Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  It was the end, we knew it. I had done an unpardonable wrong. And this was the price we all would pay.

  5.

  REUNION

  IT WAS MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY.

  I knew it because the hole in the top of the car was our observatory. I remember telling the children sometime in the night to look up—out there in the hopelessness there were stars.

  Once I know I whined out loud, “Foots, turn out that light—it’s in my face.” It was the moon; I was immobile, with an arm around each child and my feet against the back of the front seat to keep us from sliding off. Water seemed to come in from everywhere. It was way up in the floor, rippling in the moonlight like some dark channel.

  The children had been very quiet. They were resigned, poor little things. I would drift away and groan and wake up. It was gruesome; it was real.

  And then the blackness faded, and the stars faded. The sky was getting gray. I felt the children’s warm breath with my cheek. They were alive, and more’s the wonder, cold and wet as we were, they were sound asleep. I eased myself up and worked up my nerve, and I rubbed the breath-fog from the window, and looked out.

  Gray water was swirling around us, gurgling over rocks. It didn’t look very deep; I thought it might be below the bottom of the doors. The ocean at our feet was mostly drained away. I let loose of the kids as gently as I could and climbed over the seat, stiff as a board and aching like a rotten tooth from head to toe. The dregs of the flood were trickling out a hole in the front floorboard. If we’d had a watermelon on the floor we would have lost it. Under the hole dark gray water swept bubbles and leaves along, spinning them in little whirlpool dimples.

  I tried the door on the right side; that was downstream. But there was something against it. So I tried the driver’s side. It was bashed in, and jammed. The window was jammed. Dull light was coming through the roof; that raggedy hole in the top was going to be it. So out I climbed, bellying over the windshield and onto the hood. There was a silty torrent lapping at the running board. It made me dizzy. I perched out there like a kingfisher till I made myself quit looking down. The hood was sprung, but it was a good vantage point.

  We were in a fairly level little place in the stream bed, but the course upstream was steep enough, I could see, to create a regular horror in a hard rain. There had been tremendous wind in that storm, for there were tangles of broken limbs along the bank. Pieces of the bridge had jumbled with brush to make a little dam beside the car.

  We were butted into the bank. Nearly as high as the top of the fenders, the weeds were flattened like arrows in the mud, pointing downstream. I couldn’t see how we didn’t swamp. A few feet below us, the stream disappeared over a little ledge, and fell oh, maybe fifteen or twenty feet and ran a few yards further to the river. We might have been halfway back to the Atlantic Ocean by now, traveling by river bottom; we might have been well on our way back to Charleston, except that a fallen tree had caught us, and held us fast.

  I needed to find out where we were. There were willows drooping from the top of the bank, so I grabbed onto one and it showered my misery with cold water while I climbed up, digging my bare toes in the mud. It was like rising from the dead.

  I crawled over the edge, grabbing onto the sod, and stood up in a sea of meadow grass. To the left, between two hills, the moon looked like half a pearl in a pewter bowl of sky. The meadow rolled downhill to the right, to woods and the river. Beyond that, over the ridges that sheltered the cove to the east, little clouds drifted up wispy and pink.

  There was no sound but the river humming and the branch where we nearly drowned chattering sweetly. It was the stillest place I had ever seen. And then all of a sudden right at the hem of my dress, a speckled little bird fluttered up from the grass and flew in spirals, higher and higher, and when it was a tiny fleck in the sky it began to sing, “See you—see heeeere…” The lark was waking the world.

  I thought right then that I must have been wrong. I must be dead, really. This must be Heaven. I must have been forgiven. Except that I never had thought Heaven would be cold. Or that you would hurt when you got there. My legs were about to kill me.

  I climbed back down to the car, reversed the acrobatic stunt to get in, and woke up the children. “Arise, shine, for our light is come!” I said. They stared at me like damp little owls, not knowing whether they would ever take my word again. But they clambered out.

  “Is this Grandpa’s?” Hugh said, rubbing his eyes.

