by Susan Wilson
Living with Clayton means lobstering in all weathers, standing hip-deep in the cove in leaky waders while a seven-knot wind blows in his face as he rakes for quahogs; or trawling for bottom fish and slicing himself on scales, hooks, and the sharp, savage teeth of menhaden-crazed bluefish. Life with Clayton means never being able to completely wash off the odor of marine life.
The only thing that makes this life bearable is the fact that Keller has been able to attend the local high school. He’s had enough English classes to understand the term ironic. Being truant from school was what landed him in Meadowbrook; but being allowed to get his diploma is what will free him from Clayton. Once that piece of paper is in hand, he’s out of here, and for that he can thank Miss Jacobs.
It was almost the end of March that first winter with Clayton when an official-looking envelope came in the mail. Clayton held it up to the kitchen light as if he could read through the envelope and discard it without opening it. “What in the heck is this?”
Keller had already become used to his uncle’s rhetorical questions and kept his attention on a pot on the stove, giving the chowder in it a gentle stir. Clayton slit the envelope with his filleting knife, extracting a single sheet of paper, which he held aloft as he patted his pockets for his reading glasses. Glasses settled, he read the letter, then dropped it on the table. He folded his glasses and replaced them in his shirt pocket. Keller could feel the air being sucked out of the room as Clayton slowly turned to him. “You finish eighth grade, boy?”
“Yes.”
“Get a certificate?”
“No. But that’s as far as anyone goes at Meadowbrook.”
“You sixteen yet?”
“Yes.”
“Says here you need to go to school, but you don’t.” Subject closed, Clayton crumpled the letter and tossed it in the firebox of the range. “I didn’t take you in just to send you off la-di-da. You can read and cipher, that’s enough.”
Clayton was right: An eighth-grade education was enough, and Keller shrugged off the idea as wishful thinking. Until Miss Jacobs showed up at their back door, tiny and trim in a shirtwaist dress, white hair permed into submission and the look of eagles in her eye.
“Clayton Britt, this boy needs to attend school.”
“He’s of age to quit.”
“Does he want to?”
“I have the say in this house.” Clayton stood in the doorway, his bulk keeping the high school English teacher standing outside.
Keller was behind Clayton, looking over his shoulder, and she looked right at him past the old man. “Step out here, son.”
“No. You come in.” Clayton doesn’t hold the door open for Miss Jacobs, merely moves aside to let her in.
She didn’t come up to either of their shoulders, but her bearing was pure authority. “Keller, what do you want to do?”
In all his memory, no one had ever asked Keller what he wanted, and as much as he knew Clayton would make his life miserable for it, he answered with his heart. “I want to finish school. I do.”
“Clayton, this boy is entitled to an education. You cannot deprive him of that. I won’t let you.”
“What’s it to you?”
Miss Jacobs lifted her chin, as if Clayton were one of her unruly boys and she was about to bring the switch down on him. “Don’t be rude to me. I won’t have it from you. Not you, Clayton Britt.”
The pair stared at each other, and Keller realized that they were long-term adversaries, that between them there smoldered a history.
“See that this boy is in class on Monday. Keller, please dress appropriately. Bring your own pencil.”
Before Miss Jacobs had stepped off the porch, Clayton slammed the front door, spun around, and slapped Keller. “Why’d you say that? For what you’re doing, you don’t need no education and you know it. Just looking for ways to dodge work. Lazy bastard.”
But Clayton never attempted to prevent Keller from going to school.
* * *
There is no love between them, no affection, nothing more than any two men working together might share, an occasional laugh, a curse at the weather, griping about the lousy price the fish market pays for the fluke they spend four days offshore trawling for. If Clayton is taciturn, Keller is quiet. Clayton reads the evening paper spread over the kitchen table while Keller reads a schoolbook. They do not converse. They coexist. Most of the time.
It’s Saturday night and Clayton has cracked open his Prohibition-era bootleg bottle of Canadian Club. They lost a lobster trap today when Keller lost his grip on the chain and it slid out of the pulley and into twenty feet of dark December water. A tire on the old truck is too thin to hold air and the spare is shot. Clayton sits at the kitchen table and tosses back a third shot. Keller sits opposite, keeping his eyes on his plate of cod.
