I came in from washing the dishes to find the two of them in silence, she asleep and he watching her. “I thank you,” I said. He looked up at me. “This would have been a lonesome day without you.”
“I thank you,” he said. And then, “It’s hard for you, isn’t it?”
I sat down on the couch near his chair. There was no need to pretend, I knew. “I had hoped when Call came home—”
He shook his head. “Sara Louise. You were never meant to be a woman on this island. A man, perhaps. Never a woman.”
“I don’t even know if I wanted to marry him,” I said. “But I wanted something.” I looked down at my hands. “I know I have no place here. But there’s no escape.”
“Pish.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard him correctly.
“Pish. Rubbish. You can do anything you want to. I’ve known that from the first day I met you—at the other end of my periscope.”
“But—”
“What is it you really want to do?”
I was totally blank. What was it I really wanted to do?
“Don’t know?” It was almost a taunt. I was fidgeting under his gaze. “Your sister knew what she wanted, so when the chance came, she could take it.”
I opened my mouth, but he waved me quiet. “You, Sara Louise. Don’t tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don’t need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you’re after, my dear.” His tone was softening.
“When I was younger I wanted to go to boarding school in Crisfield—”
“Too late for that now.”
“I—this sounds silly—but I would like to see the mountains.”
“That’s easy enough. Couple of hundred miles west is all.” He waited, expecting more.
“I might—” the ambition began to form along with the sentence. “I want to be a doctor.”
“So?” He was leaning forward, staring warmly at me. “So what’s to stop you?”
Any answer would have been an excuse to him, the one I gave, most of all. “I can’t leave them,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t believe me.
18
Two days after my parents’ return from New York, I came the closest I ever came to fighting with my mother. Children raised as I was did not fight with their parents. There was even a commandment to take care of it, number five: “The only one of the Ten Commandments with a promise attached.” I can still hear the preacher’s twang as he lectured us. “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”
When my mother got off the ferry, there was something different about her. At first I thought it was the hat. Caroline had bought her a new hat for the wedding, and she had worn it on the trip home. It was pale blue felt with a wide rolled-up brim that went out from her face at a slant. There was charm, both in the color, which exactly matched her eyes, and in the angle, which made her face look dramatic instead of simply thin. I could tell by looking at her how beautiful the hat made her feel. She was radiant. My father beside her looked proud and a little awkward in his Sunday suit. The sleeves had never been quite long enough to cover his brown wrists, and his huge weathered hands stuck out rather like the pinchers on a number one Jimmy.
They seemed glad enough to see me, but I could tell that they weren’t quite ready to let go of their time together. I carried one of the suitcases and lagged behind them in the narrow street. Occasionally, one or the other of them would turn and smile at me to say something like “Everything go all right?” but they walked closer together than they needed to, touching each other as they walked every few steps and then smiling into each other’s faces. My teeth rattled, I was shivering so.
Grandma was standing in the doorway waiting for us. They patted her as they went in. She seemed to sense at once whatever it was going on between them. Without a word of greeting she rushed to her chair, snatched up her Bible, and pushed the pages roughly and impatiently until she found the place she wanted.
“‘My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.’”
Momma’s whole body shrank from the word “whore” but she recovered herself and went over to the umbrella stand where she carefully took the pins out of her hat. Her eyes steadily on her own image, she took off the hat, replaced the pins in the brim, and then patted her hair down with one hand. “There,” she said, and taking one last look, turned from the mirror toward us. I was furious. Why didn’t she scream? Grandma had no right—
“We’d best change,” my father said and started up the stairs with the suitcases. She nodded and followed him up.
Grandma stood there, panting with frustration, all those words that she was bursting to say and no one but me to hear. Apparently, I would have to do. She glared at me and then began reading to herself as hastily as she could, searching, I suppose, for something she could fire at me and thus release her coiled spring.
“Here, Grandma,” I said, my voice dripping molasses. “Let me help you.” I’d been preparing for this moment for months. “Read it, here. Proverbs twenty-five, twenty-four.” I flipped over and stuck my finger on the verse that I had memorized gleefully. “‘It is better,’” I recited piously, “‘to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house with a contentious woman.’” I smiled as sweetly as ever I knew how.
She snatched her Bible out from under my hand, slammed it shut, and holding it in both hands whacked me on the side of the head so hard that it was all I could do to keep from crying out. But at the same time I was glad that she hit me. Even while she stood there grinning at my surprise and pain, I felt a kind of satisfaction. I was deserving of punishment. I knew that. Even if I was not quite clear what I deserved it for.
But the incident didn’t help Grandma. She was at my mother all the time now, following three steps behind her as she swept or cleaned, carrying the black Bible and reading and reciting to her. My father, meanwhile, seemed less than anxious to get the Portia Sue out on the Bay again. He spent several precious days happily tinkering with his engine, wasting lovely, almost warm, oyster weather. Couldn’t he see how badly I needed to get away from that awful house? Couldn’t he see that being cooped up with Grandma when she was going full throttle was driving me to the brink of insanity?
