by Amanda Dykes
He’s ten steps up the path before she catches up. “Wait . . . the builder is here?” She looks around the island, no sign of life. “But they can’t still live there. There’s nothing there. No way someone could exist . . .”
“I think you’ll enjoy this person,” Jeremiah answers. “And I think he’ll have a thing or two to say about your idea of ‘nothing.’ Where you see nothing in that shanty—where probably all of the rest of us see nothing—he sees . . .” Jeremiah shakes his head slowly. “Well, you’ll see.”
And that’s all the maddening man says as they hike on another ten minutes, the sea coming in and out of view with the rise and dip of the terrain. The island is narrow, probably less than half a mile wide, but the thick pine groves make it seem bigger. Just as she’s about to ask if he is leading her on a wild-goose chase, they enter one such grove, where smoke curls from a log cabin’s chimney.
fourteen
Jeremiah lifts his hand to knock, but the door swings open and a dark, weathered hand reaches out to clap him on the shoulder.
“Fletch,” a rich voice says. “Your coffee’s on. Come on in.”
Annie steps to the left to see who it is, and surprise overtakes her.
“Thanks, Ed,” Jeremiah says. “Is it okay if—”
“Yeah, bring Miss Elle on in.” Leaning on a gnarled but smooth length of driftwood, he holds his door open for them. “Thought you’d be comin’, Bob’s Annie. Didn’t think it’d take you so long, though.”
Annie’s fishing for words and not finding them. How did a man who could not see know they’d arrived before they even knocked? How could he tell she was with Jeremiah? How was he even out here, living alone on this island, so isolated from everything? But all she manages to get out is a clumsy, “How . . . ?”
Ed waves off her unfinished questions. “Old Ed just knows things,” he says. “And you know what they say about the blind. . . .”
“That . . . all of the other senses are amplified?” Annie offers tentatively. “Did you hear us coming?”
“A deaf elephant would’ve heard the two of you coming.” That chuckle again. “No. They say the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. Deaf, blind, and mute girl said that some time ago. Seems she understood quite a lot.”
His words sober as quickly as his expression. “Word is you need some vision, Bob’s Annie.”
His directness catches her off guard. She clears her throat. “I admit, I am looking for some answers.”
“Have a seat. Jeremiah’s got a thing or two to say to me, I think, and then I’ll tell you what I know.”
Barefoot, he shuffles over to the far wall, which constitutes his entire kitchen. He leans the length of driftwood against the counter, pulls an old kettle from the top of his woodstove, and pours coffee into two metal cups, blue with white specks and straight out of a lumber camp somewhere. He shuffles back—not the frail shuffle of an invalid, but the maneuvering of an archaeologist, digging for sure footing. His bare feet are his eyes, Annie realizes, noting the bright white of his pristine Keds, placed with care against the wall near the front door.
“Where’s your Citizen Kane, Ed?”
“Citizen Kane?” Annie asks. “The movie?” This place doesn’t look like it has electricity, let alone a movie library.
A low chuckle rolls out from Ed as he leads them to a cozy gathering of chairs. “No, ma’am. It’s the old cane from The Boston Post—the citizen cane. The one with that fancy brass knob on it that they like to give out to remind you you’re about as old as Methuselah.”
“So, where’d it run off to?” Jeremiah asks.
Annie can visualize it tucked away in Bob’s hospital room closet.
“Oh, I just . . . found someone who’ll have more need of it than me,” he says.
She wants to burst forth with the truth, to thank him for such a gesture toward Bob, whose bucket list is simple but includes walking with that cane. It had special meaning to him that, for some reason, he’d never explained to her.
But Ed’s downplaying the gesture, and she decides the best way to thank him is by honoring that. And by pulling out Savannah’s pie, which she does right away. Forget using it as story-bait.
He inhales appreciatively. “Now, that is a smell I’d recognize anywhere. May I?” There’s so much of the southern gentleman in his ways.
“Of course.” Annie pushes it across the coffee table—a suitcase perched on four log legs.
