Sacred Dust (19 page)

He had to apologize. He had to tell her it had been his physical torture castigating and condemning her. Hez had very little knowledge of the bleak and lonely path she had stumbled over the passing years. She was a lost, lonely blind woman clinging to her superstitions because she had nothing else to hold. Surely he could love his mother enough to allow her that much.

The wind was howling. A fresh, driving rain pelted the windows. The stove had gone out. He could hear her in the corner, praying.

“Mother, forgive me,” and tears of remorse sliced his cheeks. “Mother, I’m as blind as you are. I’m fearful and lonely and I know you did the best you could. I’m sorry, Mother.” When she turned towards him, her Moena’s eyes looked straight into his. A terrible quiet descended. When he could stand it no longer, he spoke.

“You kind of almost seem like you’re looking at me, Mother.”

“You have Beauty B.’s eyes,” she answered.

Her chicanery annoyed him. He retreated into himself.

“Son, you got a spot on your collar there. What is it? Egg?”

She reached up and scraped it with her nail. It was just like a thing a mother would do.

“You can see!?”

“Because you saw me.”

“You can see?”

“Yes. And I see you’re a healing angel.”

Later he walked into sheets of soft, warm rain that washed the shabby faces of boardinghouses and liquor stores and ran in rivers that overspread the curb. It fell thick and steady as the daylight slipped into darkness. He stood on the seawall looking into the white hissing, black shining tide.

The storm was rolling out of the South. It carried that peculiar veil of moist feathered silk he hadn’t experienced since the Everglades. It was good to stand on the high stone wall and reflect on the vast distance his heart had come through the intervening years. He wondered at his deliverance from that hopeless swamp. It seemed as miraculous as Moena’s eyesight. Even more miraculous was the peace he felt looking back. He couldn’t regret a single step of the journey that had brought him here. Soon he would move forward in the solid stride of an educated man of God. That was deliverance beyond comprehension.

The rain was thinner now. Dense fog hung over the streets as he walked home. He had taken a wrong turn, and then another. He sat on a crumbling stoop and waited for the inevitable light of first dawn.

He heard a voice from far away and though it was dim, it was clear and irrefutable.

Moena slept fitfully, waking herself now and again to reassure herself that the light hadn’t fled. She felt easier after Hez came in. She drifted deep and slept through the rest of the night as if under a tender spell.

Hez slid back into his chair at the kitchen table. His dry robe was a great luxury against the evening chill. Outside a wind had risen
and sharper raindrops slapped the roof. Beauty’s Bible lay on the table. It was still open to the page where Moena had looked while he was out. He read the verse Beauty had underlined in black ink long before he was born.

She had underscored the next line as well. The tissue thin page was slightly wrinkled and he had to hold the book closer to the lamp to make it out.

A tiny cry pierced the drumming roar of an ocean falling from the heavens. He moved to the door and opened it just wide enough to admit the cat. He dried it with a cloth Moena kept for dishes. He sat back down at the table. He worked another hour. Then he slept.

I
came in from the grocery around two-thirty and Heath was sitting on my back porch. His eyes were as red as fire. At first I thought it was whiskey, but it was from crying over Lily. My sweet tooth was humming a little. I was sucking three aspirin. I had groceries to put away and supper to cook. I felt sorry for him. He was a mess.

It took me half an hour to draw three consecutive words out of him. He finally said he’d come to apologize for doing such a piecework job of painting the house. He had a right to apologize for that, but I knew that wasn’t what was on his mind.

“It doesn’t hurt forever, Heath,” I said, trying to pry open the subject. “It just feels like it will.”

He said he was lost and hurting and he didn’t understand. He said he didn’t know another living soul he could talk to about it. I’ve heard it all at one time or another on my back porch. I poured us some iced tea and we sat down. It was one of those hazy silver blue afternoons. You couldn’t tell the far end of the lake from the sky. He tried to go on, but he kept choking up.

