A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  “Looks like you could stand to have a little wood hauled in,” Dennis said, setting his emptied coffee on the kitchen counter. “Let me earn this cup of joe off you.”

  She watched through the window as he thudded around to the far end of the outside overhang and overloaded his arms with split oak. She watched as his long fingers plucked at the splintered ends of the cord wood and brought it evenly against his chest, arranging a simple but comely gathering in the hollow of his arms.

  A chill passed over her and she realized she’d let the fire get too low. She squatted down and swung the iron door open, the gloomed coals breathing out a swirling of ash. With the few sticks at hand, she fueled what stilled burned, brought the flame up by tender degrees. She was careful not to reach too far and graze the inner iron latch of the stove handle. It would rob her of skin in an instant, just as it had Mason the first winter they’d lived here, nearly ten years before. That season had been harder than most, not only because of the weather, but the student poverty they’d endured as well. Utility bills overlapped prompt remittances. Sometimes a weekend lacked water or lights. Money was borrowed from cousins or the church and never repaid. Shame simply accrued.

  She remembered the scar along his arm, a lean silvering where the flesh had parted from him and updrafted in the fire. He had not cried out or cursed when he was burned, but drew back reflexively and stared at part of his body detached, wilting. His fascination numbed him to the pain. He still had not broken his gaze in the time it took Lavada to run cold water over a washcloth and apply it to him as a compress. Even then, he remained transfixed, drawn in by the spectacle of what no longer belonged to him.

  Dennis came back in and settled a rick of wood next to the stove, truing up the ends with a few gentle nudges until the facing fit his idea of symmetry. She saw that he’d grown brick red in the face. Once he’d settled into a front room wing chair they talked for a while, discussing every manner of small consequence they could conjure. But with the day getting on, Lavada decided finally she could hazard a few minutes away from the old man, and she suggested they take a walk through the hollow to see what could they could see of the storm’s effect. Dennis was on his feet and to the door, folding her coat around her like a dark wing, his heavy steps sagging the tongue-in-groove floor but his hands light upon her shoulders.

  Thaw had come in to the hollow. Huddles of snow had begun to thump down from the tree branches, laying prints in the accumulation below. Squirrels dangled from overhead but did not fuss at the incursion. Dennis paused to study their frozen postures, kissing his teeth to try to lure them to some action, but the animals would not be baited and they walked on, their steps like grindstones where they went. What had been made of this world appeared somehow diminished but not damaged, a rounding of underlying edges as only slow time might enact. Lavada marveled that this place had not always belonged to her. How had she come to find it so native, so integral to every concern and consideration when she was not born to it? And yet it was as true to her now as if it were a due and necessary inheritance. Something definitive impressed on her heart, a blemish worn to familiar knowledge.

  At the creek she shied away, not wishing to explain what had happened with Sam the night before. It remained a bad dream even to her. Or perhaps she preferred to assign it as that, an encroachment of the unbelievable into her everyday, rather than to confront the reality of the old man slipping further from reason. Her grief proved what she’d thought for so long—she loved him in a way his own natural born son never had. Sam had said to her once that sadness was the price men and women paid for being good. She saw the pain that set itself in Sam, made itself adjunctive to his good heart. She wondered if the curse strong people faced was in their ability to endure too much. Or perhaps it was not even that so much as the fact that eventually others must witness what the suffering makes of what they once were. Regardless, the trials they had passed through had made her and Sam closer, joined them like night and day welded fast at the horizon.

  Without thinking and almost without registering the change, her arm looped itself around Dennis’s sleeve, and they fell in step together as they mounted a trail above the water. He did not brace or show surprise, but took her hand naturally, as if he had expected her to take hold of him from the moment he’d arrived. Was she so transparent, so typical? Lavada realized she was often blind to those things that had been most obvious to others. So much of her time was spent in the basic struggle to survive, to make new what sustained her through the long days of self-debate and plain, fumbling hurt that she often failed her own tending, spited what had kept her safe, kept her able. Her grip tightened, bringing her nearer Dennis’s arm, her weight an ease against this man who seemed to welcome every ounce of her.

