Diann Ducharme (5 page)

In misery, I looked at the empty chairs and dirty plates and cups at our table. Me, tutor a fisherman? I snorted scornfully. But my mind wandered to Mr. Whimble’s bluebird eyes, and I heard my mouth mumble, “Well, I suppose I could give it a try. Only for a little while.”

Daddy said with a nod, “I’ll tell him you can start tomorrow.”

Mama worked hard at stifling a yawn with a vanilla hand. She said, “It will be good for your education, Abigail.
I
have found that teaching reinforces and expands our own learning. This will provide a worthy occupation for you, and keep your mind from sliding into oblivion this summer.”

She removed her napkin from her lap and placed it on the table. “And I will chaperone, of course.”

They rose from the table, nodding and waving at everyone in the room, as I sat numbly, my head swimming. Mercy, what had I just agreed to?

A pink-faced Maddie, closely circled by a flock of scavenging boys, called out to me to accompany them on her family’s cart back to the house. It was dark outside, and getting late, but I agreed to go, on account of how thrilled Mama and Daddy were at the offer.

Sitting so close atop the cart, I could smell the pungent scent of alcohol on their breath as they laughed with one another. The boys then made a gallant show of assisting the ladies off the cart and helping us through the soft sand up to the little white house.

The story-and-a-half house really was charming, nestled cozily amid the bushy trees, with spectacular views of the surrounding island. Even if I couldn’t see the water, I heard the Atlantic Ocean with one ear and the Roanoke Sound with the other. For once, Maddie hadn’t been exaggerating.

We gathered on the eastern veranda to catch the night breeze. At the request of Mr. and Mrs. Adams, who were leaving us to ourselves, a little black boy came running to light the young men’s cigars with some hot tines.

With no adult chaperones, it was too intimate there on the dark veranda. I felt as small as a mouse on a patch of moonlit sand, an easy nighttime snack for the preying owls. I crossed my arms over my chest.

Red said, “I heard about your uncle Jack a couple years ago, Abigail. I’m truly sorry for your loss. I lost a cousin in the war, too. Didn’t know him very well, though. He was from down in Georgia.
He got shot straight through his skull.” He puffed on a cigar, and the smoke blew quickly away into the night. “It’s morbid, having a dead relative in the family.”

“Yes, it is.” I nodded, uncomfortable talking about my dead uncle in front of this group. I touched my reticule, buried inside my green skirts.

After an awkward silence, Red asked, “How’s your plantation doing? I hear tell it’s rough going for planters like your daddy these days. Bankruptcies left and right.”

Alice asked, “You used to own over a hundred slaves, isn’t that about right? And they all ran off, I heard.”

Maddie, with a little swing of her curls, stopped her conversation with George Wakefield to eavesdrop. I heard the lonely call of a gull sliding over the ocean.

I cocked my chin out and said, “Some of our best people stayed on after the war, so we’re making out. In fact, we built a cottage, over on the ocean side.”

They all twittered and rustled over that like invisible birds in a bush. It got me to wondering what everyone was saying about us behind our backs. I glanced to where I thought our cottage stood, alone on the sand, but I couldn’t see a single thing in the darkness.

The black boy broke the silence when he banged out the door with a tray full of silver cups. I smelled the bourbon as he stood in front of me with his offerings, and I shook my head unconvincingly. I’d never tasted alcohol in my life, but at just that moment I wanted nothing more than to guzzle a cup or two down. But the image of Daddy at breakfast, chasing his customary slice of pie with two shots of whiskey, made me think twice.

I wondered what people like the Adamses and the Taylors thought of us. I knew that our situation didn’t look good. I knew that Sinclair House appeared dark and haunted, with its cobwebbed windows
missing draperies, paint peeling off the moldy shutters, weeds growing in the flower beds. It resembled a sleeping giant, about to fall over with a mighty crash into the dusty earth.

Everything that my English ancestors had worked for, everything that my daddy and my uncle Jack had worked for, was disappearing. Maybe it was inevitable, the decline of our plantation. I’d like to blame its demise on the death of my uncle, but really, it was the death of the South that was to blame.

Still, the two deaths are always intertwined in my head. Uncle Jack was as much a part of the land as a tobacco leaf. He grew up in the house; he was even born, like my daddy before him, in the master bedroom, in a mahogany four-poster bed.

Even our slaves, the same ones who couldn’t wait to leave us when the war ended, cried when Uncle Jack was buried, even though Daddy wouldn’t let them come to the services. I could hear them late that same night, singing the saddest African songs in low, pained voices. Their singing kept me up almost the whole night, even after the songs had long ended.

Suddenly I couldn’t for a moment longer bear sitting with Maddie and her friends, who were getting progressively drunker. I made an excuse about being tired, so Maddie, with a puckered smile, ordered one of their sleepy servants to drive me home on the cart.

They all called out to me as they saw me bumping along toward the ocean, “Bye now, Abigail! Don’t get washed away by the waves tonight!”

I could hear Maddie’s laugh spiral over and over in the wind.

W
ITH A BELLY FULL OF PULLED PORK AND
W
INNIE’S TASTY COLLARED
greens, I sat idly on the porch, watching the beachcombers strolling up the shore. My limbs still felt like large pieces of waterlogged driftwood from my poor night’s rest, and some strands of hair, having
escaped a sloppily pinned knot, blew in ticklish ovals around my face.

