Sacred Dust (33 page)

“Am I right?”

“I don’t give my cat milk.”

“Am I?”

She wouldn’t look at him.

“Are you afraid of Alabama?”

“Not the place.”

“Of what happened.”

“Hush!”

Her face twisted. Her mouth pressed flat and trembled. Gigantic tears sprang from her eyes. She looked like a heartbroken child.

“I’ve tormented you. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat and withdrew an envelope with a check in it from his inside coat pocket. He tapped it and placed it in the drawer of the bedside table. Then he took her hand in both of his and held it while she cried. She closed her eyes and when her breathing was steady, he gently slipped her tiny arm under the cover and crossed towards the door.

“Of the feeling.” Her voice was low and thick and strong. He turned around. She was calm. The child had vanished. He paused. Her voice neither invited nor forbade him to stay. He waited. She made no sign that she saw him. She appeared to be hypnotized or in a trance.

“Not everything burning or hiding in the barn, not what the men did to us, not the known world shattering or the dead fleeing the now forsaken ground.…”

She didn’t see him. Her eyes were firmly fixed on the memory that possessed her.

“Get on out of here, Mother! Begone, Beauty!” She swung at the air. “Hush! Hush that! No! I will NOT go there!” Her voice faded, but her lips moved.

She was delirious. It was probably another stroke. He stepped forward to call the nurse. Something stopped him cold. For a split second the room burst bright purple. Whatever the illusion, it woke the untenable sense that Beauty B. was near.

Moena’s hands leapt to cover her ears.

“Not fear, not fleeing or the dead man swinging or dying.…” It was a child speaking, a little girl begging to be heard. He had to stop this, but nothing would move—hand, foot, lips—nothing.

“That ripping apart, that tearing off, me from me, that pulling away of me that couldn’t leave from me that had to go. Riding away, riding away and most of me left back in the road screaming for Eula and the little bit of the rest too weak to fight them, just a broke off piece of me, jagged and torn and the rest of me left back in the road screaming for Eula, but her daddy wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop and they wouldn’t let me go back. Even when that other most of me turned back around and I saw we were topping the hill and cried, ‘Wait! Wait!’ But we were too far. It was too steep. I couldn’t run. I was too weak.”

Moena wasn’t remembering now. She was looking straight into Hez’s eyes. She had taken his hand. Her voice had lost most of its timbre. She was telling him now, quickly and quietly, her former passion spent.

“I looked at me looking at me from the wagon. Then looked back from the wagon and saw me die in the road. Then we passed the hilltop. Mother was slapping me, telling me to hush or we’d all be killed. I knew, even if we got to safety, most of me was already dead.”

She was finished. She rooted around the pocket of her bed coat and took out a package of Life Savers. She offered him one. It was yellow. He declined. She pulled at it. It was stuck. She pried it off with her teeth and placed it on the bedside table. The next one was green and it came right off. She put it in her mouth and stuck the remainder of the roll back into her pocket. Then she switched on the television.

He sighed and rose. He kissed her forehead. He turned and walked out of the room, pausing at the doorway just long enough to decrease the overhead light with the dimmer switch.

The plane was an hour late taking off. He leaned into the leather seat and drew the bourbon slowly. It was his second. There was
only one other person in first class, a hard faced, leather skinned white woman with severely coiffed yellow hair. She sat directly across the aisle from him putting the stewardess through hoops. She flashed her perfect white grimace at him when he sat down. It was that peculiar I-don’t-hate-niggers-but-you-keep-away-from-me flash of teeth. He pitied her for it. He pitied her because he could imagine her hovering over some poor gardener, lamenting the bugs and criticizing his work between increasingly candid quips about her indifferent grown children and her loveless marriage. She wanted iced tea. The stewardess couldn’t make a pot until the plane took off. All right, then, she’d have seltzer now, but get right on the tea as soon as we’re airborne. He had an inexplicable urge to cry for her, to go over and sit next to her and take her hands in his and offer to pray with her. He wanted to say, “Miss, why don’t you just come on out and ask me what the hell I’m doing up here in First Class?” He wanted to shake her till her coiffure went flat. He wanted to argue all the ice off her shoulders, let her rage and scream until she melted all the way back down into something human and recognizable.

