Sacred Dust (47 page)

I stopped a trooper to ask if there was any word. No sign of him, he told me. He was someplace close and hidden. He was waiting for his moment. It seemed to me as my eyes searched the stinging damp that Dashnell Lawler and his kind would eventually inherit the earth, that evil was indefatigable, more tenacious than good.

Dashnell Lawler was out there someplace, an invisible and unconquerable force of evil. Innocent people were about to die. I was powerless to do anything to stop it.

I could make out the words now. “Mine eyes have seen the glory …” All righteousness, all hearts aglow, and marching into danger, into torment, into hell because Dashnell Lawler waited like an eternal blight on a godless land. I could see the first wave of marchers topping the hill at the Prince George County about a half
mile ahead. There was no time to make Hez listen to reason. We had to stop them.

My feet hit the ice covered bridge and I was spinning, fighting for balance, as the voices grew louder and my head hit the frozen wood. Then blackness and stars as the bridge began to shake from their approaching cadence. Then my eyes were open and I saw the brown and green blurring motion below. It wasn’t water. It was rocks moving. No. It was a rippling sheet of khaki. Then I saw a hand. Now an arm as the singing threatened to deafen me and the pain of my fall exploded. Now it was a figure, leaning forward, holding a lighted match. Him. It was Dashnell and the match was touching a fuse. I waved my arms and I hollered, but there was no sound save the hymn of approaching death. Then a bullet sang louder than the throng and Dashnell slumped forward, his arm, his hand and the burning fuse slipped into the water.

Two pairs of arms were pulling me up to my feet. I was moving away from where men in uniforms were leaping over the side of the bridge. The next thing I remember is drifting free above a thousand singing heads. When I came to I was lying on a stretcher in the hospital emergency room and my head burned like pine tar. I’m told I slept two days. My picture had been in
The Birmingham News.
The President had sent me a telegram. People were calling from Los Angeles to see if I wanted them to make a television movie about me. Lily and I laughed a long time about that.

L
ife will devil and vex you. It’ll slap you back down onto the very soil out of which you have struggled a lifetime to rise. It’ll lay more torment on your soul than you can bear. Some take strength from their pains and rise above them. Others bend to them and fall away forever. I keep trudging forward, if there’s any such thing as forward.

It isn’t what you know. Life is what you touch. It’s what to hold dear even when holding is no more than dreaming or remembering. I chose Moena. I held and let go of many others. But I kept Moena close.

I had an unusually deep sleep after lunch on the Friday afternoon before the big march. When I woke up around three o’clock, there were highway patrolmen combing the yard. Lily said they were looking for possible sniper hideouts.

I was shaking off a dream and it didn’t register what she meant. I had awakened with a sudden thing to be done that moment. The dream had flown off and left it for me.

I will need to do a thing three forevers, put it off over and over again for no reason and then suddenly find myself in the middle of doing it. Searle used to call that doing things on God’s time. But often as not these things will fall out of an afternoon nap. That’s how it was with me and those iris bulbs that afternoon.

As quick as I was as awake as I get these days, I dragged a sack of frozen iris bulbs out from the deep freeze. They’re easy planted. You don’t even have to dig a hole. Just toss them where you want them to grow and sprinkle some silt on the rhizome. Rose, who hates my irises, asked me what in thunder I was doing. I get worn with people waiting for me to go crazy. I just muttered, “None a ya …” and went on out the back door. It was already spitting drizzle. It was right windy, too, especially for February. There was water in that sharp breeze and I knew, if it kept up, it would be blowing ice by sundown. I found a calm, sheltered spot on the south side of the house and I set to work. The topsoil was frozen, but the ground beneath was soft. Rose of Sharon had worked all the dirt around the foundation. I didn’t have but maybe a dozen to plant.

Sometimes you get to thinking your time is hanging over you. You see yourself all laid out pretty. You hear the talk. You imagine people running their hands over your things after you’re in the ground. Imagining all that isn’t really dying or how it is. That’s trying to live forever.