I longed for a nap, but Mama had just leaned her head out the window to see if I had planned a lesson for Mr. Whimble. I finally went poking around in one of my trunks to find some appropriate items. I pulled out my slate and a couple pieces of chalk, which I had brought for Charlie and Martha’s summer lessons, and some writing paper and my quill and ink.

Since there wasn’t much wind today, I brought everything out to the porch, along with the old wooden table and chairs. I couldn’t for even a minute imagine sitting indoors all summer, especially with such a smelly man.

After what seemed like a long while, I heard Winnie greet Mr. Whimble at the door on the western side of the house, but she didn’t invite him in like she would a normal guest. She walked him around the outside of the house, like she would a horse.

“Here you go, Mr. Benjamin. She been waitin’ on you—it ain’t right to keep a lady a-settin’ in the heat, you know,” she said, and ambled back inside. She didn’t even offer him anything to drink, which he desperately looked like he could use.

Mr. Whimble seemed not to care. He climbed up the three steps to the porch and greeted me with an easy smile. But I could see how filthy he was. I tried to conceal my distaste, since I didn’t want to embarrass him. Yet even outside I could smell the fishy stench that lingered on his clothing and skin.

I was somehow disappointed that the man didn’t even bother to wash before coming to sit for hours in the company of a young lady. He seemed to realize his state by the sour look on my face. “I’m afraid that I stink like a hog at slop time. I came straight from hunting with your daddy, and those largemouth bass sure gave us a hard time. I can go wash up, if you can’t stand me,” he offered.

I fiddled with the supplies and nibbled my lower lip. Making him wash seemed the utmost in rude hostessing. But I was spared a response by the squeaking of the screen door and Mama’s appearance on the porch.

She stared at him as if waiting for an answer to an obvious question, and he shifted around in his chair, stammering out his crude introductions. I began to feel a little sorry for him, in spite of myself.

“Tell me of the schooling out here, Mr. Whimble,” she ordered.

“Oh, we don’t get much schooling out here, Mrs. Sinclair. We don’t have a proper schoolhouse, and no teachers, neither. Every so often Shep Johnson offers up some lessons, you know, in between fishing runs and whatnot. And all the younguns drag themselves over to his house to learn their figures.

“But we all have to earn our living, ma’am, and no schooling is going to bring in the fish or build the boats. So I guess you could say we ain’t too educated out here, and it don’t matter that much to us, anyhow,” he finished.

He seemed almost smug in his ignorance. Mama inquired the obvious: “Then why do you want to learn now? What is so important that you’d want to give up your extra wages to learn? I’m sure you could use the money …”

He glanced over to me and then said, with something like thought, “Well, I’ll like to marry soon, and I aim to provide a good life for my family. Get a steady job, one that’s not so higgledy-piggledy. I figure it’s a little sacrifice for a better day later on.”

He paused and smoothed his dirty hands on his cutoff trousers. “My pap thinks I’m dumber than a stump for throwing away my money on learning. I guess it does sound stupid to him. He’s been a fisherman his entire life. But I know things are changing ’round these parts, and I’m not the one to get left behind.”

I saw Mama’s eyes appraise him with a touch more kindness. “I think that’s an admirable decision. Education is vitally important. It’s a new world now, and we all must adapt to it. Well, good luck to you,” she said. She rose from the table to leave us alone, and went to sit on the other end of the porch to read what looked to be an anatomy textbook.

I didn’t really know how to begin teaching a grown man how to read and write, so I asked cautiously, “I thought I’d start by going over the alphabet. How many letters do you know?”

“Oh, a few, I reckon …” he answered vaguely, looking toward the ocean.

“Can you spell your name at least?”

“Well, not exactly the entire name
Ben-ja-min …
but I do know that my name starts with a
B
!” he stated victoriously. “Though I ain’t at all sure I could call it out from a bunch of scribblings.”

An exhausted, hopeless feeling began to permeate my very bones. I could not believe that I was stuck teaching the alphabet, something that even my little brother and sister learned at the age of three, to an ignorant, uncouth fisherman for an entire summer at the beach.

Mr. Whimble ran a hand through his greasy hair. “I guess you got your work cut out for you, don’t you, Miss Sinclair?”

I exhaled long and hard through my mouth, the way that Winnie sometimes did when everything was raking her nerves. Then I dragged the slate over, picked up the chalk, and began writing out the alphabet. When I finished, I asked him which letters he remembered, as I pointed to them with a finger. To my shock, he recited the entire alphabet, mixing up only
M
and
N
, and
X
and
Z
.

“Not bad,” I said, surprise leaking into my voice.

He grinned and said, “Had me pegged for the village idiot, I reckon.”

“It’s just that you’re just catching on so quickly. How much school did you say you had?”

He looked up to the porch ceiling. “Oh, ’bout a year, I reckon, give or take a couple months. It was a long while ago, though.”

I peeked through lowered eyelashes at the cracked skin over his knuckles, at the meaty muscles along the length of his forearms. “So you’re a fisherman. All you do is fish.”