  They walked together through midday, making a wide sweep of the hollow and the ridges girding it until the day was bright and the snow melting loose. When they stepped onto the porch and stamped the snow from their boots, she came to her toes and kissed him briefly on the chin before burrowing her head into his chest, her breath coming sharp and definite.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said quietly, almost so that she wondered whether he could hear her. Whether he did or not, she shuddered when she felt his hand first on the back of her head and then again as it slid to her nape, drawing her to him, bringing her within the peace the two of them were beginning to make of each other.

  Lavada tends to me, oversees what she believes is my madness. I hear her in the next room, moving about, talking to herself perhaps, writing off her own quiet insanity to particular circumstance, as if all madness is not a branch from the same searching root. But she is good to me. She is heir to my hurt and I wake each morning with her name on my lips, speaking who she is as a means of cure. I will not let her know I am wakened. I do not want to know what shape the world deigns to make of my lost mind just now.

  So broken. Her heart is a despised country, borderless and overrun with the worst parts of some bygone revolution, some defeat without name. It is a place where old men sit and murmur, dispassion pressing flat their faces. There is a counting house there as well, a chancery of lost and given souls, but she knows none of them, forgoes any idea of tally. She is innocent to the regrets that commit themselves to her care. So much the better.

  She is a hurt child. A strong woman. One does not preclude the other, and so often is the necessary receipt of the same. I have made her mine. It doesn’t matter whether she is. Not that I can tell. So much is resistant to me. So many obvious assignments of names and places, people, the history of them and me. So much fracturing that I can claim little more than the persistent sense that I know the deepest note that plays over and over, a resonance that binds the many elements of every particle of the earth correctly together. It is cosmic. But it is also a little nothing as thin and as lost breath and perforated memory.

  She does not know the wisdom of having lost all. She is part of that cursed race, those who believe themselves immune to the worst of tortures, but who are only a new generation of sentimentalists. She is tender in hope, in charity, in the many Christian lies. That she would take my son back into her arms, make a trial of his need for her. That should earn her some grace, shouldn’t it? Some pardon. But thinking like that is willful and perverse. We are told so since we are children. And all of us are children still now. Even me. Even me, lost in the gaze of this.

  And now that my son has come home. Is this the best hope of fathers? I cannot remember how he has become this man. Strangeness and familiarity are parts of a spinning coin, animating themselves into oblivion.

  LATE MARCH WINDS CHEWED THROUGH ICE in the cracks of granite, brought quick melt. Water actually spoke. It awakened a part of Mason he’d thought long discarded, a lightness in the limbs and skin that needed to shake off the heavy blankets of winter. It made him hungry. It made him want to eat away at the world.

  His small cabin had kept him well through the coldest months. A few trips to Ray Ray’s hollow had supp
lied his primitive larder with canned goods and cheap beer. In exchange, he’d helped his cousin string barbwire and shore up the trailer’s rotting porch. Throwaway jobs. Gestures at barter meant to spare his feelings. But with the warming weather his desire increased. He needed some greater possession than mere subsistence. Some piece of what other people called real living.

  He hitched his way into town in the back of a county works truck hauling tools and tar back from a half day of patching road. The stink got down into the fibers of his clothes. When after only a few miles he jumped from the deep bed, thumped the side of the truck in thanks and turned down the main street of Canon City, he smelled bad enough that anyone passing close involuntarily winced. He went into the first service station that offered restrooms along the back exterior wall and locked himself in while he stripped and doused his clothes in a sink full of sudsy water before airing everything beneath an automatic hand dryer. He stepped out into the sun, blinking, waiting for some sound idea to yield itself to him.

