A Solitary Blue

  “You might like it,” Jeff said. He couldn’t understand Brother Thomas’s lack of energy; it wasn’t like him, not like him at all. Something was wrong, he knew that, and he realized that this same barren feeling he was getting from Brother Thomas now was the only kind of feeling he’d gotten from the man this visit. Something was very wrong.

  Jeff chewed and thought. Whatever it was, even talking with the Professor wasn’t doing any good. But what was it? OK, Jeff said to himself, surprising himself, if you’re supposed to have a talent for knowing how people feel, what’s Brother Thomas feeling?

  He glanced at the man sitting hunched, staring out at the sky but not seeing it. Bleak, Jeff felt, bleak and hopeless, some inner landscape as barren as the moon’s surface, cold and lifeless.

  What can I do? Jeff asked, inside himself. He figured, if the Professor’s intelligence couldn’t help, then that wasn’t the way. He wondered if he should do anything, even if he could think of what. But he thought he would try. Something was wrong, he didn’t know what, but he wondered what he could give to Brother Thomas — who had given so much to him one way and another. “You ought to come,” he urged him. “You ought to try it, you used to be good at netting crabs off the line. Besides, you’d like my friends. I don’t know who it’ll be today.”

  “Are these the Tillermans?”

  “Yes. It would tire you out, too; we’ll let you do all the work. You remember how much work it is, don’t you? So you’ll sleep well tonght.” Jeff worked to persuade him. “But it gets hot.”

  “I don’t mind,” Brother Thomas said. Although he didn’t say he wanted to go along, he went. They needed a flashlight to get to the boat and cheek the supplies, but once they were away from the dock, Jeff told Brother Thomas to turn it off. The motor worked noisily as Jeff took the boat out to the deep center of the creek, then along into the bay. In predawn darkness, black waves made the boat buck slightly. Brother Thomas’s shape was black at the bow of the boat. The last stars faded from the sky, but Brother Thomas didn’t notice them.

  It was James who waited at the end of the Tillermans’ dock, in sleepy untalkativeness, two apples in his hand. But after the dawn had begun, a pool of light on the eastern horizon spreading out to illuminate the whole sky, and after he had eaten the apples and tossed the cores into the water, he began questioning Brother Thomas, as Jeff had known he would.

  “Apple cores are biodegradable, so it’s not like throwing garbage. Do you worry about garbage, are you an ecologist?”

  “Isn’t it because they’re garbage that they’re biodegradable?” Brother Thomas asked.

  “Yeah, maybe. No, wait, that’s not true, garbage means everything even tin cans and plastic. Who are you, anyway?”

  “He teaches at the university with the Professor,” Jeff told James when Brother Thomas didn’t answer. James was off, what did he teach, what did that mean, what kinds of books did he teach out of, what did they say, how did you get interested in teaching stuff like that, how did you learn about it, were his students smart? Brother Thomas answered all the questions, and at last his eyes met Jeff’s — humorously — over James’s head. Jeff just smiled back.

  In between, they ran the line, culled through the haul, waited a few minutes then ran it again. Jeff drove the motor, because James got impatient at the slow, careful speed you needed to maintain. Brother Thomas and James took turns netting the crabs. Brother Thomas tried to pick up an escaped crab with his fingers and got bitten for his trouble. That seemed to please him.

  “You’ll have to wash that out with antiseptic,” James told him. “Crab bites tend to get infected. We think they have some kind of mild natural poison on their shells for protection. Either that or it’s because they’re scavengers — they’ll eat anything, you know.”

  “Apparently,” Brother Thomas answered, sucking on his bleeding finger. James grinned. “What grade are you in, James?”

  “Going into sixth. Why don’t you take off your jacket, or is it one of the rules of your order that you can’t? Aren’t you hot?”

  By then they had three bushels, more than enough to sell, as well as feed both families dinner. Jeff tried to ignore the stiffness in his back muscles, tightened by hours of sitting on the hard seat, leaning forward to watch where the trotline rose up out of the water, and now straining against the weight of anchor, boat, and line as he hauled the trot line in. He hoisted up the final cinderblock and set it gently down on the bottom of the boat. He stretched his arms out, trying to relieve his back. “You wouldn’t like to run us in, would you?” he asked Brother Thomas.

