The Whiskey Sea

by Ann Howard Creel

  “Well, you’ve graduated even if you didn’t show up today. I’ve been saving money so you can take a secretary course now,” Silver said to her. He was sitting in his favorite chair on the front porch, squinting into the afternoon light that had settled over Highlands as soft and silky as a yellow chiffon scarf. Still wearing his clammer’s overalls and shucking clams out of a bucket sitting at his feet, he was preparing for one of his lectures, Frieda thought grimly.

  She stood with her feet planted and her arms crossed. “I’m not going to secretary’s school. I’ve done what I had to do. I hated school but I finished, for you.”

  Silver looked up with that wary expression in his eyes he got every time they disagreed, which was often. “Then what you going to do with yourself? You’re eighteen. Not a kid anymore. You got to have a future.”

  Frieda stepped forward to the porch rail. She wore a pair of Silver’s old pants, hitched up and held at her waist with one of his belts, into which she’d carved extra holes. He’d bought her a graduation dress, which hung on a nail in the room she shared with Bea, but she’d never even tried it on.

  The house, in its snug spot at the end of the road, sat perpendicular to the water, and she looked to her left toward the bay, where the breeze was lashing up little whitecaps and the late, slanting light sparkled on the swells. Out there was the only part of the earth that spoke to her.

  She pushed back a tendril of long, unruly hair. “I’ll clam with you.”

  With her firm gaze, she followed some incoming fishing boats. On the water—that was where she belonged. The sea didn’t care about differences in human lives; it didn’t judge. Out there the rest of the world seemed far away, and the inner emptiness she’d felt for most all of her life eased. Something else filled it, something other than her anger toward the townspeople, her fear for Bea’s future, the looks people gave her, or her constant worry about getting by. When the bay was furious and churning, those frothing waters pulled the resentment right out of her and fed it to the waves. And when the tides stopped surging and the bay became silver and flat, it was as if some almighty power had smoothed her rough edges while leveling the surface of the sea with big, broad hands. She felt as if she could sail out past the land and lighthouses and float on forever.

  Silver tossed the empty clamshells into a different bucket, and the loud clinking sound told Frieda he was getting ready to say something she wouldn’t like.

  “Clamming ain’t no work for a woman.”

  Frieda stood tall and hinged a hand on her hip. “Why not? Any work on the water is better than something shoreside. It’s been good enough for you.”

  “Because I didn’t have no other choice.”

  “Well, I do have a choice, and I’m not going to any more schools. I’m done with that. Besides, remember I took a typing class junior year? I was terrible at it, and I hated every minute. My fingers didn’t work when I couldn’t look at the keys, when I had to keep my eyes on the paper. I have to look at what I’m doing.”

  He sat back. “Well, I cain’t work much longer.”

  Frieda had noticed. Silver had always been old to her, lined with age and the sure tracks of a hard life out in the sun and sea winds. But he’d also been spry for his years. Going out in the boat every day, making runs to the school, cooking, and taking care of two girls had made that a necessity. Now he was beginning to lose stamina, move slower, and complain about aches and pains. Over the past two years his time on the water had gradually been cut in half.

  Silver said, “We got to get you some working skills.”

  Keeping her gaze on the bay, she said, “I can take over the boat now.”

  She could feel his piercing stare on her back as he said flatly, “I sold it.”

  His words hit her like a rogue wave, fierce enough to slap her down but not kill her. Sold it? She spun toward him, gasping for air. “What?”

  He looked down. “Like I said, I sold it.”

  Her heart started thumping, and her voice came out in a screech. “What are you talking about?”

  “I ain’t getting any younger, and I got a fair price. Fella’s coming by later to pay me off.”

  So it wasn’t sold yet. She pulled in a long breath. “You can’t do this. I won’t let you.”

  Silver shucked another clam. “Good fella. You know him.” His brow furrowed, and he tossed the shell. “Sam Hicks.”

  Incredulous, Frieda asked, “How could you even think of selling the boat? If you don’t want it anymore, give it to me.”

  “I sold it, I said.”

  “B-But . . .”

  “I already made the arrangements. It’s done now.”

  “I-I always assumed . . . you’d let me have it. You know how I love it out there!”

  “I never made no promises. I need to get some money out of her while I still can.”

  Her eyes bore through him, but he was having a hard time looking her in the face. “Are you crazy? How’re we going to live?”

  He edged the knife around another clamshell. “I been putting away money for some time. I got enough to get by. This house is paid for, and I’ll pick up an odd job here and there. Might crew for some fishermen when the weather’s good. After I sell the boat, I’ll have the money so you can go to that secretary school.”

  “I want the boat! I want to be out on the water. You know this.”

  “Like I said already, a life on the water ain’t no life for a woman.”

  Frieda snorted, even as panic started to pummel her. Silver seemed dead set, not budging. “I’m not like other girls. How, how . . . ?”

  “You can marry a clammer if you want.”

  A dreadful realization blanketed her brain. “Oh no you don’t.”

  “He’s a good man, Frieda. Always been a good young man. You might take a liking to him.”

  “How dare you!”

