Sacred Dust (48 page)

H
ez went to laughing so hard when he saw the multitudes, he thought his head would split in two. There wasn’t an available bus between Birmingham and the Gulf Coast, or any other coast for that matter. He had rented every one. As close as he could tell, he was going to be about forty-five coaches shy. Forty-three chartered airplanes were scheduled to land, one all the way from Stockholm. There was so much traffic backed up out of the airport, they said it was taking people three hours to make the two-mile trip to downtown Birmingham.

The first demonstrators would arrive at the Prince George County Courthouse two hours before the last left the King memorial site thirty-two miles to the south. Just before the march commenced, Hez tried to reach Heath at the number he had given him up in White Oak. He wanted an update on that Klucker who was apparently planning to blow them all to kingdom come. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t that Hez was Oblivious of the danger. Hez had every intention of making damned sure the man had been apprehended before they crossed into Prince George County. He couldn’t let Heath know that. Things were sounding pretty hysterical from up at Prince George. Hez was afraid if he delayed the march as much as an hour, the lawmen up there would let up their search. Or word would get out and the Klan in general would get inspired. He
could halt the march at the county line if it became necessary. He had prayed fervently through the night that it wouldn’t.

As nearly as anybody could estimate, they were expecting forty thousand. They were coming from New York and they were coming from old York, England. They were flying in from Nome, Alaska, and Calcutta, India, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were rolling down the highways so fast and thick, you couldn’t get a hotel room anyplace in central Alabama. It was all because a national news broadcast had run a thirty second videotape of the Kluckers hurling bricks and bottles at them during the last march.

So far, his office had handled seven hundred thousand dollars in contributions. Hez had spoken with the President as well as the heads of a dozen foreign countries. Every politician who was running for office within five thousand miles had agreed to walk at the front of the march along with Mrs. King, mayors, senators, representatives and several dozen college and church choirs.

The phone rang and Hez started laughing all over again. This time he was laughing at his addled sister Dereesa. She was fit because their mama was insisting on marching. That meant Dereesa would be stuck with the task of pushing her wheelchair up and down hills the full five mile route. Dereesa was claiming lumbago and insomnia and nerves and every other ailment she could manufacture. Moena was set like three-week-old cement. Dereesa was going to have to roll her mama home. The notion rested like a benediction or a blessing on Hez’s shoulders. His mama would touch the sacred soil of her ancestry and close the troubled circle of her life’s journey.

A
little before eight that Saturday morning, a highway patrolman came to the door and told us that Heath had suffered a concussion from a fall. He said that Heath would be all right, that it wouldn’t amount to much more than a bad headache for a few days. The man wasn’t down the front steps before Nadine came running. It was from her that I learned I had become a widow and Heath Lawler was a hero on the national news.

The marchers were getting closer. We had heard their singing gradually grow louder for the last half hour or so. Nadine was feeling like a heroine because, after all, she had tipped us off about Dashnell. She wouldn’t join the marchers with me for fear of what Sidney might do. But she was feeling celebratory enough to offer to drive Lily up to the hospital to see about Heath. In a woman like Nadine that amounts to largesse.

When the first line of them streamed over the crest, the ground began to tremble. Soon wave over wave streamed past, singing and carrying signs and laughing and talking. This was pure celebration, a parade of hearts, a healing stream gushing over a broken land.

It was bitter cold. Now and again the wind gusted. They had walked a long way in winter coats and they looked hot and tired. I took the garden hose down by the fence and let those who wanted pause to drink from it. A lady from Detroit stopped to fill her
thermos. We chatted a minute. I asked her did she mind if I walked beside her. We talked needlepoint and hooked rugs all the way to the courthouse steps where the speeches were beginning.

The minister from Birmingham opened his Bible. He said he was about to read us all he knew and ever hoped to know. He said the words contained his whole life. His voice just cascaded. It washed over this forlorn place like a lost river flowing home.

L
ord, come for Thy world! All that can be seen, has been seen. Lord, come! It was an ocean, a giant sea of heads and arms swaying down the hill. You have never heard the likes of their singing. It was perfection. It was beautiful. It shone like the Rapture. I stood on my front porch trembling before the majesty of it. They raised such a joyful noise the windows were rattling.

Nadine had run Lillian up to town. Rose had joined the throng. I had a mind to do the same, but I honestly didn’t know if I was able.

There were women with dots on their foreheads wrapped in bright silk. There were bearded men in dark suits and stovepipe hats. Now and then there would be young men with long hair strumming guitars and young ladies in striped shawls. They called to mind some of Carmen’s friends from his college days. They passed like a river of happiness. My arms grew weary from waving at them. Everything was whirling and glistening and echoing sweet. I thought the happy energy was going to bear me aloft.

I had to sit down for a while and remind myself that I was still of this realm. It was as if I had suddenly encountered the Face of Heaven and it was more alive, more beautiful and living, than I had ever dared imagine. It pleased me to know that Rose was a part of this breathing miracle. For all this, I still had Dashnell heavy on my mind. It come to me all of a flash that this was pure and holy joy,
that Dashnell must have intuited that it would be, that he lived in utter terror of so much shining sensation.

