Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  “Did somebody shoot your mule?” I said. It was all not right. And he looked at me, then, and his mouth commenced to quiver.

  And finally he said, “Miss Steele, I’m sorry…Mr. Steele is down yonder in the road. We got to get him home.” He didn’t need to say another word to me. I just sort of fell forward, on him. And he held me up, shaking. He was mortally afraid. “I never seed a dead man speak. I never seed a deader man than Ben Aaron Steele. I don’t know how he rode that horse this far. We seed him comin’ down from Wilcox Ridge. We seed him fall. We got to him, and turned him over. I’ll swear to you mam, I’m sorry, but he didn’t have no face at all. And when I laid him back, he spoke to me. Miss Steele when a dead man speaks it marks your life. He said, ‘My sin. Oh, God, my sin.’ I’d swear that’s what he said…”

  Well, I would have sworn it wasn’t. Not quite. I patted that poor man, just by reflex. And I straightened up, and turned loose, and took a deep breath, and said well, I would get the quilt.

  He and his logging partner had a team of oxen working, way back up Wilcox Ridge. The mule and wagon would be quicker. He went to get it. I went and got that blue quilt down, and took it out to him. “I don’t think you ought to come,” he said. “I’ll send somebody down.”

  “I’ll come directly, on my own,” I said. And when the wagon had rattled off, I went out and fed the chickens, and the pigs, and went about the little things I had to do, and I left the house and started up the road. It was full of butterflies, they would float ahead of me and light. It was so beautiful along the road. The joe pye was blooming so pretty, such a pretty shade of dusty pink. And the touch-me-nots, and the asters, and things. There were a few sassafras leaves fallen. I sang myself a little song, walking along. I didn’t cry at all; my nose was bleeding, but I just wiped it on my skirt. Up just a few yards this side of the road that turns off to Coy Ray’s, there was a puddle of thick, sticky blood in the road. I stopped and looked at it, curious. There was a black and white beetle crawling in it. I flicked at the beetle with my toe, I hadn’t realized till then, that I had gone off without my shoes, and now my toe was bloody, and all sticky. I walked on. In the sunny patches, the goldenrod was so pretty. On up the ridge the sourwoods were red. So he had been coming home to me. He knew. Oh, he was so surprised. That was why he spoke to me, after he was dead. My head felt light. Very shortly I will get to you, I said. I will tell you it’s all right. I’m going to be fine. I was holding onto a tree, to keep from falling. I didn’t really hear the buggy coming. I don’t know how Nam got me in it, all by herself. I remember her hollering at the horse, turning it around, and her turning loose of me just to crack the whip. I remember coming down into the Forks, at breakneck speed.

  “Where did they go with him?” I asked. “I want to see him.”

  “No, no,” she said.

  And I begged her, and I pleaded.

  “They’ve got him at Sophier’s,” she said. Against her judgment, we went to Sophier’s. Jack Garner was there, in the front yard, and Os Hambright. They helped us down. They led us, leaning on one another, up the front steps to that columned porch. We could hear Sophier inside screaming. She was just screaming and screaming, like some kind of wounded thing. There were ladies in there with her, they said. There were a bunch of men in a cluster on the porch. It was like the talk turned off with a switch, when we came through, when they stood aside and let us into their circle. On a chaise, there lay the body of Ben Aaron, still under the quilt. Somebody had draped that with a sheet. But even so, one of his hands hung down from under it. The fingers were waxy and stiff. Blood had dried between them. I reached down for that hand, and then I don’t know. I didn’t know anything, until I woke up in the bed at Nam’s.

  I woke up and heard people coming in and out, talking low. Some woman, I never did know who, was sobbing so pitifully, like her heart would break. I know Myrtle Shuman, Ansel’s wife, was there. She and Nam were talking. The sheriff had called Ans from Red Bank and said be was going up to the ridge after Coy Ray. Ans had gone down to get Rose and the boys. Myrtle was as good a soul as ever lived. I remember her broad, good face and her padding about, fetching and helping, always so quiet.

  “If I were not here, I would have to go to Sophia’s,” she said, sort of wryly, when we thanked her. Not once in all of it did Nam waver, or take on. Neither one of us had shed a tear. The matter of her moment seemed to be looking out for me.

