The Testimony of Dust

The boy lay in the dark of the barn loft and did not move. Below him several men had gathered. Their voices rose through the gapped boards like prayers from a congregation that had forgotten God's name and learned older ones instead.

He had come to sleep in the hay in summer when the house held its heat like a kiln and his small room under the eaves grew close enough to suffocate. The loft released the day's warmth as evening came, and the smell of it—dusty and sweet and mixed with horsesweat and the ghost of last year's tobacco still hanging in the rafters like the smell of sin itself.

He had not known they would come and now it was too late to make himself known.

Three of them. Maybe four. The lantern they'd lit threw their shadows long against the stalls and the shadows moved wrong, moved independent of the men the way his aunt Lucy's shadow had moved wrong in the weeks before they found her in the creek. The horses stirred and one nickered softly, then fell silent as if it too understood what was being spoken below.

He pressed his face to the boards. One eye found the crack between them and through it he could see the lantern's amber light painting the walls in shades of old honey and rust and dried blood.

"I don't like it," said the first man. Virgil Cates. The boy recognized his voice. Sharecropper's son who'd married up and never quite fit the collar of respectability his wife's daddy had bought him. He was thin and stood with his hands deep in his pockets and he did not look at the others. He wore a coat too heavy for the season like he was cold even in August's dying heat.

"You don't have to like it," said another voice. Tate Brothers. Had to be. The boy had seen him at church last Sunday, singing the hymns louder than anyone, his voice cracking on the high notes.

"That ain't what I mean."

"I know what you mean."

The boy could see the one who spoke most. Silas Crowe. A man he knew too well. A man who had sat at his father's table every Sunday after church and broken cornbread and called his mother Sarah like they'd known each other since childhood, which they had. Who once lifted the boy onto his shoulders at the Independence Day fair to see the fireworks scatter red and gold against the summer dark. Whose family had owned the boy's grandmother and her mother before her, back when owning was still legal. Who liked to remind folks at the general store that his great-granddaddy had been colonel in the War and his granddaddy had ridden with Hampton's Red Shirts after.

Silas squatted now in the dirt and drew something with his finger. The others watched. A map perhaps. Or some shape that held meaning only for those who drew it. Some sigil, some geometry of intent. The dust was fine as ash, fine as the dust that rose from the roads in August when nothing had rained for two months and the corn stood brown in the fields and the revival tent preacher said it was God's judgment for the county voting dry but keeping stills in every hollow.

The boy could not tell what was drawn. He knew only that Silas's finger moved through the dust with the deliberation of his granddaddy signing the deed that had taken the boy's family's land after the bank failed in '29. That whatever was written there was being written also in some other place. Some ledger that recorded all such covenants and granted no absolution, not in this life or the one the preachers promised.

"It has to be tonight," Silas said. He wiped his finger on his trousers—the dust came away dark, almost black in the lanternlight—and stood and looked at what he had drawn. Then he scuffed it out with his boot like he was killing a snake.

The wind came then, what little wind moved in August, and shook the barn. The lanternlight guttered and the shadows swung wild across the walls. The smell of lamp oil thickened in the air and mixed with the smell of old tobacco and something else. Something like the smell that came from the Hendricks place after old Luther had been dead in his cabin for a week before anyone noticed.

The boy did not breathe. He lay with his ribs pressed to the boards and his heart knocking against them and the sweat running down into his eyes. A piece of straw had worked beneath his collar and it itched and drew a thin line of blood where it scratched but he did not move to free it. He understood without language that he had become a vessel for something he had not asked to carry. That his body was being remade into a reliquary for terrible knowledge, the way Brother Jessup said the saints' bodies had been hollowed out to hold holy relics, except there was nothing holy in what was being placed inside him now.

A fourth man spoke. He had been silent until now and he stood back from the lantern where the darkness pooled thick as molasses. The boy could not see his face but he knew the voice. Knew it from church, from the deacon's bench, from the Wednesday night prayer meetings where this man had laid hands on the sick and spoken in tongues. Deacon Marsh. Perhaps in that darkness he was only voice and intention now. A thing not fully formed until the deed was done, the way he said the Holy Spirit wasn't fully present until the congregation had worked itself into the proper frenzy.

