Sacred Dust (39 page)

“I’m trying to be something, Daddy. I’m trying to stand for something.”

“Your mama is at home on her knees praying for you.”

The things that matter most in this world are simple. What I had wanted most in my life was to think that I was something more to my daddy than the booby prize for five forgettable minutes he spent with my mama in the dark. To that vain end I made a thousand mistakes in my life. Standing there in the cold with his eyes looking through me I finally understood I wanted something he had no capacity to give me. I felt worse than I did when that judge told me I was going to Folsom Prison for a year. If I hollered, he’d call me disrespectful. If I cried, he’d say I was weak. If I tried logic, we’d both be found frozen to death before he gave a millimeter.

“This affects more than you, boy. You go make a public jackass out of yourself and pretty quick people want to know where the rest of your family stands. If they burn your mama and I out over this, we have no place to go. We have nothing.”

I wanted to holler. I wanted to pound it into his thick head.

I kept still. That would have unleashed ancestral rage. That would have justified drawing a knife and trying to kill his own son. I’d have to kill my own father to survive.

“You leave me no choice but to disclaim you.”

Daddy got back into his truck and drove off.

I stood there a minute drawing the cold air deep into my lungs. When Mama talked the way Daddy had, it was generally a mood that passed. But I knew Daddy would hold to those words. Daddy would go home now and pull out a bottle of bourbon and sip it until he was red eyed and fighting with Mama.

I went on into the trailer and scratched down some plans for the festival. I got sixteen calls that evening. Most of them were the same tired, breathy threats. I lay down on the couch in front of the television
and drifted off to sleep. The room was filled with smoke and James Edward was barking when I opened my eyes. I dove for the door. I ran across the road and called the fire department.

I sat in the cold on the truck bed with James Edward and watched the trailer burn. Half the volunteer firemen in Prince George County belong to the Klavern. I wasn’t really expecting the engine company. I just figured it might have some effect on my landlady’s insurance. Luckily I had fallen asleep with my jacket and my boots on. I had to laugh when I considered how little I had lost. It was a big fire. The trailer sat up on a little ridge. I knew the flames were visible for miles. A blaze like that would normally bring everyone out. But no one came.

I don’t know who spread the gasoline and pitched the first match. But I’ll always believe they had my father’s permission. It burned through the night and it kept that old dog and me warmer than we had ever been a single night with the furnace working double time. It burned clean, the white tipped flames hurling devil’s fists into the sky. Then it was morning and I could hear starlings from the pink mist that hung in the wet gray trees across the road. I climbed into the truck. The seat was cold on my legs. There was frost on the windshield. The engine fought me a minute. The icy steering wheel stung my fingers. Then it turned over with a snarl that split the quiet. I was halfway to Birmingham before I remembered James Edward huddled up on a corner of the truck bed. I pulled over and brought him up on the seat beside me. He was shivering and probably hungry. I stopped at a café and asked for a bowl of warm milk. I was sitting on a stool at the counter looking at the morning news on an old black and white TV shoved up between a toaster oven and a coffeemaker. I saw Lily’s picture flash on the screen. Glen Pembroke and Michael England were dead. Galveston, Texas, doctors offered little hope for Lily. I heard a distant voice say, “Lord, come for Thy world!” It was the waitress. James Edward had spilled his bowl of milk and she’d stepped in it.

I
had always believed the mind is the first thing to go. It’s not. It’s the last. For no reason I’ll ever know, I’ve been given these hours with the stitches burning in my chest and the cold and the memory of it. I don’t think I can move. I know I’m getting weaker and colder, and there’s a clock on the wall so I can watch the seconds. I had no idea just how long a second can be. I keep asking them if Michael died, if Glen died, if he killed anyone else. But I have to ask with my eyes, and this is a busy place. No one has time to interpret the twitches of my eyelashes. I try to think about God and heaven and eternal peace, but all I see is Glen standing in that doorway and Michael sitting straight up, pulling the sheet to his chest, his eyes pressing shut. Pitiful. Glen was calm, and that made me calm. There was nowhere to run, and the end had come.

