A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  He stopped to break off a low tree limb to use as a walking stick. Here he was, an old man, an apostate. The compression of a life in these few hours. At last, he was aware of what the past had been, what disjointed time really meant. Much more than some petty regret or desire to tend his will toward a differently traveled path. No relief in the opium of nostalgia. There was no solution in that deep sleep called remembering, only deceit, self-deceit, the most vicious kind. What was gone was merely lost. There was no renewal, no chance to recover meaning from the chaotic inflictions of people and places. He realized that much of his life had been serving a sentence, a more profound sentence than the one decided by the state. He had lived a deferment of what he had hoped to become, and there could be no going back, not ever. No lust for expression would be able to find the right words for what he had once been, once had the potential to be. That life was profoundly dead.

  He saw the mountain, nameless. It leapt into view, a verdant swelling of the ground. Near its summit, bluffs straight as swords. The distance was pain, tiredness that he must cross but not return from. He was prepared for what that meant.

  He cast the shotgun off, not bothering to conceal where it fell. He would have preferred to have felt some burden lift, but he realized he was without guilt, and the weapon’s discard was only a shucking of obsolete weight. The man he had killed had been trying to kill him, to erase him. For what? Those strange words that he had spoken—I knew the river would bring me to you—why? Why would there be any larger fate in something so arbitrary and rushed, so unnecessary? That man’s death not even an obstacle to overcome, only a mechanism, a queer flight. He had given his life for an unarticulated idea, a passion stripped of cause. There was no profit in troubling his conscience for another man’s absurd sacrifice. The deputy had been an animal, relieved of life by his own basic hate.

  The air chopped, was stricken. Instinctively, Mason ducked into the nearest tangle of undergrowth. A search helicopter, swift and low. It banked, circled out toward the lowest ridges, held itself aloft inside its burdened whooping before it struck out for greater distance, the patterned report of its blades racketing hollowly off the sloping walls of the valley as it went. He moved quickly, knowing it would make a return pass within minutes.

  This was the true hunt, the one he knew there was no way to escape. The urgency alleviated the immediate pain, delayed its effect, but he was without the solace of hope beyond this day. There was pure thrill in giving himself completely to finding his father. All the poor missed chances of making a wholeness with him could be forgiven if he could make it to the mountain, to see the same unspoiled horizon he remembered from his boyhood. Surely, there was some meaning in that.

  He drove his feet hard over stone, grasped for handholds when he felt his body running out from beneath him. His head wobbled. Blood loss, near fainting. He was slave to the petty demands of breath and circulation. He leaned over, vomited.

  There was a bird overhead, some great ragged wing circling. He lifted his palm, tried to call its name, but memory dodged him. Its simple form was framed by an intractable language growing more obscure by the moment. He walked out along the promontory and watched where the creature met the sky before it disappeared behind low scudding overcast. He waited for it to reappear but it did not. There was only silence, filling him like a thought.

  He closed his eyes, saw an image jump vividly to his mind. The faces of old men and young women made into one joined clay. Details of expression and feature colliding and writing their own new offspring, like the violent work within a kiln. They were giving up their separate forms to this new incarnation. They were the changing state of things, the surrender of small time.

  He bowed under enormous pressure, felt the mountain begin to take him. But one last force of physical strength propelled him up. The final notch toward the top, the rounded granite dome basking under the morning sun. He came through the pass, stood where he had stood as a child.

  He saw the old man sitting alone, looking out on the ancient ridges. Men had given them names once, named them like children. Laid claim through the old power of words, created them anew. The same conquest, repeated so many times since. Such desperate love.

  Mason reached his hand forward, began to speak to his father’s back, began to confess all the crimes that no longer belonged to him.

  LAVADA BURIED Mason up in a small cemetery just the other side of the county line. There was no funeral, no Christian words spoken over his grave before the attendants lowered him in. A few cousins showed up, offered their condolences and promises of help should she need them, before they got in their vehicles and drove back to their homes. The old man, Hammond, came and sat with her for a while, having nothing other than his tiredness to offer. He brought his dog. She leaned down and scratched its ears, spoke to it like the words would bring some comfort to them both. It was a sunny day. She wondered how anyone could be buried on a day like that, but supposed there was no accounting for how the rest of the world might act when a good man died.

  Dennis drove her, though she’d assured him she was fine, capable of caring for herself. He did not say much, either in the car or during the brief business of putting Mason underground. Afterwards, he drove her to his place and led her up the stairs, unplugged the telephone, and made love to her in the placid twilight. Resting, she turned into the hollows of his body, took strength from the physical mass of him. The easy motions returned to so easily. She decided to not tell him she would never see him again after this night. She listened to him sleep through the long hours of the night while she remembered what she could remember of her time in the woods.

