Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  “Yes, she’s got to go,” I said. “And Coy Ray Wilcox will have to hire a housekeeper.”

  “Well, you tell ’im that, I can’t,” Ben Aaron said.

  So as our cousin took his leave that day, questions never spoken of had been decided.

  We were tenant farmers, going into the wild hare race of summer, and there would not be one hour to look back. The field would be our lot by day, the kettle and stove by night. The beans came in in the middle of July. We picked beans every day. Many a day Nam came and helped us. We canned beans plain and we canned beans pickled. We let beans grow big in the pod and let ’em dry and shelled ’em, into our laps, by the light of a lamp. We went to bed feeling fuzzy every night into September.

  Corn came in right along with the beans, field corn, not the sweet stuff everybody planted later. We pulled corn every day. We cut it off and salted it down and put it up in jars. We roasted it and ate it every day; we ate like horses because we worked like mules. When corn got hard enough we took our first load to the mill and watched it ground, and brought home sacks of meal that would bread us, as Ben Aaron put it, through the winter.

  We dug potatoes and pulled onions as big as baseballs and strung ’em from the rafters of the porch to dry. There were two red plum trees out on the side of the road that were heaven for the kids and the yellowjackets. The grape arbor had fallen in and the vines had nearly strangled themselves but we had a few straggly bunches of grapes; all the fox grapes ever we would want in our lives made arches over the branch, on the way up to Shiloh Cove.

  There were some old peach trees on the place; they were so forlorn of old age I didn’t know what they were, until the peaches showed and colored. They are full of worms, I said to myself. But when we cut into them I was surprised. We dried peaches on sheets of roofing tin, out in the sun, and nearly bankrupted ourselves of sugar on preserves.

  And we had figs. Nam marveled at the figs. “That tree was nothin’ but a snag, dead as a doornail,” she said. “It gets too cold here for figs. That one lived because it was on the sunny side and by the chimney. Daisy petted it along. There was allus a fire in her fireplace there, where it grows on that chimney. Kep’ it warm. It hadn’t had a fig I know in more than fifteen years…”

  Coy Ray made a little grape wine for us. And when the apples came he made a little brandy. I thanked him very much.

  We picked blackberries. Blackberries were something else the Lord just gave us. We did not have to grub for blackberries, we only had to endure the bad temper of their canes, and pick ’em. The kids detested it, but I didn’t. There was a first-class patch over around a little spring in the scrub field, and another, down along the branch, at the bottom of the orchard. There were plenty all over but some were bitter and weechie and hard; you wanted a patch where they were big as thimbles and sweet. That kind nearly always grew with their feet close to the water.

  I liked to go down on the branch in the mornings by the earliest light. Before the kids woke up. I would take my bucket down there, in the foggy dew; I would feel the deer looking at me but they wouldn’t let me see them. I would only see their tracks, in the soft places.

  One morning I very well remember, I was thinking to myself I had never felt so happy. All the sound there was, was the branch trickling, and the birds waking. But in my head, it was so strange, I heard a woman singing. She was singing a song I had never heard. And yet I knew what the next words, and the next verse would be. I wondered who had sung down there, picking blackberries, a hundred years before I came. I wondered who had left that song.

  When I went home up the field, feeling a little bit lighter than air, there was another woman singing that song—do you know it?—it started out, “Well met, well met, my own true love; well met, well met cried she…” It was the same, unruffled, placid kind of voice. And that time it was me.

  19.

  A SHORT CHAPTER

  NOW, WHEN THE CROPS WERE LAID BY, COY RAY WENT UNDER the house and dragged up the two old swings and put ’em up, one at each end of the porch. I think he had himself in mind; he took to coming up from whatever he was doing around the place to “set and blow,” he called it. He liked for me to sit with him. It was so far from one swing to the other you had to fairly holler. So we would sit in just one, and talk about the vital matters of the day, like the feeblemindedness of the Revenue agents, and the whelping of pups.

