City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  “Yes, it is,” Ell said. “That’s my married name. My maiden name was Swierdza.”

  “What?” Wesley looked at her, trying not to laugh.

  “I didn’t say ‘weirdo’ if that’s what you thought,” Ell said. “Sweeeerd-zuh.”

  Wesley laughed politely at her attempt at a joke. “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s Polish,” she said.

  Their next stop was Hudson Lake Mall, where all the big department stores were, to get Wesley some clothes. Wesley picked out some underwear and socks and two baggy sweatshirts and an extra pair of jeans.

  “You need more than that,” Ell said.

  “No,” Wesley said. “I’m good.”

  “Are you sure?” Ell said. “The church put in some money to help out. Don’t be afraid you’ll break the bank.” She smiled at the young man; she remembered shopping for fall clothes with her own two sons, and this excursion made her happy.

  In the car on the way back to the Myerses’ house, Wesley’s thoughts jumped all over the place as they drove through the unfamiliar landscape, the suburbs, the unfamiliar trees and roads. His mind was a battlefield of incompatible emotions. Agonies of worry and panic over his mother, and SJ, attacked him like an ambush in a strange neighborhood. Then the imagery would recede for a while, diluted and temporarily supplanted by the process of the day, the undeniable reality of this woman’s kindness, which bore in on him despite his distraction, and touched him. Then the thoughts of home would reassert themselves with a brutal force upon his thoughts. He was sure his Uncle J would have found a way to get them out, but he would be beside himself until he knew something about his mother and uncle. They must have been worried about him, too. Maybe at that moment they were trying to call…

  At one point, because it occurred to him at that moment, Wesley asked Ell why she and Art had decided to volunteer to take him in.

  “Well,” Ell said, “it’s just what you’re supposed to do. When people are in trouble you are supposed to help out. That’s really all there is to it.” She looked across at him, then back at the road. “We all can do something to help somebody else. Somewhere somebody has done something to help each one of us, and you are supposed to give that back, or pass it along I guess you’d say. And, you know, in our church, we believe that Jesus gave his life for us, so if you believe that way, you are just acting by his example, but you know, every religion has some version of that in their own way. We’re all very lucky to be alive and we should treat each other better than we do.”

  Wesley sat back in his seat and watched the road.

  They arrived back at the house around five o’clock, scooting in just under the wire before the evening traffic began in earnest, the Albany commuters and the Schenectady people. They came in with the packages and, first thing, asked Art if there had been any calls, which there hadn’t been. Then Ell said she was going to “busy herself” making supper.

  Art asked the young man a few questions about the day and then they watched the five o’clock news for a while, still full of images of New Orleans, which Wesley watched attentively. Afterward there was still time before dinner and Art said, “Want to see how I spend my golden years?”

  He led Wesley through a door and down some stairs into the basement, a large, damp-smelling cement-floored room of a type Wesley had never entered, since nobody built cellars in New Orleans; the ground was too wet. Art had turned on the light going downstairs, and now Wesley saw a room something like a bunker in one of the war movies he had watched with his Unca J, but this one full of hardware under the overhead lights, woodworking materials that Wesley recognized from SJ’s workshop.

  Art walked around the room, tapping his hand on different tools, as if ticking off inventory. “Band saw…Jigsaw…Table saw…Lathe…Over here I do my sanding; I got her rigged up with oversized exhaust fans for the varnish; it’s nasty stuff first of all, and Ell’s sensitive to the fumes. Over here is for painting; double vises over there…”

  Wesley listened to be polite, although he knew what the tools were. Art took him to a low table against the far wall and pulled the cord on a double fluorescent light under a hood and it shone down on three wooden model planes, done in meticulous detail, and one apparently in process.

  “Do you like planes?” Art asked Wesley.

  Wesley shrugged, smiled a little.

  “This is a Spad, here. That’s a Fokker triplane, like what the Red Baron flew.”

  “Like in Peanuts.” He remembered that from the Christmas TV show.

  “Right,” the man said absently. “This is the Flying Tiger, and I’m working on a Sopwith Camel.”

