Sacred Dust (5 page)

Twice in those months Hez had waked from dreams that the men had found them out. Both times he trembled in the darkened room, covered with icy sweat and vowing he would run at daybreak. Then
daylight and the songs of a thousand birds reminded him of the enchantment of her moist eyes when, alone and nude, she kissed him and tickled his flesh with her long, thick platinum hair.

Long before he would admit it to himself, Hez sensed it. First it was a half-imagined tightening of the serving girls’ attitude when he entered the kitchen and spoke to them. They no longer quite criticized him. Their scant conversation was light and vague. They knew. They knew and it was impossible not to see that they had gone upriver and spoken to their mother about it. She had sent the rumor back downriver, where a phrase in the ear of a mill supervisor soon became endless whispered diatribe and supposition. Now their former loose conversation took on an almost stilted tenor when he refilled their coffee cups. He tried to convince himself otherwise, but Hez could touch it in the silence that hung in the third floor corridor outside the door to the attic stair, which he kept locked. He kept his windows shut and the curtains drawn even on the hottest nights, vainly attempting to contain what had already spread and grown all around him.

Over and over he commanded himself to run. He planned every detail of his leaving, packing and then, unable to pull himself away from her, unpacking a hundred times. The fleeting months passed languorously now with day after day of unbearable surface calm.

Beauty B. had taught him long ago that his life would last only as long as his ability to maneuver past white men. He feared what they would do to him, but he shivered with near hysterical dread when he let himself wonder what terrible end Seraphine might face. A second year passed. Gradually the danger came to lie small and unspoken between them. Now and then he saw it in her eyes when she slipped from his bed in the late afternoon in order to be at work in the kitchen when the men returned from work.

It dried the end of his tongue and gnawed savagely at his gut as he swept the parlor carpet. Then he let the brass knocker tarnish because he was afraid to go out onto the porch because now their eyes searched him for a sign of the forbidden truth. At last he understood. The differences between these white men and those he had known in South Carolina were insignificant.

Now as he served cream and sugar for their breakfast coffee, there might be a half-heard snigger or the ominous scrape of a chair leg or an ominous pause in the table conversation.

They never spoke of it. The subject lay like a brooding body of forbidden water between them. There was a brittle edge to her laughter. He took pains not to speak directly to her when the men were about. He couldn’t summon the will to envision his life without her close. Alone each routinely weighed the increasing danger against the emptiness of life without each other.

Three days before Hez found her hanging from an oak limb over the river Seraphine had come to his room as soon as the men had gone out for the day. One of the serving girls had come clean with her. Three men had come to their house the evening before and demanded information. The men had roughed them up and threatened their mother unless they imparted what they knew. The two serving girls, frightened for their lives, had shared their suspicions. The men had been drunk. After the women had shut themselves back up in the house, the men had lingered in the yard, laying their plans. A mob was gathering. Seraphine would be given the opportunity to prove that he had forced himself on her. If they were convinced, she would be allowed to leave. If not, she too must die. Hez looked out the window as she revealed her plan of escape.

There was no time to pack. He must leave at once. She gave him the keys to the pickup truck. She would prepare a story. She was certain, she said, that they wouldn’t harm her if he was gone. She gave him the name of a minister in Baltimore who would shelter him. She would follow him after things were settled here. From Baltimore they would flee to Canada. It was the only time Hez ever knew she was lying. He tried to believe that she did it to protect him from the awful weight of saying good-bye.

Something darker stirred beneath it.

By noon he had driven due north a hundred miles, all the while dissecting their last encounter. Her words had vowed they would be together. A hundred miles was as far as he could ignore the unmistakable shame he had seen in her eyes and felt when they embraced before he left. She had entered forbidden country by loving him.
Her last gaze told him the inescapable truth. She had loved him as a means of destroying herself. Her losses had twisted her much as Beauty B.’s and Grandfather’s had broken them forever. She lacked the courage to take her own life. The men would take it for her. They wouldn’t believe any protestations of innocence on her part. If life had been her goal, she would have sent him and followed after him months ago.

