Jacob Have I Loved
Read Jacob Have I Loved Online
Authors: Katherine Paterson
Jacob Have I Loved
For
Gene Inyart Namovicz
I wish it were
EMMA
,
but, then,
you already have two or three
copies of that.
With thanks and love.
During the summer of 1941, every weekday morning at theâ¦
If my father had not gone to France in 1918â¦
Even I who read Time magazine from cover to coverâ¦
“I hate the water.”
The stranger from the ferry offered no explanation for hisâ¦
It is hard, even now, to describe my relationship toâ¦
Call and I had been so busy crabbing since schoolâ¦
I used to try to decide which was the worstâ¦
“Trudy” was what did it. Simply by using Auntie Braxton'sâ¦
The blow that I had been praying for struck theâ¦
It was the bluest, clearest day of the summer. Everyâ¦
For the three days that the Captain lived with us,â¦
Caroline kept the Jergen's lotion incident to herself, so noâ¦
I suppose if alcohol had been available to me thatâ¦
I served the tea with a smile sunk in concreteâ¦
Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in the fallâ¦
Call was not discharged as soon as he had hoped,â¦
Two days after my parents' return from New York, Iâ¦
Every spring a waterman starts out with brand clean crabâ¦
It is far simpler to be married to a Catholicâ¦
A
s soon as the snow melts, I will go to Rass and fetch my mother. At Crisfield I'll board the ferry, climbing down into the cabin where the women always ride, but after forty minutes of sitting on the hard cabin bench, I'll stand up to peer out of the high forward windows, straining for the first sight of my island.
The ferry will be almost there before I can see Rass, lying low as a terrapin back on the faded olive water of the Chesapeake. Suddenly, though, the steeple of the Methodist Church will leap from the Bay, dragging up a cluster of white board houses. And then, almost at once, we will be in the harbor, tying up beside Captain Billy's unpainted two-story ferry house, which leans wearily against a long, low shed used for the captain's crab shipping business.
Next door, but standing primly aloof in a coat of fierce green paint, is Kellam's General Store with the post office inside, and behind them, on a narrow spine of fast land, the houses and white picket fences of the village. There are only a few spindly trees. It is the excess of snowball bushes that lends a semblance of green to every yard.
The dock onto which I'll step is part of a maze of docks. My eye could travel down the planking of any one of them and find at the end a shack erected by a waterman for storage and crab packing. If I arrive in late spring, the crab houses will be surrounded by slat floats that hold and protect peeler crabs in the water of the Bay until they have shed. Then the newly soft crabs will be packed in eelgrass and the boxes taken to Captain Billy's for shipping to the mainland.
More important than the crab houses, however, are the boats, tied along the docks. Though each has a personality as distinctive as the waterman who owns it, they look deceptively alikeâa small cabin toward the bow, washboards wide enough for a man to stand on running from the point of the bow to the stern. In the belly of the hull, fore and aft of the engine are a dozen or so barrels waiting for the next
day's catch, a spare crab pot or two, looking like a box made of chicken wire, and a few empty bait baskets. Near the winch that pulls the line of pots up from the floor of the Chesapeake is a large washtub. Into it each crab pot will be emptied and from it the legal-sized crabsâhard, peeler, and softâwill be culled from their smaller kin as well as from the blowfish, sea nettles, seaweed, shells, and garbage, all such unwelcome harvest as the Bay seems ever generous to offer up. On the stern, each boat bears its name. They are nearly all women's names, usually the name of the waterman's mother or grandmother, depending on how long the boat has been in the family.
The village, in which we Bradshaws lived for more than two hundred years, covers barely a third of our island's length. The rest is salt water marsh. As a child I secretly welcomed the first warm day of spring by yanking off my shoes and standing waist deep in the cordgrass to feel the cool mud squish up between my toes. I chose the spot with care, for cordgrass alone is rough enough to rip the skin, and ours often concealed a bit of curling tin or shards of glass or crockery or jagged shells not yet worn smooth by the tides. In my nostrils, the faint hay
smell of the grass mingled with that of the brackish water of the Bay, while the spring wind chilled the tips of my ears and raised goosebumps along my arms. Then I would shade my eyes from the sun and search far across the water hoping to see my father's boat coming home.