  But then, she did a real peculiar thing. I heard her tell Myrtle, “Sit here and meet people for me, will you? I’ve got to go t’ the bank.” And off she went. Her mind’s off, I thought. Imagine thinking about money. And after what seemed like too long a while, she came breezing in, where I was, and rustled around in the little old bookcase, with her back to me, and I noticed her put two books up in the shelves with the glassed-in front, and lock the doors, with a key. At the end of everything, you know, I am curious, nosy; I wondered what was so pertinent, today, in A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. And I studied the garlands of pink flowers on the wallpaper, and it began to come on me, what had really happened on that day, and all else fogged and faded.

  Snatches of stray talk floated through the rooms of that old house like strands of spider web, looking for something to hang on. “They had a fight out here in the road one time,” a man was saying. “It was just a cuss-fight till Coy Ray jumped up in the bed of a wagon and come down on Ben Aaron’s head with a demi-john.”

  “Sheriff got ’im ’at time,” another one said. “Took ’im down to jail and locked ’im up for ’tempted murder. Next mornin’ Mr. Steele he come down with his head all bound up and the money in his hand to bail ol’ Coy Ray out. Rode off with him, peaceful as a dove.”

  “They’ve had some strife about whiskey…”

  “It was some bad blood over a woman, I b’lieve, one time…”

  “Well, I don’t know, I heared that Coy Ray’s been pirating some timber. I heared that just last evenin’…”

  Out of all of it I got only this much of what had happened: Ben Aaron had come down right behind me, that morning. For some reason he had gone to Coy Ray’s. Somewhere up on that ridge he had been shot, point-blank, with a shotgun, in the face. Somehow he had lived to get down almost to The Birches. What did he go to Coy Ray’s for? Sophia, they said, was totally incoherent. He probably hadn’t told her anyway. And of course, I wondered, did he know somehow about me being there, that night? Did he see the mule’s tracks in the road, as I had looked for Coy Ray’s? Was he going to Coy Ray’s, in the first place—or did he come on signs of Coy Ray’s private enterprise along the way, and get side-tracked? As long as I live, I’ll never know.

  The reality, that it had happened, was mercifully blurred by the niceties of death. The whole of Caney Forks was in that house sometime that day. By late afternoon a lot of Red Bank came. Over and over, the women asked Nam, “Where ought we to bring the food?” And just as calm as she could be, she’d say, “We’re goin’ to Sophier’s…we’ll all be over there…”

  When she could get away she brought a wash pan, and got me up. I still had on the clothes I had hung tobacco in the day before. She went off and came back with a black skirt and a gray checked waist, and she rounded up some shoes as long and sharp as needles, and left me to get myself together. Of course the plaquet of that skirt would not close; I left the shirt tail out to cover it. I smiled to myself and said out loud, “Ben Aaron, I need another apron.” I looked in the glass and I looked like a haint.

  The undertaker had been, when we got to Sophia’s. There was no sign of what had been on the porch. There were little knots of people everywhere, talking in near-whispers. The preacher’s wife brought us in and took us up the stairs to a room where a couple of other women were sitting with Sophia. I would have known whose room that was, anywhere. The walls were painted lavender. The furniture was buff. A pair of plaster cupids smiled down benignly from a gilded shelf over the bed. On the dresser there was a huge brass jardiniere of peacock feathers
that no doubt framed her image, while she combed. In the bed, under a lavender-flowered silk comfort, Sophia lay snubbing fitfully in her sleep. Ans had given her something for her hysterics. I went and stood over her. Her face was blotched and swollen just grotesque. Her hair was matted from tears, at the temples. She had been so lonely. She had suffered so much pain that she could not communicate, except that it came out uglinesss. This was only the final spasm. She had been, I thought, so miserably and gracelessly and lovelessly in love. How sad. I felt this strange detachment from all of it. I thought, “My sympathy, Mrs. Steele.”

  Across the bed, on the night stand, there lay the pipe with the curly-wood bowl. And a book, lying on its open pages. Ah, had he been reading Gautier and Mallarme to the romantic Mrs. Steele? I was compelled to look. It was Candide. I picked it up, keeping his place with my finger. He had been close to the end. How eloquent, how ethereal and dreamy he would have made those passages sound, for his love who understood not one word. It was a page that in English would read like this: “I wish to know which is worse, to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one’s behind cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be beaten and hanged, to be dissected, to row in the galleys, in short to go through all the miseries we have suffered, or to stay here and have nothing to do…?” All of a sudden I could not contain myself. I commenced to laugh uncontrollably. I laughed and the tears ran. I buried my face in my hands. The ladies jumped up, all flustered, to comfort me in my hysteria. Sophia tossed and moaned. Nam grabbed me by the arm and ushered me out and kept me cornered on the landing until I wore it out and hushed.

