Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  “No, Uncle Ans,” Rose said, “if y’ll let us out at the road, up yonder, it’ll suit us well to walk.” Ans looked at me, pretty concerned; I had not hardly walked from Nam’s to town. I said yes, it would be good to walk. It was sort of blustery-looking out, windy, clouds flying. But at the turnoff he and Myrtle let us out and said goodbye. We promised to come on, in a day or so and begged them not to worry, and we went on our way.

  It was then a little bit before noon, I guess. But cloudy and really cool and the wind was damp and fresh on our faces, and we needed that. We needed to walk with the silence of one another; nobody on earth could share the things we didn’t need to say. We had got up just past Barz’s house when we saw some figures coming down the road. And they began to run, coming to us. And Rose took off running to meet them. It was Cole Sutherland and the Wilcox boys, on their way to Red Bank. “This thing was on my mind so bad I couldn’t think,” Cole said. “I turned the school out at dinner. I told the children just to go on home, that I had something to take care of.” He had figured us to be in Red Bank all that day. The boys had pleaded to go; they had it in their heads their daddy might be getting out and they would see him home. Cole said he had hoped at least they’d get to talk with Coy Ray. “I know how lonely he must be,” he said. While we were standing in the road talking though the bottom fell out and it started just pouring rain on us. I said let’s all go on to the house and get a fire and dry out, and eat something, and then we would think from there. So we did, we got home and made up bread and fried it fast in the skillet, and made coffee, and got our wits together. When the deluge let up to just a drizzle, Cole and the two bigger boys took off for the Forks, carrying all kinds of messages, and left Rose and the two littler ones and me to come when it was dry.

  Along in the gloom late that afternoon we heard this whining and whimpering and then a scratching at the back door, and Rose went, and it was one of Coy Ray’s old coon hounds that’d been out of pocket for weeks, ever since the trouble. I told her to let it on in, and directly here was the other one, wanting in too, so we had ’em both in the kitchen gobbling cornbread, and then they went to sleep behind the stove.

  And mercy, did it rain. It seemed so much worse after dark. The wind picked up and howled. I went out and got more wood off the porch. Coy Ray cut this wood, I thought. He chopped it and split it for me, and piled it by the back door so I’d always have some dry. I couldn’t bear it. As I started in the door there was this horrendous roar, it was like an explosion first and then it rumbled louder and louder like the mountain was coming down on us. I threw the wood inside and yelled for Rose; she was in the front room putting down some pallets for the little boys, by the fire. She didn’t hear me, the roaring drowned me out; she heard it and came running. “Oh, before God!” she screamed. “It’s Pap’s dam is busted.”

  Dear Lord, we had forgot that whole business. I had no idea what kind of flood it would make, how high it would climb or anything. “It’ll not come up here,” I said. But we took a lantern and ran upstairs and tried looking out the window. I don’t know what we thought we’d see in the pitch black dark. There were, though, little flutters of lightning now and then. Ordinarily we couldn’t see the river from the window, even in the light. But now in the flickers we could see a fierce swirling sea coming up at the barn. “That is the worst,” I said. “It won’t come any further.” What we heard, I knew, was the booming echo of it going through the Narrows. There was cracking, now and then, too much like a gun. That was big logs busting up on the rocks, and on each other.

  We went back down and huddled by the fire. “Hit’s a sign,” Rose said, too weary to be anxious. She lay down on the quilts and draped her arm across those sleeping little boys, and she dozed off, breathing soft and fitful, like her sorrows plagued her even in her sleep. And I lay down too then, but I did not sleep. I kept thinking, if Ben Aaron were alive he’d have Coy Ray out of jail by now.

  The hounds heard a car before I did and set up a terrible racket. I took the lamp to the kitchen and threatened them with a stick to make them hush and I heard it myself, rattling down the road, groaning and shimmying in the mud. Directly headlights shined in the window and feet thumped up on the porch.

  I went and opened the door. It was the sheriff. “Ans says Rosanner’s here with you,” he said. “Get ’er up, please mam, and get ’er dressed warm. I got to take ’er with me.” I got a horrible, rattling chill. “Coy Ray’s a-dyin and he’s beggin to see her,” he said. “I swore to him I’d get ’er there.”

  I turned around and she was right behind me, her face was drawn as death. “I’m comin’,” she said. She had one arm in her coat and her shoes in her hand. “He tried to come home, didn’ he,” she said.

