Sacred Dust (2 page)

T
hey had hung Seraphine by a rope around her neck from a bough of a cypress that snaked out over the river. She looked like a sacrifice to some oozing god of the waters. Her tight blond plaits had worked loose, probably in the struggle or while they were raping her. Her eyes had been plucked out. Her teeth were broken. The men had known that eventually the rope would rot. What the buzzards left of her would slip into the silt beneath the shallow water.

He had no time to bury her. He shinnied up the tree and crawled out to the rope. He drew his knife from his back pocket and sliced it. She dropped into the black river. He watched the shining circles widen until the surface was glassy again. Twice he quieted the voice that urged him to leap in after her. Then he ran.

He ran north through shallow cypress ponds, through red and black leafy sludge into thick, wet night, stopping only long enough to catch his breath or draw some swamp water to his parched lips and then spit it out again because there was fever in it. He kept his eyes darting over the endless places where men and alligators could hide while his ears searched around and above. Eventually he reached some solid ground and he kept to the grassy edge of a logging trail when there was enough wagon rut and moonlight to make it out.

Sometimes a shack sat too close to the road and its dogs threatened. He would cut a wide circle through low marsh and brush to pass it safely. He stumbled onto a rusted pair of iron rails and followed it to a creeping strand of open boxcars. But it was rolling east towards towns and certain death. By midnight the mosquitoes had drawn bleeding sores up and down his arms and at the back of his neck. Night vanished behind a second day. He crossed more swamp and the sky was dark and the rain came in sheets. By first dusk he scraped at more than a hundred bites on his face.

They said you died slow with the fever. They said you shivered and your eyes burned in their sockets and you choked on your own scorching spit. They said no one would come near you right on your last because your breath could flood their bodies with the same wretched agony. So far there was only the itching, the swirling head and the rattle in his chest. He’d have to travel north for a week before he could risk conversation with any man black or white. He might make it.

Once he saw a lantern light dipping down under leaves behind him and he adjusted his course to the right and back, circling behind the men. He climbed a tree and looked for their campfire. But there was only endless night and the fragile blur of a dying moon behind a starless sky. He crept through sinking blackness, pausing only long enough to feel the mud cover the top of his shoe, and then he lifted his foot and stepped and then the other, pausing again and lifting, stepping, hands seeking vainly for ballast, and finally he stumbled upward and waited on solid earth for the moon or daybreak or death or an angel of God.

His body begged for sleep. He knew if he accommodated his aching limbs and heavy eyelids he might slumber forever. He closed his burning left eye, measuring the relief by a count of five, and then the right, six-seven-eight-nine.… Now he opened the left before it stuck and now the right. He repeated the ritual until the blackness was dappled and scratched with dark purple that faded into infinite blue behind vine laced hulks of cypresses and oaks. A jagged thread of pink and orange broke and spread low on the horizon. A sudden fluttering overspread the twisted treetops. The
virulent marsh echoed and trembled with the sawing screams and hacked-off moans of a billion birds of prey. An arc of red sun began to swell into a bloody orange sphere that floated up. The blighted velvet night withdrew behind a veil of blinding silver mist. He bore forward wading grassy pools of shining black, now ankle, now shoulder, now waist deep swamp.

The voice of every hunted creature’s need of heaven sprang from the unyielding mire.

Now he was lost. Now he belonged to the swamp and the fever. His cracked lips were scabbed and bloody. Try as he would to outrun it, the inferno roared in his chest threatening to consume his shirt. When his boots grew too heavy, he dropped down and pulled them off. He filled them with mud and buried them in a wet sandbank. He went on, slowly now, his fingers pulling and pinching his stinging flesh. The ground beneath his bare feet was warm and soft. It tried to suck him home as he moved over it. He’d never make it.

His best option was to sink into sleep and let their dogs sniff him down cold and lifeless. If he was still alive, he prayed only that he would hear them coming, that he would manage to run a little and force them to shoot him in the back. Otherwise they would torture him. He went to his knees in the sand. Every burning cell clung to the earth. His torn and swollen lips pressed the moist dirt. He smacked endless clumps of leafy brown soil into his tormented flesh. Now a thousand itching craters of infected blood boiled. He wailed in excruciation, madly sanding his limbs against the razored bark of a tree until he was covered with a syrup of blood and dirt. Possessed by searing torture, he slammed his skull into the dense wooden trunk over and over until, mercifully, he plummeted into insensate oblivion.

