Sacred Dust (26 page)

“Your wife don’t care for me,” he said.

“She doesn’t take care of me either.” Lousy joke.

“I reckon she told you she popped me in the jaw?” That grin again.

“Oh, yeah.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “I’m sorry about that.” I had no idea what he was talking about. However, I pretended that I’d sent her back to his house the next day to apologize, that I thought she had already done so. I said I would grab her by the hair and haul her up to his house to make full amends as soon as she got home. None of which he bought for a minute. I felt no immediate physical fear of the man, but I could sense he was holding something back, something I didn’t want to acknowledge, because whatever it was, it scared the hell out of me.

“Well, no, she never apologized.” He played along.

This is where I went too far. I lied that when she told me about the incident, she’d said that Dashnell had thrown a pass at her. I said I knew Dashnell was a man of enough character and substance to mean no harm by such a gesture. I said that Lily has a tendency to overreact when a man has a little joke with her. I said I’d speak to her about it. That wasn’t a complete lie. I intended to find out what the hell he was talking about as soon as Lily got home.

He had that drunk’s paranoid radar. He knew that I was afraid. I’d lived on the lake long enough to know that Dashnell and Jake and the others considered it their personal domain. They had asked me to go fishing or play cards or hunt with them a dozen times, and I’d always made my excuses.

“I wouldn’t throw no ‘pass’ at a woman like her,” he says. “I’d throw her down and have my way with her and then I’d pitch her on the trash where she belonged.”

He was pathetic. I intimated he was too much of a gentleman to say a vulgar thing like that to a man about his wife unless he’d had a couple too many.

“You mean I wouldn’t have the guts?”

“I mean you’d have better sense. You go sober up and we’ll continue this conversation some other time.” I got up and walked towards the house.

“Defend her. Defend that slut to me, nigger lover!” He slapped at
the back of my head. I wheeled around and my punch put him on the ground.

“You know where she is right now?” He was trying to right himself. She was up at the school printing the newsletter. But I didn’t see where that was his business.

“Man, you get off my property while you’re still able to walk.”

“She’s up there at that schoolhouse, and that homo fairy’s ridin’ her like a goddamn Brahma bull.”

It took at least two dozen punches before I had him back on the ground and he quit trying to get up. I turned and walked towards the house.

“Nothing goes down in Prince George County that we don’t know about.” He was laughing. He was on his back with blood oozing out of his nostrils and the son of a bitch was laughing. He got up and turned toward his yard. Then he stopped and turned around.

“She humped my nephew a dozen times yonder in the woods too.”

Some invisible string that had held me upright broke apart. Dashnell Lawler had said to me what I had dreaded to say to myself. It was excruciating information all by itself. Coming as it did by way of him, the ice that fell from the sky had turned to glass. I stood there and let the frozen drizzle pierce my cheeks until I imagined my face was bloody and I was about to be nailed to a tree. All I had left was the time it would take to lose her. A few yards away the mist had thinned over the water and there were rippled sheets of shining black ice. I dropped to my knees and begged God to tell me that it wasn’t so. I might have managed some way to deal with it if I had learned it on my own. This was an altogether different situation because, if Dashnell Lawler knew it, then everyone knew it. How could she be so careless? It was a question I didn’t want answered. She was careless because she wanted me to find out. She knew my pride would do the rest.

M
ichael England’s alternative school sits on a ridge at the edge of town. It’s a plain, modern white painted concrete block building with long windows and a wooden shingle roof. I never knew or cared too much about it. The foundation was laid about the time I went away to Folsom Prison. There was a new building sitting there when I came home a year later. I pass it going to and from town and home. It sits at the back of a graded gravel parking lot. For several months I had noticed Lily’s car among several others in the lot there on Tuesday evenings. I figured her boy Travis was taking karate lessons.