  “Yes, honey,” the sheriff said, “and he’s shot clear through.” They would have to go back up by the Forks, and around, he said. He had tried to come in from the south but the river was over the road, down near the highway. Rose turned her face for me to kiss her goodbye. And they went off into the fog, about the business of death. Herman woke up as they went out the door. He cried, without a sound, when he saw that Rose was gone and I took him on my lap and we rocked by the fire while he slept, again. I looked into the fire, thinking. I was beginning to understand that the love of my life was dead and buried. Our baby was dead and buried. Now a man who loved me was dying; this child that I loved so much was on her way to his dying, and it would haunt her all her life. That hideous night I thanked God for those freckled little boys who slept so peacefully, by the fire. I thanked God the room was bright and warm when those old hounds set up a howl. I took it for a sign, like Rose would have done, and put more wood on the fire to make more light and warmth. And I thanked the Lord again that the breaking clouds were rosy and the kitchen fire was dancing and the dogs had hushed when the sheriff’s A-Model came rattling down the road again. And we all went back in the kitchen and drank a pot of coffee, while the little boys slept on, oblivious.

  “I let Coy Ray down,” the sheriff said. Rose stirred her coffee very slowly, looking down into her cup. When they had got to town, the bridge was out. A wad of broken-up logs had hit it like a freight train. They had to go on, way south of Red Bank, to cross the river and come back up. When they got there Coy Ray was dead.

  “He wasn’t even cold. I kissed him,” Rose said. “I b’lieve he knew.”

  The next morning we had a quiet little procession up Wilcox Ridge, out to that spur where a hundred and fifty years of Wilcoxes lay under rocks and wooden crosses. They put Coy Ray down by Cleone, and the whole matter then was left to God.

  We straightened up, then, Rose at her brothers’ domain and I at mine. Or Sophia’s. Their place had been spared, at least, the wreckage of the flood. The birch grove was a shambles of broken trees and washed-up logs and mud. The ferns and things I thought would never come back; ’course they did, a lot, anyway, in the spring.

  Now you’d never know it, except there are these logs, about; chestnut, most of them, upholstered with moss. You might could still see they were sawed. They weren’t sawed here. Nothing, only a little firewood, was ever sawed here.

  The water never bothered the house, or even the barn. I just “redded up a little,” as Nam would say. Neatened up. But we neither one of us had any heart to stay down here alone, right then. So Ans came and got us, and took us to the Forks. He said it was best anyway, for a while. Nam was not doing any good, he said. For the first time ever he could remember, she had taken to her bed.

  “She’s old, Cud’n Sen,” he said, sort of stricken, as if he had just noticed. I’ll tell you I had a dread about going in there and seeing that, myself. I was getting clear-minded about all that had happened, and on account of me. I didn’t see how she could stand to have me around.

  She was by herself when I got there, lying up in her big old four-poster, with her night cap on, tied under the chin. As I tipped in, I thought, well sort of hoped, she’d be asleep. She raised up though and squinted at me and
she said, “Well the law have mercy. I thought I was forsaken.”

  “No, ma’m,” I said. “Not while I live.”

  “Well, stir around then and get us up some dinner,” she said.

  “I’ve not had a bite t’eat but some little old broth since I laid down here the day before yesterday. Make speed ’fore somebody comes.” While I was down in the kitchen Vicie Hambright came in the back door with a bowl of soup with a dishrag wrapped over it. She didn’t see me right off. When I spoke to her she looked like she’d seen a snake.

  “Howd-do,” she said, and she showed me her back—I must say it was considerable—and stalked off up the stairs. Vicie had put one and one together. The sum I am sure had been shared all over Caney Forks.

  Well, anyway, when Vicie had gone out the front door, to avoid the kitchen, I went up and took a plate and asked Nam if there was anything else she wanted, and she said yes, to call up to the drugstore and tell ’em to send her a bottle of calomel. “I’ve got this sour stomach,” she said. She pressed her fist into the middle of her chest. “It’s commenced to pain me even in my sleep. I’m so weak I can barely make it to the chamber. I told Ans I had to have a dose of calomel and there was none in the house and that wretch said he was glad to hear it. Wouldn’t bring me any. Bull-headed snip.”

