Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  It was right then that a lifetime of contention with my only living child was set in motion.

  It never occurred to me how hurt Pet would be with me for not coming. The next time I went for the mail there was a letter from her. “You have got to pull yourself out of this,” she said. “Nobody can do it but you. You will not ever feel better staying up there in that dreadful old house in the middle of nowhere. Hugh would not want you to be living like that. It has been awful not having you here, I wanted you with me, you know. You must learn to face awful things sometime without going all to pieces.”

  I think it was not so much that she hated this place. No less than Hugh and me she had found some happiness here and some people whose memories she surely must still love. I could never say this to her children, but I have had a feeling that it was a little bit of “Mama always did love HIM best,” a notion that this place was more home to Hugh and me, and somehow it, and maybe we, cared less for her. Unlike her brother, Pet had not caught on to some other force at work up here, for me. I have never known romance to move my daughter; I think about that voice, of the Isoldes and Sieglindes and Salomes that never had a chance because Pet had to have security that art can almost never promise.

  She did write regularly, though, and sent pictures of the baby. I thought she was beautiful. Along in the summer they did come through, on their way to Charleston. Pinky had a thirty-day leave. Pet wrote and asked me to meet them at Red Bank and I did. We all stayed at the hotel that one night and I got to hold the baby.

  They left early the next day. Pinky asked me to come with them. I wanted to, so badly, in a way. But the garden was in. I had nobody to tend anything. What it was, I really didn’t want to go bad enough to just go. Even Pinky, who was the essence of tolerance, thought that was strange. Of course it was.

  And then, the war was over. When I went down to Red Bank one Monday morning the newsboy was hollering on the street corner, “Jay-Pan surrenders! Jay-Pan surrenders!” I bought a paper and thought how wonderful, the kids would be free to come when they pleased.

  Of course they went back to Charleston as soon as Pinky was let go. They bought one of those big old houses that had been in his family, sometime, and Pet settled down to become a celebrated maker of aspics, a pillar in the Episcopal choir and a rising matron in Charleston society.

  It did not make anything better between us when I missed the next baby, too, because the day I was set to go, several days before Pet’s due date, a storm brought about twenty inches of snow and I simply could not get out of here. Ice crusted on top of it, and it was over a week before the mule could make it down to Red Bank. I called from town to explain. Pet said she and the new baby girl were fine, they had plenty of help and not to “strain myself” to get there. The baby’s name was Anna Frances, for Pinky’s mother.

  I should have got on that train and gone right then. But honestly I was so relieved I was ashamed. My living arrangement here had not made me very pretty or stylish or clever, not at least as such things are valued in Charleston. And, truth to tell, Pet was well taken care of. She had cooks and maids and nursemaids, and she had Louise, who was, in all truth, a better mother to her than I had ever been.

  Over the years, when the girls were still little, Pet and Pinky did come a couple of times, they got me to meet them in Red Bank and took me on to Flat Rock, where they had rented a big fine house for a few weeks in the summer. It was terribly social, all parties and folderol. I didn’t have any Flat Rock clothes. The first time, I didn’t know that skirts were nearly to the floor. I did go to the Red Bank Salon de Beauty and get Eloise Brock to fix my hair. It had gotten right ratty, I will admit. I didn’t know till I saw it in Eloise’s mirror that I had got so gray.

  But year by year, the visiting got sparser. The girls got busy lives of their own. Their parents took them to Europe and on excursions in the summers; they were, in fact, about as involved in this place, here, as I had been at their age.

  So, time passed, and things settled here more and more into the way they were going to be. In cool weather I spent whole days chopping wood. We sat in the kitchen a lot, the dog and I. I made Christmas presents, I had ordered a how-to-crochet book and after some awful flops I made things that actually passed for doilies and booties and caps. I made quilts and knitted socks and dwelled upon the catalogues. Pet and Louise sent boxes up. It was, for a while, a novelty to spend Christmases alone. I made a sort of ceremony of going up to where the brightest holly grew, and cutting some, and I draped the mantel with it. I made a fire, on Christmas Eve. And the dog lay down on the hearth, and I sat and drank some old wine and rocked and saw all kinds of things past in the fire, before I fell asleep.