  And Pet said in a flat, defeated voice, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  We stood in the grass and tried to get our bearings. There was no road in sight. “Was there a road last night?” Pet said. Indeed there was, I said, but I wondered too. We headed up the branch, and after a while we came to some splintered stubs of old timbers that used to be the bridge. Now we must decide which way we would walk for help.

  “Which way did we come?” Pet said. I wasn’t sure, till I saw that the bushes in the ruts across the branch were broken.

  “We came that way,” I said.

  “Then I want to go back that way,” she said.

  “You want to try to go back to town?”

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  I thought about that old man we saw with his cow. That was halfway back to Red Bank. But I wondered, did he have a house back there somewhere? Was he real? I thought, if he was real and he had a house, I bet he had a fire, too. And a pot of coffee. He wasn’t friendly but he was a bird in the hand. I kind of sided with Pet.

  Hugh was shuffling around in the mud. He had a problem of his own. “I’ve got to use the bush,” he said.

  “Well don’t be so prissy, go on!” I said. “Find you a bush, nobody’s looking.”

  “Don’t leave me,” he said. He went off up the road, crow-hopping, while we took care of ourselves the same way. I really was scared to pull my skirt above my knees. I didn’t want to look at my legs. I didn’t want to know how black they were. Black as ink. If I wasn’t walking on ’em I would have declared they were broken. I guessed the steering wheel had done it, when the car went down.

  But Hugh came back looking smug. “I want to go this way,” he said, pointing the way he had just come.

  “Why? We don’t know where it goes,” I said.

  “We can ask somebody,” he said. “There’s a house up there.”

  I could have cried. “Well for pity’s sake,” I said. “Go! Shoo! Move!”

  They ran. I hobbled along behind them, praying these people would help us.

  As we topped that little slope I could see the house, up on a rise to the right. A big house, catching the rising sun in its face, shielding its eyes with great porches, upstairs and down. It was not painted; it was weathered to the shade of the bluffs behind it. The shingles of its roof were curled and rumpled like the feathers of some big gray wind-ruffled bird, and five tall chimneys towered over them. Oh, what a house!

  I imagined that a regal old lady lived there, with her servants. No—a happy family lived there. Ladies rocked on those porches, in the heat of the day, making tatting. Children bounced and wallowed over those unbounded acres and soared in swings under that big tree.

  Pet and Hugh were out of sight, the road was bending, but I could hear them hollering back and forth, excited, and a flock of partridges rose whistling as they passed. The people of this house, I was sure, loved larks and partridges. That was why they didn’t cut their grass.

  In between the children’s tracks I spotted some dainty, pointed hoofprints I figured must be deer. They were fresh, certainly since the rain. Somewhere in this meadow, deer were watching us. Were the people in the house looking at us, too? I felt like they were and it made me feel sort of warm. Certainly they saw us. And people came this way so rarely, they’d be glad. And we’d be glad.

  They were not up yet. There was no smoke from their chimneys. Maybe they didn’t mind the cool. But I was sure they’d make a fire for us.

  The road cut around rig
ht close to the porch, and there were steps going up the bank. The children got nearly there, and stopped, looking up, and I caught up with them.

  Creeper climbed thick on the chimneys. Seedlings pushed up between the boards of the front steps and lilacs drooped in great clumps along the banisters. Upstairs, there was a broken window, and while we looked in awe, an owl swooped into the hole.

  We took each other’s hands and went ahead.

  The steps were solid enough. Our feet rang on the porch floor. I knocked on the door and waited, and knocked again. The echo bounced through the house but there was no answer, and we waited, and there was no other sound except our breathing, and all around us the waking of birds.

  We looked in the windows, then. There was a big room, with sunshine streaming in the side windows, but no furniture at all. We went to the other side of the porch and looked in, and in that room, it was very big, there was a huge stone fireplace. But no furniture.

  What we all knew, and nobody wanted to say, was that there was nobody, nobody at home.

