A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  My mother and I lived in a boarding house during the week while my father worked twelve-hour shifts and slept in a workers’ dormitory he would never let me see. The single room where we lived was small and overheated by a radiator that ticked as regular as rain against the roof. My mother was a quiet woman with a young face despite bearing me when she was middle-aged. Her hair was the color of sunlit ice, but she was all the more lovely for her matured prettiness. I remember walking with her and clutching her hand when we would pass strange men in the streets who would let their gazes linger. My fingers would become demanding of her palms if I did not feel her reciprocal squeeze, until finally she would laugh and pull me against her, calling me her “prize boy,” and promising the world held no eyes of favor for her but mine and my father’s. Even then, the sound of her voice was a balm. It stayed me. I would weep to hear it now.

  When my father spent his weekends with us, the air was that of a holiday. Even if it was just a walk along the riverfront, every second was devoted to my mother and me. We were each rewarded by the easy pleasure that appeared in his eyes, eclipsed suns of dark but burning brown. We would walk through the purple evenings of the city and I felt myself bound between them, bobbing along in a perfect equilibrium of contentment. My curse, I realize now as an old man, has been that I should have known such happiness so early in this wrecking life.

  AFTER LETTING GO THE NURSE FOR never showing, Lavada was up on her feet for much of the evening, watching the sleet and snow from the front room and listening for Sam’s troubled breaths. She depended on a strength that didn’t belong, lifting some spirit of will out of the hot tea she drank, blending a measure of calm into her. Whatever repair was done, she lost as soon as Sam rose from the couch and staggered into the bathroom where he clattered and banged away at the faucet to fill the tub.

  “Sam, do you need help?”

  The door swat shut and she could hear him climbing in and mumbling, apparently speaking to the walls and water itself. She stood close by and listened to make sure he wasn’t doing any harm to himself before pulling on her heavy coat and stepping out to the porch for some air.

  Ice ticked against the branches, weighed them. The possibility of power loss. She turned up her collar and stepped out into the slanting weather, walking toward the outbuilding. Already there was enough snow on the ground that it would be hard going out of the hollow. The falling ice would glaze everything overnight, making it into brittle waste. The land would be still but not easy, never easy, simply locked away, wearing this pristine mask.

  She wedged the door open and tugged the hanging switch on the overhead light. Within, she saw mostly gardening supplies stacked high, shovel handles and bags of mulch, a Craftsman push mower that hadn’t run in two summers. The generator was in the far corner, turned up on its side. The cap was missing. It had to be dry.

  She wrestled the generator around the collected glut, through the door and finally outside. Catching her breath, she turned her face to the breaking sky, the pellets stinging down into her. Broken pieces of the night finding their correct way back to other broken things on the earth.

  Once she had the machine up under the porch roof, she went back for the gas can, but found it empty. She rooted around for a hose to siphon something out of the Honda, but there was nothing she could use. She would have to drive out now if she was going to make it to the closest gas station, a good three miles down toward the old Lincoln Township. But she couldn’t leave Sam. Not tonight.

  “Sam,” she said, knocking on the bathroom door. “Get dressed, honey. We need to make a run to the store. Before the weather gets too bad. Let’s hurry up.”

  She prayed for his compliance in the few seconds that passed before she could hear the water dripping from his body as he stood up and stepped across the tile floor. When the door opened, he was wrapped in a towel, but still as wet as if he’d just thawed.

  “May I drive, Daughter?” he asked as he stood there, letting her dry him like he was her own child.

  “No, honey. You can’t drive anymore. Not for a while you haven’t been. Besides, it’s snowy. Dangerous. Let me do it, okay?”

  By his distracted silence, she took him as having conceded.

  He went into his room and dressed himself, putting on tweed slacks and a wool sweater that bunched at the top of his throat. Lavada helped him into his duck boots and sheepskin jacket she’d bought him the winter before from Goodwill.

