Sacred Dust (17 page)

Whether Maude Langdon was a liar or not, Mr. Carter Crowley said Rosa Lynn Brown was the second white woman and more savage attacks could be expected unless they got the message out to the niggers right away. When he said it like that, I think Daddy agreed. He and Mr. Carter Crowley got into his truck and left in a few minutes. Just before he did, Daddy told me I couldn’t have Moena up on the porch, that it might not look right to people passing. So I asked could we play in my room instead. Mother let us sometimes. But he said, “No.”

Quick as Daddy was gone and we knew Beauty B. was busy giving Wee Mother a sponge bath, Moena and I slipped off down into the woods to the place where we’d been told they found Rosa Lynn, but it looked the same as ever. We played in the creek awhile, and then when it was starting to get dark, we headed back up through the woods towards the house, Rosa Lynn’s ghost following us all the way.

Hattie was back. Beauty B. was standing at the edge of the yard
and she just jerked Moena off the ground by her arm and moved across the road with giant, stiff strides. Jake, Moena’s daddy, stood in the door of their house and I called out, “Hey,” like always. But it was like he was deaf and staring straight through me at the end of the world. Hattie started fussing at me for running off.

Hattie said Mother and Florence were spending the night with Mrs. Brown on account of they had kin coming from six places and Rosa Lynn’s wedding presents were still laid out all over the dining room and the upstairs rooms had to be made ready and you couldn’t get a colored maid to step outside her door that day. Or if you could, she wouldn’t go near Mr. Brown’s house. I asked her where Daddy was, but she wouldn’t say. Wee Mother woke with a breathing spell while Hattie and I were eating supper and for once I was allowed to rinse and replace the cool rags on her forehead until she drifted back to sleep, because Hattie was all nerves that night.

I was back in the kitchen washing up the supper dishes. Hattie had gone to peek in on Wee Mother. I heard her running up the hall, I heard the screen door slam behind her. I went into the parlor and Wee Mother was breathing hard, a foamy substance sliding down one side of her mouth. I wiped at it and then Hattie was back with Beauty B. who had brought Moena with her because Jake had been sent for Doctor McKutcheon and she wouldn’t leave Moena alone, not that night. Hattie said it was Providence that Doctor McKutcheon lived in the country and that for the most part Jake could keep to the woods. Beauty B. said if Doctor McKutcheon lived in town, Jake wouldn’t have gone for him if one of his own was at death’s door.

Hattie and Beauty B. kept dabbing at the foam on Wee Mother’s chin. Moena whispered to me that her mama was fit because her daddy had gone out on the road alone, a nigger by himself in the dark on the devil’s night. Wee Mother was jerking in the bed now and we all had to hold her. Her eyes were wide and rolled back into her head and there was a terrible smell. Hattie commenced to crying that she had to get Mother. Beauty B. kept telling her she had to stay put. But Hattie was all in pieces and she ran off. Wee Mother quit jerking and her breath was steady and the foam reduced down
to a trickle. Beauty B. kept going out onto the porch to watch for the doctor or Mother, she said, but we knew she was looking out for Jake. We knew for sure by then it was a bad night for a dark man to be out on the road alone. Beauty B. was all trembly and having a hard time holding back her tears. Her temper was gone. Moena said, “What’s wrong?” Beauty B. sank down onto the steps sobbing, “They’re going to kill every one of us tonight.” I don’t know how much time passed with no one coming and things moving from bad to worse and then finally Doctor McKutcheon drove up.

Beauty B. stood straight up all at once.

“Where’s Jake?”

The doctor said Jake had been by his house maybe an hour before. That meant Jake had been missing at least half an hour. Doctor McKutcheon told Beauty B. that she needn’t worry. Jake was no part of what was happening on court square. He was known, trusted and liked. The doctor was no part of it either. He was a class apart from it. So he really didn’t know who was safe. Beauty B. told Moena she was going to run up the hill to her uncle’s to see what should be done. She glared at me hard and said, “I don’t care what your daddy says, you take her inside and you keep her safe till I get back, or they’ll be hell to pay.”