  Bees were beginning to work the lilacs. The air was sharp and light and full of new sweetnesses, of clean wetness and field grass and ancient timbers warming in the sun.

  “I guess we should walk on,” Hugh said. He was trying pitifully hard not to cry. I didn’t want to tell him that I couldn’t walk far enough to find anybody more than a city block away.

  “We haven’t looked around back,” I said. “We haven’t looked down at the barn. Maybe down there, maybe at the sheds there’ll be some sign of life.”

  We went around on the sunshine side. A monstrous fig bush huddled close to the chimney. It was knotty with buds of figs that one day the birds would enjoy. There was a long kitchen wing on the back, with its own chimney at the end and a porch all around. At its angle with the main house lilacs sprawled all over, tall as the eaves and bowed to the ground, some branches, bent by the weight of their flowers.

  No one answered at the kitchen door, either.

  Our mouths were like cotton. There didn’t seem to be any well, but there was a trough that came almost to the back porch, and it looked like it was meant to carry water. Now it was dry, a cradle for drifted leaves, and the moss that had grown in it was black and curling. Weeds grew in the spillway that had carried the runoff. Leaning up against the sluice there was an old black iron wash pot, the kind with legs. A spider was living in it, working on her web. We followed the sluice uphill a way and found where one of its supports had rotted and left a joint gaping. Spring water was streaming through the hole; it had made itself a new little channel where it hit the ground. It was like ice and clear as diamonds, and we caught it in our hands and drank.

  “What are we going to do?” Pet said.

  I said I thought that for the time being, we ought to stay right where we were.

  “Here?” Her poor little tired face said I was crazy, but she talked matter-of-factly, as always. “What will we eat…?”

  “There ought to be something we can salvage, in the car,” I said. Part of what we had I knew would be ruined, but maybe some was not. So the children ran ahead, and when I got back down to the branch, they were already mining the back seat. Pet was handing stuff out the hole in the top to Hugh, on the hood, and he handed it up to me, on the bank. They took great pride in their finds:

  “Two cans of (pew) sardines! A can of Vienna sausage! A can of tea! A box of wet crackers! Six chocolate drops.” (All that paraffin made ’em waterproof.) “Three brown bananas…!” We would not starve that day.

  We had no matches; we couldn’t make a fire, and anyway we had no pots. I could only yearn for that tea. But we sat down on the bank, with little wild things blooming all around us, asked the blessing, and had our breakfast. I knew the kids were wondering the same as I was about where the next would come from, when this was gone. But they said nothing, and we delighted in what we had, and the sun shined on us and warmed us and we began to feel alive.

  “I tell you what,” I said. “That is such a pretty old house I know it belongs to somebody, and maybe they come sometimes to see about it. I know they wouldn’t mind if we took our stuff up there and dried it, and rested awhile, where we could get out of the rain if it started again. Then when we feel better we can walk out.”

  We were warming to adventure; we went about this squatting with conviction. The kids climbed down again and began handing out blankets and pillows and loose clothes. The suitcase was full of water and it weighed a ton. Just as I thought we’d never get it up, a hole came in one end and the water squirted out, along with underpants and socks and things I decided we’d not miss.

  “What else do we get out?” they said.

  I knew now there was no hope for the car. “Everything,” I said.

  The spokes on the left front wheel grated on the rocks as the unloading party moved back and forth. The other angled under, pigeon-toed. The grill was smashed back into I didn’t know what; the lights were broken, and some part of its entrails lay under the running board, with the water rippling over it. Had I been able I would have wept for this noble friend and servant. But I was not.

  We divided up our plunder and started for the house. We left the suitcase for another trip; we needed the food, and Pet stripped a pillow case to hold it, and we needed to dry the blankets. We noticed much more, carrying that wet stuff, that we were climbing. Several times we stopped and dropped our burdens in the grass and rested. The day had gotten very bright and clear. On our left, the field went only a little way before it turned to woods, climbing greening slopes that rolled on into shadowy waves of mountains, like clouds against the sky. Ahead of us, the ridge rose sharply, at one point, almost straight up. It was bald on its crown, and sloped green and more gently toward the east. A natural lookout. You could see anywhere, I thought, from up there. But I would never make it, not that day. And I sure was not going to send the children by themselves. We would simply wait and see.