I love Rass Island, although for much of my life, I did not think I did, and it is a pure sorrow to me that, once my mother leaves, there will be no one left there with the name of Bradshaw. But there were only the two of us, my sister, Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay.
D
uring the summer of 1941, every weekday morning at the top of the tide, McCall Purnell and I would board my skiff and go progging for crab. Call and I were right smart crabbers, and we could always come home with a little money as well as plenty of crab for supper. Call was a year older than I and would never have gone crabbing with a girl except that his father was dead, so he had no man to take him on board a regular crab boat. He was, as well, a boy who had matured slowly, and being fat and nearsighted, he was dismissed by most of the island boys.
Call and I made quite a pair. At thirteen I was tall and large boned, with delusions of beauty and romance. He, at fourteen, was pudgy, bespectacled, and totally unsentimental.
“Call,” I would say, watching dawn break crimson over the Chesapeake Bay, “I hope I have a sky like this the day I get married.”
“Who would marry you?” Call would ask, not meanly, just facing facts.
“Oh,” I said one day, “I haven't met him yet.”
“Then you ain't likely to. This is a right small island.”
“It won't be an islander.”
“Mr. Rice has him a girl friend in Baltimore.”
I sighed. All the girls on Rass Island were half in love with Mr. Rice, one of our two high school teachers. He was the only relatively unattached man most of us had ever known. But Mr. Rice had let it get around that his heart was given to a lady from Baltimore.
“Do you suppose,” I asked, as I poled the skiff, the focus of my romantic musings shifting from my own wedding day to Mr. Rice's, “do you suppose her parents oppose the marriage?”
“Why should they care?” Call, standing on the port washboard, had sighted the head of what seemed to be a large sea terrapin and was fixing on it a fierce concentration.
I shifted the pole to starboard. We could get a
pretty little price for a terrapin of that size. The terrapin sensed the change in our direction and dove straight through the eelgrass into the bottom mud, but Call had the net waiting, so that when the old bull hit his hiding place, he was yanked to the surface and deposited into a waiting pail. Call grunted with satisfaction. We might make as much as fifty cents on that one catch, ten times the price of a soft blue crab.
“Maybe she's got some mysterious illness and doesn't want to be a burden to him.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Rice's finance.” I had picked up the word, but not the pronunciation from my reading. It was not in the spoken vocabulary of most islanders.
“His
what
?”
“The woman he's engaged to marry, stupid.”
“How come you think she's sick?”
“Something is delaying the consumption of their union.”
Call jerked his head around to give me one of his looks, but the washboards of a skiff are a precarious perch at best, so he didn't stare long enough to waste time or risk a dunking. He left me to what he presumed to be my looniness and gave his attention to
the eelgrass. We were a good team on the water. I could pole a skiff quickly and quietly, and nearsighted as he was he could spy a crab by just a tip of the claw through grass and muck. He rarely missed one, and he knew I wouldn't jerk or swerve at the wrong moment. I'm sure that's why he stuck with me. I stuck with him not only because we could work well together, but because our teamwork was so automatic that I was free to indulge my romantic fantasies at the same time. That this part of my nature was wasted on Call didn't matter. He didn't have any friends but me, so he wasn't likely to repeat what I said to someone who might snicker. Call himself never laughed.
I thought of it as a defect in his character that I must try to correct, so I told him jokes. “Do you know why radio announcers have tiny hands?”
“Huh?”
“Wee paws for station identification,” I would whoop.
“Yeah?”
“Don't you get it, Call? Wee paws.
Wee Paws.
” I let go the pole to shake my right hand at him. “You know, little handsâpaws.”
“You ain't never seen one.”
“One what?”
“One radio announcer.”
“No.”