  I loved to listen to him, but that enthusiasm was not shared by certain others. One day Ben Aaron rode up on us while we were swinging and kicking our feet, and Coy Ray was telling this big tale about the time he planted some slop in a leaky old still, back up here on a branch, ’course on Ben Aaron’s land, and he “borried” Ben Aaron’s old hat and hung it on the mash paddle and then slipped the word to the Revenue. Ben Aaron walked right up on him telling that, and Coy Ray never broke off the tale, till he had told it all, and laughed hee hee hee. And Ben Aaron cut his eye at me, and glared at Coy Ray and said to him, “Coy, I b’lieve I heered the hogs a-callin you.”

  Well, Coy Ray yawned, and got up and made a show of stretching, like a peacock strutting its tail and sashayed off about his business, but very slowly.

  Now Ben Aaron had just left, going over to the lumber camp, and Coy Ray had been watching his chance to come back, and here came that little lawyer from up at the Forks, in his yellow roadster, on his way down to Red Bank. That was where his real office was; he just visited up at the Forks to take care of the sawmill’s legal business.

  His name was Harmon Garrison. I call him little; what I mean is he was at least some younger than I was, and he was sort of boyish-looking, he had inky black hair and big dark eyes and dimples. Ben Aaron swore by him as wonderful at law, “slick and dirty.” If that was really so, I thought, his great weapon was surprise. He looked so innocent.

  Harmon was our cousin. Not real near, but his grandmother was a Harmon, half Cherokee, and we were kin to the white Harmons way back and so we had this natural link, you see. So that time when he stopped by we sat out in the swing and drank lemonade and talked about the family and things.

  And every few days then he would come by. I don’t know how on earth that car took the torment of that road. He took to coming in the early evening, along in the summer. Ben Aaron would nearly always be gone home by that time; Sophia put out the hook for him at six o’clock by the church chime every evening. And Harmon would come, sometimes he would take supper, and we would sit and listen to the bugs and the nightbirds. I would beg him to go before pitch dark so he’d get down the mountain more safely, but he’d not always do it.

  Sometime along, then, he took to acting strange. He would slip his hand over and hold mine, just keep on talking like he wasn’t noticing what he was doing. And finally one evening we were sitting out there watching the lightning bugs and the little bats, and all of a sudden he turned around and kissed me. And no sweet nanny-peck, either.

  I didn’t know what to say. The truth is, what startled me the most was that I liked it. It stirred up some strange feelings, though; it was kind of distressing.

  “Now!” he said, “I am going to get you a divorce and I am going to marry you.”

  I was too addled to think with anything but my mouth. “I can’t get a divorce,” I said. “You can’t get a divorce in Charleston. You can’t get one anywhere in the state. Nobody can get a divorce…”

  “You are not there, Love, you are here,” Harmon said. “You can get one here. I am going to do it for you.”

  Well, while I sat there swinging, not saying yea nor nay, my mind was running up and down the porch wringing its hands. “No no,” I said, finally, when I was able. “No no, it just won’t do.”

  But when he was gone that night I thought the matter over. All night I thought it over. The notion made me restless; I squirmed the sheet off the bed. The next day I thought of it. Harmon was good enough to stay away and let me think.

  A couple of days later Ben Aaron came by with the wagon, going over to Shiloh. H
e stopped and hollered did I want to go and certainly I did. I hopped up beside him, and he told me he was wanting to show me the stump of an old dead tree that they had cut and it had so many thousand feet of lumber in it, he said. And I was turning it over in my head what I would say to him about what had been on my mind; whether I should say anything at all, or how I should put it, not to sound shocking, or maybe I wanted it to sound shocking, I don’t know. But finally I put my hand on his knee, and he looked down at me, and I said, “Ben Aaron, Harmon Garrison wants to marry me.”

  I didn’t say it very loud I guess. I said it more into the neck of my dress.

  “Said what?” he said.

  “Harmon said he wants to get me a divorce so I can marry him,” I said.

  His ear was down close to me. I could see the muscle tighten in his jaw; he was biting the stem of his pipe. But he raised his eyebrows to make a calm bland face.

  “Did,” he said. I nodded.

  He broke the quiet, after a little with a studied snort into his handkerchief. “And what did you say to that?” he said.

  “I said I would have to think about it,” I said.

