Sacred Dust (45 page)

“Hell come that night,” she began. “Hell ascended from the deep and spread around us. I’ve been in that hell ever since.” There were tears in her eyes. They weren’t just the overflowing feelings of an old woman whose body had grown too brittle to contain them. They were the aggregate sorrows of one whose entire existence had been twisted into a daily battle to endure sudden, meaningless and cataclysmic loss. It was a grief made more profound by the small well of clear memories of the innocent years that had preceded it.

“You were born into that hell and raised up in it. I knew another time, another way. I came from a place before it. I’m going back to that place in the morning.”

This was a woman Hez had never known. This was a child who had lain in the shining yellow grass and given her heart to the wind.

“Tell me about it,” he asked. Never had he seen then and now so tightly drawn together. Never had he so clearly understood his private stake in the march they would take in the morning.

She took him back there. She painted shadowed places where children played barefoot in warm silt on August afternoons. Her face glowed as she told him how the newly furrowed land would turn purple and ochre before the March sun sank behind the woods. She taught him the balm of the big people’s voices wafting through the screen door washing her drowsy eyes with safe sleep. She told him how you knew which neighbor was passing by the individual rattle of his wagon. She told him where honey was hidden in what tree and how Beauty B. had turned thread into lace and
sewn it on sheets and pillowcases and used them to make up her bed the Christmas Eve before the Night of Evil.

She went on like that until she was too tired to talk. She pulled herself up slowly from the table, said good-night and started out of the room.

“Mama?”

“Yes.”

“You ever hear Beauty B. now?”

“Beauty B. is the one who brought me back to Alabama. And you’re the reason why.”

G
et-this, America. I was at home in my own bed sound asleep when two carloads of Alabama State Policemen trespassed on my property, destroyed my personal property in the form of bashing in my front door, stormed into my room and violated my civil rights by forcing me out of bed and handcuffing me and hauling me away without that first Miranda right!

I was held in a cell at the county jail for eleven hours waiting on some goddamned faggot piece of a public defender to get me bailed. Finally, he gets that took care of and I’m released and the son of a bitch wants me to come right over to his office with him so’s we can discuss the case. I don’t know this guy. He isn’t true Prince George. He moved up here from Mobile a few years back on account of his wife is from here and her daddy has money and influence and other vulgarities.

“It looks pretty bad,” he says. “Let’s start with you telling me everything you did, how you planned it, how it was carried out.” I asked him was he working for me or them.

“You mean the prosecution?”

“I mean the antichristian communistic organizations which have chosen Prince George County for the site of a race war.”

“Just tell me everything that relates to your specific crime,” he says dryly. That told me everything I needed to know about him.
“Man,” I says, “man, we got a nigger war headed our way tomorrow and you want me to set up in your office and talk a whole lot of bull crap.”

“I have to know everything, Dashnell, including who else is involved.”

I says, “Look. Let’s us go on up to the Landing and eat some catfish, pass a bottle back and forth between us and I’ll illuminate the situation for you.” He didn’t cotton to the notion, but he come along behind me in his precious fairy faggot BMW. So, we’re setting there and I’m getting some nicely peppered purple onion and a hush puppy or two between my teeth and he starts in.

“Let’s plead it out,” he says. “You agree to tell the DA about the others involved. I explain to the judge that you’ve requested treatment for advanced alcoholism. With any luck, you won’t do more than five years.” If I hadn’t been so damned hungry, I would’ve broke my plate over his pointed head. “You just enjoy your meal,” I says, “I’ll worry about the law.”

“This thing is a lot bigger than you think it is, Dashnell. The media has already linked this big march they have planned to the murder of that black man on the lake. The district attorney’s office has already received over a hundred letters demanding that justice be carried out.”

I figured I’d have some fun with him before I fired him. “Sweetheart,” I says, “I didn’t kill no black man on no lake.”

“You didn’t?”

“No, sir. I cleansed the area.”

