Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  And we walked up again to the cemetery, and we counted forty-two headstones, some McAllisters but mostly Steeles, and then a few names like Shuman, and Gillespie, that showed up maybe only once or twice. And so many were babies. On some of the sunken places there were no stones at all. How many, I wondered to myself, had been born here in this house? How many died here?

  We picked some flowers on the hillside, we found an old bottle in the barn and filled it at the spout and had us an arrangement for the mantel. A lived-in touch. The sun was getting low, it was getting gloomy in the house. Ben Aaron had set out a couple of lamps and some matches but we had no oil.

  It was suppertime. The ants had carried off the last crumbs on the place. Of course we would not perish overnight; we might make it seven miles to town in the morning. But I was not going to enjoy explaining why I didn’t want to go to town this afternoon, when we were invited. And I had eleven dollars to last Lord knows how long. Well, I would sit out on the porch and watch the evening, I decided, and wait for a revelation. And I had just commenced to rock when here it came, up through the field from the river.

  It was a girl, this time. She was sitting astraddle of a mule, on a croaker sack, with her bare feet dangling down. We all went out to meet her. And it wasn’t just because I was lonely, but when I looked at that girl I thought at once, “This is the prettiest child I ever saw.” She had really gold hair, done up in plaits wound round her head, and her skin was a pale gold too, healthy, like she might spend time outdoors, but not burned brown. Even her eyes were sort of tiger-eye gold. She had on an old printed cotton dress, I guess made out of feed sacks, and it was gathered up around her knees. She sat up very tall and straight, like a lady; I figured she might be about sixteen.

  She was not one to waste words. “Mr. Steele come by and told me to bring you some supper,” she said. She handed down a bundle wrapped in a flour sack. “Be keerful of it,” she said, “they’s a jar of coal oil wropped up separate.” And she tugged the rein and the mule turned around to go.

  I hollered after her, “Where do you live?” I hoped it was close.

  “Up yonder,” she said. She pointed up the river over to the ridge, where the smoke I forgot to ask Ben Aaron about was still rising.

  “How far is it?” I said.

  “Three mile by the road. Not so far by the woods,” she said. All the time she was moving on. Then she stopped the mule and turned around and said, “I never got your name.”

  “Seneca Steele,” I said. She stared at me, and then slowly, it seemed like she looked pleased; it was hard to say.

  “Seneca Steele,” she said. “Mr. Steele never told me. What might you be to him?”

  “His cousin,” I said. “My father was born on this place, too.”

  “Y’ns better eat your supper,” she said. “Hit’ll be stone cold.” And she goosed the mule with her heels and was gone, leaving a wake in the weeds. I had been too rattled to ask her name, or thank her as earnestly as I meant it.

  We took the sack up on the porch, mystified, and pulled out a rag-wrapped quart of strong coffee, still real warm, a lard bucket of cooked white beans, with an onion sliced on top, and a thin flat cake of cornbread, covered with another clean dishrag. The jar of oil she had bundled in corn shucks, tied round and round with string, so it would not taint the supper.

  We found a few old dishes in the cupboard, and spoons in a drawer. We wiped them with a dishrag and poured beans into bowls. The children had never had coffee; Miss Lilah had been against it. This coffee would have stood alone. It had a good bit of sugar in it, that helped some, and we drank it out of cracked dusty cups, every drop.

  We filled the lamps with oil, and when we had watched the light fade behind the mountains and the stars come on, we lit one. It was like when the hurricane blew, Pet said, going to bed by an oil lamp. We lay in our glorious makeshift beds, making shadow figures on the wall with our fingers, and when the children slept, I blew out the light and lay there listening to the night, thinking about all that had passed that day.

  I was dreaming there was a terrible thunderstorm when I woke up, all turned around like you get in a strange place. The elements (or something) were really pounding on the house. It felt like the place was shaking down. I got up and went to the window. It was just getting light outside. You could still see a star or so; where I was looking the sky was perfectly clear. And there was this creaking and thumping again, and pound-pound-pound. Whatever was happening I figured it best to meet it with more clothes on. So I got myself together and went outside to see.