“Driftwood suits me better than that cane anyway,” Ed says after his first bite.
“Why is that?”
“That, Bob’s Annie, is a long story. We’ll see if we get that far today.” Ed eases back into his rocking chair and creaks back and forth, rocking as he directs the next question to Jeremiah. “What’s the news from Mississippi?” At the mention of the place, his words move deeper into the accent of his southern roots.
Jeremiah hands him a letter. “Open it, Fletch.” There’s teasing in Ed’s voice.
“You know I can’t, Mr. Ed.” Jeremiah’s smiling, parentheses creased around his grin.
“Postal regulations,” they say in unison, and Ed’s laugh rolls in easy and slow.
He slides a finger beneath the flap, pulls out the letter, and hands it back to Jeremiah. This is a ritual they’ve repeated often, Annie senses, and she presses herself farther against the deep blue sofa, trying to make herself as unobtrusive as possible.
Jeremiah clears his throat and begins reading. A letter from Hosea. A nephew, apparently. It opens Dear Uncle Ed and carries on with news from Mississippi. The homeplace. Word of Hosea’s grandson Jimmy’s high school graduation coming up, a mishap involving a crock of gravy and a poorly sealed shaker of pepper, and reports of the cicadas waking for summer.
Warmth floods Annie at the easy cadence of the letter, the world it comes from. It takes a blustering wind blowing through Ed’s cabin to ground her back in Maine.
Finished, Jeremiah tucks the letter inside a lidded tin box on the coffee table. The box is full of countless others. By the lingering smile on Ed’s face, this is his treasure trove.
“Your nephew,” Annie says. “He writes often?” She likes the thought, thinks of her own banter in the classifieds with Bob. She pulls in a sip of her coffee, its bitter notes rounded with smooth cream.
“Hosea writes every week like clockwork.” Ed’s grin tugs into lament. “But he’s not my nephew.”
Regret floods her, and if not for the coffee in her mouth, she’d be backpedaling. She should know better. Never assume—one of the basic tenets of anthropology.
But the coffee doesn’t go down quickly enough, and Ed presses on.
“I have your GrandBob to thank for these letters,” he says.
“Bob?” Annie turns the mug in her hands, and Jeremiah leans forward. The story is new to him, too, then.
“Yes, ma’am, and your daddy, William, too.”
Annie sets the coffee down. Never has she heard her father’s name mentioned in tandem with Bob’s. People skirted around the subject as if the Berlin Wall itself stood between the men, and no one would tell her why. “Water under the bridge,” they’d say. But there was no bridge. Only a dam, barely holding back the crackling tension.
“Do they know Hosea?”
A clock on the mantel chimes, and Ed listens intently, counting. “Figure we got time for some of the story before the tide comes back in and traps us here all day long. I’ve got to get to America.” He laughs at the islanders’ name for the mainland. “I’ll walk back over the sand bar with you before the tide’s too far up, if you don’t mind an old codger slowing you down.”
“As if we could keep up with you,” Jeremiah says, and the old man smiles. But it’s true, Annie has noticed. Ed is careful but swift, reading the earth with those feet.
“Well, let’s see, then. The story goes back further than we’ve got time for, but we can go back to the war and start there.”
There it was again. The
war. Everything was beginning to go back to it. It had always been this dark knot of history, ever since Annie watched the documentaries as a wide-eyed eighth grader in history class, feeling for the first time the weight of a darkness that should not be real. And now . . . it seems everywhere she turns, mystery calls her from its shadows.
“There was a time the world dropped a curtain around me. I lost my way. Hitchhiked and walked ’til I reached the edge of the world and couldn’t go farther.”
“This was after the war?” Annie asks.
“That’s so, yes. Some time after. And after another war, too,” Ed says, gravity pulling the room tight.
“Were you with my grandfather during the war?” Annie knows so little of Roy, she’s hopeful Ed might hold some insight.
Ed’s laugh is a sad one. “No, ma’am. Troops were segregated back then.”
