Sacred Dust (21 page)

Cheryl made what peace she could with that, using large sums of her own money to furnish and renovate the modest house provided by the church. A monthly check sent by her mother paid the full time housekeeper and the nursemaid. It also kept her in fashion and supplied her annually with a new Chrysler convertible. This did little to win her the trust and admiration of his congregation.

It did, however, ameliorate much of her immediate dissatisfaction. For the most part she and Hez got along extremely well. Cheryl was, for all her pampering, a wonderful companion. She was undeniably beautiful, a fiery, fun loving woman with a razor sharp wit. She was a voracious reader of books and newspapers and had a fondness for arguing philosophy. When Hez was home for the evening, an event of increasing rarity of late, Cheryl could keep
him at the supper table for hours discussing any one of a hundred topics that captivated them both.

Cheryl loved and appreciated Hez as a leader and a man who touched others’ lives, but she despised sharing him with so many others. Like the shabby parsonage her money had rendered decent, people presumed that Hez, being a minister, was their property. They called or appeared at the front door at all hours of the day or night. If it was mealtime, they expected to be comfortably seated and well fed. If their business kept them late, they expected beds and baths and breakfast in the morning. They made no distinction between the minister and his wife. They expected selfless and servile devotion to their church and its causes. They considered it no less than her divine calling to hover in the steaming church kitchen at spaghetti suppers, to teach Sunday school, to cheerfully attend and support the monthly ladies’ circle meetings.

She avoided these expected sacrifices by holding herself completely oblivious of them. This sparked increasingly strident conversations. Finally, the wives of several board members demanded that their husbands formally address the matter at their next meeting. The chairman, a doddering elder, reluctantly asked Hez if Cheryl might be imposed upon for her attendance.

Hez was of two minds. He completely supported Cheryl’s position that he and not she was obligated to serve the needs of the church. He also believed that Cheryl’s absences from certain key events, like the Christmas Eve Candlelight Cantata, was part of her quiet effort to encourage him to abandon the ministry.

“The board wants to know if you’ll meet with them.”

“Why?”

Any response on his part would stir the embers of the irresolvable debate that threatened to undermine their otherwise amicable existence. He eyed her sadly. Her astonishing beauty and deeply rooted calm arrested his rising irritation. He stood there powerless to stem the river of love that poured out of every cell.

“If I had loved you just a little more, I wouldn’t have married you,” he choked.

He could’ve been more. He should have reached higher. His
thirst for knowledge and his capacity for learning might have led him untold places—places where Cheryl had already been. He might have studied law or obtained his doctorate. She had no peers. It was their ignorance that regarded her sophisticated demeanor as haughty affect.

“Is it your fault God grabbed you first?”

“I’ll tell that board to take a hike.”

“Kiss your baby son good-night. I’ll be happy to talk to the board.”

The men were nervous. For once they arrived on time. They eyed the soiled oak table and otherwise avoided eye contact as Cheryl approached them. She had a large, beautifully lettered chart on poster board. On it she had meticulously produced a rendering of the current budget—including staff salaries.

“Gentlemen,” she started in that relentless calm of hers, “thank you for the opportunity to communicate with you.”

Before any of them could pose a single question or fire off a sanctimonious and passive aggressive assault on her character, she was leading them through the dull, meager finances of their struggling institution.

“Has any staff position been omitted?” None that they saw.

She let them ponder the silence a moment.

“There is spreading concern that I have been remiss in my duties to my church.”

Here the youngest, most recent board member, a strained shoe salesman, rose and presented a proposed list of usual, customary and expected duties for the minister’s wife which his own spouse and several others had drawn up at his kitchen table that afternoon. The board members nodded and cleared their throats and murmured their unofficial concurrence, then eyed her as one, waiting for her response.

“So you propose to elevate me to an official church position?” Several men found the courage to speak, adamantly arguing that the minister’s wife had traditionally been an official position.

“What is the salary?”

Silence.

“Since these duties include attendance at events away from the premises, is there a transportation allowance as well? What provisions have you made for the care of my children while I’m apart from them on church business?”

More silence. La Grange, an emaciated high school principal with a sonorous bass voice, cleared his throat. “Your expenses and whatnot would, quite naturally, come out of the reverend’s earnings.”

She flipped her chart over revealing two itemized lists of expenses. The first detailed Hez’s average monthly expenditures on church-related business. The second showed dollar amounts a minister’s wife would need in order to carry out customary duties.

“If that’s true,” she smiled, “you will have to triple the reverend’s current salary.”

Finally the chairman spoke in his tremulous stage whisper. “The matter is not appropriate for discussion by this board at this time.”

She thanked him. Hez watched her slowly remove her poster and calmly leave the room. He didn’t deserve her, but he would be eternally grateful that she was his wife.

Her actions created a ballast between them. She could now accept his vocation without succumbing to it. Even those who disapproved of her stance were forced to do so quietly lest they publicly admit they expected her duty and effort without remuneration. Or, as Hez chortled, relaying the incident on an overnight visit to Moena, “What black man in Alabama is going to publicly declare his support for slavery?”

Things grew easier at home. Things were understood. Minus the pressure of conscripted duty, Cheryl voluntarily expanded her participation in church activities. Hez was grateful for her effort and considerably increased his own to create more time for his family. They got along well. Cheryl was less inclined to visit her family in Memphis every chance she got. When unexpected callers appeared, they were asked to wait in the church office next door. Life was good. She presented Hez two more children, both daughters. The congregation grew.

Then the integrationist talk began.