  She drove back home early the next morning and sat with one of the deputies at the courthouse. There were some questions unanswered, the man from the search party who was still missing, presumed dead. She knew that she had no information to give them, but she was patient, let them have what they could extract from her. She certainly owed them that if nothing else. When it came to the details of what happened, she let them write their own story, was as cooperative as possible. She had not had to fabricate, merely agree with what they told her: Mason had entered, killed Irving over some criminal quarrel, struck her unconscious when she tried to interfere with his kidnapping of his senile father. It was frighteningly simple. She watched it like one would watch a tragic play.

  The sheriff and his deputies were solicitous. They worried after her comfort, her state of mind. One of the secretaries came in and took her to lunch at the café down the street. She politely declined, saying she’d rather just be finished as soon as she could. Everyone smiled and ducked their heads respectfully.

  She was released with the condition that she forward any contact information in the following weeks in case some discrepancy of paperwork needed to be righted. She was offered a ride home, but she insisted she was fine to drive, and this time she was heeded. She stopped off at the supermarket and bought a large bottle of Chilean wine. That night she sat on the cabin’s front porch drinking the wine from a plastic cup, listened to the evening birdsong. She did not weep.

  She did not look for work for the next week, and she screened out all calls from Dennis. She had been afraid that he might drive up to see her and she would have to confront him in person, but fortunately she was spared that kind of scene. Perhaps, even for him, there had been enough of that kind of thing already.

  She spent her days indoors watching whatever television banality floated across the screen. She bathed often. The hot water released tension deep in her shoulders and neck. Sometimes, she would sink below the waterline with a pent breath and count how long she could remain submerged before her lungs demanded air. It seemed a kind of exercise, though for what she couldn’t exactly say. When she had been a little girl she had been afraid of drowning in the tub when her grandmother had told her a person could die just from a few inches of water. That she had spent so many years terrified of some childhood story made her laugh.

  She drove up
to Mason’s grave only once, and when she pulled up to the cemetery she sat in the car but did not get out. There was no stone yet, only the newly turned ground, a distinguishable blemish. She had little money for anything elaborate. It would only be his name and the dates of his life etched into a glossy plaque. She had seen what it would look like in a catalogue. She pulled away and drove the half hour back home, not sure what she’d expected to see when she’d gone up in the first place.

  She made arrangements to visit Sam. He was in a place over in Asheville, just under an hour’s drive. She spoke to the nurse to see how he was doing and if it would be alright for him to see her so soon after all that had happened. The woman on the other end of the line hesitated but said it would be fine, welcomed in fact, brightening suddenly. As she hung up Lavada worried about that strange note of hesitancy, but decided there was nothing to it. How could there not be some reservation given what Sam had been through, especially in the condition he was in, that they all were in…

  She made herself up, did her hair up on top like he liked. She would be his daughter today, frame herself for him like some vanished portrait. Perhaps that would do both of them some good.

  When she was let in, the first acrid sting of disinfectant confronted her with the reality of what this establishment was. There were truly no such places as rest homes. This was a waiting room for death, a containment for those no longer capable of living what remained of their conscious lives. The walls were pale. The festive decorations of paper cutouts pasted to the bulletin boards only emphasized the clinical pallor. She walked briskly past, gave her name to one of the women at the nurse’s station, received the number of his room in turn.

  “Sam?”

  He sat gazing at some crows arguing at one another in the side courtyard. At least he had a window with a view.

  “Sam, it’s me, Lavada.”

  “Yes,” he said, turning his head. “I see. I was worried about you.”

  “Worried?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She remained across the room from him, more comfortable with the display of his books, his desk, his few photographs, than the space he occupied. She tried to tell herself that she wasn’t afraid of him. He seemed so slight.

  “I remember things sometimes. Isn’t that funny? That now I would remember things, after all this time. It is like a storm inside my head. Sometimes it takes me away, but not today. I am who I am.”

  He tried a smile. It was only a crease.

  “Can you walk for a little bit?”

  “Of course.”

  But he made no effort to rise. He said nothing more. She realized that he was abruptly gone. In time, she stepped away, closed the door, and drove back home without a word to anyone else at the facility.

  The next morning she got up early and baked big pans of pumpkin bread and brownies and covered them with white towels before loading them carefully into the back seat of the car. She was not hungry, but the baked goods smelled good. The happiness it gave her was better than eating.

  She already had the name of the man she was looking for. They had talked about him at the courthouse. She glanced through one of the old phonebooks in the front hall. There was only one name with a first initial that matched. She was sure that was the man. She wrote down the address and got in the car.

  The drive out was pleasant, the river a guide alongside the highway. Its waters had receded, become the normal hope and contentment that drew people to its banks to fish and picnic. She rolled down the windows and pulled over to listen to it, to hear what other people heard when the water was running over the rocks. She wanted so much for that sound to become hers.