  He raised his chin and looked amused. “The Noble Red Man, eh? Well,” he said. “Harmon’s fine as he can be. It’s something to think about, all right.”

  If he thought of it anymore it certainly didn’t show. “You know,” he said in about the next breath, “you could about build a house ol’ that of stump up yonder. The lumber was sorry though, riddled clear through with worms. Good for nothin’ but acid wood. Wadn’t hardly worth haulin’ out, for what the paper mill will pay…”

  20.

  CHICKENS WILL ROOST

  MAYBE THE ODDEST THING ABOUT THOSE CONVERSATIONS I JUST mentioned was that the subject didn’t come up again. Well, not soon, anyway. Harmon said nothing more about it; next time I saw him, up at the Forks, he was pleasant and nice and that was that. I’m not sure it ever registered at all with Ben Aaron. Who knows? The truth was I didn’t think about it either. Much. Life was good and fine and smooth, just so right the way it was.

  It was so right, in fact, that a little voice would nag me, sometimes. It would say, “For all this dancing, the piper will be paid.” That was usually in the night. In the day there was too much to do.

  For one thing, Coy Ray was putting up a tobacco shed. The barn lay too low he said. Too near the river; too close and damp. “Hit’ll mold afore it cures,” he said. “Hit’s obliged to have good circa-lation.” Ben Aaron said put it up behind the house. “Smothered ’tween a bluff and a spruce pine grove,” Coy Ray said, disgusted. After the inevitable knock-down-drag-out, he hauled the timbers down just above the orchard, close to the road, in a wide-open spot and commenced to build.

  I thought well, now, this is my chance to get next to him. To get my word in. He had his two oldest boys there working with him, and I pranced down there and said to them, “I’ll help your pa if you all will go burn that ol’ wasp nest out of the crib. I’m just petrified to go in there.” It was only partly a lie. And they went off, and I took over holding timbers while Coy Ray nailed. Directly I said, “Coy Ray, what are you goin’ to do for help this fall when the younguns are all gone to school?”

  “Herman ain’t goin’. He ain’t old enough,” he said, pounding away.

  Well well, I thought, I have surely made a strong presentation. I must continue firm. “Who’s gon’ stay with Herman while Rose is at school?” I said. I was braced for the blast.

  He never even looked at me. “I got me a hahr’d womern a-comin’ t’ keep house.”

  I nearly fell backwards off the plank I was straddling. “You mean you got somebody already?” I said.

  “What you wantin’ a job?” he said, not quite really nastily. “I got Chick Aleywine, movin’ in Sunday week. You know Chick Aleywine?”

  No, I did not. Hey—yes, maybe I did. I was astounded. It almost came out of my mouth, You mean that woman Nam said had pups?

  It didn’t. But the next time Ben Aaron came by I had something to tell and something to ask. What he came for, that time, he came to see if we wanted to walk over to Shiloh, to the schoolhouse. “You ought to walk it a time or two with ’em, to satisfy yourself the bears ain’t lined up a-waiting for their dinner, or anything,” he said.

  Of course the kids had already been over there time and again, with Coy Ray’s bunch; this was just a formality, but I put on my sun hat, and Pet and Hugh loped on ahead, and Ben Aaron and I set out into this beautiful afternoon, walking along slow. And we came to the path, down next to the branch, and turned up into the woods. The way was worn good and wide and clear, already, by his comings and goings over the summer. It had the feel of a very old trail, like maybe Indians had used it.

  “Wild hogs mostly use it,” Ben Aaron said. But with the corner of his mouth all curled up, on my side of his pipe. He draped his arm around me, and pulled me close to him, and we walked along in that close comfortable rhythm of inside legs, outside legs, and I could feel the strength of him, from the hipbone to the ground and I basked in that security and forgot what all I had stored up to tell him.

  The kids popped in and out of sight, far ahead. “Oh,” I said, when it came to me, “did I say that Coy Ray had a housekeeper?”

  “Hmmm?” he said, “Did you sure enough get him to do that?”

  Well, ahem, I said, errah, it was in a way his own idea.