  Now and then, over the winters, somebody would come by; a dog would come up, say, and maybe a day or so later a hunter would come by, looking for it, and maybe sit by the fire a little bit and tell some news and drink coffee. As long as they were fairly sober I was glad to have them come. Of course drunks showed up; there was a bunch that roared up in a Jeep one day while I was out replanting the dahlia bed. Shot out a parlor window, before I let ’em have it with a couple of fat rocks and some dirt clods and broke their windshield. They would’ve shot me but they were too drunk to aim; shot the little dog, instead. He cut a somersault and they drove off. When I picked up his little limp corpse he reached up and licked me; it just barely parted the hair of his head, barely skinned him.

  I carried him inside and bolted the door, knowing they’d be back. But days went by, and no sign. Tracks still went only one way, in the road. I wondered if somehow they had found a way out up at the dam. Finally, curiosity got me. The dog and I went for a walk up the road, and not more than a couple of curves away there sat the Jeep. Its hood was smashed plumb into the ground with the boulder still sitting on top of it. No sign of bodies or anything; the riders had escaped. But I looked up the bank, where that rock would have had to come from, and nothing was disturbed, not a break in the fringe of laurels it would have had to roll through.

  Word got out. This was, as the lady at the cafe had said, “a haint place,” with a witch in residence. It brought out the drunkers and the daring. One night I heard cars on the road and a ruckus up behind the house, and there was a gang going up the hill toward the cemetery, with lanterns and all sorts of gall. I was not putting up with that. I went behind them to watch; when one of them stuck a shovel in the ground I got behind a clump of junipers and hollered, “You get off of my graves!” It was kind of scary, to tell the truth; sounded weird and tremulous, like a screech owl. Boys, it got their attention. One of the brave hollered something really ugly, and they began shining lights around looking for the witch, who began right then to look for a quick defense. I found it in my apron pocket. I had boiled wash that afternoon and I still had a box of matches. With my back to them I commenced to strike matches; the matches kept going out. Finally I struck one, lit the whole box and dropped it in the grass. The brush just exploded. I ran for dear life. The visitors ran too, cussing and yelling. The field was just blazing. I fell back behind some big rocks. My conscience smote me. Lord what have I done? How could I stoop so low? I said. That mess of trash could all be killed, I thought, and it would be my fault.

  Well, while I was lamenting, a flash of lightning lit up the field, and hail began to pelt us and torrents of cold rain came down. I squatted there so grateful, and unbelieving, and I would have sworn there was a big laugh in the thunder that echoed back and forth across the cove. All that was left of the grave-dirt collectors was a string of tail lights, headed down the road. One old truck was still there the next morning, and for days after. Finally I went out and cranked it up and drove it down the road, out of my sight. It’s down there yet, I expect.

  One adventure like this followed another. One day while I was in the hardware store I picked up a shotgun and held it, looking at it, thinking I really needed it. Then I remembered what it could do, and put it back.

  The state of my mind did concern me, tim
e to time. Now and then I went up to the cemetery and sat beside Ben Aaron and talked to him, told him all the troubles and little crises. I felt better for it, especially that the only answers came from the birds and the wind.

  Much as I needed to hear from the outside, the mail brought jolts and dilemmas along with the day-to-day news. I treasured spidery little notes I got from Louise, always cheerful even though she was growing frail and A.P.’s heart was failing. Occasionally I heard from Mama, wherever on the globe she was with the man of the hour (which was about as long as some of ’em lasted). Then I got a letter from Pet, mailed from the airport in New York, saying she and Pinky were on their way to France to Mama’s funeral; she had died suddenly of pneumonia and Pet knew, rightly, that I would never get there.

