Keeper

by Kathi Appelt

  “They talked to me,” Keeper insisted.

  “Talking crabs?!” shouted Signe. “Keeper, crabs can’t talk.”

  Keeper jutted her chin out farther. “But I’m part mermaid.” As if that explained everything.

  “Aaaargghh!” yelled Signe. She couldn’t even seem to form a distinct word. Mermaids! Fury like she hadn’t felt for seven years zipped through her chest, her arms, the top of her head. She felt like every nerve, every muscle, every tendon might snap at the smallest movement.

  “Keeper!” she finally yelled, out of pure frustration, but any other words that she might have said stuck in her throat and refused to come out. The only thing left to do was slam the door. WHAM!

  If there were any haints about, they surely skedaddled.

  • • •

  Signe had tried so hard to do everything right when it came to raising Keeper, to make sure that she was safe, to teach her the things she needed to know, to show her how to care for the world unto itself and its denizens. But today she felt like the worst mother in the universe. All this time, she’d let her girl believe in something that wasn’t true.

  Then Signe knew: It was time to tell Keeper that there was no such thing as magic or mermaids or talking crabs. A girl who is ten years old should know the truth.

  “Keeper,” Signe whispered in her sleep. She had no idea that her girl was drifting away.

  50

  For Signe, this was not the way this night was supposed to turn out. That morning she had risen early, before the sun. The moon, left over from the night before, not quite full, but almost, still hung in the western sky just above the Cut. She glanced at it and toasted it with her cup of coffee. “Blue moon tonight,” she said happily.

  Right after Meggie Marie had left—in fact, only days later—Signe had gone to the Tater Public Library and checked out every book she could find on raising children. One of them, she couldn’t remember which one, had talked about the importance of family traditions.

  “Family traditions,” she remembered saying. Then she had closed the book and wondered what kind of family traditions she could create without a traditional family. But then she found the old cookbook at the Tater Friends of the Library Book Sale, the one that had a recipe for “Blue Moon Gumbo.”

  For best results, make on the day of the blue moon. Invite your family. That’s what the recipe said.

  So that’s what Signe had done. Once or twice a year, whenever the moon was blue, she made a huge pot of crab gumbo and invited her “family,” all of the residents of Oyster Ridge Road—only two besides herself and Keeper—and made blue moon gumbo. And bingo! She had a tradition.

  And just that morning, coffee cup in hand, recipe open in front of her, she could hardly wait for the evening to come. She had looked back out through the window at Dogie’s house. The light was on in his kitchen too. Dogie, she was sure, was already at the beach, seining for crabs. She had told him the night before, “If you’ll catch the crabs, I’ll cook the gumbo.” And he had smiled at her. Dogie loved her gumbo. Soon he would walk through the door with a tub full of snapping crabs, fresh from the Gulf of Mexico.

  The pages in the old cookbook were ragged and torn, which meant that the recipes had been used and used some more, a sure sign of wonderful food. The cookbook had not disappointed, and Signe’s gumbo recipe always tasted amazingly wonderful, spicy and rich. Yummm!

  Signe loved these gumbo nights. She loved sitting around the table in her kitchen with the people she cared about most of all right there—Dogie, Keeper, and Mr. Beauchamp. All of them.

  She loved that she had made a tradition all their own. Blue moon gumbo.

  She closed her eyes and imagined the way the night would go. All of them, Dogie, Signe, Mr. Beauchamp, and Keeper, along with the assortment of beasts— Dogie’s little dog, Too; BD and Captain; Sinbad— would eat gumbo until their stomachs were full. Of course, there would be watermelon for Captain.

  Then Dogie would take out his ukulele and sing as many songs as he could think of with the word “moon” in them. That was a lot of songs. Some of them she would know and would sing along with. Keeper would dance and twirl, her girl, her tall and lanky twirling girl. Mr. Beauchamp would fall asleep in his chair, and they would have to help him back to his house and wait for him to settle into his porch chair. Sinbad would weave in and out between their legs and finally jump into the old sailor’s lap before drifting off too.