He wasn’t a preacher bent on bringing humanity en masse into the baby powdered arms of Jesus. It was more like he wanted to drive and corral the chilly hordes into one beloved and loving, embraced and embracing, and profusely sweating throng of believers in a breathing universe.

His mind danced lightly back over Moena’s revelations. He finally understood her. It wasn’t what she remembered, but how she experienced the memory that illumined her. Intellectually, he had long assumed a connection between his mother’s emotional detachment and the terrible event that drove her and his grandparents out of Prince George County. He had placed it among thousands of other hideous facts of racial oppression. Now he had visceral knowledge of her private torment. To this point he had developed and maintained an irascible affection for Moena, a generous tolerance for what he had always believed was her unmitigated egocentricity. That was based on his pugnacious belief that she willfully withheld affection. The hard won truth was kinder than his mean
supposition. Moena was inextricably bound to that woeful night in 1908 and was immutably herself in light of it.

What had been decades of resentful affection for his mother had become something finer in the space of an evening. More than anything, he longed for the elusive means to lend some measure of peace to her rapidly dwindling days on this earth.

He had to bring her back to Alabama.

Hezekiah was riot a man to reason a thing like this through. You could get stuck on the thing and lose sight of the rightness of it. The rightness of a thing came from God on high.

For one fantastic heartbeat he saw Moena standing on that remembered road. He saw a piece of her restored. He was flooded with the unquestionable rightness of it. He smiled at the notion and his eyes met the white lady’s. He saw undecorated mortification in them. She looked quickly away, nervously blotting a drop of tea from her silk blouse.

No power on earth would ever bring Moena back to Alabama. Not if she was conscious.

His fingers fumbled for the seat lever. The plane hit an air pocket and his almost empty plastic glass slid off the tray table, spilling ice on his shoes. So be it. He drew the seat as far back as it would go. He closed his eyes, shutting out his mother and the nervous white woman slapping herself with a napkin. He was still snoring when the stewardess rolled back the exit door in Birmingham.

Y
ou tell me. Apt as I can figure it’s as Eula’s mama used to tell her about don’t never say never unless you understand you mean the opposite. I woke up Monday morning in the hospital. Not dead. Tuesday morning, not dead. Wednesday morning, one little stroke froze me up to where I couldn’t eat. Nurse commenced fussing when she jerked the tray from me, but paid no heed to the fingers stuck around the fork. I was half the morning prizing it aloose. It was just lucky them forgetting my bath.

Dereesa had me a ride home Friday morning, but she got called up on some cooking job ten miles somewhere out behind the country and forgot me. I fibbed and said my daughter went for the car. They wheeled me out, but the wind was blowing. I used my nice “Honey, it’s too cold. Warm yourself. Here she comes.” It worked.

Don’t bet what I paid a taxicab. Junked down white boy with a tattoo and half his teeth missing. Sweet though. Wife left him and took his religion. I said if she could do that, then his religion wasn’t worth keeping. That made him grin and say, “Neither was she.”

Hezekiah took a load off of me last Sunday evening. He relieved a parcel. Lightened up this dry old Raisinet. That’s part of it. That and it turning off too cold to think about my garden. I don’t set up by a stove warming myself well for more than two days. I take no pleasure viewing my scratch pea mess of a yard when it’s too windy
to walk on it. I get hungry. I cook it and then I don’t want it. Then the mess. Hez had some fat girl sent. Worse than useless except to eat what I cooked and didn’t want. I got shed of her.

It may only be I was trained that you can change your mind but one time about something. Once it’s changed, you go on. Not that anything I ever did made the news and this won’t either. So you’d best tell me how I went from I won’t to I’ll try it. Cold, bored and lonesome comprise my strongest guess.

I packed right. I never went no place except down on the turpentine farm, but in my working years I packed off plenty of white ladies and their husbands and children. I know how. I washed, ironed and folded and bagged up my things in paper sacks. I mended and hemmed and took in a waist or two. I found that little suitcase one of Dereesa’s kids used to carry her typewriter in. It done perfect.