  In the round face, the brown eyes were awake again. “And I shall make you fishers of men,” he joked to Jeff. “It would have been, in those days, more like crabbing than the fishing industry is now. That’s something I don’t think I understood before.”

  “You mean, with the nets they used?” James asked. Then he yelled — “I’m so hungry!”

  “You’re always hungry,” Jeff reminded him. “The line needs rebaiting — ”

  “Let Sammy do that. Maybeth’s busy helping Gram can beans, Sammy won’t mind, and besides, he got to sleep late.”

  “Usually,” Jeff explained to Brother Thomas, “we unload at their dock, then I go home to get the car to take the catch down to the restaurant. You can stay there and help cull — ”

  Brother Thomas held up his finger in mute protest.

  “We’ve got tongs,” James told him. “Gram used them when she was a little girl. Her uncle made them. They’re wooden. He was a bootlegger.”

  Brother Thomas’s face shone red with heat, and beads of sweat speckled the top of his head. He decided to stay at the Tillermans’ to clean his hand, maybe to cull, at least to set eyes on these historic tongs.

  Jeff drove the car back to the farmhouse. He parked by the barn. Dicey, he knew, worked downtown all day Saturday. Mrs. Tillerman was in the big vegetable garden, her hair wild and her loose shirt flapping in the breeze as she crouched over bushy green-bean plants. At the other end, Brother Thomas in his black suit worked with a hoe around the staked tomato plants, bending to pull out clumps of weeds and toss them into a heap, chopping at the dirt, to loosen it. His face was even redder, and sweat ran down his cheeks.

  “Do you want to come downtown with us?” Jeff asked him.

  He stood up straight and leaned his weight on the hoe. He was breathing heavily. “I’ll finish here. She doesn’t talk much, does she?”

  “No. But when she does you better look out,” Jeff said.

  “Hostile?”

  “Just sharp. She’s pretty terrific. Why don’t you take off your jacket and vest and all?”

  The brown eyes moved from Jeff’s face down to the far opposite end of the garden, where Mrs. Tillerman hunched over the beans. They moved to the green marsh grasses beyond. “If I do I might never get it on again,” Brother Thomas said. “So I think I’d better not.”

  “Ummm,” Jeff said, wondering how he should respond.

  “There’s a Botticelli angel inside, snapping beans,” Brother Thomas said.

  “Maybeth.”

  “Yes. She didn’t say a word, looked frightened of me. She applied antiseptic, bandaged my finger, stared at me. Then back to the beans. She doesn’t look a bit like James. Why was she frightened? Who are these people?”

  Jeff didn’t know what to say. He went on down to the dock, said hello to Sammy, who was rebaiting the long trotline at a steady pace, then lifted one of the bushels while James carried the other. They delivered the crabs and split the money — putting aside enough for a five-gallon tank of gas and ten pounds of salted eel. Jeff had tried not to split the money, because he certainly didn’t need it; but the Tillermans didn’t work that way, although as far as he could tell they did need it.

  Brother Thomas yawned all through dinner that night, and when they sat afterwards over the bright-colored glasses of wine he was, he said, so tired he couldn’t talk in complete sentences. “You could sleep in
Jeff’s room, you could go to bed now if you want,” the Professor said. “You don’t have to entertain us.”

  Brother Thomas shook his head, sunburned above the white collar. “You know? I’m enjoying the fatigue. But Horace, what’s Melody up to? We’ve been talking about nothing but me, and I’m too tired to agonize tonight. You agonize.”

  The Professor smiled at Jeff, who was playing softly on the guitar. Outside, the sun slid down the western sky, and the creek ran beside the marshes, blue shot with ripples of gold. “We had the hearing, uncontested. I should get the decree next week, then there’s a thirty-day period during which she can appeal. If she doesn’t, the thing is finished. So it’s been easy, in the end.”

  “The machinery of the law,” Brother Thomas said. His eyelids drooped and he lifted them, sipped at his glass, held it up to turn it around in the light, then asked, “How do you feel about it, Jeff?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference to me,” Jeff said. “I mean, I wouldn’t have gone to live with her. I’m almost seventeen, they couldn’t have made me.”