And my mother didn’t help. Every waking moment was poisoned by Grandma’s hatred, but my mother, head slightly bent as though heading into the wind, kept her silent course around the house with only a murmured word or two when a reply seemed necessary and could be given without risking further rancor. It would have been easier for me if she’d screamed or wept, but she didn’t.
She did, however, propose that we wash the windows, a job we had done quite thoroughly at the end of the crab season. As I opened my mouth to protest, I saw her face and realized how much she needed to be outside the house, though she would never say so. I fetched the buckets of warm water and ammonia. We scrubbed and wiped in blessed silence for nearly a half hour. Through the porch window where I was working, I could see Grandma, poking anxiously about the living room. She wouldn’t dare step out because of her arthritis, but it was clear that our peculiar behavior was disturbing to her. Watching her pinched face, I went through a spectrum of emotions. First a kind of perverted pride that my meek mother had bested the old woman, if only for an afternoon. Then a sort of nagging guilt that I should take such pleasure in my grandmother’s discomfort. I could not forget that only the week before I had been touched by her childish griefs. This shifted to a growing anger that my clever, gentle, beautiful mother should be so unjustly persecuted, which was transformed, heaven knows how, into a fury against my mother for allowing herself to be so treated.
I moved my bucket and chair to the side of the house where she was standing on her chair, scrubbing and humming happily. “I don’t understand it!” The words burst out unplanned.
“What, Louise?�
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“You were smart. You went to college. You were good-looking. Why did you ever come here?”
She had a way of never seeming surprised by her children’s questions. She smiled, not at me, but at some memory within herself. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I was a bit of a romantic. I wanted to get away from what I thought of as a very conventional small town and try my wings.” She laughed. “My first idea was to go to France.”
“France?” I might not surprise her, but she could certainly surprise me.
“Paris, to be precise.” She shook her head as she wrung out her rag over the bucket beside her on the chair. “It just shows how conventional I was. Everyone in my college generation wanted to go to Paris and write a novel.”
“You wanted to go to Paris and write a novel?”
“Poetry, actually. I had published a few little things in college.”
“You published poetry?”
“It’s not as grand as it sounds. I promise you. Anyhow, my father wouldn’t consider Paris. I didn’t have the heart to defy him. My mother had just died.” She added the last as though it explained her renunciation of Paris.
“You came to Rass instead of going to Paris?”
“It seemed romantic—” She began scrubbing again as she talked. “An isolated island in need of a schoolteacher. I felt—” She was laughing at herself. “I felt like one of the pioneer woman, coming here. Besides—” She turned and looked at me, smiling at my incomprehension. “I had some notion that I would find myself here, as a poet, of course, but it wasn’t just that.”
The anger was returning. There was no good reason for me to be angry but my body was filled with it, the way it used to be when Caroline was home. “And did you find yourself here on this little island?” The question was coated with sarcasm.
She chose to ignore my tone. “I found very quickly,” she scratched at something with her fingernail as she spoke, “I found there was nothing much to find.”
I exploded. It was as though she had directly insulted me by speaking so slightingly of herself. “Why? Why did you throw yourself away?” I flung my rag into the bucket, sloshing gray ammonia water all over my ankles. Then I jumped from my chair and wrung out the rag as though it were someone’s neck. “You had every chance in the world and you threw it all away for that—” and I jabbed my wrenched rag toward Grandma’s face watching us petulantly from behind the glass.
“Please, Louise.”
I turned so that I would not see either of their faces, a sob rising from deep inside me. I pounded on the side of the house to stop the tears, smashing out each syllable. “God in heaven, what a stupid waste.”
She climbed off her chair and came over to me where I stood, leaning against the clapboard, shaking with tears of anger, grief—who knew what or for whom? She came round where I could see her, her arms halfway stretched out as though she would have liked to embrace me but dared not. I jumped aside. Did I think her touch would taint me? Somehow infect me with the weakness I perceived in her? “You could have done anything, been anything you wanted.”
“But I am what I wanted to be,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides. “I chose. No one made me become what I am.”
“That’s sickening,” I said.
“I’m not ashamed of what I have made of my life.”
“Well, just don’t try to make me like you are,” I said.
She smiled. “I can promise you I won’t.”
“I’m not going to rot here like Grandma. I’m going to get off this island and do something.” I waited for her to stop me, but she just stood there. “You’re not going to stop me, either.”
“I wouldn’t stop you,” she said. “I didn’t stop Caroline, and I certainly won’t stop you.”
“Oh, Caroline. Caroline’s different. Everything’s always been for Caroline. Caroline the delicate, the gifted, the beautiful. Of course, we must all sacrifice our lives to give her greatness to the world!”
Did I see her flinch, ever so slightly? “What do you want us to do for you, Louise?”
“Let me go. Let me leave!”
“Of course you may leave. You never said before you wanted to leave.”
And, oh, my blessed, she was right. All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.
“I chose the island,” she said. “I chose to leave my own people and build a life for myself somewhere else. I certainly wouldn’t deny you that same choice. But,” and her eyes held me if her arms did not, “oh, Louise, we will miss you, your father and I.”
