Shelter (1994) (3 page)

No one was safe at church in the dark, but Buddy knew better than to beg not to go. While Dad was away in Carolina they'd walked down the road to the clapboard building maybe three nights a week, winter and summer, and every Sunday. Now they only went if Dad was asleep, but lately he drank himself into a stupor most nights. Then home was like it used to be. Buddy and Mam could play Crazy 8's and Slapjack at the table, and pop corn on the stove in the covered skillet. Buddy hated going to church when it was already dark, pulling on his long pants and a button-collar shirt in the heat. The clothes stuck to his sweat. At least now he didn't have to take a bath first, or Dad might wake up and get to swearing. Mam only wiped Buddy across the face with a cold cloth and made him scrub his hands. Now she shoved him gently toward the sink, whispering at him to hurry up. He squeezed the yellow soap, a slippery rectangular hunk of Fels Naptha she'd brought home from the camp kitchen. The strong-smelling lather stung his scratches.

Buddy didn't think he remembered Dad from before the prison visits, not really. He remembered someone, but Dad had gone away. Five years he was gone, and now Buddy wondered why he'd come back. It was like he didn't know he'd left jail, the way he woke up in the dark and didn't know where he was, and then went after Mam like a dog that was near starved and loony. When he was like that, she did what he wanted, and he was so loud he woke Buddy up. Fighting sleep to listen, Buddy got nervous and drowsy like he used to sometimes at school; he'd hear things, and then hear the shivery echo of each word or sound, the echoes coming faster and closer until he couldn't keep his eyes open. Sometimes in the morning Buddy didn't know what he'd really heard or what was animals fighting in his dreams, big animals with vast, muffled forms, making sounds that shook the room.

"Buddy? You ready?" Mam nodded toward the door. She had on her church clothes that fast.

He put the soap back on the drainboard and held his hands in cold water, splashed his face. He smelled wild onions on his fingers and wished it were afternoon. During summers when Mam cooked at the camp, he was on his own between meals in the big camp kitchen, wandering back and forth through the woods and along the road, using the house as an outpost he owned in Mam's absence. Now Dad was home, Buddy stayed in the woods and the fields, and walked back with Mam from Camp Shelter after supper. Once they rounded the bend she'd take off her crepe-soled shoes and Buddy would carry them. She'd roll down her nylons that only came to her knees, like socks, and put them in her pocket. My god, she'd tell Buddy, them girls throw away enough food every day to feed us for a month. But she brought supper home to Dad, and she'd found an extra freezer at camp that worked once she plugged it in. Mrs. Thompson-Warner had already told her she could buy it cheap, since it looked like the camp might shut down when the girls left. She was not going to steal food, no, stealing was a sin, but it was all right to freeze leftovers, and when camp closed she hoped she'd get one of the pipe crew to move that big freezer in their truck. Hadn't they said how they liked the lemonade she sent out to them with Frank?

"Come on out here on the porch and dress. Ain't a soul going to see you, it's full dark, and he's not sleeping sound." She leaned toward Buddy, her bulky shape vanilla-scented, her big arms filmy in her white blouse. Then she turned, her broad skirt preceding him out the door like a dark wall. They huddled down, her knees cracking as she knelt to hold his pants, and she pulled on the shirt and buttoned him in before he'd even got his hands through the cuffs.

"Mam, this shirt is hot. I'm sweating to pieces."

"Now, I had to iron it, didn't I? We just get to walking, you'll cool down on the road."

She was talking and they were down the rickety steps and the house was behind them with Dad in it, asleep like a bomb could sleep, Buddy thought, and the moon was up so bright he could see the shoulders of the road looking blond against dark brush. After the dew came up, the road didn't smell dusty, didn't smoke up a tawny veil that could drift and follow him. Now the road lay still, glowy and damp. It was the same road they walked to Camp Shelter, but church was farther on. The stone pillars of the camp entrance were dark shapes all grown over with vines. Honeysuckle licked up and down their height, countless sprays of blossoms emerging luminously ivory and gold against the dark, stacked rocks. The camp was all hidden, Buddy thought: some drunk going along at night, a drunk on foot, a drunk in a car, might not even find it. Like tonight Dad had cursed how he couldn't drive out of this place, had to walk two mile to even get to a paved road. Maybe he knew a little lady who would lend him a car that worked. You get yourself a car from some rip, better you just keep driving, Mam had told him. I'll drive, he'd said. But how could he, he'd only wreck himself. Maybe he'd get a car and not drink so he could drive.

