Jacob Have I Loved (10 page)

I slammed the drawer shut and went back downstairs. How dare she hurt his feelings? He had lost everything he had in this world. I saw his beautiful hands lovingly sanding the back of one of his old chairs. He had worked so hard on that house. We all had. He and Call and I. Not Caroline. It didn't
belong to her, just to the three of us. But when I got to the living room, there was Caroline, giving him a cup of coffee, practically falling all over him while she did so. Then she got herself a cup and sat down beside him, her beautiful eyes mooning with pity.

“Would you like some coffee, Louise?”

“No,” I said sharply. “Somebody's got to remember this is no picnic.” There was no place to run to, no tip of the marsh where I could sit alone on a stump of driftwood and watch the water. I wanted to cry and scream and throw things. Instead, under almost perfect control, I got a broom and began savagely to attack the sand that was stuck like cement in the corner of the living room.

F
or the three days that the Captain lived with us, I avoided looking him in the eye. I was, instead, obsessed with his hands. They were always moving because he was intent on paying his way by helping to clean the house. By the time the water had left the yard and street, most of our downstairs, though smelling more like a crab shanty than a proper house, was at least cleaned out. We carried the stuffed chair and the couch to the front porch to let them air as best we could. Grandma's high bed had escaped the water but still smelled damp, so we put the mattress on the porch roof to sun.

The Captain treated me as though nothing had happened between us. At least I think he did. My brain was so feverish, it couldn't have judged what was natural and what was not. He called me “Sara
Louise,” but he had done that for some time, hadn't he? Why then did his voice speaking my name seem so heartbreakingly sweet? Tears would start in my eyes at the sound.

The second afternoon after the water was gone, he left the house for several hours. I wanted to go with him, but I couldn't trust myself. What insane thing might I do, finding myself suddenly alone with him? But after he was gone I began to worry. Would he do something foolish now that he had lost everything? I had one horrible vision of him walking straight out into the Bay until he was swallowed up. Oh, if only I could tell him that he had me—that I would never desert him. But I couldn't. I knew I couldn't.

I forgot my work and began to watch for him. Caroline and I were supposed to be putting fresh paper on the lower kitchen cabinet shelves, so that the canned goods could be brought down once more from upstairs and put away.

“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 my 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.

C
aroline 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 want 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.

Caroline waited until he had generously salted and peppered his potatoes, then she laid her elbows on the table and propelled herself a bit closer to it and thus to him. “We heard that Auntie Braxton is going to be back in a couple of days,” she said.

“That's right,” he said, taking a large bite of potato.

“We've been worried about where you're going to live.”

He raised his hand to stop her talking and held it there until he had chewed and swallowed the bite. “I know what you're going to say, and I thank you, but I just can't.”

See? See? I was smiling inside and out.

Caroline was not. “How do you know what I'm going to say?”

“You're going to ask me back to your house—and
I'm grateful, but you know I can't come in on you again.”

Caroline laughed. “Oh, I've got a much better idea than that.”

All my smiles had dried up.

“Have you now, Miss Caroline?” He was spearing another piece of potato with his fork.

“I sure do.” She leaned toward him with the kind of smile you see a woman give a man when she's got something more than politeness on her mind. “I'm proposing that you marry Miss Trudy Braxton.”

“Marry?” he asked, putting down his fork and staring wide-eyed into her face. “You're suggesting that Trudy and I get married?”

“Don't worry,” Call began earnestly, “you wouldn't have to—” at which point my bare heel slammed down on his bare toes. He stopped talking to give me a look of hurt surprise.

Caroline ignored us both. “Think of it this way,” she said in her most sophisticated tone of voice. “She needs someone to take care of her and her house, and you need a house to live in. It would be a marriage of convenience.” I noticed she didn't say “in name only.” At least she had a whiff of delicacy.

“I be damned,” he said under his breath, looking
from one face to another. I pretended to study a torn cuticle to miss his scrutiny. “You kids do beat the limit. Who would have ever thought?”

“Once you get used to the idea, it'll make a lot of sense to you,” Caroline said. “It's not,” she added quickly, “that you couldn't find someplace else. Plenty of folks would take you in. But no one else
needs
you. Not like Auntie Braxton.” She turned to me, then to Call for support.

By now I was biting away at the offending cuticle, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Call nodding his head vigorously, pumping up for a big affirmative statement. “It'll make sense,” he repeated Caroline's theme. “It'll make plenty of sense, once you get used to it.”

“It will, will it?” The Captain was shaking his head and grinning. “You sound like my poor old mother.” Eventually he picked up his fork and, using one side of it, thoughtfully scraped the pepper off one of the potatoes. “People,” he said at last, no shadow of a grin remaining, “people would say I did it for the money.”

“What money?” Caroline asked.

“Nobody but you ever heard tell of no money,” Call said. “Me and Wheeze are the only ones you
told. And now Caroline.”

“I wouldn't take a cent of her money, you know.”

“Of course you wouldn't,” Caroline said. What did she know?

“There probably isn't any,” I said huffily. “We cleaned good and we never saw any.”

He smiled appreciatively at me as though I had helped him. “Well,” he said grinning. “It's a crazy idea.” Something about the way he said it made me feel cold all over.

“You're going to think about it,” Caroline said, rather than asked.

He shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “No harm thinking crazy.”

 

The next day he caught the ferry to Crisfield. He never even told us he was going. We had to get the word from Captain Billy. And he didn't come home that night or the next. We knew because we met the ferry each evening.

On the third day there he was, waving to us from the deck. My heart jumped to see him, and my body felt all over again how it was to be crushed against the rough material of his clothes, his heart beating straight through my backbone. Call and
Caroline were waving back and calling out to him, but I was standing there shivering, my arms crossed, my hands hooked up under my arms and pressed against my breasts.

The boat was tied up, and now he was calling us by name. He wanted Caroline and me to see to something in the hold and Call to come aboard and give him a hand.

Caroline, as usual, moved faster than I. “Come, look here!” she yelled. When I got to where Captain Billy's sons were handing up the freight, I saw the chair. It was huge and dark brown with a wicker seat and back and large metal wheels rimmed in hard black rubber. It took both Edgar and Richard to lift it up onto the pier. Caroline was grinning all over. “I bet he's done it,” she said.

Whatever was in my look made her correct herself. “I mean,” she said with an impatient sigh, “I just mean, I bet he's gone and married her.”

I had no place to run to, and even if I had, it was too late. They were already emerging from the cabin. Very slowly up the ladder, first Call's head, his neck bent. Then at last the three of them, the Captain and Call carrying Auntie Braxton on a hand sling between them, she with an arm about
each's shoulder. When the three of them turned around at the top of the ladder, I could see that she was wearing on her shoulder a huge chrysanthemum corsage.

“He did marry her.” Caroline said it softly, but it was exploding like shrapnel inside my stomach. She ran for the wheelchair and pushed it to the end of the gangplank as proud as though she were rolling out the red carpet for royalty. Call and the Captain carefully lowered the old woman into the chair.

As he straightened up, the Captain saw me hanging back and called to me. “Sara Louise,” he said. “Come on over. I want you to shake hands with Miz Wallace here.”

The old woman looked up at him when he said that, as worshipful as a repentant sinner testifying in church. When I came close, she put out her hand. Shaking her hand was like holding a bunch of twigs, but her eyes were clear and steady. I think she said, “How are you, Sara Louise?” The words were hard to decipher.