Jacob Have I Loved (6 page)

C
all and I had been so busy crabbing since school let out that we'd hardly been to visit the Captain together. Call, I knew, usually went to see him on Sunday afternoons, but my parents liked me to stay closer by on Sundays. I didn't mind. The long sleepy afternoon was perfect for writing lyrics. By now I had nearly a shoe box full, just waiting for Lyrics Unlimited to write and demand all that I could deliver.

So Call was surprised when, on a Tuesday, I proposed that we wind up the crabbing an hour early and pay a visit to the Captain.

“I thought you didn't like him,” Call said.

“Of course I like him. Why shouldn't I like him?”

“Because he tells good jokes.”

“That's a stupid reason not to like somebody.”

“Yeah. That's what I thought.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Nothing.”

I decided to ignore the implied insult. “You can learn a lot from someone who comes from the outside. Take Mr. Rice. I guess Mr. Rice taught me more than all my other teachers put together.” All two of them.

“About what?”

I blushed. “About everything—music, life. He was a great man.” I talked and thought about Mr. Rice as though he were dead and gone forever. That's how far away his Texas army post seemed.

Call was quiet, watching my face. I knew he was fixing to say something but didn't quite know how to say it. “What's the matter?” I asked him. As soon as I asked, I knew. He didn't want me to visit the Captain with him. He wanted the Captain all to himself. Besides, he was suspicious of me. I decided to tackle the matter directly.

“Why don't you want me to visit the Captain?”

“I never said I didn't want you to visit the Captain.”

“Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go.”

He shrugged his shoulders unhappily. “Free
country,” he muttered. It didn't make any sense, but I knew what he meant—that if there had been a way to stop me, he would have.

The Captain was tending crab lines on his broken-down dock. I poled the boat in close before he heard us and looked up.

“Well, if it isn't Wheeze and Cough,” he said, smiling widely and touching the bill of his cap.

“Wheeze and Cough, get it?” Call yelled back to me from the bow. He shook his head, smiling all over his face. “Wheeze and Cough, that's really good.”

I tried to smile, but my face had too much basic integrity for me even to pretend I had heard something funny.

Call and the Captain gave each other a “don't mind her” look, and Call threw the Captain the bowline and he tied us up. I don't mind admitting I wasn't too keen to step out on that ramshackle dock, but after Call had jumped onto it, and it had only shuddered a bit, I climbed carefully out and walked off to the shore as quickly as I dared.

“I'm going to fix it.” The Captain hadn't missed my anxiety. “Just so many things to do around here.” He nodded at Call. “I tried to get your friend
here to give me a hand, but—”

Call blushed. “You can't hammer on a Sunday,” he said defensively.

Hiram Wallace would have known that. Nobody on the island worked on the Sabbath. It was as bad as drinking whiskey and close to cursing and adultery. I racked my brain for the next question—the one that would prove to Call beyond doubt that the Captain was no more Hiram Wallace than I was. “Don't you recall the Seventh Commandment?” I asked slyly.

He lifted his cap and scratched his hair underneath. “Seventh Commandment?”

I had him. That is, I almost had him. I hadn't reckoned on Call. Call who snorted and almost yelled, “Seventh? Seventh? Seventh don't have neither to do with hammering on Sunday. Seventh's the one,” he stopped, suddenly embarrassed and lowered his voice, “on adultery.”

“Adultery?” The Captain started laughing out loud. “Well, I'm too old to worry about that one. Now there was a time—” He grinned mischievously. I suspect Call wanted him to go on as much as I did, but the old man stopped right there. Like offering candy to a child and then yanking back
your hand with some excuse about saving his teeth, I thought.

“Today is Tuesday,” Call said as we started for the house.

“Tuesday! Then—then—” the Captain seemed terribly excited. “Then tomorrow is Wednesday, and after that comes Thursday! Friday! Saturday! Sunday! And Monday!!”

I thought Call would die laughing on the spot, but he managed to control himself enough to gasp, “Get it, Wheeze? Get it?”

If I couldn't smile at “Wheeze and Cough,” how was I to force a laugh at a recitation of the days of the week?

“Don't mind her, Captain. She don't catch on too good.”

“Too well.” At least I could demonstrate proper grammar. “Too well.”

“Too well. Too well,” repeated the Captain chirpily, lifting his hand to his ear. “Hark? Do I hear the mating call of a feathered friend of the marsh-land?”

Call, naturally, collapsed. All I could think of was if we'd netted a spy like this, Franklin D. Roosevelt would have thrown him back. Good heavens.

Eventually, Call recovered from his hysterics enough to explain to the Captain that since it was Tuesday and not yet suppertime, he and I would be glad to lend a hand fixing up the old dock or house or whatever else the Captain might want doing around the place. In fact, Call added, we could come at about this time every afternoon, except Sunday of course, and help out.

“I'd want to pay you something,” the Captain said. My ears stretched practically to the top of my head, and I opened my mouth to utter a humble thanks.

“Oh,
no
,” said Call. “We couldn't think of taking money from a neighbor.”