  “You never can tell what people can make you do,” Brother Thomas told him. “You can’t even tell what you’ll want to do. My brother’s daughter just got married, and his son is starting college in the fall. It’s all the future with them. And they’re right. It was in California, Horace, I was out among the beautiful people. They think I’m an anachronism. Something of a lost soul. A funny old man.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Me, I don’t know. I don’t know what I think. Except, I’m tired, bone tired.” He yawned.

  “I’ve never met these friends of Jeff’s,” the Professor said. “I know Phil and Andy, but not the Tillermans.”

  “Why not?”

  “No reason,” Jeff said.

  “There are even a couple more I didn’t see, one of them a girl, about Jeff’s age, I take it.” One eyelid raised and one curious brown eye looked at Jeff.

  “She’s much younger,” Jeff said. He put down the guitar. “Her name’s Dicey,” he said, looking at his father’s face. “She’s a lot like her grandmother.”

  “That is one strong old lady,” Brother Thomas said. “She could work me into a stupor without even straining her own resources.” He yawned again and admitted that he had to get to bed, if it was OK with Jeff if he used Jeff’s room.

  After he’d left, Jeff picked up the guitar again and played what he called to himself Dicey’s song. He didn’t sing it, just played the melody against a strum, the words inside his head: “With my hands all in my pockets and my hat slung back so bold, and my coat of many colors like Jacob of old.”

  “How’d you come to take him with you today?” the Professor asked.

  “He was awake and I asked him. Why?” He wondered if his father felt left out. “You don’t want to, do you? Do you mind not meeting them? If it ever works out, you will. It’s just that I go there, not them coming here.”

  “No, no and no.” The Professor smiled at him. “It’s clear that it was good for him, that’s why I asked. He’s at a bad time — ”

  “I thought, this morning. He hadn’t slept, he said. He seems better, tonight”

  “Sometimes, I think, it’s hard to accept exactly who you are. And there can’t be much harder to get through than a genuine spiritual crisis.”

  “A spiritual crisis? But . . . I don’t understand.” Yes that would make sense, Jeff thought, that would explain the barren feeling Brother Thomas seemed to have — if you lived your life in faith, with faith, and then something made you question how you’d lived your whole life.

  “I don’t know and neither does he,” the Professor said. “But he seems to have had a good day, and that’s the first in a long time for him. I’m grateful to you.”

  “I didn’t do anything. It was mostly the Tillermans. But they didn’t really do anything, either.”

  “We never do. But sometimes, things get done. Don’t they? And I wouldn’t mind meeting these Tillermans, if it ever works out.”

  Jeff nodded his head.

  “Are you courting this girl?” the Professor asked.

  Jeff felt his face grow hot. “You don’t court Dicey,” he told his father. “That’s not what she’s like.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Jeff didn’t know what to say. “She’s — I guess — she’s straight. You know? She likes to sail. She works hard. Smart, I think, very.”

  “I can’t picture her,” the Professor said, thoughtfully. “No, that’s OK, I’m not prying. I’m only trying to behave like a responsible father and be familiar with my son’s social life.”

  “I appreciate the effort,” Jeff teased him. “If there’s anything to report, I’ll tell you, maybe. Is there such a thing as a one-woman man do you think?”

  The Professor’s face went expressionless. Then he met Jeff’s eyes and answered Jeff’s real question: “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were; it seems to be in your character. And what’s in your character is what you’ve got to deal with.”

  The next time Dicey asked Jeff to go sailing with her, he waited until they were heading out before he asked if she’d come by his house.

  “Why?” Dicey asked.

  “Well, you’ve never met the Professor and when Brother Thomas was here he met your family — ”

  “Gram said — do you know what she said? I don’t dislike the man, as if — as if that was a big compliment.” Dicey grinned.

  “He said she was one strong old lady,” Jeff told her.

  “He sure was a help.”

  “The Professor said he hadn’t met you, you Tillermans. And if he wanted to, I thought — he doesn’t ask for things, and he didn’t ask but he said he’d like to, and for him that’s asking. Would you mind?”

