Sacred Dust Read Free Page A

that cataclysmicevent had come to pass. “No more inviolate ground where our dead might sleep undisturbed and dissolve with time into sacred dust—and that means you, nigger child, mean no more to this world than a mangy stray mongrel dog! Don’t you never forget that you’re cursed. Bend low. Trust no white man. Or find yourself hung by the throat and your flesh on fire! Do you hear me, boy?”

    He had inherited that curse. It ransacked his dreams. It washed over him at unexpected moments. A sudden, boiling tide rose out of the void behind him and sucked him choking, facedown, farther and farther through foaming fetid liquid nothing before plunging him into the icy, airless black depths, and his bones screamed as a hundred million mounted demons swarmed over him on flaming hooves. Then the swirling water spiraled into a vortex and he was drawn by burning wind to the screaming surface and slapped back by a tide of blood to the dead sand shore.

    He woke and wondered in the glistening blue black darkness how the platinum stars held fast to the sky, how the moon still glowed green through broad leaves and a dulcet thrush cried out for its mate, how he could be moved by such tender things and yet despised, chased as human prey.…

    He would die in the night. He would die in the morning or on the following afternoon. Die and face damnation and torment for violating the natural order.…

    He had planted the forbidden seed of his destruction deep within Seraphine. The men would pull his arms out of their sockets and break his feet. They would flatten his face and twist his lower legs around until his knees snapped. Only then would they lay the rope around his neck. Then as the rope clenched and the neck bones cracked, they would douse him with kerosene and hell would be a relief.

    “Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.”

    Joseph of God had risen. He sat watch high in a magnolia. It was a clear night and the breeze had chased the damp. If by somemiracle this wild hermit stood apart from them, he would pose no more obstacle than a drop of rain moving against a drought. If …

    When they arrived, the zealot would ad-lib to save his own neck. He would say that he had captured Hez in his barn and he was holding him for the reward. It might well be the truth. It might be the man had no stomach, as many don’t, for killing. It might be he wanted the sin on others’ souls; he was leaving the actual torment and murder to the others.

    Or he might mean what he said about protecting him.

    Hez tried to squeeze a drop of light from the dry heap of facts the old people had told him about his birth. He couldn’t specifically invoke when or how he understood that Moena, the shy, mumbling woman who visited from Charleston, was the vessel which had borne him from creation and deposited him like thieves’ cargo on the indifferent banks of the great world. It was as given and true as the root of a tree or his obedience to the unuttered command that he neither address nor consider her as mother. The father seed had affixed itself like a blight within her deepness. She had come home swollen and, so he overheard the women who washed Beauty B. for burial whisper, ignorant of her condition. Hez still marveled that Grandfather hadn’t beaten Moena to death for her pernicious humanity.

    Moena had surrendered him to Beauty B. and Grandfather on the night of his birth. It was said that she left without a word the next morning for Charleston. Shortly thereafter God rescinded her eyesight. Her visits to the turpentine farm ceased. Only his most concerted mental effort would produce an approximated blur of Moena’s physical shape. The impact of her abandonment, however, was an open wound the intervening years could only deepen.

    Memory attempted to etch Beauty B.’s shining purple sorrow, her baleful almond eyes and her upright, sanctified visage in Moena’s place. Yet she had