I was hoping to pull some of it out of him with a light approach.

“What’s a fine, strapping young man like you doing in tears over an old married woman like her?” I regretted it immediately. He
took umbrage, defending Lily, her beauty, her mind, her complicated situation with Glen.

“I love her and I know she loves me. She thinks she’s doing the right thing.”

“Well, if you love her, then you want her to do the right thing.” If a boy ever needed a long swallow of whiskey, it was him. I poured him a double shot, but that only loosed his tears. He must have cried and sputtered a solid hour. Nothing I said made the slightest difference. It was first dusk by this time and my sweet tooth was beginning to throb again. I had exhausted every comfort I knew to offer. The truth is there’s just so much feeling sorry for yourself out loud that another person can take. I was nearing my limit.

“Aunt Rose, I don’t think anybody on this earth knows the sorrow in my heart.”

“You got a nerve.” I sounded put out and I meant to. “You have strong, young life flowing through your veins; you have whatever you make of it. You’re blessed and your real problem isn’t Lily Pembroke. It’s your lack of gratitude.”

“You don’t know how this hurts,” he spit back.

“You are talking to a mother who buried her one and only son at age twenty. I know how
that
hurts and I pray you never do.” It just sprang from me. I thought I was through it. All the hurt resurrected as if I’d just gotten the news. It seared me all over again. My head started pounding. I couldn’t stop trembling. If possible it hurt worse than the first time. Everywhere I put my eyes I saw endless despair.

“What you had with Lily Pembroke was common and deceitful and you had no moral right to do it! You’re paying a slim price, all things considered! My sorrow is everlasting and it came without warning or explanation. There’s no comfort in this world! None!” I know I ran on a good bit more. I couldn’t tell you what I said, only that Heath looked like he was watching a train wreck.

It was dark by then. Heath fetched me some Kleenex and a glass of water and he held me and rocked me and stroked my hair and apologized and cried with me all at once.

“He took whatever shred of decency there was left in Dashnell with him.” I couldn’t hold it back. “He took all the hope I had, all the reason to look forward to tomorrow.” He held my cheeks between his fingers and stared at me and those wide black eyes of his drew the sorrow out of me.

“I wind myself up like a stupid clock and I go on doing all the things that have to be done because I don’t know what else to do. But I would gladly surrender every breath in me, I’d happily lay down and die, to put my child back on this earth.”

It was the kindest pair of arms I ever felt. When the dark was full, he helped me back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed and rubbed my shoulders until the tears subsided. I could see through the window that the mist had lifted. There was a slice of moon resting on top of the cedars at the far edge of the lake. I laid back. I was almost asleep. He got up and walked to the doorway. He stopped and turned around and he said, “Thank you.”

I slept soft and deep through the night. It was quiet when I woke. I could see by the towels on the bathroom floor and the empty Jack Daniel’s bottle on the kitchen counter that Dashnell had come in the night and slept beside me and gotten himself off to work. The sky was clear when I walked out onto the back porch. There was a light wind. The water was choppy. I turned to go back into the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee. I glanced at the clock. It was noon. It may have been the fog in my head, but everything looked different. Then it came to me that I had told Heath what I had been unable to tell anyone else. I had entrusted that boy with the deepest part of myself and he hadn’t abused it. That endeared him to me. That put him among a handful of special people I’ve known. I gave Heath Lawler my sorrow and he replaced it with a measure of unexpected comfort. Until then I told myself that I held on to my grief because it was all I had left of Carmen. I finally realized that wasn’t it at all. I held on to that grief because I was afraid if I let it go, there wouldn’t be anything left that was real. I suppose I thought I would dissolve into thin air if I moved past it. I began that morning. I stepped forward. I woke to the possibility
that I could go on, that there might somehow be a better way to live. It wasn’t as solid as a fact, but it was more real than a daydream: I might not cower in the shadows of that house for the rest of my life.

