A Place Of Light

by Mary Bucci Bush

  And I just stare at her, wondering how all them words can come out of somebody who looks like she’s about ready to fall over any minute.

  It looks like she’s ready to turn around and go in the house, so I yell out to her, “We’re looking for a place to stay.”

  That stops her. “You ran away from home,” she says.

  “God no,” I tell her. “We’re on vacation.”

  She starts laughing, and it sends a chill up me, sounding like a brood of pheasants calling out to each other.

  “Why, you can’t be a day over fourteen,” she says, shaking. If she only had a collar and tags she’d be jangling like her dog.

  “I’m twenty-one,” I tell her, and Maude shoots me a look that could make me choke. “My sister here is eighteen.”

  She wobbles her head at us. “On a walking vacation from Glass Factory Road?” she says.

  “We don’t live there no more,” I tell her. “We live in Florida. We just come back for a visit.”

  Then her face gets serious and it looks like those watery eyes of hers are searching us out, trying to find the truth if they look hard enough. “You’d better go on back home,” she says. She puts her hand out, and that big ox of a red dog jangles over so his head just fits under her hand. “I’m sorry I can’t sell you any chickens,” she says. “Or help you on your vacation.”

  “I don’t want no damn chickens,” I say to her. “Don’t you know nothing?”

  “We better get going now,” Maude says.

  “I’m going all right,” I tell her. I turn around, giving the place a good looking over, but there ain’t a car parked there, not a toolshed nor a blasted barn nor a garage nor nothing but a fence and a broke-down little house with a crazy old lady and a dumb-ox dog.

  “We got to walk all the way back now?” Maude says. “We got to go back there?”

  “Stop railing at me, will you?” I tell her. “Can’t you give me half a minute to think?” with that old lady standing there trembling all over, watching us, her hand out on the dog’s head like it’s the only thing keeping her from falling over.

  “You said you knew where you was going,” she tells me.

  “Will you let up?” I say.

  “You knew she was doing it,” she tells me. “You could of made her stop.”

  “Oh God Almighty,” I say to her, and she has cut me right in two so I feel like I will fall to the floor from it, like Pa.

  “Do you want me to call your mother and father for you?” the lady says, and it’s too much for me to take, coming from both of them like that.

  And then that dumb dog trots over and noses at Maude. “Git,” I tell it. “Get the goddamn hell away from here,” and Maude sticks her hand out and pats its fat head.

  “Don’t you talk like that,” the old lady says. “You don’t walk into a lady’s yard and start cussing.”

  “Martha heard a dog barking down the road and said, ‘Dog,’ clear as day,” Maude says.

  “Don’t tell me no more,” I say. “Don’t tell me no more about it.”

  “Boy,” the lady says, trembling like she’s gonna fall any minute now that the dog’s not there holding her up, and she’s nodding her head, looking at us like she’s trying to see what’s going on, as if it’s something you can see.

  “Come inside,” she says, and I think she’s talking to her dog. “Come use the phone and straighten this out.”

  “Ain’t nothing to straighten,” I tell her. “Ain’t nothing to be done except get as far as China.”

  “Do you want me to call for you?” she says.

  “Anyways, we ain’t even got a telephone,” Maude tells her.

  “Oh,” the lady says, like somebody just give her a little poke and she’s hopping back from it.

  The dog jumps up on Maude, or tries to, and she backs off and nearly falls down, he’s so big.

  “Boy,” the lady says. “What’s he doing?” she says. “He never does that.”

  Then it’s like she gets a bright idea, just like that, and she starts wobbling worse than ever. “While you’re deciding what to do,” she says, “could you eat some pie?”

  “We got to go,” I tell her, but already my mouth is watering over from that word. I ain’t tasted it in a year, maybe more.

  “Pie,” Maude says, real quiet, like she’s in church and some holy words just come out her mouth.

  The dog jangles back over to the lady, and the two of them turn and tremble into the house.