  “What do you use them for?” Wesley asked. “They fly?”

  “No,” Art said. “I just like them. They’re beautiful. Or I find them to be so.”

  Wesley sensed that the man was slightly disappointed in his reaction. So he pointed to the jigsaw and said, “What does that one do?”

  “That’s the jigsaw,” the man said, turning off the fluorescent light and walking over to the high bench with the tool on it.

  “Like what they make the puzzles with.”

  “Well, yeah, you’ve got the idea anyway. Nowadays they make the puzzles with big stampers. You couldn’t work each one individually with a jigsaw; it would be prohibitively expensive, and it would just take too long.”

  “Why they call them jigsaw puzzles then?”

  “I think they just got started when some carpenter had a little too much time on his hands and decided to cut up a picture somewhere and they found out it was fun trying to put it back together.”

  “My uncle have a shop.”

  “A wood shop?”

  Sudden drop in Wesley’s stomach, sinking, Unca J…

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. “He has a shop in his backyard.” He was looking at the jigsaw. Thinking about SJ, or talking about him, made him feel bad suddenly.

  “Does he have his own business?”

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. “He make things, fix houses. I help him.” Then, looking at Art with a look that Art would later remember as sudden and frantic, like an animal that spooked, or a cat struggling to get out of your arms, he said, “You think I can make my calls yet?”

  Slightly startled, Art looked at the young man, with his scared eyes, skinny, standing there in his long T-shirt, and he felt a sudden rush of tenderness come over him. Yesterday, the abrupt response would have bothered him, but now he saw a kid a couple thousand miles from home, with nobody in the world. The poor fellow, he thought. “Well…let’s go see.” Then, out of nowhere, he looked the young man in the eyes and said, “It’s going to be all right, son. We’ll get you hooked up with your family.” Wesley looked at him, then looked at the floor, said, “Thank you.”

  “Come on,” Art said, putting his hand on Wesley’s shoulder. “Let’s go find Ell. She’s the boss.” And they went upstairs into the kitchen to find a pot of water boiling, unattended, on the stove, and Art’s wife of forty-two years lying unconscious on the floor.

  Three hours later, at Albany General, the doctor came out to the waiting lounge and told Art and Wesley that Ell was doing fine. She had had what they called a transient ischemic episode, which they said was nothing serious, although they wanted her to stay in the hospital for another day or two for some more tests. She had a nasty abrasion on her forehead, but the X-rays showed no concussion. “Sometimes,” the doctor said, smiling reassuringly, “wires get slightly crossed and the power goes out momentarily. We don’t know why, but it does not make a large problem mostly.” Art put his left hand over his eyes and made a kind of stifled sobbing sound, and Wesley looked away. The doctor said they were welcome to come in and see her.

  In the room, which she shared with an old woman who seemed to be dead already, Ell looked up at Wesley from her bed. “You poor thing,” she said. “After all you’ve been through and here you come into all this.”

  “I’m glad you all right,” Wesley said.

&n
bsp; “You two ought to go out and get some dinner. I had those perfectly good pork chops at home, and cabbage and all; it’s a shame to see them go to waste.” She smiled at Wesley when she said this. “All Art can cook is meat loaf.” She smiled up at Art when she said this. Wesley noticed that they were holding hands.

  “I mean, I can cook pork chops,” Wesley said. “That’s easy.”

  “You have been through too much; you need some taking care of right now.”

  “It ain’t nothing. It give me something to do at least.”

  “Well, whatever you both decide to do, have fun and don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Don’t forget to check the answering machine and see if any calls came in from the church people.”

  “We’ll do that, sweetheart,” Art said. Wesley saw that his eyes were red.

  “Here, I guess these are thawed out,” Art said. Wesley was looking under the drain board cupboards for a frying pan. “I think she keeps the pans over here,” Art said, pointing to a cabinet next to the stove.

  Wesley got the chops into one skillet and the cabbage into another; on the chops he sprinkled salt and some garlic powder he found in a cupboard. On the cabbage he put the same, along with some lemon juice, which was a trick of his Uncle J’s.