  I got out front just in time to see a figure disappear over the comb of the roof. And the pounding commenced again. I went around back, and there was a ladder up to the kitchen roof, and way up on the main house there was a man, nailing down shingles. I waved and hollered at him; he threw up his hand but he didn’t answer. Later I could see he had a mouth full of nails.

  I watched him work the width of the roof, smoothing all the ruffles, and then he hopped down on the kitchen like a monkey and loped along the ridge pole and down the ladder he came, with his hammer hooked in his belt.

  He was hardly any taller than I, on the ground. He had sandy red hair that stuck up like a rooster tail at the crown. He walked with a bowlegged, cock-banty swagger.

  “Where did you come from?” I said.

  “I come from up on the roof. Now I ax you the same question!” he said.

  “I come from out of the road,” I said. “Purely by accident.”

  “Yeah, I heared somethin’ about that,” he said.

  I guessed my cousin had told him, I said.

  “Oh, yeah, he come up-pair, t’ the house, gon’ get Rose to bring somethin’ t’eat down here last evenin’. Said he wanted me to come get t’is ol’ house in shape for you to stay. You gon’ stay?” he said.

  There was a little waking sigh in the trees, bending the new grass, rustling the dead. The rim of the sun topped the ridge.

  “A little while,” I said. “Yes. A while.”

  I asked him, was that Rose that came up last night? I could not get over that kindness.

  “Yeah, she got up a poke quick as she could,” he said. “Hadn’t milked yet. Felt bad about t’at, there being younguns. Brought y’ns some today.”

  “Is she your child?” I said.

  “The oldest,” he said.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Image of her maw,” he said. “Near smart as any man to work, I druther have Rosanner work wi’me as most men I know. ’Tween us we can really turn it out.” That seemed to be the important part.

  “I reck’n she’s a big help to her mother, too,” I said.

  “Her mother’s dead four year gone,” he said. The look in his eyes near burned me.

  “Left me and Rose four boys t’raise, oldest ’un seven,” he said.

  Then he cocked his head, and coolly looked me up and down, and his face brightened, and he said, “Have you got ar’ man?”

  “Yessir,” I said, real enthusiastic. “I’ve got one back in Charleston.”

  He grinned and looked right through me. I felt this little flutter of panic. And then I thought, well, shoot. And I hugged him and said thank you, for what he and Rose had done. And I asked him in the manner of his daughter, “And what might your name be?”

  “Coy Ray Wilcox,” he said, swelling up taller. “Wilcoxes on ’is river ’fore ever a Steele come up here. Why, we was here when Ive McAllister was still wearing dresses an’ a-blowin’ on his wind-bag, over the water. Wilcoxes was here to fight the war. Hell, Wilcoxes set up-pair on ’at ridge, where you’re alookin’, and watched God make ’ese ol’ mountains.”

  I was impressed. There was the security of neighborhood in that little breath of smoke up there, melting into the morning haze.

  “By the way,” Coy Ray said, “Rose sent you down some bread and coffee, too. I disremembered it till I reckon it’s cold.”

  Well, I would just gather up some sticks
and make a fire in the stove and warm it, I said. So I went about that, there was plenty of deadfall on the ground, and I broke up some sticks and took ’em and crammed ’em into the stove and stuck a match to ’em. And I ran to the spout and rinsed out a pot and came back and poured the coffee in it and set it on to heat.

  Coy Ray was back up on the kitchen hammering away when this clattering came down the road. Here came Cousin Ben Aaron, with a wagon and two big red mules. Coy Ray got down and ambled out to meet him. I watched; I thought just then to comb my hair.

  Ben Aaron got down and reached out a piece of window glass he had brought wrapped up in a quilt.

  “Any fool could see that’s too damn big,” said Coy Ray.

  “Any fool could cut it to fit,” said my cousin Ben Aaron.