Cheryl was a firm believer that the mingling of the races was a
historical eventuality. She saw racial equality as the logical outcome of social evolution. Hez viewed it as his immediate duty—regardless of personal cost. This, along with a litany of cries for freedom and justice, had become the mainstay of his more recent sermons. Cheryl had tried to challenge him on philosophical grounds at first. If people rebelled openly, there would be trouble, perhaps bloodshed. That would advance no one. The path to freedom lay through education and time. Hez was inviting Armageddon.

Now plans were being laid for the Birmingham bus boycott at committee meetings held in their living room. Hez had joined the nucleus of a resistance that every white leader in Birmingham had taken an oath to squelch at any price. Birmingham was a small city and there were plenty of poor black men and women who could be pressured into telling what they knew. It was widely rumored that a list of black instigators was being circulated among law enforcement officials. Hez’s name was certain to be near the top of that list. Cheryl was frightened. She begged Hez to find some less public way to support his cause. Then the church was ransacked. Cheryl was leaving town. In his heart, Hez was glad she was going. Like her he dreaded the violence which was almost certain to come. Unlike her, he regarded it as his ministerial duty to face it.

Three nights after Cheryl and the baby and the nursemaid left for her family in Memphis, Hez woke to what sounded like water dripping. It was followed by a thud and the rapid scuffling of feet. Then he smelled oil smoke. He leapt through the open bedroom window into the side yard. Within seconds the entire house and the church next door were engulfed by flames. Armageddon had come.

A
fter the meeting I sat in my car and all I could think was I’d rather die than have anybody local pass by there and see me as part of that group. Lily was quiet on the ride home, but when I let her out, she leaned over and pecked my cheek and said, “We’ll talk.”

I didn’t tell Dashnell where I’d been. He was halfway down his second six-pack and asleep in front of the television when I got in. At least that part was easy.

My head was packed with swarming things. I hid away in sleep. It was fitful. I kept waking up. Finally, I got out of bed figuring I’d throw a jam cake together while it was still cool. You could just make out a glow under the night sky in the east. I walked out on the porch. The night was clear. The water was still. The lake was deserted. The air was silver. The reeds on the far side of the lake were white against the cypresses. I couldn’t see the boat or the man. My heart knew he was there. I turned to go back into the house. When I looked back at the lake, the water was red. Then the sun was above the trees and the birds burst out all at once. I stood there in my backyard running my eyes up and down the neighborhood. I had this sudden, suffocating feeling. Because up one side of this lake and down the other you will find one common bond—ignorance.

I went by to see Mother after Dashnell left for work. She kept looking at me funny, almost as if she’d never seen me before. I
almost told her about Dashnell and the man on the lake and the discussion group. We walked the yard, hunting blooms among the weeds, her telling what was planted here once and what was under Johnsongrass there and all like that. I was intent on the house, eyeing the foundation and looking where paint is needed and where siding should be replaced. I counted up fireplaces and lifted a corner of linoleum in her room to examine the wood underneath. I had forgotten that the attic walls are dark stained tongue and groove wood. I found a set of double doors in the basement that used to hang between the parlor and the dining room when I was a child, mahogany with curly gargoyles carved around etched glass. There’s even brass fleur de lys design picture molding in all the downstairs rooms. Somebody could have a field day with that house.

I don’t know why I was so taken with it. I kept thinking how it’s a lot finer than most of the houses around here. It’s one of those big Victorian ones built after the War Between the States. Daddy kept threatening to tear it down and build a new brick house. Mother wouldn’t hear of that. She said it wasn’t the house, but the ghosts and the memories it held. It wasn’t that Daddy didn’t appreciate the old place for what it was. He said the house kept Mother looking back into the past. I always hated it when I was growing up. Mother said that was because I’d never seen it right. Daddy and I used to beg Mother to fix it up. She just wouldn’t.

Mother seemed a little nervous. I realized she probably thought I was making plans, trying to shove her out of the way and off this earth—which I’m not. I have no plan to leave Dashnell, no intention of going back to that discussion group. I’m going to die in that lake house and they’ll bury me beside Dashnell or him beside me after, and we’ll both lie there next to Carmen and Elisa. Elisa was stillborn. Carmen came two years later and took all the grief I had over that.

No, I’m going to latch my porch door to keep Lily out and take Marjean up on her offer to help me get on at Wal-Mart.

Except.

When I got home from Mother’s, I sat down and I wrote on a little pad I keep over the stove.
Change is hard
. I crossed out
hard
and wrote
necessary.
Then I crossed out
necessary
and wrote
inevitable.
Then I crossed all that out and wrote,
Change is coming.
Then I dropped to the floor and asked God to show me what to do. The moving world outside my locked screen door keeps stopping here for me. One of these days I’m going to have to pick up and go with it.

I
told Glen about putting Travis in Michael’s alternative school and he said, “Fine.” He didn’t say, “No son of his …” He trusted my judgment. He even got a little excited when I told him Michael is a black belt karate instructor and requires all the students to study with him. That’s the hard thing about Glen. Just when you predict his thickheaded response to a thing, he fools you. He demonstrates a little sense and some genuine possibility of sensitivity which makes it all the harder the next time you approach him about something and he ducks back behind his general cloudiness.

Rose took a job up at Wal-Mart. I expect they’ve got money troubles. Everything is nice and clean up at Rosie’s, but there aren’t any extras.

I thought I’d go out of my mind up here on this lake, and going to Rosie’s in the afternoon had become how I stood it. When she went to work at Wal-Mart, I thought I’d die of loneliness. But then I had this idea. Sending Travis to the alternative school is costing us a fortune. Right? Well, Michael has this computer in the office he doesn’t know how to use. He runs the school finances out of his personal checking account.

So I went in to see him after school the other day and I says, “Michael, let’s us make a deal. I’m a crackerjack office manager and you need some help here. Suppose I keep your books, pay your
bills, answer the phone twenty hours a week and you give me a break on Travis’s tuition?” He went crazy for it.