Sacred Dust (16 page)

They were dauntlessly devoted to serving God through service to other human beings. For all their vows of chastity and poverty and their blind obeisance to papal dictates, they were witty, articulate and generous people who worked tirelessly at loving others. Their unwillingness to question the efficacy of their toil in the face of a brutal, unjust world, inspired him.

He had luxuriated in their kindness and the ordered sanity of their world for six months when Sister Margaret decided that, after a few months of preparation, Hez could be given a test that would result in a high school diploma. After that she was unshakably
convinced Hez would do himself and the world the most good by enrolling at Notre Dame University.

He listened politely as Sister Margaret’s plans for the rest of his life evolved. He trusted her judgment and wanted more than anything to please this inordinately good woman who had been his saving grace. Yet the passing weeks showed him with increasing clarity that he must remain in the South. From the intractable distance of their safe harbor, he looked back with clean eyes on his life. For all the wrong turns and misery and injustices, he descried a rude majesty in, an undeniable desire to remain connected to, the malevolent, lovely people and landscapes of his youth.

Unlike half the people he knew, he saw no value in running away up north for sanctuary. The South was his home and he belonged in the South. He would embrace it. He would find the life for which God had saved him. He would do what intuition and not reason implied. He would grab hold of it the way a beaten child will bury his head in his abusive mother’s skirts.

On a rainy Monday morning in June, Hez scratched a note of farewell and affectionate gratitude. He rolled up his tiny estate and stuffed it into a canvas U.S. Army release bag which he could hang by straps over his shoulder. He slipped into the garden and cut a small yellow rose. He placed it and the note, now neatly folded in the place on the table in the dining room where Sister Margaret Helen ate breakfast with the other nuns. He crossed the purple shadowed garden at sunrise. He took pains not to let the garden gate slam behind him. He walked sixteen blocks to the bus station and purchased a one-way ticket. “Charleston,” he told the exhausted woman behind the marble counter. It was boarding. There was no time for regret or misapprehension.

Charleston meant Moena. Hez believed that his unwilling mother and he should be able to unlock dozens of mysteries for each other. He hoped that his pulsing gratitude would endure the long, slow process of forging some kind of rapport with her. He believed that the willing extension of his arm across the inexplicable gulf between
himself and the woman who would or couldn’t be his mother was both act of faith and prayer of confession.

It was right to submit himself. He was offering love and support to a woman he had used to explain and justify every weak, dishonest, self-destructive thing he had ever done.

I
learned how to deal with losing Carmen a little along. It was indiscriminate and constant hurt at first. It was every minute of every day. But gradually I’d pass an hour or two without hurting over it. Then an afternoon. Eventually he crept back into my conversation and memory, and I could think of him as he was in this life and not just how he died. Gradually I learned to separate my thoughts, to set aside time for the hurtful part.

But I’ve had no such luck with the man on the lake. I don’t mean in dreams or night visions like I had with Carmen. I mean sometimes in the broad daylight, sitting on my porch, I look off across the lake and I see that silver line of his boat. There’s a good fishing spot up in those reeds, so I probably really do see a boat. But my mind makes it his.

With Dashnell, it’s just a thing that happened like that awful rainstorm last week. Now and again somebody will refer to it in passing, and I can make no discernible difference in Dashnell’s demeanor when the subject comes up. That’s how right he thinks it was. I’d like to crack his head open and yell way down in there where he hides that I know the straight of it. It wasn’t really because the man was black. Race has very little to do with race hatred or pride. The issue of race is the outer wrapping. Some of those men did it because it made them feel a man. Some believed their victim
was trying to take something away from them. Those would be the ones who feel less secure with all they have than Dashnell. Dashnell did it because Carmen, his sunshine and his joy, was taken away from him. Dashnell went off trying to balance the scale by helping to take another. But it’s like peeling an onion, because there’s a layer under that. Dashnell Lawler was no kind of father to Carmen. He never took him places. He barely showed up for his Little League or high school basketball games. The only reason he attended his high school graduation was because Mama had come and he was afraid of her disapproval. Alive, Carmen was little more than proof of Dashnell’s manhood. But after he died, he became his sunshine and his joy.

