Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  All this on those old rotten strings. When he was down to two, he laid the fiddle on his lap and took his handkerchief to it again. I was mesmerized. “Mercy on us, Ben Aaron,” I said, sort of squeaky. My mouth was dry.

  “Aww, this thing needs some new pegs, bad,” he said. “See—(plunk-plunk)—it won’t hold its key. When I get a chance I’ll make some pegs and I’ll bring down some strings and we’ll get the thing to play.”

  “Oh, no!” I said. “You take that fiddle right with you. Lord knows you ought to have it.”

  “Oh, I’d not do that,” he said. “I’ve got one, o’ course, not a bad ’un, we all had one, you know. All of ’em homemade, like this, and pretty good.”

  He got up with it and held it out into the sunlight, so that the sun shined in one of the holes, and he squinted into its insides.

  “Lookahere, Cousin Sen,” he said, “you need to know what this is.”

  He held it for me to look inside. There were some dark letters on the bottom, it looked like they might have been burned: I. MCA. 1797.

  “I’ll bet you this was a present that old man Ivan McAllister made for his son-in-law—Hamilton Steele, the one that built this place. It’s kind of passed down with the house. You’ve got the children,” he said. “It belongs with you.”

  He wrapped it up in its rag. “I remember,” he said, “when they used to have dances here, and your granddaddy Ive would play it. Now, he could PLAY. And Aunt Daisy, she would dance. People would stop and stand back and watch ’er. She could out-dance anybody that ever I saw. Out-buck a man. That was the dancinest woman alive.”

  He closed up the little coffin and got himself up and stretched. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Tell me where you want this stuff to go and I’ll carry it.”

  No, I said, the kids would help me get it.

  He took me by the shoulder and kissed the top of my head. I just hid my face in the front of his old checked shirt. I know I left it wet. But I didn’t want him to see me cry.

  13.

  THE LOVE OBJECT

  IT WASN’T BUT A COUPLE OF DAYS THEN TILL HE CAME BACK. BEN Aaron, I mean. He brought Aunt Nam that time; she said she thought it ought to be time for the wild strawberries to come in. I hadn’t known to look.

  We took a little pot apiece and went out in the field. Once she showed me, there they were, a sea of them, with their little heads bowed to the grass. It passed through my mind that back in Charleston the vegetable man had strawberries on his wagon nearly two months ago. Sometimes I missed him so; I missed sending up the street to town, for this thing or that. There was nothing fresh here, yet, but turnip greens and a few green onions. Nam kept the pantry loaded with canned pole beans and soup mix; she would hand out apples from her cellar, she had a few still, all wrapped up in brown paper, way back in the cool.

  But to find strawberries wild—well, I was so happy just to sit in the grass up there on the hill with Nam and smell them, and lick that sweet juice from my fingers. “Mind the slugs,” Nam said. We’d pick all we could reach, sitting on our spread-out skirts, and then move to another spot. When we had enough for a couple of pies we went back to the house and commenced to cook dinner.

  Ben Aaron was out on the porch with that old fiddle across his lap, whittling pegs. The kids were sitting on the floor beside him, bent over a jigsaw puzzle he had brought them. It was a sailing ship, in a gaudy sunset. It gave me a little sharp pang.

  When we called them all to come to dinner, Ben Aaron stood out there a minute holding the fiddle, turning it one way and another, thinking whatever he thought. The kids went on in. I just stood there in the door, looking at him. It was like I had never seen him before.

  “You get it fixed to suit you?” I said.

  He told me what all he had done, and I don’t remember, it was like I didn’t hear him. I guess it was the way the light hit him. I don’t know. It was the way his hair curled around behind his ear, like a swirl in a silver sculpture. His nose was too long, of course. All our noses were too long. It was a family mark. But his had a firm nobility about it.

  There was a quality in the way he moved. And in his speech—which could go all sorts of ways, depending on the mood of things, and who he was talking to. He was bilingual even in English, and that was just the beginning of it.

  Grace. I guess that is the best I could call it. Creature of the earth that he was, there was something exquisite about my cousin. There was one word that meant it all, ever after when I thought of him. It was beauty.