  “For God’s sake, what was that about?” she said.

  “I must tell you later,” I said, and I was nearly seized again. But we forgot it; there were so many people in the rooms downstairs, to be comforted by. We were making our way out through the parlor when Cole Sutherland saw us, and came up and took me to his heart, without a word. He had brought Rose. I looked around for her, and there she was, on the arm of an overstuffed chair in the corner, with her arm around Celestine. I wondered if anybody else would see one as the carnival mirror image of the other. We went and kissed them. I held onto Rose, for an instant, like she was life itself. And then I knew I had to go.

  By the grace of God, Nam went to sleep that night. The truth was, neither of us knew yet what had hit us. My back had begun to hurt, at Sophia’s. It was an irregular throbbing that came and went. That night I could not lie still. Finally I got up and went to the bathroom. I was in labor. Nothing mattered then but to get home. The mule, I supposed, was over at the livery, shut up for the night. I couldn’t dare wake anyone. I got on my clothes and wrote Nam a note: “I am gone to feed the pigs.” And I crept out, and headed down the road. The lights were still on, when I went by Sophia’s. But it was a dark night out; the road was dark and foggy. I went mostly by feel, and sound. I could hear Boney Creek. I could hear the sighing of the hemlocks on the mountain top. I could hear the river. The pains had run together, they were constant. Near the end I had to stop and lean on rocks and trees and pant. I got to the front steps and got myself inside, and somehow got into the bed.

  That is where I was when Nam arrived, splitting the wind. She had got up and found that note. “Run out on me, did ye?” she said. “They’s folks’d come and feed them pigs.” She got a towel and wiped the sweat off my face. “Is it a-comin’?” she asked. “Is it gone too far to stop?”

  I just nodded. Babies that are ready to come are hard enough. This one was fighting every inch with every ounce, to hold on. I know unconsciously I fought to hold it. It took us a good while to lose. Nam took the horse and buggy around to the barn and hid it, in case somebody should come looking for us. She threw out some corn and let the chickens and the pigs out to forage. “Let the pigs go live with their daddy,” she said. They were slick enough to make it till the chestnuts fell. There was nothing she could do, then, but sit and hold my hand and wait.

  “When did it happen?” she said. She was weighing our chances.

  “The middle of March,” I said. I watched her whisper off the months on her fingers. “Not quite six,” I said. “We’re not going to make it.”

  “I know it,” she said. She dug around in a bag of necessities she’d brought and got out a bottle of brandy and doled it out with a spoon. I hadn’t eaten in so long it went to work at once. It eased the cramp a little and thickened my tongue, and loosened it. “I killed him,” I said. “As sure as if I had held that gun, I killed him.”

  And she said, “Hush. We can none of us say why this thing, or that thing. The book was done written when the characters were born.” She got up and went to the window and looked out, thinking whatever she was thinking. Ive’s clock began to strike ten. There was a break in the fog and the sun poured in, and the little flecks of dust danced in gold spirals around the room. The room went in spirals, round and round. I remember hollering once, and asking Nam to forgive me, and hollering again. The next thing, there was this little mewing. In my craziness I thought, where in the world did Nam get that kitten? That’s what it sounded like. She had it wrapped up in a towel, holding up against her.

  “Can you hold it?” she said. “It’s a little boy.” She laid it on my chest and draped my arms over it. She pulled me up with it, a little bit, and propped up my head. It squinched up its eyes and cried a little wispy cry. It was the tiniest thing, it was purple and wrinkled and it had its little hair, and eyebrows. It clutched at my finger, feebly, with its perfect little hands. Its little mouth was blue. It was making a raspy noise when it breathed. Nam had gone and fixed a pan of warm water.

  “Do you think we ought to wash it?” I said. “It looks so cold.”

  “No,” she said. She took it up, and held it on one arm, and with the other hand she patted it on the head with that warm water. “I baptize thee Benjamin Hamilton Steele, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” she said. She laid it back with me, then, and turned away. I could see her shoulders shaking. “Was that all right with you?” she said finally. “I never even asked you what its name should be.”