  He walked the entire street looking for Help Wanted signs, but saw none. He went on toward the edge of town, the railroad tracks curving beyond the paper mill, and squatted in an empty lot behind a flap of torn cyclone fencing where an aluminum screening business had once stood. He smoked a cigarette, watching the afternoon sun work its foul glimmerings across the puzzlework of busted glass spread across the concrete. Vandals had scribed black spray paint across boarded up windows, but the characters belonged to no alphabet Mason could decipher. Some failure of symbol perhaps, some shared mistake of heart and eye.

  As the afternoon wore on and drew clouds and finally sunset, cold came back by degrees. Little traffic passed by the edge of town. He realized nothing could be done with what remained of the lapsed day, so he broke through one of the window boardings and stepped straight through into the vacuum of dark. Loneliness swung up from beneath his gut as he walked across the bare concrete floor. Awareness of empty space opened inside him like something decayed giving way to deeper waste. Just one depth breaking into another, a headlong descent that was endless and paralytic.

  He had become homesick for his small selfmade cabin, slight and crude as it might be. Just a day off the mountain reminded him of how much a good place could mean. In every true effort, there was some measure of approximation, a strain toward what felt right.

  A single sodium light buzzed on at dusk, relieving the overall dark. He looked for something to burn, considered the boarding, but was afraid a fire might draw the police. He hunkered against the back cinder block wall and listened to the occasional scurry and sidling of invisible rodents. Eventually, he nodded off, sleeping deeper and better than he thought he might deserve.

  The sound of a truck door clapping shut woke him in the soft blue of dawn. He went to the jagged break in the window and saw an old man across the road working beside a rust dappled pickup. He was hauling big crates out of the back and swinging them around toward an abandoned concrete platform, stacking them with an eye to keeping plumb. Mason watched him for a few minutes before he crawled through and walked across the street to speak with him.

  “I can’t tell whether I should pop you with my crowbar or not,” the old man said, leaning toward the truck cab.

  Mason showed him his hands. “No sir, I’m an honest feller.”

  “Boy, I doubt that. Those that need saying it usually ain’t the best qualified. What you doing stepping out of that old place?”

  “Just caught a long way from home when there wasn’t an easy ride back.”

  “You laid up there drunk, were you?”

  Mason nodded over toward the platform.

  “Want a hand with that what you’ve got?”

  The old man looked over at his heaped crates for a minute, considering. Finally, he leaned back into the truck and brought out a hammer and pinch bar, pitching them both underhand to Mason.

  “Pop those tops off and spread everything out by kind.”

  Mason did as he was asked, revealing rows of greens—mustards, turnips and collards—as well as red potatoes and deep bundlings of yellow squash. Once all the produce was presentable, the old man reached out a tight sheaf of plastic and paint roller extension poles so they could pitch an awning over everything once the sun was up.

  By the time they’d finished, a short line had formed, older women mostly who probed their fingers into the vegetable flesh, testing, sensing, judging. The old man smiled and ducked his head when they said something that was supposed to amuse him, though Mason could tell it was all theater. There was a hardness behind the old man’s expression that spoke some immeasurable distance. Once the customers moved on, the old man drew a pint bottle of Old Crow from his denim jacket pocket and bubbled a snort.

  “Here,” he said, handing the bottle across. “I know what it’s like to suffer the wrath the next morning.”

  Mason took the bottle and did it justice. They looked on the whole vivid green field of unmown grass, slow wind moving.

  “Name’s Virgil. Virgil Hammond,” the old man said, sticking out his hand.

  Mason shook it and gave his own name. The talk that passed between them eventually eased. When their silences came, they did not look too deeply into the moment. Instead, they merely swapped language, letting it settle over them like good weather.

  “You know,” Hammond began. “I can’t offer much more than what veggies you can carry with you and a few dollars at the end of the week, but I could use some help if you’re of a mind. My back can’t handle this hauling like it used to. Plus all the cheap whisky you can hold, as long as you can hold it. I need somebody to sit and watch the store too, from time to time.”

  “Store?”

  “If you’re of a mind.”

  “I might be.”

  “Alright then. Let’s load up and I’ll run you over there to have a look.”

