Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  The first sign of life we passed was an old church hugging the foot of the mountain on the left of the road. It needed paint; its old double doors sagged open and leaves had blown inside. Doves flew out of the steeple as we went past. The ravellings of a broken bell-rope fluttered in the breeze. Behind it there was a graveyard, all gone to wild things now; wild azaleas bloomed among the stones. The ground was fairly rose with crane’s bill. I made out only one name as we passed. It was McAllister.

  A chiseled marker in front said PISGAH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH FOUNDED 1794.

  “How sad that is!” I said to Ben Aaron. “What happened?”

  “New church,” he said.

  The new church was maybe half a mile ahead, at the beginning of the one paved street in Caney Forks. It was all stone and stained glass and it had a copper spire. Its lawn was walled up with carefully mortared stone and the grass was neat and all one shade of green. Nobody seemed to have been buried there; maybe it was too new. Maybe they did not want it cluttered up. There was one of those glassed-in arch-shaped signs out front. This was All Saints Episcopal Church.

  Across the street a few yards down, there was the Caney Forks Drug and Sundry Store, with the name of Ansel Shuman, M.D. lettered in black-rimmed gilt in an upstairs window. Ben Aaron stopped there and gave me the reins to hold while he went in to get some tobacco. That gave me a nice chance to study the landscape. And I must tell you what there was, back across the street, next to the church yard.

  There was a house over there, on about a city block of land. It was a terribly large house, painted white, with more columns than the Parthenon. I guess as a nod to other cultures, it had a turret at either end, each capped with a sort of onion dome, and there was an imposing summer house in the yard built in the manner, somewhat, of a pagoda.

  My eye was captured by the entry to the place, it was an arch of wrought iron grapevines that sprang from behind two granite pillars. Stone peacocks perched on the pillars; little painted stone darkies, in red jackets and caps, held lanterns faithfully at their bases.

  There were more, let’s say, engaging features about the lawn. A decorative windmill turned its arms by a spring-branch Zuyder Zee. Nearer the street, there was a pool, fed by a pipe only partly hidden by the concrete body of a cherub, who held up a tilted pitcher, spilling water into the gaping mouth of a concrete dolphin frozen in midleap. A pink plaster flamingo stood on one bent iron leg, admiring itself in the water. A family of fake deer, with wide enameled eyes, paraded across the grounds as silently as only stone can do.

  I was all wrapped up in this vision when Ben Aaron came out of the drugstore carrying a bunch of ice cream cones.

  “You want to go on a tour of the city before we go to Nam’s?” he said.

  “Exciting!” I said. Something mean was burning the tip of my tongue. “How about if we start with that tacky-palace over there?”

  Ben Aaron threw back his head and hollered and howled and whooped and laughed. He rocked and roared. We took those ice cream cones before he spilled ’em.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said, “it’s grand. It’s superb. Who lives there?”

  “Beats me,” said Ben Aaron. He climbed up and took the reins and we proceeded on through town.

  The air was clear and soft and full of the smell of sawdust. We surveyed the commercial district: “Tatum’s General Merchandise, Founded 1792,” said our tour guide. “Original stock of fly-specked candy, yellow birthday cards and dried-up purgatives now on sale at full price.” There were a couple of benches in front of the store and a half a dozen town elders in overalls sat on them, keeping careful watch on the street. Ben Aaron waved his ice cream at them. They were plainly interested in us.

  We waved at Tom Joe Brock, standing in the doorway of his barbershop. “Cut your throat in a card game,” said my cousin, under his breath, about Tom Joe Brock.

  He tipped his hat at some ladies coming out of the Caney Forks Cafe. Their response was to study us intently, moving a corner of their mouths in quiet, shared remarks.

  “The Bank of Caney Forks,” said Ben Aaron. That and the drugstore were the only brick buildings on the street; everything else was frame and sort of propped-up looking. We clopped by Hambright’s Feed and Seed, and the blacksmith shop, and the Caney Forks Coal Yard-Ice Plant and Filling Station. The pavement ended.