He turned the truck around and drove into the encroaching night. Perhaps by some miracle he could save her. He was all action in that moment, all will. If he allowed himself to consider the situation fully, he knew he would head north again. A throbbing in his chest explained it to him. His life would be meaningless unless he risked for her all that she had been willing to sacrifice for him.

It was full dark when he drove up to the house. There were no lights. He walked through the downstairs rooms and called her name. Everything was blue and vapid from the moonlight off the river. Everything shimmered and seemed to be dissolving. He waited for angry white arms to grab him. But there was no one. No sound except his own footsteps as he walked out the back door. She hung stiff from the limb of the giant pin oak that reached out over the river. He cut her loose. Hearing or believing he heard angry voices, he ran north into the swamp.

He woke under a heap of blankets and straw. He opened his eyes. A cool wind had risen out of the swamp. It was daylight. Apparently his mind had stayed awake in his sleep. He took a slow, deep breath that promised to slice him in half. Then he heard their muffled truck doors slam. He should have run. Why didn’t he run? Another eternity of silence. Then someone called out.

“Howdy.”

There was muted talk. He caught a phrase.

And then, “ … seen him, had you?”

“Yup.” That was Joseph.

“Whereabouts?”

“A mile in. Two gators fighting over what’s left of him.”

Then a closer, dubious, malcontent voice spoke.

“What’s in there?”

Hez held his breath. The man was in the room, scuffling about. There were quick footsteps behind his.

“Yo!” That was Joseph. “I been accused of some low down things in my time, but nobody ever accused me of hiding a scummy coon boy who sins against God and man by fornicating with one of our women!”

Silence. Then the man spoke again. Hez recognized his voice. His name was Tyson. He’d asked Seraphine out a dozen times.

“No, man, it ain’t like that. I’se just curious about your barn here.”

“It’s a consecrated barn.”

There was low laughter. Joseph offered them breakfast. They said they wanted to check out this nigger boy’s body in the swamp.

“Be careful. Apt as not the boy was fevered.” Joseph gave them directions, warning them there might not be anything left to see. Then it got quiet. Joseph said in a voice that told him he wasn’t looking directly inside the barn to stay put. Hours passed. Finally, he slept.

It was dusk when he woke. Joseph stood over him. He was wearing a white robe.

“They’re long gone.” He told Hez to kneel while he anointed the youth’s forehead from a bottle of what was probably sunflower oil.

“Hearken to me, you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law; fear not the reproach of men; and be not dismayed at their revilings. For the moth will eat them up like a garment, and the worm will eat them like wool; but my deliverance will be forever, and my salvation to all generations.”

It was a rough, hilly logging road. Sometimes the rutted mud was so deep they had to wedge branches beneath the rear tires and push the truck forward. There were sudden bursts of blinding rain that forced them to wait on the narrow shoulder. It was almost morning before they hit paved road. It was noon when they reached the Orlando branch whistle-stop.

Joseph waited with him while a silver steam locomotive churned to a stop. He slipped the conductor two dollars.

Their parting was even less ceremonious than their meeting had been. Hez offered Joseph his hand. “Thank you.”

Joseph’s mind was already seeking his next mission. He barely acknowledged Hez before he turned and walked back towards his truck. Hez climbed the steps of the last car and found a seat.

He dozed off and on through the long afternoon. He bought an egg salad sandwich for supper. His mind wandered through the hours.

The evening sky was bleeding red behind the jagged edges of the pines. He sensed the familiar shape of the rolling South Carolina hills. He felt the sudden ballast of a place he knew. Beneath and through him two ends of something long and curved bent inexplicably into each other completing an unlikely ellipse.

He watched the hulking blackness of the trees moving south under a round sky that was crimson, then dark purple and finally blue black as it slipped above the stars.