Who couldn't? But for once in his life Call talked faster than I could think, and the two of them snatched away my time and energy and sold me into slavery before I had breath to hint that I wouldn't be insulted by a small tip every now and then.

That was how we came to spend two hours every afternoon slaving for the Captain. I noticed grimly that he didn't mind at all ordering us around, even though we were supposed to be doing him a favor. We didn't have our tea break after the first week because tin was becoming scarce and the Captain
was short on canned milk. And, as he explained, since he could no longer offer Call milk, it would have been mean for the two of us to stop for tea. I would have been glad to stop for any excuse, even that awful tea. When you're fourteen and your body is changing as mine was that summer, you just plain get tired, but I couldn't admit it. Both Call and the Captain seemed to regard me as mentally deficient, since I couldn't appreciate their marvelous humor. I couldn't let them make fun of me physically as well.

Nothing went right for me that summer, unless you count the fact that when my periods began, almost a year after Caroline's of course, they began on a Sunday morning
before
I left the house for church instead of after, but the stain went clear through my pants and slip to my only good dress. Momma let me pretend to be sick. What else could she do? I couldn't wash and dry my dress in time for Sunday school.

My grandmother kept saying things like “What's the matter with her? She don't look sick to me. Just don't want to worship the Lord.” And “If she was mine, I'd give her a good smack on the rear. That'd perk her up fast enough.”

I was terrified that Momma would betray me and
tell Grandma the real reason I was staying home. But she didn't. Even Caroline tried to shush Grandma up. I don't know what Grandma told her old friends, but for weeks after that they'd all ask sweetly about my health, both physical and spiritual.

My spiritual health was about on a par with a person who's been dead three days, but I wasn't about to admit it and get prayed for out loud on Wednesday night by that bunch of old sooks.

I
used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year. In the winter I would choose February. I had it figured out that the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day. December and January are cold and wet, but, somehow, that's their right. February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down. Christmas is over and spring seems years away. So February sneaks in a couple of beautiful days early on, and just when you're stretching out like a cat waking up, bang! February hits you right in the stomach. And not with a lightning strike like a September hurricane, but punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse—except August.

There were days that August when I felt as though God had lowered a giant glass lid over the whole steaming Bay. All year we had lived in the wind, now we were cut off without a breath of air. On the water the haze was so thick it was like trying to inhale wet cotton. I began to pray for a real blow. I wanted relief that badly.

In February the weather sometimes gave us a vacation; in August, never. We just got up earlier every morning until finally we met ourselves going to bed. Call and I didn't get up quite as early as my father, who may have never gone to bed between tending to his floats and going out to crab, but we were up well before dawn, trying to sneak a fair catch of crabs from the eelgrass before the sun drove us off the water.

I had a faint hope that the Captain, not being an islander, would take the heat as an excuse to slow down a bit. But Call fixed that.

“We're coming in from crabbing early these hot mornings,” he blabbed. “We could come on over here and get lots more done of a day.”

“I can't come before dinner,” I said. “Momma expects me home to eat.”

“Well, fiddle, Wheeze,” Call said. “You all eat by eleven. Don't take more'n ten minutes to eat.”

“We don't stuff like scavengers at our house,” I said. “I couldn't possibly get here that fast. Besides, I got chores.”

“We'll be here by noon,” he told the Captain cheerily. I could have choked him. That meant at least four and a half hours of gut-ripping work in the heat for nothing. Nothing.

The Captain, of course, was delighted. His one concession to the temperature was that we work indoors and not on the dock in the sun. He began planning out loud all the projects the three of us could complete by the time school opened. I managed, with a lie about my mother needing me, to get away by four-fifteen. I wanted to get to the post office before supper. It would have been better perhaps if I had not, for there it was, my letter from Lyrics Unlimited. I ran with it to the tip of the island, to my driftwood stump, and sat down to open it, my hands shaking so they made a poor job of it.

Even I, wanting so much to believe, could tell it was mimeographed. The only thing typed in was my name, and that had been misspelled. I was a fool, but I'm proud to say, not that big a fool. Heartsick, I ripped the letter down to its last exclamation point and flung it like confetti out into the water.

August and February are both alike in one way. They're both dream killers.

The next day the orange tomcat reappeared. It was the same cat, I'm sure, that had scared Call and me that time four years before when we had decided to investigate the house, and the same cat that the Captain had finally driven out after the first week or so he had lived there. The cat marched in through the open front door as though he were the long-absent landlord popping in to check out the tenants.

The Captain was furious. “I thought I got rid of that fool thing months ago.” He got his broom and took after the huge tom, who calmly jumped onto the kitchen table. When the Captain took a swing at him there, he leaped daintily to the floor, taking a cup down with his tail.

“Damn it to hell!”

I had the capacity to imagine such language, but neither Call nor I had ever really heard it spoken. I think we were as fascinated as we were shocked.

“Captain,” said Call, when he recovered himself slightly, “do you know what you said?”

The Captain was still stalking the cat and answered impatiently, “Of course I know what I said. I said—”

“Captain. That's against the commandments.”

He took another futile swing before he answered. “Call, I know those blasted commandments as well as you do, and there is not one word in them about how to speak to tomcats. Now stop trying to play preacher and help me catch that damn cat and let's get him out of here.”