  “I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t know what to do without Ell. You come to depend on these women for everything. Have your mom and dad been married for a long time?”

  Wesley was slicing an onion with an intense concentration. “My mama wasn’t married to my father. I don’t know where my father is.”

  “Oh,” Art said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. That was a personal question, I shouldn’t have…”

  “It’s allright,” Wesley said, scraping the onions into the skillet with the cabbage.

  Art watched the young man preparing dinner for him, and he felt a weird sense of vertigo, this person he hadn’t known three days before, and about whom he had had more than a few unexamined preconceptions. “We almost lost Ell about six years back,” he said. “She had to have a hysterectomy and she almost didn’t make it out of that. There was a bleeding that they didn’t know the cause of, and we had a heck of a time getting her stabilized. I’ll tell you the truth…I didn’t know if I wanted to live if she didn’t make it. I really thought to myself that if she wasn’t going to be here anymore I would go where she was. Does that sound crazy?”

  “No,” Wesley said. What the man said didn’t sound crazy to Wesley. Wesley knew what it was to feel that there was no point to living. He had felt that. And he had seen Uncle J after Aunt Rosetta died, although Wesley was a little young to really grasp what was going on. But he knew that something had seemed to go out of his uncle then.

  Over dinner Art asked Wesley if he played sports, and that opened a conversation about football. Art, it turned out, had played halfback in high school, and they began a lively discussion of various teams’ chances for the fall, which was interrupted by the phone ringing.

  Art stood and went to pick up the phone, which was on the drain board under the cabinets. Wesley heard him say, “Uh…hold on…hold on one moment. Just a moment,” and held out the phone to Wesley with a look on his face that Wesley couldn’t read.

  “Hello?” Wesley said, into the phone.

  “Wesley?” he heard the voice say. “Wesley…Oh, Lord…” he heard her voice say, away from the phone, “oh, Lord…it him…Wesley…”

  “Mama,” Wesley shouted. He heard weeping and hollering and confusion on the other end of the line. “Mama,” he said, alarmed, elated, scared; his nerves glowed red under his skin like burning wires; he would have jumped through the phone if he could have, but not knowing what was going on…

  Then another voice came on the line, a slight Southern accent, saying, “Hello; is this Wesley Williams?”

  “Is my Mama all right?” Wesley said, panicky.

  “Yes,” Steve said. “She’s fine; she’s just kinda emotional hearing your voice. She’ll be okay in a minute.” In the background, Wesley heard Lucy’s voice saying, “That my boy…My boy allright…Oh Lord…”

  Art watched the young man begin to weep, and he started to go to him, then thought better of it. He could not figure out what he should do. Ell was the one who knew what to do in a situation like this. Finally he decided to give the young man some privacy and stepped out of the kitchen.

  When Lucy had pulled herself together she got back on the phone and they told one another where they were, some of what had happened. “SJ all right,” Lucy said. “I talked with him just before. He in Texas by Aaron. They going to fly me there tomorrow.” They had both been in the Superdome, unaware of the other’s presence. “I ain’t lying Wesley, I thought we was going to die. The water come like a tidal wave. SJ swimmed to get a boat and he put me on the bridge. Then he stayed and I didn’t know what even happened to him. He with Aaron.” Lucy said Wesley should come to Houston and that FEMA would likely get them into a hotel or an apartment.

  When they finally got off the phone, Wesley stood in Art and Ell’s kitchen, stunned, trying to get his bearings. As the initial wave of emotion receded, he saw the strange room in which he had found himself surrounded by these other lives not his; it would take a few moments to regain his balance.

  Art came back into the kitchen and said, “She’s all right, your Mom?”

  Wesley nodded, looking at the man. They looked at one another for several moments. “When you think I can go?” Wesley said.

  Art was getting used to the young man’s abruptness, and he answered that they would need to ask Ell what the procedure was, but maybe he could even get out of there tomorrow.