“Then how do you know how big their hands are?”
“I don't. It's a joke, Call.”
“I don't see how it can be a joke if you don't even know if they have big hands or little hands. Suppose they really have big hands. Then you ain't even telling the truth. Then what happens to your joke?”
“It's just a joke, Call. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.”
“It matters to me. Why should a person think a lie's funny?”
“Never mind, Call. It doesn't matter.”
But he went on, mumbling like a little old preacher about the importance of truth and how you couldn't trust radio announcers anymore.
You'd think I'd give up, but I didn't.
“Call, did you hear about the lawyer, the dentist, and the p-sychiatrist who died and went to heaven?”
“Was it a airplane crash?”
“No, Call. It's a joke.”
“Oh, a joke.”
“Yeah. You see, this lawyer and this dentist and
this p-sychiatrist all die. And first the lawyer gets there. And Peter saysâ”
“Peter who?”
“Peter in the Bible. The Apostle Peter.”
“He's dead.”
“I know he's deadâ”
“But you just saidâ”
“Just shut up and listen to the joke, Call. This lawyer comes to Peter, and he wants to get into heaven.”
“A minute ago you said he was already in heaven.”
“Well, he wasn't. He was just at the pearly gates, okay? Anyhow, he says he wants to get into heaven, and Peter says he's sorry but he's looked at the book and the lawyer was wicked and evil and cheated people. So he's got to go to hell.”
“Does your mother know you use words like that?”
“Call, even the preacher talks about hell. Anyhow, this lawyer has to give up and go to hell. Then this dentist comes up and he wants to get into heaven, and Peter looks at his book and sees that this guy pulled people's teeth out just to get their money even when their teeth were perfectly
good and he knew it.”
“He did
what
?”
“Call, it doesn't matter.”
“It don't matter that a dentist pulls out perfectly good teeth just to make money? That's awful. He ought to go to jail.”
“Well, he went to hell for it.”
“Pulling out perfectly good teethâ” he mumbled, pinching his own with the fingers of his left hand.
“Then the p-sychiatristâ”
“The what?”
I was an avid reader of
Time
magazine, which, besides the day-old Baltimore
Sun
, was our porthole on the world in those days, so although psychiatry was not yet a popular pastime, I was quite aware of the word, if not the fact that the p was silent.
Time
was probably the source of the joke I was laboring to recount.
“A p-sychiatrist is a doctor that works with people who are crazy.”
“Why would you try to do anything with people who're crazy?”
“To get them well. To make their minds better. Good heavens.” We paused to net a huge male crab,
a true number one Jimmy, swimming doubled over a she-crab. He was taking her to the thick eelgrass, where she would shed for the last time and become a grown-up lady crabâa sook. When she was soft, there would be a proper crab wedding, of course, with the groom staying around to watch out for his bride until her shell was hard once more, and she could protect herself and her load of eggs on her own.
“Sorry, Mr. Jimmy,” I said, “no wedding bells for you.”
Now this old Jimmy didn't much like being deprived of his sweetheart, but Call pinched him from behind and threw each of them in a separate bucket. She was a rank peelerâthat is, it wouldn't be more than a couple of hours before she shed. Our bucket for rank peelers was almost full. It was a good day on the water.
“Well, like I was saying, this p-sychiatrist comes up to Peter, and Peter looks him up in the book of judgment and finds out he's been mean to his wife and kids and tells him to go to hell.”
“What?”
I ignored him. Otherwise I'd never get the story finished. “So the p-sychiatrist starts to leave, and
then Peter says all of a sudden: âHey! Did you say you were a p-sychiatrist?' And the guy says, âYes, I did.'” I was talking so fast now, I was almost out of breath. “And Peter says, âI think we can use you around here after all. You see, we got this problem. God thinks he's Franklin D. Roosevelt.'”
“God
what
?”
“You know when people are crazy they think they're somebody importantâlike Napoleon or something.”
“But, Wheeze, God
is
important.”
“It's a joke, Call.”