Not for the first time, Keller wishes that the old man would let him get a dog. It seems to him that Hawke’s Cove is filled with dogs. Dogs that sit patiently in cars as their masters conduct the business of the day; the fish market dog, called Flounder, which Stan Long claims is so smart, he could spell if he wanted to, but chooses not to. The big Newfoundland that goes out to sea on the fishing boat Jane Anne. The newspaper boy’s dog, which follows him around from porch to doorstep on his route.
A dog would give him an excuse to walk out of the house; a dog would side with him against the old man’s rants. A dog would listen as Keller whispered out his loneliness. A dog might fill that hollowed-out space.
But Clayton has said no. He doesn’t need any other mouths to feed.
* * *
“You’re a piece of work, you are. Losin’ that pot. What kind of fool are you?” Clayton’s indulgence in the whiskey most often follows days like this, when too much has gone wrong. Then Keller becomes an easy target for blame. “Kindness of my heart. I took you in. What’s my thanks? Cost me a trap. Can’t remember to put air in the tire. Like you was trying to make me mad.” He goes from gruff to just plain mean. “You got plans to inherit this place? You just forget it, boy. I’d rather see this place go to the devil than to you.”
“I don’t want it. What gives you that idea? You keep me here like slave labor. Why would I want it?” Keller shoves the plate aside. He stinks of fish; he can’t get the taste out of his mouth.
“I see you coveting it. Just like your mother. You come from nothing, boy. Your mother was a cheap whore.”
“Don’t.”
“Tricked my nephew into marriage. Know how? Got herself in the family way. With you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Got her clutches on him, white trash.”
“And just what do you think you are? A fisherman. High-and-mighty? Think your shit don’t stink?”
Clayton pushes himself out of his chair, stands waiting for balance, as if he’s at the helm of his workboat. Keller watches his hands. Sometimes when Clayton gets into the Canadian Club, he likes to take a swing at him. Keller has no difficulty deflecting the wild swings, and some latent decency always prevents him from decking the old man, as much as the feel of that jaw against his own hard fist would go a long way in righting some of the indignities he’s suffered out of the old man’s mouth.
Clayton wobbles and Keller grapples with him, waltzing him into the parlor and down into his chair, where the old man falls asleep. Sometimes the sight of that mean old man, drunken sleeper’s drool drizzling into his two-day-old scruff, his outrageous slanders about a mother Keller has little memory of, is enough to burn his eyes with unspent tears.
* * *
Sunday has always been the only day that Clayton Britt doesn’t go out on the water, adhering to some vestigial notion of a Sabbath, despite never having entered the precincts of a church. In the same fashion, Clayton calls lunch on Sunday “dinner,” and he usually cooks the only beef the two will eat in a week, the rest of their meals consisting of salted, boiled, fried, or raw seafood culled from their catches. Short lobsters, a dozen littlenecks. And, always, b
oiled potatoes.
Nothing is said about last night. Clayton got himself up out of his chair long after Keller had gone upstairs to his lumpy and cold bed. Keller wants to finish high school, but sometimes he thinks that he should just up and go. Stuff a laundry bag with his few possessions and light out. He’ll be eighteen soon, the age when the state would have set him free from Meadowbrook if Clayton hadn’t intervened. But if he can hold on, that diploma will be worth it.
This December Sunday, there’s a football game on the radio and the two settle in after lunch to listen to it, Clayton in the one easy chair in the room, Keller on the braided rug on the floor, rather than in the spindle-back chair, which is the only other chair in the sparse room, its skirted chintz cushion oddly feminine in this intensely masculine house. The woodstove smokes a little and Keller gets up to rearrange the logs. Outside, the midafternoon winter sun is already weakening into an early dark.
Seconds before the game is to start, the broadcast is interrupted. Keller and Clayton lean toward the radio, trying to make sense of the rushed and repeated bulletin: “President Roosevelt has announced that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air.”
