Sacred Dust by David Hill

you need to know. She kept me crisp and clean and starched and combed. I came as a surprise at a time when Mother was past longing for motherhood. She had outlived the instinct.

    I believe I missed something, but I can’t deny that I’m a very strong woman. Looking at my declining years ahead, I’m thankful that I have the spine to face them. I don’t mean to sound like I have one foot on a cake of soap. I’m only fifty-three. That’s not old. But the die is cast. I’m past wondering if I’ll ever leave Dashnell or start back to school or even see Rock City. I won’t.

    I wanted to fence the yard when we moved up here but Dashnell says it’s not done at the lake. He was right. People wander on and off each other’s porches all day and half the night. Dashnell thinks the world of it, but I’m not used to that. I like loneliness. I like to sit in the quiet and watch the sun on the lake and sip my iced tea and hold on to a thought till it branches out and it blooms and eventually dies away to make room for another one. I like to remember voices and faces and what was said to me and what I said back or what I heard people say to each other. I like to study back on a situation and think what I should have said. I rarely get life right the first time.

    I have some peace in winter while Dashnell is at work. Most of the year there’s always Marjean or Lucille or Jarvis calling to me through my back screen door. I’m not one to sit and hen with the women. They make a fine art of filling the air with pretty wordsthat say less than nothing. They consider it next to sacrilege to express any idea they haven’t heard their husbands say. Mother is right when she says I’ve done an excellent job of hiding my brains from the world. I often think I was meant to be somebody else. I don’t know who she is exactly. I feel more like her when I’m alone. I’ve kept myself a secret from me all my life. I believe it’s because Mother never taught me how to live. Mother would say it’s because I’m mentally lazy. She has a reason for everything.

    I put up vegetables and I sew and they all laugh at me, but my idea of a good day is to bleach and iron sheets. They’ve all gone to printed no-iron polyester blended linens. I like plain cotton. I like the smell of the starch and the scrunching sound the iron makes as it presses all of life’s wrinkles away. I like to turn down the covers at the end of a day’s work. I like the hiss of a top sheet as it sticks ever so lightly when I pull it back away from the bottom one. I have always imagined it would be that way in a good hotel.

    When we buried our boy Carmen, I looked at Dashnell and I told him we had to go on. Period. I said now let’s don’t confound ourselves with the Lord’s will or time healing things. I says the hurt has made a big hole in our lives and we got to jump in that hole and learn to live in it. Period. I said, if you don’t, you’ll turn to liquor or we’ll turn on each other or away from life. I was making a brave, empty speech because Dashnell turned to liquor long ago and we both turned our backs on life the day we married each other.

    What I meant by those words was I had no idea how or what to do. Carmen was my only brush with life, my only accomplishment. All my dreams were secondhand. Whatever Carmen wanted became my dreams. I suppose I was asking Dashnell to look inside himself and see if there was some courage or compassion he had overlooked. It was the only time I ever asked Dashnell for help. It might have been the only thing real that ever passed between us. All our lives together before and after that, he’s played the stronger and I’ve played the fool. It terrified him.

    He sold the house in North Birmingham and got on up here with KemCo. Dashnell won’t talk about the why and how of things. They are simply the way they are. You don’t pick at them.

    We had no clear call to leave North Birmingham, and as much as I despised it, it was