  She found the house, drove up the dirt track through its gates. Split rail hunched in a spraddled line down all the way to the edge of the property where the tree line commenced. There was no car parked out front, but the door appeared to be open, propped by a lump of river rock. She sat for a moment, waited for someone to step out to greet her, but she had known it wouldn’t be that easy. She went around, stacked the pans on top of one another, stepped up to the front.

  “Hello,” she called. She leaned in to the front room, looked around. Nothing. She set the pans on a coffee table a few steps across the threshold and darted back outside, not wanting to be caught trespassing, to have to explain that when there was no ready way to explain any of what she was really doing here.

  She waited, but there was nothing from inside. She walked around the porch, let her weight settle on the speaking floorboards. The sun warmed her, stretched the air around like its own easy somnolence. Then, a brusque complaint, the sound of a jerked whipcord.

  “Dammit!”

  She eased around, saw an old man with cropped hair and overalls leaned over a push mower. His large red hands worked at the small engine, twisting at the small organs within. Sweat and grime tattooed him.

  “Mister Gibb?”

  He glanced up, startled, wiped his hands against his pants legs. He came forward into the hard glare.

  “Yes, ma’am. Can I help you?”

  She came around to him, gave her hand to his, insisted they shake despite his worrying he might smear her with motor oil. He was a tall man, like his son.

  “You don’t know me…”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But your son. He…he was helping to look for me when he disappeared.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t know what mend this might make. But something greater than her had insisted she visit this man, look into this face. Discover the likeness between him and his boy, the likeness between any other man she might know.

  “I know this doesn’t mean much. But I did bring you something. Something for this difficult time you must be going through. I can’t really explain what I’m saying. But if you’ll come up to the house with me.”

  “Of course, of course. Come on up. It’s miserable out here this time of day. Let’s sit in the shade for a while.”

  They came up to the front, shared the light blanket of shadow cast by the façade of the house. Lavada brought out what she had baked and he thanked her but did not take anything from the pan yet. The breeze vaulted the unseen wooded swale down where the creek fed the river, brought a cool rustling that was like its own imitation of autumn days, but once it stilled the old heavy heat of the day returned, made them tired enough to keep to the conversation at hand. No special words passed between them that they had not swapped a thousand times in a thousand like agreements of mood. But the conference was not a meshing of words alone. They settled into the deep luxury of one another’s company, invited each other into their private selves. Lavada grew drunk on the sounds of Gibb’s voice, the tenor of his kindness. She was pleased that she came.

  The spell was broken by the sound of a truck grinding up the drive. It came in fast, circled around Lavada’s Honda and halted with a skittering of gravel. Immediately, a brunette woman in jeans and a flowered blouse stepped out, walked straight up to the porch without a word or soft expression. She stared Lavada down.

  “I’m Carol,” she said.

  “Yes, this is Carol, my wife. Not Cody’s mother.”

  The last comment was unnecessary. The woman couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Lavada herself, still shy of forty.

  “Good to meet you.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Her eyes didn’t leave Lavada. They were sharp as winter.

  “You’re the wife of that man out there they chased down in the woods?”

  “That’s right.”

  “One that got my stepson killed then.”

  Lavada had no answer, felt reduced in front of them both. She made a gesture toward the pans and stepped off the porch, went back to her Honda and started the engine. The air conditioning blew hot for a while in such weather before it would do any good, but she didn’t prefer to wait for comforts. She put the shift in reverse and started back down the drive. S
he turned to check if she was clear when she felt a hand on her bare arm. Mr. Gibb looked down at her. His eyes were small as punch holes.

  “I know it’s hard to find people in this world,” he said. “It’s so hard to tell them what it means when you see something familiar in the other.”

  “Yes, it always is. I guess that’s right.”

  He seemed to have something else he wanted to say, but the voice failed. He patted her once and turned to go back to the house where his young wife waited. Lavada backed out and checked the road both ways before turning for town. She let the car glide down the gentle slope for a mile or so. Then she let it run, fought luckless curves all the way back.

  Acknowledgements

  Many friends have supported the book. Special thanks to Mark Powell and Jon Sealy for their early eyes on the manuscript. They helped get this book in its present form, for better or worse. To Jesse Graves, Silas House, Jim Minick and Ron Rash for their encouragement and friendship. To all my students and colleagues at the Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writers Workshop, who have made me feel part of a thriving artistic community. I would like to convey special gratitude to Denton Loving, Darnell Arnoult and the people of the Mountain Heritage Literature Festival at Lincoln Memorial University for the award of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, which has helped greatly in the advancement of this project. And certainly, to April, who is my first, best reader.

  About the Author

  Charles Dodd White lives with his wife in the mountains of western North Carolina. A recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship and an individual grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, he is author of the novel, Lambs of Men, and the story collection, Sinners of Sanction County.