Regular programming resumes, but Clayton shuts it off, his gnarled hand lingering on the peak of the radio. He coughs, then scratches at the stubble on his cheek. He looks at Keller. “Guess that you’ll be leaving.”
“Yes, sir.” Keller looks away; he doesn’t want the old man to see the happiness on his face, the relief and the hope. His life sentence has been commuted. The attack on the naval station at Pearl Harbor was surely horrific, but by it, Keller is set free.
* * *
As Keller Nicholson figures it, Pearl Harbor is about the best thing that could have happened to him, although he’ll never say that out loud. The national outrage at the loss of life and the subsequent call to arms certainly is greater than his private joy at having a rock solid reason to leave his great-uncle Clayton’s house. Patriotism and duty to God and country. Even Clayton can’t argue with that.
Keller doesn’t wait to be called up. He isn’t going to take a chance that the lottery will deal him a losing number, and there is no way he to going to miss out on this chance to extricate himself from Clayton Britt’s life; no way, as a strapping young man, is he going to miss the excitement of going to war. As dire as the world situation is, he and many of his peers worry that they may miss it, that the war will be over before they can get into it. Four of the boys from last year’s winning high school basketball team have joined up already and three boys, seniors this year and already eighteen, have talked their way out of finishing school and into boot camp.
The day after his eighteenth birthday, Keller strips out of his overalls and pulls on his only nondungaree trousers. He brushes the dirt off his shoes with a bucket brush and digs the dirt out from under his nails with the ice pick. If Clayton won’t let him take the truck, he plans to walk the five miles to Great Harbor, or he’ll hitchhike to the recruitment center that has been set up in the empty storefront beside the A&P. Someone heading from Hawke’s Cove into Great Harbor will stop and give him a ride. No shame in sticking out a thumb.
Keller strops his straight razor and lathers his face with the bar of Ivory soap, shaving for the second time that day.
“You going somewhere?” Clayton leans against the bathroom doorjamb. Keller can see him reflected in the mirror, the old man’s expression inscrutable. There is no way to see past the weathered skin into the man’s thoughts. His eyes, ice blue and framed by crow’s-feet earned by a lifetime on the water, study Keller with detachment. As if Keller means nothing to him, and his departure doesn’t mean a season of hard solo work.
Keller rinses his razor, wiping it carefully on the towel hanging around his neck. “Recruitment center. I’m joining up.” Keller sets the straight razor down on the edge of the sink and reaches for his shirt. “I’d like to take the truck. I’ll be back in an hour.” He buttons his shirt and jams the tail of it into his waistband. “Two at most.”
Clayton doesn’t move, doesn’t answer. Standing in thick wool socks, his rubber boots left standing by the back door, Clayton is just a little bit shorter than Keller, or maybe it’s just that Keller feels bigger, taller; his resolve to join up has pushed him from boy to man. He has nothing more to fear from this old man.
Clayton moves away from the bathroom door to let Keller pass. “I’ll take you myself.”
Is it his imagination, or is there a little pride in the old man’s voice?
* * *
Miss Jacobs came to see Keller before he left for boot camp. She looked so small and vulnerable, standing there in Clayton’s sitting room; feminine in a way that he’d never noticed before. The raptor eyes and the hands that gripped a pointer like a lance were softened with a weary resignation. Even before he’d enlisted, she’d tried hard to get him to wait, to finish his last few months in high school, get that diploma, then sign up. But Keller no longer saw that bit of paper as his only method of emancipation. Now he had the army.
Keller asked Miss Jacobs to sit down, and she perched on the edge of the spindle-back chair, feet aligned, hands clasped together as if she was about to recite poetry. Sitting there in that unadorned parlor, looking every inch the schoolmistress she was, Miss Jacobs looked up from her clasped hands and directly at him, and Keller could see that she believed that she had saved him from ignorance, only to have him die a soldier. She reached into her handbag and extracted a book. “I’d like you to have this. It belonged to my father.”
