“Wheeze, what on earth are you doing? You’ve been to the front door five times in the last five minutes.”
“Oh, leave me alone.”
“I know what she’s doing.” Grandma was rocking as usual in the living room. “She’s peeking around for that heathen Captain of hers.”
Caroline burst into a giggle and then tried to cover it up with fake coughing. Once we were both in the kitchen and out of sight, she rolled her eyes at me and twirled her finger at her temple to indicate that she thought our grandmother was nuts.
“Yep. Yep.” The voice continued from the other room. “Can’t keep her eyes off that wicked man. I see it. ’Deed I do.”
Caroline began to giggle in earnest then. I didn’t know which one I wanted to kill more.
“I told Susan no good would come of letting that man into the house. Like letting the devil himself march in. Don’t take much to bedevil a foolish girl, but still—”
My throat choked up like a swamp pond listening to her drone on and on.
“But still, they that lets the devil in cannot count themselves blameless.”
I was holding a jar of string beans in my hand, and I swear, if my mother had not happened down the stairs at that moment, I might have hurled that quart at the old woman’s nodding head. I don’t know what my mother heard, if anything, but I suppose she sensed the hatred, the air was so thick with it. At any rate, she gently pried my grandmother from the rocker and helped her upstairs for her afternoon nap.
When she came back to the kitchen, Caroline was practically dancing across the linoleum, simply bursting to tattle. “You know what Grandma said?”
I turned on her like a red-bellied water snake. “Shut your mouth, you fool!”
Caroline blanched, then recovered. “Whosoever shall say, ‘Thou fool,’ shall be in danger of hell fire,” she quoted piously.
“Oh, my blessed,” said Momma. She didn’t often resort to such a typical island expression. “Is the world so short on trouble that you two crave to make more?”
I opened my mouth but shut it again hard. Momma, I wanted to cry out, tell me I’m not in danger of hell fire. My childhood nightmares of damnation were rising fast, but there was no place for me to run. How could I share with my mother the wildness of my body or the desperation of my mind?
As I finished putting away the canned goods in frozen silence, my own hands caught my eye. The nails were broken and none too clean, the cuticles ragged. There was a crack of red at the edge of my index finger where a hangnail had been chewed away.
“She’s lovely, she’s engaged, she uses Pond’s” the advertisement read, showing two exquisitely white hands with perfectly formed and manicured nails, long nails, and a diamond ring sparkling on the gracefully curved left hand. A man with strong clean hands would never look at me in love. No man would. At the moment, it seemed worse than being forsaken by God.
The five of us were already at the supper table when the Captain got back. He knocked formally at the door. I jumped and ran to the screen to open it, even though my mother had not indicated that I must. He was standing there, his blue eyes sagging with tiredness, but with a warm smile parting his lips above the beard. In his arms he was carrying the huge orange tomcat.
“Look what found me,” he said, as I opened the door.
Caroline came running. “You found the old orange cat!” she cried, just as though she had had some relation to the creature. She reached out for it. I was almost glad because I figured the tom would go wild at her touch. But it didn’t. The storm must have broken its spirit, for it lay purring close to Caroline’s chest. “You sweet old thing,” she murmured, rubbing her nose in its fur. If Caroline had been relegated to the devil, she probably would have tamed him as well. She gave the cat some of our supper fish in a bowl and set it on the kitchen floor. The cat plunged its head blissfully into the bowl.
The Captain followed Caroline to the kitchen and rinsed his hands by pouring a scant dipper of our precious fresh water over them. Then he took out a large white handkerchief and wiped them carefully before he came back into the living room to sit down at the table. I concentrated on keeping my eyes off his hands, knowing now that they were more dangerous for me than his face, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself.
“Well,” he said, as though someone had asked him, “I hitched a ride to Crisfield today.”
Everyone looked up and mumbled, though it was evident that he was going to tell us what he had been up to whether or not we prodded.