  “Anybody but the damnedest asshole fool would’ve measured the goddam winder-hole first,” said Coy Ray.

  I opened the back door quietly as I could and slipped out on the porch. My cousin swept off his hat and raised his eyebrows and smiled his little smile around his pipe. He gave a sidewise look down at Coy Ray, it was like this great bird, here, studying whether it was worth its while to peck a little bug. “Mind yer damn fool mouth before the lady,” he said. He reached a glass cutter out of his pocket and threw it to Coy Ray. Coy Ray glared and stalked back up the ladder and disappeared over the overhang of the porch.

  My cousin leaned down and kissed my forehead, and we went into the kitchen.

  “Kids up yet?” he said.

  No, I said, even all the commotion hadn’t waked them.

  “Get ’em up,” he said. “I’m fixin to take you all to Nam’s.”

  “Did you not have to work today?” I said. I was not sure about lumberjacks’ business hours.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I’ve got to ride up beyond the Forks and do some figuring. I’ll leave you with Nam and you can spend the night. Or I’ll bring you back down here this evenin’, if it makes any difference.”

  I went and hollered the kids up from the beds, and sent them out to the spout to wash their faces.

  “Rosannah send you any coffee this mornin’?” he said.

  Mercy, I said, I bet I had burnt it up. ’Course I hadn’t, my twig fire had gone out at once. Ben Aaron laughed and went out and down into the cellar, and he came in with an armload of corncobs nearly gone to dust. He put them in the stove and lit ’em and took off the eye of the burner, and opened the damper, and the fire shot up around the pot.

  “That was the most beautiful girl I ever saw,” I said.

  “Rose? Yeah, she is right pretty,” he said. “Good girl, too.”

  “Must work like a dog,” I said.

  He got some cups and poured us coffee. “I would wish a lot better for her than she’s gettin’,” he said quietly.

  “I take it you don’t much care for Coy Ray,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “Whatever gives you a notion like that? Why we LOVE one another. The best of friends. He’s got on a case of the pouts at me right now, thinks I got the best of him on somethin’. But if we’da been meant to kill one another, Cousin, we’da done it long years before now.”

  He took a swallow of coffee and chewed on one of Rose’s biscuits, thinking. “I tell you one thing,” he said finally. “Whatever abody can say about Coy Ray Wilcox, there’s one more thing the truth. That sorry little bastard has got class.”

  8.

  FAMILY

  IT WAS NOT AS THOUGH THERE WAS NOTHING TO PUZZLE ABOUT then, starting out on another journey. But a perfect May morning in the Blue Ridge is something to celebrate, whatever else. I was too happy almost to endure it, I didn’t know quite why; the anticipation of that day, and beyond that day, was part of it. There were feelings I couldn’t put my finger on. We were destitute and on the brink of disgrace, but I had never felt so rich in my life as I did sitting up on the seat of that wagon, rattling off up that twisty road.

  There were all of those things I had wanted to ask my good cousin. But I had an idea that the things I wanted most to know would pleasure him most not to answer; somehow he was charmingly perverse. And at that moment nothing mattered.

  We had not seen these mountains yet except from the cove. Now, climbing, we looked out on them as far as we could see. Pretty soon we would look down on a lot of them, they would look like great wrinkles on the face of the earth. We were looking down on those little clouds of morning that cling to the streams and bottoms until the sun melts them away.

  We were climbing that wall that we had figured stood between us and the secrets of the universe. It was called the Hogback, Ben Aaron said; it had a razorback’s sharp spine, bristled dark with some kind of pines. The Hogback stood between the place he called “The Birches” and the north wind, he said; between that old house and the worst of snows, as well as commerce and traffic, good and ill.

