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  “FASCINATING.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  HIGH PRAISE FOR

  SACRED DUST

  “[A] sweeping canvas with gut-wrenching visceral details … Unfailingly packed with generous emotion and a breathing history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  “With Sacred Dust David Hill has dipped his hands in the lifeblood of the South. It’s blood poisoned by rage and racism but cleansed by forgiveness. ‘Life will devil and vex you,’ one of the characters here concludes. That’s what this rapturous and thoroughly engaging novel will do as well.”

  —John Gregory Brown, author of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur

  “A PASSIONATE FIRST NOVEL … HILL IS A DEFT STORYTELLER. He keeps the story moving propulsively forward and offers a climactic battle for justice that is stirring and persuasive. And in Rose he has created an iconoclastic, moving heroine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “POWERFUL AND INSIGHTFUL … An engrossing story … Sacred Dust is a book that will stay with you. Its richly drawn characters ring as true as those in history books of the South.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Hill shows us a complicated, contradictory part of the South and makes us see it the same way as those who inhabit it.… There are no easy answers and Hill’s characters are too realistic to expect them. That is what makes Sacred Dust such an absorbing and memorable book.”

  —West Coast Review of Books (4 stars)

  “A debut novelist with an ear for dialogue as sure as his eye for detail.”

  —Memphis Flyer

  “A MOVING NOVEL.”—Booklist

  “A POWERFUL FIRST NOVEL with roots in Southern literature that run as deep as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. The characters are vivid and the tensions are genuine. David Hill’s voice is strong and convincing. He is a writer to watch and his first novel is a book to read.”

  —Dan O’Brien, author of Brendan Pratrie and Equinox

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1996 by David Hill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Delta® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76722-6

  v3.1

  To Lonnie

  Heartfelt thanks to the following angels, living and departed:

  Patty Mayer, Steve Malin, Marjorie Braman, Lea Queener, Linda Oates, Sunta Izicuppo, Michael Jeter, Muffin, Libby Boone, Michael Cherry, Marion Brayton, Bob and Betty Hill, John Pielmeier, Martha Holifield, Gary Cearlock, Kate Permenter, Jeanine Edmunds, and Ed Schmidt.

  I am also grateful to: Phylicia Rashad, John Irving, Tennessee Williams, John Matoian, Sarah V. Clement, Virginia Woolf, The New Dramatists, Lisa Bankoff, Phil Rose, Linda Woolverton, and Jeanne Williams.

  Say to those who are of a

  fearful

  heart,

  “Be strong! Fear not!

  Behold, your God

  will come with vengeance,

  With the recompense of God,

  He will come and save you.”

  Then the eyes of the blind shall

  be opened,

  And the ears of the deaf

  unstopped;

  Then shall the lame man leap

  like a hart,

  And the tongues of the dumb

  sing for joy.

  Isaiah 35, Verses 4–6

  Before “the Trouble”

  Old people down here still say “the Trouble.” That house was built … or that family left town … or there hasn’t been an ice storm like this since …

  Before “the Trouble”

  … means all that began with the universe and it was our cradle, our fresh clean toes tucked between sheets perfumed by the meadow sun as we slept in our houses across a dirt road from each other.…

  Before “the Trouble” was only called time back then, our time to taste warm night air laced with the new leaves or the coming of autumn or fresh turned earth. It was our grassy eternity of childhood peeping through the sorghum jungle into the cemetery at black faces long tormented with lament and the singer was shrill as a jay and held us under her mournful spell and we were thrilled to know there was a dead man in that casket.

  Even the morning of the day that snaked into the night when eternity split was before; warm wet earth sinking under racing bare feet. How deceptive, our snug, our final, four-cornered wild rose Saturday together.

  Even so passing over late Saturday morning, without a sign, boding presence or premonition—no warning bell! The dust road coiling through our woods was not, had never been, a road, rather the submerged spine of a three-clawed Sleeping Evil.

  Nor did we imagine in our fast fading sublime then time the perfumed breeze warming our necks as we sang and waded in the stream was no breeze, rather the slow waking breath of the consuming Serpent.

  We talked our favorite old different sides of the same coin litany.

  “I’m eight and you’re eight.”

  “I’m eight and you’re eight; I like horses and you like horses.”

  “I’m eight and you’re eight; I like horses and you like horses; my name’s Miller and your name’s Miller.” Moena had added something I never knew.

  “How’d we get the same name?”

  “Your great-granddaddy give it to my great-granddaddy when he bought him.”