I
look at the suffering in the world and wonder how I can agonize the way I do. But I do. I suppose that’s because if I were in danger of being gunned down in a war zone, if I were terminally ill, if I had my legs amputated as the result of some horrible accident, then people would have an automatic sympathy for me. They wouldn’t bother with who I voted for, what kind of mother and wife I was, or if and where I went to church. They wouldn’t give a holy hell who I slept with. But I have none of that to pull up over me and snuggle beneath like kids running a quilt up to their chins on a fall night after ghost stories.

I have this madness (love), this need to love flesh and be loved by flesh and to feel all right about it. I burn, I hunger, I get starved for love, and by love I mean a mingling of flesh and spirit, a window to understanding the universe that only two can open, two perfectly tuned violins that play each other. Or something. I live in feelings, not words. People have always laughed at my poems. Sometimes when I read over them, I laugh at myself. I try to laugh off these feelings. I try not to succumb to such medieval ideas. Michael, he taught us that. He said that romance as a cure to mankind’s ills was first embraced in the Dark Ages.

Michael talks about love as the light of the world, and I know he doesn’t mean romantic love, but I wish he did sometimes. Because I
feel foolish and ashamed and alone and I am trying to see it all the way he sees it. Energy and light and one race, the human race, in tune with the tides and all that.

Michael is beatific. He has a completely nonjudgmental way of looking at people. He’s not making a dime running that school. He used the little his father left him to build it. He believes what he teaches. He puts it into action. He looks up at the stars at night and sees breathing patterns. I look up; I see gases glowing in the cold. We talk about Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and dozens of people who made a difference in this world.

Michael remembers Bobby Kennedy holding a starving Missis-sippi Delta baby, its tummy swollen, saying this shouldn’t happen in America. When I remember Bobby Kennedy, I think of Marilyn Monroe. I say that at discussion group and Michael responds that I have morality turned inside out. He says morality doesn’t include how many movie stars you slept with. He says morality is how many people you loved. By loved, he means cared about, tried to help, leapt over yourself to reach. Looking back on my time with Randy, I realize now that I had him confused with a man like Michael England.

I get a tremendous feeling at discussion group. I start to feel the connection between all people and times. I try to keep it when I come home to Glen and my children.

I make them dinner and I try to do something special for each one—you know—Glen’s favorite homemade salad dressing, Sarah’s pop-up biscuits, Travis’s Mickey Mouse napkins or Chicken McNuggets. Nobody makes a sound except chewing and slurping up iced tea. Nobody thanks me. It’s probably because they know they aren’t welcome. After supper we all get away from the table as fast as we can because we have so little to say to each other. I’ve tried fresh flowers and a candle. I’ve starched and ironed their sheets. They like starched sheets. It has some impact, but, dear God, do I have to wash and iron their sheets every day for the rest of my life just so they won’t hate me?

The private time, the lights out, between the sheets time with
Glen, I try to make it the way I think he’ll like it. I try to be open and willing with my shoulders perfumed and the creams rubbed into my skin. I try to open things up with a little conversation.

This is where our sicknesses hold hands. There’s no genuine desire on my part to create physical communion. I’m playing a part, acting the decent, loving wife who’s trying everything
Cosmopolitan
suggests to rekindle faded love. I do those things to protect myself, like a rape victim cooperating with her attacker. I do them from fear and I resent them. I resent the hairy backs of his bony hands. I despise the way he sands my nipples making little jolts of static electricity that burn clear through me. If I wince or ask him not pinch me or be so rough, his pleasure intensifies and he grins like a maniac, biting my lower lip or slapping me with throaty little sniggers, slamming himself so far up in me I think I’m going to break apart, scalding and burning my insides, insane with the thrill of his total dominion, his brutal power over me, and the smallest whimper or trembling on my part lifts him into a realm of sublime madness he can sustain for hours before he finally shakes violently, and clenching my throat with his fists to cut off my air supply, he takes his demon time, wailing as his evil seed spreads through me.