Sacred Dust (23 page)

It was just beginning to rain lightly, the slow kind that builds through the night and pours its heart out all the next day.

Lily and I walked down to her house and she got her car keys and we drove down to the Catfish Hotel. We sat on the deck at an umbrella table and watched the rain on the lake and we talked till all hours. The things I said to Lily were true things and real things like memories of horse hooves in wet fields and funny people I’d known and little girl things like my dolls and waking in the dead of night and feeling cold and useless. My words felt sticky and odd because they’d lain unspoken inside me all my adult life. I had always been afraid to utter them.

I told her how I married Dashnell because I was twenty-five and afraid he might be my last chance. How I was always a little afraid of Mother and yet I admired her above all other women. How I have always been ashamed because I hate Christmas. How helpless I felt about Dashnell’s misery and other things like how hard Dashnell was on Carmen and how the only other time I could remember
things crossing lines with me and Dashnell was the time he took after Carmen with a board and I told him if he beat the boy, he’d never see either one of us again.

Mostly it was just that close feeling, a friend in the rain, a chain of heartfelt words building a shelter around us against the night.

When we were getting into Lily’s car to come home, I said I’d never seen a woman slug a man like that. I’d seen plenty fight back, trying to protect themselves, but never one to haul off and swing of her own accord. I said it made me feel good and it made me feel worth something, but that it also made me feel weak. She said it was all right to be weak in this world. She said the difference between the humans and the animals was the human obligation of the strong to protect the weak. She said strength had no other purpose. She said weakness was human too. She said that it takes the greatest strength to admit weakness. She dropped me at home. We had a good, steady rain by then. I went out on the porch and I sat and looked through the fog at the lake. A few yards up I could hear Dashnell and Jake on Marjean’s porch, their drunk and swollen voices muffled by the downpour. I grabbed Dashnell’s slicker. I didn’t care if they heard me; but I didn’t start the motor because I didn’t want to disturb others who might be sleeping. I rowed into the fog. I heard Marjean’s screen door fly open and Dashnell pounding the steps and I saw him approach their dock about a hundred yards away from me.

“What the hell are you doing?” he snarled.

“I’m going fishing,” I says.

“What? Are you drunk?”

“Might be, I wouldn’t know.”

“You get back here, or else!”

“I’m going fishing,” I says.

“I’m not having this,” he says.

“Well, sir,” I says, “you’ll just have to shoot me too.” I switched the motor on, shoved it up on high, and I sailed through that fog like a kid on a magic carpet.

I
thought maybe since KemCo is actually in the next county and it’s owned by some Yankees, that they might at least let me fill out the application form before they tossed me out on my ear. I was hoping they wouldn’t know about me or my time in the state pen for robbing that bowling alley. I heard they were adding a night shift. I got through the interview part just fine. In fact, the lady who talked to me was from over in Yellow County. She had never heard of me.

The company nurse listened to my chest and took my blood pressure and pronounced me fit to pull a plow.

I was getting fairly hopeful by this time. Daddy and I had a substantial set- to that morning about my not bringing in money. I was hoping I could waltz home with a good paying KemCo job and benefits. The nurse told me to see a supervisor named Mr. Kelly. His department was adding a shift.

She said he was in the lunch area at the back of the plant. Of course half of Prince George County was sitting in the lunch area rolling their eyes at me when I walked in. I’d rather dive into a pond filled with water moccasins than walk past those people. Still, an opportunity waited on the other side of them. I was thinking I could get myself hired and be turning in a super job performance before
some of these Prince George monkeys got this Mr. Kelly’s ear about my criminal past.

I knew him the minute I saw him. Mr. Kelly was not only from Prince George, but he was somebody I’d known all my life. He’s Jake Kelly and he lives up on Lake Evelyn four houses down from my uncle Dashnell. It wouldn’t have made any difference with Jake Kelly if I’d never been in prison. He and my daddy have been mortal enemies since before I was born. Jake is heavily involved with the Klan. Almost all of the men who live up on Lake Evelyn are. Ninety percent of them work at KemCo.