  “I always been looking out for you. Sam Hicks could make for a good husband. And now that he’ll be owning the boat, if you marry him you can still go out from time to time.”

  In that moment she came as close to hating Silver as she’d ever come before, despite the fact they’d always tangled. But arguing was pretty pointless with someone as stubborn as Silver. Trying a different approach, she consciously slowed her breathing and softened her tone. “Please don’t sell the boat.”

  He clearly tempered himself a bit, too. His eyes were a tad bit sad even. “I already done it, Frieda. I’m sure sorry if it don’t suit you.”

  “You can change your mind, can’t you?”

  “No,” he said, and wiped the knife on his overalls. “I gave the man my word.”

  “Puh-lease, Silver!”

  He shook his head and kept on shucking clams, but his rhythm was off.

  “You didn’t even talk to me about it!”

  He pointed at her with the knife. “You won’t see it this way now, but in time you’ll see I’m doing right by you. You ain’t never been out there in the world of men. You need some kind of skill for working indoors, and in time you’re going to want yourself a husband.”

  “Obviously you’ve missed the fact that it’s 1921. Everything has changed. We girls can do anything.”

  “Anything?” Silver squinted up at her. “I don’t want you doing anything. I want you doing something safe, by God.”

  Frieda huffed. “I’m as good as any man on our boat. I figure that if you gave it to me, I’d try some new areas for clamming, and I’d find a way to make more money than all the others. I’d stay out from dawn to dusk and save up every cent for Bea’s future. She loves school, loves her teachers, each and every one. She wants to be a teacher, don’t you know that? And college will take money.”

  “You ain’t never gonna make enough to pay for no college, not as a secretary or by fishing, neither one. Bea’ll be better off marrying a good provider.”

  Rage flaming again, Frieda shouted, “Are you going to pick her husband, too?”

  He looked at her keenly. “You
might give the man a fighting chance.”

  “Silver, please don’t do this. The boat has been in your family for so many years, in our family.”

  “I’m trying my best to make sure you’ll always be alright.”

  “But you know I can take care of myself.”

  Silver snorted, briefly seeming to be experiencing an ounce of regret. But his tone never wavered. “I made the decision, and now you just gotta take it like a grown-up.”

  Frieda knew exactly how the rest of this conversation would play out. She and Silver would argue back and forth, and the one who held the power would win. She’d held the power when it came to graduation. Silver held it with the boat.

  She stood in a state of exasperation, heat building inside her head. If she had to stay in his presence a moment longer, she’d explode.

  “You’ve taken everything—everything—from me!” She let out a grunt and kicked an empty bucket, which rattled across the porch, startling some nearby gulls feeding on fish guts by the water, then took heavy steps down the porch stairs and marched away. As she stormed off, she thought hard. She had to come up with a plan. The boat hadn’t changed hands yet. What could she bargain with?

  Both she and Bea had the last name of Hope, same as their mother’s. No one knew who their real fathers were. It didn’t matter, because they were Silver’s daughters. For him she had put up with the school filled with rich kids who’d sneered at her, as if she were little better than a cast-off rag doll. Not only was she poor, she was the dead whore’s daughter, and many mothers didn’t want their children to befriend her. Besides, the children were mean, often avoiding her, whispering behind her back, then bursting into sudden laughter over their private jokes. She couldn’t make friends with the clammers’ kids who had attended school either, for a different reason. Each and every one of them had something that made her think he or she could be related to her or Bea. Each could be a half sister or half brother. Every dark-haired boy or girl could be one of hers; every blond, one of Bea’s. She’d put up with it all for Silver, and now look what he’d done to her. Her escape had always been to the water, and he’d just taken that away from her.

  Silver had promised to sell the boat without telling her, and even worse, he was giving up the boat to a man he thought she’d marry just so she could hold some claim to it. Sam Hicks was about twenty-five, and after growing up here he’d served time in the Great War working on engines for the navy. His age meant that he was too young to be Bea’s or her father, and she’d known him to be a decent, hardworking sort who stuck mostly to himself. A few times they’d run into each other on the docks, and once he asked her to join him for a soda. She declined because Silver was waiting for her. Another time she caught him following her with his eyes as she helped Silver moor the boat. But she’d always kept her distance from boys, even those in her class. She had never been one to believe in happy endings; that was Bea’s territory.

  As if she’d conjured her sister’s presence by the ferocity of her thoughts, here Bea was, running up behind Frieda.

  “Slow down.” Bea, now fourteen years old, panted out the words. “Don’t go off mad. I can’t stand it when you and Silver fight.”

  Frieda’s feet kept hammering the ground, her sister on her heels, and she glanced back to see Bea’s face scrunched up in agony. “Then why were you eavesdropping?”

  “You were yelling!”

  Still storming off, Frieda said over her shoulder, “I can’t be around him right now. I swear, I want to shake him.”

  “It was my idea,” Bea blurted out.

  Frieda stopped dead in her tracks and slowly turned around. Was this whole day going to be filled with startling and infuriating confessions? “What?”

  Bea leaned over her knees, catching her breath. Then she lifted her tormented face to Frieda’s glare. “It’s true. It makes sense—you and Hicks with the boat together. So don’t blame Silver; I was the first to bring it up. You always blame him . . .”