Annie’s face burns. “I’m so sorry.” She should have known this.
“It was a different time,” Ed continues. “And most of us . . . we understood better than most what the people over there were going through, what it meant to be rounded up, shoved into certain neighborhoods, denied the rights of being a human. Threatened and killed for our heritage. So when we went off to war over there, it meant a whole lot. And when we came back . . .”
Ed shakes his head. “We’d fought, gave life and limb, as people say. But even though the government tried to help us out with that G.I. bill, some things back home hadn’t changed. We were G.I.s, sure. We could apply for those home loans, sure. But most of the banks wouldn’t loan to people like me, or would only give loans for homes in white neighborhoods. And if a black man up and moved into a white neighborhood . . . well, the neighbors didn’t care much how you got the loan. They just wanted you gone. Same with the colleges, and that G.I. school money. White universities wouldn’t take us. Black universities were flooded to past full and near to breaking with everyone trying to use their G.I. benefits and only so many schools willing to take us. Not enough teachin’ to go around.”
His wizened face holds these memories, pinching deeper into chasms as he pushes his eyebrows together. “We figured out how to win the war, figured out how to set all those captives free across the seas, but we couldn’t figure out how to liberate Jim Crow back home on our own soil.
“I was one of the lucky ones. After a few months back home in Mississippi, I found a job up at the university in Alexandria. Cleaning blackboards at night, keeping watch. Every morning come the sun, I’d go home, and every night come dark, to work I went. For nigh unto ten years after that war ended I worked in the building my own great-granddaddy laid the foundation for way back when.”
He falls silent awhile, but Annie feels the undercurrents of something coming.
“I got a fool notion in my head one day. By then the law was sayin’ they should let us into any state school, but not everyone agreed. I couldn’t forget the men we’d left behind back in Italy, in those mountains where we made horseshoes for donkeys out of melted-down barbed wire just so we could keep going one more day, where men pushed in and pushed Germany back, where they laid down their lives because they knew this was about somethin’ bigger than them. They never got to come home. I figured I owed it to them, to keep marching. So I did.
“I marched right into that university and registered. At first no one took note, they were used to seeing plain old Ed around with his broom. But when they caught wind that I was aimin’ to be a student . . . well, I didn’t mean for it to, but it struck up a new war. Riots and protests and armed guards walking me to class. It wasn’t right, but I think I could’ve taken it. It was what happened next that changed it all.”
Annie is right there with him in that beautiful, shadowed university. In her mind’s eye, she’s standing amongst those columned buildings, watching something about to crumble. And all this somehow ties to Bob and her father?
“One day the crowd showed up to march, and someone brought a gun.” Ed’s breath rakes over rubble. He rubs an arm, that scar etched there.
“You were shot,” Annie murmurs, wishing her words were a salve on that wound.
Ed nods, pursing his lips. “But not so bad,” he says. “There was another man, though—Michael. He was younger than me, with a baby at home. He built houses for a living. That wife of his worked hard just like he did, the both of them just wanting to give what good they could to their son. I s’pose that’s why Michael came out that day to march on behalf of a man he’d never met.” Ed swallows. “The same bullet that grazed me, pierced right through him.”
Annie winces.
“We thought he was gone. But somehow instead of carrying him on home to glory, that glory must’ve wrapped itself right around him. A week later he was home, holding that boy of his. Just . . . he came home without one of his arms. That man made it all the way through the war over the ocean in one piece—and then this happened.”
Annie blinks, tears splashing her folded hands. Jeremiah leaves and comes back, slipping a soft cloth napkin her way. Shoving his hands into his pocket, he lingers by her chair a moment before lowering back into his.
Ed shakes his head. “Michael lost his livelihood that day. He never once complained. Said he figured it just meant God had somethin’ new in mind, and when the Lord did a new thing, it was good.”
“What was Michael’s new trade?” Annie makes sure to speak the man’s name with the same respect Ed does.
