Sacred Dust (43 page)

“I had to see you. I had to explain why I hurt you.”

“Done is done, Lil.”

“You’re all over me?”

“In a manner.”

“I see.”

I didn’t have a clue what I was saying. I was just trying to crawl my way from moment to moment. I couldn’t help it. I had to ask her.

“Why, then? Why did you hurt me?”

“I was afraid of you.”

“You mean you thought I might do something crazy, pick a fight with Glen or tell the wrong person about us or …?

“I was afraid if you knew how much I loved you, how much I was really beginning to want to be with you, I was afraid you’d use that against me.”

A thrill went through me when I heard those words but I didn’t trust myself to say more than “Why would I do that?”

“I didn’t say you would. I said I was afraid you would.”

“But why?”

“You weren’t like other men I’ve known, Heath. You talked to me. I mean way down inside me. When you made love to me, I could tell you wanted to please me as much as yourself. You thought you loved me.”

“I did love you.”

“But you got over me. If I hadn’t pulled back when I did, I would have lost my mind over you.”

“I don’t understand!” I was practically yelling. It was like sirens wailing in my ears. I couldn’t stand much more of it. I was going to have to take off running and leave her there. Or I was going to turn into a sobbing pile of jelly.

“You’re a prince and you don’t know it. Your nails could use a trim and your grammar isn’t always the best. You haven’t found yourself. But you’re a prince.”

I don’t think I could have guessed in a million years where she was heading with all that.

“I’m a stupid redneck who wears his heart on his sleeve. I’m a convicted thief and to this day I’m not positive which fork you use for the salad.”

“No! No!”

It was a scene. I was bawling. She was shaking me.

“You wanted more than my body, Heath. You wanted more than a prop for your ego. You listened when I talked. You made me feel worthwhile.”

“Michael England didn’t?”

“Michael England pretended he did long enough to teach me what he liked in bed.” Now she was crying. “Michael England and Glen in his way and every other man who ever touched me all the way back to my daddy.”

Oh, man. I’ll never forget it. The rain was slicing across in front of us like sheets of tin. The words would slide up my neck and then stick at the back of my mouth. I was fighting for breath. I hope I never experience that kind of helpless panic again.

“Lily …” I was all hoarse. I was seeing swirling things. “Oh, God, Lily, I love you.”

She went so pale it scared me. Her mouth froze half open. I thought she was dying for a second. She started crying again. She was covering me with kisses, pulling on my hair, weeping and smiling and telling me she loved me. It may have been a flash of lightning. But it was like some celestial switch was sudden thrown open and a beacon shone on the world. We just stood there until the rain was gone and it was fully dark, holding each other, stunned and stupefied by the miracle.

T
his was late on a Thursday afternoon. It was going to rain again. You could cut the air with a knife. It was a patch of weird, warm weather that had strayed off the Caribbean and drifted up over Alabama, making it feel like summer on another planet. Rosie was inside dressing quail. I was out on the porch with Miss Eula. I was sitting close to the door half-listening for the phone. Heath was in Birmingham working with the reverend on plans for the second march. I was expecting him to call. Rosie had turned the dirt around the shrubs by the porch after lunch. The wet earth made the world smell new.

It had been a February afternoon with the false promise of spring in the thick buds. The closer it came to dusk, the warmer it got. It gave everything an end of the world feeling. Now there were purple clouds threatening. Several flocks of starlings had passed over. Miss Eula was sewing fringe on the most beautiful hand hooked rug you ever saw. She called it her “Oriental,” but in truth it displayed a story from her childhood. An accomplished woman like Miss Eula always makes me feel like hell. I couldn’t knit a pair of booties. No patience with it. Rosie told me Miss Eula started that rug the week Eisenhower was inaugurated the first time. But her greatest gift is her ability to disappear and listen in a way that invites the speaker to go on. I was running back over things half to myself.

