Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  “Learn a lot a’ things in a lumber camp,” he said, not looking up from his place. “Half the men I was raised with spoke nothin’ but French. Best timber men. Canadians, Cajun or so. Younguns all play together and you learn to talk. Your daddy helped me learn to read.”

  I leaned back on the rock myself. Warmed to the heart, I closed my eyes and he read on, softly, “I shall be buried under the earth, a ghost in the shade of myrtle, while you sit by the fire, a gray grandmother…My love, remember and regret.”

  I put my hand across his mouth. “Hush, hush!” I said. “It’s gruesome! Don’t read that anymore.” He was so pleased I understood it, he kissed my fingers. And I turned my face and kissed him just so quickly, on the mouth.

  It was the first time anything like that had happened. And it seemed like time and breath were just suspended, there, for an instant, like a hummingbird at a flower. “Well, I better go,” he said, clearing his throat. And he got up, studiedly slow, and stretched, and reached down his hand to me. And we walked on up to the house, not saying anything, but thinking plenty, on both sides. When he went to get on his horse I said, “You better let me brush the straw off your back. It looks like you’ve been wallowin’.”

  He sort of flushed and grinned and brushed his tail himself, and swung up into the saddle, and I handed him the bucket, and he tipped his hat goodbye. I had never before seen the man embarrassed. But I felt very warm, and I smiled to myself about it after he was gone.

  We didn’t see him for a while, then; it didn’t worry me, Coy Ray said he had gone off on a round of the furniture factories. If there was any money flowing he was cutting channels. And then Sophia hauled him off to Baltimore at Thanksgiving to go Christmas shopping. Ordinarily I think she wouldn’t want him on those trips. And I can’t imagine he would want to go.

  But, now, Nam was going to have us all to Thanksgiving; with the children and me there, we had a family. Not, apparently, Soph’s kind of jollies.

  It snowed the first good snow a few days before Thanksgiving; we woke up and saw the world all white and all three of us were six years old. We played in it till our fingers hurt.

  On Thanksgiving day we went to Nam’s. We had something concrete to be thankful for; Coy Ray had taken the tobacco to the auction at Red Bank and it brought us a little over $400, and we divided with him, half and half; that was the way Ben Aaron had prescribed it to be. So we were not as broke as we had been.

  And it was just after Thanksgiving that it came a snow, again. Really big, so soft and light we kicked our way through it, to the barn, but it was drifted against the privy door, and we were digging our way in when we heard something whooshing through the snow, down the road. The front steps were drifted over so the visitor came around to the back. It was Ben Aaron, with Cy hitched to an old sled.

  His face was lit up like neon. He was tickled pink with something. “You warm enough? Come get on. I want to show you somethin’,” he said. So we all got on with him, and he clucked at Cy and we went off, down the road, and turned up then toward Shiloh. Our noses were running and our mouths were too cold to talk so we asked no questions. All I could say was, “Oh, it’s so beautiful.” Our breath made a trail behind us.

  We went past the camp and the school and across the tracks that had been laid for the logging trains, and the road narrowed till it looked like we were just out in the woods. Ben Aaron stopped, and listened, and got off and led us up the hill, a little way, through a bunch of hemlocks. He would stop and listen. And then we came to the top of the rise and I heard it. It was the chugging of a steam engine, out of sight in the woods. There wasn’t any track up there. And then I saw the light, coming. It was coming right at us.

  I threw my hand to my mouth and screamed. “It killed you! It killed you!” It was bloodcurdling. I couldn’t stop, I flung myself on Ben Aaron and screamed and screamed. And the whistle blasted, right at us; the whole woods shuddered with the chunk-chunk-chunking of that horrid thing so close its hot breath hissed around us. Before it had passed us by I fainted. The next thing I knew Ben Aaron was holding me across his knees, looking down in my face. The kids were staring at me, petrified. I could hear the thing puffing, close by; it had stopped, and some men were coming to us.

  Ben Aaron was looking me in the eyes, saying, “I am not dead. Look at me, I am not dead!” I raised up and said, “The man in the tree is dead. Get him down! Get him down!”