  The road, such as it was, did not climb it straight up, of course. It crept up sideways, one switchback after another, up one hump, level off a few feet, and up again. There were places in it so narrow you looked over the side of the wagon and down on the tops of trees way below. The kids rode in the wagon bed. They were fascinated, not saying a word. I clung on to the end of the seat-board, un-obviously as I could, till my fingers turned white and went to sleep. I kept my eye on the rhythm of those big red rumps; they were not troubled by anything but horseflies that they swatted with their tails. My cousin held the reins sort of absently in one hand. He reached his other arm around my shoulders, and I tucked my head under his arm, and relaxed.

  The road had left the river, not far up from the house. There was no sound but hooves and wheels. And then around a bend there was a roaring, a booming, like an explosion that wouldn’t quit. We came to a wide place and Ben Aaron pulled up the mules and we looked down on the narrows. The ridge came to a short-off a hundred or so feet above the river. Another bluff, not so high, faced us on the other side. Between them at the bottom there might have been a gap of fifteen feet. And the river passed through it.

  “Did you hear the nar’rs in the night?” Ben Aaron asked. “Y’know, it’s not far from the house—just over the hill, beyond the graveyard, you go around a good wide bend and there it is.”

  You could come this way faster on horseback, or even on foot, he said; there was a ledge down there covered over with laurels, just above the river. An old game trail ran along there, but not wide enough to make a road.

  Well, I thought, HE might come that way. But as far as I was concerned, he could have it all to himself.

  We came down then into a dip, close to a calm place in the river, and there was a road going off to the right, over an old plank bridge and up the mountain. I asked him where did that go.

  “Up to the Wilcoxes’,” he said.

  “What do they live like up there?” I said.

  “Like Wilcoxes,” he said. He flicked the reins right sharply and the mules picked up speed.

  We had yet to cross that rocky backbone. The curves got tighter till the mules would be heading east while the rest of us were still going west. The sweat bees hovered around their slick damp hides. And then for just a few feet, we were on top. Or almost. There was a bald place to the left of us, and a little pedestal of rock that we had seen from down in the cove as the perfect outlook. We stopped here, among the laurel clumps and huckleberry bushes, I guess to listen at the wind. Ben Aaron took out his tobacco and re-packed his pipe.

  “All this you see…” he said. And I waited. And the wind blew. And the mules blew. But whatever he started to tell me he thought better of it. And finally he clucked to the mules and we moved on, going down.

  “I’ll bring you back up here another day,” he said. It was a much gentler slope we were going down than the way we had come up. Every now and then we could see the river below us, a streak of silver in a widening valley.

  I don’t know what made me think of it, but I asked him, “Where is Boney Creek?”

  “Down here, just a little way,”
he said. “What you know about Boney Creek?”

  Well, I said, I remembered Mackey telling me this story one time, about how some little boy in the family went out in the night, in his long white nightgown, and bridled his daddy’s dish-faced mare and rode her “clean to Boney Creek Bridge.”

  “Oh, way beyond!” said Ben Aaron. “Boney Creek was where I run into a bunch of ol’ boys comin’ down from Wilcoxes’, they’d had ’em a little dram or two and they were amblin’ along, goin’ home, and here we come, a-cloppity-cloppin’ right through the middle of ’em, mind this was inside a dark bridge, that ol’ mean mare an’ me. She had her a bad name already, she was so bad to buck and r’ar and kick. She’d done bit the finger off a hired man when he tried to bridle ’er.

  “Anyway, my folks would never have known a thing about that, except the next day one of them boys come up to my daddy at the mill with his eyes still this big, and he says, ‘I never knowed how mean that ol’ horse o’ yourn really was till I seed her last night with a demon on ’er back.’”

  “How old you reckon you were then?” I said.

  “Oh, five, maybe six,” he said. “I remember it. It was a pretty moonlight night. I’d been a-lyin, studyin’ about something, lookin’ out the window. All of a sudden I just couldn’t stand it. It was two or three o’clock, I guess, ever’body else dead to the world. And no reason not to go, nothin’ in the world out here to hurt anybody, day or night.”

  We crossed Boney Creek through the old covered bridge and descended into the valley, and the town of Caney Forks.