“I’ll see blood in my dreams for a long time to come. I’ll see Glen and his gun when he isn’t there. I’ll walk into a department store and catch the scent of jasmine soap and think of Michael. They can’t stitch your soul back together.”

“You have to do that for yourself,” Miss Eula said, drawing and twisting the silk cord.

“You get stuck on the way life can splinter in a second. You can forget it falls back in place almost as quick if you let it. If you love it. If you’re grateful for it. She’s a hateful old witch, my mama, but she was right when she said I was born thankless. I’ve started to learn a little about gratitude in recent days.” I was spinning between hope and regret, trying to put a placid face on things.

A car pulled into the driveway. Rose stepped into the parlor and peered through the glass curtains to see who it was. Rosie stepped in from the kitchen. She and Miss Eula shared a look. It might have only been a second. But I’d swear their eyes were locked for an hour. It was like they were stuck on electricity. I could only assume it meant something bad. Rosie raised her arms and pulled her fingers back in a way that said it’s all right. She walked out on the porch.

Something was passing before us. I glanced at Miss Eula, and for half a second I imagined she was young, no more than a girl. There was a distant streak of lightning. Rosie and her mama are charmed. Something invisible and silent had suddenly begun to swirl around us. (When I told Heath later he said it was probably electricity in the air. Oh, I says, rolling my eyes, is that all?) Rosie moved down the front steps.

The driver’s door of the car swung open. It was getting dark. You couldn’t see inside the car. You couldn’t tell who it was. But as that door opened, a circle or a cloud or a big spot of clear purple like a blob in front of your eye from a sudden bright light, hung suspended over the two women as they stood there conversing. I blinked, but it was still there. Miss Eula stood up and pointed at it. Rosie turned back to her mama for half a second, silently acknowledging that she saw it too.

She was a tall, thin dignified looking black woman in a tailored
suit. Her hair was silver and she wore it in a page boy. She handed Rose a folded piece of paper. It was the round watermelon colored stationery that Rose had kept by her stove up on the lake for grocery lists and phone messages.

Rose threw her arms around the woman and the two of them stood there crying. I looked to Miss Eula for an interpretation or sign of what appropriate action should be taken. She was cutting a bundle of silk threads for next installment of fringe.

The lady got into her car and drove off. Rose walked back up the steps and into the house. I waited a long time for Miss Eula to say something. She looked to be traveling time as Rosie calls that expression she wears before she starts one of her stories from the dim, dark past. Finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I broke the silence, “Miss Eula, is everything all right?”

“The Trouble is back,” she said, using her eyeteeth to cut a strand of thread.

M
other took to Lily right off. I knew she would. Mother likes frank people. I admit I spent the first day or two trying to make everything smooth between them, monitoring their conversations at the breakfast table when I had other things to do. They caught on to what I was doing and shut me out. I had no call to hover around them waiting for one of them to snap or bark. There’s a good deal of conversation and a lot of laughter between those two. Lily reminds Mother that she had her day. Mother even dug out an ancient picture of herself from one summer when she had peroxided her hair. I had never seen it or known that my mother went through some blond years. Mother reminds Lily that she’s a good person. She understands how deeply Lily longs to believe that about herself.

Late Thursday afternoon I was in the kitchen dressing two quail that Nadine had brought to us. Sidney likes to shoot them, but he doesn’t eat them. Nadine can’t bring herself to touch their carcasses. They don’t thrill me, but the only thing more senseless to me than hunting is letting the game go to waste. It was ponderously warm for February. It’s weather you can’t trust. Invariably a sudden rush of cold wind will drop the thermometer thirty degrees in ten minutes and the sky will drop and, apt as not, you’ll have ice and snow by morning.

I was looking out the window over the sink. The sun had dropped behind the trees and the sky was orange.
I heard the undertaker’s wagon pull into the front yard.
I didn’t pause to ponder what specific sounds a funeral wagon makes. I didn’t hold myself back a minute to realize that I had never seen or heard a funeral wagon. I wasted no time considering that even if I had ever seen one, it wouldn’t make a sound that would identify it. Nor did I bother to remember that the last horse drawn wagon of any type had disappeared from these parts twenty-five years ago. I untied my apron and walked into the parlor and peered out the window to see who was dead. Mother and Lily were looking too.