  A while later Pet wrote again, “Our old house is standing empty. Of course it is yours and it would be so wonderful if you were in it, safe and comfortable near me…” That nearly did it. It would never be quite right, though; very soon after Mama died Louise wrote that Camp was dead. Mittie was gone to live with her sister in Summerville.

  But I thought about it. I had learned not to be complacent about some things; I asked Pinky to take over Mama’s estate and secure it so that nothing could fall into hands that still, even in pitiful invalidhood, could grab and squander. I thought of Foots and his mother in the way that I thought about a dead jellyfish; step on it and it would still sting you.

  The thought of going back was tantalizing sometimes, the idea of being with those beautiful girls and people I loved, of being warm without working at it, and buying from the vegetable man, and smelling the sea. I might have done it. But one day I came in from hoeing, it was hot, and went to get a drink from the bucket and suddenly the kitchen just went dark. When I woke up days had passed, I don’t know how many, but the dog was licking my face and whining, just starved. I crawled and got a chair to pull up on; one of my legs was asleep, that arm was weak and I had an awful time getting up. Then, there was a commotion coming from the barn. The mule was hollering and kicking down his stall. It was perishing for food and water. I used the chair as a crutch, stumped out there and opened the door and just stood back. The mule came out kicking, overjoyed at the pasture grass and stream.

  I really did not know what had happened to me until I rode to town a few days later, and the first little child who saw me turned and hid her face in her mother’s skirt. When I saw my reflection in a window I saw why; my left eyelid drooped and the corner of my mouth was pulled way down. It was mortifying; I grabbed up a few necessities and fled for home as fast as I could go. The next time I went to town I wore a bonnet hiding all it could. Any idea I had of going back into society was squelched, the way it looked right then.

  I felt so ugly. And yet… One day I was out doing the wash, I’d made a fire under the pot and was stirring in soap when a paper fluttered down, dropped by the wind, it came slowly, turning over and over, and landed at my feet. I picked it up and thought now, where in the world did you come from? It was a page torn from some old children’s book, a picture of a rosy little boy and girl on a swing, looking happy. It had been printed over with a pencil, in block letters, a poem: “Forget if you must / Forgive if you will / I love you yet / From the top of my hill.” Now, what in the world? Of course my eyes went at once to the top of the hill, that crag on Hogback. There was nothing I could see. Still and all, I felt wonderful.

  But after the little dog did not wake up one morning in the fall, the loneliness seeped in like fog. There was still plenty of life; we’d had a fine crop of sunflowers, and there was plenty wild grain and thistles, and I cracked a good bit of corn, so the birds and smallish creatures came bountifully. I would put out feed and holler, “Thank the Lord for dinner!” and nearly get blown over by the rush of wings.

  Still, the house was awfully empty, give or take a mouse or a blacksnake or so. I was out picking wild grapes one morning and noticed something wiggling in the weeds. It wasn’t like something was trying to run away. I went and looked, and there was Bird. He was sort of crouching there, all rumpled. Even with his wings half spread, he was the biggest thing I nearly ever saw. I had never seen anything like him, except in a picture book. Well, and on a dollar bill. There was a raw place on one of his wings, and some bloody speckles on the white feathers of his head, like he maybe had been in a fight. He glared me in the eye and hissed.

  The sight of those claws and that snapping pruning hook of a bill made me really humble. But I couldn’t leave him for the wildcats. I thought, I will wrap him in my apron. That was like tying up an alligator in a doily. At the end, I took off my old dress and wrestled it around him, getting a few bloody marks for my trouble. He in that sling, I in my underpants, we went to the house.

  He was not permanently hurt. But he was sore and outraged, and hungry. Bread nor fatback were remotely to his taste. This was a radical problem; I was not sure I liked the way he looked at my exposed hide. Whatever I did was going to go against my grain but so much for that. I went to the chickenhouse with the axe, and brought back a faithful laying hen. He all but snatched it from me, and the feathers flew.

