Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  THE FUGITIVES

  WE WENT FIRST TO JAMES ISLAND, TO MY MOTHER’S. I HAD TO TELL Mit and Camp we were gone. There was a light on in the old carriage house. Camp always got up before day; he had the coffee pot on, already, and Mit came rolling out in her flour-sack gown. She thought somebody must have died, us being there so soon.

  It was worse than that, in Camp’s eyes, when he understood how we had got there. “De Savior he be ridin’ the runnin’ board,” he said, lifting his grateful arms toward heaven. “I be drivin’ you home.”

  Oh no, I said, we had gone along very well. The car had bucked and hopped a time or two, I said. (“All the way,” Pet said, “like riding on a frog.”) Only once or twice it had sputtered and died, I said. (“On the drawbridge,” Hugh said darkly. “And it nearly wouldn’t start.”)

  But had we not arrived? I said. And anyway, this was the point: we were not going home. Not home to Charleston. We were leaving. “Do hush!” Mit said. We were on our way to look up my father’s folks, I said. We would be all right. And Camp asked, did they know that we were coming?

  Well, no. I didn’t want to say in front of the children that these people didn’t even know we existed. Or that maybe there were none of them left. Nobody then would have thought this adventure was all right, except me. Camp stood there studying the linoleum. He knew.

  “One time one of ’em come fuh see Mr. Mack. You an’ yo’ mama be gone,” he said. “Young man he come knock at d’ do’, wants to know, do Mr. Steele be in? He big tall man, like Mr. Mack. I see he face an’ I call ’pun Jesus; I see de very spirit of yo’ daddy standin’ at de do’.” Mackey had been buried then a week or so, Camp said. Mama and I were gone all that summer. We heard no more, that I knew of, from that visitor. That had been twenty years.

  Mit fixed the children some cocoa; we had a cup of coffee and a hurried conference. I wrote down for their eyes, alone, where I hoped we’d be, and kissed them goodbye. When we walked out of there, I would have cried, but the morning star was shining, and the air was fresh and cool right off the sea, like it was full of new spirits and new secrets. I took a good deep breath and felt re-born.

  We crossed the bridges again and headed back through town. Geography was not my strong point. Nor navigation. Ahead was all new ground. Except that some people went to the mountains in the summer, Charleston largely ignored the heathen lands that lay to the west, beyond the alligators and the jungle. I knew we would be going roughly northwest; somewhere we would have to get a map. We took the one road I knew that went inland. It was getting light when we cleared the town and faced the open spaces. Shreds of mist drifted off the swamps on either side and hung among the cypresses. We crossed rickety bridges, over slow black streams, and scared long-legged birds eating their breakfast in the ditches by the road. The sun came up behind us; we were going right, more or less, so far. And I remember this: it didn’t matter. Wherever we are, I decided, swelling up with joy, we were gone from Back There. Run clean away and Gone.

  We stopped at a store with a gas pump and an afflicted boy came out and filled the tank. He shook his head about a map. He just looked blank when I asked the way to Caney Forks. We went inside and bought peanuts and crackers and were distressed to see there was nobody home but him.

  So we went on, into the pines, and the day got bright and warm, and we stopped at a cafe and got some tea and sandwiches, and we asked the waitress, and she hollered back to the cook, but they didn’t know their geography either. So we went on into the cotton land. The sun was to our back and left, and that seemed as it should be. Along in the afternoon we got more gas, and got a map. We had to ask the man then where we were, before we could figure where we were going. He drew an X with his pencil, and we stopped later, under a tree, and I looked for Caney Forks, and didn’t find it. Red Bank, though, was there, right over the North Carolina state line. It looked a real long way.

  I was getting very tired; I had a cramp in my foot from pushing the gas pedal with the toe of my shoe. But we had to move on.

  We had to find a place to spend the night. We would never make it in one day. I guessed we were fifty miles or so farther along, and the kids were thirsty, and worn out, when we came to a little sign, pointing up another road, that said, “Tourist Camp.” We stopped to debate about it, and this old truck full of junk came by, and turned up that way, and we turned and went behind it. Well, we passed this one terrible looking old house, with junk cars and even an old bus in the yard, and woebegone younguns and dogs sitting on the steps, and there was a grove of trees close by, with a couple of tents and a picnic table or so, and an outhouse, and we went on up the road looking for the tourist camp.

