Sacred Dust (3 page)

“They won’t be after you tonight. I seen them in Bellefleur twenty miles south of here this morning. They had left two back in the swamp with the fever. There were only four. They was ragged and hungry and wet to the bone. They wanted dry rooms and hot baths and whiskey. Bellefleur is nothing but a strip of whorehouses. They won’t make it this far before midmorning.”

How did he know? And why’d he shelter and heal him? Very possibly a stratagem. He could be fattening Hez up like a goose before killing-time. There was no measuring human perversity. Still, there was no sign of complication or deviousness about him. He seemed to be whatever he was right out in plain view.

“I best be on.”

“Pick your dying tree and wait for them beneath it. There’s a five thousand dollar price on your head.”

This time when he heard the voice he was sure it was Beauty B. come down with the Angel of Death to bear him the last mile of the way.

It was her, clean and close.

“Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah.” The man smiled. “I’m Joseph. Called up of God and sent into the wilderness to build His tabernacle.”

Hez shook his hand. Joseph handed him a cup of warm chocolate.

“What evil possessed you to take up with a white woman?”

Hez stared into the fire.

Joseph was silent for about five minutes.

“If you was mine to judge, I’d judge you hard,” he said. “But that’s Jehovah’s office.”

When full darkness had fallen, they went into Joseph’s citadel and lay down on opposite sides of the room on the packed dirt floor.

“You lie still when they come. I’ll do the rest.”

After the fire had died in the clearing and the moon was hidden behind the trees, Hez spoke to the darkness.

“Mister, what are you saving me for?”

“Lord God Jehovah ain’t delivered you from swamp and fever to the Ebenezer Tabernacle so you can die at their hands, boy.”

“But you’re against what I done.”

“What you done makes my flesh crawl. It blasphemously violates God’s natural order. You’ll suffer God’s eternal judgment soon enough. But Jehovah sent you to test my heart. Do I willingly serve mankind? Can I overlook the most heinous sins and minister to one and all?”

A burning sorrow dropped over him like a heavy iron chain. Joseph’s Lord God Jehovah had abandoned Seraphine to a hideous death. It cut the faith out of Hez’s heart and scattered it in the darkness. He listened for Beauty B., but no words came. Only death—Seraphine’s and his. Hers was already carved into the past. His crept towards him through the woods while Joseph slept.

Because dying is remembering all things experienced or told, his mind ran downhill through his short past and farther below his past to long before he was born. He remembered the thing they had all admonished him never to forget. Grandfather and Beauty B. and his mother, Moena, were tortured and then chased as human prey. For the vile offense of their dark skin they were driven out of Alabama in the night. Beauty B. had held him under the pump when he was five and sworn him to know that one thing above all others as if it contained the secret of life.

“Stoned, driven, ridden out, plucked like the eyes of a dead cow, cut out like an infected boil from our own farm and thrown to the winds.” He had been too frightened and too cold with the water running down his naked back to ask why or how that cataclysmic
event had come to pass. “No more inviolate ground where our dead might sleep undisturbed and dissolve with time into sacred dust—and that means you, nigger child, mean no more to this world than a mangy stray mongrel dog! Don’t you never forget that you’re cursed. Bend low. Trust no white man. Or find yourself hung by the throat and your flesh on fire! Do you hear me, boy?”

He had inherited that curse. It ransacked his dreams. It washed over him at unexpected moments. A sudden, boiling tide rose out of the void behind him and sucked him choking, facedown, farther and farther through foaming fetid liquid nothing before plunging him into the icy, airless black depths, and his bones screamed as a hundred million mounted demons swarmed over him on flaming hooves. Then the swirling water spiraled into a vortex and he was drawn by burning wind to the screaming surface and slapped back by a tide of blood to the dead sand shore.

