Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  We debated sleeping inside against sleeping out.

  “I’m cold,” Pet said.

  “I would hear feet coming down those stairs all night,” said the man of our expedition.

  We decided to sleep out, so we laid one blanket on the planks and put the other two over us, and we locked arms, so if a bear or boogerman got one of us, he would have to take us all. And the light faded, over the west ridge, and the stars twinkled, and the peepers took their pitch from their director, and sang. Down in the meadow a whippoorwill called, and a screech owl answered from the gum tree. Charleston crossed my mind, ever so lightly. And we slept.

  The sun woke us, shining in our eyes. We went up and washed our faces and drank our water and had our half a banana and limp crackers, and talked about what we should do. One thing, I said, before we might meet somebody we must get our dry clothes and go down to the river and really get clean. I admit we had avoided meeting the river up close. Pet and Hugh had looked the day before, from a safe distance, and declared it ugly. We had all had enough of ugly water.

  But it might be better that morning. We needed to brave it. We got us a change of clothes from the fence and went down. Three or four hundred feet above the river there were woods, open more like a grove that sloped down to the water. The floor of those woods was a garden of ferns and flowers like some make-believe place in a picture book. Some of the trees we knew; we had dogwoods and Judas trees in our garden in Charleston that had already bloomed and dropped. But there were mysterious huge trees, we did not know chestnuts, and I suppose no one will ever know them again, but there was one hollow hulk so big we all stood in it and said if all else failed, here we could keep house.

  Mostly, though, this grove was birches, thick as hops. They had to be old, they were so big. Their raggedy bark was shiny, like pale gold, and the new little leaves whispered and sighed when the wind played in their crowns.

  It was the kind of place, I thought, where things might go on that literal folks would never be able to see.

  The river bed was wide, where we came down, and what had sent me into panic (and a wrong turn) a few miles down, and what I dreaded so to see again was as innocent as dew. It was so clear it was almost invisible, pattering over its bed of little brown rocks, glittering in the sun.

  What looked like an old road came down on the other side, through woods and a narrow strip of meadow. There seemed to be a break on this side too, where a road might have crossed the shallow and come over. This was a likely fording place. But there was nobody across the river, that we could see, and nobody here but us. So we took our separate places, and we washed.

  We intruded on the pools of little fishes. Nothing would do, then, but that Hugh make a line out of something and fish to keep us from starving. “We don’t have any way to cook fish,” I said. But that was foolish, there was no danger of us having to try, and I told him all right, to go up to the house and dig through my pocketbook and he might find a pin or two, and a little sewing bag with a spool of thread in it, and I was sure that would hold what he would catch.

  I walked with them back up through the woods, and left them, then, and went along up the field, upriver. The grass was tall and the stalks of last year’s weeds came to my waist and the burrs of things stuck in my dress. I didn’t think anything of snakes; I did watch the ground, I parted the grass and watched where I stepped because there were so many flowers.

  It came to my mind, walking along, that maybe Ollie Trotter had seen my grandfather and had told him we had been to his store. And maybe he would send somebody to look. Maybe, right now, somebody was trying all the wrong roads we might have taken, maybe even the one we took. Maybe they would find the bridge out, and the car, and think we drowned. Nevermind, I thought, we will walk out today, and find our way to Caney Forks; very soon we will be hugged to the bosom of our family.

  It was getting steep. I thought from so high a hill I might get a wide view and some ideas. And I did. The first thing I noticed was a wisp of smoke, way up the ridge across the river. The next thing was an old wrought-iron fence, at the very top of the hill. The briers had grown over it; there was some kind of yellow-flowered vine blooming on it, and as I got up to it I saw it had a gate at the upper side, and it was sagging open. There was a rusting lamb cast in the top of it, and under it it said in iron-work letters, SWEETLY THEY REST WHO REST IN THE LORD.