I couldn’t say that to Dashnell and spend another night with him. Thirty-four years of marriage wouldn’t hold against that. I really can’t visualize hauling my sewing machine and my doll collection back home to Mama’s at this late stage. I often wish that I could.

It’s been a month. All that’s come of it, as far as I’ve heard anyway, is that a black minister from down at Birmingham called the sheriff demanding a thorough investigation. He says he wrote the governor about it. I stopped myself twice this week from getting in the car and riding over to Yellow County and finding that man’s widow to see what her situation is. Think what that could start. If she had a brain, she’d know I knew something. If she had a spine, she’d pry it out of me, and then what? It’s 105 degrees out here on this porch. But I shiver to the core when I consider it.

Lily came by yesterday afternoon. She looked real pretty. She was wearing linen pants and a white silk blouse and a silver Indian necklace. She says that she’s quit drinking wine altogether. She’s going to a little meditation and discussion group at the alternative school up in White Oak. She cut her hair and toned it down a couple shades. There was none of that hateful talk about her kids driving her up the walls and not a word about Glen. It was the first time I ever heard her comment on how pretty the lake is. I really enjoyed her company. I told Marjean about the change in Lily. Marjean says, “It don’t mean a thing but that Lily must want something from you.” Then she laughed that awful throaty rattle of hers
that winds up in her cigarette cough. What in thunder do I have to offer Lily?

Fact is, I want something from her. One of Carmen’s books was called
A Comparative Study of World Religions
. I really didn’t get all of it, but I got the general idea. You boil them down and all religions say the same thing. If you’re a selfish person, then you’re an unhappy person. Lily says this young fellow Michael England who runs the school and conducts the discussion group, he leads them through all kinds of ideas like that. I’d really like to go once and hear them all talk. I couldn’t do anything like that by myself, but I’d tag along with Lily if she invited me. It wouldn’t be that hard to suck an invite out of Lily. The hard part would be keeping Dashnell from hearing about it. If he even dreamed I attended a discussion group at that alternative school, they’d have to place him in six-point restraint.

M
other gave Moena and me what-for because we had run off into the woods. We couldn’t play together after supper, so we were standing across the road from each other hollering back and forth when Mr. Brown rode up asking if we had seen Rosa Lynn. She’d been expected at Dinah Tillingham’s house that afternoon, but she hadn’t shown up. Mother came out and talked to Mr. Brown a minute and then Hattie and Florence drifted out, curious to hear what was going on. As soon as Mr. Brown rode off, Hattie bet Florence a cookie that Rosa Lynn had eloped with her fiancé to get back at her mother for making such a circus out of their upcoming wedding. I remember that because when they all went back inside, I asked Moena what
eloped
meant and she said making a baby. Beauty B. had come out on the porch by then and she heard what Moena said, and she cackled so loud it set the starlings rustling in the cedars.

I was crawling into bed on the upstairs sleeping porch when the men came and Daddy went to help them look for Rosa Lynn. I could hear Hattie telling Florence in the next room that Mr. Brown had caught up with Rosa Lynn’s fiancé and slugged him several times before he believed the boy when he told him he didn’t know where she was.

I heard the stairs creak when Mother got up in the deep dark and
went down to check Wee Mother’s breathing. There were wagons up and down the road all night and men hollering across the pastures and searching the woods with lanterns. I heard them, but it was from faraway sleep.

I woke to thunder rolling long and getting closer. Hattie yelled, “Tornado,” and Mother was swooping me up, carrying me down to the storm cellar. Soon we could hear the men’s voices. It wasn’t thunder or a tornado. It was hooves on the road, horses and wagons and men shouting, and we went out on the porch to watch them fly past. Daddy dropped out at the rear and rode into the yard. Daddy was a long-fused, soft-spoken man who read Scripture most Sundays at church. But a meanness had overtaken him, and it scared me so bad I ran back into the house and upstairs without being told. I crawled back into bed. I could hear them flying around, slamming doors and windows shut. For the second time that night, a big person swooped me up. It was Daddy, and he laid me in his and Mother’s bed. His shotgun was propped by the window. Hattie and Florence got into bed with me. Mother was down in the parlor with Wee Mother and another gun. Daddy rode off towards town.