Yeah, it’s the most awful moment I ever lived through. Except that moment to this has been all the same. I’m still traversing that moment. I miss the kids. It would have been nice to tell them goodbye.

I don’t think Glen intended that I should lie here, my mind wading through the hours, as I drift towards the dark. This is it. I can see. I can think. I can sense the end moving in. I bet Mama is having a field day with this. I’ll say it to God’s face, “I deserved to be loved.” I think Rosie’s coming. Or maybe I dreamed that. I hope
not. I won’t last long enough to see her. At this moment I want to believe I dreamed my whole life. Regrets? One. I was a bad mother. Two. I was afraid to be loved the way Heath Lawler loved me. Three. I never reported my daddy for what he did to me.

One more regret. One I’ve tried to hold out of my mind ever since this happened because it’s bigger than the first three put together. They’re both dead. I know they’re both dead. I was just able to ask when they put me on the stretcher. The attendant was a burly man with a red beard and beer on his breath. The way his eyes twitched and he shrugged like he didn’t know. That told me. I knew Michael was dead in my arms. I just wouldn’t let myself know it. Glen Pembroke is dead because he had the bad fortune to meet me. Michael England is dead for the same reason. I don’t have the nerve to ask God to spare my life. I exit this world sadly, against my will and before my time. But there is a dull relief knowing that I won’t live to cause any more suffering. It took dying to understand that I gave twice the amount of pain that I took. I want somebody to know that. But dying is a thing over which I have no control. The time has come to embrace it.

S
idney forbade Nadine to leave the house that day on account of the trouble expected. She slipped out and run over here after he left. I had no idea what all that meant, but I was glad for her company with Rose of Sharon away in Texas. I asked her what trouble was expected. She said she didn’t rightly know. So I asked her what trouble Sidney expected that would cause him to forbid her to leave the house on a Saturday. She generally hauls in a big load of groceries on Saturdays, stays gone all afternoon. She claimed she had no idea to what Sidney was referring, and we got to talking about my hooked rug. It’s an Oriental pattern, and Nadine has drooled over every stitch for five years. At least I think I’ve been at it five years. I keep it there by the sofa where it’s handy and it covers the cigarette burns in the rug from back when I used to smoke Kents. In those days, we all believed we smoked cigarettes for our nerves. Searle stayed after me about smoking for thirty-seven years. I quit smoking when I quit driving a car. I hated to have to depend on other people to pick up things for me, and I tried to reduce my needs down to necessities. Rose of Sharon and me was watching the floor finishers pulling up linoleum in the upstairs rooms. There was newspaper dated 1947 underneath it. We seen this old cigarette ad, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand.” We laughed out loud at that.

Anyhow, me and Nadine had the Oriental spread on the floor. It’s about four feet by five, and all I lack is the fringe. Nadine has the eyes of God. She jumped up and walked back into the dining room and looked out the window and said it was two boys creeping around the orchard. So? Two boys creeping around is half the reason for an orchard, and two girls would make the other. I ain’t seen an apple off one of them trees in forty years. But then Nadine says she don’t mean boy boys, she means young men. I could hear the voices by then, the men running up and down the road in little groups, parking their trucks, dropping their beer cans on the pavement, hollering at their women. I knew I was right to send Rose of Sharon away. I knew the thing I’d waited for had begun. Though God help me I didn’t know what, and I wouldn’t say nothing about it to another soul. It’s pride, but I can’t stand it when people smile at me and their eyes tell me I’m old and crazy.

You’d have to know the South to know the thing I’m trying to tell. Father used to say if you don’t know the South, you don’t know jack, but if you don’t know jack you ain’t born of the South. By that he meant it was a beaten place. By that, he meant southern blood and southern bone hammered into dust—thousands and thousands of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, nephews and cousins put back into the earth. The hot August wind drew the dust off their graves and scattered it about the intervening years until every field and wooded acre, every backyard and dirt road alley, had been washed in that sacred ancestral dust.

