Jacob Have I Loved (4 page)

“Where's he think he's going?” Caroline asked.

The only thing farther along the path besides the marsh itself was one long-abandoned house.

“I wonder—” Momma began, but we were turning in at our own gate, and she didn't finish the sentence.

T
he stranger from the ferry offered no explanation for his presence on the island. Gradually, the people of Rass built one from ancient memory lavishly cemented with rumor. The man had gone to the Wallace place, which had been deserted for twenty years since the death of old Captain Wallace six months after his wife. He had found it without asking anyone the way and had moved in and begun to put it into repair as though he belonged there.

“He's Hiram Wallace,” Grandma had announced—everyone over fifty had come to the same conclusion. “The old ones thought he was dead. But here he is. Too late to bring them neither comfort.”

Bit by bit, straining my short patience to its utmost limit, the story of Hiram Wallace emerged.
Call's grandmother told him that when she was a child, there had been a young waterman by that name, the only child of Captain Charles Wesley Wallace. It was back in the days when nearly every boat on the Bay was under sail, before hard blue crabs brought in much money. Captain Wallace and his son tonged for oysters in the winter, and in the summer they netted fish, chiefly menhaden and rockfish. That they had made a tidy profit was evidenced by the size of their house, which stood apart from the rest of the village. As my grandmother remembered it, their land had been large enough in those days for real grass to grow in a pasture, enough to support one of the few cows in the island's history.

What was left of the land was now all marsh, but the house, though neglected, had survived. We children had always regarded it as haunted. There were tales that Captain Wallace's ghost appeared to chase off intruders. It took me years to figure out that the purpose of the ghost story was to keep young courting couples from wandering down the path to the old Wallace place and taking advantage of the privacy.

One day I had talked Call into exploring the
house with me, but just as we stepped onto the porch, a huge orange-colored tomcat came shrieking out a broken window at us. It was the only time in our lives that Call outran me. We sat gasping for breath on my front stoop. One part of my mind was saying that it had only been one of Auntie Braxton's cats. She was said to keep sixteen, and anyone who had ever been as close as her front door would have sworn by the smell that there were at least that many and more. The other part of my mind was reluctant to let it go as simply as that.

“Have you ever heard,” I asked, “have you ever heard that ghosts will take an animal form when they are angry?” Now that my breath was back I let my voice glide out in a dreamy way.

Call jerked around to look me in the face. “No!” he said.

“I was reading this book,” I began to improvise (of course, I'd never seen any such book). “In this book, this scientist investigated places where ghosts were supposed to be. He started out saying that there was no such thing as ghosts, but being a scientist he had to admit finally that he couldn't explain certain things any other way.”

“What things?”

“Oh—” I thought fast while drawing out the syllable. “Oh—certain furry beasts that took on the personality of a dead person.”

Call was clearly shaken. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, suppose old Captain Wallace when he was alive didn't want any visitors.”

“He didn't.” Call said darkly. “My grandma told me. After Hiram left, they lived all by themselves. Never spoke to nobody hardly.”

“See?”

“See what?”

“We were fixing to visit him without an invitation,” I whispered. “He was yelling at us and chasing us away.”

Call's eyes were the size of clam shells. “You're making that up,” he said. But I could tell that he believed every word of it.

“Only one way to be sure,” I said.

“How you mean?”

I leaned close and whispered again. “Go back and see what happens.”

He jumped to his feet. “Suppertime!” He started out the yard.

I had done my work too well. I was never able to persuade Call to return to that old empty house
with me, and somehow, I was never quite able to go there alone.

Now that the strange old man was there, the house was no longer empty, and the whole island was trying to unravel the mystery. All the old people agreed that Hiram Wallace was, in his youth, the hope of every island maiden's heart, but that he had left Rass with his father's money and blessing to go to college. It was an unusual enough occurrence that even someone from our island who had gone to college fifty years ago was remembered for it. People also recalled, though this point was discussed at considerable length, that he had returned home without a degree, and that he had, in some undefinable way, changed. He had never been too sociable before he left, but he was positively silent when he returned. This only made the hearts of the young girls beat the harder, and no one had suspected that anything was wrong with him until the day of the storm.