  He looked at me funny, a little hurt. He had asked me something and I had not answered. “Hmm?” I said.

  “Would you care for me to take it home a night or so?” he said again, turning the love object in his hands. “I need to make a little glue.”

  “Lord, honey, do anything you please with it,” I said. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s yours.”

  “No, but I would like to borry it one time,” he said. “Some people’s made up a little old dance down in Red Bank, tomorrow night. Asked me to play,” he said. “I’d like to see how it sounds.”

  “Help yourself,” I said. I thought, I’d like to see how it sounds too; I’d like to see the bright lights of Red Bank, for a little change. But he didn’t mention it. I guessed it was a private party or something; I guessed he would take Sophia. I guessed he should.

  We went on in and ate dinner and talked about our progress with the place, and then he got up and ceremoniously wrapped the fiddle in its rag and packed it in its case, and carried it out. Then he unhitched Cy from behind the buggy and rode off about his business.

  When we had cleaned up the table Nam and I went upstairs to look for Daisy’s sewing box. There was a sewing machine, Nam said. We took lamps up and rummaged around until we came on an old machine with a comforter over it. It was an old treadle with fancy wrought-iron legs and lots of gilt. In its lap drawer, just as she had left it, there were a couple of pairs of scissors, and the littlest thimbles, and a pack of needles rusted to the paper, and spools and skeins of thread, and a flat tin candy box of buttons. We decided we could drag that machine downstairs. As we pulled it out of its corner, we turned over a carton and spilled things all over. “How you fixed for clothes?” Nam said.

  “I don’t need evening dresses,” I said.

  She cackled and set her lamp on the machine, so she could see what we had found. “Looks like Daisy’s stuff, law yes,” she said, “I remember this, we made us a dress apiece out of these goods…”

  She took up a stiff blue dress that had been folded with paper so it wouldn’t crease. “Now this here, Ivan brought her this whole bolt of brocade one time from Savannah. Said it come in on a ship from China. She never wore this but to buryin’s and weddin’s.”

  There was a black calico dress in the pile that caught my eye, I guess because it was out of that same stuff as that old sunbonnet that hung in the kitchen. I held the dress up to the light. Packed up in there, it had fared better than the bonnet; the mice had not cut it.

  It was made by a pattern we found later in another box. It had a high neck and a low, pointed waist, with little fine pearl buttons down the front. It had long slim sleeves, and a ruffle around the bottom; on Daisy it probably was long, down past her ankles. But it looked like a dress for a child.

  “Now that went to many a dance,” Nam said. “Boys, even when she had some age on ’er, that gal could dance. Had the best-lookin’ legs ever anybody saw, ’course she wadn’t supposed to show ’em but that never stopped her, she’d yank up ’er skirt and fling ’er heels. And she’d not get tired. She’d go all night. Most times her man Ive would be fiddlin’, and she’d dance with anything that would ask ’er till she wore the men clean out. And flop down just a laughin’, fannin’ ’er skirt. It was like a game between her and Ive. She could dance as long as he could play.”

  I unfolded that dress all the way, and shook it. Twigs and the dust of leaves, or flowers, flew out of it in the lamplight. “Sweet bubby,” Nam said.
“I’d say she packed that up herself. If there was a sweet bubby bloomin’ she picked it and put it in her clothes.”

  Sweet bubby?

  “You know where the bubby bush is? It’s still there, out there right by the window. By Daisy’s old sittin’ room, there. It’s that bush with the brown flowers on it, I bet it’s got some right now.”

  Sweet shrub. I imagined I could smell it. I laid the dress over my arm and we started again, we put a lamp at the top of the stairs and thumped down the steps with that machine. We put it in Daisy’s room, by the window with the bubby bush. And then we went back up and looked some more, and straightened up behind ourselves.

  Coy Ray came down along in the afternoon, from wherever he had been. We wouldn’t have known he was there except we heard him hammering on something down in the lot. He didn’t come up to the house; he did that way sometimes, come and do what he meant to do and go, without letting on. That evening, after Nam went home, I went to the barn and there was a little pen down there that had just appeared, during the day. I wondered about it but nothing much surprised me; so far there was nothing in it.