Those who lived to surrender to hideous defeat lived to suffer the unconscionable vengeance of the victor. The righteous Union drowned the South in its own blood to prove our holy, inextricable bond. But when the war was over, what had not already been burned or looted was systematically stolen by a Congress of drunken thieves who hid their crimes behind a pretty word called Reconstruction. The southern survivor taught his child before the Word of God how to carry on, how to live in defeat, because as long ago as it seems to the victor, the loser bears the conqueror’s vengeance a hundred generations, maybe more. You’d have to be of this place, you’d have to learn that at your mother’s knee or experience
the sanctity when you cut your hoe lightly through dry southern earth.

As long as I could, when trouble surrounded me, I’d get myself out to the orchard and find a tall crook in a peach or a plum tree in which to rest my weary haunches. Get your hands around the limbs of a good tree when hard times fall, and you will feel the sense of things, the motion and the gnarled eternity of life clutching and engendering life. You surrender to the vastness and strength comes.

Now I find myself drawing strength from my child, my little Rose, and it brings tears to me. So help me God, I don’t think she minds it. In her way, I think she takes strength from that. I fight the old compunction to drift out there among the stars now that she’s here and needing me. Nadine wails on and on about how Rose of Sharon moved home and rescued me from the grave, how I have color, how I’ve taken on some weight, how I started looking at the evening news again. I’ve fought my way back this far into living because Rose of Sharon needs me. Yet I’ve drawn the strength for that battle from Rose.

Anyhow Nadine was all atremble because two young men were climbing trees in the orchard, and I told her I didn’t much mind and she turned white as heaven and says, “They’re wanting a good shot.” For the most part, Nadine is one of the most foolish people to rise up out of southern soil, but she has a grace, and that’s her tendency to talk before she thinks. Nadine wouldn’t have the sense of being to say she was against them—if she thought about it first. But by blurting it out, she revealed her true nature. Never mind what she says at church or when Inez and the boys are around or at the grocery store. You get the truth out of anybody when they’re caught off guard, and you can triple that in Nadine’s instance.

“What’s going on?”

Once again, she claimed not to know. She was as flighty as a cat with tissue paper stuck to its tail. I figured Sidney was some part of the troubles coming. You could cut the air in that room with a slice of toast.

She give me what particulars I could drag out of her. One of the
Lawler boys was raising big sand. A busload of colored communists from Birmingham was expected.

With Nadine protesting every step, I went out on the porch. I could see who they were. You know them by their creased boots and their half-junked cars and their dollar store jackets. A lot of them didn’t even have jackets. Skunks, godforsaken lost people who can’t think of no other way to hold themselves over nothing than to make misery for a busload of Birmingham colored people. You ought to hear Rose of Sharon take on when I say “colored people.”

Two young monkeys were in my orchard trying to get a better shot. I told Nadine to go on out there and run them off. But she wouldn’t. I says, “Nadine, I can’t hardly make it down the back steps and it would take me three forevers to walk down to the orchard. You could be back in a snap.” But she refused. She was scared. For a second, I thought she meant of them shooting her. That’s how she tried to paint it. She was scared word would get out that she had stood against them. She assumed that standing against that kind of criminal behavior makes a person president over whatever they stand against.

I was drifting into focus by then. I know these sons of bitches around these parts. They disgrace all the South stood for. At least the South as I have loved it all these years.

The North took slavery as their flag when they went to war against us. They didn’t call it slavery when they sent eight-year-old Irish and English boys into mines and children to die in their factories. They called that their manifest destiny. How long since I watched the good people of Yankee Doodle Boston, Massachusetts, riot over school bussing? They call us hateful down here. Would the signers of the Declaration have had the time away from home if their well-educated slaves hadn’t known how to keep things running? Or so my daddy taught me. The answer will come, and when it comes, it will come from the South. No one ever taught me that. It’s just a common thing, known among all southern people of self-respect.