Ed chuckles. “As it happens, there was an openin’ just then for someone to clean blackboards at night. And that man washed those slate walls like it was a science. He helped me study. We’d walk the corridors and rooms cleaning boards and windows, him drilling me on human anatomy ’til my ears bled. He’s what kept me going, all those years. Right there in the building my great-grandpa helped build. Same building Michael’s own son would grow up to teach in one day. Hosea Jones, Professor of History.”
“Hosea?” Jeremiah unfolds his arms, taps the letter box twice. “This Hosea?”
“The very same,” Ed says, beaming. And then his smile fades, melts into sorrow itself. “Shame Michael didn’t live to see that.” The man closes his eyes and is silent so long, Annie wonders if they shouldn’t step out, give him space.
But something draws her forward instead, fingers tentatively sliding beneath his.
“That bullet ended up killing him in the end. Seven years later, sepsis got to him from that old wound. I was graduating, finally, and when they gave me that piece of paper, something snapped. A man was dead—a child, fatherless—all for a piece of paper. And what did it matter? Not a lick. I was planning to go on for more training, but no one wanted a doctor who looked like me, not down there.”
The clock in the corner ticks on. Closer and closer to when the ocean will cover up their road home. They should be going, she knows, but Annie is yearning for just a little more of his story. Of how he’d come from Mississippi to Maine, and how on earth Bob had a hand in all this.
“What happened?” she asks tenderly, hoping to show she’s holding his words with care.
Ed shakes his head slow, sorry. “Nothing to my credit,” he says. “I’m ashamed to say I let the bitterness take me for too long. Even took to the bottle. Drank more than a man should one night, sitting there by Michael’s grave, and got it into my head that the man who did this should lose somethin’, too. I took a rock from near Michael’s grave and stumbled my way across town, across the tracks, to that man’s house, fixing to punch a hole right through it with that rock. But . . .”
Annie is on the edge of her seat now. “But . . . what?”
“I took one look through the window and saw him. Sitting at his kitchen table, gas lamp lighting a face that told me life hadn’t been good to him. He was bent over some paper, rubbing his head. A baby started crying, and he got up, left the room, and came back with that child in his arms.”
Ed’s chin trembles. “That rock felt heavier than iron in my hand. Something weighed it down, tellin’ me this wou
ldn’t be what Michael wanted. Truth be told, Bob’s Annie, I could nearly hear the good Lord tellin’ me somethin’ that night.”
“What was it?” Annie’s heart is beating harder. To think of hearing something straight from God himself. Something Josef Krause had heard, something Ed had heard . . . and something she doubted she’d ever hear. God was distant, in her experience. Real enough on the pages of the Bible, but not one to speak directly to the likes of her.
“Wait.”
“Wait?”
Ed nods. “Yes, ma’am. That’s what he said to my heart. Just . . . Wait. Loud and clear.”
“So . . . what did you do?”
“I waited. I wrapped my hand around that rock, stuck it in my knapsack, sobered up, and took to the road. Outrunnin’ the fact that Michael could never run again. Sometimes I walked, sometimes I hitched a ride. Didn’t care where I was going, just as far from that place as I could get. The place I’d fought a war for—two wars—and the place that denied me a home, nearly an education, and that took the life of my friend. Must’ve been weeks I was on the road.”
“That’s how you got here?”
“No, ma’am. I was headed the other way. Somewhere long about New Orleans, I scraped my last coins together and bought a po’ boy sandwich on a street corner. It was wrapped in newsprint dated three months before. The same day Michael passed on. And you know what was in it?”
Annie shakes her head.
“A sandwich.” Ed winks, and she gets the feeling he knows she’s sitting on the edge of her seat, and he’s enjoying tormenting her.
“Aw, now. I’ll tell you, Bob’s Annie. It was his words.”
His words . . . ? Then what he is telling her begins to fall into place. She’d heard rumblings of Bob’s “words,” but they’d mostly been grumblings from the man himself, about how the words he’d penned had run away farther than they were ever meant to. All the way to New Orleans, apparently.
She feels silly admitting she’s never read them and holds her tongue.