Sacred Dust (18 page)

That was the first I’d heard about any homo hippie. I didn’t know much about the school or its founder, only that it sounded like there was something more than gossip and pound cake recipes going on there. Dashnell doesn’t take a position, he welds himself to it without examining why. He has a rich cousin in the wall-to-wall carpet business. The man donated the money to air-condition his church a few years back. Dashnell, who has always been insanely jealous of him, tormented him for half an hour at his family reunion about the immorality of cool sanctuaries in the summertime. No,
when Dashnell stands against a thing, I step aside and evaluate how badly I want it. I determine how I’ll move around him to get it. Or I let go of the notion.

When Lily honked for me late the next afternoon, I told her I wasn’t much for going after all. Of course I was dying to go and I let it show all over the place that Dashnell was keeping me from it. I thought I’d at least extract a little sympathy. But I didn’t.

“Get in this car, Rose,” she commanded, screwing up her face.

“Dashnell won’t let me.” I smiled that pitiful smile which Mother has always said she wants to slap.

“Dashnell Lawler isn’t the problem,” she said, letting all the air out of me. She let the car roll backwards.

“If he’s not, then who is?” I asked. How many times had I heard her blaming her husband for all the world’s evils. She just pasted a Miss America smile on her face and kept backing out. That stung me. “Walk a mile in my shoes, missy!” I hollered as she wheeled around, shifting gears to pull down the road. “You’re not mad at
me,
Rose,” she said with such self-assurance I wanted to strangle her. I turned around to go back inside and saw Dashnell in the screen door behind me.

“What’s she want?”

“Move,” I says, swinging the door wide open. He did. He stepped back and let me through. But it wasn’t real acquiescence. He had taken my tone of voice as a red flag.

“Come on back here in this bedroom and let me fix what’s wrong with you, woman.” He was just drunk enough. Another beer and the notion would pass.

“Not now, I got things to do,” I says, moving towards the kitchen trying to invent something to pass the evening. He reached from behind me and pinched my breasts. It hurts when he does that.

“You refusing me?”

“I have to run by and see about Mother. I’ll be back early,” I says, breaking away and grabbing my car keys off the kitchen table. But he was right up on me.

“Are you refusing me?” he says.

“Dashnell, hush!” I says, hoping he’d drain his beer and grab another. But he grabbed me instead.

“Turn me loose!” I knew better. He wanted a fight, especially with me because I’m no match for him.

“I’ll break that will,” he snarled, slapping me across the face.

“It’s broken,” I whimpered, despising myself for not making more of a fight.

“Come on back here in this bedroom.” I still don’t know what came over me. It’s so much easier to let it happen. But I shoved him a step backwards and told him I wasn’t a dog.

“That’s just what you are,” he says, “a fat bitch dog, and you ought to thank God I’m desperate enough to bring my need to you.”

“I want a say in the matter,” I hissed, because my cheeks were still burning from the slap. He grinned. He took me by the shoulders and shoved me against the kitchen counter. His hands were running up my dress. He pinched my breasts again. He kissed me hard and mean. A voice kept telling me not to resist him, but I couldn’t stop myself, I bit his lower lip.

This time his fist went into my face. My first thought was that no bones or teeth were broken and if I got some ice on it immediately, I wouldn’t have any more bruise than my base makeup would cover. He hit me again, this time in the stomach, and the wind went out of me. I dropped to the floor and he started pulling my hair out in clumps.

I was afraid to whimper. I was afraid to move. I knew he’d keep at me until I blacked out, so I pretended to. He kicked me once after that, hard on my spine, and I thought I felt it crack, but it didn’t. I lay there on the floor and listened. I heard him take a beer out of the refrigerator and snap the top. I heard him swoop up his truck key. I listened until I heard the front door slap shut behind him, then his truck engine started, then the tires spit gravel and the motor died away as he pushed down the road.

I got up and walked over to the sink and made a wet rag. I sat at the kitchen table and thought how it was good to have it over. It wouldn’t happen again for months. He’d be a little nicer for the
next while. It really hadn’t been too bad that time. There was no blood and nothing broken. I always go through that. Then I generally go completely off in another direction, thinking about other things and walling it out of my mind.

