That made sense. Jeff could see how that would make her feel and she might decide to marry him if she felt that way. “But — then you left — ” he started to say.
“I was so unhappy, Jeffie. He didn’t notice, he didn’t care. That horrible little house and all the stuffy professors and their horrible frumpy wives, and he didn’t do anything to make things better. We never had any money — I always had to pinch pennies, everything, no matter how small. There wasn’t ever enough. You don’t know how that can wear a person down.” Her eyes grew unhappy as she remembered.
Jeff felt so sorry for her he didn’t know what to say. He wished he hadn’t brought up the question at all. He was angry at himself for making her unhappy. “It’s OK, really; I understand.”
“I don’t think you can,” she said, her voice low and sad. “Sometimes, I don’t think any man can.”
“I don’t mind,” Jeff said. “But tell me about this festival; does it last all week? Who’s going to appear, do you know?”
That cheered her up. “Max will, that’s the important thing, for a whole week.” She smiled at Jeff as if they shared a secret. “And Gambo would be livid if she knew.” Then she mentioned a list of other names, some of which he had heard before, and the rest of the lunch went too quickly by.
Melody returned to her darkroom after lunch, telling Jeff to wait in the kitchen please. Then she took him by the arm and led him with her to the cellar stairs, to whisper in his ear: “Don’t say anything about Willum to Miss Opal. He’s in jail, for five years — he was selling marijuana. But if he’d been white it would only be two years and — don’t ask about him, OK? It breaks her heart.”
But Miss Opal did want to talk about Willum, explaining how Willum couldn’t help going bad, with the friends he had and his parents living so far away, with her having to work for their living, with the schools the way they were, and the job situation. “That boy — he never did have a chance,” she said, stirring sugar into her cup of tea. “But I tell him, his old Granny won’t desert him, he always have a home with me. I ask the Lord to spare me for that time.”
“How old are you?” Jeff asked.
“Why, seventy-eight.”
Jeff stared at her. “But you’re older than Gambo. I didn’t know you were.”
“Well, I always was,” Miss Opal said.
Melody came back upstairs to show him a print so fresh she held it in tweezers and let it drip onto the table. “Look, Jeffie, what do you think?”
It was the happiest picture Jeff had ever seen. The boy in the picture had just seen something that he’d always wanted to see and never hoped to. Whatever it was, it made his eyes bright and his shoulders, all of his body that showed in the photograph, looked like he was about to run toward it.
“But that’s me,” Jeff said.
“A candid portrait. Now will you believe I’m good.”
“The boy never doubted it, Miss Melody.”
“I’ll make you a copy,” Melody promised him, “and Gambo too — would you like that? You can keep this one.”
Jeff didn’t know he ever looked like that.
“But I’m going to have to work downstairs all afternoon, I’m afraid; you’re going to have to find something to do. We took hundreds of pictures last night. You can find something to do, can’t you?”
Finding something to do was what Jeff did — for a month, because Melody was away from the middle of June to the middle of July, as it turned out. The trip kept getting prolonged, for a few days, or a week. Jeff figured out in short order that Gambo’s stroke had altered her interest in him, somehow. When he asked her questions, she answered impatiently and always concluded with something about “you young people.” She wanted to talk, that summer, with the aunts, and their conversations began with the question, “Remember when?” Jeff didn’t remember, but he would have liked to listen. The women, however, looked at him as if he were eavesdropping moved closer together so that he couldn’t hear, or simply ignored him. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong, he didn’t know how to do it right. Miss Opal, busy keeping the entire house, had no time for him and refused his offers to help her with her chores. “She’d be furious to see that. She’d fire me, and then what would I do? And then what would she do?”
After the first four phone calls, Jeff stopped hoping that Melody would be home soon. The disappointment of hearing her voice on the phone, after he had been expecting her to walk in the front door at any moment, of hearing her explain what had happened, asking if he could stand it if she was away for another few days, promising to really be back on Thursday, or next Saturday. . . . It was better not to hope.
Instead, he kept himself out of the house, wandered around the city, did some sightseeing, and took to riding buses out as far as they went. Gambo asked him every morning where he’d be going, how much money he needed, whether it was raining or not. She wanted him to be away. “I’m too old to entertain children,” she said, opening her black purse. “I don’t know what your mother is thinking of.”
Jeff had more money than he could spend that month, because his father sent him ten dollars every week, the bill wrapped around with the yellow lined paper the Professor wrote lectures on. The Professor also had something to say, some sentence. “Hope your weather is better than ours,” or “Here’s your allowance.” Sometimes he included a postcard Brother Thomas had sent from England to Jeff. So Jeff could take Melody out for as many lunches as she liked, when she got back.
One day Melody did return and was there in the living room with Gambo and the aunts when Jeff walked in the front door. He didn’t remember where he’d been when he heard her voice and saw her face, her eyes shining at him, her hair damp and curly from a shower. “Where have you been?” she asked him.
Jeff just let the happiness grow inside him.
“Nobody knew where you were,” Melody said. “You shouldn’t just go wandering off like that.”
She was angry. “I’m sorry,” Jeff said. “I told Gambo this morning.”
