Shelter (1994)
LATE JULY, 1963 SHELTER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA
PARSON: THE GIRL WHO WAS A FISH
BUDDY CARMODY: CARVE THE CROSS
BUDDY CARMODY: DUST OF THE ROAD
LENNY: THE VOICE THAT DOESN'T TALK
PARSON: THE CLOCK AND THE GATE
BUDDY CARMODY: FAR FROM ANY OTHER
FOR
S
AM
Copyright © 1994 by Jayne Anne Phillips
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Jayne Anne, date.
Shelter / Jayne Anne Phillips.
p. cm.
ISBN
0-395-48890-7
I. Title.
PS
3566.
H
479
S
48 1994
813'.54—dc20 94-8391
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
BP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Book design by Anne Chalmers
Portions of this book have appeared, in different form, in
Esquire, Granta
, and
Lis-
tening to Ourselves: More Stories from "The Sound of Writing
" (Anchor Books,
1994). The quotation on
[>]
and
[>]
is taken from
Uncle Arthur's Bedtime
Stories
, by Arthur'S. Maxwell (Review and Herald Publishing, 1950).
Author's note
: The rhyme "Up the Airy Mountain" was found in my mother's pa-
pers, written in her hand as a six-year-old, 1931. The source of the rhyme is un-
known. I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony for generous support during the writing of
this work. I'm grateful to Joe Kanon, Camille Hykes, and Larry Cooper for sensitive
editing. And I continue to thank Sam Lawrence, the angel of my writing life, in every
word.
And I saw an angel come down from heaven,
having the key of the bottomless pit and a
great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on
the dragon, that old serpent, which is the
Devil ... and bound him a thousand years,
And cast him into the bottomless pit, and
shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he
should deceive the nations no more, till the
thousand years should be fulfilled: and after
that he must be loosed a little season.
—Revelation 20:1–3
Every angel is terrifying.
LATE JULY—Rilke,
Duino Elegies
, 1963 SHELTER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA
Concede the heat of noon in summer camps. The quarters wavering in bottled heat, cots lined up in the big dark rooms that are pitch black if you walk in out of the sun. Black, quiet, empty, and the screen door banging shut three times behind you. Allowed in alone only if you are faint. Perhaps the heat has come over you, settled in from above and sucked your insides until you must lie down to sleep in the empty cabin while the rest are at hiking or canoes or archery. Now you lie there sleeping and the room is heavy and warm, but cooler than noon, the rough wooden walls exuding shade. The cots are precisely mute. Identical and different in olive-green blankets, each pulled tight and tucked. In your mind, you see the bodies lying there, each in its own future. You are frightened because it is you here with the future. And they are scattered along Mud River walk, obscured by dense leaves, their occasional cries no louder than the sounds of the invisible birds. Or they are standing in line before bright targets stretched across baled hay. They are holding taut bows straight out, pulling back on the strings with all their strength.
The sky burned white to blond to powder to an almighty blue; the sun fell unobstructed. The girls wore heavy green shorts that were too long and short-sleeved white blouses embroidered in a clover silhouette above the right breast. The blouses were all too big; only the older girls with larger breasts looked strangely seductive in them. The dark shorts were forest-green gabardine, fluted with fine yellow braid on two deep pockets. In Charleston, the state headquarters of Girl Guides did not concede the heat of the Appalachian summer; they recommended knee socks with garters, neckerchiefs with a gold pin at the throat, wool berets. But Camp Shelter was newly reopened, the cabins were in shored-up disrepair, the cots themselves castoffs from a Boy Scout camp in the Panhandle. The county was low income, the mines, statewide, laid off. Only the shorts and blouses were regulation; girls on Supplement or Full Supplement wore secondhand uniforms and got away with rolling up their sleeves.
The upper sites had no cabins at all, just tents donated by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The tents were war surplus, army olive, weathered, alight on squat frames that were new and rough. Each frame seemed the unfinished skeleton of some more ambitious structure. A row of pale two-by-fours angled out from the wooden platforms that served as floors; like rows of awkward elbows, each held a lashed knot tight and the square form of the tent remained uncomfortably aloft. The raised front flaps were tied back, revealing olive interiors so completely plain that the metal cots with their blue-striped mattresses looked direly ornamental. The plank floors tilted and some were supported by posts in front or behind. Lenny and Cap were in the last row of Highest; beyond the rear wall of their tent, the world dropped off. Tattered in the descending bank, brush and flowers grew waist high. Lenny had stood there, looking up. From behind, the tents seemed temporary and strange. Like the dwellings of nomads in flight from floods, they perched on the hillsides in ascending order. Enclaves meant to be A, B, and C camps were soon dubbed High, Higher, and Highest: Girl Guides were rotated ever higher, the better to experience lashing in the wild and long hikes to flag raising. Seniors at Highest camp walked provisions up every morning after early swim in Mud River, and were never seen except at breakfast and at seven
A.M.