He woke and wondered in the glistening blue black darkness how the platinum stars held fast to the sky, how the moon still glowed green through broad leaves and a dulcet thrush cried out for its mate, how he could be moved by such tender things and yet despised,
chased as human prey.…

He would die in the night. He would die in the morning or on the following afternoon. Die and face damnation and torment for violating the natural order.…

He had planted the forbidden seed of his destruction deep within Seraphine. The men would pull his arms out of their sockets and break his feet. They would flatten his face and twist his lower legs around until his knees snapped. Only then would they lay the rope around his neck. Then as the rope clenched and the neck bones cracked, they would douse him with kerosene and hell would be a relief.

Joseph of God had risen. He sat watch high in a magnolia. It was a clear night and the breeze had chased the damp. If by some
miracle this wild hermit stood apart from them, he would pose no more obstacle than a drop of rain moving against a drought. If …

When they arrived, the zealot would ad-lib to save his own neck. He would say that he had captured Hez in his barn and he was holding him for the reward. It might well be the truth. It might be the man had no stomach, as many don’t, for killing. It might be he wanted the sin on others’ souls; he was leaving the actual torment and murder to the others.

Or he might mean what he said about protecting him.

Hez tried to squeeze a drop of light from the dry heap of facts the old people had told him about his birth. He couldn’t specifically invoke when or how he understood that Moena, the shy, mumbling woman who visited from Charleston, was the vessel which had borne him from creation and deposited him like thieves’ cargo on the indifferent banks of the great world. It was as given and true as the root of a tree or his obedience to the unuttered command that he neither address nor consider her as mother. The father seed had affixed itself like a blight within her deepness. She had come home swollen and, so he overheard the women who washed Beauty B. for burial whisper, ignorant of her condition. Hez still marveled that Grandfather hadn’t beaten Moena to death for her pernicious humanity.

Moena had surrendered him to Beauty B. and Grandfather on the night of his birth. It was said that she left without a word the next morning for Charleston. Shortly thereafter God rescinded her eyesight. Her visits to the turpentine farm ceased. Only his most concerted mental effort would produce an approximated blur of Moena’s physical shape. The impact of her abandonment, however, was an open wound the intervening years could only deepen.

Memory attempted to etch Beauty B.’s shining purple sorrow, her baleful almond eyes and her upright, sanctified visage in Moena’s place. Yet she had never offered herself as a replacement for his mother. Beauty B. had already become sanctified, she was already three quarters out of her flesh.

She eschewed all routine and understood things. Nothing that could be described or experienced engaged her. She might sit
entranced on a yard stump three days and nights gibbering. Or lay her fork on her supper plate to wipe her lip and remain frozen, the napkin between her fingers, until sunrise.

A gnarled limb of green oak had hissed pale blue smoke from its bed of embers since dusk. A sudden troupe of dancing yellow and white flames leapt across it. Its reflection shone in the tree branches overhead. What had been hovering darkness burst into a thousand shining fragments. Presently soft raindrops thumped and twittered the leaves.

He remembered about coming up a child on the little turpentine farm with Beauty B. and Grandfather. He remembered Beauty B.’s preaching, her gyrating, hypnotic orations and mystic visions on Sunday evenings in the woods. Her foaming lips were spewing fountains of increasingly incomprehensible oracle, divination and prophecy which dazzled and soothed ever growing numbers of the devout and the curious. Sometimes she would lift Hez naked before the assembly crying out that he was the bastard child of the bastard child of the Bastard Child of God. Once she placed him on a tree stump, offering him as a sacrificial oblation and igniting the base of the trunk, which she had soaked with kerosene. As the mortified child screamed inside the circle of rising flames, she ordered silent obeisance to Jehovah’s will. If the stump and the child were consumed by her mad conflagration, then Jehovah had willed it His holy pyre. If the blaze went out or burned away from the stump, then the boy was anointed of God to deliver them from oppression. The fire had gone out quickly, but Hez still marveled that all those people would have sat there and watched him die. Not because they were bad or indifferent or deluded like Beauty B. It was her inexplicable power to charm and entrance.