Melody stood up and took him out into the front hallway to say, “You know she can’t remember anything. Honestly, Jeffie, I thought I could trust you.”
Jeff felt ashamed of himself, although he couldn’t be quite sure why, and he hadn’t noticed Gambo forgetting, just not being interested. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then said it again. “I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t satisfied. “And I told Max I’d go with him out to Santa Fe, and now I don’t know if I can,” she told Jeff. “All you can say is, ‘I’m sorry.’ Just like your father.”
Jeff just stared at her. He couldn’t have spoken. He was confused, between guilt at failing her, dismay that she was going away again, and the desire that she not be angry at him.
“Well?” she asked.
He swallowed. “When?”
“We have to leave tonight and drive straight through, to get there in time. I had to wash and iron everything, and Miss Opal is so slow — it takes her ages to do anything these days.”
“But Melody . . .” Jeff heard his own voice complaining and saw anger rise in her eyes again. He didn’t protest any more. “For how long?” he asked.
“A month, maybe five weeks. It’s a really important chance for Max. And you’re here to keep an eye on Gambo for me so it’s all right. If you weren’t here I don’t know how I’d get away.”
Jeff made himself accept it, right then. He knew that if he waited even for a second, he would start complaining, and then she really wouldn’t like him. “OK,” he said.
“Oh Jeffie, I knew I could count on you,” and she smiled into his eyes. But her smile was as painful to him as her anger. He didn’t know what to do. But he thought, if he was careful, he could keep a grip on himself until after dinner, until he was alone in his room. He held his face expressionless. “Sometimes,” Melody said, leaning forward to kiss him gently on the cheek, as if to take the sting out of her words, “you really do remind me of your father. That’s silly, isn’t it?
Come and watch me pack? We can catch up with each other. Oh, I missed you, Jeffie,” she said. She looked like she meant it. He felt like she was telling the truth, even though he knew she must be lying.
When Jeff was at last alone in his room that night, he lay across the bed and cried. He didn’t even take off his clothes or turn on the lights. He felt so bad — sorry for himself, and angry at himself for losing her — and helpless. He didn’t know what he should have done, what he could have done. He felt — rolling over onto his back and wrapping his arms across the pain in his chest and stomach, pain that wasn’t even real — as if he had been broken into thousands of little pieces. Broken and then dropped into some dark place. Some dark place where he was always going to stay.
Because Melody was going away, again. Because she didn’t want to stay where he was. And he wasn’t sure he could stand that.
He had never suspected how easy he was to break.
He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do. Ever.
* * *
Jeff made it through several long days, trying not to think. He mostly stayed up in his room. He did not come down for meals, but ate sandwiches in the kitchen if he felt hungry. Nobody paid much attention to him. He paid no attention to anybody, just struggled with the sadness that always threatened to overwhelm him into crying again. He was ashamed of himself, but he couldn’t help it. So he stayed upstairs. He watched out his window, but what the weather was he didn’t notice. After several days, he realized that with the exception of Miss Opal, nobody in the house knew he was there. Not really knew. If you’d asked them, he supposed they would have looked vaguely around and said, “Jefferson? He’s somewhere around, isn’t he? Or has he gone away?”
Because he was easy to forget, easy to leave behind — Jeff understood that. He had interested them for the one summer, but that was more because of being a stranger and the last of the Boudraults than because of what he was like. He’d misunderstood that.
Everybody could leave him behind. But that was OK, he decided, waking before dawn one morning when he had fallen asleep fully dressed on top of the bedspread. If nobody owed him anything then he didn’t owe anybody anything. So at least he could do just what he wanted. If there was anything he wanted to do.
That morning he rode the bus along the same route he had followed on his last day last summer. Then he walked down along the same road, through the live oak tunnels. The island lay as he had remembered it. Jeff stood squinting at it over the broad field of marsh, over the narrow river. He wouldn’t mind going out there, he thought. He was hot — he could feel sweat running down from his armpits, over his ribs. His hair stuck on his forehead. Bugs buzzed around him. If he had a boat.
Jeff walked slowly back up the road to the bus stop. There, he went into the ramshackle store where the screen was ripped and the dim air inside uncooled even by a fan. He bought himself a Coke from the white-haired black man behind the counter. A strip of flypaper hung in coils down from the ceiling, covered with dead flies. A fly buzzed around Jeff’s ear.
“If I wanted a boat,” Jeff said.
“Suh?”
“Like a rowboat,” Jeff said.
“Whuffo?”
“Never mind,” Jeff said. He drained the last of the Coke from the bottle. His sorrow was rising up in him again, and he needed to get outside.
“M’neighbor’s boy — he got him a barque he be glad to get shot of,” the old man said.
Jeff hesitated. He didn’t know why he’d asked. He brushed at the fly that hovered near his ear.
“Come wi’ me, suh. It’s just a pace out around back.”
Jeff followed him, going by oil drums that overflowed with garbage, down a short dusty road to a line of five wooden cabins, built up on cinderblocks. Cars were parked all over the place, some rusting away on wheelless axles, some shiny new. A creek ran behind.