  We walked along gawking like tourists from the grand hotel. Blue-eyed grass twinkled in the ruts. Wild strawberries lifted their three-fingered hands to catch the sun and now and then there would be clumps of thrift that must have run away from a lady’s garden.

  It was, I said, the most beautiful place that I had ever seen.

  We came again to the house, and it was our duty to knock three times again, but nothing happened. Nobody came. Snatches of rail fence that one time must have kept in cows would do fine for a clothesline, we decided, and we draped them with our worldly goods. We spread the edibles out on the porch with a feeble hope the crackers would dry, and the bees commenced to swarm on the bananas.

  Pet and Hugh flopped on the steps, exhausted. I stretched myself out on the warm planks of the porch, in the sun, and squinted out across the landscape, listening to the bees humming, and humming…And they were a woman, singing some quiet, happy, work-a-day-song, in the lightest, floating voice, softly, sweetly…

  When I sat up the sun had moved across the cove. The gum tree cast its shadow now toward the river. “Children?” I said. They were curled up at the far end of the porch, still asleep. I don’t know what came over me, ladies never went into somebody’s house when nobody was at home. But I tried the doorknob, just lightly, you know, to see if it was locked. And the door opened slowly, for it was big and heavy, and I had to go inside.

  “Mama!” Pet said. I know my hair stood straight up. She was standing in the door, behind me.

  “Come on in,” I said. “I know there’s nobody lived here in an awfully long time.”

  She didn’t think much of such trespassing, but she woke up Hugh, so he wouldn’t wake up alone and be scared, and we went on a tour.

  There was a wide hallway, down the middle, with a staircase going up about halfway back, and at the end there was a door that went into the kitchen. On either side, the walls of the two big front rooms were paneled with some kind of pretty wood, but kind of dark. There were two rooms behind those that had the feel of ladies’ rooms; they were p
apered with fine old silky wallpaper, with roses that had faded and paled, trailing lilies turned yellow with age and smoke. Every room had its fireplace and each was different; the big rooms had wide hearths and mantels of stone and the smaller ones were made of brick, framed in wood that somebody had spent a long time carving with reeds and running vines. We didn’t go upstairs. Somehow that was presumptuous, even in here. But we went back through the hall to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was as big as a lot of people’s houses. It had its own fireplace, at the end, with a crane in it. There was a big, long, rough kitchen table, and benches, and a wood range, and wash pans hanging up, and a few pots. By the door that went out to the back porch and the spout, there was an old bonnet hanging on a nail. By instinct I reached and took it down. When I did a mouse squealed like it was murdered and jumped out and ran up my arm. And I squealed and danced, and the poor little thing hit the floor running. We looked inside the bonnet, and there was its nest of nibbled straw and cloth, and its little pink babies, and we lifted it out, carefully, and laid it in the corner where the mama cowered under a molding, with nothing showing but her tail, and I went out and shook the bonnet and clapped it on my head, ignoring the mouse perfume.

  We walked up the lot and into the barn, and of course the first thing Hugh saw was a blacksnake dozing in some hay as old as time, and he grabbed it and flung it at Pet and ran. And when she got her voice back she took after him, across the field, cussing like a sailor.

  There was at least, then, other life, of sorts, on this place.

  The smell got the best of me; I went to the run where the spring came down and washed the bonnet, and hung it on a post in the afternoon sun. I would need it, tomorrow, when we went abroad exploring.

  We went down to the car and got the suitcase, then, and carried it by turns one on either side. And we hung our clothes on the fence, and took down our blankets, for by mercy they were dry, and we sat down on the porch and ate our supper. It never occurred to us to look in the kitchen for a cup; we washed the sausage can and drank from it. We did go look for matches, while it was light enough to see, but we found none and decided to go to bed at dark.