Hez lay in the dark room waiting for death and trying to count the times Beauty B. had instructed him that a righteousness would wake in him one day. She fervently believed her own oracles. He had been sent like Christ to be raised in modest circumstance, an unlikely crown prince who would don the mantle of divine favor and show his people the way. He was her sacred charge. She compelled him to memorize tedious, ineluctable passages of Scripture.
She enforced three day fasts. She kept him separate from other children and worldly influence. She washed his feet. She dripped hot oils over his head. She beat him regularly to exorcise demons.

He remembered Grandfather’s meanness and how the old man would drink moonshine of a night and go out and find a low down woman and bring her home. He would pull Beauty B. out of their bed by her hair and have the woman while Beauty B. and Hez sat on the porch reciting, “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers …” and on down. Beauty B. was never more serene than when they sat in the darkness while her husband and another woman set the iron headboard knocking on the other side of the wall. Grandfather beat his women after he had them. They always fought back, especially at first. Gradually the shrieking and slamming sounds would become a battery of muted thuds as he punched her unconscious. Sometimes the first blue haze of morning hung over the pine groves before the bruised, half-mutilated good time girl trudged across the front yard, her sporadic wails diminishing gradually as she moved up the road.

He intuited things he would never say to Beauty B. or Grandfather. For one, Beauty B. was a part of Grandfather’s strange rituals with his sluts. The hapless tramps had no way of knowing it, but she was a means of communicating some private information that only Grandfather and Beauty B. understood. For another, Beauty B. was only about half as sanctified as she tried to be. Her holy priestess of the woods was for the most part an act. It dressed up her day to day despair and lent an exotic patina to her haunted existence. Part of what Grandfather did on those interminable, bleak nights when Hez and Beauty sat vigil wrapped in quilts on hard wooden porch benches or, looking back now, perhaps most of it, was an effort to effect behavior as bizarre and hurtful to his grandmother as hers was to him. Beauty’s serenity on those occasions was because she understood Grandfather’s intent. She found it touching that he still wanted and needed to converse with someone she had once been. If it wasn’t an expression of affection, it at least acknowledged they had once owned a farm, shared a passion and conceived a daughter in a sane place and time now lost forever.
There was tacit, mutual awareness that each was only the true and logical result of the displacement and disillusionment born one evil Alabama night. It was no more or less than the madness of two people who shared an untenable loss.

The summer after his twelfth birthday, Beauty was struck dead by lightning as she ranted in tongues from the back of a wagon at an all day June singing. They had buried Beauty B. without his ever having gotten a clear understanding of why she and Grandfather and Moena had been ripped up and run out of Alabama.

Grandfather didn’t run with women after that. He took Beauty’s electrocution as a Sign that God would not long suffer her false righteousness. He was disconsolate and sat weeping on the front porch in the evenings calling out to the empty air in the vain hope of invoking her spirit. Eventually Grandfather got himself up like a bishop in his old starched Presbytery and his one decent pair of shoes, rubbed the ache out of his arthritic joints with pine pitch, and habitually walked three miles every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening to attend church service.

Joseph’s breathing was long and heavy. Every moment of this interminable night was a discomfiting blanket of eternity and dread. Something pattered like distant hooves. Hez sat forward, straining to hear their voices as his executioners approached. Rain. It was only rain and the swamp would be impassable until it stopped. It fell steadily for half an hour.

South Carolina.

Hez got to thinking about Mercelle Scott, the ugliest girl in South Carolina—black or white. Mercelle had waked him to the little thrill of doing it when he was seventeen and she was fifteen. He thought she was doing him a big favor; he thought she knew worlds he didn’t, so he went on down there to the woods with her a few dozen times and engaged in that rippling pleasure.

Eventually he grew tired of Mercelle and he wanted to expand his experience with other girls. Mercelle went crazy with rage when Hez quit her. She followed him to the turpentine groves and plagued him with tears and threats all day. When his indifference to her bleating finally sank in, Mercelle turned mean. She took to
telling around the county that Hez was courting Rayetta Flowers, a white girl who lived up the road.