He laid his knife across the top of his plate like a little fairy fay. Then he pulled out his wallet and laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue, wiped his mouth real dainty-fied like and stood up.

“Haven’t seen my wife and kids all day. I’ll just head home and leave you to seek other representation.”

That flew all over me. I jumped to my feet. “Set your pink ass down in that chair and let me give it to you plain.”

He remained standing.

“Your father-in-law maintained extremely close ties to the
klavern and supported our activities with generous donations. Obviously you was handpicked by the klavern to represent me. You was assigned to represent a whole hell of a lot more than me. You was assigned to represent the last best hope of the white Christian race of which I am but a symbol and a standard bearer. I ain’t pleading out nothing and I sure as hell ain’t naming names. I plead innocent. We own that motherfucking courthouse, judge and jury.”

He smiled and give off a laugh that wasn’t much more than pressed air.

“My father-in-law has been dead for five years. So far the prosecution has in their possession a note in your handwriting threatening to kill the man. This morning I was privileged to read six separate signed statements by members of your almighty damned klavern stating unequivocally that despite their best efforts to stop you, you went out and shot that man in the back. One of that holy bunch of fools handed over the murder weapon with your fingerprints on it. That’s premeditated murder, Mr. Lawler, punishable in this state by the electric chair.”

Well, I had me a big laugh over that. Because under the front seat of my pickup truck in a plastic bag I keep
The Book of the Order
give to me by my daddy who got it from his daddy who helped to write it in 1911, the year of the First Holy Purgation. If you will read that book, it says quite clear that towards the end of this century Satan will raise up an army of niggers and they will swoop over the land. It further states that “one of our own, little thought of or believed and often mocked and derided, will suffer betrayal. In that dark hour, he will become veiled in purity, possessed of a light and a shield of honor, and he will deliver the white man from the pestilence.” That one is me, America!

I let that namby pamby fool walk away. I enjoyed my catfish and hush puppies and ordered an extra bowl of that Landing slaw which has no equal on this earth. I washed it down with good clean bourbon and left my former attorney’s twenty on the table to pay for it. I run by the liquor store on the edge of town for some fortification. I had one hell of a night ahead of me.

I swung by the lake to see if there was any lights on in Jake’s
house, but it was dark as a tomb. I pulled into the Billups station there by the interstate ramp and called Sidney. Nadine, his dried-up witch wife, answered the telephone.

“Sidney there?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Let me talk to Sidney.”

“Dashnell?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard you was in jail.”

“Get Sidney.”

“He’s not here.”

“If he’s telling you to say that, Nadine, he better be smiling.” I had passed their place on the way out to the lake and seen his truck on the carport. I’ll admit it. I broke code there. I threatened a member of the Order. I lost myself and I’m not proud of it. “You tell him I need to talk to him now and if he don’t see fit to do so, I’ll sing pretty for the ABI.” Of course I wouldn’t, not in one million years. I have too much character for that.

“Yo, Dashnell.” That was Sidney. He’s one of the Chosen, but one of the least of the Chosen in my estimation.

“Look here. I need the combination to the arsenal.” I didn’t have him on the line to talk about the weather.

“Can’t do it.”

“We got a Code Seven working.”

“All activities have been temporarily suspended.”

“Why?”

“My supper’s getting cold.”

Like I believed that at nine-thirty at night. But he hung up. I got a busy signal when I dialed back. A man has to do what a man has to do. I drove back to my house and went into the garage. The electricity had been cut off. It was hard to see, but I found that hacksaw.

I could take you to the arsenal, but I doubt I could direct you there. You go out past the covered bridge on the Indian Road and then you follow three more dirt roads until you run out of houses. It’s an uphill path from there, easy enough to find during the day, but next to impossible at night. It’s a cabin sitting on what become
government property when they went to damming up every stream in this part of Alabama. It took the better part of an hour to saw through that lock. It was four trips up and down that path before I had enough dynamite. I couldn’t find a detonator. But I’d worked with a long fuse before.