  “We did get him down,” he said. “It’s all right, now. It’s all right.”

  “She’s all right,” he said to the men that had got off the engine. “She’s just scared of that thing. I ought to have known she would be.”

  “City gals,” one of ’em said wisely. “Scared of their shadder.” I kept my face hid in Ben Aaron’s jacket until they went away. And I heard the thing going chunk…chunk…again.

  “Let’s look at it,” said Ben Aaron.

  “No!” I said.

  “If you could put your hand on it…it’s nothing but a machine,” he said.

  And I screamed, “NO! NO! NO!” and buried my face again, sobbing, like a little girl. I was twelve years old, in the dark, among strangers, and I had just seen somebody die.

  Ben Aaron got up then and picked me up like I really was a child. “Just keep your face to my neck,” he said, “and I’ll tote you out of here.” So we went down the ridge that way; I could feel the heat when we passed the thing.

  “I wish she didn’t act that way,” Hugh said wistfully. “I’d like to ride on it.”

  “We better not do that today I ’spect,” Ben Aaron said. “But I think she might get over it. Don’t give it up.”

  He set me down on the sled, then, and started us off for home. When we got inside, and got the fire stirred up he excused us from the children and took me to the kitchen and fired up the stove. “You were on the ground,” I said.

  “I was on the ground,” he said, looking very serious. “How do you know all this?”

  “You were burning,” I said.

  “I got some hot coals down my back,” he said. “It didn’t do much harm. Just a few little places. Could of rurned my looks,” he said, trying to be light. “How do you know it?”

  “It was in the winter. It was 1912.”

  “I had just got the thing. Belonged to Sophier’s daddy. He’d quit the lumber business and sold me some equipment. That thing’s made to go on snow or soggy ground you know. Called a Lombard.”

  “It was off the track.”

  “Don’t need any. Skids on the front, treads on the back. You put half a dozen cars on skids behind it and you’re haulin’ timber.”

  He wasn’t taking his eyes off me. “I think you better tell me,” he said.

  I told him. I told him about what I saw, in a dream, on a cold night in a boarding school in Paris, I told him I had sat all day in the kitchen with the cooks, and they had petted me a little bit, because I was “homesick.”

  He was not put off at all. He sat considering, a little bit, and then he told his side.

  “We had cut a road through a big stand of white pine, up near the Forks,” he said. “We’d come around the side of the mountain with it, blasted out some places, one place it was too narrow, I knew it, and real steep. Anyway we fired that thing up, I’d just got it down here and it was a real play-toy, you know, and we had it up there bringin’ logs down to the railroad, havin’ a big time with it. It’d warmed up that day and the snow was soft. The ground was soft. We were comin’ around that narrow bend, I was sittin’ up in the cab with the old boy we’d hired to run the thing. And the ground just gave out from under us. Over we went. I don’t know if he jumped or was pitched out.”

  “He was in the tree,” I said. “He was dead. I saw his eyes.”

  “He was in a tree with his neck broke.”

  “And you were on the ground.”

  “I stayed with the thing all the way down, till it hit bottom. Then I hit the snow, with a few hot coals on top of me.” His voice was shak
y. He got out a cigarette and tamped it in the palm of his hand and lit it, and looked at me very long and hard.

  “I was knocked out for a little bit,” he said. “While I was lyin’ there I saw somebody—I thought it was Daisy, but it was much too young. It was a beau…” it was a child that looked just like me, he said. And she was screaming hysterically, and he couldn’t figure why.

  We digested that in silence, for a while. “Thought I’d never get that engine up from there,” he said. “Didn’t give a damn, either. Didn’t go about it till spring. Finally took a bunch of oxen down in there, and righted it. Dug out a road around the base of the mountain and dragged it out of there. Boiler was busted. We hauled it back up to the mill and put it in a shed. Jack Garner got it fixed, used it a while, while I was gone, in ’17-18. I never used it again myself, never went where it was runnin’, till just now.”

  He frowned, studying his fingers. “Why did I do this to you?” he said, finally. “It just makes no sense.”

  I was finding it easier and easier to forgive my cousin anything. Anything in the world. But some things I did ponder.