Call was too shocked now to do anything but obey. He ran out after the cat. I started laughing. For some reason, the Captain had at last said something I thought was funny. I wasn't just giggling either. I was belly laughing. He looked at me and grinned. “Nice to hear you laugh, Miss Wheeze,” he said.

“You're right!” I screeched through my laughter. “There's not—I bet there's not one word in the whole blasted Bible on how to speak to cats.”

He began to laugh, too. Just sat down on the kitchen stool, the broom across his knees, and laughed. Why was it so funny? Was it because it was so wonderful to discover something on this island that was free—something unproscribed by God, Moses, or the Methodist conference? We could talk to cats any way we pleased.

Call reappeared carrying the struggling tom. He looked first at the Captain and then at me, apparently baffled. He had never seen us laughing together, of course. Maybe he didn't know whether to be pleased or jealous.

“Who—who—” puffed out the Captain. “Who is going to take that damned animal back to Trudy Braxton?”

“Trudy Braxton!” I think both Call and I yelled it. We had never heard anyone call Auntie Braxton by her Christian name. Even my grandmother, who must have been nearly the old woman's age, called her “Auntie.”

After the first shock, my feeling was one of pleasure. It really was. I no longer wanted the Captain to be a Nazi spy or an interloper. I wanted him to be Hiram Wallace, an islander who had escaped. That was far more wonderful than being a saboteur to be
caught or an imposter to be exposed.

“I'll take the cat back,” I said. “If the stink don't get me first.”

For some reason my irreverent description of Auntie Braxton's house triggered Call. “Did you hear what she said?” he asked the Captain. “‘If the stink don't get me first.'” Then he and the Captain were laughing their heads off.

I grabbed the cat from Call just as it wriggled free. “Come along,” I said, “before I call you a stinking name or two.” I wasn't quite bold enough to use the forbidden curse word aloud, but I thought of it several times quite happily as I made my way up the path and to Auntie Braxton's house.

I hadn't exaggerated the smell. The windows of the house were open and the overwhelming ammonia essence of cat stood like an invisible wall between me and the front yard. The tom was scratching and struggling to get out of my grasp, leaving stinging red lines all over my bare arms. If I hadn't been afraid that he would turn and run straight back to the Captain's, I would have dropped him on the front walk and run back myself. I had, however, a duty to perform, so I marched bravely up the walk to Auntie Braxton's door.

“Auntie Braxton!” I yelled her name over unhappy cat sounds coming from the other side of the door. If I let go the tom to knock or open the door, I might lose him, so I just stood there on the dilapidated porch and hollered. “Auntie Braxton. I got your cat.”

From within a cat howled in reply, but no human voice accompanied it. I called again. Still no answer from the old lady. It occurred to me that I might be able to push the cat through the torn window screen. I went over to the window. The hole was large enough if I stuffed the creature in a bit. As I stooped to do so, I saw something dark lying on the front room floor. There were cats perched on top of it and cats walking across it, so for a minute I simply stared at it, not recognizing it for what it was—a human form. When I did, I panicked. Throwing the cat down, I half tripped over it in my hurry to be gone. I raced back to the Captain's house where I nearly fell over the door stoop, panting out my terror.

“Auntie Braxton!” I said. “Lying dead on the floor with cats crawling all over her.”

“Slow down,” said the Captain. I tried to catch my breath and repeat myself, but after two words he
was already past me and walking, almost running up the path toward the old woman's house. Call and I followed. We were both terrified, but we ran to catch up to him and stayed at his heels. No matter what terrible thing was going on, we wanted to be with him and each other.

The Captain pushed open the door. People never locked their houses on Rass. Most doors didn't even have locks. The three of us went in. No one was bothering about the smell anymore. The Captain knelt down beside the old woman, scattering cats in every direction.

Call and I hung back a little, wide-eyed and breathing fast.

“She's alive,” he said. “Call, you go down to the dock. As soon as the ferry docks, Captain Billy's going to have to take her to the hospital.”

Relief washed over me like a gentle surf. It wasn't that I'd never seen a dead body. On an island, you can't get away from death. But I'd never found one. Never been the first person accidentally to stumble in on death. It seemed more terrible somehow to be the first one.

“Don't just stand there, Sara Louise. Go find some men to help me carry her down to the dock.”

I jumped and ran to obey. It was not until later that I realized that he had called me by my full name, Sara Louise. No one bothered, not even my mother, to call me Sara Louise, but he had done it without thinking. Strange how much that meant to me.

I got my father and two other men from their crab houses, and we raced back to Auntie Braxton's. The Captain had found a cot mattress, and he and my father gently rolled the old woman over and lifted her to the mattress. The Captain covered her with a cotton blanket. I was glad, for her thin legs seemed indecent somehow poking out from her faded housedress. Then the four men began to lift the awkward makeshift stretcher. As they did so, the old lady moaned, like someone disturbed by a bad dream.

“It's all right, Trudy, it's me, Hiram,” the Captain said. “I'll take care of you.” My father and the other two men gave one another funny looks, but no one said anything. They had to get her to the hospital.