Then I cleaned the house top to bottom. One of the neighbor women came by with some hot mush because she can’t keep me straight with her toothless mother-in-law. I made like I was just too feeble to feed the cat and she took it home to keep until I get to feeling better.

I got a better taxicab driver and it wasn’t nearly as much money. I found the ticket counter with ease. This cross eyed white witch with foot long fire engine nails and three sticks of Doublemint working.

“Where to, Granny?”

“I ain’t your granny,
Miss Alabama.”

“Where you going?”

“Birmingham.”

She went crazy with a hole puncher and piece of printed paper. She took my money and handed me an envelope.

“Know why?”

“What, Granny?”

“Know why I’m going to Alabama?”

“Why?”

“ ‘Cause my mama done tole me to.”

It was true, but that’s not hardly the same as telling the truth. I
was no more than barely settled into my seat before I finally got the picture. So obvious I giggled out loud at my own stupidity. I was near the front and I caught the driver’s glance in the mirror over his head. The little sign underneath it says, YOUR DRIVER MARK WILLIAM DUNN, FRIENDLY, RELIABLE, COURTEOUS. That look he shot me wasn’t none of that. He shot me several more narrow stares. Made me feel like I’d robbed a bank.

Be that as it may. I had this little excursion back to hell figured out. How it come to me was I was thinking what to wear to church to hear Hezekiah preach on Sunday.

“Oh,” I says to me, real casual like, “oh, well, I brung my teal blue dress and the lace collar.” As if I had ever wore that dress and that collar. I had stood there over my ironing board, peeling back and ironing that collar a pinch at a time without realizing why.

Cheryl sent it years back, the Christmas it snowed. I unwrapped it and I thought to myself, “Well, good. Something decent for them to bury me in.”

I’m going to Alabama to die. It relaxes me to know it. There is nothing I hate worse than to be doing a thing and asking myself all the while, “Why am I doing this?”

I was made from Alabama clay. It’s only natural I’d go back to it. Like our old preacher man used to say at them country funerals when he’d drop a fistful of orange dirt down onto the coffin. It’s what we come from and what we become.

H
e lay on the ratty Leatherette sofa in his office and glanced over the morning paper. He was nearly out for the count when his eyes landed on something that made him sit forward and shake so hard with laughter that Marcia, his secretary, peeped her head in to see if he was all right.

“All races, creeds and religions are invited to a Harmony Festival in
Prince George!
” He could barely get the words out before his sneezing laughter overtook him. He laughed until his chest hurt so bad that he thought he was having heart failure. That scared him a minute, but then he realized the pain was from the right side and his heart was on the left.

He culled the man’s name from the paper and dialed his number. But there was no answer. He drummed his fingers on his desk and then he called Watnell Pegues looking for his daddy and was sad to hear that Watnell senior had passed over. “Watnell was a mighty soldier,” Hezekiah said. “Stood right next to the King all the way through Cicero. Refused to bow down to Bull Connor’s dogs too.” Young Watnell allowed that he was teaching public school days and working on his MBA at night. Hezekiah told him he was one in a million and fumbled around his drawers in search of his old address book. Willie O’Neill. Willie had come out of jail down in St. Augustine
about a week before the King’s funeral. Said he was going to try to get his daddy’s carpet business back on its feet.

“Willie?”

“Who is this?”

“Hez!”

“Naw …”

“Brother, dig out your marching boots, we’re going to Prince George.”

Prince George was a joke. The King himself hadn’t been to Prince George. Even the most staunch member of the Movement conceded that Prince George would be Prince George until by some miracle it got swallowed up or plowed under or blown away. Willie got a great big chuckle out of that. But when Hez pressed on with it, Willie said he’d go gladly, seeing how little the average man had to hope for with the cream of the old leadership sold out to Carter and now Reagan, and he went on lamenting until he was in enough lather to promise he’d round up a few more of the old militia. Hez was lathered too.