  It was like the air itself was tingling. I pushed the weeds aside and went in. There were these rows and rows of stones. Moss grew on them. Brambles grew on them. Some were too old and dim to read. One had a clump of bluets growing at its base; I looked at it a long, long time. It said, SAVANNAH MCALLISTER STEELE OUR DAISY, OCTOBER 7, 1846-MAY 4, 1909. WEEPING MAY ENDURE THE NIGHT BUT JOY COMETH IN THE MORNING. On the one next to it was BENJAMIN IVAN STEELE, APRIL 12, 1840-APRIL 29, 1909 LOVE ENDURETH.

  There was a little breeze rustling the grass. I could hear the children, like they were awfully far away, and they were anxious, and afraid; they were out here all alone, and they could not find their mother. I started to them, down the ridge. I was just sobbing. Out of control. The ground rolled under my feet like waves and I went tottering like a drunk. I could see Pet, running toward me, hollering.

  “Mama! Where have you been? Hurry—brush off your dress and straighten up your hair. There’s a horse coming! And there’s an old man on it.”

  6.

  BEN AARON

  THE KIDS CAME RUNNING UP TO MEET ME, AND HELD MY HANDS, and we went down the back lot fast as we could go. They had made it up between them, they said, that they’d go up the road and find town by themselves and run back and surprise me. What they did find was this man coming riding around a bend way above them. Coming slow, they said. I wished they had gone to meet him—what if he disappeared?

  Pet snatched burrs off of me as we went. I looked down at myself and there were green streaks where the suitcase lining had run on that white muslin frock. My hair was flying forty ways for Sunday. I grabbed that old bonnet off the post as we went by and clapped it on my head. And I trotted in the back door and through the house.

  There was, at the side of the front porch, what looked like a great stone statue. It was a big gray man on the biggest old gray horse I ever saw. I leaned over the railing to look close—I wanted to see that they were real. I was going to say thank you for coming. Well I could do no more than open my mouth. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. I knew that face. Oh my God, I thought, we are all dead. This is where we go when we die. Oh, Mackey Steele, you have come to meet me! I stared at the spirit’s hair, fluttering silvery around his ears in the breeze. Mackey did not die gray. Did death do this? I clung to the banister, about to wither over. Whatever he was, he stared back. I don’t think he blinked.

  “Sweet Jesus!” he said, very low. No, he was alive. The horse nodded and pawed and snorted; the white showed of his good eye (the other was blind white anyway). He was feeling his rider’s uneasiness. Both, I thought, would have loved to turn and flee. From me? What had I done? This person was as scared as that old man down the road. But braver. And more polite.

  He reached up a trembly hand and tipped his old gray hat. “Ah’hmmmm,” he said, “Is there some way I can help you?” He knew we didn’t belong here.

  “You can help us get to Caney Forks,” I said.

  “Have you got people there?” he said.

  When I thought about it, I said, sort of feebly, “None living, I guess. Do you know any Steeles?”

  “My name is Steele,” he said.

  There was this ringing silence. Then he said, “Who are you?”

  “Mary Seneca Steele,” I said.

  The next thing I remember was the smell of sweaty hat. He was fanning me with his hat, with my head on his knee. He had sent the kids up the hill for a sausage can of cold water, and he dipped his handkerchief in it and wiped my face. Gently, like I was a little child.

  “Mackey’s child,” he said. “Yes you are. How on this earth did you find th
is place?”

  I told him that I didn’t. That somehow it had found me. I raised up and he sat me on the step, and kept his arm around me, and I told him some about what had happened. ’Course not all the truth. I said my dear husband was all involved with his business, and I had always been so interested in seeing my daddy’s side of the family, and the children and I had planned this little trip. Pet and Hugh were standing there all the time, shifting their feet, rolling their eyes at one another. But I was lying only in the part about leaving, and all. The part about the road and the old man running from us and the rain and the wreck and all that, that part was all true.

  And this was a great gentleman sitting beside me; he took every word, and he nodded sometimes, and narrowed his eyes and frowned at the account of our perils, and raised his eyebrows and smiled around his pipe over intimations of heroism and deliverance. It was Mackey, again, listening, listening to me go on about a big ugly worm that chased me out of the garden clacking its teeth.

  “Which Steele are you?” I said finally. It had only been important to know that there was one.