"Mam, is our road two miles out to the highway?"

"No, course not. It's barely a mile. Don't we walk it every day, all winter? We dress warm, why, we're all right." Her breath came in soft, wuffling huffs, a kind of music. "That's why I buy us the best boots I can get, and gloves for inside our mittens, and you got that fur hat I made you."

Buddy wanted her to stay quiet so he could hear her beside him, the sound coming from above and just ahead of him, a sound familiar as his own heartbeat. Sometimes when he was by himself, he'd open his mouth a little and pant slowly, softly, trying to sound like her. In the winter her breath came out of her like furled clouds. Now she went on like a chant or a song.

"Wasn't enough for you a whole coat from that fur. Just pieces of an old muskrat jacket I got at Goodwill. Had I found more, I would have lined your coat..."

He stopped listening, aware of sounds beyond her voice. Just here the road was a space with tall, dense walls of foliage on either side. Honeysuckle trailers moved, slight and wafting. The same trembly flowers grew like a tangled webbing all around the frame church, and Buddy thought he could smell them too, like the heady perfume and the church itself and all the voices singing in it were creeping back along the road. Spirit could creep that way. He smelled it coming toward them.

"Listen to me, Buddy." Mam was talking still. "Don't you pay Dad any mind when he rails on like he does. He rants out his head."

"Out his head." Buddy paused. "Why is he like that?"

"Oh, he didn't used to drink so bad. But he never could stand being cooped up. Jail scared him, I reckon, reminded him of things he tries not to think about." She felt for Buddy behind her, and took his hand. "I know it's scary, but maybe the Lord means you to see what drink does to men. Then you know never to put that poison in yourself."

Buddy wanted to say Dad was poison. Instead he asked, "Would we ever get us a car?"

"Couldn't get a car moving on this road in much snow, and takes money to fix cars. They're always breaking down. And it don't hurt people to walk, whatever weather. You know my uncle gave me this house and we own it free and clear." She laughed. "When you were little and starting school, I thought of finding something in town. But those rents were so high! So what I did was get one of those plastic saucer sleds, and I'd pull you all the way down the road to the bus. You had the best time!"

During the school year, she worked in the kitchen at Buddy's school. She was the biggest of all the big women in white uniforms. It was mostly country kids who ate hot lunch, and Mam who stood behind the counter, spooning red beans onto plastic rectangular plates. Town kids got mad if their beans touched their cornbread. Mam shoved the dense yellow wedges to the side, her hand in a see-through glove the kids called monster hand. When she began working at the sink instead, Buddy could eat better, but he wanted her near him; he'd never ridden the bus without her. Last winter, he'd made her stop pulling him on the sled. It started to scare him, how hard she'd be wheezing by the time they got to the bus stop. If she fell down in the snow, he wouldn't be able to move her.

"You think you're too grown up for that stuff now," she said. "Remember how we'd hide that saucer in the pine trees and get on the bus, then pull it out in the afternoon and go on back home?"

"Yeah." He was listening hard. At certain points on the road, he could hear the girls in the upper camp, far up the mountain, singing around their fire. No words, just a windy carrying sound Buddy thought of as Lenny. He thought of the sound as her voice, and he heard it near her even in the daytime, like it wafted off her skin, and nothing could ever touch her or grab her. He'd be safe with Lenny. He was scared at church with Mam. Sitting in the long pews, she was like all the rest, saying amen, nodding, agreeing in a voice Buddy didn't recognize, a voice that was broken, gone soft. He was even scared of the road when they walked to church. It was his road, but at night it led to the church with the round windows that were like eyes. He wanted the sanctuary of the trees, their darkened leaves and layered pewter depths, and he longed to run into the woods where Mam wouldn't follow. He could imagine her standing in the road, looking at the border of the trees as at a surface of unmoving water, shouting his name, but he would have disappeared, vanished. Mam could never track him, no one could, not even Dad. A long time ago he'd learned how to run and move, cleaving sideways and upwards, using roots and vines, using stones in the stream to leave no trail at all. He could be running the stream now, hearing the rattle of the water, flying across and over it to Lenny, but he was here with Mam.

"Will you look at this?" She pulled his hand for him to stop, and they stood seeing the thickly grown trees, how they were all tangled up with glossy piles of rhododendron. The moon shone bright and just here the honeysuckle had broken out in a long gash of whitey yellow that spilled like a waterfall down a length of green. The smell of it washed over them. "Smells like honey cooked to a boil and cooling in the air. No wonder the bees go wild. But we got it to ourselves now the dew is up."