“How can it be a joke? There ain't neither funny about it.” He had broken into a waterman's emphatic negative.
“Call, it's funny because Franklin D. Roosevelt has got too big for his britches. Like he's better than God or something.”
“But that's not what you said. You saidâ”
“I know what I said. But you gotta understand politics.”
“Well, what kinda joke is that? Fiddle.” Call's cuss words were taught to him by his sainted grandmother and tended to be as quaint as the clothes she made for him.
When the sun was high and our stomachs empty, Call stepped off the washboards into the boat. I shipped the pole and moved up with him to the forward thwart, where we put the oars into the locks and rowed the boat out of the eelgrass into deeper water and around to the harbor.
Captain Billy's son Otis ran the crab shipping part of his father's business, while his father and two brothers ran the ferry. We sold our soft crabs, peelers, and the terrapin to Otis, then split the money and the hard crabs. Call ran home to dinner, and I rowed back around the island as far as the South Gut, where I traded oars for the pole and poled the rest of the way home. The South Gut was a little ditch of water, one of many that crisscrossed Rass, and a natural garbage dump. The summer before, Call and I had cleaned it out (it had been clogged with rusting cans and crab pots, even old mattress springs) so I could pole the skiff through it all the way to my own backyard. Rass might be short on trees, but there was a loblolly pine sapling and a fig tree that my mother had planted on our side of the gut, as well as an orphan cedar on the other. I hitched my skiff to the pine and started at a trot for the back porch, a bucket of hard crabs in one hand
and a fistful of money in the other.
My grandmother caught me before I got to the door. “Louise Bradshaw! Don't you go coming in the house dirty like that. Oh, my blessed, what a mess! Susan,” she called back in to my mother, “she's full ruined every scrap of clothes she owns.”
Rather than argue, I put my crab bucket and money on the edge of the porch and stepped out of my overalls. Underneath I had on my oldest cotton dress.
“Hang them overalls on the back line, now.”
I obeyed, pinning the straps securely to the clothesline. Immediately, the breeze took them straight out, as though Peter Pan had donned them to fly across our yard toward never-never land across the Bay.
I was humming with goodwill, “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace⦔ My grandmother was not going to get me today. I'd had a right smart haul.
Caroline was shelling peas at the kitchen table. I smiled at my sister benevolently.
“Mercy, Wheeze, you stink like a crab shanty.”
I gritted my teeth, but the smile was still framing them. “Two dollars,” I said to my mother at the
stove, “two dollars and forty-five cents.”
She beamed at me and reached over the propane stove for the pickle crock, where we kept the money. “My,” she said, “that was a good morning. By the time you wash up, we'll be ready to eat.”
I liked the way she did that. She never suggested that I was dirty or that I stank. Justâ“By the time you wash upâ” She was a real lady, my mother.
While we were eating, she asked me to go to Kellam's afterward to get some cream and butter. I knew what that meant. It meant that I had made enough money that she could splurge and make she-crab soup for supper. She wasn't an islander, but she could make the best she-crab soup on Rass. My grandmother always complained that no good Methodist would ever put spirits into food. But my mother was undaunted. Our soup always had a spoonful or two of her carefully hoarded sherry ladled into it. My grandmother complained, but she never left any in the bowl.
I was sitting there, basking in the day, thinking how pleased my father would be to come home from crabbing and smell his favorite soup, bathing my sister and grandmother in kindly feelings that neither deserved, when Caroline said, “I haven't got
anything to do but practice this summer, so I've decided to write a book about my life. Once you're known,” she explained carefully as though some of us were dim-witted, “once you're famous, information like that is very valuable. If I don't get it down now, I may forget.” She said all this in that voice of hers that made me feel slightly nauseated, the one she used when she came home from spending all Saturday going to the mainland for her music lessons, where she'd been told for the billionth time how gifted she was.
I excused myself from the table. The last thing I needed to hear that day was the story of my sister's life, in which I, her twin, was allowed a very minor role.