  And we were looking left and right—and not ahead—when a tangle of barbed wire fell off that old truck. And we were on it, before I could stop. What a racket. It got both front tires, like they were shot out with a gun. We were all struck dumb. We didn’t say a word—if we had we’d have ended up killing one another. I moved the wire and drove off the road, bump-bump-bump, as best I could, and we got out and started walking, back to the only sign of people we had seen.

  The kids on the porch ran around the house and the dogs slunk off, looking back over their shoulders. A man with a week’s worth of whiskers and a red nose came out, when we knocked. He had on a dirty undershirt and some britches with no top button, and no shoes. “You want spend the night at the tourist camp, little lady?” he said.

  “We were looking for it,” I said.

  “We seen you when yins passed it,” he said. “It’s right down yonder. Wha’ did ye do with that fine autoMObile?”

  “It’s up the road,” I said, about to cry. “It’s got two flat tires.”

  “Hmmp,” he said. “Leroy! Cebo! Come hep this lady change some tahrs.”

  Two boys, might have been eighteen or twenty, came out from the gloom with an old dog slinking along between them. “She got spars?” one said.

  “You got a spar?” said the elder. I reckon I looked real blank at him, and then it came to me. “There ought to be one in that round thing on the fender,” I said.

  Leroy and Cebo got in a jalopy and sped off up the road. There were some old cane chairs on the porch. Our host wiped one kindly, with his hand, and invited me to sit. My kids sat on the edge of the porch, forlornly watching up the sandy road for a sign of hope. The elder busied himself picking ticks off the dog and squashing them between his fingers.

  When the boys came back they’d changed one tire, they said. They were rolling the two injured ones. The innertubes looked like they’d been in a sword fight. “Is there somewhere we can buy a tire?” I said.

  The elder stroked his whiskers. “Not close,” he said. “Yins’ll not get one today. Good thing it happened where you can stay the night.”

  I was suddenly desperate. “Do you think one of ’em could be fixed?” I said. Cebo and Leroy looked at one another and said to the elder, “Yeah, we c’n fix ’em. Take a while.”

  The sun was getting low. Late into the evening, Cebo and Leroy stuck patches on those tubes, and pumped in air, and watched them go down. They brought in a tub of water from the pitcher pump, out back, and submerged each one and watched the bubbles rise, and put on more glue and more patches.

  “You ain’t got no tent,” the elder said. “How was you goin’ to sleep?”

  “In the car,” I said. I hadn’t known exactly how a tourist camp worked.

  “Where’s your eats?” he said. “You leave ’em in the car?”

  Oh my, I thought. “Yessir,” I said.

  “Well, no cause to worry about nothin’. We got plenty of place to stay right here. Plenty t’eat, if the ol’ womern’ll jist get movin’.”

  We had not seen the ol’ womern, to that point. Directly she appeared, silent and gray as a spook. She had no teeth, but she was tying on a clean apron, and she had on some bright blue carpet slippers, and she looked at us and nodded, and said to the elder that supper was nearly ready. By then it was getti
ng quite dark.

  Weakly, I said, “We can make it further up the road if the tires are ready.”

  Leroy/Cebo dunked a tube back in the tub and the bubbles spewed and popped. “It ain’t gon’ be safe to put t’em tahrs back on till we see do they hold ahr overnight,” the elder said. “Come on in an’ mek yin’s seffs to home.”

  The kids had been mercifully silent the whole afternoon. They had said not half a dozen words between them. Now, by the light of a lantern the Samaritans had hung on a nail on the porch, they looked at me beseechingly. I asked if we could go wash our hands, and the host handed us the lantern and pointed us delicately to the outhouse and the pump. “There’s nothing we can do,” I said, when we were alone. “Tomorrow’s going to be a better day. I promise you.”