  “You look handsome, Sam.”

  He said nothing, leading the way out.

  The tires slipped and whirled before they found purchase and kicked the Honda up the steep drive and out to the hardtop road. A plow had run through within the hour, leaving a thin flat of macadam visible. At the road edge, the fallen snow had already begun to stack. Lavada felt her stomach drop and swing out when she coasted onto an ice patch and glided toward the half-thrown guardrail. Her headlights cut wildly, slashing the tree line. She lost breath.

  The car nudged the railing in a high grind and scratch, halted. Lavada closed her eyes and rested her head on the wheel. Sam simply looked on, his tongue working inside his mouth but no words following. When she opened her eyes and looked down into the hollow, Lavada could see the symmetrical glinting of the Plum River where it forked and played out into the broader wilderness of the Smokevine National Forest. No light pollution capped the powdered trees, the frosted ridges. Development had been forfeit in this stretch of country for a century, and the woods she gazed on were as true and wild as they had been three generations gone.

  “Lovely,” Sam said just above a whisper, spoken so quietly that Lavada did not know if his words were meant for her. “I have always enjoyed the difference, what the snow makes of this. The winter.”

  She eased the shift into reverse and put them back on the road, headed towards the gas station. She drove slowly on, hugging the high side of the road. They witnessed no other traffic the way there.

  The clerk was locking up when Lavada rolled to the gas pump. When the engine cut, she could hear the ice cracking down harder now against the emptiness of the crossroads.

  “Please, just a minute,” Lavada called, waving.

  The clerk, a teenage boy in a dark hoodie and stuffed vest, flipped the lock back open and stood inside by the register, leaning up against the counter. His eyes bit into Lavada like a blade.

  “I can’t afford to get stuck,” he said as soon as she stepped inside. She glared at him but said nothing, spreading a ten dollar bill in front of him and going back out to fill the plastic can. When she was done, she threw the nozzle on the ground and drove away to the sound of the boy cursing.

  MASON MADE HIS WAY INTO THE cut well past midday, the sky over him heavy with the weather to come. He stopped alongside the old logging road and capsized his pack to get to the grey sweatshirt that tumbled out in a wad from the bottom. It smelled of mildew as he pulled it over his head, still damp from poor drying. Even so, he counted on his body heat to make the material serve its purpose, to keep him feeling fluid, ready and human.

  His calves ached from the hike across the valley. He had stayed clear of the roadways that would have given him easy transit, preferring instead the barren ridgelines and the untrafficked railbeds, not wishing to see anything or anyone that would remind him of what he’d lost. Not wanting to see or be seen. Remain the intruder he knew he was.

  He ascended the final draw, sweating. The weight on his back had become too much, and when finally he came into the derelict timber camp and released the straps, the rucksack dropped from him like an old pain giving way only after some deeper hurt had been done. He turned over an old paint bucket caged among weeds and sat on it, gazing at the longhouse. Despite the southeast corner being stove in, most of the old tin roof appeared to be intact. When the sky began to toss the first shreds of snow, he set about what improvements could be directly met.

  Wedging open the front door for light, he still had to blink away the dimness before he could advance on th
e shelter’s interior. As his pupils brimmed, he began to make out the cobwebbed intricacy of upended bedframes, splintered furnishings and corroded tools enmeshed in one another’s crooks and planes. He inspected one of the open boxes where a hammer claw hooked itself to the rim. Among the crate itself maybe half a dozen boxes of ten penny nails, an empty bottle of 3-in-1 engine oil and a Ducks Unlimited calendar from 1974. He took the hammer and swung it to feel its heft. It answered solidly, so he tossed it toward the front door where he could find it later.

