Jacob Have I Loved (11 page)

“Welcome home, Miss Trudy,” I muttered. I couldn't for the life of me call her by his name.

I
suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We didn't have many. I know that now. I have been to libraries on the mainland, and I know that between my home and the school there was very little. But I had all of Shakespeare and Walter Scott and Dickens and Fenimore Cooper. Every night I pulled the black air raid curtains to and read on and on, huddled close to our bedroom lamp. Can you imagine the effect of
The Last of the Mohicans
on a girl like me? It was not the selfless Cora, but Uncas and Uncas alone whom I adored. Uncas, standing ready to die before the Delaware, when an enemy warrior tears off his hunting shirt revealing the bright blue tortoise tattooed on Uncas's breast.

Oh, to have a bright blue tortoise—something that proclaimed my uniqueness to the world. But I was not the last of the Mohicans or the only of anything. I was Caroline Bradshaw's twin sister.

I cannot explain why, seeing how the storm had affected our family's finances, I never told anyone that I had almost fifty dollars hidden away. Among the first things that had to be given up were Caroline's mainland voice and piano lessons. Even on generous scholarships, the transportation was too much for our slender resources. I suppose it is to Caroline's credit that she seldom sulked about this deprivation. She continued to practice regularly with the hope that spring would mark the end of a successful oyster season and give us the margin we needed to continue her trips to Salisbury. I might say to my own credit, as I needed every bit of credit available in those days, that I did not rejoice over Caroline's misfortune. I never hated the music. In fact, I took pride in it. But though it occurred to me to offer the money I had saved to help her continue her lessons, I was never quite able to admit that I had put it away. Besides, it was not that much money—and it was mine. I had earned it.

I went once to see the Captain after he got married.
He invited the three of us—Caroline, Call, and me—to dinner. I suppose he meant it for a celebration. At any rate, he pulled out a small bottle of wine and offered us some. Call and I were shocked and refused. Caroline took some with a great deal of giggling about what would happen if anyone found out he had smuggled spirits onto our very dry little island. I was annoyed. The absence of alcohol on Rass (we never counted Momma's sherry bottle as real alcohol) was a matter of religious, not civil, law. We didn't even have a policeman, and there certainly was nothing resembling jail. If people had known about the Captain's wine, they would have simply condemned him as a heathen and prayed over him on Wednesday night. They'd been doing that ever since he arrived.

“I used to buy this kind of wine in Paris,” the Captain explained. “It's been hard to get since the war.” I assumed, of course, that he meant the war of the moment. Thinking back, I guess he must have meant World War I. I had a hard time keeping in mind how old he was.

With Auntie Braxton, there was no question. She sat at the head of the table in her wooden and wicker wheelchair, smiling a lopsided, almost simple
smile. Her hair was white and so thin you could see the pink of her skull shining through. I suppose the strange angle of her smile was the result of the stroke, which is what had caused her to fall and break her hip. She tried to hold her glass in the tiny claw of her hand, but the Captain was there to hold it steady at her mouth. She took a sip, a bit of which dribbled down her chin. She seemed not to mind, keeping her clear, childlike eyes devoted to his face.

He patted her chin with a napkin. “My dear,” he was saying. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to drive a car across the city of Paris?”

For those of us who had lived all our lives on Rass, an automobile was almost more exotic than Paris. It irritated me that the Captain had never thought to tell, or chosen to tell Call and me about this adventure. For it was an adventure, the way the Captain told it.

Settling back in his own chair, he explained that he had driven a car only once before in his life, and that on a country road in America, when his companion, a French seaman, suggested that they buy a car someone was hawking on the dock at Le Havre and take it into Paris. The Frenchman felt that it would be a wonderful way to pick up some girls,
and the Captain, his pockets full of francs and with a week's shore leave in which to spend them, saw the car as a means to independence and excitement. He did not know until after the purchase was made that his companion had never driven a car before.