  And after a while Keeper’s eyes would get so heavy, she wouldn’t be able to stay awake any longer, and Signe would tuck her into bed, with BD nestled on the rug next to her.

  And then, at last, she and Dogie would sit outside on the porch that wrapped itself all around the haint blue house. Signe would smoke her cigarette, the one she allowed herself each night, even though she knew it was bad for her, and Dogie would play his ukulele, only he wouldn’t sing any more songs, just run his fingers over the nylon strings.

  And meanwhile, across the road, Mr. Beauchamp, sitting on his own porch, would wait and wait and wait until the moon was right at the top of the sky, when his night-blooming cyrus, the queens of the night, would burst into bloom. He had waited all summer, all year, for the gigantic flowers to open. And tonight, the night of the blue moon, this would be the night. Even though he would be snoozing, Signe knew that he would wake up in time for the blossoms to open. He always did.

  Then the heavy aroma from the huge flowers would waft across Oyster Ridge Road and encircle them all.

  A tradition. That’s what her blue moon gumbo was. But there was one more item that the recipe called for: a wish. Right there, at the bottom of the list of ingredients, the recipe said, Stir in one wish.

  Always before, Signe had stirred in wishes for things like good health for Keeper, big tips from her customers at the Prince Oyster Bar and Bar, and decent tires for the green Dodge station wagon. But not tonight. Tonight she would wish for Dogie to sing his two-word song for her. While he and Keeper thought they were keeping it a secret, she had heard him practicing it when she had walked down to the Bus to pick up Keeper after work one day.

  She had been waiting for him to sing this song for her for ten years. And finally, tonight while Keeper slept and Mr. Beauchamp watched his beautiful cyrus blooms greet the moon, maybe, if she wished hard enough, he would sing it just for her, and she, in turn, would tell him how much she loved him, how much she had always loved him. That had been the plan.

  But now, that cold round moon rising in the eastern sky, nothing had gone according to plan, nothing. No gumbo. No twirling girl. No blossoms of the night. And no ukulele, either.

  Now here was Signe, wrung out from the day left behind, unaware that her girl was all alone, with only her dog and a bent-winged seagull for company. Alone and drifting away.

  Wake up, Signe. Wake up.

  51

  It seems like a girl should know about her very own mother, doesn’t it? Once, a long time ago, Keeper had asked Signe, “Did my mama love me?” and without even a small hesitation, Signe had answered, “Yes, Keeper. Oh, yes.”

  But then Keeper asked another question: “Did we love her?”

  This time Signe paused. Keeper felt the time stretch out like the next-to-last day of school, the longest day of the year. The pause seemed like that. But then Signe looked right at Keeper and said, “We loved her, Sweet Pea. We did.”

  The thing is, Keeper did not remember that. She did not remember loving Meggie Marie. She only remembered waiting for her. Are loving and waiting the same thing? Keeper had wondered this many times. It was a question for the universe.

  But the big question right now was could she manage to get her little vessel to come aground atop De Vaca’s Rock?

  So far, in the perfect plan, she had checked off Steps A, B, C, D, E, and F. Amended Step G was in progress. She was now on the cusp of Step H: Go through the channel. And then she would embark upon Step I: Row to the sandbar.

  Keeper knew what she needed to do: point
The Scamper’s prow directly into the waves and steer it straight toward the rock. Surfers always avoided it because it scraped their boards. But she was going to make a beeline for it. Straight ahead, mateys! All hands on deck!

  But just then Keeper had a disturbing thought: Would the sandbar leave a ding in The Scamper?

  Dings in surfboards were a problem. Then again, surfboards were made out of fiberglass. The Scamper was made of much sturdier wood. Keeper gingerly patted both sides of the boat with her sore hands. Yep, the wood was as solid as could be, not at all like those flimsy-whimsy surfboards with their thin fiberglass skins. She decided: No need to worry about dings. Nope.

  Keeper rubbed the charm around her neck. And then she said to BD and Captain, “I can make a wish on the charm, can’t I?” When a girl is ten, she is full to the brim with wishes. Wishes on stars, wishes on tooth fairies, wishes on fishes. A lucky charm should be chock-full of wishes, shouldn’t it?