One night I pulled into the driveway at home and I suddenly remembered Mama had asked me to bring home a gallon of milk. I did a U-turn across the yard and headed back towards town. When I passed Michael’s school, I noticed that Lily’s was the only car left on the lot. I drove on down to the 7-Eleven and bought the milk. For fun I filled out a job application while I was there. Lily’s Rover was still sitting in front of the school when I passed heading home.

I drove the long grade up past Miss Eula Pearl’s place and headed into the open country. I switched on the radio and listened to the Braves stomp the Dodgers for about five minutes. The next cross road I came to, I swung back around and headed towards town.
Her car was still sitting there. There were no lights on inside the school.

The back of the school sits high on a clay bank. A little gravel road runs beneath it. I pulled up on the shoulder there as best I could. The clay is soft in winter and it’s easy to get stuck. I pulled myself up the bank, grabbing onto the roots of trees that hung there. In less than three minutes I was standing outside the window of the room at the back where Michael has some kind of apartment. The curtains were thin and white. I was close enough to smell that they had been recently starched and bleached. I could make out a burning candle in a wine bottle resting on a dresser on the far wall.

I stood there for about five minutes and let the light fade outside. I could see them on the bed. They were naked and twisted up into each other. My first sensation was a deep, searing pain, a fluttering that threatened to burst my chest. I let that settle a minute. Then I was smitten by how pretty they looked. They were amber and they shone in the candlelight. Her hair was brilliant copper, his was shining dark rust. Their limbs were gold. The shadowed curves of their backs and shoulders, the wrinkled white sheets that half covered them, conspired to make a picture you might see in a magazine. It was as if I was some ancient artist and they were posing for me. Lily blew out the candle and I sneaked away.

I slipped back down the hill and got into my truck. I let it roll forward, pushing it as best I could with one foot out the open door so I wouldn’t have to start the engine and disturb them. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt to see Lily in his arms. It wasn’t that I could be happy for Michael England. It was as if some power or purpose had arranged them for my eyes so that I would see that she belonged with him. They looked like lovers the way poets describe them. He was princely and smooth. She was soft and willing. He was as far above her in this world as she was above me. When I saw that, I saw why I couldn’t have her. I understood what she needed. It helped. It was painful, but it was right. It made sense. I wouldn’t know how to be a man like Michael England. I’d be a damned fool to try.

In a minute I was back on the blacktop moving out from town.
The sky had dropped in deep purple behind the shining silver trees. There was a churning swirl of gray, white and gold on the horizon where the sun had set. To the east a yellow moon had risen thin like a lemon peel. It was only the end of another dull, wet winter day; but it was the first one I ever completely saw and felt.

M
y daddy is a high school principal. My mama teaches third grade. They were licensed by the state of Alabama to impose and enforce their ignorance on young minds. Mama has a fearful nature that manifests itself in saccharine enervation. Surviving Daddy’s temper exacerbates it to the point of lunacy. Daddy drives. Mama goes along. She takes fewer bruises that way.

I tried to tell her once. It was while I was home from Dallas right after Randy went back to his wife. Daddy and I had gotten into it at the supper table. I don’t remember what about. I do remember that I had disagreed with something he said, probably about Ronald Reagan, who he reverently called “Mr. Reegun.” The point is you don’t disagree with him. He doesn’t talk. He preaches, literally. Every other word is a quotation of Scripture. Mama loves to tell people she married him because he knew more Bible than any man she’d ever met before or since. Never mind the fact that my daddy believes the Bible was written to prove that he’s right about everything. The high school kids used to call him Moses behind his back.

Daddy makes his pronouncements and Mama nods with her eyes pushed wide at you, instructing you to nod right along so he won’t get upset. It’s a habit he beat into her years ago. Or maybe it was beaten into her by my grandparents. Maybe she was ripe for the
back of his hand by the time she married him. She never resists or complains about it.