“‘But no matter,'” the Captain imitated the Frenchman. “‘Is easy.'” With difficulty, the Captain persuaded his friend to let him drive and then began their hair-raising trip from Le Havre to Paris, culminating in a cross-city ride at the busiest time of the afternoon.

“And then I came to a huge intersection—carts and automobiles and trucks coming at me from what seemed to be eight directions. If I stayed still I would be plowed under but to go forward was suicide.”

“What did you do?” Call asked.

“Well—I shifted into first gear, grabbed the wheel as tight as I could with one hand, squeezed the horn with the other, jammed down on the accelerator with both feet, shut my eyes, and zoomed across.”

“What?” cried Call. “Didn't you kill yourself?”

A peculiar noise, more like a chicken cackle than anything else, came from the end of the table. We all turned. Auntie Braxton was laughing. The others all
began to laugh then, even Call, who knew the joke was at his expense. Everyone began to laugh but me.

“Don't you get it, Wheeze?” Call asked. “If he'd of killed himself—”

“Of course I get it, stupid. I just don't happen to think it's funny.”

Caroline turned to Auntie Braxton and said, “Don't mind her.” She flashed a beautiful smile at Call. “Wheeze doesn't think anything's funny.”

“I do, too. You liar! All you do is lie, lie, lie.”

She gave me her most pained expression. “Wheeze,” she said.

“Don't call me Wheeze! I'm a person, not a disease symptom.” It would have sounded more impressive if my voice hadn't cracked in the middle of the word
disease
.

Caroline laughed. She acted as though she thought I had meant to be funny. When she laughed, Call laughed. They looked at each other and hooted with pleasure as though something enormously witty had been said. I propped my forehead on my elbowed hand and steeled myself for the cackle from Auntie Braxton and the laugh, which reminded me of an exuberant tuba, that would come from the Captain. They didn't come. Instead,
I felt a scratchy arm about my shoulder and a face close to my ear.

“Sara Louise,” he was saying gently. “What's wrong, my dear?”

God have mercy. Didn't he know that I could stand anything except his kindness? I pushed back my chair, nearly knocking him down as I did so, and fled from that terrible house.

I never saw Auntie Braxton again, until she was laid out for her funeral. Caroline reported to me regularly how happy both the old woman and the Captain were. She and Call visited them almost every day. The Captain always asked Caroline to sing for them because “Trudy loves music so.” He seemed to know a lot about this old woman that most people who had lived all their lives on the island didn't.

“She can talk, you know,” Caroline said to me. “Sometimes you can't understand, but he always seems to. And whenever I sing she listens, really listens. Not with half her mind somewhere else. The Captain's right. She loves it. I never saw anyone who loved music so much, not even Momma.” When she would say things like this, I'd just bury myself more deeply in my book and pretend I hadn't heard.

On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Auntie
Braxton suffered a massive stroke and was rushed to the hospital by ferry in the middle of the night. She was dead by Christmas.

There was a funeral service for her in the church. It seemed ironic. Neither she nor the Captain had been to church for as long as anyone could remember, but the preacher in those days was young and earnest and gave her what was warmly regarded as a “right purty service.” The Captain wanted our family to sit with him in the front pew, so we did, even Grandma who, I'm glad to say, behaved herself. The Captain sat between Caroline and me. While the congregation recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art with me…” Caroline reached over and took his hand as though he were a small child in need of guidance and protection. He reached up with his free hand and wiped his eyes. And, sitting closer to him than I had in months, I realized with a sudden coldness how very old he was and felt the tears start in my own eyes.

Afterward my mother asked the Captain to come home and have supper with us, but when he refused, no one pressed him to change his mind. Caroline and
Call and I walked him to the door of what was now his house. No one said a word along the way, and when he nodded to us at the door, we just nodded back and headed home. As it turned out, it was a good thing he had not come home with us. Grandma went on one of her worst rampages to date.

“He killed her, you know.”

We all gaped in astonishment. Even from Grandma this was strong stuff.