After an eternity of bliss I noticed the crowd was beginning to thin out a little. There were several people in wheelchairs now, young men with withered, useless legs and muscled arms and healthy faces rolling themselves along in God’s Army. My arms and legs were getting stiff from sitting in the cold. I stood to move inside the house. I took one last look, letting my eyes wander over the moving heads and up the hill where an arrow of sunlight had broken through. I saw a shining thing appear at the very top and soon realized it was another wheelchair. Something round and purple and swirling seemed to hover over it. But as they moved down the hill and out of the sun towards me, I saw it was a woman in a purple coat pushing an old lady in a wheelchair. I couldn’t help but think that poor old thing must be shaking with cold. The wind had picked up and the temperature was dropping. She was tucked in under a blanket, but she had to be freezing to death. I stepped down off the porch and approached the road and to ask if she wanted to come inside to warm up a spell. As they moved closer I could see that the lady pushing the chair was miserable and exhausted. I knew they couldn’t hear me for all the singing, so I waved to get their attention. The woman guided the chair towards where I stood at the side of the road. As she did, my eyes locked into those of the old woman in the chair.

I knew those eyes. I had always known those eyes. I had felt them watching me a thousand summer afternoons. I had remembered them in countless troubled dreams. I had waited for them, watched them leaving, prayed for their return.

“Moena!?” I gasped, my chest pounding, my hands shaking, the ground beneath me beginning to soften.

“Eula!” That tired old face drew back into a grin and she stood up and threw her arms around me. I held her with all I had left in me, held everything that mattered, and I prayed, “Take me
now,
God, take me in this sunburst with the singing in my ears and her trembling arms around me.”

My legs began to buckle and someone righted me. Moena sank back into the wheelchair.

“Eula,” she moaned, the accrued sadness of her years swelling up over her and swirling around and around. “Oh, God!” we cried in unison, weeping and trembling and I pulled her right out of that chair and clung to her neck all over again like a twig in a torrent.

I caught my breath a moment to be sure I wasn’t dying—that this wasn’t a tender illusion fate had provided to ease me out of this world. Then Moena giggled and I knew she was real.

Everything after that blurs until somehow I was sitting in the parlor and Moena was opposite me and no one knew what to say or how to begin. Rose came home eventually and I cried so hard I couldn’t explain it so Dereesa, Moena’s daughter, did. Others came later. Lily. Moena’s son Hezekiah, the reverend. It was like when Searle died. I was home amid a houseful. People were doing all around me and I let them because I had no will of my own. I do recall much later that evening, the reverend and Dereesa said that it was time to fetch Moena home. I did rise to that occasion. “Moena is home,” I says. “Now, no more about it.” Moena snorted a giant laugh when I said that. I must have been direct and forceful and true when I spoke, because it wasn’t long before the reverend and Dereesa said their good-byes and went on back to Birmingham.

The next day turned warmer towards midafternoon. Moena and I walked across the road and stood about where Jake and Beauty B.’s house had been. Moena said she got a feeling for the place by looking back across the road at our house. She said it hadn’t changed a lick. I reckon Rosie has near about put it back to rights. Moena probably wouldn’t have said that a year ago.

By the by we wandered on down to the old cemetery spot. I told her about taking up the iris bulbs and she told me I had no call to take them and I had to put them back. I offered the best explanation I could for my actions, but she wasn’t interested. We liked to have gotten into it right there, except Lily came over to say that a reporter from
The New York Times
was at the house and wanted to take our picture.

W
e drove back up to Prince George several times that spring to visit Mama. She grew increasingly frail as the weeks passed. Finally, when she could no longer stand of her own accord, Rose of Sharon set up a bed in the parlor. Ironically, the ancient blindness revisited her in those last weeks. Miss Eula, who was herself noticeably weaker, rarely left Mama’s side day or night. She hovered over her, whispering in her ear, plaiting and replaiting her hair or wiping her cheeks with damp towels. In the end my mama died in her sleep on the land where she was born.

Heath raised a crew and cleared the old cemetery at the edge of the pasture behind Miss Eula’s house. We buried her there on a gray Sunday morning towards the end of June.
The Washington Post
told her story, how she had been driven out and how she came home, a native of Prince George County, its first black citizen in almost eighty years and the only one of the thousands who fled to actually return.

Three months later Heath phoned to say that they would lay Miss Eula beside her the following morning.

It was a dry September afternoon. After the service we sat on the porch: Heath and Lily, Rose of Sharon and me. We talked until after the sun had gone down and a new moon hung tender over the trees in the east. We shared pieces of the story, patching and weaving
it together by turns until we understood how it had brought us to that place and bound us to each other. Returning late on the road back to Birmingham, I understood too how the past is a work in progress, one generation handing down to the next its unfinished toils, adding onto an eternal chain of human endeavor, struggling and straining and stretching beyond the bounds of our own time into eternity.