There was a red Buick on the driveway. I didn’t remember it at first. I looked at Mother and she looked at me. We were silently asking each other who it was, but neither of us knew. I went on outside and down the steps and approached the car. I figured it was someone asking directions.

Mrs. Smith got out of her Buick. She had changed her hair since then. She was also dressed for an occasion. It didn’t dawn on me until weeks later that she had dressed for this specific occasion. Mrs. Smith was taking a monumental step. She reached into her purse and took out a folded piece of paper. It looked oddly familiar. Then I realized it was just like paper I used to keep beside my stove.

The note was written in Dashnell’s left handed scratch.
Next time you show your black ass up here on this lake—you die.
She said her husband had brought it home from his next to last fishing trip up on the lake. It was written proof of Dashnell’s intent to kill that man, the missing piece of evidence the law needed to charge and convict him.

“Why have you brought this to me?”

I knew why. She knew I knew why. The only other place to take it was the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. If Mrs. Smith placed it there in the wrong hands, it would dissolve like mist into the sunrise.

“Are you planning to play the fool your entire life?” It was a true, clean voice, but it wasn’t hers and it wasn’t inside my head. I
glanced around at Mother and she looked at me as if she’d heard it too. Lily looked scared.

I asked Mrs. Smith to come inside. She cocked her head towards the fading sun and said she’d best get out of Prince George. She got back into her car and started the motor. I watched her back out. I walked back inside the house. I went back into the kitchen and finished dressing those quail.

I
f it moves at all, time travels in circles. More likely it just hovers, tucking itself between the attic eaves or hiding in the woods. It doesn’t march straight on and on and on unbending like they showed it in that historical chart that sat above the blackboard when I was in school.

You live a day in a certain spot, and you wait in that spot long enough, and you’ll find yourself back in that day. All the weeks separating then and now pile up in that place until the present whirls and whirs into a spear that breaks it open.

Like Thursday last.

Last Thursday I opened my eyes and the bed was still warm where Hattie had lain beside me seventy years ago. No matter that Searle had slept there several decades in between. It was Hattie. It wasn’t just the general warmth of Hattie long ago. It was the day we buried Wee Mother, the morning after the horses ran the road all night and smoke hung thick in the trees.
I could just make out her lavender scent and the soft roar of the crowd downstairs in the parlor. A giant odor of tuber roses met me at the top of the stairs. The sky was a deep gray veil through the front door glass. Underneath there was a green copper cast that bore watching. Across the road I could see the charred ruins of Moena’s house. There was an
angel in the tall grass by the ditch. She had come to bring Wee Mother her wings and lead her to Pastures of Glory.

Thursday last, as clean as the eye of God, while Rose of Sharon and Lily was still in bed asleep, I dropped back to that terrible day. I was in it. I have outlived all use for my religion. I was never a deep believer and never one for spells or enchantments. I never visited a fortune-teller or took a thing for a celestial sign the way so many of these blind fools around here do. But this is no illusion.
I was alone in the parlor with Wee Mother, telling her good-bye.

I have revisited that day a thousand times since I first passed through it. It was the morning after the end of a world. The Trouble had erupted full blown across the land. I return and I study that day while I relive it. It has more dimension than ordinary memory. The odor of death and tuber roses, the fear in Moena’s eyes. I would rather think that it’s only a burdensome memory like sitting in that stifling Baptist church crammed with oily haired Lawler men and puffy Lawler women in cheap dresses with babies on their laps watching Rose of Sharon marry into a life of regret.

Now that stops me because the impossible came to pass there the day Rose of Sharon slammed the door on that remorseful existence and came home and made me ashamed that I gave up on her. Time, that undefined thing that moves us around and back, made an exception and crept perceptibly forward when she did that.