Sacred Dust Read Free Page B

never offered herself as a replacement for his mother. Beauty B. had already become sanctified, she was already three quarters out of her flesh.

    She eschewed all routine and understood things. Nothing that could be described or experienced engaged her. She might sitentranced on a yard stump three days and nights gibbering. Or lay her fork on her supper plate to wipe her lip and remain frozen, the napkin between her fingers, until sunrise.

    A gnarled limb of green oak had hissed pale blue smoke from its bed of embers since dusk. A sudden troupe of dancing yellow and white flames leapt across it. Its reflection shone in the tree branches overhead. What had been hovering darkness burst into a thousand shining fragments. Presently soft raindrops thumped and twittered the leaves.

    He remembered about coming up a child on the little turpentine farm with Beauty B. and Grandfather. He remembered Beauty B.’s preaching, her gyrating, hypnotic orations and mystic visions on Sunday evenings in the woods. Her foaming lips were spewing fountains of increasingly incomprehensible oracle, divination and prophecy which dazzled and soothed ever growing numbers of the devout and the curious. Sometimes she would lift Hez naked before the assembly crying out that he was the bastard child of the bastard child of the Bastard Child of God. Once she placed him on a tree stump, offering him as a sacrificial oblation and igniting the base of the trunk, which she had soaked with kerosene. As the mortified child screamed inside the circle of rising flames, she ordered silent obeisance to Jehovah’s will. If the stump and the child were consumed by her mad conflagration, then Jehovah had willed it His holy pyre. If the blaze went out or burned away from the stump, then the boy was anointed of God to deliver them from oppression. The fire had gone out quickly, but Hez still marveled that all those people would have sat there and watched him die. Not because they were bad or indifferent or deluded like Beauty B. It was her inexplicable power to charm and entrance.

    Hez lay in the dark room waiting for death and trying to count the times Beauty B. had instructed him that a righteousness would wake in him one day. She fervently believed her own oracles. He had been sent like Christ to be raised in modest circumstance, an unlikely crown prince who would don the mantle of divine favor and show his people the way. He was her sacred charge. She compelled him to memorize tedious, ineluctable passages of Scripture.She enforced three day fasts. She kept him separate from other children and worldly influence. She washed his feet. She dripped hot oils over his head. She beat him regularly to exorcise demons.

    He remembered Grandfather’s meanness and how the old man would drink moonshine of a night and go out and find a low down woman and bring her home. He would pull Beauty B. out of their bed by her hair and have the woman while Beauty B. and Hez sat on the porch reciting, “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers …” and on down. Beauty B. was never more serene than when they sat in the darkness while her husband and another woman set the iron headboard knocking on the other side of the wall. Grandfather beat his women after he had them. They always fought back, especially at first. Gradually the shrieking and slamming sounds would become a battery of muted thuds as he punched her unconscious. Sometimes the first blue haze of morning hung over the pine groves before the bruised, half-mutilated good time girl trudged across the front yard, her sporadic wails diminishing gradually as she moved up the road.

    He intuited things he would never say to Beauty B. or Grandfather. For one, Beauty B. was a part of Grandfather’s strange rituals with his sluts. The hapless tramps had no way of knowing it, but she was a means of communicating some private information that only Grandfather and Beauty B. understood. For another, Beauty B. was only about half as