A Solitary Blue (15 page)

“Good,” Jeff said.

“It's awfully isolated; you'll be alone a lot.”

“That's all right.” Jeff waited for his father to finish thinking out the major objections. That was the way the Professor did things.

“But I agree with you, it's like an island, isn't it?”

Jeff hadn't thought of that, he'd thought only of the quiet water noises, the sense of space and peace. “I guess it is. I really like it, Professor.”

“Not at all what I imagine Charleston looks like.”

“Not a bit,” Jeff agreed. “Except — it's like that island, just like you said.”

“You didn't see alligators?” The Professor sounded alarmed.

“No, Professor, I didn't. Alligators need a warmer climate. Just the heron.”

“Then we'd better make a bid on it, don't you think? It doesn't do to disregard a sign from the gods. Back to the office. We'll have to add on some rooms — redo the bathroom entirely — finish off that room for year-round living — maybe gravel the driveway so it won't wash away in bad weather. I guess the septic system's all right; he says it's only two years old. And a dock, we'll need a dock.”

“What for?”

“For your boat. Let's go get the business over.”

“I thought so,” the agent said with satisfaction, “I thought you were the right people for this, soon as I saw you.”

“You appear to have been correct,” the Professor said. “What's the nearest town, and how far are we from it?”

“Crisfield,” the agent said. “You're about eight miles out, as the crow flies. Maybe ten or a little more by road.”

“But what about you, Professor?” Jeff had a picture of the map of Maryland in his mind. He remembered where Crisfield was and where Baltimore was in relation to that. “How will you get to work?”

“I can arrange my schedule so that it's only a couple of nights a week I'd need to be away. I can stay at the Faculty Club or with Brother Thomas. As long as you can take the solitude, it shouldn't be hard to arrange.”

“I can take it,” Jeff said. “You know that.” He thought his father might be teasing him.

The Professor bought the property, as he called it, and sold their little house in Baltimore. Before they moved, they had a lot of work done on the cabin. They added hallways and two bedrooms going off opposite sides of the kitchen. They ripped out the old bathrooms and had an entirely new one put in. They had the cabin insulated, its walls finished. New double-paned glass doors replaced the old ones in the kitchen. They both wanted to leave the ceiling unfinished, so they did. They had the long driveway graded and covered with oyster shells. They put a short dock out into the creek and steps down the steep bank leading to it. They drove down frequently to check on the progress and watched the swarming workmen; carpenters, glaziers, roofers, painters, and listened to the sounds of saws and the pile driver.

Brother Thomas seemed to find unflagging humor in everything about the new house. “How big is this piece of wilderness?” he asked, and “How's Jeff going to get to school — dogsled?” and “You putting in any crops, Farmer Greene?”

The Professor answered him mildly. “When it's done, you'll come down to visit. On the property.”

Jeff didn't call it that. To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had been right. When they had bought a little skiff, an eleven-foot wooden boat, painted white, with a seven and a half horsepower outboard motor and he took his father exploring up the creek, winding among the branches of fallen trees, staring up at the backs of little cabins or waterfront homes, or meandering across the marshes on one of the canals that ran into the creek — the water so shallow they had to raise the motor and pole the boat — he knew he had been righter than he'd thought. The Professor didn't seem to mind the inconveniences: the distance from the grocery store and libraries, the mosquitoes that rose up like mist on windless evenings, the necessity of keeping Coleman lanterns available for power failures when thunderstorms moved up the bay. Sometimes the Professor would even suggest himself that Jeff take him out in the boat. “I need to get away from myself for a while. Want to go up the bay shore a ways?” They didn't talk much on such trips, but looked about them. The Professor wore a floppy white spinnaker hat to protect his face from the sun and looked out over the water where a fish would often reward his vigil by leaping up out of the water.
Jeff wore only shorts, or trunks, and studied the shoreline. He was learning the names of birds and trees, learning also how to scan the water's edge for where a great blue might be standing in camouflage, looking like a branch of one of the fallen trees or blending into the grass. The blues roosted, he had learned, on the high branches of trees. If he wandered outside at night and let the door slam behind him, he could hear them taking off — squawking — from their roosts. They never traveled together, they never shared fishing territory; he liked to think that they squawked their displeasure with one another and him and the state of the world. Great Cranky Birds the Indians had named them.

He told the Professor this as they sat in the boat at the mouth of the creek, rocking gently as the tide carried them out onto the bay. “I don't know why they're so jumpy,” Jeff said. “There isn't anything that preys on them, is there? What spooks them?”

“Women with big hats,” the Professor said.

Jeff looked at the back of his father's head. His neck was getting tan, Jeff noticed. Jeff always ran the boat because the Professor couldn't seem to learn how to handle it. He tried to figure out what his father meant. A fish jumped off to starboard. An egret, snowy white, fished along the muddy shallows, its path crossing with two of its fellows. Egrets shared their fishing territory with one another. “C'mon, Professor,” Jeff said. “I was serious.”

“Oh, so was I.” The Professor turned around to look earnestly at Jeff. “When women wore those picture hats, with hat pins — one of the prized adornments was heron feathers.”

Jeff thought about that and thought about his father's response to his question. He started to laugh, a small bubbling of humor in his stomach. “But that's funny, what you said.”

“I have my moments,” the Professor answered, and turned back to the water. But he was pleased, Jeff knew that.

In the evenings, the Professor studied or wrote or read a mystery. Jeff played his guitar. They had decided against a television, had bought a stereo, instead, and a radio, so they could hear the news and weather. Sometimes the Professor joined Jeff in the kitchen, which they had turned into what magazines called a family kitchen, with sofa and chairs near the Franklin stove the Professor had insisted on having. Sometimes he worked in his room. “Are you writing another book?” Jeff asked his father, one night, watching him
wander to the window to look out over the water, which ran red under the last light of the setting sun.