  I look at Maude and she looks at me and then I don’t even know what’s happening, all I know is me and Maude are walking into that old lady’s house.

  It’s dark in there, from getting late, and the sun low behind the trees and just a little window over the sink and another one facing out where there’s trees and shade. She moves over near the sink, running her hands along the edge of the sink to the cupboard, and takes two dishes and pulls out half a pie from I don’t know where. “I never eat pie,” she says. “Mr. St. Clair from the church group brought it. He’s always stopping by with something.” And then she puts them two plates down on the table with big hunks of pie on them.

  So we sit down and I have to lean over to see what it is, and I smell it, blackberry maybe, so sweet it hurts me. Maude hunches over hers and picks up her fork like some big spear and she is going to catch this one, this one ain’t getting away. I take a bite, and it makes me go weak all over, and then that’s all we do is eat, till we’re down to scraping juice from the empty dishes.

  I come up like from a dream and look over at the old lady sitting at the table with us now, moving her head like she’s been keeping a beat to the scraping sounds. “I never did go for sweets,” she says, “not even when I was little. I should just tell people I don’t eat sweets, then they wouldn’t give these things to me.”

  And I’m thinking she really is crazy, to tell people don’t give her nothing sweet. Then I hear the dog drinking water, making so much noise it’s like waves crashing on the rocks, and the lady says, “I didn’t even offer you anything to drink with that pie.” But then she don’t offer anything still.

  So finally Maude says, “Can I have a drink?” After some creaking and moving around the lady’s up and going to the refrigerator. “I don’t even think I have anything,” she says. When she opens the door the light shines out and that’s how I see how dark it’s getting. She sticks her hand in and feels around, then pulls out a milk bottle. “I didn’t think I had any,” she says, and she puts it down on the table and puts a couple glasses down and says, “Can you pour for yourself?” like we’re some kind of babies. We drink her milk with her standing there holding on the back of her chair watching us. Maude watches her right back while she drinks.

  Finally Maude says, “Don’t you have no lights in this house?”

  “Oh,” the lady says. “Is it too dark?” and she reaches up in the air over our heads and waves her hand around until she catches the string and pulls and the light goes on.

  It’s like a light flicks on inside me, too. I look at her and think, I’ve seen a man who was deaf and a boy with one arm but I never seen nobody that was blind. I wave my hand in the air in front of her but she doesn’t look.

  “Is that better?” she says.

  I fling my hand right up near her face and Maude looks at me like I’m nuts, but the lady doesn’t blink.

  “Damn,” I say.

  And then, like I just won a shopping spree in a toy store I race my eyes around that room, checking how many cupboards and drawers she’s got that might be holding money.

  I grin at Maude and nudge her. “I told you we was going to Florida,” I say. When the old lady cocks her head my way I say, “Back to Florida.”

  “My brother lived in Fort Lauderdale eight years,” she says, “and I never once went to visit him. I just never wanted to. I liked staying put here.”

  I stand up, looking around. “You couldn’t pay me to stay here,” I tell her. “I’m glad we left when we did. Ain�
��t you glad, Maude?”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, nodding her head and giving me a look that says What you talking about? What kind of business you thinking to do now?

  “Where in Florida are you from?” the lady says.

  I got my hand on one of her drawers, ready to pull it out when she says that and I stop dead in my tracks, racking my brains for the name of some town, but I don’t know a one. “The Everglades,” I tell her.

  “Ho!” she says. Then she starts real slow and quiet with a laugh until pretty soon we got that whole brood of pheasants back in there crawing to each other.

  “It’s a little town nobody ever heard of,” I tell her, and I take my hand off the drawer and look around the room. She’s sitting at the end of the table, trembling her head with her shriveled hands fidgeting on the table. “It’s mostly colored people live there,” I say, and she trembles her head, smiling. Maude sits there shaking her head at me like I am the sorriest person she has ever laid eyes on.