  It was just a few days after that that half the school at Shiloh came down with the measles. Pet had had ’em, when she was about two. Hugh never had, till then. Cole Sutherland brought him home early one afternoon, just burning up. Cole didn’t feel too good either, it turned out. When he broke out himself the school closed down.

  I had halfway agreed to take the kids home for Christmas; I really hadn’t meant it but it was something to get those people down there out of my hair. I sort of sadly realized we had the money to go on, ’course if it fell into certain hands when we got down there we’d never get back here, or we’d come back broke as haints at best. Well I confess I seized upon Hugh’s measles as a perfect excuse. I waited till he ought to have been nearly over it, it was along about the middle of December, and then wrote Louise that sad to say I guess we couldn’t come.

  Well, the penalty for that sin was that he didn’t get over it. The littler Wilcoxes were sick too but they were up bright as pennies when Hugh was not able to even stand on his feet. He kept coughing this dry, wracking cough. I heard him groaning and talking in the night one night and I jumped up and lit the lamp and felt his forehead and it was like a coal.

  It was sleeting out and black as pitch, and I didn’t know what on God’s green earth to do. He was making a queer noise when he breathed. I got Pet up, I didn’t have the faintest idea what she’d do but I didn’t want to be alone with him. He was taking spells of shivering; his teeth would chatter and his lips were right blue and cracked and dry. When he coughed and blood flew out on the comforter I started to cry in a panic.

  “Hush, Mama, I’ll go get Rose,” Pet said.

  “No no, I’ll go,” I said. “I can’t have you out there in that dark.”

  “I’ll not stay here alone with him while he dies,” she said, pulling on her rubber boots.

  Well, I got the lantern and went with her to the barn and bridled the mule, and started her off around the road, though it was farther; I wouldn’t have her ford the river like that and go up that icy trail for anything. And I went back in, dreading it, but I could hear Hugh breathing before I got in the room and that was some relief.

  It seemed like forever before I heard two sets of feet come on the porch. It was Rose and Coy Ray; they had left Pet at their place in front of their fire. She was drenched and freezing. Coy Ray looked down at Hugh and turned around and started out the door. “I’m a-goin after Ans,” he said. And that was all there was to that. Off into the gray he went, for it was getting morning. When he and Ansel Shuman came back down in a buggy, it was day.

  I remember Ans coming and standing by the bed; his hands were cold and he didn’t want to touch Hugh so he stood there frowning down at him, counting the pulse in his neck. Then he went and warmed his stethoscope at the fire before he put it on Hugh’s chest. Ans was like that; he was big and white-headed and heavy, not so fat as just big. And quiet; he never did say things just to be talking, it was funny how in his bigness and stolidness I could see some kinship to Rose’s leanness and grace; a gentle, good soul.

  Hugh’s eyes were glassy from the fever. His mouth was all dry. Ans sent Rose to the kitchen to make tea and Coy Ray out to the woodpile to bring in lots of firewood. He kept leaning down and listening to Hugh’s chest. Finally he straightened up and his face lightened a little bit. “I think it’s just on one side,” he said. “I think we might be lucky.”

  He went and raised the window some and said to keep a big fire all the time. He said to keep spooning tea and cider and grape juice into Hugh’s mouth till he was able to drink. He made up a mustard plaster then and put it on one side of Hugh’s chest, and told me to watch and not let it blister, and he said he would be back the next day. He seemed to be confident there would be a next day.

  But pneumonia to me meant death. I was stunned, I felt condemned. I had brought this child up here to die. I was glad Ben Aaron had gone to Pennsylvania, or someplace. He was part of why I felt guilty.

  Nam came trotting down that afternoon. Ans had called her. She came like she always came, with her bag of provisions. Coy Ray had chopped a bunch of wood and gone home. Pet came riding down on the mule when she was assured there was no dead body here. Rose was able to go home when Nam came.