"There's another way," Deacon Marsh said.

"There ain't."

"We could talk to him. Reason with him."

Silas Crowe turned and looked at where the voice had come from. His face in the lamplight looked carved from something older than flesh. Something quarried from bedrock.

"You think he don't know," Silas said. "You think he ain't been waiting for this. A man like that. Coming down here from up north with his college degree and his ideas about how things ought to be run. Telling folks their land could be worth more if they just organized. Like this was some union town in Pennsylvania. He knows what he's doing. He knows what it costs. He's known since before we knew ourselves."

Virgil spoke again, his voice thin and high. "His boy," he said.

"What about him."

"He's just a boy. Ten years old."

The words hung there. In the silence the boy could hear the katydids outside and the far-off sound of the freight train and the closer sound of his own blood in his ears.

Silas Crowe stood fully upright. Tall. His shadow climbed the wall behind him and broke across the rafters and in that breaking became something larger than any shadow thrown by any man. As if the darkness itself recognized him. Claimed him. Extended its kingdom through his silhouette the way his granddaddy's kingdom had extended through this county, through the deeds and debts and midnight visits that kept the colored folks in their place and the poor whites in theirs.

"There ain't no boys," Silas said. "There ain't no men. There's only them that do what needs doing and them that don't. There's only them that understand how things are and them that try to change it. You can choose which you want to be but you can't choose it twice and you can't choose it later. My granddaddy chose. My daddy chose. Now it's our turn."

Virgil nodded slowly. He did not look convinced but he took his hands from his pockets. He was ready now or as ready as he would be. In the lamplight his face looked like wet clay that might slide right off the bone beneath.

Outside an owl called and called again and the dark gave no answer. The boy lay still. His body had gone cold despite the August heat trapped in the straw, despite the sweat that soaked his shirt and plastered his hair to his skull. That coldness spread from his chest outward like frost in winter, and he understood it would never leave. It had taken root in him the way kudzu took root in the abandoned places, covering the old Marchbanks mansion on the hill where nobody had lived since the daughter hanged herself in 1911.

The men spoke of times and locations. They spoke of the county road where it passed through the Nickerson woods. They spoke of how a man driving home from a union meeting in Raleigh might be expected to slow for the curve there. They spoke of what hour the moon would set and how long it would take. They spoke of his father by name—James, they called him, never Jim, as if the formality made it something other than murder. As if calling a man by his Christian name sanctified the planning of his death.

What they spoke was the architecture of murder laid plain as the blueprints for a church. Each word a brick, each pause mortar. The structure stood complete in the air between them, as real as the barn that held them, as real as all the other structures they had built in this county—the segregated schools, the separate water fountains, the invisible lines that colored folks knew not to cross after dark.

The boy listened and the words entered him. They moved through his ear and down into his chest and there they took root. He felt them spreading through his body like jimsonweed through a cornfield. They would never leave. They would grow with him. They would flower when he was old, and the flowers would be poison.

Then they went out into the dark one by one. Tate Brothers made some comment about his wife wondering where he was and Deacon Marsh laughed, low and ugly, and said something about women not understanding men's business. The lantern went with them and the barn was black and the silence was not silence but the absence of something that had been there. The boy lay in the loft with the smell of hay and horsesweat and lamp oil and his own sweat gone cold on his skin. The knowledge coiled in him like a cottonmouth in the creek, patient and venomous and waiting.

He could hear the horses breathing below. He could hear his own blood in his ears. He could hear the katydids outside singing the same song they'd sung every August since before his father was born, since before the first white man came to this valley and looked at the bottomland and saw cotton growing there instead of the forests that already grew. These were the only sounds and they were enough. They were a kind of music if you had ears for it. The music of being alive in a world where such things could be spoken, could be planned, could be carried out under the same stars that shone on lovers and children and men who meant no harm.