No, it wasn’t Mr. Reagan that time at the table. It was Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. They had just unveiled a statue of him down at Birmingham and Daddy was livid because the school board had voted to bus his students down for the ceremony. Daddy was claiming to possess proof that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a carefully disguised Russian communist, a Satanic instrument of destruction whose activities were financed by the sale of Cuban marijuana. I couldn’t
say
anything. I knew it would bring down the wrath of God. I looked at the floor. I counted the peas on my plate. I held my breath and tried to think about every dark, awful, sad thing I could.

Daddy was getting wound up. Mama was nodding along so fast with every word she looked palsied. I couldn’t help it. I had to giggle. That hushed Daddy instantly. Mama eyed me like I had just committed the one unforgivable sin. I tried to collect myself, but the two of them looked so ridiculous that all I could do was throw back my head and laugh. Mama slapped the table in front of me, her eyes threatening perdition. Dad turned raspberry, then gray. I guffawed another minute, knowing all the while it would cost me dearly. Finally, I got my laughter under control. A dread silence fell.

“What’s funny, Lilyun-yun?” Officially my name is Lillian Anne. He came up with it and he can’t even pronounce it. Mama said that I was laughing about an altogether different subject. I hate her when she’s gutless like that. I hate Daddy even worse for making her that way. Without delivering the Sermon on the Mount, I hate him for all the hell he put me through trying to make
me
that way.

“What’s funny, Lilyun-yun?” he repeated.

“Nothing.”

“I agree.” He snorted.

Mama sighed with relief and her color came back. Apparently he was going to let this one go. I was trying to. He graduated to his next topic. Now a Russian backed Cuban army was planning to invade Miami Beach! I was gone. I was pounding the table. I spit tea on the floor. I hollered. Mama leapt back up from her chair.
Daddy didn’t say a word. He just reached across the table and slapped me across the face.

I suddenly realized that I had married Glen to get away from that slap. I decided in that moment I’d go back to him to get away from it again.

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.”

That was Mama tiptoeing back into the room, looking at Daddy in hopes that she’d said the right thing. She had. He pointed at his plate, meaning that she could take it away and bring him his pie. She did so gratefully. I hadn’t said a word. I hadn’t made a move. He continued to eat his supper as if nothing had happened.

You can do anything you want to with Scripture. I went to Sunday school a few thousand times. I had it force-fed to me from birth. Some of it’s perfectly beautiful. A lot of it’s just old and not applicable. Daddy is one of those who love to say that there is only one perfect book and that’s the Bible, especially if he’s using it to make a point.

Every ounce of common sense I possessed told me to excuse myself, pack my suitcase and get out of there. I guess I wanted a parting shot. I put head between my hands and leaned towards Daddy:

“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.”

I had run across that in a hotel room in Phoenix. Glen was at a computer convention and I had nothing to read but the Bible and the Phoenix Yellow Pages. It didn’t take too much mental manipulation for me to apply it to my situation. Mama and Daddy had seen Glen as a miracle handed down from heaven to get me off their backs and put me forever on the right path.

You have to understand that Dad considers the Bible his personal Book of Revelations. He has the exclusive rights to pervert it to whatever end he deigns. Scripture out of anyone else this side of Billy Graham and maybe one or two mealy-mouthed Baptist preachers he’s admired over the years is nothing less than blasphemy.

“What was that, Lilyun-yun?”

“I just told you that if your hand touches my flesh again, I’ll bite it off.”

He turned to Mom and said very quietly that I wouldn’t be there when he returned from his school board meeting.

Mama wasted no time attacking my lack of gratitude towards a man who had fed, clothed and educated me. She said she’d ask Aunt Nina if I could stay with her until Daddy cooled off and I apologized enough times for it to take.

“I’m going back to Texas,” I said. She went immediately beatific. “I don’t want to go back to Texas, but I won’t stay here and I can’t think where else to go.” I told her I wouldn’t be back, not even to visit, that this was good-bye. Period. That produced no discernible effect. She was transfixed by the imminent possibility that I was out of her hair for good.