  Right there Keeper made a majorly big wish: “Make everything all right,” she said. And then, so she wouldn’t make Yemaya feel left out, she called out again to the great mother of the sea, “Help me find my mother.”

  It was a boatload of wishing.

  And to seal the deal, she opened the shoe box and lifted out another figurine. The siren. She could tell by its sharp shoulder blades. “Those are what’s left of her wings,” Mr. Beauchamp had explained.

  Quickly, before she could change her mind, she set the siren into the water and turned her head. She couldn’t watch, but after all those wishes, she felt good.

  “We can do this,” she said to BD and Captain. “Easy peasy!”

  52

  There are many stories of sirens. Some have a split tail like the Sheila-na-gig of Ireland. Some look like movie stars and have no tail at all. But Keeper’s siren was from an older tribe. As the story goes, there is an enchanted island somewhere in the Greek Isles that was home to the beautiful Cyrenes, winged women whose songs were so lovely that sailors could not resist them and drove their boats onto the rocky cliffs that protected the shores. These were the creatures Odysseus encountered on his long quest.

  But through the years, their name was changed to “sirens” and their bodies were changed from birds to fish.

  Maybe it was a siren, and not a regular ol’ mermaid, who had lured Cabeza de Vaca onto the sandbar off of Oyster Ridge Road five hundred years ago. A siren and her song.

  53

  Speaking of songs, here was a question that Keeper had asked over and over: How was it that whenever Dogie played his ukulele and sang along with it, he never ever stuttered? Instead, the words were always crystal clear. There were so many questions for the universe.

  54

  Signe, fast asleep, not knowing that her girl was out in The Scamper, knew that what she had said was true, that she had loved Meggie Marie. Loved her like a sister.

  In the small den of the haint blue house, she kept a framed photo of Meggie Marie on the sofa table, an old black-and-white shot cut out of the Galveston Daily News, with the caption, “Mermaid Queen Leads Parade.” The photograph was fuzzy and yellowed, but it showed Meggie Marie atop a float shaped like a giant nautilus shell, her mermaid crown atop her head, her smile as wide as the ocean itself, a smile so much like Keeper’s.

  Yes. Signe had loved Meggie Marie. But she did not miss her.

  55

  All the oceans of the world are connected. Throughout the centuries, their names have changed, but the water has just kept flowing from one ocean to another. If, say, a dolphin had a mind to, it could swim from the water off the coast of Texas, just south of Galveston, north of Corpus Christi, and then catch an eastward current around the tip of the Florida Keys, careful not to bump into Cuba or the Yucatan, then slip north across the Atlantic—no need to stop in the Virgin Isles or Bermuda, no need to stop at all until it got to the Mediterranean Sea, just off the coast of France at the mouth of the Riviera. It could swim all that way without ever having to backtrack or take a train or hitchhike.

  As a seagull flies, it’s about five thousand miles, give or take a few. It’s probably a little farther for a dolphin.

  Once there, that same dolphin would find an ancient swimmer, so old there are wrinkles on top of his wrinkles.

  Under the moon’s bright light, the dolphin darted by, and the swimmer felt his aged heart rush.

  Had he just felt what he thought he felt? He paused and let the water hold him up. Yes, there it was again! A signal. At first it seemed oh-so-faint, but as he cocked his head to the wind, he felt it grow stronger. Yes. He was sure of it. Someone had made a wish on the porte-bonheur. A sliver of joy buzzed through his body. How many years had he been searching for this signal? Eighty? Ninety? A hundred? He didn’t think it was a hundred, but he had quit counting long ago.

  He ducked into the warm sea, then popped back up and shook his head. Yes, the signal was growing. He stood up in the water and tried to figure out which direction it was coming from. He stretched his arms above his head and reached into the clear blue sky, let the wind blow through his fingertips.

  Texas.

  He frowned. Texas? How many times had he swum along the coast of Texas, and always to no avail? But now, tonight, he was certain, a wish had been made.

  He leaned back and floated atop the warm water. The wind danced above him. A wish. Yes. It was clear and lovely.

  Texas. Again.