Other times, you measure the resistance in your shoulders to the weight of the day ahead to calculate how much strength you have left and you know it’s coming and the only sense you can make is bending into it. Sometimes you don’t do an important thing because you think you’re only living to see it finished. But its realness sneaks up on you. Its realness catches you quiet, alone, fluffing your pillow some interminable night. You stay awake and wait for it hoping you can scare it away. Or maybe it doesn’t sit right, the notion of dying while you’re asleep, because if you have to die, then you ought to know when it’s happening. You ought to experience it. Maybe you do anyway.

It was nineteen hundred and forty-seven when Searle took it in his head to plow the pasture where the graves were. The stones had long since fallen and crumbled. To the casual eye it was no more than a wide snarl of Johnsongrass. But it was holy ground to me. They had built a church to go with it. It had burned in the Trouble. I forbade him to disturb it.

Searle was planting everything but the front yard in cotton that year of ‘47. The price of cotton had jumped over the moon. He saw it as a snarl of weed that he could turn, into another bale. But I remembered when Moena’s granny had been buried there. That had been well over fifty years back even then. I believe to my soul Moena’s granny was the last to be laid to rest in that cemetery. I just couldn’t think of a tractor disturbing her bones, if it was even any bones left by then. Searle argued strenuously with me that those dead had long been dust; they was gone back to dirt. The purpose of dirt was to resurrect life, to return it another form. I says, “Fine. Go plant cotton on your mama’s grave!” That stopped him.

So back then in ‘47 I went down there to the graves on the pasture’s edge with two hired men. The three of us dug post holes and strung barbed wire to save it from Searle’s ambitions. It was the thick of June. There was heavy Johnsongrass and thistle and crumbled and cracked cement from the tombstones and I don’t know what all. It was hot work. One of them found the clump of irises. They weren’t more than little spears choked back and shaded by grasses. It made no sense to weed them. Field grass will take a patch of irises in three days. So I dug them out as careful as I could. I remembered it like yesterday. The year before her long illness and the Trouble, my grandmother had given those irises to Moena so she could plant them on her granny’s grave. I had gone there with Moena when we were six years old. We had pressed them into the fresh mound of dirt. It had given us both a lovely comfort.

That was worth more to me than an extra bale of cotton. Searle had come up poor. He had watched his daddy lose everything to the bank while he was off fighting the First War. Searle had a regard for money in the bank that I never completely learned. Nadine’s curiosity about my savings isn’t totally unfounded. Searle left me well beyond a million when he passed. I had nearly another million he never knew about. That was from mother’s aunts dying off one by one. With leasing out the land and putting back a little from my Social Security, I’ve near about doubled it all over the last twenty years. I don’t think Rosie knows, but she’ll have a wad to spend as she sees fit when I’m finished dancing on this tired earth. Though to
hear her tell it, she’s put by plenty of her own down the years. Thrift has always run through the women in our family.

I had intended to set out those irises the day we took them up in ‘47. But Mother, whose health broke fast that year, had a spell that afternoon and I had to carry her into White Oak to see the doctor. I had little enough time to string fence in a pasture and less for setting out irises. I set them by the back step and there they lay one whole summer. Then one fall afternoon I swooped them up and dumped them into the deep freeze on the back porch to prevent them from sprouting.

A thing stays in a place for a time and we forget how it got there or why. It just sits there and little by little it becomes its own reason for being there. It takes a certain power over us that way. I moved that sack of bulbs twice when I bought new freezers. The last time was about fifteen years ago. Even then, I wasn’t freezing sides of meat and garden truck like I once did. A few weeks back Rose of Sharon bought the new side-by-side refrigerator-freezer saying we had no use for the deep freeze anymore. We gave it to the Goodwill. Last thing I did before they hauled it away was reach inside it and pull out that sack of iris bulbs. I pitched them right back where they had spent that summer forty years ago beside the back steps.

I finally put those bulbs in the ground that Friday afternoon late with Rose of Sharon fussing over my shoulder and the frozen wind burning my neck.