  Wesley left the room to go to the bathroom. Art cleared the plates off the table and put them into the sink, scraped the few remaining strands of cabbage into the disposal. He gave thanks inside himself that Ell had set this up. They had done something good. He couldn’t wait to tell her. Once or twice he had to struggle to keep his composure as he reexperienced the shock of seeing her on the floor earlier. He had had periods of mild depression lately, an occasionally overwhelming sense of melancholy at how quickly everything seemed to go. It all went too damn quickly. This young man’s presence had somehow, for short bursts here and there, almost made it feel as if time had slowed down, or gone backward just a little, as if new things were still possible. And, of course, it reminded them both of when the boys were still young.

  Upstairs, Wesley stared absently at some plastic flowers in a small vase on the toilet tank. His mama was all right, and Uncle J was all right. When he was finished he zipped up and went to wash his hands. To the side of the bathroom mirror were two little shelves bolted to the wall. As he washed, his eyes grazed over a haphazard arrangement of small, neglected treasures placed there. A pinkish jar with a lid that looked like a bouquet, a tiny, dusty glass dish with a chipped edge, shaped like a heart, a small ceramic urn with partly effaced lettering that read QUEEN’S SILVER JUBILEE.

  He found himself staring at them after he turned off the water in the sink. Why were they making him think of a small plastic fire truck his mama had given him a long time ago? He remembered that truck suddenly and fully, as if he could see it in front of his eyes. It was so vivid it almost scared him. He had carried that truck with him everywhere. He would get right up close to it on the floor or along the edge of a table, and try and imagine himself inside it, like he could live inside that little truck until she came back from wherever she had gone off to.

  He dried his hands and left the bathroom.

  In the kitchen he found Art, putting the pots away in the cabinets under the sink. He had the skillet in his hand and was looking around like he had forgotten where he parked his car.

  “That one went next to the stove,” Wesley said. “Down there.”

  Art shook his head, bent down to the narrow cabinet next to the stove. “I think I’d forget my own head sometimes if it wasn’t stuck on my neck.” After he’d put the skillet away, with some difficulty, he stood up and said,
“How are you making it? This is some pretty big news for you.” He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down.

  “Yeah. She going to stay in Texas with my Uncle Aaron. My Uncle J there already. I was worried they might be dead.”

  Art nodded slightly, looking at Wesley.

  “Your Uncle J is the carpenter?”

  “Yes,” Wesley said. “His name SJ but I call him Unca J. He partly raised me sometime, like when my mama sick or someplace, he and my Aunt Rosetta would raise me.”

  “Is your Aunt Rosetta still alive?”

  “No.”

  “How does your uncle do alone?”

  “He all right. My mama always say he need to find somebody to be with, but…He takes care of shit. I’m sorry…” Wesley said, trying not to laugh and looking to see whether Art was offended by the word.

  If Art noticed, it wasn’t apparent. “It’s hard for men alone,” Art said. “In a way, I think the women have an easier time of it after their husbands are gone than the other way around. I think you just fall back on discipline.”

  “That’s what Unca J say.”

  “Was your uncle in the service?”

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. “Can I sit down?”

  “Of course. Help yourself.”

  Wesley sat down.

  “What branch of the service was he in?”

  “I don’t really know,” Wesley said. “I guess the army. He went to Vietnam.”

  “I spent two years in the army in Germany in 1959, 1960. Here.” He rolled up his sleeve and Wesley looked at the tattoo, a blue eagle with red tips on the wing feathers. Wesley had a tattoo of his own, above his left bicep, which read, simply, “Chantrell,” in blue script with little starbursts of the ends of the C and the final L, but he didn’t show Art. He planned to get it erased when he could.

  “I’m sure glad we were able to give you a place to stay, even if it was just for a short time. Ell and I both said it was almost like having one of our boys back for a while. I don’t know where the time goes. As you get older, it just makes your head spin. I’ll tell you, it was such a shock seeing Ell like that.” He fixed Wesley with a look that seemed to Wesley both guarded and pained. “I’m real glad you were here. Thank you for being steady. Your uncle would be proud of you.”