formation. Lenny and Cap stood then in a single line with the rest, just round the flag, looking hard and scratched in their dark, wrinkled Bermudas as the Juniors struggled out of the woods. The Seniors wore slouchy beige or white hats and terry-cloth wristbands: marks of combat with the insects and the heat, and the mist they were already walking through when reveille sounded far below at the quad. The dew-slick windings that were the trails from Highest were a jungle unto themselves and smelled of melons and snakes. Lenny was a Senior with the Seniors. What did they do up there all day?
A million things,
Lenny had lied to her sister, Alma, who was only a Junior and slept in a civilized cabin off the quad. At night the Seniors sang. Lenny knew they were made to sing. From below, their fires would appear as haphazard orange winks in the dark, and their voices must carry as vague chants that lifted and dropped:
Come by here, my Lord.
Lenny thought they were probably praying.
After cooking and mess duty and campfire close, they finally went to their tents, each one a canvas bunker whose sides and drooping roof held the heat of the day. Lenny and Cap were on the side of the mountain; if they tied up the front and rear flaps, air moved through the tent like a blessing. At ten and eleven they were still awake, indolent, murmuring, lying on narrow cots with the sheets still tucked. Cap wore her underwear but Lenny took off everything, relieved to be rid at last of the blouse that buttoned to the neck, the heavy shorts that covered her to her knees. She lay on her bed, legs spread, arms out, her blond hair flung over her face. Her hair, weighty, dense, released from its binding elastic, smelled of woodsmoke but felt cool; she imagined its light color made it cool in the dark of night on Highest. Even the lanterns were out. The counselors were sleeping, having made up chore lists for tomorrow; in these hours, Lenny was free. She felt her body borne up and slowly spinning, spun free by the cooling air, the blackness, the night sounds that grew louder and louder as she concentrated on each one: crickets emitting their pierced warbles, the woods owls hooting like they were trying to get breath, the grasses moving ever so slightly, crack of a twig. Though she complained, Lenny liked camp; she liked being dirty, dousing a change of uniform in the stream, throwing it over a rope line to dry, and putting it on still damp. She liked how the river slid, brown and flat, just a stretch of woods from Turtle Hole, the swimming pond whose mysterious depths were forbidden. She liked being with girls and the fact there were no boys, just Buddy, the cook's little kid, who followed them everywhere like the plague, and Frank, the good-looking bugler, perhaps a year older than they, safely observed from a distance. There were four or five county workmen, faceless in khaki clothes, but their river colony of ditches and pipes seemed unreal as home.
Walking was real. Lenny liked the endless walking that was by now automatic, the meaningless, inarguable up and down of the mountain. The routine, the common movements of the group, were oddly pleasant: nothing to be thought of, nothing to be decided, only this chore or that chore, all of them alike, really, the cleaning of objects, the storage of objects, the carrying up and down the mountain of objects. Even food seemed a series of objects, peeled and cut and cooked into mash, even the water to cook it hauled from somewhere. All day Lenny carried this or that—apples, potatoes, buckets, wood—through shimmering heat, conscious sometimes of the heat as a nearly liquid element, as though they were all kept upright, forced to move by what oppressed them. They struggled against it as swimmers struggle, cutting through, buoyed up.
The days were long. When dark descended, Lenny felt cooled and numb. She thought of the glass of beer in her father's hand: she felt as translucent and dense. He would be drinking beer now, on the dark porch at home, in the absolute quiet of Alma's and Lenny's absence, Audrey a canceled zero somewhere in the workings of the house. Lenny couldn't imagine her mother except in the context of Alma and herself; her father she saw clearly. Wes existed apart from them, always—that was Audrey's constant reproach. Home nights, Lenny often walked outside with a paper cup and Wes would pour her part of his beer; she drank it down in slow swallows and it spread through her. At night in Camp Shelter, protected by Cap and dozens of sleeping strangers, she imagined the beer pouring into her and over her, thick and golden like cold, syrupy lava, poured from her father's glass in a Technicolor dream. She wasn't here with Cap, she wasn't anywhere. In the emptiness, full, she nearly slept but didn't sleep, and floated.