Jacob Have I Loved (14 page)

“Well,” he said. “My. Well.”

“It's good to be back,” Call said, covering the old man's discomposure.

“I've saved a tin of milk,” the Captain said. “Saved against this day.” He started for the kitchen. “Let me just put on the kettle.”

“Do you want some help?” I asked, half-rising.

“Oh, no, no. You sit right there and entertain our conquering hero.” Call laughed. “You heard about Caroline?” the Captain called.

“Yessir, and she's everlastingly grateful to you.”

“It was Trudy's money. Nothing would have made Trudy happier than to know she helped Caroline go on with her music.” There was a pause. Then he stuck his head in the doorway. “You been keeping up with each other lately?”

“I saw her,” Call said. “I stopped in New York on the way home.”

My body understood long before my mind did. First it chilled, then it began to burn, with my heart thumping overtime in alarm.

They were exchanging inanities about the size and terrors of New York, but my body knew that the conversation was about something far more threatening. The Captain brought in the black tea and the tin of milk, which he had neatly poked open with an ice pick—two holes on one side, one on the other.

“I'm guessing you can take the tea now,” he said, handing a chipped cup and saucer, first to me, and then to Call. “Not just the milk.”

“That's right,” Call said grinning. “They made me a man.”

“So.” The Captain seated himself carefully, and compensating for the tremor in his hands, slowly
lifted his own cup to his mouth and took a long sip. “So. What's Miss Caroline got to say for herself these days?”

Call's face flamed in pleasure. It was the question he had been bursting to answer. “She—she said, ‘Yes.'”

I knew, of course, what he meant. There was no need to press him to explain. But something compelled me to hear my own doom spelled out. “‘Yes' to what?” I asked.

“Let's just say,” he was eyeing the Captain slyly. “Let's just say she answered her Call.”

The Captain gave a great tuba laugh, sloshing his tea out onto his lap. He patted away at it with his free hand, still laughing.

“Get it?” Call turned to me. “She answered—”

“I guess it took you most of the train trip from New York to work that one out.” Call stopped smiling. I suppose it was the bitterness in my tone. “She's only seventeen,” I said, trying to justify myself.

“Eighteen in January.” As though I needed to be told. “My mother was married at fifteen.”

“So was my grandmother,” I said nastily. “Great advertisement for early marriage, wouldn't you say?”

“Sara Louise.” The Captain was almost whispering.

I stood up so quickly that the room seemed to spin. I grabbed the arm of the chair, rattling the tea cup all around the saucer. I staggered to the kitchen and put it down, then came back into the room. I knew I was making a scene, but I didn't know how to escape. How unjust to throw everything at me at once.

“Well,” I said, “I guess you won't be culling for Daddy this winter.”

“No,” he said. “I've got a part-time job lined up in New York as soon as I'm discharged. With that and my GI Bill, I can go to school there.”

“What about Caroline's school? Have you thought of her? What she'll have to give up to marry you?”

“Oh, my blessed,” he said. “It's not like that. I'd never let her give up her chance to sing. She'll go ahead with all her plans. I wouldn't ever hold her back. Surely you know that, Wheeze.” He was asking me humbly to understand. “I can help her. I can—”

“Give her a safe harbor,” the Captain offered quietly.

“Caroline?” I snorted.

“She's alone in that world, Wheeze. She needs me.”

You? I was thinking. You, Call? I said nothing, but he heard me anyhow.

“I guess,” he was saying softly, “I guess it's hard for you to think someone like Caroline might favor me.” He gave a short laugh. “You never did think I was much to brag about, now did you?”

Oh, God. If I had believed in God I could have cursed him and died. As it was, I extricated myself as quickly as I could from them and made my way, not home, but back to the crab house where I proceeded to ruin my only decent dress fishing the floats.

C
all was not discharged as soon as he had hoped, so it was the next year, the day before Christmas 1946, that he and Caroline were married. My parents went up for the ceremony in the Juilliard chapel, which, I gathered, was stark in word and dress, but rich in Bach and Mozart, thanks to Caroline's school friends.

I stayed home with Grandma. It was my choice. My parents spoke of getting a neighbor to stay with her, and each offered to remain and let me go instead. But I felt they were greatly relieved by my insistence. The way Grandma was or could be, we dreaded the thought of asking someone outside the family to endure even a few days alone with her. Besides, as they said later, it was the first trip of any length that the two of them had ever taken together.
They left, with apologies to me, on the twenty-second. Perhaps my soul, now as calloused as my hands, could have borne such a wedding. I don't know. I was glad not to be put to the test.

Grandma was like a child whose parents have gone off and left her without making plain where they have gone or when they could be expected to return. “Where's Truitt?”

“He's gone to New York for Caroline's wedding, Grandma.”

She looked blank, as though she were not quite sure who Caroline was but felt she shouldn't ask. She rocked quietly for a few minutes, picking a thread on her knitted shawl. “Where's Susan?”

“She went with Daddy to New York.”

“New York?”

“For Caroline's wedding.”

“I know,” she snapped. “Why did they leave me?”

“Because you hate to ride the ferry, Grandma, especially in the wintertime.”

“I hate the water.” She dully observed the wornout ritual. Suddenly she stopped rocking and cocked her head at me. “Why are you here?”

“You hate to be alone, Grandma.”

“Humph.” She sniffed and pulled the shawl tight
about her shoulders. “I don't need to be watched like one of your old peelers.”

The image of Grandma as an old sook caught in my mind.
Get it?
I wanted to say to somebody.

“What you cutting on?”