  That was perfectly right, I said. I held it to my face. I could hear its chest bubbling and struggling. And then it stopped. I could feel the life twitching away. Nam went to take it, but I said no. She went out, then; I heard her go out the back. I knew where she was gone. When she came back, after a while, she had to untangle its fingers from my hair. They had gotten stiff.

  “Get my shawl and wrap it in that,” I said. She did, and laid it back on the bed. “What can we put it in?” she said. I couldn’t answer her, so she went to look for something. She came back with what could have passed for a neat little coffin, lined with red plush cloth. She laid the baby in that old fiddle case, and we prayed over it, our own quiet prayers, and she said Amen, and closed the lid and latched it, and went out with it, in her arms. When she came back from the hill she said she had put it in the grave with Hamilton Steele. “The first and the last,” she said. And then she didn’t even sit down to rest.

  She got more warm water and a rag. “I’ve got to clean you up,” she said.

  “Oh, let me rest,” I said.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I can’t. I’ve got to get us back to the Forks. Thank God, I doubt Soph can get that funeral up until tomorrow or next day. They’ve sent for her sister.”

  “Oh, I can’t go,” I said. “There’s no way I can go like this.”

  “Indeed you must go,” she said. “I’ve got to go and you’ve got to go with me. We’ve got to make on like nothin’ in the world has happened. Only death and destruction.” She was already scrubbing away on my face and arms and hands.

  “I can’t go,” I said. “I cannot go to that church and sit there. I cannot see him put in the ground.” She squeezed out the wash rag and dabbed my bloody self, and washed my legs and feet.

  “You have got to do all that,” she said. “You have got to give that body up.” She went to the wardro
be and got clean clothes then, and pulled my feet off the bed, and got me up and dressed me like I was a child. Even to a diaper, out of an old sheet. And she went and got the horse and buggy, and drove it up, and helped me out to it, and came back and shut up the house, and we went flying off to the Forks, with me lying in her lap, until we got nearly to town and she made me sit up. When we passed the Episcopal Church there were a bunch of men out digging a grave. “She won’t let us bring him home?” I said.

  “Never thought she would,” Nam said. To everybody who had panicked in her absence, she explained, “We had to go down and feed Sen’s stock. And I had one o’ my sinkin’ spells; it’s just I’ve not slept good.” I thought please nobody look at her too close. She had blood splatters down the front of her dress. After we got in the house, not much got through the fog to me at all. I remember waking up, I know it was that night, and Rose was sitting there, tending the fire in the room. It had turned off real cool. Or else I was in a chill. I started to say something to her and drifted off again, with my mouth open. I remember her feeding me milk toast with a spoon, I guess it was the next morning. I know she and Nam got me up that afternoon and put clothes on me, and they put a hat on me, with a long veil, and lifted me into the buggy and we went to the church. They took us in the side door, I know, and sat us down in the pew behind the “family”—that was Sophier and her sister and Celestine, and some queer people I never saw before nor since. I remember us all getting up and the people singing “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, Like the wideness of the sea; There’s a wideness in his justice that is more than liberty…” And I remember that casket being brought down the aisle by strangers, pale, well-to-do looking men in expensive dark suits. Sophier was all got up in black, of course, but she was peculiarly quiet, sort of all drawn up. I’ll tell you, though, when that coffin got to the front of the church her sister Patience turned loose a screech and wail to raise the dead. She shrieked and sobbed for I reckon what in her mind ought to have been. And Celestine was sitting there between Patience and her mother, all bewildered and upset anyway, and it scared her so bad, all that taking on, that she commenced to howl and cry out of pure panic. And then some women behind us took it up, and the preacher stood up there with his hands folded, waiting to be able to talk. Whatever it was he said, I don’t remember it. But we sat there, and it was like the Lord’s hand I guess was on us. It was serene as sitting on the riverside. The sun was coming through those stained glass windows; it made shadows, I thought, like those water-dapples it makes on the rocks above the river. There were a lot of flowers in there, there was a solid blanket of red carnations over the casket, but that was not the way it smelled, in there. It smelled like fresh sap and sawdust and warm wild grass. And when we went out to the churchyard, and watched them put that carved oak showpiece down into that hole in the clay, and watched them shovel that red dirt in on it, I thought, well, Ben Aaron, the ground has won. You always did belong to it and now you always will. But not I, sir. No, not I.