  “Y’don’t say,” he said. “You say he’s got somebody already? Who’d he get?”

  “You know Chick Aleywine?” I said.

  He stopped cold and turned and looked at me. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Sonofabitch.”

  “You know ’er,” I said, assuming.

  “Not as well as some folks do, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I ’spect Coy Ray knows her inside and out. Shit fire, Sen—he called THAT a housekeeper? Why she’s so nasty you can’t hardly be in the room with ’er, closed up.”

  “Thought you didn’t know her that good,” I said.

  He glared at me and then he laughed in spite of himself. “Housekeeper my ass,” he said.

  “Does she not work for other people?” I said.

  “Depends on how you mean,” he said. “You take somethin’ with big dinners and the scruples of a tick, it’ll make its way in a sawmill town. Plenty of takers like Coy Ray around, pantin’ to hop anything atall.”

  When that filtered through I was mortified. “Ben Aaron!” I said. “Mercy goodness!” I had never known a man who could be so courtly, in one breath, and so coarse in the next as my cousin.

  “A nanny goat could make it,” he went on, unrepenting. “A nanny’d make a sweeter screw than ol’ Chick Aleywine. Lord God Almighty, Sen, he’s bringin’ that into the house with Rose?”

  Well, I said, really Rose wouldn’t be there all that much and when she was she’d be too busy to get corrupted. Besides she had too much sense. Maybe it was the best that Coy Ray could do. “Does this woman know anything about children?” I said. “Has she ever had children of her own?” I thought it best to not bring up the pups.

  “Grass don’t grow in the middle of the road,” he said. Dejectedly, he put his arm around me again, and we walked on.

  We came down the rise and crossed a new footlog over Shiloh Branch and came out into the clearing. The kids were coming back to meet us, up through the sparse little graveyard of Shiloh Church, which stood gray and weathered as its own tombstone. “We didn’t go in,” Pet said. “We could hear somethin’ moving around in there.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ben Aaron said. “I think it’s apt to be the boogerman himself.” He grinned and got her by one pigtail and took Hugh by the hand, and we went to face the worst. And as we came down through the graves the bell in the steeple gave a mighty Bong and even our cousin Ben Aaron near left the ground.

  “Cole! For the Lord’s sake!” he hollered, when he found his breath.

  A head of wavy pale red hair appeared at the opening of the belfry. A young man with spe
ctacles leaned out. “I’m tying a new rope,” he said. “I guess rats chewed the old one, it broke off in my hand.”

  As we went up the steps we could hear him descending. “Cole Sutherland,” Ben Aaron said. “He’s come to teach for us this year. You’re goin’ to like him, that I can tell you.” Out of the narrow little stairwell came this tall thin scholarly-looking boy; well, he had started a mustache to make him look more formidable, I guess. The cut of his clothes, the softness of his hand, even the look about his eyes said “Money.” Never worked. But he had studied. He had finished college that past May. There were few urgent cries for majors in Greek literature, at the opening of the school year in 1929.

  “His daddy was a friend of mine at school,” Ben Aaron said. “Lives in Richmond. We never did lose touch.”

  So Cole had come here, to teach school. A whole new thing, for him. A whole new people. He would cut the wood for the stove, and enforce respect for the privies; he would have the water bucket filled at the spring and passed down the rows, with the dipper, twice a day. He would school eight grades and then some, row by row; he would tend as best he could to toothaches, and weep behind the scenes, with understanding, for those little ones who simply could not see. He would resort a time or two to a great long hickory, and cast it, broken, into the stove, in his own pain. Cole Sutherland was wonderful; that first time I ever saw him, I just knew it.

  He had brought in a wagon-load of books that day, most of them his own, and had set about turning the choir into a library. Desks already took the place of pews; “I’ve got to wash the windows,” Cole said. “The better we can see outside, the less like jail.” We would help, we said. We would get rags and vinegar and come back the next day.

  We asked if he’d come home with us to eat, and he said, well, he’d settled in to board with Ans and Myrtle Shuman. But when we went over the next day and helped clean, he did come back with us, and it was sort of like a whiff of jasmine, on a dark warm night, to hear about the outside world again.