This time was different. This time I couldn’t shake it off no matter what. I made a pie; I took a shower; I trimmed my hair and set it to where you couldn’t see any clumps were missing. I watched some TV; but it stayed with me. It wouldn’t bury itself this time. Over and over I kept thinking I should have gotten into Lily’s car and gone to that meeting with her. It wouldn’t have happened. He would have been passed out in bed when I got home. I got stir crazy and I walked down by the lake. I studied the flat, murky water a long time. I could feel that poor man out there someplace in the mist. I thought how Dashnell had shot him out of some nameless evil he couldn’t control. The dead man seemed luckier than me. He had died all at once from a bullet in the back of his head. Dashnell was killing me slowly. There was no escaping that. What had happened that night was going to happen again and again until I was dead on my kitchen floor. The jolt of that realization shut me down. I went back into the house, crawled into bed and fell into merciful and dreamless sleep. My back was killing me when I woke the next morning.

The bruise was bad. I stayed in bed the next three or four days claiming a terrible cold. A week later it was still tender to the touch. Lily was mad at me over not going to the meeting, so luckily she stayed away. Dashnell continued his usual routine as if nothing had happened. He always does. I expect Mother enjoyed her respite from my concern.

M
oena tried to claim she rented the little shack on a pitiful street in the worst section of Charleston. Hez never saw any landlord come around. He figured that she had just squatted there. He slept on a pallet in an alcove she called the sewing room. He found night work baking bricks at a local plant. A minister Moena had known helped get him enrolled in the divinity college.

It was rougher going than he’d anticipated. He’d sit in the furnace room at the plant reading Latin and Greek and Hebrew all night. At dawn he’d go home and bathe. Then he’d head for class. On Sundays he’d go out with one or two other students and preach at poor country churches.

The others invariably kept their sermons strictly to expansions on Scripture. Hez always wrapped the meaning of the Scriptures around the plight of the poor and downtrodden. On one occasion he made the Book of Isaiah sound as though it prophesied the long awaited uprising of black Americans.

More than one member of the congregation was heard to whisper after the service that if the wrong white man ever heard one of Hez’s sermons, they’d lynch him for sure. He woke fear in them. But he stirred hope in them as well.

Moena took no pride whatsoever in her son’s sermons. She considered them loose and dangerous. She believed his free interpretations
of the Scriptures were reckless slaps at heaven. Like many others she also feared the day when the wrong white man got wind of Hez’s inflammatory words. It confounded her. The longer Hez studied at the Bible college the less true religion he seemed to possess.

Moena worshipped in a tiny storefront church called the Sanctuary of the Descending Spirit located down by the docks. The preachers there talked in tongues, inviting the most devout to share their own rhythmical, syllabic revelations.

Many in the congregation would soon feel their own raptures and fall gratefully onto the floor with holiness. They would rock and pray and bathe themselves in the divine tingling until a spirit whirled around them, cutting off their circulation, and they fainted. Sometimes in the hard swelter of late summer, even Moena admitted it was less divine inspiration than the effects of a relatively short supply of oxygen in conjunction with the humidity.

Twice Hez accompanied Moena to this spiritual orgy, long enough to see it as vestigial old time rural high jinks and hysteria. He told Moena she was blind in more ways than one. But Moena’s blindness was the precise reason she attended Descending Spirit. Healings and the Casting Out of Demons were commonplace there. Charleston was overrun with stories of the lame who had walked and the deaf who had heard after attending a service at the Sanctuary of the Descending Spirit. She herself had watched while a visiting minister shrunk a goiter in the neck of a neighbor woman. Moena still clung to a thread of hope. When she had demonstrated complete obedience to heaven, her sight would be miraculously restored.

Hez had no patience with that and even less with the illiterate preachers who filled his mother with false hope in exchange for the hard won dollar bill she placed in their collection plate each week. She would come in on Sunday evenings drenched in sweat and ashen, wearing an annoying, beatific smile. Hez was usually at the kitchen table trying to cram for Latin or Greek or Philosophy. Moena invariably seized the moment when he was trying his hardest to concentrate to recount the day’s miracle for him. His usual
tack was to gather his books and go into the sewing area until he heard her body fall dead asleep onto her bed in the next room.