There’s a temporary wooden bridge in a low place surrounded by thick brush and evergreens about a mile outside of town. The old concrete bridge was cracked when a semi overturned on it in an ice storm. A couple floods last spring did the rest. This wood replacement isn’t much more than a few dozen railroad ties nailed together. The marchers will be coming over it on their way to town.

Now get this. I got the news in my pickup truck driving over to the Landing to eat catfish with that nervous piece of a nelly-faced lawyer earlier this evening. They got every flaming liberal asshole in the United States coming to be seen in the nigger walk tomorrow. Kennedys and senators and representatives, earls of England, Japanese chinko royalty and movie stars. They’ll all be in a pack at the head of the walk, carrying banners and posing for the cameras, showing their fake love of niggers for all the world to see.

I’m no fool. I got myself hid under spotted khaki cloth down here in the shadows. I waded a mile from upstream in my hip boots. It’s a sheer thirty-foot drop from the river’s edge here. You can’t climb down here from the road unless you fling yourself into the water and you’d smash yourself into pieces on the rocks. They’ll never find me—not that anybody’s looking. That’s the beauty of it. Nobody has a clue what I’m doing. There’s nobody in this world to know or care of my whereabouts. No one to report me missing or come looking for me. I hid that pickup truck so well that even I might not be able to find it. I’m angled off here where I can see the patrol cars running the march route. But I’m out of the path of their beacons when they slow down to search the water and the banks.

One match, forty sticks of dynamite and all the world is going to see that the Order has been a sleeping giant, a great and mighty force waiting for its place in time. They’ll be plenty of press in the vicinity to catch the show. I’m going to give them the finale of their dreams. Hundreds of thousands of decent white men and women
the world over will see the work of the Order carried out here and their hope will be renewed. Their hearts will rejoice. They’ll send their money and ask where to join. They’ll volunteer and rally and unite. They’ll take courage from it and pick up their own gauntlets and carry forth the holy work of taking white America back.

Then let’s hear what that stupid cunt Rose has to say about me. Then let’s see her dry haint skeleton of a mama look at me like I’m a dog turd on her living room rug! Let these turncoat, yellow-spined Brethren of the Local Order brush me off! Because I know what they claim to know. I see what they’ve blinded themselves to. The Savior of Humanity did not arrive on this earth in no Cadillac. The Savior of Us All hadn’t never eat no lunch at no country club. He come into this world in a crummy little stable smelling of horse shit and cow manure. He made himself low down the way some people in these parts love to try to make us Lawlers feel.

But who will they say this time tomorrow lifted the hopes of the white race out of the cesspool of modern liberalism? Who will history record and remember as the one who spread his arms and turned back the tidal wave?

It’s a damned pretty world out here tonight by this bridge. Man, I set here and look at the swirling stars and the moon reflecting off the ice in the stream and I see the Kingdom Coming. I know this if I have ever known anything, it’s going to be a whole new world in the morning.

I
got back up to Miss Eula Pearl’s house about ten o’clock that Friday evening. There was nothing left to do. Hez had a hundred volunteer organizers tending to every detail. I figured to spend the night at Miss Eula Pearl’s and then drive over to the start point with Rose and Lily in the morning. I had just taken a shower and I was sitting in Miss Eula’s living room with Rose and Lily telling them about all the newspaper reporters I’d talked to that day and what all I’d said. Hez and I had made a big show of talking to the press together—him, an old civil rights war-horse and black as Moses, and me, pink faced with yellow wire blond hair and my Alabama red neck.

A Chrysler that was hurting for a new muffler pulled into the driveway and a tall, skinny woman came in the door without knocking. She was dripping in sweat and shaking like a leaf. Rose went out on the front porch with her. In a minute, Rose stuck her head in the door and asked Lily to join them. I went and sat on the porch side of the room to see if could determine what was eating her.