  But the road went on, dirt, lined now on either side with little houses, more like cabins, all lots alike, some out of logs, some frame. There were dozens of them. Little kids played in the yards in the sun. Women hung their wash on lines front and back and visited on porches. Ben Aaron waved at them as we went by; they waved and hollered back as though they were all friends. I started to ask him was this where he lived but did not.

  And then we came to a ramshackle sprawl of boards and corrugated tin; it might have been a warehouse, a big one. It seemed to cover acres. Plumes of smoke and steam rose from its stacks and chimneys. Flickers of light and thumps and whines of machinery came through the cracks. It smelled delicious.

  “You want to see where I work?” said Ben Aaron.

  “Don’t you work in the woods?” I said.

  “Sometimes do, sometimes not,” he said. “Have to come in here, when the flour gets low, and pick up m’pay.”

  We went through a gate, into a compound of sheds and ponds full of floating logs and mountains of sawdust and piles of slabs and stack after stack of lumber. A young man coming out in a shiny yellow roadster pulled over to let us pass. He leaned out to speak very nicely to Ben Aaron and smile nicely at me.

  “Slick lawyer,” Ben Aaron said. “Slick and dirty. Best kind.”

  A locomotive sat puffing, going chunk…chunk…chunk while a bunch of men loaded lumber on a string of stake-sided flatcars. We bumped over the track in front of it. I felt a shudder start at the back of my neck and go down to my fingers and toes; it was peculiar. We went on and stopped in front of a bad-looking old building.

  There was a sign by the front door that said, CANEY FORKS LUMBER CO. I. AND D. STEELE AND SONS LOGGING LUMBER MILLWORK.

  “Mackey was one of the sons, you know,” said Ben Aaron. “Worked here till he was twenty-three.”

  “And you were the other one,” I said.

  “I was eight years old when your daddy left. Looks like a eight-year-old’s piece o’ management, don’t it?” he said.

  Way up the track, in a long tunnel of pines, another engine blew. I linked my arm through his and held his fingers very tight. We watched it come laboring in, ringing its bell, pulling half a dozen cars of logs onto a siding.

  “No,” he said, “our daddies were both alive back then. They were great gentlemen, both of ’em. Knew about as much about business as a tumblebug knows about grand opera. Never figured they had to know; they owned timber. Mack was the one had the gift. He made the wheels turn here; it was a long dark time after he was gone.”

  I was about speechless. “You’ve kept it,” I said finally.

  He sighed and squinted straight ahead and sucked his pipe. “I did what I thought I had to do,” he said.

  He sat up straight then and clucked at the mules. “Let’s us get on over to Nam’s,” he said, “it’s a-gettin’ dinner time.”

  He took a road that turned up through the mill village and cut back south, skirting the town. It seemed to be the residential street, the street of old white houses and gray houses and a brick house or two, with wide cool porches that looked out across the valley, with willow trees and quinces and snowball bushes in their yards, and latticed well-houses, and their clotheslines all politely in the back.

  We came to one on a corner, back near downtown, that was dazzling, fresh-paint white, like a three-layer wedding cake. We stopped in front of its picket fence and Ben Aaron got down and draped the reins over a post and we alighted. Golden bells poked through the fence. Budding roses trailed over it. Ben Aaron hesitated a minute with his hand on the latch of the gate. This was the old McAllister house, he said. Not the real old o
ne—that one was burned during the War Between the States by Union-serving neighbors whose names (even their descendants’) were never since mentioned in this house, not even today. “We don’t even th’ow up a hand when we meet ’em in the road,” he said. He was smiling but I felt like he meant it.

  This was a house of the age of gingerbread. It had a frilly porch around three sides, every banister and post turned and joined to look like lace on a petticoat. It had high steps going up, with spirea bushes drooping white by the railings. The ceiling of the porch was painted sky blue. There was a fan light over the front door, and an oval glass panel in the door itself. Ben Aaron opened the screen door and knocked and hollered, “PunNAMMER…hey, PunNAMMER! Come looky here!”

  We could feel the light approach of feet, very fast for someone eighty-seven. A face appeared then in that oval glass, it was a person not nearly as tall as I, a tiny, blue-eyed person with black hair skinned back in a bun and little gold spectacles on her nose. Ben Aaron stood back as she flung open the door, and we were face to face.