My daddy and Jake grew up near that lake back before people had fancy houses all around it. Lake Evelyn took its name from my great-grandmother. There’s a story about her and a divining rod during a drought when she was a little girl. Apparently she went into the woods blindfolded and located a spring buried by rocks. The spring was opened and a pond that was formed took her name. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed it into a lake proper when my daddy was a kid.

Anyway, Jake took it personal when Daddy declined his invitation to join the Klan some years back. Then last year Daddy sold off what was left of his home place to Glen Pembroke. Glen was the first outsider to own property on the lake. Jake Kelly and his bunch regard the land around that lake as their sacred dust. I walked over to where Jake was sitting at a lunch table with several other familiar faces from up around Lake Evelyn. I tried to sound as respectful as I could.

“They told me to give you this.” I handed him the yellow slip they had given me up front. Jake grinned from ear to ear. Uncle Dashnell was sitting beside him.

“Hey, Uncle Dash,” I says. I wasn’t exactly leaning on blood here. Mother hasn’t spoken to Dashnell in a hundred years. Daddy makes a point of avoiding him at funerals and weddings and family reunions. But I had done a bang-up job sodding his yard a few weeks back and he had seriously underpaid me. I figured he owed me one. Besides, blood is everything to a red faced half-dog, halfman
like Uncle Dash. At least that’s what I told myself to slow my racing heart.

He leaned right over and snatched the paper out of Jake’s hand and pretended he was looking it over. I sucked in some air and tried to keep my eyes on the prize. The man held the rest of my life in his hand.

“I sure appreciate the opportunity,” I says. “You know how rough it is out there.” Jake kept grinning. Several men and women had closed in around behind him and Dashnell by this time. Jake pursed his lips.

“Boy,” he says in that deceptively low manner he has that hides how mean he really is, “I’m going to give you an
opportunity
to make it from here to the parking lot without getting your brains knocked out.”

That’s when Dashnell took the job slip out of Jake’s hand and pretended he was blowing his nose into it.

“You can thank your scum faced, turncoat daddy for this.” Dashnell is pure, ugly arrogance and stupidity mixed with confidence. He can’t hide what he is. You can see right off what you’re dealing with. Jake Kelly on the other hand is refried ignorance in a starched blue shirt. He’s a halfway nice looking man who affects a phony cracker accent. I could feel the veins in my forehead bulging and I knew my face must be red as a Coca-Cola can. Something was testing me. Something wanted to know if I had the fortitude to walk away without busting Jake Kelly’s pretty little nose.

“Jake, I’m an excellent worker,” I said. “Uncle Dashnell can tell you. I just sodded his yard and painted his house a little while back.”

“Yeah, he sure did,” Dashnell allowed. “He took his pay out in trade on Glen Pembroke’s skinny harlot wife.” Nobody has any secrets in Prince George County, at least not for long. I could hear several of them sniggering as I walked out of the lunchroom. I got into my truck and I pounded the dashboard until my palms were numb and I begged God to let me live long enough to watch those sons of bitches choke on their ignorance. I started wondering. If Dashnell knew about Lily and me, then maybe Glen knew.

I went home and chopped nearly a cord of wood trying to cool myself down. Man, I wanted that job. I had stopped off to call Lily on the way home, but she wouldn’t even hear me out. She just asked me to please not call her again.

I guess she feels she has to make a go of it with that thick-lipped, weak-eyed excuse of a husband.

I could have chopped a train rail in half with my bare hand. I spun around wasting invisible evils in the yard for more than an hour. I sat on the woodpile and watched the sun go down. There’s something spellbinding and sad about the daylight fading. I could see Mother through the kitchen window making supper and Daddy washing his hands. I was watching their life. I didn’t have one. It didn’t all fit in my head. I had to let go of something. So I cried. It’s no big thing. I cry at the end of TV movies when the lady is always safe and she has her cute little tykes back in her arms. I cried about Lily and I cried about the sorry state of the world. I thought about Glen and I cried for him too, because if Lily told me straight, he’s probably the only other man in the world who knows what it is to love her in vain. I know, if no one including Lily does, the torment he endures.