  “Ben Aaron,” he said. “You know—no, you probably don’t know—but your daddy and me, our fathers were brothers and our mothers were sisters, and they were cousins, besides.”

  “I got all mixed up on that, up there with the tombstones,” I said.

  “You found ’em,” he said, not much surprised by now.

  “Just a little bit ago,” I said. “Till then I had no idea…”

  “I’ll swan,” he said. “I’ll swan.”

  “Plenty of us dead,” I said. “How many of us living?”

  “Three, now!” he said. He was plainly delighted. “Till today there wadn’ but two. Punnammer and me.”

  “Punnammer?”

  “Yeah. My mother’s sister. Punnammer McAllister. Married Daddy’s oldest brother Garland. Widdered sixty-somethin’ years. She’s a-holdin’ court up at the Forks. Ain’t but eighty-seven.”

  I closed my eyes and saw that letter again, crumpled in my daddy’s hand, that running scrawl that ended up, “Devotedly Aaron. Panama sends her love…”

  “Eh, law,” he said, “wait’ll she sees what I found here this mornin’.”

  “Do you have a family?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Hey, captain, what you doin’—diggin’ a well?” He had turned around to watch Hugh tormenting the dirt with a stick.

  “I got to get some worms to go fishin’,” Hugh said. “We ’bout to starve.”

  “How many days since you eat?” our cousin said, getting himself up. “I ought to thought of that, first thing. Here wait a minute,” he said, “it’s awful to fish on a empty stomach. Fish can tell it. Makes ’em nervous.”

  He went and got a sack out of his saddlebag and handed it over. It had biscuits in it big as saucers, stuffed with slabs of ham, and must have been a whole fried chicken, and two baked sweet potatoes, split and filled with hunks of butter.

  “Sawmill cook won’t let abody go hungry,” he said, grinning over the joy of the receivers.

  “I told him I was scoutin’ today so he fixed me a poke,” he said.

  “You work for a sawmill?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said blandly, “I cut timber.”

  Pet gave me a biscuit. “Don’t you want some of your own dinner?” I said. I felt bad about starving our savior.

  “I spect I’ll live to get back,” he said. “Now I’m going to send down and get you up to Nam’s before night.”

  Suddenly, now everything was all right, and I was exhausted. Somehow I wanted to save this next reunion, until these others had sunk in.

  “You know something?” I said, “If it’s all right with you, could we just stay still tonight, and go up in a day or so? Maybe I can just walk to the store and get us some milk and bread,” I said. “How far is it?”

  “Oh, ’bout seven miles,” he said, smiling. He sat on the step, considering, sucking little puffs on his pipe.

  “Sure,” he said. “You going to stay, though, we’re going to see you don’t sleep cold another night on the boards.”

  He got up, and handed me up. “Did you climb the stairs?” he said. I reckoned I could have, I said. But I didn’t have the nerve. Took all I had just to walk inside that door, the first time. He leaned on the door frame and rubbed his chin, studying.

  “Tell me somethin’,” he said. “You say you just walked in. Was the door open when you got here?”

  No, I said, and I told him how it was, that it was shut but opened very easy. He stepped back and closed the door softly.

  It locked.

  There was a look came over his face, the slightest smile. I would have loved to know what he was thinking. But he fished in his pocket and pulled out some big iron keys and turned one in the lock, it took a little force, for it was old and stiff, and he pushed the door open, and we went inside. “You’ll see why I keep it locked,” he said. He led me past the big staircase and back into the kitchen. Then he moved a big old cupboard, turned it aside, and poked a finger through a knot hole in the wall behind it, and undid a latch, and a door of perfectly matched boards creaked open. We went inside a dark little pantry kind of room. He took a candle down off a shelf, and lit it, and there was another door, and he unlocked it with another key, and there was a staircase, going up into pitch black. He held my hand and we went up.

  We came out in an enormous room at the top. “Did you not wonder what was over the kitchen?” he said. There were some shreds of daylight from a vent at the far end. Little birds were cheeping in their nests in the eaves, and other small life that had long gone undisturbed flittered across the candlelight into the shadows.