  “And you’re always too eager to shoulder the blame! Stop it, will you? I know you didn’t come up with this on your own.”

  Sunlight trembling in Bea’s silk-spun hair, she straightened, sucked in a long, tight breath, and focused on Frieda’s eyes. “OK, so I might not have come up with it first. But I think it’s a great idea.”

  Frieda harrumphed. “And I like to think for myself!”

  “Look, you know me. I like to think of romantic endings.”

  “Good lord, Bea.”

  Bea wrung her hands together. “Come back home. Apologize.”

  When Bea set her clear blue eyes that way, Frieda was normally hard-pressed to refuse her anything. Something as pure and sweet as her sister should never have landed here. Bea was too fragile and sensitive for such a hardscrabble life. Silver had tried to make things as good as he could, but it was up to Frieda to make them better. Without the boat her chances were nil, and the boiling anguish inside her was erupting. “Why don’t you do it for me? You apologize so well. Besides, I think he should be apologizing to me! You, too. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “His mind is made up. It’s obvious he can’t keep going out anymore. He’s getting tired and old. Have some mercy. Knowing he’d have to sell, he wanted to do it before the boat fell into disrepair, and he chose a good man.”

  “This is unbelievable. He doesn’t want me to be a clammer, but it’s OK for me to marry a clammer?”

  Bea looked away, as if a tiny splash of shame had just run through her. She rubbed her temples. “Something like that . . . But Hicks is a veteran and a mechanic, too. He can do other things. He can always make a living.”

  “So now you’re planning my life, too.”

  Bea let her hands fall to her sides. “I have dreams. I know what I want. I want you to have some plans, too, something to work toward. What, dear sister, do you want, anyway?”

  “You know what I wanted! How many times do I have to say that?”

  Bea’s eyes pleading, she said, “Well, the boat’s gone. Find something else to want. Otherwise, you won’t have anything to reach for.”

  Frieda chuffed out a laugh. “Such flowery talk. You have promise, Bea. You have so much to offer the outside world. I’m just a regular girl trying to chip an itty-bitty pebble of my own out of a hard rock situation.”

  “See? You’re flowery, too, only you’d never admit it.”

  Frieda kicked at the pieces of oyster shell that littered the road. She couldn’t hold still another moment. She loved her sister, and Bea needed her. Even small slights hurt Bea deeply, so Frieda normally protected her. But not today. Her feet flying again, she yelled over her shoulder, “Leave me alone, please!”

  Bea called from behind her, “Don’t be gone long. Silver will worry . . .”

  Frieda ran as if she could crush the day’s revelations on the shell-strewn street. She ran until her breath was ragged and sweat swam down her spine. Finally walking to calm herself, she strode down the dock, where the sinking sun lit up the distant water with floating topaz twinkles. Clammers still in their bright-yellow oilskins were gathering for talk and drink after a day over the shoals. Some of them spoke to her, but most of them only glanced up, rheumy-eyed and weary, stooped over their catches or their boat engines, and didn’t say anything. Some looked her over like hawks eyeing their next meal. She didn’t know if they stared the same way at all young women, who were rare on the docks, or if it was because of her mother’s legacy. Their stares seemed predatory and leering—the way she imagined one would appraise a whore’s daughter who might be forced into the same business someday.

  She walked past them all, feeling lost, then trudged uphill to the cemetery to sit on her mother’s grave. Some people said it was disrespectful to sit on a grave, but that was the only place Frieda could recall anything about her mother. The memory of a five-year-old is blurry, but she could dredge up a few things: her mother teaching her to make sand castles on the beach; being tucked in at night; having a cool, da
mp cloth placed gently on her forehead when she was sick. She remembered her mother’s caring hand and missed it, and yet she never wanted to grow up to be her mother. She had to make sure that never happened to her or Bea.

  The warmth of the earth seeped into her bones. Today there was a new bunch of wildflowers on the grave of the long-dead town whore. Frieda figured Silver left them from time to time. She’d seen bunches of flowers laid out here for years. At one point she thought Bea brought the flowers, but Bea denied it.

  Picking them up, she curled her legs underneath her on the grave marked with only a once-white wooden cross. These flowers were fresh, and she knew that Silver hadn’t been up here today. She lifted the flowers to her nose and took a sniff. Earth and nectar. Not salt and water.

  Who else still thought of Della? Had anyone loved Della while she was of this earth? Della Hope: what a heartrending name for someone who’d had such a hopeless life. No one ever mentioned her, as if sad subjects should not be broached. People knew—everyone knew—but it was as if Della Hope had never existed and all that remained was her legacy of two leftover girls. Long ago, kids at school had stopped whispering about Frieda and Bea’s origins, and only the occasional kid had the nerve to mention it now, then quickly regretted the impulse. Frieda had made sure of that with her thorny exterior, and Bea had accomplished the same thing with her personality and likeability. The old story had passed its prime, making her mother more dead than ever.

  And what of life and love after her death? Had Della risen past clouds and flocks of dewy angels into the open arms of a kind Lord in heaven? These questions never met up with answers. Instead they floated like each of her breaths—then disappeared.