  And then the next morning here came Rose, riding up from the river with a box in her arms. She hollered out by the barn. She couldn’t get down off the mule without dropping the box and I ran out there and took it from her. It rustled and cheeped. She opened up the little pen and took the box and began to fish out biddies, “dibs,” she called ’em, a dozen little yellow chickabiddies and dark biddies and a couple of tiny brown-and-gold ones, guinea chicks, she said, and then a buff-colored mother hen. The babies pitted round and round in the pen, making biddie noises, picking at the wire.

  We went to the house and got some corn meal and put it in a pie pan for them and of course they got in it and scratched. They walked in the pan of water we put in for them.

  “Pap’ll put up a good chicken yard,” Rose said. “You just got to keep ’em up tight till they get a little size. A snake’ll help hisself to one or two; a fox or a weasel’ll rurn ye.”

  We squatted and watched them. We watched a hawk circling over the birch grove and we hollered threats at him. Rose had saved the eggs and set the hen; the biddies were another of her gifts to our welfare. Her mouth turned up at the corners, just so slightly, and her eyes sparkled when she watched them.

  I brought her up to the house, then, and I got out that pattern of Daisy’s, the one with the pointed waist, and held it up to her. Rose was much taller. I would have to cut it longer, and wider, in proportion, too, although she was real slim. But I liked it. I imagined that blue-flowered goods made into a dress like that. Only for summer, I thought, I would just cut a fichu collar to drape over the shoulders and not make sleeves. I didn’t know how to put sleeves in. I was studying all that when she said she had to go home and fix some dinner for the little boys.

  Well, after she was gone I laid out the cloth on the kitchen table and bit the tip of my tongue while I cut out that dress. I made the kids take their dinner and go out on the porch. And I ran the seams up on that machine; it worked real good when I finally got it threaded right, and got some rhythm into pedaling.

  A few hours later, when the pieces were together, it looked like a passable garment. There was some tatting in the machine drawer, wrapped around a spool; I decided to wash that, it was kind of yellowed, and to put it around the fichu because I was not real good at pretty hems either. And not being much on buttonholes I made some loops out of the cloth. And by suppertime, it was ready for the buttons and the hem.

  I had not done much else that day. Things were sort of lying around. I had needed bad to do a washing but let it go; the kids had some clean clothes and I figured I could go sort of soiled until tomorrow; then I would wash.

  Well, lo and behold, just as I got the stove going to put some supper on, here came Ben Aaron, trotting up in the buggy. He got down and came striding up on the porch, hat in hand.

  “You ready to go?” he said. He looked sort of dubious when he said it; I was barefooted and not much fixed up.

  “Go where?” I said.

  “To that dance,” he said. “I told you I was goin’.”

  “You never told me I was goin’,” I said.

  He sighed a weary sigh. “I thought you’d want to hear the band,” he said.

  “I’ve got to get the kids home,” I said, half panicked. “They went off over the hill to pick strawberries.”

  “I’ll go get ’em,” he said. “You go on and do what you got to do.”

  He drove off around the house, and I splashed around in the wash pan and doused rosewater on myself and ran about in my petticoat, looking for something to put on when I knew there wasn’t anything. I didn’t much think an evening dress would go over in Red Bank. I looked at Rose’s dress—no, I couldn’t do that. Anyway it would drag the floor. I knew I couldn’t button that dress of Daisy’s, to save my life. But I put it on over my head and squirmed my arms into the sleeves. And was trapped.

  Oh, Lord. I couldn’t get it off. It was tight as a drum. It was a straitjacket. Well, I ran to the mirror, like that would help. I saw it didn’t look so bad at the bottom, it hit me right at the ankles and that wasn’t so bad. And I started at the bottom of the waist, where it was not so tight, and buttoned; I sucked in, and buttoned it to right under the bosom. I heard Ben Aaron and the kids come in the house. They hollered, and I hollered back sort of feebly, I had been a while without a breath. Pet came back looking for me.