Moena and I went back into the parlor, and Doctor McKutcheon was giving Wee Mother a shot. When I asked him what for, he said so she’d go easy.

“Go where?” Moena asked. That made me so tired I kicked her.

I knew what I had to do, and I knew Doctor McKutcheon wouldn’t let me, so I says, “Beauty B. just ran across the road a minute. We’re going to fetch Beauty B.…” I leaned into Moena’s ear and whispered, “Follow me,” and I was out the door. Doctor McKutcheon could smell that I was lying. He flew out onto the porch behind us. We were already in the road by then, hidden by the darkness, disappearing up the hill.

“Where are you going?” he shouted.

“To get Daddy,” I says.

That’s when his voice slapped the darkness.

You have to wonder where words go when they’re not heeded, because his words got stuck in this house like a bird in the attic that hides by day and beats itself half crazy trying to bust through the window at night. Those words caught up under the porch eaves and sometimes rest a few seasons between cracks in the wood, but they eventually work themselves loose.

I can be cooling fresh canned beans in ice water late on a Saturday night and they’ll slide through my ears and swirl above me and disappear another five or seven years, but they’ll come back.

But we were off the road by then, rolling over ourselves through the Delanys’ pasture, stepping right on account of cow pies and left because of nonexistent snakes. The moon was bright and heavy in the east over town. I could just make out a line of black clouds, but they were still low and a long way off. We found a narrow spot in the creek and jumped the trickle, and then we were in thick woods sure enough. Rosa Lynn and murder were all around us then, but we kept shut and we kept to the path because even at this distance, you could hear the rumble. We thought it was thunder. Wee Mother was no part of it. Wee Mother was a departed angel and that at least felt right.

We had to cross the creek again where it curved back around by the railroad trestle, and this time it had to be done gingerly because there was quicksand, and a drunk tramp had drowned trying to pull another one out some years before. Hattie said passing railroad engineers had seen his ghost. I was past the change of life before Hattie told me that was all a lie. Directly on now, the path was surer passing through thick cedars and past a pond. Then we were back on the farm lane that took you to the main road all the way to the edge of White Oak.

We hid in the Johnsongrass and watched the wagons and automobiles and trucks. Men were piled ten and twenty on truck beds, shooting rifles into the air and shouting and blowing horns as if a war had ended or broken out in Prince George County. Moena
crouched low and started whimpering about heading back. I had to find Daddy and tell him about Wee Mother, so I told her how people thought the moon and stars of her mama and daddy, and she was all right because she was with me. She kept on whimpering. I knew she was right to crawl back into the cedars and run home. I knew she wouldn’t be safe that night in Prince George County, not even in the bosom of Jesus. I just said that she would because I was getting the picture and I was afraid and didn’t want to go on alone, but I was glad when she ran away.

Three blocks from the courthouse, the traffic stopped in a logjam. Men were abandoning cars, trucks and wagons and carrying their rifles on foot. The crowd on the courthouse lawn was already backed down all the side streets running off the square. I was sidling past thick legs of men who reeked of whiskey and tobacco, and I was covered with sweat. Some were saying the U.S. Army was expected and that they were ready to fight. Some were laughing like, standing around out front in church. All had their eyes glued to Henry Gill’s corpse hanging like a voodoo doll from the tree. Someone ran up out of the crowd and swung it back and forth and everyone laughed. Then a boy doused it in kerosene and set it aflame. That’s when I knew it was still alive because it jerked and screamed, only the sound wasn’t human. It was like the pigs when the barn burned. You couldn’t hear it too good because of all the laughing and shouting and rifle shots. A pair of hands grabbed me, and I was looking straight into my daddy’s eyes, and what I saw scared me more than all the rest because his eyes looked dead and he wouldn’t speak.