  It was another frozen moment. She clapped her bony hand over her mouth and stared. “In the name of the Lord, Aaron, what stunt are you pullin’ on me?” she said. Her chin was trembling.

  He answered her in a high, cracking voice. “Mack’s girl,” he said. And he turned away, then, I guess he could not bear the sight of women just boo-hooing.

  Finally, when I turned loose of her, she stepped back and pulled down her upper lip and wiped her eyes on her apron, and flipped up her frock and blew her nose on the hem of her petticoat.

  She looked at me again, more calmly. “They law,” she said, “she does so favor Daisy…”

  “She does that,” said Ben Aaron.

  9.

  REVELATIONS

  “WOMERNSES, WOMERNSES, A-KISSIN AND A-CRYIN’,” BEN AARON said. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose quite loud. “I reckon I’m a-gonna have to cook my own dinner. These younguns and me’s eat nothing but biscuit bread all day.”

  “G’won, then, go to it,” Aunt Nam said. “Sass will get you nothin in this house but a whippin’.

  “Come on in the house,” she said, for we were still clustered on the porch. She smothered up the children and made over them; “What a pretty child, Lordamercy. And such a big fine boy. Handsome! Favors us some, don’t he?” I saw that he certainly did.

  She tripped off through the parlor, it was a regular Auntie parlor, all that dark wood and faded rose damask and shelves full of gimcracks. We followed her through the dining room and into the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of woodsmoke and strong soap and coffee and green things boiling with fat meat. She chunked another piece of wood in the stove and took up the lid off an old black pot, and the steam rose off about a gallon of pole beans, simmering on the back of the stove.

  “Were you looking for somebody to come to dinner?” I said.

  “Nobody but Aaron, he generally comes ever’ day or two when he’s not gone someplace,” she said. She put on slabs of ham to fry, and made up cornbread, scoops of meal and pinches of salt and soda and unmeasured calculations of buttermilk and grease and dumped it in a hot black pan to bake, talking all the time.

  “You come up to So-Fier’s last night?” she said.

  “Hmm?” I said.

  “She come in down at The Birches,” Ben Aaron said, answering for me.

  Nam stopped in mid-stir and peered at me, frowning. “How in the world?” she said. I told her the highlights of our coming, and Ben Aaron told her how he had found us. He told her he had gone down there to see what the storm had done, and found something had blown in, instead of blown away.

  We touched lightly on the odd things about it, and there was a thoughtful little silence while she poured hot water from the kettle into the coffee pot and dumped in a scoop of coffee and set it on to boil. It was, right then, one of few things, as I would find, upon which Aunt Nam ever reserved comment.

  “You stopped by So-Fier’s on the way up then this mornin’,” she said, throwing that puzzle out again.

  “No…I don’t know,” I said. Ben Aaron opened his mouth to say something but didn’t, and went back to studying the toes of his boots. “We stopped a couple of places,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “Darlin’, if you ever went there you’d of knowed it,” she said, with the merriest glint of malice. “It’s the showplace of the town.”

  “Captain, do you and Sis like horses?” Ben Aaron said, plainly uncomfortable. Hugh gave him a sort of tired smile and a nod, but I don’t think it would have mattered if the child had said, No, they petrify us both. Ben Aaron was going to say, “Well, come on, let’s go over to the stable,” anyway.

  “No, you don’t!” Nam said. “Don’t you leave this house. This dinner is ready to put on the table.”

  She went to the pie safe and got out a platter of fried apple pies and some cold biscuits. She got jars of chowchow and molasses and jam and peach pickles from the pantry and went out on the back porch, to the ice box, for a jar of milk. She poured coffee in the pan with the ham to make gravy, and dished up the dinner, and we went to the dining room and sat down in state.

  She squinched her eyes and dropped her chin and began to pray, “Lord make us thankful for these and all thy blessings we ask it in Jesus’ name Amen. And Lord I thank you for my children.” Then she made us eat. And we did.

  I sat there chewing on a piece of cornbread dipped in molasses, thinking this outdid all the Thanksgivings and Christmases of my life rolled into one. We talked about our lives as though we had lived them together and had parted only days ago. We told things we remembered about Mackey; I felt real warm and good that I remembered so much, and that they were so anxious to hear it.