“I went to see Trudy in the hospital,” he said. “She has that perfectly good house standing there empty. It occurred to me she might not mind my staying there until I can work out something more permanent.” He carefully unfolded his large cloth napkin and laid it across his lap, then looked up as though awaiting our judgment.
My grandmother was the first to speak. “I knowed it,” she muttered darkly without a hint of what it was she knew.
“Hiram,” my father said, “no need for you to rush away. We’re proud to have you with us.”
The Captain flicked a glance at Grandma, who had her mouth open, but before she got her words past her teeth, he said, “You’re mighty gracious. All of you. But I could be cleaning out her place while I live there. Make it fit for her to come home to. It would be a help to both of us.”
He left right after supper. He had nothing to move, so he simply walked out with the orange tom at his heels.
“Wait,” called Caroline. “Wheeze and I will walk you over.” She grabbed her light blue scarf and tied it loosely about her hair. She always looked like a girl in an advertisement when she wore that scarf. “Come on,” she said, as I hung back.
So I went with them, my legs so heavy that I could hardly lift them. It’s better, I tried to tell myself. As long as he is here I will be in danger. Even if I do not give myself away, Grandma will see to it. But, oh, my blessed, did I hate to see him go.
School opened, and I suppose that helped. With Mr. Rice gone, there was only one teacher for the whole high school. Our high school, which had about twenty students at full strength, was down now to fifteen since two had graduated the previous spring and three had gone off to war. Six of us, including Call and Caroline and me, were freshmen, five were sophomores, three juniors, and a lone senior girl, Myrna Dolman, who wore thick glasses and doggedly maintained the ambition she had harbored since first grade to become a primary schoolteacher. Our teacher, Miss Hazel Marks, used to hold Myrna up to the rest of us as an example. Apparently, the ideal pupil in Miss Hazel’s eyes was one who wrote neatly and never smiled.
I wasn’t smiling much that fall, but my handwriting didn’t improve a whit thereby. Without Mr. Rice, all the fun of school was gone. Although he had not been our teacher when we were in the eighth grade, we had been allowed every day to join the high school for music since the chorus could not do without Caroline. Even having to acknowledge that debt could not diminish my delight in our hour of music. Now, however, there was nothing to look forward to.
On the other hand, there was a certain safety in the unrelenting boredom of each day. I heard once that there are people who commit crimes with the sole purpose of being caught and put in jail. I rather understand that mentality. There are times when prison must seem a haven.
The ninth grade was seated in the worst possible place in the classroom, at the front, and to the right, away from the window. I spent hours gazing into the disapproving face of George Washington as painted by Gilbert Stuart. This experience left me with the conclusion that our first president, besides having frizzy hair, a large red hooked nose, and apple cheeks, had a prissy, even old-ladyish mouth and a double chin. All of these would have rendered him harmless, except that he also had staring blue eyes, eyes that could read everything that was going on underneath my forehead.
“Really, Sara Louise,” he seemed to say every time he caught my eye.
My mental project that fall was a study of all the hands of the classroom. It was m
y current theory that hands were the most revealing part of the human body—far more significant than eyes. For example, if all you were shown of Caroline’s body were her hands, you would know at once that she was an artistic person. Her fingers were as long and gracefully shaped as those on the disembodied hands in the Pond’s ad. Her nails were filed in a perfect arc, just beyond the tip of her finger. If the nails are too long, you can’t take the person seriously, too short, she has problems. Hers were exactly the right length to show that she was naturally gifted and had a strength of will to do something about it.
In contrast I observed that Call’s hands were wide with short fingers, the nails bitten well below the quick. They were red and rough to show he worked hard, but not muscled enough to give them any dignity. Reluctantly, I concluded that they were the hands of a good-hearted but second-rate person. After all, Call had always been my best friend, but, I said to myself, one must face facts however unpleasant.
