We Will Not Be Taken Alive (part I)

It was dusty then. The dust was everywhere. It scratched at our eyes when we walked to town. It got in our mouths and made sandpaper of our teeth and paste of our spit. It rained down upon us, a cruel unmelting snow that griped our kindling hair and caked on our callous faces.

It was windy then too, and the gales whipped the dust up in angry spirals before hurling it into mounds and chiseling the mounds into austere monuments. These unholy temples lined the road walls and the foothills, and grew and receded at the mercy of the fickle wind. A cathedral of sand and dirt that hand defied a direct passage in the morning would often be withered and impartial by the afternoon. And one sensed it was the very same dust that one rubbed from his eyes before sweeping it from his threshold. The dirt that had caked windows yesterday, clogged the well today. And always the sentry dust beacons watched from the foothills and the road walls, more patient than we.

Despite our best efforts, we consumed that dust. I fashioned a small scrap of muslin around Frank's small ears before I'd let him out of doors, but by the time he came in for his dinner the muslin was a clogged filter, laden and black and Frank would take to fits of coughing. Twice a day did I rinse the thin muslin, and three times a day, did it collect its filth, a dismissive tithing from an unapologetic wilderness. Our water was stale with the dust, and it left a perceptible film of micro-grit upon all of the potatoes, the plates, and the cups. At times I began to entertain the idea that we were made of dust, and that if we were not, we may be worse off for it.

At night, soon after I had fallen asleep, I would dream of darkened thunderclouds rolling up over the ridge line at the horizon victorious. They were low lying things, their bellies swollen with rain and electricity. My thirst was quenched. As the rain began to fall, it welled in the eyes of my father and of my neighbors. We danced in it. We shook it from our lips and our fingertips. It rolled cool over my skin with aquatic nutrition. This was benediction, baptism, a revival. Through the rain, I saw the smiles come back to the stern and the sorrowful. I saw color for the first time in our world. The fields were velveteen green and sunset pink apples dotted the orchard. Through the rain, in my dream, I saw life.

Long before I awoke the apparitions disappeared. A serpentine light coiled around the thin curtains covering the window and pried my eyelids wide. There had been no feast in the garden, no rain dance, no praise to our forgiving God. Just dust and wind and fear.

It was during this time, this drought that Samson was born and that Mama died...