  We got up for more coffee and went through the whole plate of pies. The children slipped out and went to sit in the porch swing, and we talked on.

  A worrisome thing was preying on my mind, even while we laughed and dwelled on pleasant subjects. Plaster deer and flamingoes marched across my conscience. I knew I shouldn’t but finally I asked, timidly, “Who is So-Fier? Is she some of our kin?”

  Aunt Nam looked at Ben Aaron sidewise, frowning. Ben Aaron looked down at his plate. Very quietly, he said, “She is my wife.”

  It was clear, right then, the insult I had handed him, back in front of the drugstore. I was mortified. “Oh, I am so sorry!” I said. “I mean…” I knew the more I said the worse it was going to get.

  But he was smiling at me, a smile I never forgot. It was a tight little flat-mouthed smile; his eyes were smiling, really sparkling. And then he told Nam what I had said about the house he had built for Sophia, his wife, and he started to laugh and the dishes rattled. Nam clapped her hands together and then held in her teeth and laughed. I never thought it was funny in the first place, but being sure I was forgiven, I laughed too, knowing full well I should be ashamed.

  He got up from the table then, still grinning, and hitched up his britches and said he’d better go. “I’ve got to ride up on Wolfcreek and look about a boundary somebody wants to sell,” he said.

  “How big a boundary?” Aunt Nam said.

  “Oh, ’bout six hundred acres.”

  “Timber or land?”

  “Both. Said it’s a right smart of walnut and red maple,” he said. He emptied his pipe and stuck it in his pocket and lit up a cigarette. He was talking business.

  “What they want for it?” Nam said.

  “Said they want fifty dollars an acre. It’s heirs, wantin’ all they can get.”

  “What’ll ye give?”

  He raised his eyebrows and studied his fingernails. “I’ll not give that, for danged sure. I may give thirty-five, I don’t know. Don’t know if I’d have it atall. That’s long-time Harkins land. I never lost nothin’ up there…”

  He sauntered toward the parlor and turned back, in the doorway. “Y’uns need to go back down for anything this evenin’?”

  “No, they don’t,” Nam said. “They’re
here till I talk ’em to death. G’won about your bidness. Stay the night up there, why don’t you?”

  “I’ll take my blanket then,” he said. He came back and kissed us both on the face and took his leave. I heard him holler goodbye to the kids as the wagon rattled away.

  We cleared off the table and covered up what food was left and put it in the safe. The icebox at Nam’s, I learned, was for ice. And milk and butter, in warm weather. She poured a kettle of scalding water in the dishpan and rubbed a rag on a block of homemade soap and commenced to wash the dishes. “Tell me,” she said, “how did Mack die?”

  I had always wondered, I said, did anybody really tell them he was gone. She said, “Well, the way it was, the day when Ive took sick, Ben Aaron sent your daddy a telegram and told him please to come. Ive was groanin’ ever’ breath, ‘Mack…Mack…’ We got no answer, got no answer. And Ive died. And Aaron sent again, said, ‘Your daddy’s gone. Come home.’ Mack never came, and we never heard. In just a few days then, Daisy, she passed on…” Big tears were dripping in the dishwater.

  “Ben Aaron said that mornin’, ‘Don’t you lay Daisy in the ground till I get back here with Mack Steele.’ He went to Red Bank and got on the train and went to Charleston. Didn’t nobody hardly have an automobile then, you know.

  “He got down there and he found the place where you all lived, said they wadn’ nobody in Mack’s family home but an old nigger man come to the door. Good ol’ man. Said tears come in his eyes when he said, ‘Why Mr. Steele’s done been buried now two weeks.’ Said your ma had took you and gone to Paris France, to get it off her mind. And in the meantime, I think it was that very day that Ben Aaron went, a letter come from your ma, said only that Mack had died, said she was in such a state she had to get away. I wrote her after that, asked her to come and let us see you both. But I never did hear from her again. Aaron did, I know; they had some business back and forth.

  “But tell me,” she said, switching back, “tell me how it was he died?”

  I told her, all of it, as I have told you; it was pain, for I had carried it all those years, for there’d been no one to tell it to before.