  “Help!” I said weakly, “I can’t get out of this thing and I can’t get in it.”

  ’Course she started to laugh. And I couldn’t. It was a miracle to me how that old cloth and thread held together. No, it was a torment. If I could have torn it I could have escaped.

  And then I looked in the mirror and there stood dear Ben Aaron, leaning on the door frame, just laid back laughing.

  “Where’s all them dauncy dresses?” he said.

  “You get out of here!” I said. I threw an old pomander at him, an old mummied orange I had found in a drawer. It hit the wall and shattered into brown dust.

  “I got to,” he said, undisturbed. “I’m going to be late.” And he turned around and started ambling off.

  “You come back here!” I screeched. I was going to that dance. Well, he stood and smirked at me, and then he went on back to the kitchen and disappeared. I heard him tell the kids to fix some jelly biscuits to take along. Then I heard his feet going up the attic stairs. And directly he came back down, and he threw me a red checked folded something.

  I held it up; it was a ruffled pinafore apron. I shook it out and put it on, looking in the glass. I reached under and undid the cruelest buttons. Then I tied the apron strings right snugly behind. And I brushed down the frizzes in my hair, smooth as I could. The effect was right cunning. I looked at myself and smiled, like it was someone else. In the mirror, there was Ben Aaron, standing behind me grinning.

  “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher.”

  “Stop that!” I said. “How did you know where all that stuff is? How can you remember everything?”

  “Packed a lot of it up m’self,” he said. “It’s got some order to it. There’s a box of stuff that was packed right off the kitchen table, just as Daisy left it. She’d done a big ironin’ the day she died…”

  That stopped me cold, for a second. I put my hands in the apron’s pockets, then, and followed him and the kids out to the buggy. But before he put me in, I begged for another minute so I could run and pick a bubby for the neck of that dress.

  We all squeezed in on the seat and he laid the fiddle case across my lap. The sun was getting low and the little frogs were singing. I figured I had probably made him late.

  “Where is your wife tonight?” I said. “Did she not want to come?”

  “Gone to Baltimore,” he said.

  When we had gone on a way, with only the little evening noises from the woods, I knew he was going to volunteer no more. “Does she have people
in Baltimore?” I said.

  “You and me go to Red Bank to the store. Sophier goes to Baltimore,” he said.

  We had got across the bridge and started up the mountain when Coy Ray passed us on a mule. He tipped his straw hat grandly as he went around. He was sort of squatting up on a croaker sack, hugging for dear life with his knees. He had a banjo case strapped on his back.

  “Is he going to play too?” I said. As often happened, I got no straight answer.

  “Rides like a cow tick,” Ben Aaron said.

  It was still light when we got down to town. We went to an old dance hall, an old barn kind of place. After he hitched the horse and helped us out, Ben Aaron left us to our own devices while he got together with who all else was going to play. There were a lot of people coming in; I found myself looking at them sort of anxiously, a little wistfully, maybe. I felt somehow like I ought to know them. And that some of them maybe should know me. A few times I noticed people, mostly the older ones, looking long at me. Some of the younger ones looked too, but that was very different. It made me feel better to see that the get-up I had on was not so strange; a couple of other aprons turned up. Fashion seemed to be pretty slow to change in this part of the world.

  The band set up on a little stage. There were a half dozen or so, a couple of guitar pickers and a mandolin player and a bass fiddle. Then there was Ben Aaron. And Coy Ray. They all chewed and smoked and plunked and cocked their ears to one another and tuned. Ben Aaron looked around the hall, then, and got down and went off in a corner and found an old barrel and toted it up to the stage and sat down on it. Coy Ray moved close and stood beside him. They were, in that posture, nearly eye to eye.

  It was warm-up time; somebody in the crowd hollered, “Billy in the Lowground,” and they began to play. It was a spectacle, just the way they played together. I mean, Ben Aaron and Coy Ray. There has never been such fiddling or such picking, not to my ears. They played over and under and around each other, they would back each other up, one would stop and let the other shine. It was like they would hop the fences of harmony and time; they would lag and rush and go off two ways up the branch and come out like clockwork. They were like one mind.