sudden torrents of men on horses swept off the tops of hills and there was barely time to dive into the brush before the trees bristled in the savage orange light of their torches.

It was better to wake up, but he couldn’t wake up; the dream held him prisoner. Wake me up, wake me up, he shouted, then he stepped back onto the road. But which way? Bats were swarming. Then a tide of humanity spilled out of hiding. A spuming sea of black faces, denatured, ghostly, fleeing men, women and children, some weeping, breathless, old people, gasping, dropping down and screaming, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” They foamed towards him, running barefoot, riding wagons and mules. Some had their possessions. Others carried what they could. Wake me, wake me, wake me.… A woman dropped a bundle into his arms. It was her infant. He eyed her, incredulous, unable to speak. Her face entreated him.

“If I take him with me, neither of us will survive.”

“Don’t you love your child?”

“I don’t want to die, mister.”

“You have to love your child.”

“Everybody’s not strong like you, mister.”

She broke off into the undergrowth. The infant wailed as he ran with the crowd. There was a low fooming whoosh. They had been
moving up a long grade. At the crest of the hill a giant cross flamed. They were surrounded by torch bearing horsemen.

Oh, God, wake me! This was dying, this dream; when they killed him with the others here, he would die back there. His tormented existence would finally pass. Let it. Let it. Their Nazi Christ had ordained it. He would be branded by their burning swastika and slaughtered with the other cattle and descend into celestial oblivion. It was futile to resist. There was no exit from his dream until it dissolved into silent blackness. He let fly one long cry of woe, a soaring, sorrowful and beatific echo of his being that split the ceiling of that fearful night. Then he was empty of all longing and regret.

He was calm. He had surrendered. He was easy all the way through as he embraced defeat. What folly it had been to rail against the immutable order of all things. The infant sensed that the madness and the torment had flown. It kneaded its head into his chest and closed its eyes and slept. A river of joy sprang from his heart, a broad, spreading compassion that blanketed the child. The men were setting fire to the trees all around them. Death, as senseless as all the years of his life, would soon choke the life out of them. His joy endured. He was flooded with gratitude and humbled by impossible, illogical peace. Then from above an ancient voice descended:

The horsemen tried vainly to rein in their nervous steeds.

A glow appeared in the sky. Panicked, the captors spread in all directions and shouts of deliverance and triumph rang out. The light grew into a draped and folded whiteness. The voice continued.

He gazed into the serene white linen above him. He blinked with wonder. He closed his eyes and drifted a moment, then opened them again. She was an old nun. Her eyes were watery and her pink skin was creased and spotted. Her small hands clutched her rosary beads as they rested on the Bible in her lap. Her teeth were as white as her habit and she smiled with profound gratitude.

“God sent you back to us.” She clapped her hands. Her Bible and her rosary fell to the floor. She threw back her head, delighted by her clumsiness. It was night. He was on a large ward. Instinctively he tried to lean forward to gather up her things. He could barely lift his head. The effort made him dizzy.

“Not hardly yet.” She bent down, then stood up with a groan. “Rheumatic fever, child. The army hospital was full.” She leaned forward and whispered into his ear. “We know that’s a lie.” Then she sat back and cracked her knuckles. “They gave you up to us for dead. It’s been almost a month ago now.” Slowly her words began to sink in.

“God had other plans for you.” Then she giggled. “I’ve read to you for weeks, all four Gospels and the Psalms, and you were a most unappreciative audience. Until Isaiah. Old Isaiah made you sit up and listen.” She excused herself and went to ask the nurse to bring him some food. The dream of the evil night was still with him. One hand cradled a pure white pillow like an infant on his shoulder. The other moved with considerable effort to lift Sister’s Bible off the bedside table. He opened the cover and read an inscription.

Given with love to Margaret Helen O’Brien

in recognition of her graduation with honors

from All Saints Academy, Dublin, Ireland,

16 June 1894.

He slowly lifted and dropped the weightless, opaque pages, taking strange comfort in the sudden familiarity of their arrangement … Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.… Pages ir-refutably dusted by decades of the pious sister’s scrutiny … Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel.… There was a worn
green velvet bookmark nestled between Isaiah 34 and 36. Holding it close with both hands, he searched the page until he found it.

He closed the book. He stared at the ceiling. He listened to low, distant voices and echoing footsteps. He slept a dreamless half hour. He woke. He ate some stinging hot soup that made him cough. He rested. He picked up the Bible and turned to 2 Kings, where he found the story of his namesake King Hezekiah as bland and uninspiring as ever. He went back to the verse in Isaiah. Pretty words. If they contained some personal meaning, it eluded him. Still, they were pretty words and they had waked him from a deathly slumber. Had he not been ransomed and returned? He couldn’t ask them to mean more than that. Ransomed, why? Returned, where? Surely these words had not lifted him from that well of darkness merely that he might addend his violent, surreal, happenstance existence. He touched something scratchy at his throat. He picked up a small hand mirror. He had grown a full beard. His eyes were clouded and sunken, his lips parched, swollen and ghastly gray. Yet death was nowhere about, and underneath something rooted, affixed itself, took hold and drew willingness out of darkness and time and it was bounty to breathe in and out, to hear low, distant voices and echoing footsteps, to believe that more meaning slept in those words, to enter the path of an honest and productive existence and follow it to its awakening.

The voices had all faded. Lamps had been switched off up and down the ward. Through a line of long, bleak windows over iron beds where afflicted, incurable men slept on the opposite side of the ward, the empty, shining enameled upper branches of ancient elms creaked and bristled blue over streetlights. At the far end of the room a dull and restive metallic knocking gave over to the hissing of a leaky radiator valve. Far off, he descried the faint and fleeting whistle of a southbound freight train; and sliding down into easy
slumber he felt it might not be a train, but a shooting star sailing under the dark side of the moon, or the earth shifting on its axis, or the weary breath of time passing over the pink and gray marbled earth.

M
ama says I’m thick to feel the way I do. That’s because she’d be a duck in a swamp living in this beautiful house with a man who adored her the way Glen does me when we’re out in public or in front of the kids watching television. Mama says I ought to get down on my knees and thank the Lord. She says I was born thankless. She’s too thick to understand there’s no love beneath his adoration, only some perverse need to make me grovel. I wonder, though. Is Glen a breed? Does Daddy hurt and humiliate my mama in the dark the way Glen does me? Does Mama sense that about Glen? Does she think it’s just the way of the world? Or worse, does she like it? Has she been hiding bites and bruises all these years? She would. I certainly wouldn’t put anything past my daddy.

I have to have love. I have to have love, physical love from a man. I mean warm and sweet. I need it. I want the other kind of love, the higher kind. But I need your garden variety, dime store, man going at a woman love too. That’s what I wanted Heath to be, but that’s the least of what it was. It shocked me. You’d think he was just a good time boy. He’s built like Hoover Dam and pretty as a woman. You don’t expect tenderness or consideration or vulnerability to show up in a package like that.

He looks straight into my eyes the whole time he loves me.
There’s no hurry. He doesn’t drift back into himself, hitch up his trousers and take off when it’s over. It’s hard to tell where the communication stops and the lovemaking begins. He calls here all day long. I keep telling him not to. He knows I don’t mean it. I want him. I just can’t drag a person as fine as Heath into my messes. He deserves so much more than me.