I wanted so to believe her. “Will you really?” I asked. “As much as you miss Caroline?”
“More,” she said, reaching up and ever so lightly smoothing my hair with her fingertips.
I did not press her to explain. I was too grateful for that one word that allowed me at last to leave the island and begin to build myself as a soul, separate from the long, long shadow of my twin.
19
Every spring a waterman starts out with brand clean crab pots. Crabs are particular critters, and they won’t step into your little wire house if your bait is rank or your wire rusty and clogged with sea growth. But throw down a nice shiny pot with a bait box full of alewife that’s just barely short of fresh, and they’ll come swimming in the downstairs door, and before they know it they’re snug in the upstairs and on the way to market.
That’s the way I started out that spring. Shiny as a new crab pot, all set to capture the world. At my mother’s suggestion, I wrote the county supervisor who had graded my high school exams, and he was happy to recommend me for a scholarship at the University of Maryland. My first thought was to stay home and help with the crabs until September. My father brushed the offer aside. I think my parents were afraid that if I didn’t go at once, I’d lose my nerve. I wasn’t worried about that, but I was eager to go, so I took off for College Park in April and got a room near the campus, waiting tables to pay my way until the summer session when I was able to move into the dormitory and begin my studies.
One day in the spring of my sophomore year, I found a note in my box directing me to see my advisor. It was a crisp, blue day that made me feel as I walked across the quadrangle that out near Rass the crabs were beginning to move. The air was fresh with the smell of new growth, and I went into that building and up to that office humming with the pure joy of being alive. I had forgotten that life, like a crab pot, catches a lot of trash you haven’t bargained for.
“Miss Bradshaw.” He cleaned his pipe, knocking it about the ashtray until I was ready to offer to clean it for him. “Miss Bradshaw. So.”
He coughed and then elaborately refilled and lit his pipe.
“Yes, sir?”
He took a puff before going on. “I see you are doing well in your courses.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose you are considering medicine.”
“Yes, sir. That’s why I’m in premed.”
“I see.” He puffed and sucked a bit. “You’re serious about this? I would think that a good-looking young woman like you—”
“Yes, sir, I’m sure.”
“Have you thought about nursing?”
“No, sir. I want to be a doctor.”
When he saw how determined I was, he stopped fooling with his pipe. He wished it were different, he said, but with all the returning veterans, the chances of a girl, “even a bright girl like you,” getting into medical school were practically nonexistent. He urged me to switch to nursing at the end of the semester.
A sea nettle hitting me in the face couldn’t have stung worse. For a few days I was desolate, but then I decided that if you can’t catch crabs where you are, you move your pots. I transferred to the University of Kentucky and into the nursing school, which had a good course in midwifery. I would become a nurse-midwife, spend
a few years in the mountains where doctors were scarce, and then use my experience to persuade the government to send me to medical school on a public health scholarship.
When I was about ready to graduate, a list of Appalachian communities asking for nurse-midwives was posted on the student bulletin board. From the neat, double-spaced list, the name “Truitt” jumped out at me. When I was told the village was in a valley completely surrounded by mountains, the nearest hospital a two-hour drive over terrible roads, I was delighted. It seemed exactly the place for me to work for two or three years, see all the mountains I ever wanted to see, and then, armed with a bit of money and a lot of experience, to batter my way into medical school.
A mountain-locked valley is more like an island than anything else I know. Our water is the Appalachian wilderness, our boats, the army surplus jeeps we count on to navigate our washboard roads and the hairpin curves across the mountains. There are a few trucks, freely loaned about in good weather to any valley farmer who must take his pigs or calves to market. The rest of us seldom leave the valley.
The school is larger than the one on Rass, not only because there are twice the number of families, but because people here, even more than islanders, tend to count their wealth in children. There is a one-room Presbyterian Church, built of native stone, to which a preacher comes every three weeks when the road is passable. And every fourth Sunday, God and the weather willing, a Catholic priest says mass in the schoolhouse. There are no mines open in our pocket of western Virginia now, but the Polish and Lithuanian miners who were brought down from Pennsylvania two generations ago stayed and turned their hands to digging fields and cutting pastures out of the hillsides. They are still considered outsiders by the tough Scotch-Irish who have farmed the rocks of the valley floor for nearly two hundred years.
The most pressing health problem is one never encountered on Rass. On Saturday night, five or six of the valley men get blind drunk and beat their wives and children. In the Protestant homes I am told it is a Catholic problem, and in the Catholic homes, a Protestant. The truth, of course, is that the ailment crosses denominational lines. Perhaps it is the fault of the mountains, glowering above us, delaying sunrise and hastening the night. They are as awesome and beautiful as the open water, but the valley people do not seem to notice. Nor are they grateful for the game and timber that the mountains so generously provide. Most of them only see the ungiving soil from which a man must wrestle his subsistence and the barriers that shut him out from the world. These men struggle against their mountains. On Rass men followed the water. There is a difference.
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