  What remained of the vegetable stand could be gathered and boxed in a pair of the bigger crates. The remaining empties the old man crushed flat for kindling and tossed in with the tarpaulin and poles. Mason got in and rode, letting his arm drape from the open window, sunshine beating down on his skin. The slipstream gushed up to his armpit. He felt like some invisible hand was trying to lift him up.

  When they pulled into the gravel lot it was near suppertime and Hammond’s old collie barked its welcome. The dog was mangy and tied to an iron pipe. Its eyes were fogged with cataracts that Mason could make out from a dozen feet away. He leaned over and scratched it behind the ears. He could feel burrs that had been picked and scabbed. The dog quit barking and licked his hand. He saw the water bowl was empty and filled it from the house spigot, watching it drink while the old man unlocked the door and turned on the lights.

  He followed Hammond inside the general store, looking up and down the length of the shotgun aisles of canned meats, vegetables and hardware. A box fan rattled from somewhere far in the back. Dust motes danced.

  “Crack something open if you’re hungry,” Hammond called.

  Mason walked in among the Vienna sausages, Spaghetti-os, and other dry goods. He turned the key open on some Spam and dipped his fingers, chewed and sucked on the juice while his gaze took in this place from half a century gone. A tin sign tacked over the transom featured a pickaninny rolling ecstatic eyes over bloodred watermelon.

  “Only true general store left in the county,” Hammond said, tumping out some more of the Old Crow into a pair of red Solo cups, followed by a splash of lukewarm Coca-Cola. “My Daddy willed it to me back in the eighties.”

  Mason briefly wondered if any customers had ventured the threshold since that lost decade. He took the red cup and turned it up, his head light from so much already on an empty stomach.

  “We used to get more foot traffic from the college before they went and got that big bond so they could build everything up. Put in campus stores. Fucking Starbucks. Now it’s not too many. But I guess I keep the doors open out of nostalgia as much as anything else. You ever been up to the college
?”

  “Father used to work there. Years ago.”

  “That right? Well, it’s good money I guess.”

  Mason didn’t allow whether it was. He followed Hammond around to the few shelves, learning where everything was kept: the ledger, the cash register, the ancient scattergun loaded with single aught buck.

  “Can’t be too careful with goddamn methmonkeys running around.”

  “Methmonkeys?”

  Hammond fell to a story of a meth lab run by a strawberry headed boy known by the name of Strom who had cooked crank by the deep crook of the Plum River, remembered up unto that point in time for hollering drunk at the full moon, claiming hereditary werewolfdom. When he met the blunt edge of sobriety these claims evaporated as surely as the river fog did, but that did little to allay the sufferings of any souls within earshot whenever the animal spirit moved on him. At some obscure point he had inherited a chimpanzee rejected by a traveling circus, rejected supposedly because of the ape’s proclivity for detaching his trainer’s digits with his teeth. Two such poorly prepared individuals had no correct business being placed in one another’s company, of course, but the universe conspired and this ill-favored boy and this ill-starred primate found themselves domestically bound. There were some who believed, despite all common expectations, the pairing drew a previously obscured sense of responsibility out of Strom, as a magnet might draw out solid mineral deposits from a pile of dry scat. He was seen tending to the hirsute dependent, running a comb over its wiry coat, mimicking the grooming behaviors of true children of the wild.

  The problem, however, came when the county deputies caught Strom out on the back end of Buchanan Holler, delivering three baggies of crank to a bachelor party for Roddy Buchanan, a boy less than six weeks back from Iraq. When he was popped for possession (as a result of being shaken down in a routine brace since there was no mystery to the illicit nature of the boy’s income), Strom mouthed off to one of the arresting deputies, which resulted in a quick jab to the mouth with the tough end of the lawman’s PR-24 police baton. The blow did more damage than intended, dislocating Strom’s front teeth and swelling his mouth so that his words came out in an ugly and largely ignored stream of profanity. Lost in this muffled diatribe were his entreaties about his pet chimp, locked without direct access to food or water in his small trailer.