The Bay is famous for its sudden summer storms. Before they can read their school primers, watermen learn how to read the sky and to head for the safety of a cove at the first glimmer of trouble. But the Bay is wide, and sometimes safety is too far away. In the
old days, the watermen would lower their sails and use them as tents to protect themselves from the rain.

This is the story that the old people told: Captain Wallace and his son, Hiram, had let down their sails and were waiting out the storm. The lightning was so bright and near that it seemed to flash through the heavy canvas of the sail, the roaring and cracking enough to wake the dead sleeping in the depths of the water. Now, a man who is not afraid at a time like this is a man without enough sense to follow the water. But to fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another. This, Call's grandmother said, was what Hiram Wallace had done: terrified that the lightning would strike the tall mast of his father's skipjack, he had rushed out from under his sail cover, taken an ax, and chopped the mast to the level of the deck. After the storm passed, they were sighted drifting mastless on the Bay and were towed home by an obliging neighbor. When it became apparent that the mast had been chopped down, rather than felled by lightning, Hiram Wallace became the butt of all the watermen's jokes. Not long after, he left the island for good….

Unless, of course, the strong old man rebuilding the Wallace house was the handsome young coward who had left nearly fifty years before. He never said he was, but then again, he never said he wasn't. Some of the islanders thought a delegation should be sent to ask the old man straight out who he was, for if he was not Hiram Wallace, what right did he have taking over the Wallace property? The delegation was never sent. April was nearly over. The one slow month of the watermen's year was coming to an end. There was a flurry of overhauling and painting and mending to be done. Crabs were moving and the men had to be ready to go after them.

“I bet he isn't Hiram Wallace,” I said to Call one day in early May.

“Why not?”

“Why would a man come to Rass in the middle of a war?”

“Because he's old and has nowhere else to go.”

“Oh, Call. Think. Why would a person come to the Bay right now of all times?”

“Because he's old—”

“The Bay is full of warships from Norfolk.”

“So? What does that have to do with Hiram Wallace?”

“Nothing. That's just it, dummy. Who would want to know about warships?”

“The navy.”

“Call. Don't you get it?”

“There's nothing to get.”

“Warships, Call. What better place to spy on warships than from a lonely house right by the water?”

“You read too much.”

“I suppose if someone was to catch a spy they'd take him to the White House and pin medals on him.”

“I never heard of kids catching spies.”

“That's just it. If two kids were to catch a spy—”

“Wheeze. It's Hiram Wallace. My grandma knows.”

“She
thinks
he's Hiram Wallace. That's what he wants everyone to think. So they won't suspect him.”

“Suspect him of what?”

I sighed. It was obvious that he had a long way to go before he was much of a counterspy, while I was putting myself to sleep at night performing incredible feats of daring on behalf of my embattled country. The amount of medals Franklin D. Roosevelt had either hung around my neck or pinned to my front
would have supplied the army with enough metal for a tank. There was a final touch with which I closed the award ceremony.

“Here, Mr. President,” I would say, handing back the medal, “use this for our boys at the front.”

“But, Sara Louise Bradshaw—” Franklin D. Roosevelt for all his faults never failed to call me by my full name. “But, Sara Louise Bradshaw, this medal is yours. You have earned it with your great cunning and bravery. Keep it and hand it down to your children's children.”

I would smile, a slightly ironic little smile. “Do you think, Mr. President, with the life I lead, that I will live long enough to have children?” That question never failed to reduce Franklin D. Roosevelt to silence touched with awe.

In my dreams I always went in alone, but in real life it seemed selfish. Besides, I was used to doing things with Call.

“Okay, Call. First we got to work out a plan.”

“A plan for what?”

“To catch this kraut in the very act of spying.”

“You're not going to catch him spying.”

“Why not?”

“Because he's not a spy.”