A younger man, who wore only denim overalls, led him onto a sagging dock. At the end, a flat-bottomed, unpainted rowboat was tied up. Its oars had weathered splintery gray. The man’s skin glistened with sweat, his dark eyes barely looked at Jeff. He yawned and scratched at his neck. Jeff looked down at the boat.
It had one seat, just a board nailed across at the center. There wasn’t any water in it, so he figured it didn’t leak.
“She be fifteen,” the man said.
“I don’t know how to row,” Jeff said. He didn’t know what he was doing back here, anyway.
The man shrugged and walked back along the dock. Jeff walked with him.
“It’s not hard to row, is it?”
“Nosuh.”
“Fifteen dollars?”
“Yessuh.”
“If I give you another five, can I leave it tied up here? When I’m not using it?”
The man shrugged. He turned and faced Jeff, looking over Jeff’s shoulder.
“I’ll bring you the money tomorrow,” Jeff said.
The dark eyes finally focused on him. “I be here,” the man said.
It took Jeff three days to learn to handle the little boat well enough to dare an approach to the island. By that time he could row with confidence along the creek that ran behind the cabins. He had run aground on the shallow creek bottom often enough to know how little trouble that caused, had asked the nameless black man about currents and tides, had looked at a map of the area and found the island on it. He bought himself a hat to protect his head. Out on the water, the sunlight was reflected and it scorched his face and his eyes especially. He had also heard a couple of songs he’d never heard before. “They’s gospel,” the man had answered his question. “She sings over to the church.” Whoever she was. But the man was no more curious about Jeff than Jeff was about him.
One morning, Jeff pushed himself away from the dock, turned the boat around, and rowed down the back creek, heading toward the island. He had sandwiches in a paper bag and two quart jars of apple juice. He’d learned how thirsty you could get out on the water.
He rowed down between standing marsh grasses. It wasn’t long before he was out of sight of human habitation, out of the sound of human voices. He could see only the low wall of grass and the bleached sky above it. An occasional bird burst out of cover when he came near. He could hear the silence made by the surf breaking on the other side of the barrier island, by the plashing sound of his oars in the water.
Although the map he had looked at was clear in Jeff’s memory and he turned north when the back creek joined the deeper creek that separated the island from the mainland without hesitation, the strangeness of the scene affected him. The tide was up and made the water look deceptively deep. Over toward the island, across the grasses, he could see the line of trees and underbrush: it looked wild and dangerous. He was afraid.
He was always a little afraid in the boat. That was, in fact, why he liked it. That fear came from outside, from the unfamiliarity of the place, from his being so far from people that if he yelled for help nobody would hear him. He slipped into that fear like slipping into the water to go swimming. Because the fear that came from outside distracted him from the fear that was living inside him. The fear inside him threatened at any moment to take him over and sweep him away, and the only way he could manage it at all was by avoiding it. In the boat, alone on the water.
That first day he went only half a mile up the main creek. Then he tossed over the ten-pound anchor he had purchased and sat. The boat swayed gently on the water of the narrow creek. He sat and looked around him and listened and became easier in his spirit as the scene grew familiar. This had been the pattern of his days on the back creek, too: he would move the boat out until he felt more frightened than he had courage to match; then he would anchor and wait.
Jeff ate his sandwiches, drank juice, and watched the slimy underwater stalks of the grasses grow visible as the tide ran out. He sat on the floorboards, his back against the side, watching and listening. A rustle of wings announced the arrival of one of the great blue herons. The bird landed a few yards up
from the boat and proceeded to walk along the water’s edge, its long beak pointing down. The bird’s legs, more like pipes than legs, bent backwards at the knee, so it looked like the bird was going backwards or was trying to go backwards when it was actually moving forward or like it could only move forward by going backward. Every now and then it would halt and stand motionless, then plunge its beak into the shallow water, shake its head two or three times, and swallow its catch, whole.
The blues were always alone, Jeff had noticed. They came at low tide to fish along the edges of the marshes. They stalked the shallows, their flat, elongated, triangular heads facing down, to where their prey hid. This blue hunted up about a hundred yards, then backed up until he stood camouflaged against the grasses. The blues were big, awkward birds on land; in flight they spread long wings out, tucked their necks in against their chests, and trailed their legs out straight behind them, looping across the land or the water.
At the end of the afternoon, Jeff rowed back down the creek, then along up to the dock. The last bus to town left at sunset.
It was a week before he actually landed on the island, tying the boat up to the poles of an abandoned dock that sat beneath the overgrown lawn of a burned-out house. There, the steep mudbanks were inhabited by land crabs. Their holes, as large as fifty cent pieces, made the steep brown banks look like swiss cheese. The crabs came out into the sun — to eat, Jeff supposed. When he had first seen them, from a distance, he had thought they were large beetles, and not until he had come so close that they scurried back into their holes had he recognized them. The first time he landed, Jeff watched the crabs for a cautious half hour before he brought the boat close enough to tie up to a piling. As he had deduced, they scrabbled quickly into holes when he set his foot on the mudbank and scrambled up its slippery surface to the weedy lawn.