  He discovered little else of interest. Much of what was there was utter garbage or so long exposed to the elements as to take on a useless frailty. However, toward the back he found what the timber men had used as an improvised heating source, an upright steel drum with a hand cut opening large enough to feed split logs and deadfall. It was attached to aluminum flashing piped through the north facing wall. Other than the obstruction of a deserted bird’s nest, the homemade furnace appeared to be in working condition. He jerked out the straw from the piping by handfuls, scattering it across the bottom of the barrel for kindling, went outside to see what could be gathered before dark.

  When the snow began to stick he brought what he had scavenged from the hill and dumped it beside the furnace. Within five minutes the fire barrel began to tick with the heat, flames spiraling amid smoke that rose and snaked up the pipe.

  Though the longhouse began to warm, the furnace cast only feeble light, and Mason lost himself to the contemplation as the dark shapes around him eventually found their own eventide shapelessness. Origin and oblivion were matched doors. Gates in and out of a life that held no ceremony, no special dignity for those that passed through them. As a boy he’d often heard old men talk about the life after this one, the hereafter coming, but such pronouncements seemed impossibly remote, absurd. A man breathed and then he rasped once before breathing no more.

  His thoughts touched Lavada. How she’d drawn him back here, despite everything, despite the hurt. Swung it down on him like an ax blade, opening the tenderest parts of who he was to sun and air. She was utter confusion, an ambush of feelings he could not ever defeat. He wanted to hate himself for the stupidity of his own actions, the years of running pills back and forth across the county, roxies dropped off in the trailers of kin that were supposed to know well enough to keep their mouths shut whenever the law came poking into what wasn’t anyone’s concern outside the hollow. But she had known there was something in him, some element of risk that always seemed to get drawn out if he sat idle for too long. Nothing like his father, the old fool with his swerving state of mind, the inevitable collapse of all those years spent hooked over his desk, eyes growing weak from books, dim light and superiority. No, Mason was a wreck of intent and pure will. A sudden danger that couldn’t be controlled or assigned ready value. And she had wanted it, craved the unpredictabilities that were as much a part of him as the pitch of his voice. So he could not fault himself for what had made her desire him. He had simply happened to her. It was as useless to blame himself as it was to blame a lightning strike.

  When he woke at first light, Mason rose from a dreamless sleep and went to the cracks of the door sill, the world outside given over to a piercing white. Ice had maimed the landscape, making dangerous beauty where the slash of the old timber cut was ugly enough beneath. He could smell wood smoke on the morning air, acrid and thin. How far away the fire burned he could not tell. Big hurt worked itself up in his chest like something trying to punch its way through his skin. He went to stoke the furnace.

  It calmed him to know he could lose himself in the simple mechanics of surviving, the tending of the fire, the heating of pork and beans still in the can, the deliberate bites he took until the contents disappeared into his body. Not unlike prison. There the schedule had been artificial, enforced by men. Both cons and guards strove to keep a kind of order on the yard, even if the mechanics of the system might appear obscure to an outsider. Nevertheless, it was there, a forecast of how you were to behave if you expected to hold on to some fiber of dignity. When to obey and when not to. When to talk and when to bow your head and say nothing. The truth of the place made its truth in you, testified itself so that the daily repetition developed into a kind of faith. That world baptized you, making you fit for it. The trick was to not lose yourself in what it would make of you, give away too much of what got you there in the first place. If that happened, everything was lost.

  But here too there was a regimen, only more archaic and vague. Ceremonies had to be reinvented each day. Repetition was not nearly as simple as it was behind the penitentiary fence. Act surrendered to analysis too soon, too many doubts invited themselves in. Madness was written in all this open sky, and the only defense a man could mount against it was in discovering something new each day that confirmed who he was and what he could do to keep himself free.

  Midmorning, he set out to walk the perimeter of the timber cut. Much scrub had grown up since the last big cultivation more than a decade ago, and the woods were a maze of runty pine and copse, made uncanny by the pall of snow and ice. At times, after walking for a good distance unhindered, he would meet a low convergence of limbs so thick that he couldn’t go on, and he would have to read the signature of his own footprints to find his way back. But these errors did not dissuade him. Each misdirection enlarged his knowledge of the woods, and he began to plan what he would make of them given enough time.