He did not climb down for a long time. When he did the moon had risen and it fell through the slats in bars of pale light like the light that came through the windows of the colored church on Wednesday nights when he passed by on his way to somewhere else. He walked through them and they fell across his body like the bars of a cell that had not yet been built around him, though he understood now that the cell had always been there. That his father had been born into it and his father's father. That it was made of things older than iron, stronger than steel.

His legs were stiff and they did not feel like his own. They felt borrowed. Like the legs of whoever he was going to become. A stranger's legs carrying him toward a stranger's life.

At the barn door he stopped. Across the yard the house stood dark against the sky, charred-looking against the stars. A single window held light where his mother sat waiting. His father had driven to Raleigh that afternoon for the union meeting, would be driving home now or soon. Would take the county road like he always did. Would slow for the curve through the Nickerson woods like a man should. Would maybe be thinking about the speech he'd given, about how he'd told the assembled men that they deserved better, that their labor had value, that the old ways were dying whether the old families liked it or not.

There was no telephone that would reach him. The boy was ten years old. He could not drive.

He watched that window and it seemed a thing from another world. A world he had lived in an hour ago and could not return to. The window glowed amber with all he was about to lose. He was seeing it now as the dead see the living. From a great distance, across a divide that could never be crossed again.

His mother sat inside with her mending, her fingers moving in the old patterns her mother had taught her.

The boy stood there. His hand on the doorframe and the old wood dry and warm from the day's heat but already cooling. Sixty years it had stood. Seventy. It had been a doorframe when his grandfather was young, when the fields were still worked by slaves, when the war came through and burned half the county. It would be a doorframe after all of them were names on stones in the Baptist cemetery on the hill, if his father got a stone at all. If they found enough of him for a proper burial.

Somewhere out in the dark the men were riding. Virgil Cates in his too-heavy coat. Tate Brothers who sang hymns loud in church. Deacon Marsh who spoke in tongues. Silas Crowe whose very presence bent the dark around him. They were riding toward the county road, toward the curve in the Nickerson woods, toward the thing they had convinced themselves was necessity, was the preservation of a way of life that was already dead but wouldn't lie down. And his father was driving toward them.

He looked up at the stars strewn across the heavens in their slow eternal wheel. They burned on in their ancient patterns. They had burned over the plantations and the battlefields. They had burned over the lynchings and the night rides and the quiet murders that never made the papers. They asked no questions and answered none. They were beautiful—unbearably so—and their beauty was the same as their indifference.

He went into the house. His mother looked up from her mending and smiled at him and asked if he couldn't sleep. He said he couldn't. She told him to get some water and go back to bed, that his father would be home late and wouldn't want to wake him. The boy stood in the kitchen and drank the water. He went to his room. He lay in his bed and watched the ceiling and listened to the clock mark the hours. The stars turned in their slow machinery and somewhere on the county road the thing was happening or had happened or would happen soon.

He did not sleep. Toward dawn he heard his mother's footsteps in the hall, heard her go out onto the porch to watch for the truck that would not come. He heard her come back inside. He heard the silence that was not silence but the sound of her not knowing yet, the last minutes of her not knowing, and he lay still and did not go to her because he could not bear to see her face in the moment when the knowing came.

The sheriff's car came up the drive a little after seven. He heard the tires on the gravel, heard the engine cut, heard the car door and then the footsteps on the porch. He heard the knock. He heard his mother open the door and he heard the silence before the sheriff spoke, the silence that said everything, and then he heard the sound she made, which was not a scream and not a word but something older than language, something that belonged to the grass and the wind and the dark spaces between the stars.

The boy lay in his bed and listened to his mother wail, and the knowledge that had been planted in him the night before began to grow. He had not chosen this. There had been no test. He had only been a boy asleep in a barn who woke to hear his father's death being planned.

He carried it with him all his days like a stone in his chest where his heart had been. Sometimes late at night when sleep would not come he would feel it there, that weight, and he would know it was not a stone at all but a seed. That it had never stopped growing. That it would go on growing until there was nothing left of him but the thing it had made. Until he too was just another man shaped by this place, by its history and its violence and its terrible secret knowledge of what men will do to preserve a world that's already lost.