Mostly I cried because to that point, despite all my best efforts, I couldn’t get a job with a gun. I couldn’t make my life start. Why did so many others put it all together and not me? I had a brain and willing hands and I had made a serious effort to turn things around. What was lacking? That evening on the log pile, I gave up. I quit. I let go. I surrendered. I said it right out loud, “I surrender.” I didn’t know what I meant. But I knew that I meant it. I was sincerely finished with grabbing for things I was never going to get. I told myself, “Fine, you may never be anything, you may never have anything, you’ll just get on one way or the other until you die and that’s all, that’s it, there isn’t any more than that anyway.”

I started along that line mad as a swarm of angry bees. But it calmed me more than anything I ever experienced. I smashed into rock bottom. It was awful. But it was also the first time I can remember being awake and not feeling like I was falling, like I had to swing my arms and legs hopelessly trying to fight that constant
downward sensation. I felt the earth under my feet. It was solid. I saw the sky above me. It was vapor and the setting sun was fire. I was small and powerless in a time and a place. It was real and I was real. I was a part of it. I was there. I was in it. It wasn’t, as I had always believed without thinking about it, mine to own, to conquer or rise above. I was with it. I thought back to my time in Folsom Prison when I was certain I had felt the Breath of God. I felt it for the second time that evening on the log pile. I made a solemn promise to remember it this time. I didn’t expect that to change anything in the world around me. I didn’t fall on my knees and ask God to find me a job or bring Lily back to me. I did, however, head into the house for supper convinced firsthand that there’s wisdom in acceptance.

H
e had nothing to offer them but his words. His sermon was true and inspired by God. These people needed money. These people called him throughout the week looking for help with the landlord or rat control or burying a family member inexpensively. No matter how much religiosity Hezekiah rubbed into his sermons, they seemed dusty and archaic next to the living needs of his congregation. They just didn’t apply. The Living Word was dead as far as most of his congregation was concerned.

He tried the joke about the black man from Birmingham standing at the gates to hell. The devil says, “Mister, go on up to heaven. If you’re from Birmingham, you already done your time in hell.” That woke a couple of them for a minute. Most of them had heard it. Heard it, hell; they were living it.

Now and again, a passing cloud would send a shadow over the sanctuary or a dry leaf would scrape an open window or a bubble of hope would catch at the back of an otherwise dry throat before bursting. Now and again a loyal remnant from the glory days of the sixties would echo an empty “Amen,” or a woman intent on a mole by her right eye in her compact mirror would send up an obligatory “That’s right.” But his sermon about the black man’s journey to freedom and God’s hand in it lay as flat as a Jell-O mold salad in the noonday sun.

” ‘Arise, men of the Almighty!’ the ancient Prophet wails, ‘Arise and glorify Him by your shining witness!’

“But my people sit meekly in the shadow and refuse the helping hand of the Lord their God. My people hang around on street corners with their cold backs turned to His grace. My people lie in loveless fornication, blinded by their all consuming rage, their wonder at His majesty dulled by cheap wine, their bodies enslaved by debilitating drugs. My people have surrendered their ambition and their dignity and their hope to an all consuming despair born in the deepest under-regions of hell and spreading like a cancer among us.

“How can a man who will not believe in himself look faithfully to heaven? You have not been forsaken, my people. You have forsaken your God and, by doing so, you forsake yourselves and your children’s children. Wake, my people, wake to the light in you, to the God in you, rise up and be a beacon to your children and a revelation unto yourselves.”

There was no point in bringing up hell or damnation. This old raggle-dee corner of uptown Birmingham in the August heat
was
hell and damnation. The Coca-Cola thermometer on the drugstore across the busy avenue had reached ninety-nine by eleven A.M. Church bulletins and cardboard funeral home fans and handkerchiefs swayed listlessly in every face. Now and then a vagrant wasp would drift languidly down from its nest in the ceiling beams and hover over an old woman’s head. Now and then diesel fumes wafted up from the bus stop under the open windows and the agonizing grind of a tired city bus eclipsed Hezekiah’s words.