“Mother, why are you out here in this cold and wet planting irises?”

Rose of Sharon kept moaning about the cold and I kept telling her to go into the house. She tried to take the shovel from me once, but I jerked it away with a velocity that confirmed for me that this was my thing to do, my pardon to finish.

“Mother, what in thunder are you doing?”

“Doing?” I says, sprinkling the last rhizome with frozen, powdered leaves, “I’m done, child.” We were back in the kitchen two minutes later, me at the table and Rose hovering over the teakettle. “Mother, I really wonder about you sometimes.”

“I wonder about you too, Rose.” That quieted her. Not my
words, but the weight of their intent. It was a day for turning more things over than tired ground and iris bulbs.

“What do you wonder about me, Mother?”

“I wonder how with all your nurturing goodness you have come this far without fixing your heart completely on something and loving it beyond all cost.” I thought she’d come back at me with Carmen, because a mother will love her child beyond cost. But that’s a given thing. I meant something different and I was gratified to see she knew it.

“I don’t know.” She was hurt. She looked like she might crack in two. I almost wished she would just so I could see down into the middle inside of her and understand her insides. I should have been sorry I had opened my mouth; but I felt the time slipping beneath me and I wanted to know if it was something I had held back. I wanted to hand it over to her now while I was still drawing breath.

“I’ve always been a disappointment to you, haven’t I?”

I listened hard, but I couldn’t discern even a trace of self-pity. She sincerely wanted my answer.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I wanted to box her ears and shout that she tried to put a frame around everything and an engraved brass explanation underneath it.

“Because you are a fearful person, Rose of Sharon. You live in fear. You married in fear. You run home in fear. After I’m gone, you’ll cower around this house in fear like your own ghost!”

It was as if I had sheared a layer of her skin. I have no word for the expression on her face just then. That’s because she wasn’t feeling as much as she was thinking through what I had just said. But she came right back in a split second with a retort.

“Well, at least I have been to Texas!” She said it so straight and flat and fully that there was nothing either of us could do but fall out laughing.

“Rose,” I cackled, “that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. “Mother,” she spit out between giggles, “it’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard and I’m the one who said it.” We must have been
loud because Lillian peeked in to see what the noise was. But she sensed a communion that couldn’t include her at the moment and she quickly vanished.

“Why don’t you, Mother?”

“What?”

“Live in fear.”

“Because there’s nothing to fear in this world, child.” Rose of Sharon drank my words. I could see by the wry turn of her bottom lip that they had taken.

“Mother, you know things.” It comforts the young to believe that about the old. “Why didn’t you teach me that forty years ago, Mother?”

“It can’t be taught,” I says, “any more than you can learn to pray until you let God steal into your heart. You have to live your way to it. Rose, there’s no pain in this world like fear.”

“No, ma’am, there isn’t,” she said, and a veil that had separated us was lifted. Though neither one of us made an immediate comment. We sat in living silence for a good while. Rose cleared her throat.

“I want to get to know you more before you die, Mother.”

“You will,” I said, wondering as I always do if I was taking my last breath.

“Mother, what were you doing out there in the cold planting irises?”

The warm tea had steadied me. “It’s just something I’ve been meaning to do.” That pacified her. I was glad. Rose went back upstairs. I poured more tea and I sat a good while. I was trying to remember my dream, but it wouldn’t come back to me. It was enough that I had finally thrown a little piece of Moena to grow against the back of the house. But there was more to it. A good deal more was turning that day than tired leaves and irises. A little ball of eternity was gathering that Friday afternoon, drawing up fragments of time and event. In less than twenty-four hours, all the days of my life would show me their accumulated meaning.

It would make a better story to say that I sensed it sitting there in
the kitchen watching the gray sky glow pink through the wet branches of leafless trees. But the longer I sat there, the more my thoughts turned to pie. I pulled the flour canister from the cupboard. I dug out my sifter and I set to work peeling apples.