  “I’ve met some colored people from Florida,” the old lady says, and I’m thinking, God Almighty, ain’t she got a purse somewhere that I can just nab it and hightail out of there?

  “They came up on the railroad,” the lady says. “A few settled here. Most were from Georgia and Alabama, though.” Her head’s nodding all over and she’s smiling away. “My great-grandfather worked for the railroad. Did you know it came right through here? Did you know this is historical land that you’re on?”

  Maybe that’s why she’s not locked up, I’m thinking. One minute she’s giving you a piece of pie like she’s all right. Then she starts talking like that, but she keeps fooling you with it. I open a cupboard door and peek in but it’s only cans of soup and other such junk in there.

  “Did you want something else?” she says.

  I nearly jump out of my skin and catch myself from slamming the door shut. I stare hard at her trying to figure out if she really can see. But those eyes are all watery and funny-looking and she sits there wobbling like she’s waiting for a parade to come.

  “There ain’t no train up in these hills,” Maude says.

  The old lady grins at her, like Maude just said something too smart for words. “Of course it’s not here anymore,” she says.

  I see through the door what’s got to be her bedroom and I wonder how I’m gonna get in there to look around without starting a ruckus.

  She’s off smiling, nodding her head and blinking her eyes at something from a long time ago. “I’m proud my family was a part of it,” she says.

  “We got a cousin worked for the railroad,” Maude tells her, “cutting weeds along the tracks.”

  The old lady laughs. “I’m talking about the underground railroad,” she says.

  I’m heading for the bedroom, quiet, so she don’t hear me, trying to see around the doorway if there’s a purse or anything worth some money in there.

  “It goes through tunnels?” Maude says.

  “No,” the old lady says so sharp and sudden I think she is saying it to me, and I stop cold. Maude yawns and runs her finger down the pie plate, but there’s nothing to get. Tunnels, I’m thinking. Clear from here to Florida.

  The old lady looks at me like she sees me going into her bedroom, and I’m stopped there like a treed coon. I see now she knows I’m aiming to steal any good thing I can lay my hands on. “No tunnels,” she says, looking at me funny, and it hits me right then the old craw’s lying, scared I’m going to haul her loot down into them tunnels and disappear.

  I come back slow to the table and stand next to Maude, eyeing that old lady, with her head going this way and that and everything on her a tremble.

  “I been on a underground railroad once,” I tell her, but I’m lying. “It was nothing,” I say, and I shrug. Maude’s looking at me like I just lost any little bit of sense I had left.

  But then she turns back to the old lady. “How come it don’t run here no more?”

  “There’s no more need,” the lady says. “Thank God for that.”

  Now I know she’s lying because people are always wanting to go places and if there was a train they could get out and not be stuck here like a burdock root in hard land.

  “That little brick building where the road turns in Peterboro,” the lady says. “That was one of the stops.”

  I look at her wondering if she’s trying to throw me off or if she’s so dumb she forgot she didn’t want me to know. But she’s not looking at me. She’s sitting there smiling and wobbling her head at Maude’s like it’s only her and Maude in the world and she plumb forgot I was even in the room.

  We could walk there in a couple hours, it’s that close. We could walk there and get in them tunnels and nobody would ever know on earth what happened to us, not even Pa. Not even that one that killed my sisters. And all along I was picturing caves and rocks being the way in. I never thought of walking inside no little brick building in the middle of a town to reach them.

  “We better get along now,” I say to Maude. “It’s getting late.”

  “Where to?” she says, like it never crossed her mind that we could leave that old lady’s house.

  “Where you think?” I tell her. “Home,” I say, so the old lady won’t think anything.

  “Home?” Maude cries out, and I have to throw my hand up over her mouth, and then I put my finger to my lips, too, to make her see she’s got to keep shut up and do what I say.

  That dumb dog is laying under the table somewhere snoring, and the old lady sits there wobbling her head looking around like a chicken trying to see in the dark.

  “You said we wasn’t ever . . .” Maude says, and I clamp my hand tighter.