  That speechless lady sat us at the table, first, and brought us plates of grits and white gravy and biscuits and slab meat. She had piled up the plates, and it was not as bad as I had imagined. I felt bad about letting a bite go back, I thought it would hurt her feelings, except that dog-eyes looked longingly around the door jamb at every speck we tried to eat. I took the plates to the kitchen when we had done the best we could, and asked if I could help her wash dishes. “No, mam,” she said.

  She wiped her hands on her apron and led us back to a room at the back of the house. There was no furniture but a slop jar and a tick stuffed with straw in a corner of the room, with a little light blanket spread over it. She went out and brought another little blanket, and when she left with the light, we were in the pitch black. The tick was ripe with the memory of other bodies I knew had been displaced so we could sleep. We sat down on it and took off our shoes, and held to one another, and soon fell back exhausted.

  Dogs howled and whined. Once the chickens roused and started squawking, and then there was a shot and an exuberant cry, “You sonnabitch, I got che!” And peace was restored. We squirmed a good bit; something made us itch. The night went on forever. We would be here forever, I decided. We would be part of the family, sitting on the porch picking ticks off the dog (or off each other) waiting for our tahrs to heal themselves.

  I watched the window for the faintest hint of light. The front of the house came to life first, though; I heard talking and moving around, and the front door bump. And a car went off, and directly two came back. I got into my shoes and went and looked out, and there was the car, on all four tires, and Leroy and Cebo and the elder looking over it, talking and grinning. One of the boys polished a place on the hood with his shirt and admired himself in the finish. I said thank-you prayers right then, I’ll tell you. And I went and got the kids up, and we went forth to the landlord, all smiles and gratitude.

  “What do we owe for everything?” I said. He cleared his throat and spat and considered the dirt. “If three dollar don’t sound like too much,” he said.

  “Oh no,” I said. “And how much for our room and board?”

  “That’s all of it,” he said. “Three dollar. But you ain’t had no breakfast.”

  That was quite all right, I said. We would hurry on up the road and get some later. I paid and went back in to the kitchen and told his wife goodbye, and thanked her. “Come again,” she said.

  We drove off, into the morning, and when we came to a patch of woods, with a little clear stream running through, we stopped and got out and straightened up and began to feel human again.

  4.

  WE ARE SCARED

  WE CAME THROUGH A HUNDRED MILES OF COTTON FIELDS THAT day, I know. There would be people out in them, hoeing, with big hats on, and they would be like ants so far away, little dots among the stripes of green cotton and red earth. And there would be houses perched on little hills, with trees to shade them, watching over their acres and the people working them.

  There would be no hiding in that land. I knew how it must have felt to be a runaway slave, with only those slim thickets that grow along where branches run, where you could duck in and squat and wait for the dogs to come. I had my eye out all the time for bushes that would swallow a car, if need be.

  I could just see Foots in full gray fury, ringing up the law. He would be good and mad by this time. By now police from Mexico to Maine would be on the lookout for a stolen car, two kidnaped children and a piece of thieving, thankless chattel. I wondered whether he had given them a picture for the post office. Would it be a wedding picture? No—I bet he would pick one from the coming-out ball. Any yegg could get married. Foots would want it known he dealt only with the crème.

  Anyway, every vehicle that came in sight looked like the Black Maria. The kids looked out the back and sounded the alarm over hog trucks, ice trucks, mailmen and one-mule wagons.

  We had the jitters, of course. We had slept so little in so long that we imagined things. I kept feeling something crawling on me; it got under my corselet, where I couldn’t reach, and bit. It occurred to me that maybe those people we bedded down with last night had shared more with us than their straw tick. And that was not imagining.

  Sure enough as we were going through a town a policeman got behind us. I saw him in the mirror as I was neatening my hair. I thought, Lord, show us the way. We went on, like we were unconcerned, through the downtown. It was too late to tell the kids to get down and hide; they had been looking at him too. We crossed several streets where the menace might have turned. But he did not.

  Well, there comes a time when a run-down rabbit may just flop over and wait for the fox. I just stopped. True, I did not put out my hand like you are supposed to when you stop in the road, and he nearly hit us. And he drove around beside us then and looked at me very hard.