“Oh, just whittling.” It was in fact a branch of almost straight driftwood, which I had decided would make a good cane for Grandma. I had spread out part of the Sunday
Sun
and was trimming the wood down before sanding it.

“I ain't seen that old heathen about,” she said. “I guess he's dead like everybody else.”

“No. Captain Wallace is just fine.”

“He don't ever come around here.” She sighed. “Too snobby to pay attention to the likes of me, I reckon.”

I stopped whittling. “I thought you didn't like him, Grandma.”

“No, I don't favor him. He thinks he's the cat's pajamas. Too good for the daughter of a man who don't even own his own boat.”

“What are you talking about, Grandma?”

“He never paid me no mind. Old heathen.”

I felt as though I had stumbled off a narrow path right into a marsh. “Grandma, do you mean
now
?”

“You was always a ignorant child. I wouldn't have him on a silver plate
now.
I mean
then.
”

“Grandma,” I was still trying to feel my way, “you were a lot younger than the Captain.”

She flashed her eyes at me. “I would've growed,” she said like a stubborn child. “He run off and left before I had a chance.” Then she put her head down on her gnarled hands and began to cry. “I turned out purty,” she said between sobs. “By the time I was thirteen I was the purtiest little thing on the island, but he was already gone. I waited for two more years before I married William, but he never come back 'til now.” She wiped her eyes on her shawl and leaned her head back watching a spot on the ceiling. “He was too old for me then, and now it 'pears he's too young. After scatter-headed children like you and Caroline. Oh, my blessed, what a cruel man.”

What was I to do? For all the pain she had caused me, to see her like that, still haunted by a childish passion, made me want to put my arm around her and comfort her. But she had turned on me so often, I was afraid to touch her. I tried with words.

“I think he'd be glad to be your friend,” I said. “He's all alone now.” At least she seemed to be listening to me. “Call and Caroline and I used to go
to see him. But—they are gone now, and it isn't proper for me to go down alone.”

She raised her head. For a moment I was sure she was about to hurl one of her biblical curses at me, but she didn't. She just eased back and murmured something like “not proper.”

So I took another bold step. “We could ask him for Christmas dinner,” I said. “There'll be just the two of us. Wouldn't it seem more like Christmas to have company?”

“Would he be good?”

I wasn't sure what she meant by “good,” but I said I was sure he would be.

“Can't have no yelling,” she explained. “You can't have a body yelling at you when you're trying to eat.”

“No,” I said. “You can't have that.” And added, “I'll tell him you said so.”

She smiled slyly. “Yes,” she said. “If he wants to come calling here, he better be good.”

I wonder if I shall ever feel as old again as I did that Christmas. My grandmother with her charm, gaudy and perishable as dime-store jewelry—whoever had a more exasperating child to contend with? The Captain responded with the dignity of a young teen who is being pestered by a child whose parents
he is determined to impress. While I was the aged parent, weary of the tiresome antics of the one and the studied patience of the other.

But I shouldn't complain. Our dinner went remarkably well. I had a chicken—a great treat for us in those days—stuffed with oysters, boiled potatoes, corn pudding, some of Momma's canned beans, rolls, and a hot peach cobbler.

Grandma picked the oysters out of the stuffing and pushed them to the side of her plate. “You know I don't favor oysters,” she said pouting at me.

“Oh, Miss Louise,” said the Captain. “Try them with a bit of the white meat. They're delicious.”

“It's all right,” I said quickly. “Just leave them. Doesn't matter.”

“I don't want them on my plate.”

I jumped up and took her plate to the kitchen, scraped off the offending oysters, and brought it back, smiling as broadly as I could manage.

“How's that now?” I asked, sitting down.

“I don't favor corn pudding neither,” she said. I hesitated, not sure if I should take the pudding off her plate or not. “But I'll eat it.” She flashed a proud smile at the Captain. “A lot of times I eat things I don't really favor,” she told him.

“Good,” he said. “Good for you.” He was beginning to relax a bit and enjoy his own dinner.

“Old Trudy died,” she said after a while. Neither the Captain nor I replied to this. “Everybody dies,” she said sadly.

“Yes, they do,” he answered.

“I fear the water will get my coffin,” she said. “I hate the water.”

“You got some good years to go yet, Miss Louise.”

She grinned at him saucily. “Longer than you anyway. I guess you wish now you was young as me, eh, Hiram Wallace?”

He put down his fork and patted his napkin to his beard. “Well—”

“One time I was too young and too poor for you to pay me any mind.”

“I was a foolish young man, but that's a long time ago, now, Miss Louise.”

“You had no cause to leave, you know. There was ones who would have had you, coward or no.”

“Grandma? How about some more chicken?”

She was not to be distracted. “There's others who's not favored lightning, you know.”

“Lightning?”

“'Course, chopping down your daddy's mast—” She tittered.

“That's just an old story, Grandma. The Captain never—”

“But I did,” he said. “Took me twenty minutes to chop it down and fifty years to set it back.” He smiled at me, taking another roll from the tray I was offering. “It's so good to be old,” he said. “Youth is a mortal wound.”

“What's he talking about, Wheeze? I don't know what he's saying.”

He put down his roll and reached over and took her gnarled hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. “I'm trying to tell the child something only you and I can understand. How good it is to be old.”

I watched her face go from being startled by his gesture to being pleased that he had somehow joined her side against me. Then she seemed to remember. She drew back her hand. “We'll die,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “But we'll be ready. The young ones never are.”

She would not leave us that day, even for her nap, but rocking in her chair after dinner, she fell asleep, her mouth slightly open, her head rolled awkwardly against her right shoulder.

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.