Then there were my hands. But I’ve already spoken of them. I decided one day in the middle of an algebraic equation to change my luckless life by changing my hands. Using some of my precious crab money, I went to Kellam’s and bought a bottle of Jergen’s lotion, emery boards, orange sticks, cuticle remover, even a bottle of fingernail polish, which though colorless seemed a daring purchase.
Every morning as soon as there was enough light to see by without turning on the lamp, I’d work on my hands. It was a ritual as serious as the morning prayers of a missionary, and one which I took pains to finish well before Caroline could be expected to wake up. I carefully stashed my equipment at the very back of my bottom drawer in the bureau we shared.
Despite all my cunning, I came in one afternoon to find her generously slathering her hands with my Jergen’s.
“Where did you get that?”
“From your drawer,” she said innocently. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Well, I do mind,” I said. “You have no right to go poking around my drawers, stealing my stuff.”
“Oh, Wheeze,” she said, placidly helping herself to more lotion. “Don’t be selfish.”
“Okay,” I screamed, “take it! Take it! Take everything I own!” I picked up the bottle and hurled it at the wall above her bed. It smashed there and fell, leaving a mixture of shattered glass and lotion to ooze down the wall after it.
“Wheeze,” she said quietly, looking first at the wall and then at me, “have you gone crazy?”
I fled the house and was headed for the south marsh before I remembered it was no longer there. I stood shaking at the spot where the head of the old marsh path had begun, and through my tears, I thought I could just make out across the water a tiny tump of fast land, my old refuge now cut off from the rest of the island, orphaned and alone.
13
Caroline kept the Jergen’s lotion incident to herself, so no one else suspected that I was going crazy. I kept the knowledge locked within myself, taking it out from time to time to admire in secret. I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless. After all, I hadn’t thrown the lotion bottle at anyone, just the wall. There was no need to warn or disturb my parents. I could probably live out my life on the island in my own quiet, crazy way, much as Auntie Braxton always had. No one paid much attention to her, and if it hadn’t been for the cats she would have probably lived and died in our midst, mostly forgotten by the rest of us. Caroline was sure to leave the island, so the house would be mine after my grandmother and my parents died. (With only a slight chill I contemplated the death of my parents.) I could crab like a man if I chose. Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied. Thus as long as I left everyone alone, I could do as I pleased. Thinking about myself as a crazy, independent old woman made me feel almost happy.
So since no one knew about me, the crisis demanding the family’s attention centered around Auntie Braxton. She was going to be released from the hospital, which meant that the Captain would soon be homeless again.
To my father it was perfectly simple. We were the Captain’s friends, we would take him in. But my grandmother was adamant. “I’ll not have that heathen in my house, much less in my bed. That’s what he craves. To get in my bed with me in it.”
“Mother Bradshaw!” Momma was genuinely shocked. My father glanced nervously at Caroline and me. She was on the verge of laughing. I was numb with rage.
“Oh, you just think when a woman gets old no man is going to look at her that way again.”
“Mother,” my father said. His intenseness made her pause. “The girls—” He nodded at us.
“Oh, she’s the one stirred him up,” Grandma said. “She thinks he craves her, but I know. I know who he’s really after. ’Deed I do.”
My father turned to Caroline and me and spoke quietly. “Go to your room,” he said. “She’s old. You got to make allowances.”
We knew we had to obey, and for once I was eager to. Caroline hung back, but I grabbed her arm and started for the staircase. I couldn’t help what my parents heard, but I didn’t want Caroline to hear. It was she who knew that I, not Grandma, was the crazy one.
As soon as our door was shut Caroline burst out laughing. “Can you imagine?” She shook her head. “What do you suppose is going on in that head of hers?”
“She’s old,” I said fiercely. “She’s not responsible.”