  I leaned out and waved at him and said, “Excuse me, sir, but can you tell me the way to Hampton Street?” To be convincing I had to pick a number. “We need to find 400 Hampton Street, I always do get lost downtown,” I said.

  He was a stolid-looking kind of fellow. “You just crossed Hampton Street,” he said. (Of course we had.) “Go on to the next street and turn left and go back around.” Then he gave me a broad smile. There was something behind that smile I thought besides a broken tooth. I knew we better go to Hampton Street.

  So we did, and we looked for the proper number and parked and got out, very business-like. “What are we DOING?” Pet groaned, exasperated. “I am NOT going in there.”

  “Oh, yes you are,” I said through gritted teeth, “or you will be the greatest challenge these people ever had.”

  There was a sign on the green scalloped awning over the sidewalk that said B.V. STOKES AND SON FUNERAL PARLOR. We went inside to play our part.

  There was a waiting room with musty green plush draperies and dark horsehair chairs and a table with a Bible on it, and there was a picture of Jesus on one wall, and a much bigger portrait of B.V. Stokes, Sr. on another. We were, for the moment, alone. I had this flash of hope that we could just sit quiet for a dutiful time and then depart, undetected, wiping our eyes. But nothing doing. The bell on the front door was a sign to the unseen. Somewhere back in the labyrinth a needle scraped down on a record, and a man began to sing, somewhat warpedly, “Safe in the arms of Jee-E-susss, safe on his genn-tull breast…”

  Our hostess pattered out like a trapdoor spider. She was really a sweet-looking little old lady with bobbed and curled white hair. She was gotten up in proper gray for mourning. I wasn’t sure how well I could lie to her, or what the lie was going to be. But she came to my rescue.

  “Bless my soul, Bertha honey, they’ve just this minute gone,” she said.

  “They have?” I said.

  “Oh, law, child, they’ve been so worried about you drivin’ all that way with just the chirrun. Your Aunt Zula’s been a-standin’ on her head, she said she’d not let your uncle be laid away till you got to see ’im, though. Mercy, it’s been so many years since you was home and I don’t believe you’ve growed an inch since your mama took you away…”

  “Where did they go?” I was sort of groping in the dark.

  “They went over’t the house
to eat some dinner, Lord child, I never saw the like of what them neighbor women and the Ladies Aids has brought t’ the house to eat, hams and cakes and mackyroney pie. Now they’re a-looking for you to come on. But ’fore you go, do come in here and look at Mr. Hopp. I think he looks so nice.”

  I felt Hugh’s shoulder shudder under my hand. I grasped Pet firmly by the back of the neck and we proceeded through the arch of green curtains.

  There was Mr. Hopp, under a fly-net. In the candle-light, he was a little bit green himself. His fingers were like wax, clasped over the stiff snowy bosom of his shirt. Urns of tuberoses at each end of the casket added a lot of weight to the atmosphere.

  “Oh, Uncle…Hopp…!” I said. There was nothing to do then but cry. Pet stared, open-mouthed. Hugh spun around and buried his face in my dress, just sobbing.

  “Your letters had meant so much to him, while he was sick so long,” the undertakeress said.

  I thanked her then and said I guessed we’d better run on over to the folks’, since they were worried. And she said she’d see us, then, at the services. “Three o’clock,” she said.

  We were at the door when she had a thought. “Say, darlin’, please come back and sign the book before you go. Folks’ll be takin’ on so this evenin’ you might forget it.”

  I went back and my hand was shaking like the palsy, but I wrote, “Bertha Hopp (Scribble), Tootie and Bubba.” I reckon I really looked wan, because she said as an afterthought, “I hope you never had no trouble on your trip.”

  I dabbed my nose with my hanky and told her, “No’m. So far so good.”

  She put her arm around me as a parting gesture, and squeezed my shoulders and said, “Honey, I’m so sorry about this.”

  “I am too,” I said. And I meant it.

  As we came out into the light, Pet was still pale as death and Hugh was wiping his eyes on his sleeve. A coarse-looking, hefty woman with two kids brushed by us, going in, as we passed under the awning. I made a last blubbering display of grief as we hightailed it for the car and jumped in. Down the block, a police car moved away from the curb and slowly departed.