  As the snow began to melt away from the weak sun, he discovered a clearing. A shell of sandy ground over a granite outcropping that permitted only a few spiny weeds. A wall of low pine encircled. The only view was at the extreme of the stone ledge pitching off into a bluff above a creek that moved through a stand of mixed hardwoods. He stood looking over the edge and dropped a few loose rocks to watch them clatter wildly down the stone face before they leapt toward the white treetops and disappeared.

  He stood, working dimensions in his head, the force of concentration turning back thoughts of the cold. A small cabin, overlooking the gorge. He could devise the shape of it in his mind’s eye, a primitive enclosure better suited to his needs than the longhouse could offer through the cold months. Giddiness surged through him at the prospect. The materials could be salvaged from the longhouse, the tools as well. The accomplishment of it by degrees seemed almost physically palpable, and he began to mark the outlines of what could be wrought by tearing straight limbs from the snowy trunks and laying them flat to the ground, tip to break, the simple skeleton of what he meant to build.

  He faced back down toward the longhouse and set about wrecking the materials that could be useful to him, carrying up the bits of what he would use to assemble into his own scattered home.

  LAVADA HEARD THE RUMBLE OF A downshift before the bright grill of Dennis’s Blazer thrust into the head of the hollow. The grind of the engine rocketed down, glancing off the smooth cape of snow and blisters of naked outcroppings. Before she could decry his general foolishness, he had barreled down the narrow trail, nosed in next to the Honda and cut the engine, sticking out his chapped face, bareheaded and grinning.

  “You’re alive!” he shouted.

  “And you’re plumb loony,” she answered. “What you doing out here?”

  He stepped down, smacking his loose leather gloves together as he stamped the snow from his Timberlands across the broad boards of the porch. Welts of his breath opened in the air.

  “I was worried you’d tried to drive over the mountain and you’d gotten yourself stuck. I called, but your phone wasn’t ringing.”

  “Wal-Mart phone. Can’t get reception down around here even half the time. I don’t know why I pay for the damn thing.”

  He stood there, still smiling and looking on her in a way that made her suddenly shy.

  “Well, come in. I guess I can allow you a cup of coffee for your driving out here, as long as you shuck them boots before dragging all that slush in with you.”

  He complied, bracing his shoulder up against the cabin whil
e he pried one crusted boot free, then the other. Followed her in.

  She poured them both coffees. This stolen day did not offer a respite from her waiting on him. What was it in her that succumbed to this easy tending of men? Why did it rise up in her unbidden? She placed the mug to her lips too quickly and burned herself.

  “I was worried about you all,” Dennis said, his voice lowered, perhaps fearing he might wake Sam.

  “We’re pretty good about seeing to ourselves out here, Dennis. You might be surprised.”

  “No,” he smiled. “I don’t guess I really would be all that much.”

  Dennis had always puzzled her. She knew little of him, other than he’d been good enough to her when she’d turned up in his diner a few weeks after Mason had been sent upstate. He had given her a chance to clear tables when there wasn’t much else to be had, other than clerking at the Wal-Mart or running the redeye at Citgo. He was always quiet and she thought lonely, staying open on nights when there wasn’t much better than the slimmest chance that some wayfarer might straggle in from the interstate on the tail end of a freight run between Florida and Knoxville. She had never minded the time spent alone with him, even if they didn’t trade more than a few dozen words over the course of an evening. She half expected some form of harassment on those solitary nights. While she did not think herself a beauty, she was aware of how men could act when they gave themselves license to behave as they wished. But he had never offered anything other than his reticent kindness. And now to have him turn up here on the other side of the storm, standing in her cabin in his sock feet grinning at her, she was aware of something new between them, something she would prefer to hold as her own guarded pleasure.