  There were rows of trunks and banks of humps draped in quilts and sheeting. Shelves held musty books stacked to the rafters. He lifted covers and the candle shined on polished wood and glittered in prisms and bounded back on us from mirrors dark so many years. For an instant we looked at ourselves reflected in one, mesmerized. And then he held the candle close to his chin and made an awful face, and we laughed, and moved on. He found some featherbeds, just feather ticks, you know, and laid out three, and some quilts.

  Then, deliberately, he pulled a cloth down off the wall and held up the candle. Another mirror. No—but so odd. Just the clothes, mostly, were different. It was a painting. A portrait of two people. Square-jawed man, silvery hair, wise-looking eyes, kind of regal. And a little blue-eyed wife with dark curls caught up with some pearly combs. She kind of twinkled down on us. What an incredible likeness, of my cousin Ben Aaron and me. I started to shiver, I was cold from the inside out. My teeth chattered.

  “My aunt and uncle, my cousins. Your cousins, too. Your grandparents,” he introduced this portrait of just two.

  “Daisy and Ive…”

  I began to understand something about my family in that instant. This was more than family, in any usual sense. This was family you couldn’t plot back on a tree; we were more like a vine, grown ’round and ’round ourselves, tangled and knotted never to come undone.

  “I can’t believe what I see,” I said.

  Ben Aaron laughed softly. “You see now how you give pore ol’ Cud’n Barzilai Peek such a jolt, when you met him in the road,” he said. “Lord, you raised the hair on my head, a-standin’ down there on her porch, in her old bonnet…”

  “Yes, I see,” I said. I thought I did. But I saw only partly. The whole picture had a good long way to come.

  He took me down and made me sit on the steps and he carried down things he thought we’d need. The kids had gone to fish, and I sat there looking out, too dazed to really think. He shook out the ticks and spread them in the east front room, by the window where there was still a little sun. “It’s nice to listen to the river in the night,” he said. He carted down rocking chairs and lined ’em on the porch.

  Then he came and sat by me. He picked up his damp handkerchief and began polishing his fingers, one by one. I noticed he had perfectly beautiful
hands. I wondered how you kept hands like that when you cut timber for a living but guessed there was lots I didn’t know about just everything.

  He got up, then, and stretched, and said he’d be going ’long. “I’ll get t’at window-light fixed upstairs right shortly, got to fix the shingles, too. Anyway I’ll be back in a day or two to take you up to the Forks.”

  “Do you live in the Forks?” I said.

  He stooped down and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll take you to Nam’s,” he said. “I’ll not tell her a word till the very minute. And I can’t wait.”

  He started down the steps and a thought suddenly struck me. “Who owns this place now?” I said.

  He stood still, looking a long way off. And then he turned to me and he said, “It’ll always belong to the family.”

  7.

  NEIGHBORS

  I REMEMBER HOW THE HOOFBEATS SOUNDED, GETTING DIMMER and dimmer, going up the road. Finally, the hum of the bees and the river and the birds were all there was, again. There is a sharp little ache you feel for human company, sometimes when you’re all alone. Many’s the time…But anyway I sat there rocking; I got this eerie feeling, watching the wind rock the other chairs. And I thought of a dozen things I should have asked our cousin, but had not. Like, exactly when would he be back? He hadn’t even told me where he lived. Tell the truth, I was not all that sure if he was real.

  But it was the loveliest afternoon, so bright and green and blue. I got up and walked down to the river, found the kids hanging over a rock, jiggling a bent pin with the remains of a poor worm into a little green pool, entertaining a bunch of teeny fish the size of tadpoles.

  Readily they gave it up. “Till an hour,” Hugh said, laying down his stick on the rock. (When he came back, oddly enough it was gone. He was sure some huge fish had bit it and towed it away. Maybe so, I didn’t know.) But we went roaming around again; we walked downstream and found that boggy dark place down there, where the frogs are singing. It’s a suckhole, there’s a spring branch that comes out of the orchard and then goes underground down there, again, in this little bitty hole. Not our favorite place. Then on up toward the road we got into the orchard, all those old trees with so many dead limbs, all woolly green with moss. But some had bloomed; the petals had dropped not long ago and there would be a little fruit.