  I said well, I would just walk down there, if she would be all right. And I did; I went up to Ans’s office and told him what she wanted and he laughed a sort of sad laugh, and got out some milk of magnesia tablets and said tell her the drug store was cleaned out of calomel and to take a couple of these.

  “You know it’s not her stomach,” he said. I didn’t think so, I said. “Her heart’s just gone,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s lyin’ over there across the road.”

  Ans was not the most demonstrative creature on earth. He kept a kind distance, you might say. But he got up, then, and came and held me and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m so sorry for it all,” he said. “So sorry. And it’s not over yet.”

  I borrowed a piece of paper from him and wrote the children a quick note. Somehow, in the fog, I remembered I had written them once in the past month. I had written, “Our Cousin Ben Aaron has died. There is so much to do it will be a little while before I can come home. Remember that I love you.”

  Now I wrote them again. “Aunt Nam is very sick and I must stay until something changes.” I went on down to go to the post office with it. When I came out of the drugstore there was a big Packard automobile coming out from Sophia’s. As I walked on up the street it passed me; there was a trunk strapped onto the running board and one on the back. I couldn’t see who was driving. There was a pile of hat boxes in the front seat, and two dressed-up ladies in the back. I watched them up the road, up past the sawmill and the mill houses, till the dust closed in behind them.

  It was the next day that the Bank of Caney Forks closed its doors. I didn’t tell Nam that; I knew she had some money in there, like a lot of other people that got stung. It was one of the Sunshine Club that came in every day, with all the news of deaths and bread lines and Republicans; one of them told her about it.

  I was appalled and then surprised. “Well, I thought it’d happen,” Nam said philosophically. “I figgered it would go when Aaron’s money left it. That ’us about all holdin’ it together. That and the mill account. Sophier wadn’ about to leave it there for charity’s sake, I could tell you.

  “As for me,” she said, “I’m an old woman; money’ll not long be of use to me. I feel bad, ’course, for you other folks that’s lost…” I thought she took it terribly well. When the bearer of bad news was gone, Nam raised up and reached a key from the little dresser by her bed. “I want you to go in that old bookcase yonder and fetch me a couple of books,” she said. “I want you to know what they are, so you can get ’em, when you need ’em.”

  But before she could say what she wanted I heard the front door open, and one of the neighbor women hollered from the foot of the stairs. I hollered back to come on up, and stuck that key down in my apron pocket and went on about my business. That night when all the company was gone, and I took up her supper, she seemed awfully droopy. Her color was bad, right gray, and she didn’t eat. I sat by her and tried to feed her with a spoon. “I know it’s good, Daisy darlin’,” she said, “but I just can’t, I’m just too tired.”

  Now, that rocked me. I can’t tell you what a sinking feeling came over me. I sat there just devastated, watching her, till she closed her eyes and her breath got fairly regular and slow, and I flew downstairs and called Ans.

  “This is the way it will go,” he said. He came by and looked at her, but she was sleeping blissful as a baby. And that was pretty much the way it was, from then on. We watched her slipping farther and farther away, and there was nothing we could do. When she was able to speak, she called me Daisy all the time. Bat Dung went down and got the tobacco out of the barn and took it to the auction for us. When I got the check it came to about $350 apiece for Rose and me. She divided with the boys, of course, and I sent some home to Louise for the children, but I had to keep some to run our household on, for I guessed Nam’s nest-egg had gone down with the bank.

  Well, one day I was feeding her some breakfast, and the light came back on in her eyes, and she said, “Daisy, I want you to have something. I think I told you a while ago to fetch me Papa’s books out of the bookcase.”

  “What was it you wanted?” I said.

  “Bring me the Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith,” she said. I got the key and unlocked the glass doors and looked. There were two of them, two volumes. They were uncommonly fat and bulging. I took ’em and handed ’em over.

  “Read!” she said impishly, waving her hand. I opened one at random, to a hundred-dollar bill. Nam put her fingers to her mouth and smirked. “Right interestin’, eh?” she said. Both books were stuffed as tight as ticks. “We beat Sophier to it, darlin’,” she said.

  “Lord have mercy,” I said. “What do you want me to do with these?”