  That of course could not go on; it was good fortune to learn that he loved fish. The river was a Godsend. Bird had free run of the house; there was no confining him. He had a lot of confidence about his place in the world. This was not what anybody could call a standard relationship between beast and human; I was as wild a creature as Bird so I guess was less a threat to him. Very soon when I came in with a catch, I would say, “Thank the Lord!” and he would be right there for dinner. He even got more polite about how he grabbed it. And, he took to following me around. He would perch on anything big enough to hold him. I would talk to him, and he would listen.

  We had lived several weeks like this when he seemed perfectly well, and I opened this window, here, and he flew out. What a sight, those tremendous wings. I watched him soar off across the field, and then he turned north, over the Hogback, toward the lake where he really was at home. It was painful. But it was right. It had gotten cold, but still, I left the window open; I had the idiotic notion he might come back. It took him three days; he came back that time with a goose, just swooped in and made a dreadful mess. After that he came and went. Sometimes he would spend the night perched on the footboard of the bed. Like he is, right now. Soundly sleeping.

  I got down with a heavy cold; maybe it was from sleeping in a blizzard with the window open. But it got really bad; I could not get to town and everything was running out. Bird had been away for several days; I had sadly just about given him up. Here I was, on my last legs. And then here he was. In he sailed, and dropped a great big fish on the floor beside the bed. It was still flopping. But he didn’t eat it. Out the window he went again, and shortly here he was back with another one. Then he was gone again. I was too weak not to believe what he was doing. I crept out and went downstairs and made a fire in the stove, and fried fish. Things got better very fast.

  It was something else that really made me wonder, though.

  I was cutting brush one day that spring when a young man came walking up the road. Not anybody from around here. Not a bad looking kid, nice-looking towny clothes, recent haircut. But he looked sort of vague, the look of the truly lost. He was trying to get to the dam, he said. Said he was supposed to talk to somebody there about a job. Wanted to know how far it was, which way to go. I told him, but he sort of shuffled around, nervous, before he went on up the road.

  I worked on a while till it got late afternoon, and I went up to the house. Went in the front door and started back to the kitchen. And there, right beside me in the hallway, was that weird boy. He had dumped out the bureau drawers, had stuff scattered all over. He had big old knife from the kitchen, holding down by his side. My jig was up.

  “So what are you doing in here?” I said.

  “What are you gonna do about it, old woman?” he said. Then he grabbed my shoulder. “You got money, old woman. Where is it?”

 
I never even thought. I stood just an instant, then I threw back my head and loud as I could, I hollered, “THANK THE LORD FOR SUPPER!”

  The kid stepped back, astonished. There was a dark shadow then that filled the stairwell. A whoosh of wings. Bird descended, and hovered. The kid screamed, terrified, and bolted. I thought Bird was only curious. It was not until I was cleaning up the trail that boy left behind him as he made for the road that I noticed drops of blood, along with a stream of poor thin hockey. I have wondered whatever happened to him, actually it was kind of pitiful, but we were not apt to see him ever again.

  Sometimes the tiniest things take hold of our lives. Like losing a pair of dimestore glasses. I figured they must have been in my dress pocket when I gathered up Bird, and fell out in the struggle. Several days I went back down in the field and kicked around the weeds, looking, but no luck.

  The fact was, I could read but mighty little anymore without them. Mail came that I could not interpret. The situation got worse after the mule went off and died; getting to the post office was so hard that several weeks sometimes went by and I would not have any idea what was happening. A nice thing, an old guy who drove a logging truck took to looking out for me; he was hauling out of Barz’s old place and he would just come on up, bring the mail, sometimes flour or coffee, whatever occurred to him I might be out of. I would open the letters out in the sun; that helped, also if it was Pet or Louise I knew the handwriting and it was easier.

  One time he came and brought a tax notice. I had him wait while I looked at it, and then consulted the Rev. Sydney Smith. When I counted out the money into his hand, and asked him to pay it for me, I had thirty dollars left to last the rest of my life.