When he came to midmorning sun drilled through his eyelids and he was blinded by glaring yellow mist. By sustained effort of trembling arms, he forced his throbbing head and torso up into a sitting position. When the mist was thinner he saw a grassy break in the woods, a fit enough place for dying. It was a quarter of a mile up a
sandy knoll to the clearing. He managed to approximate a standing position by pressing his back into a tree trunk while clutching its lower limbs and coaxing his leaden legs into straightening. He listed with nausea. His legs couldn’t hold him. He held himself at three fourths of a standing position until his bony hands and arms threatened to shatter. He dropped back to the ground, and gathering his dwindling breath, he crawled towards the clearing, taking long rests every ten or fifteen feet. First dusk had faded purple when he reached the edge of the clearing and noticed the building.

It was new. It looked to be a barn that had changed its mind and tried to become a house. There was no clear trace of whoever had built it and no sign of a reason why. It was full night before he leaned his shoulder into the wooden door and it swung inward. Hez crawled inside. It only had one room. The dry mud floor had been pounded smooth with a wooden mallet. The scent of the thin pine walls and tar paper roof reminded him of the turpentine farm, of South Carolina, of the life that was oozing out of him. The acrid stench of the newly milled pine kept the mosquitoes away.

Hez moved in his sleep. He floated up out of sheltering oblivion. There was a pillow under the back of his head and a blanket covered his torso. Someone had removed his outer garments, bathed him and rubbed camphor all over his body. The nightmare itch was gone. The running sores had started to dry into scabs. A strong male tenor voice rang out.

Hez was too weak to move. He couldn’t draw enough wind to push his voice past the door. He faded back into sleep.

Joseph had returned from his supply trip four days after Hez crept into his building to die on its smooth earth floor. The boy’s
breathing was so slow that Joseph took him for a corpse. He rolled him over with the toe of his boot thinking to check his pockets. Hez coughed.

Yellow fever. Worse ways to go—especially for a wanted colored boy running circles in a white man’s swamp.

Joseph pulled the comatose adolescent into a sitting position and beat his back until green spume covered his trousers and lay in a puddle on the floor. He squeezed a wet handkerchief over his mouth, repeatedly moistening his parched tongue and throat. Then he stripped him and laid him on a blanket in the sun to treat his jaundice. Later he balanced the boy’s head on his chest and spoon-fed him broth and herbs. He repeated the ritual several times.

It was night when Hez woke again. It was pitch black inside the barn and the air was close. For a moment he thought he was dead in his grave. Then he pushed blankets and straw away from his face and there was a little light. He smelled smoke and meat. He sat up slowly. He had dreamed of flames, but that must have been the fire in his chest. There was only one way out of the barn and that was through the open door where the man leaned over the fire. Hez slowly pulled himself to his feet and the room swirled. He sat back down and when the spinning stopped, he stood up again. He moved warily towards the door frame.

Joseph was bent over, stoking the fire. He was a sinewy, long jawed man with enormous round blue eyes and long, wavy silver blond hair brushed back and tamed by a leather string at the nape of his neck. He was all angles. His wide shoulder span spread over an incongruously narrow frame. Joseph looked up over the fire at him. From full front Hez saw taut skin stretched into a handsome skull face. Obviously not one of those who hunted him. They wouldn’t have stopped to build a fire. They would’ve dragged him out and hung him straight off.

“Welcome to the Ebenezer Tabernacle.” His half smile revealed two abundantly supplied rows of perfect pearl enameled teeth. His slightly elongated incisors lent substance to his beautiful face.

Hez squinted at him. He coughed up some dried blood. It lodged like a handful of broken glass in his throat.

“Hezekiah, is it?”

The man knew his name. It didn’t bode well. He had been drawn into consciousness by his hunger and his need to piss. Joseph was turning bacon in a new iron skillet which he had placed on a bed of rocks in the middle of the fire. He was young despite his gray hair. His boots were new and they had cost plenty. Hez had worked enough mercantile to know the price of things. The sweet scent of sizzling pork liberated a new wave of nausea. He lurched away to puke in the circling darkness.

When it was finished, he sat down in the tall grass. His breathing steadied. Bit by bit his nausea eased. He returned to the fire and sat down.

“Hungry?”

Hez nodded. He stepped into the shadows to piss. He came back and sat down and the man handed him a plate. The pair of them ate in silence.

Hez figured it was the fever that spoke. He was certain it wasn’t the man. Maybe it was the echo of one of Beauty B.’s sermons from the tall old days in South Carolina. She had often spoken of a sky choked with falling celestial beings. He pushed the obligatory words through the cinders in his chest.

“Mighty good, mister.”

“Get you some more.”

“Not just now, thank you.”

“Where are you headed?”

“South Carolina. How far above the Everglades are we?”

“You’re smack in the 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.