A
ll of them think I’m crazy because I say such a little nowadays. What is there to talk about at my age but the past? They’d find that a whole lot less tolerable, my gumming on about things hated and beloved. I’m old now. I feel old. When I watch the world passing on the road in front of the yard, when I listen to how the world talks on the television, I know that I
think
old too.

I drift. Sometimes I’m sitting in church when Nadine drags me to service, and in between “For Thine is the kingdom” and “Amen,” I’ll swear I’m off someplace three forevers beyond the sunset. It’s like I’m practicing dying or letting go of this world a little along. I don’t know.

Now Searle, he didn’t talk about such things if it was this way with him right on the last. Of course, Searle went sudden. Or so we was left to believe. He sat up in bed one Saturday night and his hands went to his chest and he was gone. If he had any idea he was going, say that Saturday morning, he never mentioned it at breakfast.

Funny. I remember thinking, “What am I going to do now?” at his funeral. It was a gray hot Monday morning with just enough wet dropping to dust down the cotton. It was May and the dirt on his mound felt warm when we went back to pull the cards off the flowers around suppertime. Rose of Sharon took me. I remember
thinking she looked so pretty that day. The sadness become her. Or maybe I just looked at her good.

No, I remember so well wondering what I’d do without Searle. But you do pretty much the same. I sold off the cotton gin and paid what was owed against it. We must have pulled bank money out of that gin a dozen times in the forty-two years we owned it. I had a good deal of money left over and half of it went down on a good brick house for Rose of Sharon and Dashnell and little Carmen. It was one of those miniature
Gone With the Wind
places with baked white aluminum columns made of new brick that’s supposed to look old. It was just this side of Birmingham. Rose of Sharon had two kitchens, one to set and drink coffee in, the other for putting up vegetables and ironing. I didn’t see it but one time. I didn’t much want to go. I don’t sleep good in other people’s houses. Besides, new houses stink of paint and carpet. But Carmen was graduating high school and I was the grandmother. I had no choice.

But if Searle had been having my away and back again experience before he died, he never mentioned it to me. He might have told Rose of Sharon. She never let on to me if he did. But she wouldn’t. Not from meanness. Rose of Sharon don’t have that capacity. If she did, I doubt she would’ve married Dashnell. But maybe she would have. So all I could conclude was Searle went or was took in a flash. I like my way better.

My way you outlive all your dreams. Then you outlive any regret over that. I used to think, if I had an old age, I wouldn’t mind it because by then I’d know things that only time reveals. But I see the folly of that now.

I miss sleep, and by that I don’t mean rest so much as laying my head on the pillow and dropping down into a deep and holy blackness that draws a clear line between the day past and the one to begin. Now I lie with my head propped against six pillows. That, I’m told, helps keep the fluids from filling up in my lungs and drowning me. I lie there and fixate on pieces of the past, pleasant or excruciating, but I never go all the way someplace. I can always hear the clock ticking or the trickle of water on the rusted streak in
the bathroom sink. It’s not that out of body stuff they talk about on the morning TV shows. But it has a kind of enchantment about it.

Rose of Sharon and Dashnell moved back up home after Carmen died. I probably should say, “after Carmen was killed.” But that sounds like he was murdered. He went in a car wreck. I wouldn’t say it to Rose of Sharon, but that boy was born with a shadow over him.

Rose of Sharon takes me to the doctor, but half the time I get there and I can’t recall the original complaint. I invent one so as not to be embarrassed. No. Sleep is for people who got something to do tomorrow.

I got one strip of bacon and one egg to turn in its drippings all the tomorrow mornings I got left. I might not have any left. I can’t buy a two-pound package of bacon without that in mind. But that’s old age. Then, if I feel up to it, I got a cup and a half of my weak coffee to make. Searle used to threaten to leave me over that coffee. He walked all over France and Germany with his division swearing he’d joined up to get away from my coffee. His whole family was peculiar about their coffee. One of his uncles claimed to have moved from Mobile to Houston just to get away from Maxwell House coffee. There’s a lot of foolishness with his people.