Sacred Dust by David Hill Page B

Marjean’s all-day birthday party. The men came around eleven in the morning and they were drunk all over the backyard by two in the afternoon. The women laid out lunch, but none of them went near it. By suppertime, they were sitting in my kitchen with glassy eyes. Their loud talk had gotten low. There were eight or nine of them. Every few minutes one of them would rush off for another case of beer. It was just a matter of how muchbeer it would take to shut off the remaining decency in all of them. Men like that regard decency as an encumbrance.

    Several of the women including Marjean stood back a little, goading them on. I’m talking about small minded, tight jawed women who pinch their lips and roll their eyes and say “ nigger” with enough venom to kill every fish in the lake. There wasn’t a soul in my kitchen who didn’t know that something was fixing to happen.

    I had food here. I had a honey-baked ham and grilled chicken and potato salad and Waldorf salad and pies. I had cold cuts and relishes and deviled eggs and baked beans and cheese corn casserole. I could see by the way the men just picked at it, that they didn’t want it to get in their way. They were fueling their rage with alcohol. They wanted their insides to burn until the vapors from those fires rose over them, creating demons for them to conquer.

    I tried three times to pull Dashnell out of the room and talk some sense into him. He wouldn’t so much as look me in the eye. He’d just grunt the way men around here do at their women when other men are around. Then Jake says, “Let’s go up to the house to play cards.” We’ve all been with our men and their tomfoolery enough to know that Jake runs the show. Jake was giving them the high sign. Dashnell grabbed a fresh gallon of Jim Beam bourbon from over the stove and they were gone. No one thanked me for the meal they hadn’t consumed or explained why not. I was given to understand they were mobilizing on official business.

    We knew they weren’t about to play poker or five card draw either. Not before they’d sneaked out and done whatever evil they had planned. Suddenly we were like women in wartime, cleaning up after a rally, women wrapping the bloody deeds of absent men under Saran Wrap and stowing them out of sight. Later we felt like a coven sipping coffee at the table, and Marjean, Jake’s wife, started whimpering about how hard our men have it, how good our men are and all like that, like they were facing Hitler’s storm troops. All agreed, all nodded and pursed their lips and the air went out of the room. We talked on. We made conversation avoiding the topic at all cost. We drifted through Jeanine Thompkins’s new kitchen andwhat all was said at Sunday school and tried to act like they were really up at Jake’s playing cards.

    One by one we’d all say, “Marjean, we haven’t lit your cake. It’s still sitting in my deep freeze today. Every time I open that deep freeze and see that cake, oh, God.…”

    See, I knew by Dashnell’s denying about Carmen, I knew he’d be the one who’d feel the most entitled. From what Marjean told me later, I about had it right. They all went back to Jake’s after they did the thing. Marjean had gone home by then. She told me later that they came in ravenous. Jake had her pulling the cupboards bare trying to fill that emptiness it left in them. Meanwhile my kitchen was groaning with a week’s worth of cooking, half of which I wound up throwing away.

    Marjean said after the men gorged themselves at her house, Dashnell sat on her porch and told the men about Carmen. He must have told it right because Marjean says Dashnell went off crying by himself to the lake. She said the men let him go alone. Marjean said the men felt privileged to know all about it. She said a religious and brotherly feeling came over all of them. That went through me like a plutonium razor.

    What did my only son’s senseless death have to do with the deliberate and