One rainy Sunday in March she came in and found Hez in his usual place over his books at the kitchen table. He had a toothache. He had gone out before dawn in order to hitch a ride to a little town fifteen miles south where he was supposed to preach. Traffic was light that morning. The cold rain had swollen his aching jaw into a ball of fire. He had all but forsworn alcohol in those days, but he purchased a fifty cent bottle of corn whiskey after he got back to Charleston hoping it would numb the pain.

“I been called up for a healing,” she beamed, waking the pain in his jaw.

“What?”

“Sometime in the next forty days and nights.” She was ecstatic, souped.

“Who’s got you hypnotized now?” he asked, pressing his hand into the side of his face.

“The Lord my God.” She chopped, chastising him for his sacrilegiousness.

“Hell,” he muttered, gathering up his studies and shuffling in near stupor towards the sewing room.

“Hell is exactly where a nasty child like you are bound,” Moena sang, her words lodging like darts between his shoulders.

“Hell is where I am right now,” he yelled louder than he meant to.

Beauty B. had beaten her one true religion into Moena. Now Moena felt the call to make one final effort to do the same to her full grown son.

“You’re a false prophet,” she hissed. “You’re a moneylender in the temple.”

“You’re a hateful fool!” he shot back.

“You caused my blindness!”

Hez had always known she believed that. But she had never said it aloud. Now he understood the full measure of her contempt. It was the force against which he had pushed his tired shoulders, the fathomless cauldron of fear that boiled endlessly like pine tar deep
within. The tears were gushing down his cheeks before he could feel them coming. The pain and sorrow raced through his entire body and brought him to his knees. He was struggling for breath.

“You best be sorry,” she muttered.

“Sorry I was born to an ignorant and hateful woman like you,” he replied, rubbing his jaw.

“God is going to bring a mighty army down on you!” But that was barely a whisper. Moena had shocked herself by telling Hez the unbearable secret. She could feel her skin steaming under her wet clothes. She wanted to go back into her room, dry herself up and crawl into the bed. This wasn’t a thing that a night’s sleep under a tin roof would fix. This was the end of something.

“So that’s what I am,” Hez muttered because he couldn’t find his voice, ”—a curse on this world and the mama who brought me into it.”

“Devil take you for making me say it,” Moena said, trying to throw something back at the burning colors swirling in front of her.

“You’re worse than a devil, Mama. You’re worse than all hell’s evil. You brought me unwanted onto this earth and let me fend for myself.”

Moena was shaking. Her eyes blazed with tears. Terrible stinging threads of color seared her skull.

“Heaven called you to care for me and you turned your back. Satan whispered into your ear and you believed him. You believed I was a curse and a punishment and that’s what your hatred made me!”

She understood this. She had prayed a wall against it. She had carved images of insurmountable oppression into it. Lit candles to it. Worshipped it.

“God has not blinded you! You burrowed into the darkness rather than see that you and not heaven have created so much suffering and grief. I was your child, new and helpless, and you condemned me by your indifference. You dumped me like a puppy in a hop sack on two old people gone strange with sorrow. You turned away from your own mother and father. You abandoned them to their bewilderment and loss. Your blindness is your selfishness.
Your contempt for your own flesh is your curse! If I could, I would believe like you in the sulphurous burning lake. It would be my deepest hope to think of you there, eternally bound in molten chains. What kind of demon will love neither mother nor father nor child?”

He couldn’t talk anymore. It hurt him too. It tormented him to let go of these things, to know them as true, to be powerless against the pointless invective they drew out of him. Then the fire of hell erupted inside his jaw as the sack of poison burst. He was gripped by torment. “O God, take me.” He begged for the bliss of oblivion. Then almost as quickly as the torture exploded and spread, it diminished. He sank back into his chair, feeling the pain slowly ebb. He didn’t notice right away that Moena was kneeling. He didn’t see her shoulders heaving. Something cleansing spun between them. Something tilted, righted itself—settled. Neither spoke for a long time.