“He wanted her house. I knew soon as he moved in there this was bound to happen.”

“Mother,” my father said quietly. “Don't, Mother.”

“I reckon you want to know how he did it.”

“Mother—”

“Poisoned her. That's how.” She gazed about the table in triumph. “Rat poison.” She took a large bite of food and chewed it noisily. The rest of us had stopped eating entirely.

“Louise knows,” she said in a sneaky little voice. She smiled at me. “But you wouldn't tell, would you? And I know why.” She broke into a child's singsong jeer. “Nah nah nah nah
nah nah.
”

“Shut up!” It was Caroline who yelled what I could not.

“Caroline!” both our parents said.

Caroline's face was red with rage, but she pinched her lips together.

Grandma continued unperturbed. “Ever see how she looks at him?”

“Mother.”

“She thinks I'm only a foolish old woman. But I know. 'Deed I do.” She stared at me full in the eyes. I was too afraid to look away. “Maybe you helped. Did you, Louise? Did you help him?” Her eyes were glittering.

“Girls,” my father was almost whispering. “Go to your room.”

This time both of us obeyed immediately. Even behind the safety of our door we could not speak. There were no more jokes or excuses to be made for the silly, grumpy old woman we'd known from birth. The shock was so enormous that I found my own puny fear of exposure melting into a much larger darker terror that seemed to have no boundaries.

“Who knows?” the voice from
The Shadow
asks. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Now we knew.

Much later, when we were getting ready for bed,
Caroline said, “I've got to get away from here before she runs me nuts.”

You? I thought but did not say. You? What harm can she possibly do? You do not need to be delivered from evil. Can't you see? It's me. Me—I who am so close to being swallowed up in all that eternal darkness. But I didn't say it. I wasn't angry at her—just deadly tired.

In the light of the next day, I tried to tell myself that I had only imagined the great evil of the scene the night before. Hadn't I once tried to convince Call that the Captain was a Nazi—a U-boat delivered spy? Why, then, was I so upset over Grandma's accusation? I saw again in my mind those glittering eyes and knew it was not the same. Grandma, however, seemed to have forgotten everything. She was quite her grumpy, silly self again, and we were relieved to pretend that we, too, had forgotten.

In February, Call dropped out of school. His mother and grandmother were destitute, and my father offered to take him aboard the
Portia Sue
as an oyster culler. My father would tong, bringing up oysters with his long fir-wood tongs, which looked like scissors with a metal rake at the end of each shaft. He would open the rakes and drop his catch
onto the wooden culling board. There Call, his hands in heavy rubber gloves, would cull, using a culling hammer. With the hammer head he knocked off the excess shell, and with the blade at the other end he struck off the small oysters. The debris was shoved into the Bay and the good oysters forward until they could be sold to a buy boat, which would take them to market. From Monday well before dawn to Saturday night, they would be gone, sleeping all week on cramped bunks in the
Portia Sue
's tiny cabin, for the best oyster beds were up the Eastern Shore rivers, too far away for daily commuting when gas was so strictly rationed.

Of course I was jealous of Call, but I was surprised to realize how very much I missed him. All my life my father had followed the water, so it had never seemed strange to have him gone, but Call had always been around, either with me or close by. Now we only saw him at church.

Caroline made a fuss over him every Sunday. “My, Call, we sure do miss you.” How could she know? Besides, it didn't seem quite ladylike to say something like that, straight out.

Each week, he seemed to grow taller and thinner, and his hands were turning more and more into the
rough brown bark of a waterman's. Even his manner seemed to change. The solemnity that had always lent him, as a small child, a rather comic air, now seemed a sort of youthful dignity. You could sense his pride that he had come at last into a man's estate, the sole support of the women upon whom he had until now depended. I knew we had been growing apart since summer, but I had been able to blame that on Caroline. Now it was more painful, for the very things that made him stronger and more attractive were taking him deep into the world of men—a place I could never hope to enter.