Keller took the copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur from her, opened it, and read the inscription. “To Alfred Jacobs upon his successful matriculation. 1892.” Beneath those words was another inscription: “To Keller Nicholson as he begins the journey of a lifetime. Best wishes and good fortune, Miss (Ruth) Jacobs. 1942.”
“Thank you, Miss Jacobs. I’ll always treasure this.” Urged on by an unaccustomed grace, Keller kissed her cheek, and was surprised to find it wet. “You’ve been so kind to me. I don’t know why. But I’ll never forget you.”
* * *
Clayton drives Keller to the train depot in Great Harbor, where he is to catch the early-morning Portland to Boston run. Leaving the truck running, Clayton gets out with Keller, hands him the small valise Keller bought himself with the little money Clayton has given him over the years. In it just some clean underwear and his shaving kit. The book from Miss Jacobs. He has nothing else.
“That’s it, then.” Almost as an afterthought, Clayton offers him a hand, and Keller accepts it. Two work-hardened palms meet for the first and last time.
“I guess it would be right to say thank you. For taking me in.”
“Yeah. Well, good luck.” Clayton turns quickly and walks away, as if Keller isn’t leaving him and his hardscrabble life behind forever. As if this journey is of no consequence, that his only blood relation isn’t going to war.
“You, too.” Keller is rooted to the sidewalk, watching the old man’s back. It isn’t affection or gratitude that he feels, but relief. Excitement. This is a ticking off of a phase in his life—like living with his mother’s siblings until that became living in the reform school and that became living with Clayton. It’s over and done with and now a whole new and completely self-chosen phase is about to commence. Keller feels like yelling: Yahoo!
Then, with a little hitch of reluctance, Clayton pauses, turns. “You know that you can come back.”
“I do.” But I won’t, he thinks. This door is closing and a brave new one is opening up.
* * *
The Portland to Boston train puts Keller Nicholson into South Station half a day early for his connection to New York. After that, another eighteen hours to Fort Bragg. This is his first train trip, and Keller soaks it in, the novelty not yet worn off by the time he gets to South Station, and he’s looking forward to the next leg of his journey. He has a few hours to explore what he can of Boston, and he roams happily up to the Common, window-sh
opping at Jordan Marsh along the way and eating a hot dog from a street vendor. The stiff breeze coming off Boston Harbor barely gets Keller’s attention. He isn’t far enough from home to sense a difference in the air. It’s all too familiar, sea air chilled by a constant breeze. North Carolina is going to be a lot different. And from there, well, who knows what exotic places he may be in. Keller is back at South Station in plenty of time for his train. The crowd has grown, lots of uniforms, but many more, like him, still nominal civilians but wearing that excited, terrified look of new recruits. Keller feels like he’s part of a club, and he is amazed at how there is no mistaking the other members. Maybe it’s the families surrounding them, or the wives and girlfriends all “bearing up” under the circumstances. A guy just heading to New York on business wouldn’t have a mother clinging to his sleeve and dabbing her eyes with a hankie. He wonders then if he’s readily identifiable as a recruit. He has no one frightened for him, or proud of him. No one making him promise to write. He stands alone, his back against the wall. Keller thumbs through the first pages of the Malory, his attention on the bustle around him, but grateful for the shield of the book, giving him the appearance of a man calmly making the journey of a lifetime.
* * *
Keller jockeys for position in the line queuing up to board the Boston to Penn Station train. Ahead of him is an odd trio, a man and woman and a big handsome dog. Nice-looking dog. Shepherd maybe? A tarnished silver with black points. Keller has never had a dog, but he likes them. When the fellow hugs the dog and then his wife, Keller smiles, thinking that the guy has his priorities straight, but then he sees the anguish on the human faces and regrets his impish thought. A moment later, the dog is pushing people aside as the young woman gripping his leash follows like a blind person. Later, on the train, Keller keeps thinking about that image: the man and woman and dog and how separate and devoted the couple were to each other. In the midst of this crush, they had carved out a niche of privacy, guarded by the dog. In another moment, he’s sound asleep and the image and the thought fade away.