Mother had told them not to tell me, so it took a lot of whimpering and pleading. I think Hattie finally broke down so she could get some sleep. She told me they’d found Rosa Lynn lying facedown by the creek in the woods with a gash in her forehead. She said they found her unconscious and her clothes were torn. I had never heard the word
raped
, but I knew it was too terrible to inquire about, so I didn’t. Hattie whispered that the slayer was still out there someplace loose, apt as not very close by. I grabbed hold of Hattie’s hand and I started to fall asleep, but then I remembered Moena and I wanted to go tell her, but I was too sleepy and Florence told me that Moena already knew because her daddy was one of the men out there helping them look for Rosa Lynn. Florence got up once in the night. I could hear her crying. That was because she’d bet Hattie a cookie that Rosa Lynn had eloped.

Wee Mother ate a bowl of oats the next morning and we all felt happy about that. Daddy didn’t come back until around midday
dinner. He told us that Rosa Lynn was dead. He walked up the stairs, leaning on the banister. He caught a nap.

Mother and Hattie and Florence went to be with Mrs. Brown in her tribulation. Beauty B. came over to sit with Wee Mother. She let Moena and me play on the porch, but we weren’t much for play. We kept looking up at the clouds and seeing Rosa Lynn there. I don’t know what time Mr. Carter Crowley come driving up in his truck. He asked for Daddy, and Beauty B. took him into the dining room since Wee Mother was bedded in the parlor. The dining room is right inside the porch and Beauty B. cracked the windows to draw some air across Wee Mother. We could hear them talking.

“We got him.” That was Carter as Daddy came into the room. Beauty B. was serving them both iced tea.

“Who did it?”

“Henry Gill. He’s up at the jail.” Henry Gill was a midget retarded colored man you’d see on the square on Saturdays.

“How did they catch him?”

“He had one of her rings in his pocket.”

“Well, he’ll hang, and good riddance.”

“Some say he won’t.”

“Nigger rapes and murders a white woman?”

“Some think his being retarded could factor in.”

Daddy said he was sure it wouldn’t. He said he was certain the law would deal swiftly and justly with Henry Gill. Years later I realized that was because my daddy didn’t have much stomach for what he knew they were going to do. Mr. Carter Crowley reminded Daddy that this was the second time a white woman had been raped by a nigger in Prince George County in a year. The one they got for the first one was a vagrant from nobody knew where. He’d sawed his way out of jail and fled to avoid lynching. He was never found.

I have often wondered about that first man. Maude Langdon, his alleged victim, was a skinny, hysterical woman who sang in the Baptist church choir. Hattie said she had copied off her test papers all through school. You’d see Maude Langdon everywhere running her mouth about everybody in town. They said what she didn’t
know, she made up and told as the truth. It may have been like she said. This vagrant broke into her house and raped her one evening when she came home from choir practice. In my mind, it could just as easily be the man knocked on her back door and asked for a drink of water. No one around here was likely to wait around for the truth to come out. I thought it was pure genius of him to saw his way out of that jail and run off.

I’ll always wonder where he ended up, if he or his luck changed. It might have been he found decent work and settled down someplace with a woman. It could be he discovered peace of mind, turned a trade and lived to become a grandfather. In all fairness, it could also be he moved on to his next victim. Maude Langdon lived to become a great-grandmother. A few years after she was raped, the bank president’s wife caught him in bed with her. It wasn’t long after that Maude Langdon had herself a bank president and a new Lincoln every other year. I mean back when a Lincoln was a Lincoln. Searle drove up in a brand new Lincoln one time. It was a beautiful thing. I made him take it right back, though. I was terrified somebody might follow us home and see where we lived.