  “Lordamercy Ans Shuman’s a-goin’ to freeze this child to death,” Nam said, slamming the window down. “You got to smother the pneumonie fever. He won’t never learn. Wha’d he put on this baby’s chest?” she said. “A mustard plaster? In the name of the Lord what ignorance.” She went tearing off to the kitchen with her bag and I smelt the onions frying. Directly she came out with an onion poultice and yanked up Hugh’s undershirt and plunked it on him. He stretched his lower lip and gave a little retch. But after a while we all got used to it.

  Day by day, night by night it was the same. Ans would come in every morning and quietly go open the window and throw more wood on the fire. He would take off the onion poultice and listen to Hugh’s chest and “forget” to put the onions back on.

  As soon as he was in the road Nam would run heat her onions up, or fry a fresh batch.

  Hugh held on, rattling and spitting and shivering and talking about things we could not see. It was like he was melting right in front of us. His cheeks got hollow and his skin was tight and blue-looking. I had the horrid dread that I was going to have to send Louise word that he was dying.

  We would sit by him and rock. Our talking didn’t seem to bother him; he was not with us. No comfort to me, Nam catalogued the children up on the hill. All the little stones with such sad stories. Some of them came with awful things wrong with them. Some never breathed. Several came frail in the mind; a few of those lived awhile, loving and trusting and all the more grieved over when they died. A couple lived on and were good children all their lives. The ones Nam didn’t talk about were the ones that died coughing and burning and wasting. Like Hugh.

  On the seventh night a screech owl settled in to gurgling, over the house. Hugh got real restless. He thrashed his arms about and fretted that his fishing line was tangled in a bush. I started to cry. I put my head down in Nam’s lap and wailed till I was absolutely limp. She patted my back. I could hear her sniffing. We had given him up.

  I don’t know how in that posture we went to sleep. I guess we were exhausted. But sometime close to morning I heard Hugh holler, “No I won’t drink anymore! It’s bad!” I jumped up and turned up the lamp and looked at him. His hair was stuck to his head with sweat. His pillow was wet. He had kicked off his covers.

  He opened his eyes and peered at me. “Take that stuff away, Mama,” he said. “It tastes awful.”

  “What stuff?” I said. And it was like he had waked up, then, from a deep sleep.

  “Where is your other dress?” he said.

  That made no sense. “What dress?” I said.

  “That white dress you had on,” he said. “I liked it.”


  He just sort of faded out then; he lay back and smiled, and drifted off, and his breathing was easy, and he slept.

  Nam had got up. “I smell pennyrile,” she said. “Did somebody bring some pennyrile tea in here? I wish to the Lord we had some for this child. Your daddy liked to died one time and Daisy biled up pennyrile and boneset and made ’im drink the tea.”

  “He’s asleep, Aunt Nam,” I said. She looked close at him. His face was pink and calm.

  “He’s come through the crisis,” she said. “Praise the Lord.”

  Hugh was sitting up in a chair for the first time the day Ben Aaron got back and heard about our near-miss. It was two days before Christmas and it had snowed a blizzard, when he came down. As it turned out he had been supposed to meet Sophia at her folks’ in Massachusetts for Christmas but he had to come home to the mill for some reason, and had sworn to get back to her at least by Christmas Day. And here he was, down here at The Birches.

  Hugh was sitting by the fire with a quilt around him looking at a catalogue, happy as a lark. “I think this place needs a Christmas tree,” Ben Aaron said. “Come go up the line with me,” he said to me, “I know where there’s the very one.”

  We left Pet in charge and went off with the axe, up to the base of the ridge and into the woods, just this side of the river. The woods were mostly brown and bare; the snow was drifted against the laurels, and clumps of young hemlocks held snow in their arms. I thought one of them would be beautiful.

  But there were some hollies scattered about, too. We came to a particular tree that was thick with leaves; that is rare, they usually are right sparse, in the deep woods like that, wild. It had a splendid shape, not so very tall, but full of so many berries it was like it was decorated. “I’ve watched this grow for years,” he said. “I knew sometime there’d be some use for it.” And he took the axe and started to take a swing at it.

  “No, don’t!” I said. “Don’t cut it down. Don’t kill it, I can’t bear it.”

  “The kids’d love it,” he said.

  “They’d love a pine,” I said. “I can’t take that. It’s perfect.”