  “We got to go back to the car,” I tell her, making faces to try to make her wake up and catch on. “Back to the Everglades.”

  And then she just flat out starts bawling.

  “Goddamnit,” I say. “Why you got to start that? Goddamnit to hell,” and I take my hand away and let her go at it. The dog rattles out from under the table and sticks its big square nose up on the table to see what’s happening.

  The old lady sits there a minute taking it in. Then she stands up slow and wobbling. Maude sits there bawling with her eyes on the old lady, watching what she’s going to do. She goes to the sink, feeling around and running water, and I stand there helpless in a broken-down house on a dead-end road nowhere up in the hills. I sit back down at the table and let them cinder blocks stack up inside me again because I can’t stand it no more from the weight of them.

  The old lady wobbles over to Maude with a wet washrag. When Maude sees that cloth come at her she shuts up and moves to get away, but the lady plops it right on her.

  “This always helped me when I was weepy,” she says to Maude. “Washing my face with cool water.”

  Maude sits there like the bogeyman jumped out the woods and scared her out of her skin, while the old lady runs that cloth all over her face, going off into her hair and against her nose, feeling for where the face is. She puts one of them shriveled hands on Maude’s shoulder to hold her steady while she rubs her face down and Maude goes stiff. “Doesn’t that feel good?” the old lady says, but Maude is stiff and struck dumb from it.

  “I should wash your face, too,” she says to me, and I jump to.

  “Don’t nobody wash my face but me,” I tell her. “Don’t nobody better try.”

  She lets off with Maude, and Maude sits there blinking her eyes like she just come out of the dark and don’t know where she is.

  “Maybe you’d get some help if you told somebody,” the lady says, wobbling her head.

  I look at her wondering what it is she knows we should tell.

  She goes over and drops that washrag in the sink. “A little girl like you belongs home in bed this time of night,” she says. Maude sits there like a rock, with her eyes on the old lady, not saying nothing.

  “Your mother and father are going to be worrying about you,” she says.

  “You ain’t kidding,”
I tell her, thinking they’re worrying right now are we telling somebody what’s going on. And then I go creepy again, thinking of Pa outside somewhere, moving through the woods, hunting us down.

  “Our mother . . .” Maude says, and I swing around and look at her.

  “Shut up, Maude,” I tell her. “Don’t you say nothing.” I move to get her up and get going, but she’s like somebody who’s drunk too much and won’t budge. “We’re going now,” I tell her.

  “They’ll put her in the electric chair,” Maude says.

  “Shut up,” I yell at her, and it’s like a knife cutting me what she says. I look over at the old lady who’s all trembling and a-fluster-looking.

  “I hope they do,” Maude says. “I hoped they put them both in.”

  I take Maude’s arm and tr y to pull her from the chair. “We got to go,” I tell her. “You going to get us in big trouble if you don’t shut up.” I yank but she still don’t come.

  “If something bad has happened . . .” that lady says.

  “Every blasted thing is something bad,” I tell her.

  And then I don’t care no more. I go open a cupboard door and start pushing things around. I take out a can of peaches.

  “What are you looking for?” she says.

  “I gotta find me something,” I tell her.

  “You ask if you want something,” she tells me. “You don’t go snooping in people’s cupboards.”

  I open a drawer that’s full of spoons and forks. Then I go to the bedroom.

  “Come back here,” she says, and she starts after me, knocking into a chair. “What are you doing?” That big ox of a dog jangles up and lumbers after her.

  It’s an old lady’s bedroom, all dusty and still and smelling like old no-good powder. She’s got a big bed with posts and a bedspread and fat pillows. There’s nothing on the dresser but a doily and a dish with some dust and bobby pins in it.

  The dog comes up behind me, I can feel it nosing my leg. “What do you want?” the lady says.

  I open the top drawer and throw my hand in to root around, then pull it back out just as fast. The drawer is full of her underthings, all laid out in there. I close it and turn around like the breath got knocked out of me.