What can you do with a man who has no faith? “All right. Who is he then? Just answer me that.”

“Hiram Wallace.”

“Good heavens.”

“You're cussing again. My grandma—”

“I am not cussing. Cussing is like ‘God' and ‘hell' and ‘damn.'”

“See!”

“Call. How about pretending? Just for fun, pretend the guy is a spy, and we've got to get the proof.”

He looked uncertain. “Like one of your jokes?”

“Yes. No.” Sometimes Call could be perfectly sensible and at other times you could have gotten more sense out of a six-year-old. “It's like a game, Call.” I didn't wait for him to answer. “Come on.” I started running for the path through the salt meadow marsh with Call puffing behind me.

If Call's family was as poor as my grandmother said they were, I could never figure out how Call got so fat. As a matter of fact, both his mother and grandmother were fat. I thought that if you were poor you were skinny. But the evidence seemed to contradict this. And Call had other problems with running besides his weight. Like all of us, his shoes came from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. To order
shoes from a catalog, you stood on a piece of brown wrapping paper, and your mother drew a pencil line around both your feet. These outlines were sent to the mail-order house, and they sent you shoes to fit the brown wrapping-paper feet. But the brown paper outlines didn't tell the mail-order house how fat your feet were on the top. For that reason, poor Call never had a pair of shoes that would lace properly. The tops of his feet were so fat that once he got his shoes laced up, there was nothing left to make a proper bow. So when he ran, his shoes often came unlaced and flapped up and down on his heels.

It was low tide, so I left the path and began making my way through the marsh. My plan was to give the old Wallace house a wide berth and come up on it from the south side. The old man would never expect people from that direction.

“Wait!” Call cried out. “I lost my shoe.”

I went back to where Call was standing on one leg like an overweight egret. “My shoe got stuck,” he said.

I pulled his shoe out of the mud for him and tried to clean it off on the cordgrass.

“My grandma will beat me,” he said. It was hard for me to imagine Call's tubby little grandmother taking a switch to a large fifteen-year-old boy, but I
held my peace. I had a greater problem than that. What would Franklin D. Roosevelt say about a spy who lost his shoe in the salt marsh and worried aloud that his grandma would beat him? I sighed and handed Call the shoe. He put it on and limped back to the path.

“Sit down,” I commanded.

“On the ground?”

“Yes, on the ground.” What did he expect, an easy chair? Then I cleaned his shoes and mine as best I could with my handkerchief. My mother had trouble persuading me to carry one because I was a lady, but I now realized that a handkerchief was an invaluable tool for a counterspy—to erase fingerprints, and so forth. “Now,” I said, “I'm going to fix your shoestrings.” I unlaced his strings and started again, skipping the second and fourth holes. This way I could make the lace long enough to provide a decent bow.

“There,” I said, tying them for him as though he were a little child.

“You left out four holes.”

“Call. I did it on purpose. So they wouldn't come loose all the time.”

“They look dumb.”

“Not as dumb as you'd look in your sockfeet.”

He pretended to ignore this and stared at his shoelaces, as though trying to decide whether to retie them or to leave them be.

“Why don't you think of it as a secret signal?”

“A
what
?”

“Counterspies have to have ways of identifying themselves to other counterspies. Like secret code words. Or wearing a special kind of flower. Or—tying their shoes a certain way.”

“You can't make me believe that spies tie their shoestrings funny.”

“Just ask Franklin D. Roosevelt when we meet him.”

“That's one of your jokes.”

“Oh, come on. You can tie them again later, after the mission.”

He had his mouth set to argue, but I didn't wait for a retort. Good heavens. The war would be over and he'd still be sitting there fussing about his shoestrings. “Follow me and keep low.”

The cordgrass was about two feet high. There was no way, short of crawling through the mud on our bellies, that we could approach the Wallace house unseen. But there is a way of feeling invisible that
makes one almost believe it's true. At any rate, I felt invisible, creeping bent over toward that great gray clapboard house. My heart was beating as fast and noisily as the motor of the
Portia Sue
.