  “We should get somebody else. James is home; he’d love to meet someone who wrote a book. Ready to come about?”

  “No. Just one at a time, he’s — ” Jeff didn’t know how to say what he was thinking, because it was so complicated. Something to do with treating the Professor gently, or maybe letting him meet them the way Jeff had, sort of one at a time, or naturally and not as if it was arranged. He didn’t want to explain, he just wanted Dicey to go along with what he wanted.

  She shrugged and gave her attention back to the sail. He pointed out the entrance to the creek. “We’ll have to tack up it,” she said, and that pleased her, because it was harder. “When we get past the point, haul up on the centerboard. Your creek is broad.”

  “It’s not my creek.”

  Jeff pulled up the centerboard and set it down on the floor-boards. They negotiated the entrance. “Is that your house?” She looked up at the windowed front of the low building. Jeff nodded.

  They had to tack six times. Dicey decided to sail up above the dock so they could approach it with the wind behind them. As they turned around to head down — and Jeff crawled onto the deck to pull down the jib — he saw a blue heron standing on a little muddy point of land across the creek. He pointed and Dicey followed his eyes.

  The blue raised its flat head to look at them. Its feet were in the water, its feathers slightly ruined as if by a recent annoyance. Jeff watched the bird, waiting for it to take off, anticipating the squawk with which it would trumpet its disapprovals.

  But the blue seemed not to find them threatening. It stared across the creek at them, then turned its back on them in a stately gesture of dismissal. Jeff knew the bird knew they were there. But, from all you could tell, the bird had never noticed them. It raised its head to look out across the marsh, unconcerned, solitary, ignoring them with great determination.

  Dicey’s low voice told him to pull down the mainsail, and he did. When he had it gathered around the boom, he looked back to the bird. The great blue still stood there, its back still to them. It wasn’t going to let the suspicion that they were there chase it off of its fishing territory.

  Jeff wrapped the sheet around the loosely furled mainsail and went up
to the bow to fend off. Dicey concentrated on maneuvering the boat, propelled now only by its own weight. Her hand rested on the tiller as she waited patiently for the sluggish hull to respond to her directions. The landing was perfect.

  Jeff held onto a piling with one hand while he looped a clove hitch around it. Then he looked back at Dicey. “You know who that bird reminds me of? You.”

  Her expression changed, and he didn’t know what he’d said wrong. Then he saw that the change was caused by Dicey trying to hold back laughter. “I was thinking how much it was like you,” she told him.

  He didn’t know what to say. “Come on up to the house.” He didn’t offer her a hand. Dicey liked to do things for herself.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t have James here?” she asked him. “James would really like it.”

  Jeff was sure. He turned for a last look at the heron, now glancing over its shoulder to be certain they were leaving. “Who’s that?” Dicey asked.

  A woman stood at the top of the steps leading down to the dock. Her skirt blew around her slim legs, her dark hair blew back from her face. She raised on arm to wave, although she was close enough to have called out. She looked like a photograph of a dancer, Jeff thought, a dancer caught in one gesture of the dance. She looked eager and happy. She ran lightly down the steps.

  “Melody,” he told Dicey.

  “Who’s she?”

  They stood side by side, watching.

  “My mother,” he told her, wishing she would stop asking questions.

  Dicey stood away as Melody wrapped her arms around him saying, “Jeffie, Jeffie, it’s so good to see you, I’ve missed you so terribly.” Melody was shorter than he was now, and she had grown her hair out straight, but shorter than she used to wear it. Her perfume was the same. In the sunlight, the sounds of the little creek behind him, Jeff didn’t know what to do.

  “And who is this?” Melody asked, looking at Dicey. Jeff didn’t answer, so she went over to Dicey and held out her hand. Dicey shook it briefly, looked at Jeff, looked back to Melody. “I’m Jeffie’s wicked old mother,” Melody said, laughing. “He didn’t know I was coming — did you, darling?” Her face turned like a flower briefly back to Jeff, who shook his head. “I hope I haven’t interrupted your plans for the day. Your father — I might have guessed — had no idea of what you were up to, where you were, when you’d be back — ”