Sacred Dust Read Free

middle of the Everglades.” Hez had been running in circles. Joseph’s eyes weren’t blue. They were gray. They looked as if some event or cataclysm or revelation had drawn all the hue out of them. They invited you in. They locked into Hez’s again and a silent voice traveled out of them. Fever, madness or revelation—it was all the same to Hez as the firelight diminished and he pondered his stalking death.

    “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.

    “Follow me home.”

    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?”

    It blasphemously violates God’s natural order.

    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.

    You’ll suffer God’s eternal judgment soon enough.…

    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