"I figure all that's on this road is ours," Buddy said.

"You do, do you. Even the bees that's thick in the daytime, even that camp where I'm working."

"We're the only house on the road, and there ain't nobody at the camp all winter, all fall, even all spring."

She laughed a warm, pleased laugh and moved her fleshy hand to the back of his neck. "That how it seems to you, why that's fine with me. Used to be a couple more families, back before you remember, but they moved out. Reckon they did better in life."

"Well," Buddy said fiercely, "them old broken houses of theirs don't count. This here is our road."

"And this is our honeysuckle?"

"Sure it is." And he grasped a leggy branch within his reach, bending it to break it off and make her take it.

"Hold on there. You don't pick honeysuckle, why it wilts right off if you pick it. Wilder than you are, and that's saying something." She took the blossoming branch from his fingers and bent to look at the lacy flowers, holding them so they were just near Buddy's face. "You know 'honeysuckle' was one of your first words? Nearly three before you talked, and you come out with a big word like that. I figured you was going to be a late-blooming genius."

"What's a genius?" He ran a finger along a flower, parts so small he couldn't feel them—small like a hair, like an insect's leg.

"Oh, someone who's different from other folks." She straightened up and let go of the flower. "And I reckon you are different, ain't you."

Sometimes she said a question but it wasn't a question. He made the branch nod like a leafy wand. "Is Dad a genius?"

"What? Not likely. No, genius means you know more, out of nowhere, but you might only know about a certain thing." She paused. "Like you know about this road, and the woods around here."

Buddy snapped the end off the long spray he held. "Look, you can wear it to church. It'll last that long, I know it will. I'll fix it on you."

"All right then, Buddy." She bent down till she was his height and he fixed the flower to the top buttonhole of her white blouse, her good one she always ironed for church, and the pale spray curled up around her collar.

"You know there's a Jesus story about honeysuckle?" She pulled off one of the flowers and touched its parts. "These three long petals at the top, they're Jesus' head and arms spread on the cross, and this one petal going down, that's His legs bound together and nailed to the wood. And this long, thin neck of the flower, that's because He was so far from God in His Agony."

Buddy pointed to the delicate threads outflung from the center of the bloom.

"That's the spirit flowing from Him when His soul went up to heaven." She touched the flower to Buddy's mouth.

He tasted an orange dust. Now she was funning with him a little and he wiped his lips and spat the dust away, relieved. He looked into her eyes that were so known to him, her flat hazel eyes with their green flecks like lights shot through them from behind. Like she was hiding in her narrow eyes, behind her white face that was round and smooth as a big bald moon. "Was Dad there when I said that word 'honeysuckle'?"

She kissed his lips a quick hard kiss and stood, then turned to keep walking. "No, he wasn't there."

"Was he in jail then too?"

"No, he just wasn't there. He didn't come to be your dad till after that."

"Well, who was my dad back then?"

"Nobody. Was just you and me then. You and me playing on the road and back of the house and in the stream..." She was walking away from him. "Step it up now, we'll be late for service."

But they wouldn't be late. Even this far away, he could hear the singing, the night was so quiet. And the singing always kept on until the preaching started. The songs were mournful from far off, but stronger and scarier as Mam and Buddy got closer. They could see the church in the clearing; like a dead thing come alive, the church could wear different faces. In summer dusk a yellowy, jack-o'-lantern light crept across it and the white building with its whitewashed steps looked illumined against greeny brush and bushes and honeysuckle bloom. By day the windows with their little square panes looked blind and blackened. But inside, light fell amongst the singers like blue smoke, a smoke with no smell, a smoke like the dead would make if they were burning. Now, at night, the cold ice was burning up in there. The different preachers talked about the dead, and how to be safe from burning. Buddy thought the dead would burn in the river, where no one but the dead could catch on fire. They would be burning in Mud River, under the same rattling silver bridge the school bus crossed on the way to Gaither, and Buddy thought they started to burn as Mam walked up the steps to the double doors of the church. Mam's skirt was orange and her haunches moved the whole broad surface of the silky cloth. Black leaves on the cloth moved too, and her feet in their white sandals trod the steps so heavily that Buddy felt the wood shake as he made his own reluctant ascent behind her.