  “Papa’d want you to have his books,” she said. She was fading off again. Sometime during those dreary days I was aware, just for the moment, that it was Christmas, and I felt wretched about the children. I called them on the telephone and we had this wooden conversation that ended up in a three-way crying match. That night Cole Sutherland came by, to say goodbye. There were no men working in Shiloh, hardly any kids left in school and no more money to pay him, and he was moving on. He had an offer back in Virginia; not much more than room and board, but he was going. “Look after Rose,” he said, with a tremble in his voice, “She’s the most valiant human being I will ever hope to know.”

  Into January, Nam mostly slept. She would stir and I would drip a little soup or custard into her mouth with a straw or a spoon. She lay gray and sunken on her pillow. Her eyes got hollow. Her little fingers curled useless like bird claws on the counterpane. She took on the unmistakable look of death. One night, I remember it was snowing something fierce, I had pulled a chair up beside the bed and had gone to sleep in it, and I heard her calling, “Daisy! Daisy!” just as happy as a girl. That time I knew she was not talking to me.

  We had to wait for the road to clear to make that trip to The Birches. We put her beside Daisy. It was where my daddy would have been, if he had ever come home. It was where she would have wanted to be.

  29.

  THE GRAVE ROBBERS

  IT IS PROBABLY JUST AS WELL THAT IN THE FEW WEEKS AFTER NAM died and was buried there wasn’t much time to sit and mope around. We had business to look after. Nam was not what you’d call a pauper. Most everything a McAllister had ever owned was still there at the Forks.

  She left the house to Rose and me, together. That was some relief since it had not left my mind that I was Sophia’s guest at The Birches. Anyway, Nam apparently had done some latter-day figuring. She knew that Ben Aaron had left Rose a little money, and a place, so Rose was far from destitute.

  So Nam left her savin
gs to me. And she left me an interest, that Lord knows I never knew she had, in the Caney Forks Lumber Company. Now that was bound to be a burr in Sophia’s hide. Not that it was going to amount to anything, the way things were going. It was 1931 and nothing much was going anyway but down. And if we had been in the middle of a boom it probably would have been no livelier, at the sawmill.

  The last day Rose and I were at Nam’s, going through and sorting out, Jack Garner came by. He came and stood in the parlor, with his old felt hat in his hands, and told me goodbye. Jack Garner had, for all purposes, run the lumber mill for close to twenty years. A couple of the sawyers had done been and told me goodbye. Most all the hands I knew were gone. Now here stood Jack.

  “I’m not a-goin’ to work for that Orpington bunch,” he said. “Them people treat me like hired help. I feel like I’m supposed to go ’long wipin’ up behind ’em with a rag.” He had stayed till he had worked out every contract Ben Aaron had left behind. Nobody had gotten any since. He had a job offered to him up in Tennessee, at a pulp mill. So he kissed me on the face, and went out into the gloom.

  That afternoon, Rose and I loaded up a few quilts and pictures and things I thought she ought to take with her, and closed up Nam’s house and left it. On the way out, she took Nam’s bonnet off the peg by the back door and put it on her head and tied the strings under her chin, as I locked the door behind us. Rose became, by that gesture, the queen of a falling realm. The future of the Forks was as gray and cheerless as the fog we went out into, on that day.

  As we went down the road in the buggy, we noticed for the first time (we just hadn’t been looking) that there was no smoke at all from the mill. No noise. No trains. There was a light in the office window; the carpetbaggers were in there going over accounts. But no industry at all. We went by Ans’s then, and Myrtle fixed us tea. The boys were all dutifully at school. Rose said to her aunt if it was all right, she would just as soon go on down to The Birches with me. It was, right then, an awful lonesome road ahead. And the truth was, of course, there was nothing left to keep me there. My days as a squatter on one of Sophia’s favorite properties were bound to be numbered. So Myrtle said by all means go. She could make do. She had a wondrous quality of having things always under control. We started down, then, bundled ’round in a woolen blanket apiece against the cold and wet. We went past Sophia’s abandoned castle. No one had raked the leaves that fall. A tree had fallen, full of ice I guess, across the “brook” and toppled the little windmill. The creatures of the cement zoo stood dismal in the rain. And we went past the churchyard, with thoughts too heavy to speak of. Little splatters of red mud pelted the base of that monstrous, lonely marker. The blanket of fake grass was all mudded and matted down. We went on; there was nothing to stop for. All the way home we didn’t say a sentence between us. But things improved, as they always do, when we got a fire in the stove and the kettle on. We opened a quart of soup and made up some bread.