“She’s not that old. She’s younger than the Captain and he’s not the least bit crazy.” She didn’t even look up to see how I was reacting. “Well,” she continued in a chatty tone of voice. “At least we know he can’t stay here. I can’t imagine what she’d do if we invited him in again.” She pulled her legs up and sat cross-legged on her bed facing toward mine. I was lying on my stomach with my head on my hands. I turned my face toward the pillow, trying not to betray myself any more than I had already. “I don’t see why he can’t just keep on living at Auntie Braxton’s,” she said.
“Because they’re not married,” I said. If I weren’t more careful my voice alone would give me away. I cleared my throat and said as steadily as I could, “People who are not married do not live together.”
She laughed. “It’s not as if they’d want to do anything. My gosh, they’re both too old to bother with that.”
I was so hot all over at the suggestion of the Captain doing something that I could hardly breathe.
“Well?” Obviously she wanted some comment from me.
“It doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “It’s how it looks. People don’t think it looks right for people who aren’t married to live together in the same house.”
“Well, if people are going to be that way, they should just get married.”
“What?” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat bolt upright.
“Sure,” she said calmly, as though she were explaining a math problem. “What difference would it make? They should just get married and shut everybody up.”
“Suppose he doesn’t want to marry a crazy old woman?”
“He doesn’t have to do anything, silly. They’d just—”
“Will you shut up about doing things? You have got the filthiest mind. All you can think about is doing things.”
“Wheeze. I was talking about not doing anything. It would be a marriage of convenience.”
“That’s not the same.” I’d read more than she had and knew about these things.
“Well, a marriage in name only.” She grinned at me. “Like that better?”
“No. It’s terrible. It’s peculiar. And don’t you even suggest it. It will make him think we’re peculiar, too.”
“It will not. He knows us better than that.”
“If you mention it to him, I’ll kill you.”
She shrugged me off. “You will not. Honestly, Wheeze, what’s got into you?”
“Nothing. It’s just that he might w
ant to marry someone else. How would it be if we made him marry Auntie Braxton and then later on, too late, he finds he’s really in love with someone else?”
“What on earth have you been reading, Wheeze? In the first place, if you don’t count Grandma, who’s really nuts, and Widow Johnson, who still worships the image of her sainted captain, and Call’s grandma, who’s too fat, there is no one else. In the second place, we can’t make him do anything. He’s a grown man.”
“Well, I think it’s filthy even to suggest it.”
She stood up, choosing to ignore my comment. At the door she listened for what might be going on downstairs and then, apparently satisfied that all was quiet, turned to me. “Come on,” she said. “If you want to.”
I jumped off my bed. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to get Call.”
“Why?” I knew why.
“The three of us are going to see the Captain.”
“Please stop it, Caroline. It’s none of your business. You hardly even know him.” I was trying to force my voice to remain calm with the result that all the unreleased shrieks were clogging my throat.
“I do know him, Wheeze. And I care about what happens to him.”
“Why? Why do you always try to take over everybody else’s life?” I thought I might strangle on the words.
She gave me her look which indicated that once again I had lost all sense of proportion. “Oh, Wheeze” was all she said.
It was up to Call to stop her. He would, I was sure—he and his tight little sense of propriety. But once she’d explained to him what a marriage “in name only” consisted of, he blushed and said, “Why not?”
Why not? I followed them to Auntie Braxton’s house like a beaten hunting pup. Why not? Because, I yearned to say, people aren’t animals. Because it is none of our business. Because, oh, my blessed, I love him and cannot bear the thought of losing him to a crazy old woman, even in name only.
The Captain was making tea and cooking potatoes for his supper when we arrived. He was uncommonly cheerful for a man who was about to be cast out on his ear for the second time straight. He offered to share his supper, but there was hardly enough for one person, so we all politely refused, insisting that he go ahead—at least, Caroline and Call were insisting. I was sitting tight-lipped on the other side of the room, but when Caroline and Call started to sit down at the kitchen table with him I dragged myself across the living room and dumped myself into the empty chair. As little as I wanted to be a part of the coming scene, I didn’t want to be left out of it either.
Jacob Have I Loved Page 10