Daddy didn’t talk on the way out of town. That was highly unusual. Daddy was a talker. You could smell smoke through the trees and groups of men were breaking off in all directions with torches and kerosene. He didn’t say a word and when we got a mile out, he told me to get down in the back and hold tight, and he pushed the horses like fire. I kept shut and he wasn’t talking until I looked up when he was yelling, and we were up in Moena’s yard. Jake was back, and Beauty B. too. Moena got into their wagon with the baby and we helped them haul things out of the house and throw them
on Jake’s wagon. Daddy was yelling at Jake, telling him not to try the roads that night. They had a powerful argument. Beauty B. finally joined in and convinced Jake that Daddy was right. In the first place, it would be daylight and easier to travel. In the second, it would be Sunday, and a good many of these riled-up, drunken men would be under the sedative of church and Sunday suits. Jake was wild and saying no church or sunrise would abate their blood lust. It took a lot of persuasion, but finally he and Beauty B. and Moena drove behind our house into the barn. Daddy sent me to fetch them blankets.

I thought the house would be brimming like the night my grandfather passed, but nobody came. I slept in my own bed, the same as now on the front over the porch, except nobody slept that night with so many men and horses and wagons and an occasional automobile running up and down the road, and Wee Mother a corpse, and Hattie and Florence and Mother still up at the Browns’. I was awake when the men came all in a cluster and I saw them in a circle around Moena’s house. I heard them shout for Jake. I saw my daddy out there, shouting with them, making like he thought Jake and Beauty B. and Moena were still inside. I had never seen my daddy afraid enough to act out a lie like that. Then I saw three men, including my daddy, run up on Moena’s porch and kick in the door. I heard my daddy holler, “Gone!” That house burned in a minute.

The men didn’t linger to see it. Daddy rode off with them because they would have suspected him if he hadn’t. They would have lynched him like they hanged Henry Gill if they’d had any idea he was hiding Jake and Moena and Beauty B. in the barn.

I watched Moena’s house until I saw the flames spread across the yard into the brush and burn itself out as the rain started. But I was ragged by then and, merciful God, I slept. When I woke up I could hear the crowd downstairs. A neighbor lady helped me dress.
The sky was a deep gray veil through the front door glass. Underneath there was a green copper cast that held the seeds of an inferno
. Wee Mother was in the coffin. It looked a lot better than that awful bed. So did she. The dying smell had been covered over with the scent of
perfume and tuber roses. As soon as Hattie and Florence and Mother got home from the Browns’, we started for the church.

I wanted to run out to the barn to see about Moena, but I remembered I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody where they was hiding. We passed displaced families on the road to the church, their belongings piled on wagons, their heads low, their mules moving as fast as they could pulling such heavy loads. I heard someone say in the churchyard while we were waiting on the coffin that, as bad as it had been, at least there wouldn’t be any more
Trouble
in Prince George. The minister spoke and Mother and Florence cried, but I was holed-up down someplace in my mind trying to absorb all the sudden strangeness.

It was on the way back home on the road that we encountered Jake and Beauty B. and Moena and the baby. Moena was at the very back of the wagon.

“Where y’all going?” I asked Moena while Daddy talked to Jake.

“Off from Alabama,” she says.

“For how long?” I says.

“Till it’s better,” Moena says, and she was crying, and I jumped up into the wagon and grabbed her and begged Mother and Daddy to let her stay. Mother and Hattie and Florence yelled at me to get back in our wagon before somebody saw. Daddy and Jake pulled us apart. I craned my neck watching that wagon disappear over the hill. When we got back home, I sat on the front porch and stared up the road in the direction they had gone and I cried. It was as if they had piled all mankind’s hope onto that wagon and carried it away. Even then I didn’t understand why my daddy let them.

I
didn’t have to ask Lily to take me to that little discussion group. As it turned out, she invited me. Here’s where I completely want common sense, because I got on my high horse just as if I expected him to change on the spot and tell me it was all right with him.

“It’s a little philosophical discussion group that meets once a week up at the alternative school,” I says. Then he says if I want a little religious discussion there’s Baptist Church Circle and Sunday school galore. I says, “Dashnell, it’s just a little something different to do of a weeknight.” I didn’t dare tell him Lily had invited me.

Well, he wouldn’t hear of it. He said it was bad enough that “homo hippie” from California was allowed to open his filthy school in Prince George, and he’d let me have no part of it.