“Hmmm?” The Professor turned, but didn't focus his eyes on Jeff. “I think maybe,” he said.

Jeff began playing on his guitar again, softly. The Professor didn't mind, he'd given Jeff only a fraction of his attention, Jeff knew, because he was thinking something out. Jeff worked out a background for one of the songs he'd heard in Charleston. It needed, he thought, a kind of jingle to it, almost like a tambourine, as if the guitar were one of those cigar box banjos. He thought the Martin could make that kind of sound, if he could figure out how to get it out of his fingers. “Oh Lord, you know, I have no friend like you,” he sang. He almost had it, but not quite. “And I cain't feel at home in this world, any more.”

The Professor drifted back to his room. “This world is not my home, I'm only passing through,” Jeff sang. He was getting closer to the sound he wanted.

They registered Jeff in school and got him a ten-speed bicycle, for days when he didn't want to take the bus. The guidance counsellor didn't even ask him why he was repeating the eighth grade. The Professor didn't ask whether Jeff was strong enough to bike the miles to the school, but he did suggest that Jeff might want to build up his muscles. So Jeff packed sandwiches and took long rides on the empty roads, roads that went along for miles between intersections. He learned every turn of the flat road into Crisfield, became familiar with the farms set back behind fields, their barns bright tin or bright red, with the little houses set up close to the road, with the clusters of trailer homes, the rectangular fields framed by loblollies. He learned the names on the mailboxes along the road to school, most of them standing opposite trim driveways, as erect as soldiers. Only one mailbox was neglected, tilted over, its door always hanging open, its paint chipped, its name faded away to
llerma.
He became familiar with the stores in the shopping center, a mile before the sehool — the large antiseptic supermarket that carried medicines as well as school supplies and even some clothing — and with the less modern stores down at the town center, the hardware, the restaurant, the small grocery whose windows were streaked with grime.

On good days, Jeff took the boat out. He learned to dangle chicken necks at the end of pieces of string to catch crabs. He could, he knew, set pots out in a line, then run the boat along the line,
pulling up the pots to see what he'd caught. That would have been more efficient. But he preferred the quiet of the boat anchored in the middle of the creek, he preferred the lazier pace. He'd bait five or six strings and dangle them over the side of the boat. He left them undisturbed until he saw, by the movement of a string on the gunwales, that a crab was feeding on the bait. Then he would take the string in his fingers and pull it gently in, feeling the crab at the other end, knowing it had one claw firmly fixed on the chicken neck while the other ripped off pieces of flesh to eat greedily. Gently, smoothly, so the crab wouldn't sense anything unnatural, Jeff pulled the string in, until he could see the crab, now a few inches beneath the water's surface. He held the bait steady by stepping on the string and picked up his net. He scooped the crab up in the net, dumped it into the bushel basket, and tossed out the string again, feeding out line until the bait came to rest on the creek bottom. They often had steamed crabs for dinner, eating them with cornbread made from a mix, or biscuits, and glasses of beer or wine or iced tea.

Jeff tried to teach the Professor how to catch crabs, but his father's hands were clumsy. Somehow, his crabs always swam off from the bait before the Professor could net them. Jeff, watching, admired the crab's sideways retreat. The crab slipped away, angling into darker, deeper water. “I don't know how you do it,” the Professor said to Jeff.

“I don't know how you can't,” Jeff answered.

“High natural ineptitude,” the Professor said. “I'd rather read anyway.” He sat and did just that most of the time, moving his legs out of Jeff's way when Jeff moved around the boat to cheek the lines.

Brother Thomas, who came to stay for a week in late August, took a more voluble interest in crabbing and in Crisfield, especially the workboats that moored up at the town dock, especially in the history, especially in everything. “Look at all the churches,” he said, walking along the residential streets that ran back behind the town. “Look at those old Victorian houses, the gingerbreading. I'd think someone would fix them up. Who do you suppose built them?” Brother Thomas, in the bright Hawaiian shirts he wore on vacation, wandered happily through the stores, talking with anyone nearby. He met the local priest, he talked with the old men who sat in the shade of shacks by the dock, among miniature mountains of oyster shells. “This is a wonderful life. I don't know how you found this place,”
Brother Thomas said. “It must be your background as a geographer, Horace.”

“Your what?” Jeff asked. They were all sitting outside on low chairs. The men drank a chilled white wine and Jeff watched the egrets feeding on the opposite side of the creek. A wind blew the mosquitoes away, so they sat in comfort.

“I started out specializing in geography,” the Professor explained to him.

“Why?” Jeff asked.

“I was interested. It seemed like a good way to get grants to travel.”

“Did you know your father won a Rhodes Scholarship?”

Jeff didn't know that.

“But that was in 1945, so he couldn't take it. Honestly, Horace, it's almost pathological, your secretiveness.”

“It never came up,” the Professor said.

“Besides,” Jeff said, “it's not the kind of question you think of to asks — ‘By the way, what academic prizes did you win?' It's not like ‘What do you want for dinner?' or ‘Can I take any library books back for you?' Is it?”

They were all stretched out in their chairs, and the quiet stretched out around them.

“My only question now is, how often can I come back?” Brother Thomas asked.

“As often as you like. The sofa bed is there for you,” the Professor said.

Jeff heard in their voices their contentment. They were two of a kind, he saw; two quiet men, each able to respect what was central to the other's life, both intellectuals. Brother Thomas had a deep, stabilizing faith; although he didn't talk about it, it was always there in him. The Professor had his study of history, whether reading it, writing about it, or thinking it over; it was always there in him, always important. Jeff saw why they were friends.