  All was in perfect, as ever and always, asymmetrical balance as we dried our blue tingling toes in the sun and Moena, a stalk of sweet straw wedged into the groove behind her singing tooth let slip that Beauty B. was making me a doll for my August birthday, a gypsy fortune teller from a magazine picture Mother showed her.

  We were imperious to assume August, arrogant to proclaim dominion over pasture, creek and wood. We held each other our most sacred protectorate, hopelessly confusing ourselves with each other.

  The straight up sun announced dinner which was what you called the big Saturday noon meal back then in Prince George in the country.

  Half past noon and our white sprawling house creaked amiably. The meal was still drifting onto the table. Saturday dinner was Hattie and Florence’s chore. Washed up, I sat down to await Hattie’s rolls. I vamped and blinked repeatedly at Father’s “Where’d you get to all morning, Eula?”

  Flossy spoke, nervously obsessed about dangerous railroad tramps which Mother rightly guessed came of reading trash novels. Mother off on a sermon about mental putrefaction and the wages of disobedience. Now she cut her eyes at Hattie who had charged several yards of expensive silk to Daddy without his permission.

  There was a distant booming like thunder. Fate was galloping towards us on horseback.

  Fate was galloping towards us, but silently.

  One o’clock. Dessert was peach cobbler. We lingered in the dining room, almost bilious and quite giddy and ignorant of the invisible threads of fate gathering and twisting and knotting up into a hard, thick noose.

  In the dying light of the day under the night God forsook us, before the shining gold mist of first dusk leapt into darkness, I sat nervously in the dining room waiting with Hattie for the doctor because Wee Mama had turned badly again. I was all dread and thrill to watch her die and do t
he grown-up things I dreamt of, washing the corpse, setting the hair, seeing her laid out in the beautiful box. It was already a brooding Paradise, sitting alone with Hattie, listening for the doctor in the chair with cracked wooden seat that pinched you if you stood up too fast. There was a long low rumble like distant thunder. Hattie asked if it was sprinkling.

  I went out on the front porch to see. It was a clear, windless night waiting for a moon. No, it wasn’t sprinkling.

  It was raining pure brimstone evil.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1 - Hezekiah (1941)

  Chapter 2 - Eula Pearl (1989)

  Chapter 3 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 4 - Hezekiah (1943)

  Chapter 5 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 6 - Hezekiah (1943)

  Chapter 7 - Heath

  Chapter 8 - Lily

  Chapter 9 - Heath

  Chapter 10 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 11 - Glen

  Chapter 12 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 13 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 14 - Hezekiah (1943)

  Chapter 15 - Lily

  Chapter 16 - Hezekiah (1945)

  Chapter 17 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 18 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 19 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 20 - Hezekiah (1946)

  Chapter 21 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 22 - Lily

  Chapter 23 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 24 - Hezekiah (1960)

  Chapter 25 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 26 - Lily

  Chapter 27 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 28 - Heath

  Chapter 29 - Hezekiah (1987)

  Chapter 30 - Dashnell

  Chapter 31 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 32 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 33 - Glen

  Chapter 34 - Heath

  Chapter 35 - Lily

  Chapter 36 - Moena

  Chapter 37 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 38 - Heath

  Chapter 39 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 40 - Heath

  Chapter 41 - Glen

  Chapter 42 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 43 - Dashnell

  Chapter 44 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 45 - Glen

  Chapter 46 - Hezekiah

  Chapter 47 - Moena

  Chapter 48 - Hezekiah

  Chapter 49 - Heath

  Chapter 50 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 51 - Dashnell

  Chapter 52 - Glen

  Chapter 53 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 54 - Lily

  Chapter 55 - Glen

  Chapter 56 - Dashnell

  Chapter 57 - Hezekiah

  Chapter 58 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 59 - Heath

  Chapter 60 - Lily

  Chapter 61 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 62 - Lily

  Chapter 63 - Hezekiah

  Chapter 64 - Heath

  Chapter 65 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 66 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 67 - Heath

  Chapter 68 - Lily

  Chapter 69 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 70 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 71 - Hezekiah

  Chapter 72 - Dashnell

  Chapter 73 - Heath

  Chapter 74 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 75 - Heath

  Chapter 76 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 77 - Hezekiah

  Chapter 78 - Rose of Sharon

  Chapter 79 - Eula Pearl

  Chapter 80 - Hezekiah

  1

  Hezekiah

  (1941)

  They 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.

  Cut your reason away from your pain and hold it out in front of you and follow it.

  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 mak
e 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.

  The gates of hell were opening. A black winged bat with the face of a child was looking in a book for his name.