  Perhaps, he thought, perhaps. A smile spread across his wrinkled face, and he laughed right out loud.

  56

  The swimmer was not the only one receiving a signal on that blue moon night. In the house where Dogie lived, Too raised his head from the pillow where he slept between the headboard and Dogie’s noggin.

  Too had a title: Storm Prognosticator. A prognosticator is someone (or some dog) who can predict things. Too predicted storms, or more accurately, he predicted atmospheric disturbances, which, if you think about it, indicate some sort of storm or another.

  Whenever there was a storm on the horizon or some other disturbance in the atmosphere, Too could not stop barking: “Yep, yep, yep.” Plus, he danced on his tiny hind feet. Too looked a little like a Chihuahua, but had a rounder nose, and the black spots of a Dalmatian. He had enormous eyes. Maybe it was his enormous eyes that let him see the storms coming before everyone else.

  Dogie had never had a dog like Too. He was his best dog ever, just like BD. In fact, his whole name was Best Dog Too, but Dogie just called him “Too.” So that’s what everyone else called him.

  Too.

  Storm Prognosticator.

  Now he raised his head above the pillow and sniffed the air. Yep, yep, yep, a storm was brewing. He could only barely smell it. Then he sniffed again. There was something different about this storm. It wasn’t a typical gale that would blow in off the gulf and toss the palm trees around. No. What kind of atmospheric disturbance was this? He sat up and let the soft air of the night slip over him.

  He turned in a circle on the pillow. A storm was coming, a disturbance in the atmosphere. But for now it felt far away and faint. He pushed his nose into Dogie’s fuzzy dreadlocks and went back to sleep. Soon, he thought as he drifted into his best dog dreams, someone will need to wake up.

  57

  Anyone who lives by the sea knows that the moon is the queen of the tides. She pulls them back and forth, to and fro, up and down. Then round and round she goes.

  As he sat on the lap of his old, old friend Mr. Beauchamp, Sinbad listened to the man’s shallow breathing and made a great big wish, a tarpon-size wish—no, a whale-size wish, a wish as big as the moon herself, that at last Mr. Beauchamp would get his own wish, even without the night-blooming cyrus… before it was too late.

  In the old man’s hand was one of the broken blossoms. It wouldn’t open now, not after crashing onto the crushed oyster shell drive.

  Mr. Beauchamp had lived along this road for such a long time. He and ten wild ponies had come across the Atlantic Ocean and acr
oss the Gulf of Mexico on a small ship from his home village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue region of southern France, a region famous for its sturdy ponies.

  Mr. Beauchamp had never meant to stay on Oyster Ridge Road this long, never. He was supposed to stay with the ship only until the crew delivered the ponies to a circus based in Galveston. He was barely fifteen when he signed on as the ship’s stable boy for the journey across the Atlantic.

  Mr. Beauchamp had loved the ponies. And they loved him. They knew him for his quiet touch, for his calm and steady voice, and for the way he calmed them down when the boat tossed about on the bounding seas.

  But he was never supposed to stay along this stretch of the Texas coast, and he probably wouldn’t have if his ship had not run aground on the sandbar just off the shore, the same one that Cabeza de Vaca hit five hundred years earlier. Not the first, not the last. The night had been stormy, and Mr. Beauchamp’s ship began to take on water. The ponies panicked, he had to rush to get them off the boat safely, and once on shore, they had disappeared into the salt grass marshes so like the Camargue, the region they had left behind in France.

  But something else was left behind in France. Someone else.

  Someone whose eyes were as blue as the sky, hair as black as night.

  Now, all these years later, Mr. Beauchamp held the broken flower in his hand and let himself remember.

  58

  Two boys.

  Henri Beauchamp first saw Jack in a market beside the plaza in his village, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, named for three biblical Marys who had arrived there by sea.

  One night after Henri had fed and watered the ponies, just weeks before he was to sail with them across the Atlantic Ocean to a place called Texas, he washed his face, slipped on his new jacket, and walked to the plaza. When a boy is fifteen and preparing to sail away, his step is light, his heart is wide open, he is ready for life to begin.